Never Fear (10 page)

I emptied another glass, and just as quickly filled it again.

None of them had been touched; none had filed legal complaints, only with the theater's management. But they were people to me now, with names. They were the age of my own daughter. And I knew that if they hadn't experienced fear before that day, they knew it from that moment on because of my father. Whenever a door opened behind them, whenever they heard a footstep, they would be afraid.

A makeup artist named Terry was the first one he touched. It was in the middle of a performance. She was in the dressing room going through her kit when she heard him enter the room. She began to turn when he reached out, put his hand over her mouth, and pulled her out of the chair. She tried to scream but couldn't, then just as quickly he let go and backed away, repeating, “I'm sorry, I'm sorry.”

He touched two more women, mirror images of the first encounter that ended with an apology. I didn't look at their names. I wanted to open a second bottle of wine and turn the clock back to when my father existed as little more than an image on a television screen, but I didn't. I moved to the last report in the file—the only assault where police questioned him. Jenny Roberts, the first victim of the River Killer. The perfect young blond actress who did community theater and wanted to be on a TV series.

I quickly scanned the report from the officer who had questioned my father. “She came on to me,” my father said. “It happens all the time in the theater. Some people are unable to turn emotions off after intense work.”

No charges were filed. He was fired from the theater a week later. A month after that, Jenny Roberts was found on the riverbank, strangled, her hands tied behind her back with a thin yellow cord.

I closed the file and pushed back from the table. It was nearly one o'clock. I poured the last of the bottle of wine into the glass and stepped out the front door. The dry air that had been flowing out of the desert into the basin was warmer than it had been earlier in the day. The smoke wasn't visible in the darkness, but the aroma of fire was there. I took a breath and it stung my throat. It was different than it had been when Pasadena was shrouded in orange light. Instead of just burning brush and chaparral, there was the sting of something else hanging in the air now.

Houses were burning—roofs, furniture, plastics, cleaning chemicals under kitchen sinks, fabrics, books, shoe leather. All physical evidence of lives lived was being consumed.

“It happens all the time in the theater,” I whispered.

The words sent a chill through me as if I'd stepped into a cold room. All through my childhood I had pretended my father was a salesman trying to sell bicycles to cowboys. One day I dreamed he would come back. And now I hoped to God he hadn't.

13

Twice in the night I bolted out of sleep as I felt a hand reach around my neck and try to pull me into the darkness. Each time I sat up in bed and searched the dark corners of the room to make sure I was alone, then I lay down and tried to force myself back into a dreamless sleep that I knew wouldn't last.

The third dream was different. He didn't touch me this time, but he was there, standing behind me. I tried to fight off the dream, but it held a grip on me as surely as if he were in the room. Then I heard my mother. “It's okay now. It's okay.”

The sound of her voice shook me from the dream and I jumped into consciousness. My ribs ached from lying on my side. The sheets were damp with perspiration.

The alarm clock read 5:10 A.M. I looked around the darkness and noticed the curtain blowing into the room. I lay back on the pillow and tried to think of something that would allow me to slip back to sleep. I attempted to picture my daughter, then to remember the touch of Harrison's hands as he gently washed my legs, but I could only hold on to either thought for a moment before the shadow of my father intruded, and another terrible question formed in my mind to push sleep further away.

Was I one of his victims?

Was that why I became a cop, to undo some terrible wrong that had been swept from my memory? Was that why my mother was so upset at the prospect of my wearing a badge? That inevitably the one investigation she knew I would have to undertake was my own past, a past she had spent a lifetime concealing from me?

I tried a breathing exercise that Lacy had learned from her PTSD sessions to relax, but my broken ribs made the exercise futile. I rolled onto my side away from the broken ribs and watched the gentle rise and fall of the curtains.

“Let it go,” I started to say, then stopped. There was no letting go of this. Maybe this was what John Manning had known, and it was why he became an investigator just as I had. It was the thread that connected us, except he had chosen to solve the one mystery I had forever tried to bury: Who was our father? And that search probably cost him his life.

I got out of bed and walked back out to the dining room, where I had left the case files. There wasn't a sound anywhere. Not the wind. Not a distant car, a jet, anything. I realized I was shaking and eased myself down into a chair at the table and sat in the darkness. Tears began to well up in my eyes, and I wiped them away with the back of my hand. My brother had thought of me the night he died because he believed I needed the same answers he did.

Wind jostled the windowpanes. I heard the siren of a distant fire truck. A mockingbird began a wild singsong and then a crow let go with a series of shrieks.

I stood up and walked to the front door and stepped outside to get some air. The wind had shifted overnight and was blowing directly into my face. Smoke obscured the sky above. To the east over the nearest ridgeline, the orange light of fire glowed in the predawn. There were more sirens audible. The flashing lights of a fire engine appeared at the bottom of Mariposa. Other residents on the block were loading their cars with belongings.

I retrieved my phone from inside and hit the speed dial. Harrison answered on the second ring.

“Are you all right?” he said.

His voice was as reassuring as the feel of his hands on my legs. Fragile gray ash began falling out of the sky, covering the ivy on the hillside like new snow. The first wisps of flame were becoming visible, topping the ridge less than two miles away. A nervous deer came bounding out between two houses, its delicate hooves slipping on the pavement before it vanished into the shadows behind another house.

