Killer (7 page)

How could I have known those things? The things I saw at Temescal Canyon?

I can see the doorway to my office from the counter and I go to the office as I chew on a cold chicken leg seasoned with rosemary.

In the office, I stare at my books.

If I knew those things at Temescal, what about other things? From the following books? A murder in each book…

I reach for a copy of my second book,
Killer At Large,
an advance copy from Terrapin, signed on the cover page by my editor, Judith Price:
Thanks for keeping me awake nights! XO, J.P.

I sit at my desk and open the book and start to read. It is a little more recognizable than
Killer
, but not much. After a few pages I feel my limbs getting heavy with fatigue, and I wash up and take the book to bed with me.

At eleven p.m. I realize I have read the fourth page of the book three times and I can no longer stay awake. I close the book and put it on the nightstand and turn off the light and turn into my pillow and in less than a minute I am sleeping like a guilty man.

THINGS PAST

By age thirteen he had begun to seek the refuge of the closet on his own. The Witch was gone more often than not now—sometimes to County, sometimes off with men for days, weeks. He had learned to care for himself in the filthy little house by the freeway. He could have slept on the couch when the Witch was gone, but he didn’t—and he couldn’t even conceive of sleeping in her bed.

He liked the closet now. He was far too big now to sleep on the pile of clothes, even when curled in a fetal position. So he had fashioned a method of piling and folding the grimy couch cushions on the closet floor and against one wall. His head was supported at a comfortable angle so he could gaze at the Angel without even lifting his eyes, his knees raised and propped up by a cushion he had folded into a V and duct-taped to the floor. He would lie there, naked—always naked—and talk and listen and, in the darkness, he would forget the world, forget himself, and go with the Angel to the places from the picture books. Cradled in her arms, touching and being touched, her perfect blue eyes twin North Stars guiding him toward indescribable bliss. The dark place had become Heaven. Because he had made it so.

He never went to school any more. Social Services had forgotten him years ago. He had fallen through every crack of every city, county, state, and federal bureaucracy. Officially, he existed only in a few early school records, in fits and starts. He had no birth certificate, no Social Security number, no medical or dental records.

He had learned to take care of himself quite well as the Witch’s absences increased in length and frequency. He had grown. He had left the house many times and gotten daylight and fresh air. And with the Witch gone, he got regular meals. He taught himself to become an expert shoplifter. He had a natural cunning, which was sharpened by years of maneuvering around the Witch—to bathe, to eat, to move around the house without disturbing her and drawing her wrath. He started by stealing small amounts of produce—anything without a tag or bar code that would set off the security alarms that flanked the automatic doors at the large Ralph’s supermarket six blocks from the house. Then he figured out how to remove the tags and bar codes of other merchandise with a small pair of nail clippers. People were so stupid. So trusting. So easily confused and misdirected. Cattle. The hoofed beasts of the field. A few drops of cooking oil discretely dripped on the floor in front of the busy deli counter, near a towering pyramid of soda or beer or other merchandise, and all he had to do was wait until some bovine shopper would slip and knock over the stacked merchandise and send the security guard, clerks, and managers running to help, to apologize, to clean up. Twice he had walked out during the confusion, pushing a shopping cart brimming with his favorite foods.

He never went hungry. His limbs grew longer and heavier, his mind sharper still. He cut his own hair. He bathed carefully every day, when the Witch wasn’t there, of course. He had no need for companionship, other than the Angel. He never watched television or listened to music. He had stolen a paperback Bible from the book rack at the supermarket. A King James version, just like from the day care. It didn’t have pictures, but he had outgrown the picture books. Besides, the pictures he created with the Angel were far better.

So while other gangly thirteen year-olds were listening to music or playing video games or dating or doing homework, he read his Bible—read it deeply, constantly. He still loved the day care stories, especially David and Goliath, but lately he had become fascinated with the New Testament, particularly the book of Acts, in which Paul had his conversion on the road to Damascus.

