Eyes Wide Open (9 page)

Chapter Twenty-One

C
harlie sat at the kitchen table in his T-shirt and shorts, sipping his morning coffee.

He didn't know how the detective who'd been killed might've figured in with Evan. Only that, with the sneaker he had found, it gave him the slightest spark of hope that what he knew in his heart was true: that his son hadn't jumped off that rock on his own. He would never have hurt them in that way.

To him, this was just another rung on the long ladder of how he'd been screwed over in his life. Beginning with his father. To the doctors Charlie had seen, who never truly understood him. Who had put him on brain-numbing meds for thirty years. To the state—how they barely gave him and Gabby enough to squeeze by. How they had placed Evan with all his young promise in that crap hole of a school, filled with future meth heads and gang members. Who chewed his son up and spit him out, and started him on his decline.

“You see, Gabby, you see!” Charlie said, his pulse pounding. If it wasn't clear to that stupid detective what had happened, it was clear to him. “He didn't kill himself after all. I know the truth. Evan's sneaker. They never even made an attempt to find it. You know what that means, don't you? His sneaker, Gabby, I'm telling you, that's the key.”

“You have to calm down, Charlie,” Gabby said. “You're in a rant. Jay will handle it for us. Here . . .”

She doled out his pills—trazodone to calm him down, felodipine and Caduet for his blood pressure, Quapro for the kidneys, Klonopin to calm his shakes. Six or seven others. She laid them out in a long line on the counter. The blue one was lithium. He'd taken it for thirty years, and now his kidneys were starting to break down.

“Here, Charlie,” she said, shuffling up in her robe, putting them into a small dish, and giving him a glass of orange juice.

He swallowed them in one gulp.

“Good boy, my husband,” she said, petting him on his shoulder. Then she sat down in the chair next to him, strain etched in her face. And grief—grief no one should have to bear. Today was no different than it would be every day. Every day for the rest of their lives. He could see she was an inch from tears.

“Jay says they'll have to reopen the investigation,” he said, upbeat, trying to make her happy. He squeezed her hand.

“I always thought my boy was crazy,” Gabby said. “Talking to that thing over there.” She looked at the furnace. “But now I don't know. Maybe we didn't do the right thing, Charlie. Did we kill our own son?”

He had to hold back tears himself. “I think we did, Gabby. I don't know . . .”

He switched on the TV, the local news station, taking his coffee to the couch to hear the news. “Maybe there'll be something further on Evan . . .”

Then he remembered they hadn't picked up the mail. In days. Not that there was ever anything there. Only bills. And catalogs with merchandise they couldn't afford.

Still, it gave him something to do besides drive himself crazy. He got up. Went to the door in his shorts. “I'll be right back.”

He stepped out, if only to get some air, if only to get out of their cramped, tiny tomb of an apartment filled with so many painful memories.

This shit hole where they lived that filled him with disgust. That hadn't been painted in years. That stank like piss. The grass in the courtyard hadn't been cut in weeks. Look at where they forced him to bring up his son.

I've been talking to the police,
the boy had said
. They want me to take the test . . .

Yes, they did drive him away, Charlie realized
.
They killed their own son.

He shuffled out to the carport in front where the mailbox was. Several days of mail, stuffed in, tumbled into his hands. He flipped through the stack: California Power and Light, the pharmacy, the cable company. All he did was pass the bills along to Gabby.

At the bottom of the stack, one large envelope was addressed to him. In an unfamiliar handwritten scrawl. It didn't appear to be junk mail or a bill. He didn't get much personal mail these days.

He flipped it over. No return address. Trudging back to the apartment, he put the rest of the mail under his arm and opened this large one, slowly easing the contents out.

There were photos. Several of them. Black and white.

He stopped.

The photos were of a woman. Her eyes open; her face twisted in a horrible expression. Bloodied and cut up. Red marks disfiguring her.

What the hell was he looking at?

The woman wasn't young, but she was naked on top. Her nipples were bloodied, the tips cut off. A dark red slit circled the bottom of her neck, and blood was pooled off to the side. She had other slash marks under her eyes that ran down to the top of her cheekbones like a trail of tears.

He cringed. Who would send these to him? Was it some kind of cruel joke? Someone who knew what had happened to them and wanted to hurt them further?

He stared in revulsion at the disfigured face, the eyes wide open, the victim's mouth parted, the mole on her cheek
 
. . .

Her braided long blond hair.

Suddenly Charlie's stomach climbed up his throat.

He realized he knew her.

He felt stabbed in his chest, spun back in time, like in one of those low-budget sci-fi movies, hurtling back through the vortex of time.

