What Waits for You

by Joseph Schneider

  Sponholz slapped the table and stood. “You all take care. Amy and I are gonna head out in a few minutes anyway. Long drive back to Northridge. You know she actually booked a town car for me tonight? Amazing lady.”

  “G’night, LT,” said Rall.

  “Yeah, good night, sir,” said Mailander.

  “Thank you,” Jarsdel mumbled. He looked at his drink again, at the last inch or so of Ray’s Mistake in the bottom of the glass. It would be cool on his throat, yes, but it wasn’t worth it. “I need a water,” he said aloud.

  Mailander glanced at him, then slid her glass of ice water over. “Here. I don’t have cooties.”

  Jarsdel drained the contents, letting some of the ice spill into his mouth and sucking greedily on the cubes. “Thanks,” he managed. “I’ll get you another.”

  “I’m fine.”

  From somewhere not far away, and growing ever closer, a police siren howled. As it faded, another took up the call, passing right outside the Tiki-Ti before rocketing off to whatever new tragedy awaited.

  Jarsdel’s fingers began throbbing. This surprised him. He probably had enough alcohol in his system to sit through an amputation. But his fingers burned where Haarmann had cut them. He could feel the skin growing around the stitches, and the stitches pulling back at the skin, fighting it as it healed.

  Heads lowered, the detectives allowed the sirens to fade completely, then got up one by one and left the bar.

  11

  ReliaBench was a beast—an eight-foot-long reinforced concrete tube, two feet in diameter, supported by thick steel beams set into the sidewalk beneath. You could sit on ReliaBench, sort of—as long as you did so without leaning backward or to either side—but you wouldn’t want to do it for long. Five minutes at most, and you’d be grateful when your bus arrived.

  Varma had declared war on the city’s bus stops, identifying them as breeding grounds for crimes of opportunity. According to Varma’s philosophy, time bred mischief. The less time a person could spend at a location, the less likely he was to break the law. By targeting bus stops, Varma was removing places to stop and think and, ostensibly, contemplate bad behavior. And if the city’s vagrants, of which there were a record number, had fewer places to rest their weary limbs, then that was good, too.

  LA didn’t have the budget to replace all of its nearly fourteen-hundred bus stops with ReliaBench, so it fell back on statistical data to lay out its implementation strategy. Not surprisingly, the city’s COMPSTAT system found comparatively few incidents of criminal mischief at bus stops in Los Feliz, West Hollywood, Sherman Oaks, Studio City, Toluca Lake, and Laurel Canyon. Those could stay, for the time being. But East Hollywood, Panorama City, Santa Monica, Venice, Culver City, and most of the rest were on the high priority list.

  Reinforced concrete isn’t expensive—limestone, clay, gravel, sand, and water, all packed around a rebar skeleton. Casting the ReliaBench tubes was therefore relatively cheap—less than ninety dollars per unit in materials. Compare that to the amount of money and manpower the city expended annually on emergency responses to incidents at bus stops, and you had an obvious win.

  If that had been the only incentive, however, ReliaBench still might not have been deployed. But Varma had packaged her product with two emerging and dazzlingly attractive technologies. The first was a self-healing capability. Even quality reinforced concrete may crack, and when it does, water slips in and causes the rebar to rust and swell—eventually compromising structural integrity. But Varma’s concrete had been impregnated with the bacterium B. pasteurii. It could lie dormant for decades, but snap awake if released from its calcium silicate hydrate bonds by an invasive trickle of water. All it needed was food, but that too had been provided in the form of a simple starch added in with the concrete matrix. The bacteria would feed and multiply, all the while excreting waste in the form of calcite. Calcite, being a chemical ingredient in concrete, fills the crack and the wound is closed.

  Sure, that was all interesting stuff, but what really got the approval for Varma’s project, along with the ten million to fabricate and install ReliaBench, was the self-cleaning feature. Each bench was treated with a coating of titanium dioxide, a colorless substance which, when struck with the sun’s UV rays, generated free radical ions that would attack dirt particles on an atomic level. But the benefits went beyond mere appearances; self-cleaning concrete also breaks down airborne car pollution, making the city a cleaner, healthier place. The idea of giant, self-healing, crime-deterring air filters was simply too attractive to pass by.

