After Her (16 page)

“Everybody at school keeps talking about the Sunset Strangler,” Patty said, rubbing her hand over his cheek, which needed a shave.

I wanted to shush her. He'd never said it, but we both knew that he didn't like talking to us about his cases. This one most of all.

“You tell them they should keep their minds on their schoolwork, Patty Cakes,” he said. “How's your team doing?”

“We won in overtime,” Patty said. “I scored twenty-seven points.”

“I should've been there, baby,” he said. “Maybe next time.”

“You want to say hi to Mom?” I asked him. “We made some cookies.” They weren't normal cookies, because our oven was broken again, but we'd recently invented a recipe that didn't call for baking. It was melted chocolate, basically—old candy bars melted on top of the stove—rolled in coconut we'd gotten from Jennifer Pollack.

“I wish I could stay longer,” he said. “Got to get back to work.”

“I know you'll catch him,” Patty said, as he got into his car. We stood on the curb watching it disappear.

H
E DIDN'T MAKE IT TO
my sister's game that Friday. I could feel her tension on the court as she watched for him.

After that, Patty stopped expecting our father to show up to watch her play. She said she knew he wouldn't make it to any of her games. By that point there'd been another girl murdered: Robin Burke, a twenty-five-year-old backpacker. Her body turned up in a wooded stretch of parkland thirty miles north, as if to offer proof that there was no way of sealing off the entire trail system, the killer covered so much territory. Including, more and more, my brain.

O
VER
T
HANKSGIVING BREAK,
I
WAS
invited up to Alison's Tahoe house for the weekend. I felt guilty leaving my mother and Patty alone, but Patty had a game and my mother was never one to work on anyone's sympathy.

“I'm in the middle of a great book,” she said. “I'll take a bath and put my feet up. I'm the lucky one, not having to stand over the oven all day holding a turkey baster.”

Mrs. Kerwin didn't have to do that either, as it turned out. The entire meal was delivered in plastic containers, right down to the cranberry sauce.

“It's such a godsend, having these professional chefs that do the whole thing for you like this, only better,” she said. “Plus they deliver.”

“Let's face it. Grandma's turkey wasn't all it was cracked up to be,” said Mr. Kerwin, popping the gravy in the microwave.

I could have told her a few people who would still want the grandma version. Starting with Patty and me. We loved those scenes on
The Waltons
where the grandmother and everyone else pitched in, and there was this great spread, and they said grace and sang songs and later, in their beds, called out to each other their good nights. Nothing like that ever happened at our house.

Alison's grandmother, Bernice, had come for the holiday. The rest of the time she lived in Florida. She was a skinny woman with unnaturally taut skin who looked like a version of Alison's mother that had gone through the dryer too many times, on high. Alison called her Beef Jerky, though not to her face.

Over dinner, Bernice brought up the topic of the Sunset Strangler investigation.

“So, Rachel, do you have any hot leads to report to us?” she asked. “All my friends want to know why your father hasn't caught this monster yet. They're scared to death one of us might be next.”

I wanted to point out that it wasn't too likely the killer would choose some wrinkled-up old hag or any of her Jazzercise cronies as his next victim. He liked young girls, and pretty ones. Plus, his territory had not extended to West Palm Beach. But I kept my observations to myself.

“Our father's working incredibly hard on the case,” I said. I got up to help clear the table, hoping that someone might change the subject. Bernice lit a cigarette.

“Well, I'm just saying, you've got people out there talking who feel the police need to step up the pressure on this person,” Bernice said. “I know how I'd feel if it was my daughter or granddaughter he got his hands on, God forbid.”

“The creepy thing is knowing he could be anyone,” Alison said. “You might walk right past him on the street, and never know. He could be your best friend's dad or your teacher.”

“Could we please change the subject?” Mrs. Kerwin said. “The good news is they've got that police drawing now for people to consider, and that woman who thought she saw the red Toyota.”

“My father's tracing every known Toyota that color that's more than five years old and registered in the state of California, on the chance that one of them might belong to a person with a criminal history,” I told them. I hoped this sounded impressive.

Thirty-four thousand red Toyota Coronas. That was all they had. And very likely, it would mean nothing, same as all the other leads had.

 

Chapter Nineteen

P
atty and I were heading out on our bikes to the rec center for her CYO girls' basketball tryouts when we ran into Alison.

Patty had remained the consistent high scorer on her JV team all season, often by as much as twenty points, most recently breaking a tie to win in the last seconds of the game—one of the many times I knew she'd hoped our father might be there but wasn't.

But the CYO team was a lot more competitive and a huge step up in my sister's basketball-playing life. My sister's old sneakers had worn right through in a couple of places, to the point where a kid on one team she played against asked if she did all her shopping at the town dump. That's when I broke into my jeans fund to get Patty a good pair of sneakers, which she was wearing for the first time that day.

