What Waits for You

by Joseph Schneider

  Jarsdel nodded “Any thoughts on how the Creeper might’ve known you weren’t home?”

  “He must have been watching us, right?”

  “Possible. Do you keep a gun in the house?”

  “Other than my service weapon? No.”

  “So your wife wouldn’t have had access to a gun while you were out.”

  Sponholz sighed. “Gentlemen. I am tired. Very tired. Got nothing left. Can we continue this in a few hours? Or tomorrow?”

  “Of course, sir,” Rall began. “You let us know—”

  “Actually,” Jarsdel said, “I’d like to go for just a couple more minutes if we can. I’m curious about…” He paused, noticing Rall’s frigid stare.

  “We are more than happy to continue this conversation later,” Rall said to the lieutenant, keeping his gaze knifing into Jarsdel.

  Sponholz lay back on his pillow and closed his eyes. “Thank you. I know you guys have to do your job. So I appreciate the reprieve.”

  “Anything we can do, sir,” said Rall. “I don’t need to tell you we’re gonna get this guy. Just rest up, and you let us know when we can talk again.”

  Rall turned to go and waved to Jarsdel to follow. Reluctantly, he left the room. Once the two of them were outside, the door closed behind them, Jarsdel spoke up.

  “I think we’re making a mistake not talking to him.”

  Rall pointed at the door. “He just had the worst night of his life. Something neither of us can imagine.”

  “Yes, and the longer we wait, the muddier his recollections are going to be. That’s the freshest Creeper scene we’ve got so far. Even the tiniest details matter, and he’s gonna lose them.”

  “LT’s a pro. He knows what to focus on, what to hang onto.”

  “Still has a fallible human brain. Those’re important details. How the Creeper got in, all that minutia with the alarm. How exactly he knew when to strike.”

  “Nothin’ there that can’t wait.”

  “Sir, if a witness is coherent, we interview. I get it. I get your sense of compassion. But it’s misplaced. We can help the LT more in the long run by getting through this.”

  Rall smiled, but it was a mirthless smile. “That man in there has put away some of the city’s worst offenders for thirty years. We’re gonna give him some professional courtesy. You know, you’re the kinda cop who’d ticket his own mother.” Shaking his head, he moved off. Jarsdel heard him mutter, “Swear, s’like I fuckin’ got stuck with Mr. Spock.”

  15

  Father Ruben Duong was a balding man of sixty, and so thin his parishioners often arrived at Mass pressing bags of food into his arms—homemade coconut sponge cakes and sweet corn pudding and bánh patê sô, a savory puff pastry filled with ground pork. Duong always accepted the gifts graciously, then made the short trek over to Skid Row, where he handed them off to any of the thousands of homeless roaming Downtown LA.

  Duong had been a child when Saigon fell, plucked from a Catholic orphanage—and a likely death at the hands of the besieging Viet Cong—by President Ford’s Operation Babylift. He almost made it onto the first transport, but gave up his spot to a friend who needed medical care. The plane, a Lockheed C5-A Galaxy, crashed just after takeoff. Most of the orphans aboard were killed. Duong never learned if his friend was among the dead or if he’d survived.

  The orphanage had saved him from abandonment, Ford had saved him from the VC, and fate had saved him from the crash. If God was trying to tell him something, He’d gotten Duong’s attention.

  Father Duong tolerated no frailty. Whenever he felt a desire beyond selfless service to others, even a physical need, he quashed it. His mind and body were important only to the extent that they furthered his work, but neither was going to be his master. Conquering oneself wasn’t merely virtuous; it was essential in being an agent of God, Whose voice could not be heard over the constant din of the ego.

  On both of his knees, hidden below his long Roman cassock, were tattooed the initials “M.K.” These stood for Maximilian Kolbe, the Polish friar who’d volunteered to be starved to death in Auschwitz to spare a fellow prisoner—a total stranger—from the same punishment. Duong had learned of him while studying at the Fuller Theological Seminary, and considered him a perfect servant of the divine. When he saw that Kolbe had died on August 14, the same date records showed he himself had been abandoned at the Saigon orphanage, Duong resolved he must follow Kolbe’s example of pure selflessness.

