After Her (20 page)

The planchette moved again to the word
yes
on the board. Our spirit had heard of the Sunset Strangler, she told us.

JVSRQICTNMS HR. WM BNW.
Victims here with me now.

“That's great news,” Patty said. “Now we can ask the girls who killed them.”

BDMJJJJ.

Bad man.

RSGSX.

The first letters were a mystery. But not the last two.
Sex.
He wanted sex.

“Can you say more?” I asked. “How old is he? What color hair does he have? We need to know who he is so our father can arrest him.”

NOVXR HR. No Hair.

WTSKSC. ST. TL.

Wants sex. Stands tall?

The significance of some letters remained unclear, but I got that part.

I looked at my sister across the table, fingertips touching mine—that surprised look on her face that meant she was concentrating hard.

The pointer began to move again.

DG. CT. DG.
My sister didn't even have to reach for the pen this time to write the letters down. I understood without that.

The pointer had spelled
Dog
, of course. There was a dog involved. And I had seen a dog in my vision that night. In Muir Woods, the day of the Naomi Berman murder.

The pointer stopped moving then. We sat there in the darkened kitchen, our fingers no longer touching on the board, just breathing.

“What do you think Zara meant?” Patty said. “Maybe he's going to kill a dog next time?”

Everyone was always wondering how it was the Sunset Strangler managed to get the women's guard down as he came up to them. Why, seeing a man approaching on the trail, after all the murders, they hadn't run.

Maybe, as my vision had suggested, the Sunset Strangler had a dog. A cute one.

 

Chapter Twenty-four

I
t was a Friday night—rainy as always—and Patty's team, the CYO Junior Varsity girls, was up against St. Vincent's for the season championship. There had been a story in the paper the day before about the upcoming game, with a focus on my sister as the youngest member and high scorer of the team—“a player to watch,” the reporter had written. The article also noted who Patty's father was. Our name was well known throughout the county now, though having your name associated as ours was with a run of serial killings—even if you were on the side of the law—was not good news.

I cut the article about Patty out and tacked it to our bulletin board, with the photograph alongside showing my sister executing an amazing shot from just beyond the arc. In the photograph, she had that wide-eyed surprised look on her face, as if the ball had just magically found its way into the hoop. When I cut out the story, I left off the final paragraph with our father's name featured, but Patty had known it was there.

It was understood that our mother didn't usually attend games, and Patty had stopped hoping that our father would show up, never mind providing a ride. So, as he often did, Mr. Armitage had driven Patty and me to the game. Despite my expressed belief that Mr. Armitage was a weirdo, my sister had developed a friendship with him over the many months of walking his dog, and regular visits in which their talks about Petra were conducted over cookies and root beer floats.

Because this was a big game, all the kids from school were there, including Teddy Bascom, though he pretended not to see me. He and Alison's friend Violet leaned against the wall with their hands in each other's pocket. Fine with me.

Harder to take in was the little posse of girls around Alison herself—Soleil of course, and Heather, and some others known to me from our many hours together doing one another's nails in her rec room, though it appeared that in their eyes now, I no longer existed.

“How's it going?” I said to Alison when I reached the section of bleachers where they'd stationed themselves. I had nothing to say to them, really. I just wasn't going to act like someone who's ashamed of herself.
Don't let anybody give you shit.

“Great jeans,” she said. Though they weren't new and even when they had been, they'd come from K-Mart.

I was sitting alone in my usual spot, high in the bleachers, where I could watch my sister without being close enough to take in her anxiety or convey mine to her. One thing Patty had a hard time with were all the minutes she had to sit on the sidelines, especially if she was not simply being given a break but had fouled out, and worst of all if, as was true this time, her team trailed by a dozen points. It killed her not to be out there angling for the ball. Shy as she might seem elsewhere, out on the court my sister was on the ball like a junkyard dog going after a bone.

