Self-Defense (2 page)

“Does Lucy seem nunnish?”

“Who’m I to say?”

“You’re a pretty good judge of character.”

“Think so, huh? Well, I don’t know
anything about her love life. Don’t know much about her, period, other than
that she’s having bad dreams.”

“Is she single?”

“That’s what she said at the voir dire.”

“What about a boyfriend?”

“She didn’t mention any. Why?”

“I’m wondering about her support system.”

“She said her mother’s dead and she doesn’t
see her father. In terms of social life, she comes across a little like Miss
Lonelyhearts. Defense guys probably loved that, too.”

“How come the prosecutors didn’t eliminate
her?”

“I asked George Birdwell about that. He
said they were running out of disqualifications and figured her for a fooler.
Inner toughness that would make her do the right thing.”

“Do you sense that, too?”

“Yeah, I do. There’s a... solid core
there. You know the old joke about a conservative being a liberal who’s been
mugged? She impresses me as someone who’s been through rough times.”

“What does she do for a living?”

“Crunches numbers for one of those big
accounting firms in Century City.”

“CPA?”

“Bookkeeper.”

“Did she mention any problems other than
the dreams?”

“Nope. And the only reason the dreams came
up is I told her she looked tired and she said she wasn’t sleeping well. So I
took her out for a piece of pie and she told me about having them. Then she
changed the subject fast, so I figured it was something personal and didn’t push.
Next time she called, she still sounded wiped out so I suggested she see you.
She said she’d think about it; then she said okay, she would.”

He took a cigar out of his pocket, held it
up to the light, put it back.

“Are any of the other jurors having problems?”
I said.

“She’s the only one I had any contact
with.”

“How’d she hook up with you in the first
place?”

“I was studying the jury the way I always
do, and we happened to make eye contact. I’d noticed her before because she
always seemed to be working real
hard.
Then, when I went up to testify,
I saw her staring at me. Intense. After that, we kept making eye contact. The
day the trial ended, the jury was being escorted out back and I was parked
there, too. She waved at me.
Really
intense look. I felt she was asking
me for something, so I gave her my card. Three weeks later she calls the
station.”

He pressed one hand down on the bar and
inspected his knuckles. “Now I’ve done my good deed for the year. I don’t know
how much she can afford—”

“I don’t imagine bookkeepers are investing
in bullion,” I said. “We’ll work something out.”

One hand pulled at his heavy jowls,
knockwurst fingers tugging heavy flesh down toward his bull neck. In the
ice-blue light of the lounge, his face was a pockmarked plaster cast and his
black hair hung over his forehead, creating a hat-brim shadow.

“So,” he said. “Is a day at the beach
really a day at the beach?”

“Bitchin’, dude. Wanna come by and catch
some waves?”

He grunted. “You ever saw me in a bathing
suit, you wouldn’t offer. How’s the house coming along?”

“Slowly.
Very
slowly.”

“More problems?”

“Each trade seems to have a sacred
obligation to ruin the work of the previous one. This week, the drywallers
covered over some electrical conduit and the plumbers damaged the flooring.”

“Sorry Binkle didn’t work out.”

“He was competent enough, just not
available. We needed more than a moonlighter.”

“He’s not that good of a cop, either,” he
said. “But other guys he did construction work for said it came out fine.”

“As far as he got, it was fine. With Robin
taking over, it’s even better.”

“How’s she handling that?”

“Now that the workers are taking her
seriously, she’s actually enjoying it. They’ve finally learned they can’t snow
her—she gets up on the scaffold, takes their tools, and shows them how.”

He smiled. “So when do you think you’ll be
finished?”

“Six months, minimum. Meanwhile, we’ll
just have to suffer along in Malibu.”

“Tsk, tsk. How’s Mr. Dog?”

“He doesn’t like the water but he’s
developed a taste for sand—literally. He eats it.”