They had been together for only a short while. Months, maybe. Years ago. They had traveled around for a time. Back in the day. Then gone their separate ways. Who had sent this? How would anyone even have known? Or even put them together?

It had only been a short time, but in it they had shared the biggest secret of their lives.

Sherry?

He brought her pretty face to mind. It had been more than thirty years.

The other envelopes fell out from under his arm, scattering on the walkway, as his legs grew weak and an even greater dread took hold of him, bringing with it a fear that reverberated through him like the first frost of fall.

Who even knew that he was there?

Chapter Twenty-Two

T
ruth was, Sherwood sighed, stepping out of his car, he didn't buy a word of what the doc had told him.

He didn't believe the murdered ex-detective and boy who jumped off that rock had even the slightest connection. He didn't believe this Miguel Estrada kid was on the level. Or that he had ever even seen the two of them together.

Not for a second.

What he
did
believe was that it was far more likely Miguel had something to do with Walter Zorn's death.

And since one of the cases he was handling happened to be from Santa Maria, fifteen miles down the freeway, he had a perfectly valid reason to stop in at the local police station there.

So after meeting with the grief-stricken family of the sixteen-year-old Pequillos member who'd been tossed in the woods behind the Grover Beach tracks, he made the drive and parked in the lot on Cook Street.

Larry Velez was one of the two homicide detectives stationed there.

“Keeping busy?” Sherwood knocked on the door. He and Larry had worked together at times over the years. Velez had started out as a detective in Pismo before moving down the freeway.

“Never the problem.” Velez sighed. Santa Maria was a town of only ten thousand, but the total lack of jobs there, the shit-ass education system, and the control of the local gangs gave it the highest rate of violent crime in the area.

“Don't say I never gave you anything . . .” Sherwood dropped his findings on the Pequillos killing on the detective's desk. “
Surprise—
coroner's ruling it a homicide. I passed it over to McWilliams.” Dave McWilliams was head of the homicide detail in Pismo Beach.

Velez put the file on top of three others. “Nice of you to bring it down.”

“So how's it going on that retired detective?” Sherwood took a chair and asked. “What was his name, Zorn? Anything further?”

Velez shrugged. “Only prints we found were from him and a housekeeper who came once a week. A neighbor saw a dark van parked on the street that night and heard some noises inside. Word is, the guy kept a bunch of money in the house. We found a desk rifled through. A metal lockbox opened. We're checking any day laborers in the area who didn't show up for work today.”

Sherwood nodded. “I didn't catch a COD on the news.” Cause of death.

“Not a coincidence,” the Santa Maria detective said. “The guy was strangled.”

“Strangled?”

“With an asterisk,” Larry Velez added.

Sherwood looked at him, a little confused, and pulled his chair closer. “Listen, Larry, I know this isn't procedure, but you mind if I take a quick look?”

The homicide detective hesitated. He and Sherwood were friends and all, but they generally didn't open their cases like that. His chief wouldn't go for it. Velez scrunched his brow. “And what's the reason, Don?”

“A case I'm working on. Kind of a long shot. There's a chance this might tie in. You remember that jumper in Morro Bay?”

Velez chuckled. “I heard there was someone stirring things up on that. That they even got one of the TV stations involved. Perokis down your throat on this?”

Perokis was Sherwood's boss.

Sherwood shook his head. “Just so I can cross it off my list. C'mon, Larry, what do you say you just go grab yourself a coffee, and I'll just wait for you here?”

Velez seemed to ponder it a second and then stood up. He pulled a blue folder from his slotted file and dropped it in front of Sherwood. “Light or dark?”

“Dark,” Sherwood said with an appreciative smile. “Thanks, partner.”

“Be back in five . . .” Velez left, shutting the office door. Sherwood took out his reading glasses and picked up the blue file.

Walter Zorn. A series of crime scene photos. The white hair, the red blotchy birthmark the doc had mentioned.

The first document he found was the 10-05, the report filed by the responding officers at the scene.

There were signs of a struggle. The lamp cord wrapped around his neck. Body found at the couch in front of the TV. Apparently the old guy stuck mostly to himself. Before moving up, he'd spent twenty years on the Santa Barbara force. Worked a couple of high-profile cases back in the day. Retired with the rank of inspector, senior grade.

It was a small community and Sherwood had never seen him around at any of the bars or cafés where cops generally hung out.

What the hell would Zorn possibly have wanted with Evan?

Sherwood leafed through the crime scene photos. The victim's eyes were bulging. He looked like he'd put up quite a fight. Just run out of strength. Zorn was a big guy and not one who would go down easy.

Robbery did seem likely.