From where I sat I could see a woman across the court, seated almost as high up as me and, like me, alone. She didn't look like anybody's mother. She didn't have a mother hairdo for one thing—hers hung down past her shoulders—but it was more than that. Mothers at games were focused on their players. This woman seemed to be focusing her attention on the door to the gym, as if for her the important action would take place over there, not on the court.

She was one of those people who stand out in a crowd. She had an intensity surrounding her, almost like a force field, and you could sense it meant a lot to her to be in that room, though not for the same reason the rest of us were.

I knew her from someplace, but it wasn't until the third quarter that it came to me where.

More than five years had passed since I'd seen her. It was Margaret Ann, the woman who had caused my father's face to light up in a way I had not seen before or since. Here was the woman whose house we used to drive by with our father, not even stopping. He just looked up at her window. The woman who inspired my mother to pronounce that if he ever married again, his daughters would never get over it.

When I'd heard those words, I'd believed them.

So had my father.

M
ARGARET
A
NN WAS STILL GOOD-LOOKING—EVEN
from such a distance I could tell that—but she wore glasses now, and it appeared she'd put on a little weight. Back in the days we'd visited her, my father had said he could get his two hands around her waist, she was so slim, though this couldn't have been true, really.

Margaret Ann.
I had no doubt what she was doing at my sister's game, and it had nothing to do with being a basketball fan.

Margaret Ann had shown up at this game for the same reason I did—with the hope that my father would be there. Not even to speak to him, just to be in the same space as he was, to share the same air for a while. One look at her and I felt it: just like us, she longed to catch a glimpse of him, if only for a moment.

He arrived partway into the fourth quarter, just as my sister was making a foul shot. She made it of course, taking her team, the CYO Warriors, to a one-point lead over their rivals, the Saints. All through the first half, Patty had continued glancing out to the stands, scanning the crowd, but she had given that up now, all focus on the court.

As many times as she had watched for him that season, I wasn't sure if Patty had seen our father slip into his seat in the very last row, high in the bleachers, or the flowers he had in his lap to give her after the game. If anybody sitting near him had noticed his arrival—as the man on whom the citizens of Marin County had, for a time at least, pinned their best hopes of apprehending the Sunset Strangler, the man now blamed for failing to do so—no one let on. He was just another tired-looking basketball fan—a dad, most likely, based on the bouquet in his hands—who looked as though he could use a cigarette.

Margaret Ann noticed him. Even from where I sat, I could see her back straighten as he made his way up into the bleachers, and one hand go to her hair. She took her glasses off. Put them on again. Took them off. She turned back to the game, but I could feel her concentration on my father now.

All these months, it had been my affliction that the person whose story had occupied my brain was the one I'd least want to have there, but that night, for a moment anyway, I imagined what it would feel like to be Margaret Ann. She did not move her lips, but it came to me that she was praying.
Look this way, Tony. I'm here.

He hadn't spotted her. He was looking toward the court, where my sister was on fire. Two times in the space of a minute she grabbed the rebound and put it right back up to score. Tore down the other end to steal the ball back, made her hook shot, got it in without the ball even touching the backboard, took the ball back down the court, stole the inbounds pass, and threaded a pass to her teammate for a win.

“That girl can't miss,” a man said, sitting next to me.

“The detective's daughter,” his wife offered. “From the paper.”

“She could teach her father a thing or two,” he said. “This girl knows how to go after what she wants.”

Across the court, I studied my father—imagining how he would look to Margaret Ann now, if, as I guessed, she hadn't seen him for a while. How thin he'd gotten. The gray hair. The sloping shoulders. That weary look.

But I knew Margaret Ann saw none of that. To Margaret Ann, my father remained the most handsome man in Marin County, and the most irresistible. She was cheering for my sister's team now, but she was thinking only of my father.

Alone on the bleachers, eyes on Patty, he saw none of this.

Look. Look. Look,
I said to him, but only in my head.
There's someone here who loves you more than anything. A woman who still believes you hung the moon.
Even I could see that. As much as I had hated that fact once, I was grateful now that this was so.

