Girl With a Past

by Sherri Leigh James

  I returned his stare, scowling at him. “Do I have to have a reason?”

  “Why the sudden interest?” Dad asked, as the chime of a new email caught his attention.

  He glanced at the laptop on his desk.

  “I don’t know . . . I had a dream a couple weeks ago, it’s been coming back. Probably from you keeping that file around when I was a kid.” I swung my legs over the arm of the chair trying to appear casual. If I told Dad about the nightmares that had gotten worse every night, if I said, “I’m afraid to go to sleep because I’m haunted by this terrifying image of a dark figure in a black hood,” he’d be alarmed. He’d want me to “talk to someone.”

  Especially if I told him I woke up with blinding headaches after each of the nightmares––pain in my head that felt like half of my face had been blown off.

  The dreams started my freshman year at Cal and got increasingly frequent and more intense each year. Then, last summer I paid a visit to a great aunt in Pacific Heights. I saw this kid on a bike. He was about sixteen. Strong déjà vu. My heart leapt, then fell. Something about him was familiar. He looked like some one but I couldn’t think of who. I watched his dark head disappear as he rode away and my heart ached with loss. I had no clue why I reacted like that, but the dark nightmare got even worse that night.

  Now, in my senior year, the headaches that followed the nightmare were so bad I often missed morning classes.

  Then again, if I told him, maybe he’d stop looking at his computer and talk to me. “Hey, Dad!”

  “What?” He closed the lid of his laptop and leaned back in his fancy black mesh chair.

  “When I was little, I used to sit at your desk at home and pretend I was a lawyer.”

  “Yeah, you sure did.” He smiled at the memory of his five-year old daughter playing prosecuting attorney, how I would pick up the phone and mimic his voice and attitude when talking to defense attorneys.

  “That file was on your desk for years. I looked for it after dinner when I was over last night and it wasn’t there.” I could vaguely recall the contents of the folder; I remembered that I felt a strong connection to the incidents.

  And my first totally bad headache started while I was looking at newspaper clippings included with the papers. “Mom thought you’d brought it to the office.”

  “Al, please, there’s no need to dig all that up again. It’s ancient history.”

  “Where is it?” I grinned at my father. He was a good guy; all my school chums were hot for him. He still had a full head of strawberry blonde hair, although it got lighter every year. He and Mom spent enough time on golf courses, tennis courts, sailboats, and ski hills to maintain his year round tan.

  “I put it away. Decided it was time to get over it.” He glanced at the book on his desk.

  “Why?” I knew he needed to get back to work, but I persisted. “Why give up on it now after decades of obsession?”

  “Don’t you have classes today? A painting to work on?” He raised a blonde eyebrow at me. “What are you doing hanging around here anyway? You don’t work here anymore. Summer’s over.”

  I swung my legs off the arm of the chair, turned around, and leaned forward. “Dad, I’m like, totally serious. I want to look at your file. I’m taking a criminal anthropology class, it’s a good real world example.”

  “Al, it’s time to put all that behind us.” He stood, walked to the window and studied the sailboats and ships out on the bay. “If it’s a real case file you want, I’ll give you one from a closed case, a real one, because that file is not an actual case file. I just collected that stuff. It was my personal file.”

  “What are you saying?” I joined him at the window. “Why? After all these years?”

  He rested his arm on my shoulders. “Al, do you know why I was obsessed with that killer?”

  “Yeah. Mom gave me the download. He killed a good friend of yours when you were in college.”

  “She was my best friend.” He looked away, stared at a row of law books on the shelves lining his office.

  I nodded, trying not to feel guilty about the sadness on his face.

  “I was in my last year of law school. I’d just met your mother. My best friend was shot and killed while coming home from a date,” he hesitated. “There was a guy around at that time that was killing young lovers. There was some thought that he, the Zodiac was her killer.”

  Dad’s work dealt with killings all day long, but it was obvious that decades hadn’t made this one easier for him. He turned back to the view of the bay

  “So?” I would wait as long as necessary. I’d wanted to know what the deal was with this murder from the get-go. I wasn’t going to let his discomfort stop me now. “Yo, Dad tell.”

