SUMMER of FEAR (26 page)

Martin looked a little gray but forced a grin at me.

As an adult, Ing had been arrested three times, questioned on three
other occasions, and had done a total of 123 days in lockup. At twenty-two,
he'd been popped on a standard DUI and found to have a pocketful of peyote on
him—no charges for the drug; no probable cause for the search. Two years later,
while working as a groundskeeper for a private school, he was questioned on
complaints from his employer that certain animals in the school's
"zoo" were disappearing. No charges filed. Two years later, he was in
on a complaint from his landlord, who said Billy had broken into three
different apartments in the complex and stolen nothing but women's underwear.
Nothing filed. In 1984, at the age of thirty, Billy Ing had been convicted of
his first real crime—an indecent exposure to a woman on Laguna's Mai Beach. The
ninety-day sentence was suspended in favor of out patient psychiatric
counseling—seven sessions. A year later, Ing fell for grand theft auto, which
earned him four months. The
car
was
stolen from a side street in Laguna Beach and returned to hilltop residential
area of the same city two days later. He was questioned in 1987 regarding an
attempted rape at Laguna’s Thousand Steps beach, and again two years later for
a series of dogs and cats that had washed up, beaten to death, near the
Aliso Pier just south of Laguna. No
charges filed.

"Russell," said Karen, "this personal history may be of
interest to our readers. Most of it is taken from the psych evaluations done
here at County—the rest from some phone interviews Probation did. You can't
quote the evaluations—they're confidential—especially what Billy Ing said. You
may quote Martin, Sheriff Winters, Wald, and me. You may quote Mrs. Ing if she
will consent. Are we clear on this?"

"Clear."

Ing was born in Anaheim, Orange County, in 1954. His
father, Howard, was an aerospace draftsman at Rockwell; Mary worked in food
service in the hospital in which Billy was born. He was an only child.

"Nothing could have been more 'normal,'"
said Wald, looking up from the sheet. "But while Mr. and Mrs. Ing worked
hard and young Billy was left in the care of a day-sitter, he was beginning to
lead, I suspect, a very unhappy life. Is that true, Mary?"

"He was not a happy child," she answered, looking down at the
page. "I can't believe how much you have on him. On... us."

"Mrs. Ing," said Erik, with a look of deep gravity, "you
have absolutely nothing to be ashamed of. You have come here, and you are
saving lives. You are a good person."

Karen shifted uneasily in her seat, as did Martin Parish. If Winters
detected the massive condescension, he did not let on. Neither did Mary. She
blushed deeply, looked down at the pages, and wiped her eye again with the
wadded blue tissue.

Parish went back to reading.

Ing was a large child, plump and not athletic, shy and friendless. More
aggressive boys hit him, girls derided or ignored him; teachers disliked him
because he was slow and stubborn as a student. His epilepsy was a topic for
chiding. Ing came in at 136 on the Stanford-Binet IQ test. He was often truant,
for which he was beaten by his father. Howard, according to Billy, was
"always drunk" and abusive, sometimes to the point of hitting Mary
with his fists. Howard had told his son many times that Billy and Mary were
"anchors" around his neck, that the long hours he worked to support
them were hours he would have spent—without the curse of their presence—in a
life devoted to, of all things, the study of law.

I looked at Mary, who continued staring down at the papers on her lap.
She gave off a clear, if inaudible, wail of distress. Sensing my attention on
her, she glanced quickly at me, held my gaze for a moment with her hopeless
blue eye: then directed them back toward her lap. Her fist clenched hard upon
the tissue.

Parish flipped a page and continued.

According to Billy, Howard was a man "so stupid and fat” that he
got along better with animals than people.

"I expected this," said Wald. "It fits
perfectly."

"Then maybe you should let me read it,"
said Parish.

"Pardon me, Captain," said Erik.