Now I was back to square one with my jeans fund. And here was Alison, in the very pair of Chemin de Fers I'd been saving up for.

“I saw your dad on TV last night,” Alison said. “My dad said they were thinking of replacing him with someone else, on account of how he still hasn't caught the Sunset Strangler.”

“You're crazy,” Patty said. “Everybody knows our dad is the best detective in California.”

“I was just saying,” Alison commented. “I just thought you might want to know.”

In fact, my sister and I had seen our father on television that night too—seen, not heard him, since we had watched his most recent press conference through Helen's window.

In our beds after, we'd talked about it. Something about the sight of our father on the television screen that night had a tentative quality I never would have associated with him before. For a brief moment, watching him speak, I could imagine how it would be for the killer, watching this same broadcast—and observing, as we did, the unfamiliar slump of Detective Torricelli's shoulders, the lines in his face I never remembered before. If the Sunset Strangler had seen how our father looked that night, he would have felt triumphant.

For the first time I could remember, that night my father looked like a regular person, not a hero.

But my sister made it onto the CYO team.

A
FEW DAYS LATER IT
happened again—the feeling that had started visiting me since around the time the murders began. Now I recognized it—dreading what was coming, at the same time I knew I should give in and watch for clues that might signal the killer's identity.

I could see a thin girl clutching at the ground for something, a rock maybe, and getting nothing but a handful of dirt.

She was flailing. One last kick, then no more.

I could hear his breathing grow shallower. I could see his hand reach down to the waistband of her shorts. One leg out of the shorts, no need to bother with two. He rolled down her underpants, revealing a tampon string, and pulled.

What happened next made me bury my head in the pillow. I looked down and saw an erect penis, a sight I'd never seen except on dogs, and those mating horses on the hillside.

He was pounding his body up and down against her. It almost seemed as if “My Sharona” was playing in the background.
Always get it up . . . for the touch, of the younger kind.
A drumbeat. Or maybe a heartbeat.

Faster, faster.
When you gonna give it to me . . . Give it to me . . .
Then over.

Then very slowly, I saw the fingers unbuttoning her blouse and slipping the fabric down around her shoulders. He was turning her limp body around—no resistance from the woman in the dirt; she just lay there. Very slowly, with a kind of reverence he would never have displayed while she was living, he unhooked her brassiere and took it off her.

He held it up and stroked the lace. He placed the fabric against his cheek. I couldn't see his face, but I could hear him letting out a long, slow breath, like a sigh. Then he went for her shoelaces.

A
NOTHER GIRL HAD DISAPPEARED.
H
ER
body turned up in the brush near a trail in Point Reyes, thirty miles up the coast. The killer was extending his range now—the chance for containing him about as likely as containing an oil spill or the leaks into the atmosphere from the meltdown of a nuclear power plant—an event that had taken place earlier that year at Three Mile Island.

Our father was working all the time. We knew his number at the office, but we knew without being told not to bother him with phone calls. There was a hotline to the Homicide Division, and people were flooding it with ideas concerning possible suspects, though so far none of them had yielded anything but frustration and weariness. As for me, I knew not to try again to tell my father the details of my increasingly frequent visions.

The Sunset Strangler's victim this time—the twelfth—was a nineteen-year-old long-distance runner named Lexi Shaw. She ran track for UC Berkeley, but she'd been training for the Boston Marathon, with a hope of winning a place on the U.S. Olympic team. Her parents and coach, hearing she was still training on the trails of Marin County, had begged her to stick to the running trails around the university, but she had laughed at them.

“If anyone tries to mess with me, I can outrun him,” she'd said as she set out for a late-afternoon run in early December.

The night they found her body, our father had stopped by our house to talk with our mother. He had come in to kiss us good night, then settled into his chair in the kitchen to share a cigarette with our mother—their regular routine now. Patty and I were supposed to be sleeping.

We weren't of course. The two of us had huddled by the door, straining to hear everything, the first thing being the clink of ice in their glasses. She had poured him a glass of whiskey, and one for herself from the sound of it.

“Not much gets to me anymore, Lillian,” he said. “Not necessarily a good thing; that's what a dozen years of police work does to a person. But seeing this girl's body in that same damned position, with the electrical tape, and the laces gone from her shoes, I wanted to throw up.

“She was just so skinny. Not an ounce of extra flesh on her. These hard little tits, more like a boy. The bastard took her running shoes and set them next to her. Minus the laces.”

“You'll find him, Anthony,” our mother said. “Sooner or later, he's bound to make a mistake and leave you something to work with.”