The buzzer sounded. 78–65, Warriors. Roses in hand, my father stood up and made his way down the bleachers onto the floor to find my sister.

An odd thing happened then. For a moment, his gaze had shifted from the players on the court to the bleacher seats where Margaret Ann had been sitting all that time. He got a look on his face, as if he'd received an electric shock. I watched his body go rigid, and his face change, and for a moment I thought he must have seen her.

But she was gone. When I looked to where Margaret Ann had been sitting, nobody was there anymore.

Then it was just us again, riding home in the Alfa, with my sister and me jammed into the one bucket seat, her trophy on her lap, because she didn't even want to set it on the floor.

“You played some game, Patty Cakes,” he said.

“It's different being out there when you know someone who really matters is watching,” she said.

For a moment, I thought I'd tell him.

You'd never guess who I saw at the game . . .

Only what then? He hadn't been able to figure it out five years ago. He'd be less likely to now. It might just make him sad to think of her. If he didn't already.

In times past, this would have been a moment for a round or two of “That's Amore,” but we rode home in silence, my sister holding tight to her trophy. No sound but the windshield wipers, pushing back the rain.

 

Chapter Twenty-five

I
t had been the wettest winter anyone could remember, and unlike most years, the rain had not let up entirely even now, late April. But we knew the better weather would come soon, and that when the mist finally cleared and the sun returned to the mountain, more than likely so would the Sunset Strangler.

In years past, April was the month when work got under way for the community theater's annual musical production, the Mountain Play, slated for performance in the outdoor amphitheater on the mountain. Always before, the announcement had come around Easter as to which musical would be produced that summer. But this year the word had come down: due to the murders, there would be no performances in the amphitheater this year. It seemed wrong for tap-dancing numbers to take place, and happy songs to be belted out over the hillside, so close to where violent crimes had been committed. It seemed disrespectful, but more than that, it was dangerous. Even if people wanted to hike up the mountain to see the show, encouraging anyone to venture out on the trails—with the killer still at large—was courting trouble.

The killer must have loved this.
Did
love this
.
I felt it, knew that he kept tabs on all the news reports, and that the months of rain and enforced absence from the trails had left him restless. It would be a particular thrill for him to watch the news, to listen to reporters describing the increasing desperation of law enforcement agencies in locating the killer, and see the grainy snapshots of his victims flashed again and again on the screen.

Charlene Gray. Lexi Shaw. Naomi Berman. Kelly Cunningham. Willa DePaul.
I knew their names by heart, the details of every one of their murders, and what their faces looked like. I knew all this not simply from eavesdropping on my parents' middle-of-the-night conversations, and the scraps of information the newspaper offered up, or the gossip provided by Alison, back in the days when we'd been “friends.” No: I knew the sense of arrogance and triumph the killer must be feeling from what took place inside my own head.

I knew he liked to sit in front of his television set and watch my father standing at the podium telling the reporters there was nothing new to report. I knew he noted the slope of my father's shoulders, the thinness of his frame, and enjoyed knowing he was the reason for all he observed, including the diminishment of Detective Anthony Torricelli.

In my mind I saw the killer standing in front of a microwave oven in a kitchen filled with old pizza boxes, eating chocolate pudding straight from the container. Checking the weather reports, anticipating the day he'd be out there once more with his piano wire.

The television was on. They were talking about him again. And one more time, the images of the murdered women flashed on the screen.

He studied the faces of his victims staring out at him, remembered them begging to be allowed to live as the wire he'd tightened around their necks cut off the air to their vocal cords.

He opened a drawer. Took out one of his precious shoelaces. Cleaned his teeth with the tip.

Somewhere on the television screen, the reporter was still talking—something about a task force—but the killer was not paying attention to that part. I pictured him like some kind of animal, like the shark in
Jaws
cutting through the water. Or a vulture, circling high over a mountain hillside, spotting a small dead animal and having only one objective then.

