Never Fear (7 page)

“Please stay,” I said.

He held my look for a moment, then nodded and sat down on the floor, leaning back against the door.

“I'll be right here.”

I took a breath and closed my eyes, letting myself sink into the warmth of the water.

“Do you want to talk about it?” he asked.

“Williams?” I shook my head.

“I was thinking about your brother,” Harrison said.

I opened my eyes and looked at the candlelight flickering on the tile of the bathroom wall.

“Someone loved him,” I said softly, barely conscious of my own voice.

We looked at each other for a moment, and then I lay back and closed my eyes.

Forty minutes later his hand touched my arm and I opened my eyes.

“You fell asleep,” Harrison said. “We should get you out of there and rewrap those ribs.”

He took hold of my arms and helped me to my feet, wrapping a towel around my shoulders. As carefully as he had washed away the blood on my legs, he gently dried me off and began rewrapping the bandage just below my breasts.

“Tell me if this is too tight,” he said.

I tried to say it was fine, because I either didn't care about the pain anymore or just didn't notice it. I wanted to ask Harrison a thousand questions, to take apart what was happening between us like it was a case we were working on, but I couldn't do any of it. I just listened to a sound I hadn't heard in a very long time— the beating of my own heart.

Harrison finished wrapping the bandage, then draped a robe over my shoulders, closing it around me.

“You should get some sleep,” he said.

He walked me out of the bathroom and down the hall to my bedroom.

“Can you get into bed all right by yourself?”

I looked at the empty bed for a moment.

“I have a lot of practice at that,” I said.

Harrison looked at me and I saw his eyes wander for just a fleeting second.

“I'm familiar with that feeling,” he said.

I reached up and touched the crescent-shaped scar at the corner of his eye. He placed his hand on mine, holding it gently against his cheek.

“If this was . . .” I started to say before he stopped me.

“Yes,” he said. “The answer's yes.”

He closed his eyes and kissed my hand, seeming to lose himself for a moment, then his fingers slipped from mine, and he turned and left.

I stood absolutely still listening to the front door close, and the sound of the car starting and backing down the driveway. When silence returned so did the dull ache under the bandage around my ribs. I carefully sat on the bed, turned out the light, and lay down in my empty house.

9

The voices down the hallway wake me. I reach for my gun in the drawer of the nightstand but it's not there. I slip out of bed, walk over to the door, and press against it to listen. A man and a woman are yelling at each other. I can't understand the words because they're flying too fast, but I can hear the fear in her voice—that mixture of adrenaline and terror.

And then it stops, and the silence begins to gather and take on the quality of a scream. I open the door and step into the dark hallway. A faint light glows at the far end and I slowly walk toward it. I think I hear a sound, but it's only the silence. At the end of the hallway I stop, and then step into the light.

My mother and father are in the living room. He's holding her by the neck, her feet several inches off the floor. He turns and looks at me, then lets her go and she crumples to the floor like a bathrobe that has slipped off its hanger.

The ringing of the alarm yanked me out of the dream. I lay still for a moment measuring my breath. I didn't remember ever having the dream before.
Why now?
My hand touched the bandage around my ribs. Dreams and violence both come from places that are beyond our control. My daughter's screams in the night for months after the killer Gabriel touched our lives were testament enough to the connection.

The clock read nearly eight-thirty. I'd been sleeping through the electronic buzz of the alarm for an hour. I sat up, the broken ribs forcing me to make even the smallest of motions as if they had been carefully rehearsed. I looked into the dull light filtering into my bedroom through the curtains. The light wasn't right, and then I smelled the smoke that had settled over the city like a shroud.

I looked at my robe lying at the end of the bed and I was standing naked in front of Harrison again, his hands gently moving over my body. I tried to take a breath but could hardly manage it. A shiver ran through me and I closed my eyes, trying to hold on to that moment, but instead I saw the image of my half brother lying on the table at the morgue, a small bullet hole in the side of his head.

The phone on the nightstand began to ring. I let it go, trying to find my way back to the memory of Harrison, but it already seemed to be slipping away faster than I could hold on to it. I wasn't even sure it had happened. I reached over and answered the call.

“How you feeling?” Chief Chavez said.

“I'll have to give that a little thought,” I said.

He hesitated a beat too long. “What?” I asked.

“We're on tactical alert. The whole damn county seems to be catching fire.”

“That's not why you called me,” I said.

“No. An officer is on the way over with your car to pick you up. I found something you need to see.”

10

The hills above Pasadena hadn't begun to burn yet, but a fire to the east was laying down a heavy blanket of smoke over the city that turned the sunlight to the pale orange of a melon.

Chief Chavez and Harrison were in his office when I stepped inside. My eyes met Harrison's briefly, but he gave nothing away about the intimacy of the night before. A manila folder sat in the middle of Chavez's usually empty desk.

“Tell me that's Detective Williams's case file on my brother,” I said.

Chavez nodded.

“How did you manage that?”

“Let's just say I didn't use your name,” Chavez said.

“Any word on the Western Union clerk Lopez?”

Chavez shook his head. “Every media outlet has his picture. Every agency is looking for a cop killer.”

Chavez pulled his chair back and I stepped around the desk and took a seat.

“It's not exactly what I thought might be in there,” Chavez said.

I began to page through the file. There were the usual crime-scene reports from the riverbank where John was found. Coroner's report, preliminary autopsy, a few cursory biographical facts. Toxicology and the complete lab work were missing because they hadn't been finished yet.