  “There was no evidence linking the prime Zodiac suspect to Lexi’s murder. In fact there was never enough evidence to indict him for any of the cases.” Dad turned around and returned to his desk chair.

  “Did you think it was the Zodiac guy?” I sat on the corner of his desk.

  “I never thought it was the prime suspect, this Arthur Allen, that shot Lexi.”

  “Who’s Arthur Allen?” I asked.

  “A deadbeat. A pedophile. He lived in Vallejo. He was the closest the cops ever came to arresting someone in the Zodiac case. Got warrants to search where he lived three times.” Dad leaned the mesh chair back and locked his hands behind his head.

  “You don’t think he was the guy?”

  “No.”

  I raised an inquiring eyebrow at my dad.

  “No, there was a mountain of circumstantial evidence that linked him to the Zodiac, but the fingerprints at the scenes and the handwriting didn’t match Allen’s.”

  “Handwriting? From the notes sent to the newspaper?”

  “Yeah, the Zodiac wrote these wacko letters to the San Francisco Chronicle.”

  I knit my eyebrows. “How do they know that the killer actually wrote the things?”

  “The letters contained info that only the killer and the cops could’ve known. You know, stuff never previously released to the media.”

  “So this Allen guy. What was the deal? If there was no real evidence, why was he the prime suspect?”

  Dad shrugged his shoulders. “He was the only suspect at the time.”

  “Why didn’t you think he was the Zodiac?

  “The reasons for suspecting him could easily have been coincidence. A lot of men wear size ten-and-a-half shoes.” Dad sighed and rubbed the back of his head. “Turns out I was right. A few years ago, the FBI excluded him based on DNA tests of the saliva on the stamps of letters from the Zodiac.”

  “Whatta you mean . . . at the time, he was the only suspect?” I asked.

  Dad exhaled a long sigh. “In recent years, maybe a hundred people have claimed that their father, or their stepfather, or their uncle was actually the Zodiac. It’s gotten so the police don’t even want to talk to anybody on the subject.”

  “So . . . you have theories that you’ve been working on. That’s why you had the file, right?

  “Lexi’s date went missing the same night. His body was never found.” Dad put hands on either side of his head and pushed back his hair. “He could’ve killed her.”

  “Yeah?” I said. “So? What about him?”

  “Years went by. He never turned up.”

  “Why would he disappear? Did this Zodiac killer hide other victims?”

  “Not that we know.” Dad frowned. “There was a Jane Doe who had been moved, she was found around the same time, but police were uncertain about the linkage to other cases. There were some aspects that didn’t connect, were different. In general, his victims were shot or stabbed and left at the scene.”

  “Per my criminal anthro class, it’s a bit weird that the same killer would use both a gun and a knife. Shooting is much less personal than stabbing. Doesn’t seem like it was one guy.”

  Dad shrugged, pursed his lip. “Well, there ya go. Maybe the guy was schizo.”

  �
�Or maybe there was more than one Zodiac?” I studied Dad’s face to see what he really thought, but he looked down at the law book and his notes. I asked anyway. “And your friend, Lexi? She was shot?”

  “Yes.” He glanced up at me, and then studied his hands in his lap.

  Dad’s pain tugged at my heart, but I had to know. “Why have you lost interest?”

  He shrugged without looking up. “The prime suspect died a long time ago.”

  “But you didn’t think he was the guy anyway.”

  “Al, I don’t want to talk about this right now, I can’t, I’ve got a case . . . I can’t get distracted.” Dad leaned over his law book. Knowing him, I figured he didn’t want me to see tears in his eyes.

  Conveniently for the man who didn’t want to talk about the subject, his cell phone rang, and he grabbed it. “Hi! Yeah, I forgot to check with Lauren, I’ll have to get back to you. Al’s here. Sweetheart, say hi to your Uncle.”