Go get it.

This was where I sat up in my bed. Turned on the light to see my Peter Frampton poster, and my sister's new trophy, the roses set into a jar. A picture of my sister and me that day on the cable car. My jewelry box, with the gum wad in it.

He was coming back.

F
OR OUR FATHER'S BIRTHDAY—“
T
HE
B
IG
4-O,” as one of the waitresses at Marin Joe's called it—Patty and I made him tiramisu.

We didn't have a recipe but knew the basics. Ladyfingers and mascarpone cheese, grated chocolate, tons of whipped cream.

We stopped at the supermarket on the way home to pick up the ingredients. When we were done constructing our dessert, we covered it with foil and laid the whole thing in Patty's bike basket. It had been a while since we'd paid a visit to our father's office at the Civic Center. Now with great anticipation we set out to make our tiramisu delivery.

It was a two-mile ride to the Civic Center, much of it along the highway with cars whizzing past. The sky was almost dark when we reached the entrance, but there were people milling around as always—men in suits, leaving court probably, office workers, local citizens come to look up their property maps or pay their tax bill. And members of the police force.

We rode the escalator up to his office on the second floor, just down the hall from the courtrooms where the criminals went on trial. Our mother used to bring us here when we were little sometimes, to have lunch with our father in the cafeteria.

“This building was designed by a famous man named Frank Lloyd Wright,” she told us. “Some people got pretty upset about how modern it looks, but I like it.”

In those days, our father kept a picture of the three of us on his desk—our mother, Patty, and me. Now there was just a picture of Patty and me. Also a giant stack of papers, a pile of folders, two telephones, and a bunch of coffee mugs with cold coffee in them, and an ashtray that looked as if it hadn't been emptied in a week, though maybe that was just one day's cigarette butts. On the wall behind him, a row of photographs of smiling young women, all with long brown hair, cast their gaze toward an imagined sunny future. The murder victims.

Suddenly it felt as if my sister and I shouldn't be here. “We brought you a surprise,” I said. “Happy birthday.”

“How did you two get here?” he said. His voice sounded gravelly, in a way it didn't used to.

“We rode our bikes,” Patty said. “We took the highway, but we stayed way over on the side of the road, so the cars weren't that close to us.”

“No way you're doing that again,” he said. “I'm driving you two home.”

“We made it ourselves,” Patty said. “Tiramisu.”

I knew he was trying to appear happy and excited. But he was looking at his watch too.

“Special delivery from Betty Crocker and Julia Child,” he said. “How did I ever get so lucky?”

“Are they going to have a party for you later?” Patty said. “You and all the other policemen?”

“We're not exactly party types around here these days,” my father said. “Come on. I'll throw your bikes in the trunk.”

O
NCE WE WERE OUTSIDE,
I
got a glimpse of how things had been going for my father those last few months.

In the half hour we'd been inside the Civic Center, a small crowd of reporters had assembled—some with notepads and tape recorders, a few with microphones and cameras. When they spotted our father, they started calling out to him.

“Have you seen this press release yet, Detective Torricelli?” one of them called out. “A group of victims' families has issued a complaint about the lack of progress made by the Marin Homicide Division. They're calling for the governor to bring in a team of FBI agents to take over the Sunset Strangler investigation.”

“Do you care to speculate on what effect the failure of your investigation will have on the sheriff's chances for reelection?” Another voice, insistent above the din.

“Is it true the governor himself called you to express his concern? Did the citizens' petition have anything to do with that?”

“Do you have any explanation for why your office has yet to name a single suspect in the killings?”

“What's your response to charges that your department is indirectly responsible for the girls' deaths?”

At first, when he had seen the reporters, my father had tried to ignore them and press on through. Now, finally, he stopped and moved to face one of the microphones before him. When he spoke, his voice had an edge that hadn't been there the first time he addressed the press about the murders.