“Sooner or later, maybe, Lil,” he said. “Question is how many more girls he'll get first. How many more times do I have to knock at some poor bastard's door and tell him and his wife they don't have a daughter anymore? Or one less than they used to.

“I don't know how these people keep on putting one foot in front of the other,” he said. “If it was one of our girls, I'd jump off the bridge. After I tore whoever did it apart with my bare hands.”

“I know,” our mother said.

“The problem is, I'd have to find him first,” said our father.

Patty and I couldn't hear anything then. I pictured them sitting in the near darkness, smoking. The only sound, the click of his lighter.

B
EFORE THE MOST RECENT SPATE
of killings, talk of the murders had quieted down some, but now every day at school kids talked about the Sunset Strangler again. At the very moment we were sitting in study hall—memorizing symbols from the periodic table or sharpening our pencils or pulling on our gym shorts in the locker room—we knew that he was out there somewhere just a few miles away—on the hiking trails, lurking in the shadows, just waiting until some woman he'd never met, wearing a fanny pack and carrying a water bottle, with long brown hair, came by and made the fatal mistake of talking with him. Or just not running away fast enough.

Maybe he'd actually follow her—running ahead at some point. Maybe he stopped when they met on the path, to point out a hawk or a rabbit a little way off. Maybe he asked if she had any insect repellent. He could have pretended to have turned his ankle, at which point she might have bent down to take a look.

I thought he'd chew gum and offer her a stick. Have a dog, maybe. It might even be the dog that got the girl's guard down. “Cute dog,” she'd say. She'd kneel down to pet him.

I knew how it would go then, not from anything our father ever told us or episodes of
Starsky and Hutch
or
Kojak
observed through somebody's picture window, but from the far-scarier scenes that played out in my brain, nights in my bed.
Such a dirty mind.

Hands in the pockets. Hands raised. Piano wire across her neck.
Good-bye, world.

Fat fingers rolling down the waistband of her underpants. Unzipping that fly.

And later: Tape on her eyelids. The shoelaces. I saw him chewing on the tip of one of them, as he made his way down the trail. Whistling.

Later again: In front of a television set. I saw him turn on the news. They were talking about him, as a picture of the victim filled the screen.

He was famous.

E
VERY DAY AT LUNCH NOW,
the girls talked about the Sunset Strangler. Suppose he came to one of their houses when it was dark and tried to climb in the window? What would you do if you woke up some night and there he was standing over the bed with a length of wire stretched between his hands like a cat's cradle, only he was lowering it toward your neck, and when you tried to scream for your parents, no sound came out?

What if, on your way home from school—somewhere between the place the bus let you out and home—a man came up to you and asked for directions, then grabbed hold of you and swept you off to the bushes? Or he said he was conducting a survey on shampoo or granola bars, and he wanted you to answer a few questions?
Whoosh, he had you.

First sex. Then death.

At least in front of the girls, the times we overheard them, the boys' talk went in a different direction, toward acts of heroism and vigilante pursuit and capture. Some of them talked about organizing a stakeout on the mountain, looking for the guy. They'd know him when they saw him. He'd look like a creep. Then they'd surround him, tie him up. Turn him into hamburger.

For the girls with whom I shared my lunch now, there was never the idea of confronting the killer. The girls saw themselves as potential victims, powerless at the killer's hands if—totally at random—he decided to strike.

At this point, every man you saw, especially if he was a little odd looking, you assessed as a possible killer. One of the pizza delivery boys fell into this category.

“Did you see the way he looked at me when he handed me the bill for the pizza?” Soleil said, after he left Alison's house one night. “Like he was thinking what I'd look like with no clothes on.”

“And that acne. You know nobody would ever go out on a regular date with him. That's probably why he started going after those girls on the mountain. He was so desperate,” said Heather.

“My mom said to never trust anyone that has those type of ears where their earlobes blend into the side of their face instead of drooping down,” another girl offered. Her name was Delia, and lately Alison had started inviting her over too, most likely because she had a twin brother Alison had a crush on. “He had those earlobes.”

“What if he was right here!” Alison said. “Standing there with the door open to my house while I looked for the pen, with those way-short pants and white socks.” This was where she suggested that maybe Delia's brother could come over, so there'd be a boy around to protect us.

“We should tell your father about him,” Alison said to me. “He could put a trace on the guy or something. His fingerprints will be on the box.”

“What if there's something weird he put on the pizza?” Soleil said.

“You mean like poison?”

“Worse. Like, you know, that thing boys do, while they think about sex. And he squirted it on top before he brought it in.”

“You are
so
gross,” Alison told her.

We finished the pizza anyway. But we locked the door, except when the boys came over—Chase, Todd, and Teddy of course. The one who came for me.

“The boys are here,” Alison would call out, when we heard them burst through the door, calling for pizza.

As if that meant we were safe.