“The fire's moving right toward me. I think I'm going to have to evacuate,” I said.

“I'll be right there,” Harrison said.

“I think it's possible my father could be a killer,” I said before I hung up.

By dawn the flames had crested the ridge to the east and began advancing. Three fire engines were parked in the cul-de-sac. My neighbors were packing their cars with pets, tax records, family photographs, and anything else that couldn't be replaced and would fit in an SUV.

I watched through the dining room window the exodus of my neighbors. I had gone through the house and piled anything I thought I couldn't live without in boxes by the garage door. The irony of my father's case files from a murder investigation sitting on top of family memories was not lost on me.

“I bet I'm the only one on my block saving a case file from a murder investigation along with all their baby pictures.”

“You have a place to stay till the fire's out?” asked Chief Chavez, who had arrived shortly after Harrison, when he heard of the evacuation notice.

“I have an extra bedroom,” Harrison said.

I glanced at him and his eyes revealed nothing more than an offer of shelter.

“Good, I don't want you alone,” Chavez said.

“I'll be fine. I can get a motel room.”

Chavez shook his head. “If your brother and Williams were murdered because they were a threat to someone, then that means whoever continues that investigation is also in danger.”

“Me, in other words,” I said.

Chavez looked out the door at the line of flames a mile from the house and shook his head in disbelief. “Do you really believe it's possible your father is the one they are looking for?”

“You mean, do I believe my father could have murdered his own son?”

His eyes appeared to reveal a reluctance even to consider the question so directly.

“Eighteen years ago my father ripped open Jenny Roberts's blouse and dragged her across a stage floor by her ankle as she screamed for help. A month later she was murdered. Does that make him a murderer? I don't know. Until last night, all I knew of him were a few images on the TV.”

Chavez looked at me for a moment, hesitant to say what he was thinking. “Maybe you should walk away from this.”

I shook my head and looked over at my father's file.

“I've already done that for most of my life. For an instant I had a brother in this world reach out to me. If I walk away, I'll lose him again.”

“I don't want you alone. You stay with Harrison.”

He gripped my hand and then walked out to his squad, parked on the street. The sun was fully over the San Gabriels now, though from the amount of light coming through the heavy smoke you would never know it.

“I heard someone who lost his house in a brush fire say that no one is as free as the person who has just lost everything,” I said.

I turned and looked at Harrison. “You believe that?”

He shook his head. “That sounds like something to believe when you have no other choice.”

Tiny embers carried on the wind began hitting the side of the house as firemen began to deploy their hoses, preparing to defend the block. I closed the front door and stood looking into my house. So much pain had happened here. How could it possibly matter if I lost it? I wondered.

Tears filled my eyes and I rushed into the kitchen, grabbed a paper bag, and began walking through the house picking up things that I thought needed saving—salt and pepper shakers from the dining room table, a refrigerator magnet, a drink coaster, a pen, a book that I had never read, a pair of shoes, clothes from Lacy's closet that she hadn't worn in years, her princess phone.

When the bag was full I sat down on Lacy's bed and held it like it was a newborn. Harrison walked in a moment later and sat next to me.

“I don't know what half the things in this bag are,” I said. “I was trying to find something happy to remember . . . I don't know.”

I looked out the window at the smoke streaming by.

“There was a prosecutor from the DA's office present at your father's questioning. You want to start there?” Harrison asked.

“Okay.”

I quickly packed the boxes of family records into my Volvo, closed all the doors and windows, then drove away from my home of twenty years, not certain it would be there when I returned.

14

The lawyer with the DA's office who had been present at my father's interrogation eighteen years ago was now working as an investigator out of the Antelope Valley office, sixty miles north of L.A. on the edge of the high desert.

This was as far as you could get from the center of the city and still be within the county. Tract after tract of housing developments spread out in every direction where desert used to be. Lawns replaced tumbleweed. Ninety-minute commutes redefined the limits of community.

From the parking lot of the DA's offices you could see extinct cinder cones rising out of the sand to the north. To the south, the column of smoke from the fire threatening my house climbed thousands of feet into the air, dwarfing the San Gabriels.

Outside of a few desert rats and dirt bikers, no one came to the high desert out of choice. You came because it was the last place you could afford, or you came for work. In every sense it was the end of the road before leaving L.A. entirely behind.

The investigators' windowless offices were on the ground floor, far from the views of the lawyers three and four floors up. Frank Cross met us in the hallway and walked us back to his small office. Cross was a large man, over six feet, powerfully built, though far from fit. Why a former lawyer for the DA's office was now working as an investigator I suspected had something to do with his presence here at the outer edge of the system. His eyes had the tired look of a traveler stuck in an airport with no hope of ever reaching his destination.

On a wall of the office was a marker board with a list of open cases. A quick glance suggested the majority of them were spousal abuse, hate crimes, and property theft. Not the stuff investigators' dreams are made of.

“Your call said you wanted to talk about the River Killer investigation?” Cross asked.

“A portion of it,” I said. “You took part in the interrogation of the only suspect ever arrested.”