  After being assigned to Our Lady of Guadalupe in Downtown, Duong had devoted himself to the problem of human suffering. He ran a soup kitchen in the church’s parking lot every Sunday, volunteered as a chaplain in the Men’s Central Jail and as a counselor for the California Youth Authority. He allowed runaway teens to sleep in the rectory while he himself lay on a foam mattress in the utility closet. When an ex-con he’d been counseling couldn’t afford to pay for his mother’s funeral, Duong sold his own car and covered the bill himself.

  Duong was also responsible for several gang ceasefires. If a dispute erupted, he was brought in to arbitrate, and his rulings were final. Both the Vatos Locos and Sureños dubbed him “El Santo,” while the Crips and their associates called him “Gandhi.”

  In 2005, when tales of his deeds made their way to the LA Weekly, he was asked why he worked so hard for the good of others, most of whom he’d never met and would never see again. His answer, which his parishioners printed onto bumper stickers and T-shirts, was short and to-the-point: “You and I are not we, but one.”

  Rumor had it that he slept perhaps three hours a night. Others insisted he didn’t sleep at all, that his consciousness was linked with the shoreless sea of God’s loving wisdom, and that such a divine connection exempted him from mundane human needs.

  In late 2019, Duong was appointed president of the Los Angeles Interfaith Council. He was awarded the Key to the City a year later. Duong couldn’t attend the ceremony because he was giving out jackets and cold-weather preparedness kits to Skid Row families, so Rabbi Michael Kaplan accepted the honor on his behalf. After shaking the mayor’s hand, Kaplan told the audience that “Father Duong would never say so himself, and it’s possible even he isn’t aware of it, but I think—and I’m not alone—that he’s one of the Tzadikim Nistarim, the hidden righteous ones. In our faith, these are the thirty-six perfect souls, always thirty-six and always among us, who do God’s work here on earth. And we also believe that it is because of these dear ones that God allows us to continue on. That He spares us, chooses not to make of us another Sodom, another Gomorrah, no matter our sins and our crimes and our failure to follow His will, because these sacred thirty-six stand among us.”

  As the ceremony at City Hall came to a close, a very different meeting was just getting underway across the street at PAB. Seated were Paul Stout, the LAPD’s chief of staff, Gloria Williams, director of public affairs, and Commander Brittany Lee of Transit Services Group. After a short lecture, they watched enthralled as Dr. Alisha Varma made the thick blue veins on Councilman Ken Peyser’s arm vanish in the flicker of a PuraLux lamp.

  Father Duong railed against PuraLux upon its release and organized a protest in partnership with the Los Angeles Mission. Before the march on city hall, thousands gathered in Pershing Square to hear him speak. His small stature belied his voice. It seemed to roll out of him—a thunderous timbre worthy of an Old Testament prophet.

  “They call it ‘PuraLux.’ As a euphemism, it ranks among the best—or worst, depending on your view—standing shoulder to mendacious shoulder with such standbys as ‘enhanced interrogation,’ ‘pacification,’ and ‘cleansing.’ For truly PuraLux is a foul thing, an abominable thing. It is a weapon aimed at the least fortunate, at those who cry out for compassion and succor. Instead of offering our brothers and sisters in poverty the merest gesture of goodwill, our city grinds them underfoot.

  “When Juan Crespí encountered wh
at we call the LA River, now a polluted trickle that makes its way alongside our freeways between banks of concrete, he was so struck by its beauty that he named it ‘El Río de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles de Porciúncula’—‘the River of Our Lady Queen of the Angels of the Porciuncula.’” He paused there, letting the significance of the name settle on his audience.

