SUMMER of FEAR (4 page)

"Shit," he said, raising his left thumb to his mouth.
"Thanks for the shells, Russ. Maybe we'll go get some quail in October.
I'll have a few days off by then."

It was Marty's opening farewell, but I didn't move. "Okay. Keep the
physical and thanks for the peep show. But at least come clean with me, Marty.
Are we talking common sense here, or is Herr Sheriff leaning on you?"

"Beat it, Russ. You want to know what the cops are doing, you
should have stayed with the cops."

"What's your gut say?"

"Where will I read about what my gut says?"

"Nowhere. I've never burned you, Martin—you or anybody else with a
badge."

"You burned Erik Wald."

"He doesn't have a badge."

"Neither do you. Look, Community Relations is calling the Ellison
and Fernandez shots, but I'll tell you this much. Our evidence isn't matching
up—that's the truth. We're looking at two different things, at least two
different guys,
not
the same one. To be honest, though, whoever conked
them didn't take anything."

The idea formed that Marty was playing with me, fueling my tank with
enough bad information to get me down the wrong road, or at least out of his
office. It struck me as odd that the CS photos he'd just meted out to me
contained no establishing shots, no wide-angles, no walls. Just bodies. Why?

"Give me one thing on him, Marty."

"Them,
Russ."

"Them."

"You've got what I've got."

"This happens again, how are you going to stomach yourself?"

"See you later, Russ. I read about any of this and it's all she
wrote for you here. I don't have to tell you that."

"Don't worry."

I stood to go. Marty was examining the drop of blood on his cut thumb.

"Have you seen Amber lately?" I asked.

Parish shook his head without looking up at me. The phone rang. He
reached out, but before he touched it, he wiped his brow with the crook of his
elbow, moving his arm across his forehead, blotting up the sweat.

I lingered to see whether the call was Amber's 187.

"Hi, honey," Marty said.

I called my
editor at the
Journal
from the car phone. Car phones are supposed to be
for people who think they're more important than they really are, but they're
also for people who don't want to be seen making calls they shouldn't be. Like
one to Amber at 12:42 last night. Like
this one.

My
editor's name was Carla Dance. She is a short, heavy-set woman, fiercely
intelligent and unceasingly levelheaded. Over the last ten years, she had a way
of dangling assignments just when I needed the money. I like her very much, and
I think she likes me. Her father has cancer, and Carla takes care of him,
except when she's at work. When Isabella was diagnosed nineteen months ago,
Carla and I spent some anguished afternoons together in a bar up by the
Journal
offices. Something about her reasoned outlook helped me. Carla
already knew then what I have come to know: When someone you love has a bad
cancer, the line between hope and despair is one that you crisscross a thousand
times a day. It is a true crazy-maker. I also learned that we are a closed society—we
who love and care for someone with cancer. To the outside world, we proffer
only optimism. But among ourselves, we can admit without feeling weak or needy
or unduly bleak that the one we love may very well not. be with us for nearly
as long as we'd like. We are a society of helpless helpers. But there is
something in our bond of foxhole faith, and something of the cleansing that I
used to feel, long ago, in church.

"I may have something for you," I said.

"Sunday magazine would pay best, if it's not too
grisly.”

"It's too grisly. I'd call this hard news. Real
hard."

"Breaking?"

"Yes."

"The Ellisons?"

I didn't mention that Carla Dance is also prescient.

"Yes again."

"What's the angle?"

"That he'll do it again."

"We'd have to be real careful, Russ. The racial overtones are
touchy."

"Well, let the story slip and see how touchy it
can get.

"I've worried about that, too."

"I need something first—space for another Dina story, wouldn't have
to be front of the section."

"Dina again?"

"The big game starts next week."

