Chasing Darkness (26 page)

THE SANTA
Monica sky was incandescent with shoreline haze, filling Alan Levy's backyard with light so bright the swimming pool sparkled. City Councilman Nobel Wilts and Chief Marx were standing beside me at the edge of the rose garden. Thirty-two varieties of roses had been carefully removed and heaped in a pile on the far side of the yard. They would not be replanted. When the city finished its work, the roses would be discarded.

Marx waved over Sharon Stivic, who was the chief coroner investigator overseeing the recovery.

“How much longer?”

“It's a big hole. You have to be careful with the soil. We don't want to miss something important.”

The bodies were found using a gas sensor that detected the unusual concentrations of methane generated by decomposing flesh. A side-scanning sonar had then been employed to determine the exact locations, and now members of the medical examiner's office were scraping away the soil.

Wilts said, “Gotta be his wife and kids, right?”

Marx nodded. The sonar had defined their shapes and sizes.

“Won't know for sure until the identification, but yeah—it's an adult and two children.”

“Jesus Christ, I met the woman. I'm pretty sure I met her. It was a while ago.”

Wilts scrunched his face, trying to remember whether he had met Alan Levy's wife or not, but finally gave up. He mopped his brow, then scowled at the sky.

“Fuck this. I'm getting out of the sun.”

We watched him walk to the house, which was swarming with criminalists, detectives, and reporters. Levy's street was crowded with so many news vans, coroner vehicles, and gawkers that I had parked three blocks away. None of the newspeople had showed up when Yvonne Bennett was murdered, but Yvonne had not been a downtown attorney who had murdered his family—Yvonne was only a nobody who had once protected her sister.

Marx had called early that morning, telling me the bodies had been located the night before. He had asked me to come to the recovery, so I did, though I had seen enough bodies. I didn't want to see more, but I was hoping for answers. Both for myself and the Repkos.

I gestured at the growing mound of dirt.

“Might find Debra Repko's PDA in there.”

“Might.”

“Or in the house.”

“If we're lucky.”

“Or more pictures.”

“I hope to hell not.”

“Levy's autopsy show anything?”

“Nothing. Brain was clear. No tumors, cysts, or lesions. No drugs. Blood chemistry looked fine. What can you say?”

“What about the people at his firm?”

“Stunned, like everyone else. Levy told them his wife left him and took the kids east. That was eight years ago, just before Frostokovich.”

“Neighbors add anything?”

“Most of'm never met the man. We'll be reconstructing this mess for months.”

There was nothing more to say. You want them alive to answer the questions.
Why did you do this? Were there only seven, or did you kill more?
Now we had questions that would never be answered.
Why had Jonna Hill done what she did?

A booming laugh came from the house. Marx and I turned to see Wilts with a beautiful female reporter from one of the local television affiliates. Wilts was fingering her ass.

I said, “Does he know you suspected him?”

“Nah. I didn't see the point.”

Marx had gone to the Repkos and the rest of the families to explain why he misled them, but had not told them his true suspect was Wilts. A fixer to the end, he kept Wilts out of it. I respected his courage for facing them.

Two men with blunt-nosed shovels were up to their thighs in a four-foot-by-eight-foot hole. They scraped the soil away one inch at a time. Both men stopped digging at the same time, then one stooped to touch something. They wore rubber gloves.

“I'm going to take off, Chief. I don't want to see this.”

Marx stared at the ground for a moment.

“Do you think she taped him, the way she said? When he gave her the pictures?”

“She made it up. She made up a lot of things. Her sister was the same way.”

“If that tape exists, I'd like to find it.”

“You have her interview.”

“Hearing that tape would help. Not just what he said, but how. You never know what the sonofabitch might have said. It could explain a lot. Might answer a lot of questions.”

“If you find it, let me know.”

I hoped he was right.

I left him standing by the grave in Alan Levy's backyard, and walked through the crowd to the street. The sky was a beautiful crystalline blue, as bright as any I had ever seen, but a certain darkness could blot the sky, even in the middle of the day.

Darkness had lived in Alan Levy. A dark shade touched Jonna Hill long before her sister was murdered. Debra Repko brushed darkness and never returned.
Why had she gone for a walk with him? Why had he killed her on that night, and not another?
We would never know.

The darkness frightens me, but what it does to us frightens me even more. Maybe this is why I do what I do. I chase the darkness to make room for the light.