  So in they came, flown into position by cranes and harnesses and shouting men, then lowered and fitted onto their posts. No one would much want to sit on the new ReliaBenches, let alone lie on them. The concrete wasn’t polished—the sand and pebbles comprising the aggregate plainly felt to anyone interested lying down. Just to make sure, however, the city removed a select number of bus stop canopies; in case anyone got too comfortable, maybe the weather would persuade them to leave. People tried anyway. One man suffered a broken arm after tumbling off in his sleep.

  There wasn’t much pushback, at least at first. The most notable incident involved an angry Boyle Heights man who attempted to lever a ReliaBench from its supports with a tire jack and roll it down Whittier Boulevard. The scheme was doomed to failure from the start. ReliaBench weighed in at nearly two tons. The citizen succumbed to a hernia and, upon waking in the hospital, found himself cited for disorderly conduct.

  That same week, Varma unveiled her third crime-dampening strategy, Sonic Fence. It was a sturdy plastic device, weatherproof and shock resistant, about the size of a deck of cards. To protect Sonic Fence from destruction, it was always mounted high up and housed behind a steel cage.

  If PuraLux assaulted the sense of sight, and ReliaBench the sense of touch, Sonic Fence declared war on the human ear, emitting a high-frequency whine. In an LA Weekly article, Heather Malins wrote, “It’s not that it’s loud. It doesn’t need to be loud. It’s penetrating. How best to describe it? Imagine a radial saw. Flip it on and listen to that screech. Good; now touch that spinning blade to a cast-iron frying pan next to an idling jet engine while a goat gets attacked by a pack of hyenas, and you’ve got the dulcet tones of Sonic Fence.”

  The technology acted upon the stereocilia—tiny, sensitive hairs of the inner ear. And since people lose their stereocilia at predictable intervals throughout their lives, Sonic Fence could be calibrated, with a turn of a dial, to affect ever narrower age groups. The broadest setting could be heard by everyone, and was probably the most unpleasant. Malins commented that “[it] should be tested in earnest on coma patients, as even the most vegetative specimen would surely work out a way to get up and leave if confronted with such auditory rape.”

  But a hard twist to the left made it so only listeners under twenty-four could hear it. This gave Sonic Fence almost messianic status at places like the David Farragut Transitional Care and Rehab Center, whose frail, elderly patients—along with anyone visiting—frequently found themselves targets of muggings by local MS-13 bangers. The hoodlums woke in the late afternoon, and by evening circled the facility like flocks of carrion birds. Sonic Fence kept them at a distance, flushing them from their usual ambush points.

  Its most noticeable victory, one that earned grudging praise even from the solidly anti-Varma LA Weekly, was in reclaiming a neighborhood playground in San Pedro. Dedicated in 1933 as the George E. Waring, Jr. Community Park, it had for the last decade been annexed as a hangout for the area’s larval criminals. Patrol officers referred to them collectively as the FFA—Future Felons of America. The life-sized bronze statue of Waring—“The Father of Metropolitan Sanitation”—was probably the single most vandalized object in the city, an irony appreciated by no one.

  And while the delinquents usually started showing up after dark, families stayed away regardless of the hour. Ignoring the profanities, gang placas, and crud
ely scratched cocks and pussies decorating the play structure, a trip down the twisty slide was likely to end atop a pile of cigarette butts and spent glass pipes. Digging in the sandbox was an even riskier proposition, guaranteed to include the discovery of several lumps of cat shit and, occasionally, a greasy condom with a nicely filled reservoir tip.

  Then one morning at sunrise the folks at the Bureau of Street Lighting arrived. A two-man team strapped a single, solar-powered Sonic Fence unit to the trunk of a nearby palm. They turned the dial to the right, the arrow pointing at the word ALL AGES, and set the activation time from 9:00 p.m. to 6:00 a.m. To discourage any would-be Tarzans from climbing up to disable the device, the men wrapped a square yard of slick sheet metal around the tree a few feet up from the bottom. As a bonus, it would also keep out palm rats.