Dina was the DNA typing apparatus that the county crime lab bought the
year before. It cost $800,000, it hadn't produce a shred of admissible evidence
yet, and, worse, defense attorneys were just then getting the hang of
demonstrating what "genetic fingerprinting" had been from the very
start—complex, unproven, and without agreed-upon standards. There had been two
reversals from higher California courts in the last six month and one acquittal
by a jury that believed the defense had put genetic typing well within the
shadow of doubt. Dina, needless to say, was supposed to become the county's
biggest crime-busting star. But her luster was fading before she had even
gotten to trial, and nobody at the crime lab, or the Sheriff's, or the DA's
office could seem to talk fast enough to quell the increasingly vocal critics.
The first trial in which she would be used—the Ballard rape case—was set to
open next week. The defendant was on trial, but so was Dina. A pro-Dina story
by Russell Monroe in the
Journal
could help set a more comfortable
atmosphere for her tryout. For me, it was a bargaining chip.

"Can the police link the Ellisons and the first couple— what's
their name, Fernandez? We ran the story today that says they can't."

"They can, but they don't want to."

"We'd like it first, if and when they do. I'll
make space for

Dina."

"Thanks."

She told me to take care of myself, then hung up. I knew she wouldn't
ask about Isabella, the same way I didn't ask about her father: The subject of
cancer was not something you tagged onto the end of a business call, even one
about murder. There were other times for that.

Next I called Martin Parish's boss—Sheriff Dan Winters— and pitched him
my deal: a good solid Dina piece in trade for pole position
on...
I
almost
said the Midnight
Eye.

I explained.

He acted as if I was a fool, which I knew he would, pretended to dismiss
my offer, which I also knew he would. But the seed was planted, and that was
all that mattered. That, and perhaps the fact that I'd generously volunteered
my minor celebrity (and less-than-minor money) to Daniel Winters's reelection
campaign two years ago. Now Dan was knee-deep in bad ink: jail overcrowding,
lawsuits, rising crime stats, shrinking budget. My offer of good ink would get
under politician's skin and it wouldn't cost him much. He said he’d think about
it.

I kept the police scanner in my car turned up for the 187 at Amber's.
I've got a scanner in every room of my house---a questionable luxury I paid for
with the movie money from
Journey Up River.
In my early years as a
successful news writer, I left the scanners on every minute that I wasn't
asleep, and often when I was. Isabella put an end to this shortly after we were
married. It wasn't hard for her to do—any man on earth would rather listen to
Isabella's dusky smooth voice than a dispatcher droning code numbers.

But the 187 didn't come. It was 5:30 and I was starting to wonder.

So I called Amber's agent in Los Angeles and said I was Erik Wald. Erik
Wald, like myself, was a former "companion' to Amber. I had introduced him
to her, just as Marty had introduced her to me. That was six years ago, long
after Amber and I were over, and I was escorting her socially, occasionally,
without romantic interest on her part. It was my own somewhat pathetic way of
keeping the possibilities open, but I brought what dignity I could to the job.
Shortly thereafter, Amber and Erik were item. I was briefly jealous, but their
affair was short, and I had since fallen deeply in love with Isabella. I
tracked the dashing couple in the society column of the
Los Angeles Times.
From my occasional social and professional contact with Erik, I know that Amber
had managed to keep him immersed in the quagmire of her financial affairs as
surely as she had managed keep me immersed in the swamp of my own desire. It
seemed to me that Wald had gotten the better terms.

Erik Wald had never been one of my favorite people, though I was a
distinct minority in this matter. As do most people in semipublic life, Erik
groomed an outward persona that, like the copper casing around the softer lead
of a bullet, protected his passage through the perils of media coverage, county
politics, and—in Erik's somewhat unique case—the often mercurial world of
academia.

He was a professor of criminology at the local state university. He had
been tenured twelve years ago, at the age of thirty-one, shortly after applying
the principles of his dissertation, "Aspiring to Evil: Transference
Identification in the Violent Felon," to help successfully discover the
identity of a rapist who had claimed eight victims in the north part of our
county in six short months. The gist of Wald's paper was that because certain
paranoid types are subject to delusions of grandeur (a fact), these persecuted
"geniuses" could act out scenarios in which they willfully play a
role totally opposed to the higher behaviors approved by society. In effect,
Wald argued, they were providing their own "evil" at which to gaze in
their daily lives, while at the same time satisfying their inner needs for
superiority/persecution.