  I called out, “Hi Uncle!” without asking which one. Dad had a group of college friends that my brother and I had always called Uncle. “Dad?”

  “Hold on a sec,” he said into the phone. “What?” he asked me.

  “Where’s the file?”

  “In the safe in my study at the house.”

  “Can I get it?”

  “Yeah, okay. Go ahead. Otherwise you’ll stay here bugging me the rest of the day, huh?”

  He put the phone back to his ear.

  CHAPTER

  2

  I loved driving the hills of San Francisco in my vintage rag top bug, but somehow it had freaked Dad out when I bought it. His reaction to my excitement when I found the right yellow fabric with red and black ladybugs to replace the torn head lining was just plain weird. Or so I thought at the time.

  The distance from Dad’s office to our house was only a few miles, but nearly a half hour drive in afternoon traffic.

  Mom should have been home by then. She usually timed her trips to the design center to avoid rush hour traffic. She’d be surprised to see me on a Monday afternoon. I came home on Sundays to get a home cooked meal but seldom during the week.

  I drove between the massive square pillars marking the entrance to Seacliff, lowered the car windows and enjoyed the briny aroma of the breezes off the ocean.

  China Beach, the one beach in San Francisco safe for swimming, was below the cliff side of the house. “Safe,” that is, if one was a fan of water temperatures that barely hit sixty degrees on the warmest summer day.

  After my brother and I had left home for college, my parents down-sized from six thousand square feet on Pacific Heights to a four bedroom six bath Italian Renaissance villa in the only San Francisco neighborhood adjacent to the ocean and reduced household staff to day help.

  Like most of the houses along the avenue, my parent’s was built in the 1920’s. Well-mannered lollipop trees lined the quiet street, maintaining a height blocking no house’s view, and symbolizing the perfect order that marks the graceful neighborhood.

  I punched in the code that opened the heavy wood planked garage door. Mom’s car wasn’t in the garage.

  I bound up the stairs to the kitchen door, punched another code, and hurried through the kitchen and hall to Dad’s antique pine paneled study. I opened the pencil drawer of his desk, pulled out a tiny box, and turned it over. On the bottom of the box was a code from which I eliminated the date of my birth, 5-25-1987, so that 5927561896847 became 97-68-64, the combination to Dad’s safe.

  A hinged colorful oil painted by some old friend of Dad’s swung open with the touch of my finger. I used the combo, and extracted the familiar, dingy file folder. Without bothering to close the safe or the painting, I sat down in the worn leather chair that had been Dad’s my entire life and opened the file.

  It was in reverse chronological order with the earliest items in the back. I flipped to the bottom of the pile of papers. A newspaper clipping folded around a lock of hair caught my eye. I unfolded the dark, fragile paper and stared at a black and white photo of a young woman my age. Long blonde hair fell past her shoulders in what was meant to be her college graduation portrait.

  Something in her eyes felt familiar. The headline identified the girl in the photo as Alexandra Johnson. Alexandra? Was I named for her?

  I heard a noise from the front of the house. Must be Mom, but it didn’t sound like the garage door opening. I heard the tinkling of breaking glass in the front of the house––.

  Shit! What was that? The shrill security alarm rang.

  I peeked around the edge of the doorway opening into the hall. A dark figure with a gloved hand reached through the broken pane, stretched to grasp the door handle lock, and undid the dead bolt.

  I heard a voice, maybe two voices. How many were there? It wouldn’t be smart to stick around to find out. On autopilot, I gathered the papers and the lock of hair off the top of the desk, stuffed them back into the file, picked it up and ran.

  My car was parked in the front . . . where the break-in was occurring. That wasn’t an escape option.

  I bolted to the French doors that opened onto the terrace. Wisps of gray fog filled the air.

  I ran across the terrace, down the steps to the garden below, and to the trail that led down the cliffs to the beach.

  I scrambled down the path of the railroad tie steps, shoving aside overgrown shrubs. A manzanita branch scraped my face and neck.

  A sharp, loud noise from the street above scared me into a faster pace.

