Killer (3 page)

She sang softly as he wept and finally slept. He dreamed of being held in the arms of the Angel, held like the baby Jesus in the picture books, held and kissed and caressed.

Loved.

CHAPTER TWO

She is sitting across the aisle from me on the plane. Small and round, late fifties, Nieman Marcus from head to toe, and she is reading my last book,
Killer Unbound.
She is reading with the intensity I like to imagine everyone has when they pick up a book of mine at an airport, which is where most people pick up my books. We are halfway to Los Angeles and she is halfway through the book when she happens to glance up and see me watching her. I look away quickly, but not quickly enough. From the corner of my eye I see her check the back of the paperback, where my postage stamp-sized photo is sequestered between the bar code and ISBN number. I feel her look back at me. I wish I’d splurged on first class.

“Excuse me,” she leans across the aisle toward me. Her wire-framed glasses are smudged at the edges with makeup and her breath is stale.

“I couldn’t help but notice…” she holds up the book, indicating my photo, then pointing at me. “Are you Jack Rhodes? The author?”

“Yes,” I smile politely.

“Oh my God,” she says too loudly and presses the book against her breasts. “I don’t believe it! I’m sitting here reading your book and there you are, right across the aisle from me!”

“Yep. Right here.”
Please let there be turbulence. Oxygen masks dropping…screams from the galley…

“I read
Killer
when it came out. Couldn’t put it down. Then I read
Killer At Large,
and now
Killer Unbound
… Oh my God, I just love your books.”

“Well, thank you very much.” I press the button overhead for the flight attendant.

“I always wanted to write. I studied at LSU. Creative Writing. And I’ve always loved the way you have of pulling the reader into the story…”

“Thank you.” I press the button overhead again. Not a flight attendant in sight. They have obviously taken the escape pod.

“I mean, just the way you follow the story…the way you…” she struggles to come up with
le mot juste
, “…the way you
seduce
the reader. It’s
so
good.”

“Thanks.”

“Where do you come up with your ideas? I’ve tried to write…I mean, nothing at all like you—well, in a way maybe a little,” she blushes slightly. “But I just can’t imagine how you come up with so many characters and stories and… Where do you get your ideas?”

“They just come to me,” I shrug. She gives me a blank look. This won’t satisfy her. I pray for a lightning strike.
Ah, folks, we’ve just lost both engines and we’re going to have to ditch in the Rockies so please stop talking to one another…

“They just come to you? I can’t imagine. All those characters and the
detail
…you just make it all up?”

“Pretty much.”

She stares at me as if I were an ostrich in the aisle seat across from her.

“I can’t imagine.”

“It’s not really that mysterious. The story just kind of…tells itself.”

“I just can’t imagine.”

That’s right. You can’t. And I can. Big deal.

A flight attendant who resembles the seventh grade math teacher from Sara’s school reaches over my head and turns off the service light.

“Is everything okay?” she asks.

“Just great. Could I get a pillow, please?”

“Certainly.” She heads off to the secret pillow cache.

“I’m sorry, I know you want to sleep, but could I just ask you one favor?”

“Sure,” I smile again. It’s getting harder to smile.

“Could you sign my book?” A timid girl’s giggle as she holds the book toward me. I take it from her and reach for the pen that’s always in my pocket.

“To…?” I prompt her.

“Maryann,” she says, blushing fiercely.

I sign her book and, feeling guilty for being a jerk, I make it a little extra personal.
Keep writing!
I hand it back and she reads it and the blush spreads from her cheeks and down her neck and for a moment I’m afraid she may explode and blow a hole in the fuselage, killing us all. The flight attendant returns with my pillow.

“Thank you.”

I rest back against the pillow and close my eyes.

“Thank
you
,” Maryann says.

“You’re welcome,” I say, and close my eyes and turn aside as Maryann returns to
Killer Unbound
.