What it all boiled down to, he said, was a well-read, middle-class
suspect of sterling reputation (possibly a churchgoer) who had aspired to a
higher station in life than he had achieved, likely because of some profound
unsuitably in his character, or perhaps even physiognomy. All eight of the
women had been elderly, some enfeebled. While the police and sheriff combined
forces to round up the usual suspects, Wald fed his thesis to an ambitious
black Sheriff's Department lieutenant named Daniel Winters, who linked two of
the victims to a Meals-on-Wheels service provided by a church located in the
north county. An investigation of the volunteer drivers revealed nothing, but
Wald pressed Winters deeper into the congregation, to find that one of the
actual Meals-on-Wheels cooks fit the profile rather neatly. He was thirty-four
years old, a bachelor with a law degree from a Catholic (!) university who had
failed the California bar three times and seemingly retreated to a quiet of
Christian service and paralegal work. He lived with his grandmother, who, it
turned out, was a friend of three of the other victims. Winters's closing net
ended in a stakeout and tail done after hours and without pay, which resulted
in observing suspect—one Cary Clough—driving early one morning to a quiet
suburban street, where he sat in his car until daybreak. The same afternoon,
Winters established that eighty-two-year-Madeline Stewart lived alone in the
house outside which Clough had parked. Madeline was a recent sign-up for the
Meals-on-Wheels program. The following night, Winters waited for Clough in an
unmarked station wagon, and when Clough approached the house in the dark
morning hours, Winters shook him do for suspicious behavior. Winters's yield
was a red ski cap and a pair of latex gloves. He made the collar, took Clough
downtown, and after some exemplary work by the crime lab, matched not only
fibers from the cap to those found on four of the victims but Clough's teeth
prints to those left behind in a decorative wooden apple that Clough had
mistakenly tried to eat after raping his third victim!

This story, such a resonant marriage of the biblical a scientific, made
great headlines, television fodder, even a "60 Minutes" segment.
Wald's entry into the public eye was swift and certain. The state university
tenured him a year later. Dan Winters was bumped up to the rank of captain, the
youngest one in county history, and the first black. Clough got 150 years.

More interestingly, Wald was made head of the Sheriff’s Reserve Units, a
position for which he would neither be paid nor deputized. He was given an
office on the same floor as the newly sainted Dan Winters, and the two men
crusaded to make the Reserve Units into potent allies of the professional
deputies. (The public ate up this idea, too: more law enforcement for the same
amount of money.) All of this reflected well on Jordan Clemens, a tough
politician whose years as elected sheriff would obviously not last forever.

I watched these events from the uncomfortable position of junior
investigator, uncomfortable because I could hardly wait to abandon the
department ship in order to write and because my heart was still tender with
the tramplings it had received from parting with Amber Mae Wilson. Moreover, I
had met Wald on his late-day visits to the office of Dan Winters and had found
him—against the sum of all my efforts—both intimidating and likable.

Physically, he was impressive, one of those tall and slender men whose
muscles knotted effortlessly with the most casual movements. He was handsome
and knew it, but he played off it in an apparently unselfconscious way that the
television cameras loved. His face was wide and boyish, with laugh wrinkles
parenthesizing a mouth that was quick to smile. His hair was a curly golden mop
that he managed to keep rather longish but still trimmed, a perfect compromise
between academic eccentricity and Sheriff's Department conservatism. He was rumored
to hold a black belt in a particularly difficult Chinese-Philippine martial art
and to be a collector of antique weapons. Most impressive of all was his mind,
however, which was possessed of a nonchalant sharpness that left most
people—myself included—eternally off balance. He could be outrageously charming
and mortally offensive, all in the same sentence. One more quality about Wald
struck me in those early years— namely, his willingness to offer confidences and
to receive them in return. I had never met a man in whom the illusion of trustworthiness
had been so deeply and convincingly cultivated. For that specific reason, I did
not choose to trust him. So, when Amber Mae began asking me about this
"handsome crime-buster type," I was unsurprised, if somewhat angered.
I was still not fully adjusted to the idea of being a used person.