SUMMER of FEAR (25 page)

"You know what I
m-m-meanl"

"A favor," I said. "I know exactly
what you mean."

A few minutes later, I asked Joe to walk me to my car. tried to explain
to him, in the calmest way I could, that the Midnight Eye had just called his
house. Joe nodded in his stoic fashion, always a man for whom no task of love
can be too great.

"I'm the one he wants to talk to," I said. "I don't think
he'll call here again. What I'm saying is, be very, very careful.

"I got two shotguns and two deer guns and two
pistols.

"Keep them... available. Does Corrine know how to us them?"

"The pistols, okay."

"One of you stay up. Don't let everyone sleep at
the same

time."

"No. We been doing that for Izzy, anyway."

"You're a good man, Joe."

“She is my only girl.”

The bedlam at the
Sheriff's Department had gotten worse. The General Services people clogged the
elevators, heading down into the bowels of the building to revive, allegedly,
the dead air-conditioning system. Random sheets of drywall had been pried away
to expose the ducting system, in front of which the orange-clad techs stood
looking in with arms crossed, postures of stubborn defeat. Against the far
wall of the Investigations section, the Citizens' Task Force phone bank was up
and running, staffed by four volunteers in blue T-shirts with images of Kimmy
Wynn on the front. The dicks came and went, giving wide berth to the phone-bank
workers, as if they suffered something contagious. Reporters lingered, unable
to restrict themselves to the pressroom, clearly ignored by the dicks. Karen
Schultz, gripping a bulky Records file against her body, tried to direct them
back downstairs.

I proceeded down to the lab, where I found Chet Singer using an electron
microscope on a piece of fiber left behind at the Fernandez scene. I handed him
the tape I'd taken from Martin box of evidence, which Isabella had so
beautifully decoded.

"Can you tell me what's wrong with this?"

Chet looked at me rather dolorously, taking the cassette in his large
hand. "The Eye again?"

"Maybe," I said. "I think you should
hear it.
Only
you.'

"Then I shall. I will tell Karen to fetch you when I've had a
chance. You certainly look bedraggled today, Russell."

"Long night."

"Ah, I can imagine."

Winters, Parish, and Wald were positioned around the desk in Dan's
office when I walked in. Between Wald and Parish directly across from Winters,
sat a woman I'd never seen before. She was in her early sixties, with stiff
strawberry blond wave of hair, bloodshot blue eyes, and a plain,
not-quite-pretty face. She dabbed one eye with a tissue after looking up at me.

"Russell Monroe, meet Mary Ing. She's identified the photograph we
ran in the papers. Our suspect is her son."

Wald grinned at me and nodded. Parish regarded me with a particularly
hostile stare. Although Dan's voice was calm, I could see the satisfaction in
his eyes.

Mary Ing offered her hand and I shook it. She sniffed into the tissue.
"I'm still not positive."

"It's been eight years since you've seen him," said Winters.
"We understand."

Erik leaned across the desk, picked up a small stack of snapshots, and
handed them to me. They were all of the same man—in one shot, he was just a
sullen boy. The last two picture bore dates: 12-24-82 and 12-25-80. The
subjects were identical, a male Caucasian of varying age, in the last three
photo graphs wearing his red-brown hair quite long, with a full bear and
mustache. He looked like the man in the video.

"Billy," said Mary quietly. "William Fredrick Ing."

"He's got a sheet," proclaimed Parish. "I've had a chance
to study it. Interesting stuff. Schultz is burning copies right now."

Karen came through the door, lugging the bulky file. "Schultz is
done burning copies," she said as she strode to Winter's desk and plopped
the bundle down in front of him. "Gad, the media is a pain in the
ass."

Wald introduced Karen Schultz to Mary Ing. A moment of silence covered
the office, then Dan spoke. "Mrs. Ing, you might not want to be around for
this. It's official business, and there's nothing in Billy's file you don't
know about already. But if you'd like to, we want you to stay. Anything you can
add to what we have might help. It's very possible, Mrs. Ing, that you may have
already saved lives by what you've done."

