JF Gonzalez - Fetish.wps (12 page)

What if we go out and really hit it off? What if we wind up back at my place or
hers and in bed and it happens
?

What he was afraid of letting happen was falling in love with Rachael. When he had fallen in love with Diane Sterling, his second wife, he had the same problem. He was never able to let go of the past hurt he had experienced when Shirley and their unborn baby had been killed. Of course he didn't know this at the time; when he met, dated, and married Diane, he was practically married to his work as a cop. Diving into the police academy and then his work as a law enforcement officer had been part of his method of dealing with the loss of Shirley and their unborn child.

Dealing with the aftermath of Shirley's death had been very hard. For one, her personal effects were all over the two-bedroom apartment they'd shared. Shirley had been the decorator, and she had had a ton of clothes in the closet that he had not been able to bring himself to touch for close to two years. For the first year and a half he was numb to the fact that she was really gone. He would sit in the apartment after getting home from work, drink a beer, and look around the apartment, remembering every piece of furniture, every knick-knack that she had picked out. It all brought back memories of her. Clearing the apartment of her stuff would feel like getting rid of her and he couldn't do that, not so soon after the funeral. But the days stretched into weeks, the weeks into months, and before he knew it almost two years had passed and he found himself in their bedroom going through her side of the closet, pulling dresses out and putting them in plastic green garbage bags to take to her parents. He had worked in a blind stupor that day, packing her clothes from the closets and dressers, boxing up her books and the knick-knacks she liked to decorate the entertainment center with. He had collected her high school yearbooks and put them in a box. Then he had driven them over to her parents and told them that they could have the items if they wanted them. They hadn't questioned his reasons. They had simply accepted them.

The hardest part was cleaning out the second bedroom. He did that two months after Shirley's murder. Daryl had been slowly converting it into a nursery in the months prior to Shirley's death. Dismantling the crib, taking down the baby things Shirley had put up, had been emotionally draining. But he'd done it. It had been the first thing he'd done because seeing the baby stuff in there just made him more angry and grief stricken.

Daryl sat back in his chair and mused on the past twelve years. As much as he'd tried to erase the physical remnants of Shirley from his life, he still stumbled over some of her belongings. Occasionally he came across a favorite record album of hers that had been salted into their collection, or a favorite book. One time he had found a notebook of hers in a desk drawer that she used to keep notes in. Some of the picture frames he still had were those that she originally bought. The sofa he had was the one she picked out when they had first gotten married. The dishes he used had been given to them by Shirley's parents. He supposed he would never be totally rid of the physical memory of her, but that was okay. He didn't want her to be totally absent from his life; he needed to hold on to a few things to keep her close to his memory and his heart.

He finally moved out of the apartment three years after she died. He moved to a bigger apartment in Torrance. When he and Diana got married, they rented a house in Silverlake. By the time they got divorced, Daryl had saved up a pretty healthy nest egg.

Thankfully divorce proceedings had been civil; neither side had gone for the throat, and Daryl got to keep his retirement package and his savings. Diana kept the house they were renting and Daryl moved into an apartment in Studio City. Two years later he bought a home in Burbank.

He didn't date for a long time after Shirley was killed. He didn't want to see other women: Shirley had been his life. He had loved her more than life itself. After the tragedy, he pushed back returning to school to complete his Master's degree. He took a job in a warehouse and immersed himself in the physically exhausting work. Because it was physical work, it allowed him time to think. And the only thing he could think about during his work day was how Shirley and their unborn child had been murdered. And the more he thought about it, the angrier he got.

The gang members responsible for Shirley's murder had criminal records a mile long. One of them had served time for second degree murder and been released after having served five years of a fifteen year sentence. Five years. What a joke.

It was this anger that fueled his decision to enter the police academy. It took him six months to muster up the nerve and prepare for it. He passed the written examinations with flying colors and he aced the psychological exams—hell, he lied on a lot of questions just so he could get his foot in the door. He knew that if he related that he had once been the victim of a violent crime that he would be denied. So he hadn't even mentioned it.

By the time he graduated from the police academy a year later, it had been two years since he had been with a woman. His first sexual experience after Shirley's murder had been with a graduate student in her apartment one drunken summer night. He'd met her at a nightclub and they wound up at her place. If he hadn't been intoxicated he probably wouldn't have gone through with the act. But because he was drunk he was able to put the image of Shirley out of his mind as he and the woman screwed with lustful abandon. What ruined it was afterward, when she told him she loved him.

She had been a very nice girl; he still remembered her name. Rita Something. Rita had been very nice, very sweet, but he couldn't deal with her being in love with him. He avoided her in the days following their sexual encounter, didn't return her phone calls, and she got the message. Word floated back to him through a mutual acquaintance that she thought he was the worst asshole she had ever met. The barb hadn't even stung. He was sorry he had avoided her following their one-night stand, but when she had told him she loved him that brought him back to his relationship with Shirley and the vows they'd made to each other: that they would always love and cherish each other, that they would never leave each other, that they would never cheat on each other. Daryl had still felt committed to Shirley even though by this time she was two years in her grave. To him, they had never broken up. Going out with another woman, having another woman tell him she loved him, felt like he was throwing everything he'd ever felt for Shirley into the toilet.

Daryl sipped his beer, randomly scanning channels. He watched the History channel: this evening's segment was on Theodore Roosevelt. He watched the various segments on Roosevelt's life in a blind stupor, drinking sullenly as the past fast-forwarded quickly to the present.

He didn't start steadily dating until he was actually on the force. By this time he had already entered therapy at the suggestion of a priest he knew at the church he attended, St. Mary's in Pasadena. With the help of counseling, he was able to put his life with Shirley in perspective; it was better to have loved than to not have loved at all; in the brief time Shirley was alive he had provided joy in her life, the best gift a loved one can give to another human being; and that old standby—you will love again.