Satisfied, Sherwood tapped the photos back into a pile. He'd done what he'd promised. He told the doc he'd take a look, and he had. He saw nothing that connected the old cop to Evan. This kid Miguel was probably just trying to make some hay. To be safe, he'd mention to Velez he ought to run Estrada's prints anyway.

And that if Evan's name ever happened to come up to let him know.

As he was putting the crime scene photos back in the file, another dropped out. It had been taken during Zorn's autopsy.

Sherwood picked it up and looked at it, almost randomly. It was a close-up of what appeared to be cut marks on the victim.

Cut marks, Sherwood saw, staring closer, on what appeared to be the underside of the dead detective's tongue.

An asterisk,
Velez had mentioned.

It appeared to be kind of a circle with a red dot in the center of it, enclosed in two irregular curved lines.

Even a traffic cop knew no burglar left a mark like that.

Suddenly his heart came to a stop. He adjusted his glasses and looked closer.

No fucking way,
Sherwood said to himself
. Can't be . . .

He blinked, bringing the photograph close to his eyes. Looking at it one way, it appeared to be nothing—simply random, unconnected cut marks.

But if you turned it another way, and he did—and stared at it from another angle—there it was, plain as fucking day. Staring right back at him.

An eye.

“Sonovafuckingbitch,
” Sherwood muttered, taking off his glasses.

An
open
eye.

Chapter Twenty-Three

T
he six o'clock news carried an update on the Zorn murder.

A pretty Asian reporter stood in front of an undistinguished, white ranch house, explaining that the retired Santa Barbara detective had been strangled in his home, in what the police were describing as an apparent robbery. She said how Zorn's drawers and closets had been rifled through and a locked metal box in his desk was pried open and emptied.

I was on the bed in my hotel room, hoping that Sherwood might call me back, when the news report came on.

The reporter said Zorn had lived quietly in the area for almost ten years after he retired from the Santa Barbara force. For a while he had volunteered in local youth programs. Then he pretty much just kept to himself, battling some health issues.

In his hometown of Santa Barbara, the woman reported, Zorn had been a decorated policeman and a respected detective. He had even worked some high-profile homicide cases going all the way back to the 1960s. There was the Veronica Verklin murder, which had made national headlines, in which a celebrated porn star was believed to have been beaten to death by her convict ex-husband, but eventually it turned out to be her boyfriend/director.

And Zorn had also been involved in the investigation of the Houvnanian murders, in which a charismatic cult figure and four followers committed a series of drug-induced ritual killings of affluent residents in the Santa Barbara hills. This was back in 1973, and it had created national headlines.

The group lived in a commune on a ranch up near Big Sur once owned by Paul Riorden, one of the victims. The perpetrators were all convicted of several counts of murder and were serving life sentences.

The mention struck a chord with me. The Riorden Ranch. I was pretty sure Charlie had lived there for a while. Back in the early seventies. Well before the killings.

The reporter closed by saying the police were appealing to the local residents for any leads.

I sat there for a while, the idea of this vague connection knotting my stomach. Charlie had always distanced himself from the terrible things that had happened on the ranch, always shrugging it off by saying he left long before then and only hung around there “for the drugs and the girls.” It was all part of the lore that made his past so captivating.

I watched the news through the sports, then I decided to call him. He answered with a kind of a downtrodden tone. “Hi, Jay . . .” I'd spoken to him twice already that day, and both times, he sounded sullen and kind of medicated. “Did they find any connection between Evan and that cop?”

“No, not yet,” I said. “But tell me about Russell Houvnanian.”

He paused, the delay clearly letting me know I had taken him by surprise. “Why do you want to know about that?” he asked me.

I didn't want to fully divulge why. Right now I didn't have anything—only this vague, decades-old connection that probably wasn't a connection at all. Plus, I knew how Charlie's mind operated and didn't want him to get all worked up over things that might lead nowhere.

“You lived there for a while,” I said. “Didn't I always hear you knew him?”

Charlie's past was always so vague, so clouded by his many retellings, not to mention the drugs, that it was hard to know what was actually the truth and what wasn't.

“I was only there for a couple of months.” His tone was halting, as if he were still trying to figure out where I was headed. “I was long gone before anything took place. You know how stuff like that always gets built up. Dad always liked to tell it that way. Like when he was trying to bang some chick and needed to wow her with one of his stories.”

I kept on him. “But you were there.” Years before, he had told me about the Rasputin-like effect Houvnanian had on his followers. The cultlike mix of religion, music, sex, and drugs. “You met the guy, right?”

“Yeah, I met him,” Charlie said. He didn't follow up for a moment, but when he did, it almost knocked the phone out of my hand.

“You met him too, Jay.”