  That’s all it took. The cigarette butts and glass pipes began to disappear. Tentatively at first, then in a flood, the neighborhood’s children retook Waring Park. Their parents repainted the play structure and raised money for a new water fountain. They dug out the fetid, probably hazardous sandbox and brought in a hundred bags of fresh, silky white sand. They even installed a cover to keep the cats out at night. And though no one had heard of the man in whose honor the park had been named, the statue of George E. Waring, Jr. was lovingly restored, its brass polished to a high sheen.

  12

  There wasn’t a cafeteria inside PAB, so every day Jarsdel worked on the task force he had to eat out. To save time, he waited until the lunch rush was over, then took the short walk over to Señor Fish. It was the closest place to get food, just off PAB’s main entrance, and it was probably the world’s safest restaurant. LA might continue to devolve along its jittery, paranoid course, but a meal at that particular Señor Fish was guaranteed to be peaceful. Misbehave in there, and you’d quickly find yourself kissing the floor, courtesy of the dozen or so officers dining there at any given time. The chief himself, who stopped in at least once a week for an order of chilaquiles, might even be the one to clap on the cuffs.

  That day Jarsdel was enjoying a fried shrimp burrito, knocking it back with a large agua de jamaica, a daily treat he now allowed himself. The iced hibiscus tea was as sweet and red as hummingbird nectar, and he supposed even his sturdy metabolism wouldn’t be able to keep up with the stuff forever.

  He’d snagged a large table and laid his work out before him. Statements from patrol officers, private security companies, firefighters, paramedics, even garbage men. All had worked in their official capacities near a Creeper crime scene. Each had been given the simple instruction to describe any unusual activity in the neighborhoods in question.

  In reading the statements, Jarsdel began to feel there was a whole other world that existed outside his awareness. He’d assumed that as a homicide detective he was already in tune with every bizarre, cruel, or otherwise repugnant thing that went on in his city. Not on a case-by-case basis of course—Los Angeles was vast—but at least in a broader, thematic sense. That assumption, he now saw, was incorrect.

  Location: 5100 Block, Mount Royal Drive, Eagle Rock

  A postal worker recounted emptying a public mailbox a quarter mile from the Verheugen crime scene. Inside, along with the letters, the man discovered a pile of long blond hair. The shortest strand was two feet, the longest nearly twice that. His first conclusion, that the hair was a misguided donation to a cancer relief organization, perhaps Locks of Love, was quickly dismissed. Instead of being cut, the hair had been ripped out by the roots. The worker reported the find to police as well as to postal inspectors, but so far nothing had come of it. Jarsdel certainly agreed that it fit under the broad category of “unusual activity” he’d laid out in his questionnaire, but if it was related to the Creeper, he couldn’t see how.

  Location: 2000 Block, Hyperion Avenue, Silver Lake

  Next up was a duo of paramedics who’d been contacted because, according to their dispatcher—who was herself relaying information provided by the caller—“a man in business attire appears to be in physical distress.” Arriving on scene, the paramedics agreed that the man did certainly appear to be in distress, but weren’t at all certain what the caller had meant by “business attire.”

  What they found was a Caucasian male—later identified as Dylan Roswurm, thirty-three—clad head to toe in full samurai battle dress, crawling down Hyperion toward Lyric. Behind him was a trail of blood extending several blocks. When emergency personnel intercepted him, the man admitted he’d tried to die honorably by means of seppuku—ritual suicide by disembowelment—after losing his job at Line of Fire shooting range. The procedure had been much more painful than he’d expected, and the wounds he’d inflicted were ultimately superficial.

  When he was informed he was going to be put on a forty-eight-hour hold over at Fantasy Island, however, the man’s story changed. Now it was the Creeper who’d attacked him, stabbing him with his own katana before fleeing into the haze of an August afternoon. As far as Jarsdel could make out, that patently idiotic statement was the only reason the report had been kicked over to him.

  Obviously not relevant, Jarsdel wrote at the top of the page, underlining the word not with three firm strokes. His phone buzzed. He didn’t recognize the number, but it was local. He touched accept and brought the phone to his ear.