It was the blinding light that first caught his attention; the blinding, brilliant light which struck down Paul—Saul, as he was called before his conversion. The blinding light—like the light which burst from the door when the Witch attacked him. After the Witch attacks he would lie on the closet floor, beaten, sometimes bleeding, and he could see nothing until his eyes adjusted once again to the dark closet, and the porcelain face of the Angel would slowly form, hovering above him, nothing else visible; alone, head and hands, head and hands, serene, compassionate, loving, listening, touching...

Then came the day of his own conversion. And the transubstantiation of the Witch.

The blinding light that led to his own conversion was the direct summer sun that exploded into the dark closet when the Witch threw open the door. He had been in a special new place with the Angel, a place based on a picture he saw on a gift card at Ralph’s. The picture was a crude, tiny reproduction of a Corot pastoral, featuring a lone woman seated near a shallow slough in which three cows meandered under a thumbnail moon. He pictured himself at the water’s edge, in the arms of his Angel, and then the light struck him blind and the Witch found him there, naked, tumescence in his moving hand, gazing at the Angel.

He turned away from the light and the assault he knew was coming, but all he heard were vulgar words and then—horribly—the sound of shattering porcelain, and he knew right away what the Witch had done.

He knew, even before he turned and saw the shards of pure white porcelain, head and hands, now shattered on the floor near him, and the Witch began to kick him with the sharp heels of her knee-high boots.

The next thing he heard was a shriek—not from the Witch, but from his own throat. A strange new sound; part deep and guttural, part a small boy’s scream, as he lunged from the closet and toppled her and sat atop her and beat her with his fists until she lay motionless.

And yet he beat her still.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

I startle awake with the unmistakable sense that there has been a loud noise in my bedroom. I lie still in the dark for a moment. I can’t remember the sound, but I have the inexplicable conviction that it was loud and very close. I lie listening to the soft tick of the clock on my nightstand. A faint wind rises, brushing the branches of a pine against my bedroom window.

I get up and head down the hall. I leave the lights off, remembering Lt. Foley, a retired NYPD detective who once told me in his thick Bronx snarl,
the humid scent of scotch on his breath, “
The last thing you wanna do is turn the lights on if there’s an intruder. You know your place—they don’t. The dark gives you an advantage.”

I think a raccoon on the roof is more likely than an intruder, but nevertheless I go to my office and grab
The Dangerous Summer
from the top shelf of the bookcase by the door. I pull the book cover off the small wooden box I built in my woodshed. Inside the small pine box is the stainless steel Smith & Wesson .45 with the rubber grip that I keep there. I bought the gun after encountering a bear one night while I was taking out the trash. The guy at the gun shop suggested a shotgun but I want nothing to do with shotguns. So I bought the .45, which my cop pals tell me will kill pretty much anything if used with the proper ammunition, decent aim, and a persistent lack of empathy. I have hollow-cavity rounds, my aim is decent, and if it’s between me and the bear, the bear’s going down.

I grab the gun and head back down the hall. No bears in the living room. I peer out the window at the trash containers outside. Sealed shut and upright. No animals. I look at the clock on the fireplace mantle: 4:45. I debate putting on coffee and starting work, but I’m still too tired. I head back to bed and I’m about to put the gun back in the bookcase when the floorboard under my foot pops loudly.

That was it.

That was the sound that woke me. No question. I stand there for a moment.

Relax. The cabin was freezing. You turned the furnace on and the floorboards expanded with the heat and made a noise. Nothing mysterious.

Thank you, Mr. Science.

I half-smile at myself and decide to forget about it. I head back to bed, but stick the gun under the mattress where I can reach it. Just in case.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Six hours later I wake from a series of disconnected dreams. I sense there was something important about them so I try to remember but the harder I chase them the faster they slip away.