Mary Ing stroked the wrinkles from the lap of her patterned cotton
dress. "Of course." She glanced very briefly at me, then lowered her
blue eyes. "I'll stay and do what I can."

Karen handed a file copy to each of us.

Winters nodded to Parish. "Martin, walk us through this— you had
time to study it. Karen, keep Russell here on the straight and narrow."

I got out my micro recorder, rewound the tape, and turned it on. I got
out my notepad and pen. Mary Ing looked at me with sorry curiosity.

"William Fredrick Ing," said Parish. "Male Caucasian,
thirty-nine, six-two, two ten. LKA Dana Point, but it's four years old and
patrol's already checked it. Nobody there has ever heard of him. History of
epilepsy since childhood, alcoholism as an adult, some uh... family problems.
The raps seem random until you get them together for a long view back. Stack up
the fact that he's killed eight people in the last two weeks and you can read
his sheet like a 'how to create a killer' manual."

"Don't quote him on
that,"
said
Karen.

I followed the sheet as Parish read. Ing made his
debut in the juvenile justice system on July 14, 1966, at the age twelve, for
"hunting" two girls with a BB gun at a junior h school campus. For
reasons unfathomable, the girls had tried to hide in a glass phone booth. Ing
had pinned them down with. BB fire for an hour before some older boys caught
him, broke the gun and Ing's nose. The riddled phone booth cost Ing’s mother
eighty-nine dollars to repair. Neither girl was hit or hurt. The girls'
families didn't press. Billy was counseled at Juvenile Hall—six sessions—then
the charges were dropped.

He was back a year later, when neighbors in his Santa
Ana neighborhood told police that their pets were disappeared and that
"Crazy Billy" was their suspect. Billy denied know anything about the
animals. The headless carcasses of the dogs and six cats were exhumed from
shallow graves in a nearby orange grove a month later. Police found the head:
"crudely preserved with gasoline and newspaper stuffing "--- a
makeshift lean-to beneath the bridge of a flood-control ditch. Also found in
the lean-to were a vise clamped to a piece scrap plywood, a blood-clotted
coping saw, two containers pet snacks—one for dogs and one for cats—and a
bloodstained Nelson Foxx model Louisville Slugger baseball bat. The Santa Ana
cops could find no evidence that the lair "belonged" to
Billy
although the same flood-control
channel ran directly behind his house, which was less than half a mile away. It
also ran along the grove where the bodies were found. Following Ing's Jul 6
interview with the cops and the dismantling of the lean-to, no more pets
disappeared from the neighborhood.

"He's active this time of year," I said.
"Look at the date

"Like a rattlesnake," said Parish, making
an embarrassed avoidance of Mary Ing's sad face.

"He always liked warm weather," she
muttered.

And then it hit me that Ing
might have been leaving his name on the tapes he left at the scenes.
"Coming," I said.

"Seeing...
having... willing... they're all on the Wynn tape.
Ing."

"Right, Russell," said Erik. "Gamesmanship. Mrs. Ing, was
Billy fond of trickery, deceit?"

Mary looked at Erik with her blue, red-rimmed eyes. "I don't know
if he was fond, Mr. Wald. But he... well... he was what I would call a born
liar. He lied about almost everything, just as a matter of course. Did he enjoy
it? I don't know. Billy's emotions were almost never... visible."

I stared for a moment at one of the glossy blowups of the photograph
taken from the video. Ing's bearded, wild-haired face was a fear-inspiring
thing to behold, precisely for the absolute lack of fear that it contained.
Beneath the deep brow, his eyes had a look of determination, boldness, cunning.
I saw something else there, too—superiority and arrogance. Here was the face of
a man proud of the horror he could personify, a horror he had worked a lifetime
to possess.