Parish grunted and went on. According to Billy, the Ing always had three
Staffordshire terriers (pit bulls) and three cat: One of Billy's jobs was to
feed and clean up after them before his father came home from work. He hated
the animals, the way they "slobbered and shit everywhere," the way
they seemed, for reasons beyond his understanding, to receive more love and
tender attention from his father than he did. He was attacked at age eight by
all three of the dogs one night, receiving 135 stitches to close the wounds. As
an adult, he grew facial hair to cover the scars.

Karen interrupted. "Sheriff, what's your call on the scars? We can
publish it, or we can hold it."

"Why publish?" asked Wald, "He's
wearing a beard."

"It can't hurt," said Parish. "What if he shaves? Which
is a distinct possibility, after the picture we ran."

Winters contemplated this. "Drop the scars, Russ. Let' hope he
keeps the beard. Mrs. Ing, any pictures of Billy with no beard and the scars
visible?"

She shook her head. "He's worn a beard and mustache since he was in
his early twenties. The scars embarrass him. I don't think he would shave."

Winters nodded. "Save the scars, Monroe. You got only
so
much space."

Parish shook his big head as if he were dealing with children, then
continued.

According to Billy, the dog attack, although terrifying and deeply
angering, was not nearly as painful to him as the incident that immediately
preceded it.

At this point, Parish looked at Mary Ing and asked with a gentleness
that surprised me, "Is it okay to read this, Mrs. Ing?"

She nodded but didn't look up.

Apparently, during one of his rages, Howard began beating Mary. Billy
could hear them behind the closed door of the bedroom. His father was
"grunting," something—or someone— was slamming against a wall, and
his mother was sobbing. Billy threw open the door. Howard's back was to him,
and he had his coat on, but his pants were down around his ankles. All Billy
saw of his mother, blocked as she was by his father, were her two hands,
fingers spread against the wall, and the profile of her face—"strangely
angled"—also pressed to the wall, "like she was trying to hear
something on the other side of it." Billy said that it looked
"painful" for his mother. So he jumped onto his father's back. Howard
easily shook him off, and when Billy rushed to his mother's aid, she slapped
him so hard across his face that he stopped dead in his tracks. Billy said
later that the feeling of Mary's hand on his flesh was "the single worst
pain I ever felt." Billy had then run out the back door of his bedroom,
across the darkened backyard toward the fence, behind which lay the
flood-control channel, and made two unsuccessful leaps to get atop that fence
before Howard's pit bulls—in a snarling fury of mistaken protection—dragged him
down.

"Note the date," said Wald. "Fourth of July, 1962. The
County shrink notes that the dogs might have been aroused by the neighborhood
fireworks, which in '62 were legal and popular. Look, even Billy says, down at
the bottom of the page, that he remembered hearing the scream of a 'Picolo
Pete' going off as he tried to get over the fence. This is the answer to the
question of why he took the vet hospital job. Not the answer actually—but the
question itself. Fear and its governance. E you integrate it or isolate
it?"

"Who cares?" asked Martin.

"If we understand him, we can help him,"
said Wald.

"I thought we were supposed to stop him,"
said Parish.

Wald, obviously trying to accommodate Mary's feelings---and to pave in
advance a layer of trust, should we need her help—smiled at Parish and shook
his head. "We help Billy, we help everybody in this county, Martin.
That's
what we're paid to do."

Karen looked at me. "This isn't the kind of stuff we expect to see
in your next piece, Russ. It's background."

As Parish proceeded with his reading, I couldn't help but feel some pity
for the Billy Ing who used to be. And I also couldn’t help but wonder whether
anyone—especially a county ps
^y
chologist—could ever really locate the
reason why a human turns into a hunter of other humans, a thrill killer, a
living nightmare. True, Ing's story was horrible enough—a violent family bad
experiences at school, even the awful attack by his own dogs. But there were
thousand of others with comparable—or worse—lives who had managed somehow not
to break, not turn, not to slip over that final edge and fall into the numb,
self-pitying, remorseless rage that is the hallmark of the sociopath murderer.
Why Ing, if indeed Ing was the Midnight Eye? Why not someone who had suffered
even more?