  If only I knew some of the neighbors, I’d know where to go for help.

  But I didn’t even know how to access all the walled-in houses.

  The going was faster once I reached the beach but the sand hampered my run.

  A glance up the side of the cliff and a glimpse of a dark figure in the mist quickened the pounding of my heart.

  The tide was in. Waves broke on the jutting rocks, blocking access to the adjacent sections of the beach.

  There was nowhere to go.

  I shoved through tall brush and ducked into the shadows under the overhang of a stone terrace. A brisk, cold wind whipped through my hair and blew sprays of moisture off the water.

  I dug my cell out of my pocket. Marginal service. I pushed the speed dial for Dad’s cell. When it went immediately to voice mail, I tried Mom next.

  I didn’t want Mom to come home and happen on the burglars.

  Another voicemail. “Mom, don’t go to the house. Call the police, stay away. Burglars broke into the house. Stay away.” I sent her a text: “burglars in house.”

  I dialed 9-1-1. “I need to report a break-in in progress. And I think I heard a gunshot.” I gave the address. “No, I left. I’m hiding below the neighbor’s deck. Please tell them to hurry.”

  I huddled in the cold, damp sand listening for sirens but all I could hear were waves crashing on the rocks pounding in the same rhythm as the pain in my head.

  My hands shook as I tried to call Mom again, but now I had no service. I checked the time. It had been less than five minutes since I’d called for help.

  I clung to the file folder, wondering why I’d brought it with me in my panic. I used the light from my phone to look at the newspaper clipping again.

  My heart jumped when I saw the grainy photo of the male college student who went missing the same night that Lexi was killed. I knew him. But how could that be? Yet his face . . . it was as though I knew exactly how his face felt, the rough texture of his beard on my skin.

  Whoa, Al, get real. What are you thinking?

  I shoved the paper back into the file and stood up. I hadn’t heard any sirens but I needed to go back up. Waves splashed into my damp and cold hiding place. The rising tide would soon reach me.

  Uncertain as to what I would find at the top, I took my time climbing up the path. Had the bad guys left?

  CHAPTER

  3

  I peeked around the full growth of bushes and saw lights flashing. Relieved, I ran to the patrol car.


  Two guns held in beefy hands greeted my return to my parent’s house. One hand grabbed me, shoved me against the front fender of the car.

  “Hey, what’re you doing?” I shouted.

  “What’re you doin’?” Asked the uniformed officer who owned the hand.

  I attempted to shake off his hand. “I’m the one who called you.”

  He ignored my protests as he patted me down. I assumed he was checking for a weapon. He put his hand on the file.

  “Hey!” I screamed, “That’s my property. Dude, what the hell do you think you are doing?”

  “Do you have some identification?”

  “It’s in the house.” I pulled away from his grasp. This time he let go. “I’ll show you.” I turned to go inside when I spotted Mom’s car pull into the gates. “There’s my mother. She lives here.”

  Mom stopped to let an ambulance pass her.

  I watched the vehicle pull to a stop twenty feet from where we stood in the street. A cluster of officers stepped back to let EMTs through.

  The group of police opened their circle. One kneeling officer stood up and moved aside. A body lay face down on the sidewalk in front of our house. Long tan legs extended from jogging shorts to end in feet clad in running shoes. Blonde hair was colored with bright red at the back of the head.

  My world stood still. Who was that?

  “Al, what in the––?” Mom slammed the car door then rushed to gather me in her arms. “O my god, I thought . . . maybe that was you.” She hugged me so tight I had to struggle to breathe.

  But I hugged her back and then waited until she wiped away tears and blew her nose before I asked, “Who is that?”

  She shook her head and grabbed me again. I held her while she struggled to get a hold of herself.

  Mom can be a bit emotional. My brother and I figure her protectiveness had something to do with the struggle she went through to have us, the number of miscarriages and stillborn babies she endured.

  Mom showed her ID, assuring the waiting officers that I was her daughter and not a bad guy.

  “Mom, do you recognize the person they’re putting on the stretcher?”