“Charming. Maybe you can teach him to shit
adobe bricks, cut your masonry costs.”

“Always the practical one, Milo.”

It had been a nomad year.

Thirteen months ago, just before Jobe
Shwandt had started climbing through bedroom windows and ripping people to
shreds, a psychopath high on vengeance had burned my house down, reducing ten
years of memories to charcoal. When Robin and I finally mustered the strength
to think positively, we began plans to rebuild and looked for a place to rent.

The one we found was on a beach on
Malibu’s far west end. Old rural-route Malibu, nudging up against the Ventura
County line, light-years from the glitz. The recession made it affordable.

Had I been smarter or more motivated, I
might have owned the place. During my hyperactive youth, working full-time at
Western Pediatric Hospital and seeing private patients at night, I’d earned
enough to invest in Malibu real estate, buying and selling a couple of
land-side apartment buildings and turning enough profit to build a stocks-and-bonds
portfolio that cushioned me during hard times. But I’d never lived at the
beach, thinking it too remote, too cut off from the urban pulse.

Now I welcomed the isolation—just Robin,
Spike, and me, and patients willing to make the drive.

I hadn’t done long-term therapy for years,
limiting my practice to forensic consultations. Most of it boiled down to
evaluating and treating children scarred emotionally and physically by
accidents and crimes and trying to untangle the horror of child-custody disputes.
Once in a while something else came along, like Lucy Lowell.

The house was small: a
thousand-square-foot gray wood saltbox on the sand, fronted on the highway by a
high wooden fence and a double garage where Robin, after deciding to sublet her
storefront in Venice, had set up her luthier’s shop. Between the house and the
gate was a sunken garden planted with succulents and an old wooden hot tub that
hadn’t been serviceable for years. A planked footbridge was suspended over the
greenery.

A rear gate opened on ten warped steps
that led down to the beach, a rocky spit tucked into a forgotten cove. On the
land side were wildflower-blanketed mountains. The sunsets were blindingly
beautiful and sometimes sea lions and dolphins came by, playing just a few feet
from shore. Fifty yards out were kelp beds, and fishing boats settled there
from time to time, competing with the cormorants and the pelicans and the
gulls. I’d tried swimming, but only once. The water was icy, pebble-strewn, and
seamed by riptides.

A nice quiet place, except for the
occasional fighter jet roaring down from Edwards Air Force Base. Lore had it
that a famous actress had once lived there with two teenage lovers before
making the Big Movie and building a Moorish castle on Broad Beach. It was
documented fact that an immortal jazz musician had spent a winter shooting
heroin nightly in a rundown cottage on the east end of the beach, playing his
trumpet to the rhythm of the tide as he sank into morphiate peace.

No celebrities, now. Almost all the houses
were bungalows owned by weekenders too busy to recreate, and even on holiday
weekends, when central Malibu jammed up like a freeway, we had the beach to
ourselves: tide pools, driftwood, and enough sand to keep Spike licking his
chops.

He’s a French Bulldog, a strange-looking
animal. Twenty-eight pounds of black-brindled muscle packed into a carry-on
body, bat ears, wrinkled face with a profile flat enough to write on. More frog
than wolf, the courage of a lion.

A Boston terrier on steroids is the best
way to describe him, but his temperament is all bulldog—calm, loyal, loving.
Stubborn.

He’d wandered into my life, nearly
collapsed from heat and thirst, a runaway after his mistress died. A pet was
the last thing I was looking for at the time, but he snuffled his way into our
hearts.

He’d been trained as a pup to avoid water
and hated the ocean, keeping his distance from the breakers and growing enraged
at high tide. Sometimes a stray retriever or setter showed up and he romped
with them, ending up winded and drooling. But his new appetite for silica more
than made up for those indignities, as did a lust for barking at shorebirds in
a strangulated gargling tone that evoked an old man choking.