“There's nothing here of any use,” I said and looked at them both. “What was it you wanted me to see?”

Chavez motioned toward a brown envelope paper-clipped to the bottom of the folder.

“Take a look at that.”

I opened it and pulled out a faded arrest report. It was dated 1987. I started to run down the lines of information.

“It's an arrest in a murder case,” Chavez said.

My eyes stopped on the name of the suspect arrested.

“Thomas Manning,” I said.

A mug shot was clipped to the back of the report, and I pulled it free and looked at the photograph.

“That's my father,” I said, barely speaking above a whisper.

I quickly began scanning the rest of the report. “It refers to the River Killer murders.”

“I remember them,” Chavez said. “I made a few calls to refresh my memory. Three young women were murdered, their bodies left on the banks of the L.A. River.”

“Where on the river?” I said.

“Same general location as your brother. The murders were never solved.”

In my mind's eye I saw the image from my dream the night before, only it wasn't a dreamlike image anymore. It was real. I was a little girl staring at my father choking my mother.

I felt a hand on my shoulder yanking me back to the present.

“Alex, you okay?” Chavez said.

I took a deep breath.

“Yeah, I'm okay.”

“Look at the name of the counsel present at the questioning of your father,” Harrison said.

I flipped to the second page of the report and found it in the middle of the page. “Gavin . . . He was my father's lawyer.” I looked at Harrison.

“Your father was released within hours of his arrest, no charges filed.”

I tried to let the pieces fall together in my head, but all it added up to were more questions than I had started out with.

“It can't be a coincidence that my brother was working for Gavin,” I said.

“Unlikely,” Harrison said.

“And if you carry that logic further, the fax my brother sent probably had something to do with this. One or both of them must have been looking for something to do with that case.”

“Or looking for someone,” Harrison said.

I couldn't help but connect the dots that they had just laid out. My father had been questioned as a suspect in a serial murder case, and my brother died in nearly the identical place as the victims of that killer while working for the man who represented my father eighteen years before.

“A serial killer, and the murders of my brother and an LAPD cop. And the one connecting thread is my father,” I said.

“That doesn't make your father guilty of anything, Alex,” Chavez said. “Hell, you don't even know if your father is alive.”

“No, but that's why you called me. It's probably what brought my brother and Gavin together, and now they're dead, and so is a cop who saw this file and was thinking the same thing we are. One way or the other my father is at the center of this.”

“But how?” Harrison said. “Williams may also have just gotten a random hit on the name Manning linking your brother and father to the river.”

“LAPD still considers your brother's death a suicide, and the coroner is probably going to agree,” Chavez said.

“You think Detective Williams would agree if he could?” I said.

“Gavin still died in an accident.”

“And the day my brother died, he tried to contact me for the first time in his life. There would have to be a pretty good reason for him to have done that, something that affected us both.”

“Your father would be the logical reason,” Harrison said.

I nodded. “But as what?”

“Only your brother knew that,” Chavez said.

“Not only my brother—his killer knew, too.”

“Have we found Dana Courson?”

“She lives in Studio City. There was no answer on her phone, no answer at her door. The public defender's office said she told them she would be out for a week. I left word for her to contact us if she calls in.”

I looked at Chavez, whose soft, dark eyes were never very good at hiding even the most innocent of emotions.

“Your father was questioned in a murder case eighteen years ago,” he said. “A bad arrest was made. My bet is it ends there.”

“It didn't for my brother and Detective Williams,” I said. “You think LAPD has made the connection between the River Killer and this?”

“If there is a connection,” Chavez said. “They haven't made it yet if they're still looking for a cop killer.”

“Can we get the complete case file on the River Killer?”

“LAPD has made it very clear that if you stick even a toe into your brother's or Williams's death, they'll arrest you for obstruction.”

“All they have to know is that we're looking at an eighteen-year-old murder case.”

Chavez shook his head. “Once they get their heads out of their asses, they may make the connection.”

“Can you get the files?”

Chavez sighed. “I'll see what I can do.”

I looked down at the mug shot of my father. He was years older in the picture than the last time I had seen him. The charming good looks that had fueled a dream of stardom had faded. The sparkle in the eyes was gone; the sharp lines of his face had softened. I tried to imagine what his life had been like after he left my mother and me, but I couldn't. Mug shots freeze a moment in time unlike any other photograph. The subject has no past, no future, just a single terrible moment in the white light of the camera's flash. The truth was, if I met this man on a street this afternoon, I wouldn't know who he was.

I took the file and stepped into my office while Harrison called the doctor who had attended to Gavin. I glanced at the mug shot of my father one more time, then closed the file and picked up the phone. I knew the number but, as I did every time I called, I looked it up in my book. Perfect daughters don't make mistakes.

“It's me,” I said when she answered. “I need you to tell me something.”

“It's one of those conversations, is it?” my mother said.

“No, I just need you to be honest with me.”

“When have I not been honest with you?”

“That's not what I meant.”

“Well, that's what it sounded like,” she said.

“I'm sorry, I should have phrased that differently.”

“You talk to everyone as if you suspect they've committed a crime.”

I closed my eyes and took a breath.

“It's a bad habit,” I said.

I thought I could hear the sound of a cigarette being lit, even though she swore she quit years ago.

“Okay, now what do you need to know?” my mother asked.

I thought I knew how to ask the question, but I suddenly realized I didn't. Or at least I didn't know how to ask without her thinking I was accusing her of something. I hesitated, and then asked it the only way I knew how. The way a cop would ask.