Where do you get your ideas?
It was the question that finally caused me to stop doing interviews and book signings. Arnie and my publishers were genuinely perplexed. It’s the most common question for an author—an inevitable question. And most writers have a stock answer. Some even enjoy talking about their writing process. Some, in fact, will never shut up about it. But the question irritated me on a deep level. I don’t know why. I once read a quote from George Bernard Shaw, who said that for him writing was like taking dictation. All he had to do was begin and the play wrote itself. I have no pretensions to the level of a Shaw, or anyone for that matter. I know who I am and what I write and I think it’s pretty good for a white trash kid from West Covina who grew up without a father and a mother whom I barely knew—a mother who drank and drugged all day with one boyfriend after another. I don’t believe in Muses or writer’s block and I don’t read reviews. But I understand what Shaw was saying. I simply sit down every day and write what is already in my head, waiting to be put down on paper. I don’t know how it got there. I don’t question or analyze it, I just write it down. At a book signing once, a flirtatious woman of a certain age asked me if I had a Muse and I said “Yeah, his name is Dave.” She didn’t laugh, but from then on I jokingly called my muse Dave.
Dave
told me to write this or that.
Dave
said kill her with a claw hammer.
Dave
would figure out how to get out of the building barricaded by the SWAT team.

Not that I didn’t wonder at first where all the ideas came from. At first I had privately marveled at my facility to concoct each murderous scheme, each vicious, perfect killing, each elaborate plan to elude capture. It all came so easily, as if each story were already fully formed in my head and I was just taking dictation from some uncharted part of my subconscious. I didn’t want to look too hard at that uncharted part—it was clouded with pain that would stop me in my tracks. My lapse in memory began before Sara’s death, before the drinking. I remember virtually nothing from my early childhood, and I didn’t care to conjure that time to consciousness. I’ve always had the profound feeling that some things are best left unexamined. My writing had kept me sane and sober for five years. It kept my restless mind busy with imaginary situations and problems of my own creation. I would never be lonely as long as my characters were speaking to me. I would never be bored as long as I could sit at my computer and slip into that peculiar trance where their voices were almost audible... Maybe this isn’t normal or maybe it is. Maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe some rocks are best left unturned.

Fuck it. I turn my face into my pillow. Dave the Muse gets all the blame and none of the glory. Well, that’s how it goes,
Dave
. Get your own goddamned publishing deal. And next time book me in first class.

CHAPTER THREE

I forgot my sunglasses. I close my eyes against the low, piercing November sun as my taxi curves around the long ramp to get on the 110 freeway. We are headed downtown, to LAPD headquarters at Parker Center. Once the sun is behind us I look ahead at downtown—a cluster of earthquake-safe skyscrapers against the San Gabriel mountains. I can see the foothills just above the neighborhood where Sara and I used to live.

Part of her lay in those foothills for a season, until the rains came. Maybe part of her still does.

My plan is to meet with the police, then rent a car from the rental agency two blocks from Parker Center. I will then drive to San Gabriel, to the storage facility where Sara’s things have rested for five years. I will pick up the boxes I have already bought over the phone from the storage office, and I will pack Sara’s things. There isn’t much. Some books, some clothes, and odds and ends I couldn’t bring myself to deal with when I left. I had asked Sara to marry me a year before she died, and she had begun collecting things—bridal magazines, honeymoon travel destinations clipped from magazines, and some photos of homes and gardens she liked. Sara was fiercely independent and I had teased her about becoming so domesticated so quickly. She would make a face at me and say,
“I
am
a girl, you know. Did you forget?”

“Never,”
I would say, and then we would wind up making love. We did this so often that the bridal magazines and the travel magazines became props in our foreplay. She would come home with a new
Architectural Digest
and flash it at me with a sly smile and say,
“Got some yuppie porn for ya.”
We would ooh and ahh at the Craftsman bungalows and post-and-beam ceilings as if they were centerfolds and I would slowly remove her clothes…

I found the magazines after she died, stuffed in the back of her closet. She had saved them all.

How do you throw away things like that?