I have a theory, though perhaps it's less a theory than simple point of
view. I'm not a religious man, though faith has something to do with my theory,
as does the cold truth of mathematical probability. (The idea has come to me
that God and mathematics are one.) But I've always believed that there is God
somewhere, that certain people are closer to that God than others, that some
are tied to a "purpose" that seems to come from outside of
themselves, from "above." My list would include people as diverse as
Solomon, Buddha, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Muhammad, Blake, and certainly Jesus
Christ. Thus, statistically, one in every Xmillion people are
"chosen" or "choose" or simply end up being closer to God
than the rest of us, and they function much as journalists, scurrying between
above and below, reporting back, keeping us informed. It is their job to carry
out the high-level diplomacy that people like me would only bungle— misquoting,
missing deadlines, missing the point, losing the notes, erasing the tapes.
Similarly, there are those "chosen" to do the darkest work of the
world, to function as God's continuing curse upon us, or—for those amused by
the concept of God—to fulfill the mathematical fact that for every
X
million men and women who walk the earth at a given time, one of them will be
little more than a merciless predator of other men and women. Solomon was
chosen for his gift of poetry; the Midnight Eye for his gift of rage. One
celebrates his specific blessing; the other bears his unique curse. But both do
their work so that
we don't have to.
The Eye was a serial killer for the
simple purpose of allowing me to be a writer. In a sense, I owed him. I extend
this sense of gratitude to all sufferers of disease, too. Especially to
Isabella, who, I am convinced, received her sickness so that I would not. None
of this is to say that the best place for the Midnight Eye is not the
guillotine or some modern equivalent—it probably is. And if called upon to
lower the blade, I certainly would, though less with a feeling of vengeance
than a sense of duty. I would lower the blade so you wouldn't have to. Cancer
is a serial killer; a serial killer is a cancer. No one chooses either. Parish
then briefly reviewed Ing's history of epilepsy, while I wondered whether his
taped stutterings might have been influenced by seizures, or post seizure
confusion. Had he taped them during the "aura" experienced by some
epileptics before a fit, those seconds of ecstasy, vision? Ing had admitted to
being heavy drinker from the age of eighteen, when he left his parent: home and
took the job as hospital night clerk. After his four year stint there, Ing
began a life of localized vagrancy that took him further and further out of
contact with his mother, and oddly, further away from contact with law
enforcement.

Something else I found fascinating, if pathetic: Ing had been questing
for religious belief from an early age. He had tried it all. Lutheran,
Methodist, and Baptist churches as a boy (his mother often moved the family's
place of worship); as a young man on his own he'd tried Catholicism, the
Four-square Church, Judaism, Buddhism, Islam, Confucianism, Rosicrucianism,
Scientology. In his own words, Ing had been "looking for simple answers to
complex questions. All religions, I discovered for myself, are based on the
fraudulent assumption that there is Father who cares. There is no greater
lie."

An uneasy quiet settled over the office then, broken only by the distant
sound of the General Services crew still yanking away at the sheetrock. Winters
sat back, crossed his arms, and contemplated the desk in front of him.
"Mrs. Ing," he said finally "you have anything to add?"

She breathed deeply, squaring her burdened shoulders "Well... I
think... I suppose that most of what you just read is true. When Howard died,
ten years ago, Billy seemed to take on certain... courage? I can say that all
through my life with Billy there seemed to be two of him—one that was there and
one the was somewhere else. Truly, deep down inside, he's a good boy. I know
that sounds like I'm blind, but really, he was never, I mean, he was always...
I mean, I don't know what I mean."

"You mean he's your boy and you love him,"
I said.

"Thank you, yes."

"What were his interests, his hobbies?"
asked Parish.

"He liked electric things, electronic things. He took apart our
phone once and tried to put it back together."