And he had. In the next three years, before he met Diana, he dated a succession of women. He had enjoyed their company, was able to perform sexually with them with only a minimum of thinking about Shirley. He found that he had to completely forget about Shirley if he was to resume a normal life. And for awhile he had. When he was seeing those other women Shirley never once entered his thoughts. It wasn't until the eve of his wedding to Diana that he was sitting alone in his apartment, the nervous jitters of the following day's wedding mass fluttering through his stomach, that Shirley's face came to him as his mind played a quick movie of his life with her. He lost it. He buried his face in his hands and cried until the tears ran dry.

After that, he couldn't help but think of his long lost love and the child they had created together whenever he made love to Diana. Diana noticed the sudden change, asked him what was bothering him, and he made the mistake of telling her. She almost left him then, but she could clearly see that this was troubling him. Of course he had told her about the tragic incident with his wife and she had appeared sympathetic. Now she was just getting irritated at his inability to get over it.

By this time he was well into his career as a law enforcement officer. He had quickly climbed the ranks to detective, and was assigned to the anti-gang CRASH unit.

And when he was able to, when he knew he could get away with it, Daryl poured his frustrations and hatred out on the gang members he arrested. He did whatever he could to keep the vermin off the streets; even if it meant planting evidence and lying on the witness stand to do it.

A year after the marriage Diana suggested he seek counseling, which he probably should have sought after Shirley's death but never did. He followed Diana's advice and sought therapy. The problems between them got worse.

To escape from the pressures his problems were causing, he buried himself more in his work. Diana, likewise, became more embroiled in her job as a financial auditor.

She also started an affair with a co-worker that Daryl didn't find out about until they separated. Surprisingly, he wasn't angry with her over it. He didn't blame her. He had abandoned her emotionally.

Before their marriage ended Daryl renounced his Catholic faith. In the years since he was married his belief in the Catholic structure of salvation, heaven and hell, God and Satan, were waning. And in the last year of his marriage they crumbled completely. Part of it had to do with the reading material he dived into the more he got into his job as a homicide detective. He began to read a lot of psychology: Freud, Jung, as well as the major philosophers. He had grown especially fond of Nietchze. He slowly began to suspect that everything he had been taught by the Catholic Church, everything he had been led to believe in, was all a delusional lie. He had been duped. Because if there was a God, He wouldn't have taken Shirley away from him so cruelly. If there was a God there wouldn't be so much human suffering. There wouldn't be so much hunger, so much poverty, so much hopelessness. He saw it himself on the streets when he went to work his beat. When he saw the viciousness of human nature—the drunks that drove and killed, the gang members that fired indiscriminately into a crowd, killing innocent people; the father who beat his six-month-old baby to death because its crying bothered him—he thought that if mankind was truly God's crowning achievement than He must be seriously flawed. And because He had seen fit to take Shirley and their child away from him was only the icing on the cake.

So he had renounced his Catholic faith. He had trashed the idol of the Virgin Mary he had received after taking First Communion and likewise disposed of an old wooden crucifix with a striking life-like image of Christ pinned to it. He had ripped the pages of the only Bible in the house and burned them in the kitchen sink. Then he had gone through the house and destroyed everything relating to his Catholic upbringing—the nativity scene his parents had given him when he was eighteen; the painting of the Blessed Mother, hands clasped together in prayer, that Diana's aunt had given them as a wedding present.

But the damage was too far gone. Diana divorced him. He tried to reconcile with her, but she wouldn't even attempt it. She had tried to help him, tried to work with him for three years. She had had enough.

Daryl glanced at the clock that sat on the bookshelf on his right. It was only eight-thirty. The night was still young.

He walked to the kitchen and poured himself another beer.

And spent the rest of the evening drinking, watching TV, and thinking about Rachael Pearce and wondering if he'd ever find love again.

Rachael Pearce was peddling at a steady forty-five miles per hour on the lifecycle when Daryl Garcia came into her mind without warning.

Her evening until then had been spent in virtual “routine mode"—out of the office at 5:00, home by 6:00, a quick dinner of pasta and chicken and then up in her office by 7:00 to work on her notes for the book she had thought of a few days before. The Eastside Butcher piece she had written for the
Los Angeles Times
had inspired her to begin keeping a working diary of the case for a possible book. She had always wanted to write a true-crime book but had never found a particular case that interested her despite all her years of journalism. She had come close a few times; five years ago she had an idea to do a book on the plight of child sex offenders after running a two-part story in the paper, but after three days of research the subject had depressed the hell out of her. The thought of delving further into the minds of ten-year-old boys who took perverse pleasure in raping four-year-old girls had been so alien, so horrifying, that she had abandoned the project. It was simply too disturbing for her.

And the Eastside Butcher case isn't
? She thought to herself as she pedaled away.

After all, you're dealing with the same kind of sickness, only the perpetrators and victims
are adults. For all you know our anonymous butcher might have been very much like that
lost, sick, nine-year-old boy you interviewed for that aborted book that got his jollies by
sticking pins in little girls
.

She shuddered at the thought. And made a note to mention that correlation in this evening's writings.

After she had written for an hour or so, she headed straight to the third bedroom of the two-story condo where she kept her workout equipment. In this room, the smallest of the three bedrooms, she kept a stair master, a lifecycle, and a multi-purpose weight machine. A small stereo system was erected in the corner of the room. She liked to work out a minimum of forty-five minutes every evening, minus weekends.

Iron Maiden's
Killers
was blasting out of the CD player. She loved working out to heavy metal music. The fast beat, the heavy drumming and bass lines, the loud guitar riffs, all seemed to lend an energy which created the perfect atmosphere for working out.