I look up at the foothills of the San Gabriel mountains again.

Why did you do it, Sara?

I force the question away, out of reflex. I know that, if I let it, the question will haunt me right back to thirst for my own oblivion. And yet, after all this time, I still feel selfish for wanting to go on living.

I have arranged with the storage people to have the boxes sent to me in Vermont, and I will decide what to do with them from there. I haven’t been back to L.A. for five years and I don’t want to come back again. The charge that appears on my Amex statement from the storage place is a monthly reminder of the final loose end, the last piece of a life that hangs unfinished. I have put this off long enough, and I am ready to face the ghosts in the small storage space—they are free to reside in my attic in Vermont, or to be given away, to whom I don’t know. Sara’s father abandoned them when she was a toddler. Sara had no siblings, and her mother, who never left Pittsburgh, retreated from life after Sara’s death. She wants nothing to do with me and I don’t blame her. But maybe she will accept these things of Sara’s if I simply send them to her. I will decide later. For now it is enough to muster the wherewithal to take this one step. I will pack up Sara’s things, then drive to the airport for a midnight flight and never return to this hateful city.

The cab barrels down the ramp and onto the clotted downtown streets. After a brief, lurching ride, we stop in front of Parker Center and I go inside. I am waved through metal detectors and wanded and when I tell the cop at the end of the security line who I’m supposed to see he directs me to the elevator. Third floor, Robbery-Homicide.

After writing four books about a serial killer I have had plenty of experience around cops and Homicide Divisions. I have bought drinks for uniform cops, veteran detectives, prosecutors, even a couple of FBI agents, and I have pried them with endless questions about the true-life secrets of their trade. I have met with them in their offices, shot with them at ranges, sparred with them at the gym, gone on ride-alongs—including a couple of roller-coaster nights in NYPD choppers. I have jumped out of cruisers and followed cops into dark alleys and tenements, ignoring their orders to stay back and pressing to the front to feel what they feel and see what they see, beyond the bravado and the hard shell of silence.

There was always some kind of unspoken test—in order to get closer access I would have to participate in something dangerous or horrifying. The things hidden from civilians are jealously guarded secrets by those on the front lines. Not because of procedure or rule, but simply because civilians are not in the club. Cops are a tight lot, and they routinely have difficult encounters with civilians in the course of duty—a problem they refer to as “the asshole factor.” Civilians are unpredictable, emotional, abusive, and prone to prevarication. As a civilian, I would have to prove my mettle before I would be allowed in the club, even as a guest. I would have to tour morgues and see the week-old infant that had been cooked in a microwave. I would have to spend hours in a forensics lab watching them painstakingly match shattered jaws with shards of gunshot teeth. I would have to watch the skin peeled back from a dead grandmother to count exactly how many stab wounds there were, which organs they pierced, and which were the fatal wounds. I would have to watch for hours through one-way glass while ignorant, impoverished murderers were angered and manipulated and worn down by detectives until they confessed or gave it up on their best friends or family or feared enemies. I would have to sit through endless courtroom proceedings, watching the professionals grind the wheels of their trade relentlessly, until the final verdict was reached. I have done all these things and never stepped back or flinched and have thus been allowed glimpses into What Really Goes On in order for we good citizens to feel safe—and for me to write my books with some sense of authenticity.

Despite all of this, after everything I’ve seen, I am still struck by the banality of it all. This is why, when I get out on the third floor, I am disappointed—instead of finding a bustling hive of colorful TV detectives with .38’s in shoulder holsters, I find an empty hallway. I walk down the hall, looking at the unmarked doors. Where are the cheap suits? The sullen perps? The sassy hookers?

I come upon a set of double doors and open them to find a warren of tiny offices. A guy in the first little office looks up from a computer screen.

“I’m looking for Detective Marsh,” I say.

“Who are you?”

“Jack Rhodes, he’s expecting me.”

He punches a button on his phone, says my name to someone, then tilts his head toward the deep end of the maze of offices.