  “Dear friends, that saddens me,” he continued, “because the Porciuncula was the church in which Francis of Assisi carried out his work. Francis, who traded the silken costumes and bulging larders and bacchic galas of his family estate for coarse brown cloth and cincture. For the company of the destitute, the leprous, and the mad. What would Francis say of PuraLux, I wonder? What would he say of a thing so thoughtfully engineered to attack the dignity of man? To strike him when he is at his weakest? To deny him the simplest of rights—a place to rest?”

  But when ReliaBench debuted, Father Duong was conspicuously silent. When asked by a reporter if he was planning another protest, his answer was oblique. “Treat a man like an animal, and he behaves as animals do. Treat a man like a criminal, and he behaves as criminals do.” The interviewer waited, microphone extended for the third term of the truism—surely there would be a third, there always was—but the priest had apparently finished. As he walked away, Duong murmured something. The reporter wasn’t sure exactly what he’d heard at that moment, but events shortly to come convinced him it was “He who does not take his cross and follow after Me is not worthy of Me.”

  Then came Sonic Fence. Again, silence from Duong. Then a week later, early on the morning of August 14, his parishioners placed calls to every news station in the city, informing them that their spiritual director was going to make a statement on the corner of 5th and Crocker—the geographical heart of Skid Row—at three o’clock that afternoon.

  When reporters arrived, the first thing they noticed was the ReliaBench that had recently been installed at the intersection. Someone had covered the concrete tube with garlands of flowers, so many that only the tiniest swatches of dull-gray rock were visible.

  Father Duong, in his forbidding Roman cassock, sat amid the fragrant petals.

  “Why’s he all wet?” a KTLA reporter asked. “He just get out of the shower?”

  “Something smells,” said another, this one from FOX 11. “What is that?”

  “I love you all,” said Duong, producing a cigarette lighter. “All,” he repeated. Holding the lighter near his heart, he smiled, closed his eyes, and thumbed the striking wheel.

  Father Duong burst into flames.

  The fire was hot. Duong had poured enough accelerant around the ReliaBench that no one could get close enough to rescue him.

  His parishioners dropped to their knees, clutching rosary beads and murmuring prayers, as reporters shouted at their cameramen and shielded their faces against the tremendous heat.

  Duong didn’t make a sound as he burned, but eventually lost consciousness and tumbled backward. His bare feet remained in view above the ReliaBench, pedaling the air as his nerves fired. The flowers—purple, red, buttery yellow—curled into black smudges.

  16

  The summer sun cast its scorching, unblinking eye on Malibu. The water glittered back, sapphire, rolling to white as it struck the sands of Zuma and Point Dume, right up to the beach chairs and slowly cooking bodies of SoCal elite.

  It hadn’t rained since March, a half-hearted sprinkle that had done little more than moisten the topsoil, and now the soft chaparral and coastal prairie grass had turned the color of hay. The same chaparral and prairie grass stippling the hills and hugging the twenty-million-dollar mansions tucked among the coves.

  High up on the stilted pool deck of just such a mansion, two boys gathered a stockpile of leftover Fourth of July sparklers. The goal was to see how many they could light at once. What they were doing was dangerous—the boys understood that, instinctually if nothing else. They sensed the pregnant menace in the heat and in the crisped, sun-beaten land all around them. But they’d thought this through. They were on a pool deck after all, and if things got out of control, they could easily toss the sparklers into the water. Besides, they were nowhere near the parched vegetation. There were only scattered patches of it climbing the rocky slope behind the house; most of it was far below them, carpeting a gentle hillside teeming with rattlesnakes and California alligator lizards.

  The day buzzed with life. Insects thrummed. A hot breeze stirred dust and pollen into the air.

  The first boy gripped the bundle in a small fist sticky with Popsicle juice, while the second held out the flame of his father’s cigar torch. The tips of the sparklers glowed momentarily red, then burst to violent life, showering both boys’ hands and feet with stinging bits of molten aluminum.