“I continue to feel nothing but pride in the job being done by the men and women of the Marin Homicide Division,” he said, his voice flat, almost mechanical. “I'm confident that we can work together with federal authorities, and that our efforts will eventually bring the individual responsible for these crimes to justice. We're doing everything in our power.”

“Are those your daughters?” someone else called out. A woman.

My father whirled around then, and for a moment, the cameras shifted their focus. To me and Patty.

A cacophony of voices then. (Eighth-grade vocab word:
cacophony.
)

“What if it had been one of your own daughters he'd gotten his hands on?” From somewhere else, the question: “What are their names?” And then: “Which one's the basketball player?”

“Can you look this way, honey?” a man called out to me. A man with a camera.
Flash.
Then flash again.

What happened next seemed almost to come in slow motion. My father raised his arm, and for a second, I thought maybe he was about to punch the man, except that instead of making a fist, his fingers were outstretched in such a way as to block the lens. I felt his big, broad arm around my back, and he was pushing my face into his jacket—mine, and Patty's, away from the lights—and he let out a sound less like anything human than an animal roar.

“Don't ever do that again,” he said to the man behind the camera. “Don't ever, ever again think of showing one of my children's faces on television.”

A minute later, we were in his car, heading down Route 101 to our house on Morning Glory Court.

“You didn't have to act so mad when you talked to those reporters about me,” I told him, from my spot in the front seat. “You sounded mean.”

“I acted mad, because I was, Farrah,” he said. “Those reporters have no business letting your face appear onscreen. It's not only unethical. It's dangerous.”

My father didn't say anything then, but I could see from his face what he was thinking, and I knew it too.

The killer liked to watch TV. Especially when the subject they were talking about on TV was him.

The Sunset Strangler had already identified our father as the enemy. Now he knew our father had two daughters. Now he knew what we looked like.

C
ONSIDERING THE FACT THAT THE
Armitage household didn't appear to have a television set for us to watch through the living room picture window, I don't know what it was that took Patty and me down to Mr. Armitage's end of the street that night. Sometimes we just liked to study the stars, and the spot at the end of Morning Glory Court—treeless and unobstructed by other rooftops or TV antennas—offered the best opportunity for viewing. Plus, the rain that had been pounding down on us for months had finally stopped.

We were out later than usual, and there was only a sliver of moon, which not only made us less visible but made the insides of the houses we passed more so.

The lights were off in the Armitages' living room. But in the bedroom, whose window was nearly as large as that in the living room, and faced the hillside, we could plainly make out the figure of a half-dressed person. A woman.

At first we thought it was Mrs. Armitage getting undressed for bed. This was interesting, considering the fact that by this point months had gone by since either my sister or I had laid eyes on Mrs. Armitage. For all the afternoons Patty spent in their house in the cul-de-sac at the end of the street, no mention had ever been made by Mr. Armitage concerning his wife, and Patty—having decided they must be separated, if not divorced—had never raised the subject to her employer, as to what had become of his wife.

Now there she was, in the bedroom. There was that hat again. Evidently she even wore it indoors. The large brown pocketbook on the dresser. The same polka-dot dress, draped over the back of the chair. She must be getting ready for bed. Hard as it was to imagine Mr. Armitage having sex, maybe he did.

It took a moment to understand: the person we saw through the window was not taking clothes off as you might expect at that hour. She was putting them on.

Then we realized that although the person was putting on a dress, this was not Mrs. Armitage putting on the dress. It was
Mr.
Armitage, standing in front of the mirror, fastening a brassiere over his chest and then, once that was accomplished, wriggling into a pair of panty hose.

Patty and I stood frozen on the hillside, watching as he lifted the brightly colored dress over his head and pulled his arms through the sleeves. It was hard to identify why this was, but his motions seemed different from those of a woman undertaking the same task. This was true when he got to the next part—when that oddly burly arm reached in back to pull up the zipper, and that large hand smoothed the skirt over the broad, mannish backside we now understood to be that of Mr., not Mrs., Armitage.