  “Jarsdel.”

  “Hi, this is Jonas calling from Motor Transportation Division.”

  Jarsdel brightened. “Terrific, when can I pick up the car?”

  “Actually we’re calling because it’s gonna take a little longer than we thought. The door handle’s on back order.”

  Jarsdel exhaled. “Okay. How much longer?”

  “Could be up to two weeks.”

  “Wait, seriously? For a door handle?”

  “It’s an older model, and—”

  “Yeah, I know, never mind.” He pinched the bridge of his nose. “What am I supposed to drive until then?”

  “You still have the patrol car?”

  “Yes, but it’s really not ideal for what I do.”

  “Don’t know what to tell you. Sorry, sir.”

  “Okay. You’re sure that…okay. Thank you.” Jarsdel hung up. He put Roswurm the would-be samurai to the back of the pile and read on.

  Location: 5900–6000 Block, Foothill Drive, Los Angeles

  A mere two blocks from the Lauterbach house, patrol officers responded to several complaints of a fiftysomething white male going from house to house selling “Creeper Insurance,” which would remit huge payouts if a policyholder was killed in a certified Creeper homicide. Officers were unable to locate the salesman. Jarsdel turned the page.

  Location: 8013 N. Stoker Drive, Highland Park

  Across the street from the Rustad house. Wanda Heitkamp, a widow of eighty-two, reported a figure outside her bedroom window. Her bedroom was located on the second floor, and the culprit had allegedly been peering in from the top of an avocado tree. She thought it was probably a man, but it was hard to tell for sure from the build, which was very petite. No, she didn’t get a look at his face. Yes, she had an idea whom it might be.

  “An agent of the Israelite Defense Forces,” she’d said. “My father was in the German army, you know, during the war, and now these people just won’t leave me alone. Even though I had nothing to do with any of that.” She also indicated they were tapping her phone and slipping unspecified “toxins” into her water supply.

  Jarsdel turned the page.

  Location: 6874 Joston Avenue, San Marino

  Three houses down from the Santiago homicides. A mysterious package delivered to the home of Zack Brandsted, a single father. The item consisted of a large cardboard box wrapped in brown paper, and contained nothing but packing peanuts. No return address given. Package turned over to postal inspectors.

  Location: 9452 Atkins Place, San Marino

  Half a mile from the Santiago hom
icides. A very large, unidentified insect, possibly a centipede but “a heck of a lot meaner,” crawled from the wedding album of Frank and Sheila Kubly. They considered the event suspicious because the album had previously been secured inside a fireproof safe which neither had recently opened. Their conclusion was that they were being targeted by the Creeper, and that he’d planted the insect as a sign they’d been marked. They were however unable to provide an explanation for how he’d gained access to the safe.

  Location: 7034 Nuez Way, Topanga Canyon

  One block from the Galka house. Sam Judkins, a widower, reported a prowler casing his property two weeks prior to the homicides. Someone had apparently ascended his oak tree and was watching him getting ready for bed. Judkins wouldn’t have seen the man, except the rising moon had silhouetted his head and torso. By the time Judkins made it outside with his shotgun, the figure in the trees was gone.

  Jarsdel flipped back through the pages until he located the report from Wanda Heitkamp. He put the two side by side, reading a little of one, then the other.

  “So,” he said. “You like to climb trees.”

  * * *

  Mailander, Al-Amuli, and Rall sat at the conference table. Jarsdel stood before them, arranging his paperwork. “Just a quick second,” he said.

  “What’s the tea?” asked Al-Amuli.

  Jarsdel glanced up. “Almost done.”

  “Spill the tea.”

  Mailander shot him a look. “What are you, in middle school?”

  “Ta-da,” Al-Amuli sang. “Knew it wouldn’t be long before you were at me again.”

  “Shut up, people,” said Rall. “Tully, you ready?”

  “Okay,” said Jarsdel. “Sorry, wanted to make sure I had everything right. So…” He handed each detective a copy of three separate reports. “I think we’ve got something pretty definite. He, uh, well—he likes to climb.”