  The first boy yelped and dropped the sparklers. Most scattered harmlessly on the deck, but a few rolled off, dropping fifty feet before vanishing into a patch of shade beneath the house. An ordinary match would’ve gone out, might have even been cool to the touch as it hit the tangle of brown tinder below. But the sparklers flared even brighter, and landed hot. The insects fell quickly silent, and then there was new, hungrier sound in the still afternoon.

  * * *

  A trio of news helicopters passed overhead as Jarsdel pulled into Hollywood Station. They beat their way westward, and he watched until they dipped out of sight. A twinge of anxiety vibrated through his guts. He couldn’t help wondering what they were in such a hurry to cover. Vultures of human misery. He could only hope it wasn’t another movement in the Creeper’s symphony of horror.

  Jarsdel avoided the detectives’ squad room. Seeing Morales and Haarmann together would only piss him off. Instead, he cut around back, passing the imbecilic and eminently useless desk sergeant, Curran.

  “Thought you were at PAB,” the man said, glancing up.

  Jarsdel considered answering, but couldn’t think of anything nice to say. Sometimes the advice they gave you in preschool wasn’t all that bad.

  He made it to Varma’s office. Her door was open, and she waved when she saw him.

  “Hey, glad you came.”

  “Not at all. Grateful you could make the time to see me. I know things are busy.”

  “Definitely one way to put it. Come in—what can I do for you?”

  Jarsdel sat across from her, just as he had the last time he’d been in her office. It was different now, after the moment they’d shared at Watts Towers. His attention was drawn once more to her lips. He knew what they felt like now, how soft they were, and wanted to feel them again. Wanted them pressing against his own.

  Then he saw that day’s Los Angeles Times poking out of her bag. Above the fold, hundreds of candles burning in the night, illuminating the ghostly hands and faces of their bearers, all clustered around the site of Father Duong’s self-immolation. The ReliaBench had been removed, but it didn’t matter. The bus stop at the corner of 5th and Crocker was now a shrine.

  Jarsdel raised his eyes to meet Varma’s. He could only imagine the opposition she now faced, and suddenly he felt selfish coming to her with his problems. “I don’t want to lay any more…bummers on you. And as I say, I don’t want to impose, but—”

  “Yeah, please though,” said Varma. “I don’t have a ton of time, so if you can tell me how I can help, that’d be phenomenal.”

  “Of course. I’ve been struggling with what happened to Lieutenant Sponholz’s wife. And it’s a tricky situation, because my team isn’t really…well, much of a team.”

  Varma’s smile became stiff. “I remember telling you I’m not a therapist, yet it seems like that’s the road we’re going down.”

  “No. I’m here for your expertise as a security professional. Well, mostly for your keen sense of logic.”

  “You’re trying to flatter me.”

  “I’m being honest. I’m counting on your inductive powers to show me a way out
of this. My thought was that I was gonna give you a picture—essentially—then ask if you could work backwards, tell me how it came to be.”

  “Still sounds a little outside my wheelhouse.”

  “Maybe,” Jarsdel agreed. “But would you be willing to give it a crack? No shame if it doesn’t come together. I assure you, you’ll be in good company.”

  Varma tapped her pen against the table, considering. “Ten minutes. That’s all I have.”

  “Then I won’t waste any time. We got back the DNA results from under Amy Sponholz’s fingernails. The nails were totally mangled and bent, so it was obvious she’d fought off her attacker. It follows that she’d have his DNA all over her hands, and lots of it under her nails, maybe even his blood.”

  “It follows,” said Varma.

  “But it wasn’t there. No human matter at all. Instead, we got traces of leather. That means our guy was wearing gloves.”

  “Why’s that so unusual?”

  “Because he wasn’t wearing gloves. His prints were all over that bedroom. They matched our exemplars perfectly. It was the Creeper, no doubt about it. Something like one in two hundred billion that someone else would have the same prints. That means the Creeper put on gloves to strangle Amy Sponholz, but wasn’t wearing them the rest of the time.”

  Varma chewed on that a moment. “And your question is why would he do that?”