I get up, see that it’s almost eleven, and go make coffee. Frost covers the cabin windows. I can see only that it’s dim and gray outside. I turn the phones on and check the voicemail. Nicki Feldman’s office has called twice. I call her back and leave a message, then hang up and pull a large Circulon skillet from the cabinet beneath the phone. I turn the flame on low under the skillet, then drop a dollop of butter into it. As the butter melts, I crack four eggs into the skillet, splash in a little milk, and sprinkle in some shaved cheddar cheese. I turn the heat up and scramble the eggs while they cook.

Sara had disdained my scrambled eggs method, although she liked the results. She thought I should mix the eggs and milk in a bowl, then dump the contents into a pre-heated skillet. We had an old Teflon skillet which had begun to peel, and she didn’t like the idea of the eggs sloshing around in it too long, absorbing exotic polymers. She was probably right.

“I just like doing it this way,” I say as I stir the eggs, which are beginning to form tiny islands of solid mass in the Circulon skillet.

When I moved to the cabin, after I had bought my hardware, I had everything for the
outside
of the cabin, but the inside was as empty as a church on Saturday night. I didn’t even have a fork. So I drove to Burlington, went to Macy’s at the mall, and at the housewares desk I found a young man tying a ribbon on a box for a woman. He had neat, short brown hair, with a cowlick that was faintly frosted blonde. He wore a pale blue Brooks Brothers shirt, dark wool slacks, and black Kenneth Cole loafers. His socks and belt were exactly the same shade of dark cerulean. He finished the ribbon and turned to me.

“Hi, I just moved here and I need some things,” I said, and handed him a two-page list of items on yellow legal paper. He stared at the list. His nametag said “Jonathan.”

“You need all this?” he said, his eyebrows raised.

“Yes,” I said. “Do you carry all of it?”

“I’m pretty sure we do…” Jonathan said, scanning the list. “I’ll have to check furnishings for the bed and the sofa and the rugs. They’ll have to be delivered if they’re not in stock.”

“That’s fine.”

“Okay, well…guess we’d better get started,” Jonathan said, then came around from behind he cash register.

“If you don’t mind, you can go ahead and pick it all out and ring it up. I’ll be in electronics,” I said.

Jonathan blinked at me. “You want me to pick out all your stuff?”

“If that’s okay.”

“It’s fine with me, but what if I pick out something you don’t like?”

“I’m sure whatever you pick out will be fine. It’s a pine cabin. The floors and walls are pine, with a medium brown finish. The kitchen is modern with stainless steel appliances and brown granite countertops. The bathroom tile is white with navy trim.”

“What about price?”

“Just use your best judgment. I’ll be back in a couple of hours.”

“…Okay,” Jonathan said, then started writing down my description of the cabin.

I went to the electronics section and sat down and watched the Oakland Raiders hammer the Kansas City Chiefs 32-0. When the game was over I returned to housewares and found Jonathan running the cash register, which was spitting out a paper receipt that spilled onto the floor like Rapunzel’s hair. Jonathan was surrounded by boxes of merchandise.

“Perfect timing,” he said. “Just finished.”

I gave him my Amex but he insisted on at least showing me the items he chose. They were all perfect. He rang it up, I pulled my truck around to the loading dock, then drove my new household home, wondering why the Chiefs hadn’t had a consistent offense since Joe Montana.

When the eggs are done, I spoon them onto a Macy’s Cellar dinner plate. The plate is white with a navy border that perfectly compliments the brown granite countertop. I grab a Macy’s Cellar dinner fork from the silverware drawer, and I am savoring the first bite when the phone rings. I pick it up and Nicki says “Good morning.”

“Morning,” I say.

“Get some sleep?” she asks.

“Yes, thank you.” I take another bite of scrambled eggs.

“Turns out LAPD was less than forthcoming with you,” Nicki says. “Temescal Canyon Park was renovated in the summer of 2001. They started construction a week after Beverly Grace was reported missing. The park was closed for two months and a security guard was posted there while the heavy equipment was on site. A fence was put up with a locked gate and it was inaccessible all summer. Which means they’ve pinpointed the week she was killed. It had to have been just before they started construction.”

“Why didn’t they just say so?” I ask.

“Because they wanted to see how much
you
would tell
them
.”