Mostly he stayed by Robin’s side, riding
shotgun in her truck, accompanying her to the jobsite. This morning, they’d
left at six and the house was dead quiet. I slid open a glass door and let in
some heat and ocean noise. The coffee was ready. I took it out to the deck and
thought some more about Lucy.

After getting my number from Milo, she’d
taken ten days to call. Not unusual. Seeing a psychologist is a big step for
most people, even in California. Somewhat timidly, she asked for a 7:30A.M.
appointment that would get her to Century City by 9:00. She was surprised when
I agreed.

She arrived five minutes late and
apologizing. Smiling.

A pretty but pained smile, rich with
self-defense, that stayed on her face almost the entire session.

She was bright and articulate and full of
facts—the small points of the attorney’s legal wranglings, the judge’s
mannerisms, the compositions of the victims’ families, Shwandt’s vulgarities,
the yammerings of the press. When the time came for her to leave, she seemed
disappointed.

When I opened the gate to let her in for
the second session, a young man was with her. Late twenties, tall, slender,
with a high brow, thinning blond hair, Lucy’s pale skin and brown eyes, and an
even more painful version of her smile.

She introduced him as her brother, Peter,
and he said, “Nice to meet you,” in a low, sleepy voice. We shook. His hand was
bony and cold, yet soft.

“You’re welcome to come in, take a walk on
the beach.”

“No, thanks, I’ll just stay in the car.”
He opened the passenger door and looked at Lucy. She watched him get in. It was
a warm day but he wore a heavy brown sweater over a white shirt, old jeans, and
sneakers.

At the gate Lucy turned to look back,
again. He was slumped in the front seat, examining something in his lap.

For the next forty-five minutes, her smile
wasn’t as durable. This time, she concentrated on Shwandt, intellectualizing
about what could have led him to sink to such depths.

Her questions were rhetorical; she wanted
no answers. When she began to look beaten down, she switched the topic to Milo
and that cheered her up.

The third session, she came alone and
spent most of the time on Milo. She saw him as the Master Sleuth, and the facts
of the Bogeyman case didn’t argue with that.

Shwandt had been an equal-opportunity
butcher, choosing his victims from all over L.A. County. When it became
apparent that the crimes were connected, a task force involving detectives from
Devonshire Division to the Sheriff’s substation in Lynwood had been assembled.
But it was Milo’s work on the Carrie Fielding murder that closed all the cases.

The Fielding case had brought the city’s
panic to a boil. A beautiful ten-year-old child from Brentwood, snatched from
her bedroom in her sleep, taken somewhere, raped, strangled, mutilated, and
degraded, her remains tossed on the median strip that bisected San Vicente
Boulevard, discovered by joggers at dawn.

As usual, the killer had left the crime
scene impeccable. Except for one possible error: a partial fingerprint on
Carrie’s bedpost.

The print didn’t match the little girl’s
parents’ or those of her nanny, and neither was it a mate for any swirls and
ridges catalogued by the FBI. The police team couldn’t conceive of the Bogeyman
as a virgin and went looking through local files, concentrating on newly
arrested felons whose data hadn’t yet been entered. No leads emerged.

Then Milo returned to the Fielding house
and noticed planter’s mix in the dirt beneath Carrie’s window. Just a few
grains, virtually invisible, but the ground beneath the window was bricked.

Though he doubted the importance of the
find, he asked Carrie’s parents about it. They said no new planting had been
done in their yard since summer, and their gardener confirmed it.

The street, however, had been planted
extensively—magnolia saplings put in by a city crew to replace some blighted
old carrotwoods—in a rare show of municipal pride stemming from the fact that
one of the Fieldings’ neighbors was a politician. Identical planter’s mix had
been used around the new trees.

Milo set up fingerprinting sessions for
the landscaping crew. One laborer, a new hire named Rowland Joseph Sand, didn’t
show up, and Milo went to his apartment in Venice to see why. No sign of the
man or his registered vehicle, a five-year-old black Mazda van.