"He was in some kind of trouble with the police or juvenile
authorities every summer until he turned eighteen," said Parish. "At
which time he dropped out of continuation school and took a job as—get this—a
live-in attendant at a veterinary hospital."

"Perfect," said Wald. "He was
searching for integration."

"Integrating what?" said Parish.

"His hatred, which was directed at helpless animals. He was trying
to find a way to live with that hatred, for the hatred to become manageable. If
he could integrate the animals into his life, he could accomplish this, at
least on a surface level. For Billy, it would have been a start."

"Either that or he was looking for more animals to kill," said
Parish stubbornly.

"No," said Mary Ing. "He took that job against his own
fear of dogs. Mr. Wald is right—Billy was trying to overcome his fear."

"Of course he was," said Erik. "I'll bet he didn't look
forward to his first days on that job."

"He came down with the flu," said Mary.

"I'll rest my case," said Wald. Then, to Parish, with a smile.
"Read on, Captain."

Ing had managed to keep the job for four years. He was fired after an argument with the
doctor, who filed a police report in the summer—of course—of 1976, claiming
that Ing had be stealing various drugs stored at the facility. The doctor had a
claimed that Ing had "removed" bodies from the hospital freezer,
though exactly what the night attendant had done with them he "couldn't
imagine." Police interviewed Billy, who denied any wrongdoing. No charges
filed.

With Parish's mention of the word
freezer,
I looked hard at him,
while he stared dully back at me. It had been clear to me how Martin's work in
Amber's bedroom was supposed to turn out: the bloody walls, the bludgeoned
woman, even the tape in the stereo would have been more than enough to aim
investigators straight at the Midnight Eye. Parish had practically signed the
Eye's name to the scene. Then, for reasons I still hadn't be able to decipher,
he'd changed his plan and was trying instead to stage
my
and Grace's
guilt by removing the body to my property and documenting its burial. Why the
change of plan? What had Martin learned between the time he killed Alice on
July 3 and the time on July the Fourth when he removed his victim and the
"evidence" of the Midnight Eye? Why had he laid it on me? I
remembered something that Chet Singer had told me once—that premeditated murder
required audacity. Parish's just-spoken words rang in my mind—that the doctor
"couldn't imagine” what Ing might have done with the carcasses stolen from
the deep freeze. It was only the doctor's limited imagination that kept him
from the truth. And that concept—the unimaginable---was always applied to the
serial killer, to the fact that Randy Kraft would drive around with his latest
victim in the seat beside him; to the fact that Art Crump would return to the
rental yard a chain saw still clogged with blood and hair; to the fact that
Richard Ramirez would simply walk into quiet suburban homes late at night; to
the fact that Jeffrey Dahmer would cut up his victims with an electric saw
right there in his little apartment while the smell of rotting human flesh
crept out from under his door and filled the hallway. The audacity! It was all,
truly, beyond imagination. So as I returned Martin Parish's stare, I understood
the secret he had kept—that behind his calm exterior and his badge lived a man
capable—quite literally—of the unimaginable, a man intimately familiar with
audacity.

He smiled at me and said, "What do
you
think Ing was doing with the bodies from the freezer, Russ? You writers are
supposed to have imagination."

And that was when it occurred to me that the only way
to bring Martin Parish to any kind of justice was to out imagine him, to meet
him on his own audacious turf. But how?

"Maybe he had a friend bury them and taped it
with a video camera," I said.

Martin retreated behind the blankness of his smile,
while Wald, Winters, Schultz, and Mary Ing all looked at me and then at one
another with a series of unconnecting glances that left all eyes on me again.

"Billy didn't have any friends," said Mary
Ing in all seriousness. She was not fluent in the language of the
unimaginable.

"They didn't have commercial video cameras in
1976," added Wald, clearly a man who did not understand audacity.

"Who in hell cares what he was doing with the
dog bodies, Marty?" asked Winters. He looked at his watch. "Get on
with this, Martin. Russell here has a story to file sometime this year."