The Deepest Cut

by Dianne Emley

  She inched away from him along the kitchen island.

  “Pick up the knife and get busy.” He staggered.

  Betsy Gilroy, in her stockings, her shoes left behind on the floor, hands handcuffed behind her back, flung herself off the chair at Persons, barreling her head directly into his groin. They flew backward, knocking over his chair and toppling the jug of gasoline, which spilled across the wooden floor.

  He aimlessly fired the .45, weakened by blood loss and tangled up in the chair.

  Gilroy grappled to get away from him and his bullets, trying to get traction on the gasoline-slick floor, not having her hands to help her.

  Persons shot wildly as he tried to get to his feet.

  As soon as Gilroy made her move, Vining spun around and grabbed a gun from the island. She thought she’d grabbed one of her weapons, but ended up with the Taser. She didn’t dare spend the time to trade it for something more lethal. She fired at Persons.

  She got off a good shot. The two darts hit Persons in the upper chest. She kept her finger on the trigger, sending a steady stream of 50,000 volts into him.

  He dropped the gun and fell back onto the floor, frenetically jerking from the electric jolt.

  Gilroy got her feet against the island and was able to push away from the convulsing man. She managed to get around to the other side of the island and away from the gasoline.

  She was so covered in blood from the wounds that Persons had inflicted, Vining didn’t know whether she’d been shot.

  Suddenly, there was a whoosh as the gasoline ignited, set off by sparks from the electric charge. While thrashing on the floor, Persons had become drenched in gasoline. Now he was engulfed in flames.

  Vining threw down the Taser and jumped out of the way of the growing blaze.

  Screaming in agony, Persons rolled on the floor, only further spreading the flaming gasoline. He got to his feet and lumbered around, as if amazed at what was happening. His naked chest was charred black in places and seeping pink and red in others as his flesh seemed to melt from him. As he staggered, flames leaped from him onto the window shades. They were consumed in a heartbeat. The crown molding, made of synthetic material, also caught, and fire raced around the ceiling.

  Vining was frozen, astonished at seeing him being incinerated before her eyes.

  He wavered on his feet, as if about to finally go down, when he saw her across the kitchen. His face was a blackened, oozing mess. His lips were burned away. Still, he smiled as if somewhere in his dark diseased brain, he was happy. He took rickety steps toward her, arms outstretched as if seeking a final embrace. While still a few feet away from her, he crumpled like a house of cards onto the floor.

  Vining roused from her trance. Dodging the encroaching flames, she opened cabinets, searching for a fire extinguisher. She opened the door of the pantry and had plunged inside before she realized where she was. For a few precious seconds that she couldn’t afford to spend, she was stunned to find herself there, the place where she had crawled over a year before, the knife that T B. Mann had stabbed her with still jutting from her neck, the wound that she would die from, gushing blood. The place where she had met her doom. Dazed, she ran back into the kitchen.

  Someone nudged her back to the here and now. She turned to see Betsy Gilroy, duct tape still over her mouth, hands cuffed behind her back, and her feet in stockings. She still wore the costume pearl-and-sapphire necklace that her son had given her on top of her blood-soaked blouse. She gestured with her head, urging Vining to get out.

  Vining pulled the neck of her shirt up over her mouth and nose and followed Gilroy out of the kitchen, keeping low, beneath the flames that had nearly engulfed the area. She remembered to grab her Glock and her beloved Walther PPK from the kitchen island before she ran through the doorway into the butler’s pantry. She passed through the dining room and then made a left turn into the foyer with its Oriental carpet runner. She had to open the front door for the handcuffed Gilroy. When she had crossed the threshold onto the front porch, she’d completely retraced the steps she’d made that fateful day when she’d first entered that house at 835 El Alisal Road. Now she was out. She had fled it and its spell over her.

  Gilroy kept running until she reached the grassy parkway, where she collapsed.

  Vining dropped to the ground beside her. She peeled the duct tape from the chief’s mouth and asked, “Are you all right?”

  “I’m okay. How about you?”

  “I’m fine. I don’t have a key for those cuffs.”

  Gilroy shrugged and watched the flames leaping into the dark, early-morning sky.

  There were sirens in the distance.

  Vining said, “Chief, even if I could unlock those cuffs, I wouldn’t. I’m arresting you as an accessory to the Cookie Silva murder.”

  Gilroy’s steely gaze returned. “Do what you need to do but you need to know something. I did not frame Axel Holcomb. I did not coerce a confession from him. Decisions were made based upon evidence.”

  “Did you take that necklace off Cookie’s corpse?”

  Gilroy looked unblinkingly at Vining, seemingly oblivious to her own sliced face. “I’m not discussing this with you further.”

  Vining dropped it for now, while thinking that poor Axel Holcomb was in for a pleasant surprise.

  As neighbors stepped from their homes in robes and slippers, fire trucks and emergency vehicles poured into the street. In the midst of them was a dark Crown Victoria that swerved erratically to the curb and stopped. The door flew open and out ran Jim Kissick

  Vining leaped to her feet when she saw him.

  He was out of breath as he rushed to her. “I was on my way to the Foothill Museum when I heard a broadcast about a fire at Eight-three-five El Alisal. I just had a feeling.”

  They embraced in the middle of the street.

  After breaking from their kiss, he examined her all over, looking for injuries. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine.” She spotted his bandage. “What happened to your hand?”

  “A bullet grazed me during the Victor Chang shoot-out. Lost my cell phone and it took me a while to find it. That’s why I didn’t answer your calls right away.”

  “Shoot-out?”

  “Yeah, we located Chang in Bungalow Heaven and …” He saw Betsy Gilroy standing a few yards away. “What’s Chief Gilroy doing here? Why is she bloody?”

  “Tanner Persons— T. B. Mann— cut her.”

  “What? He was here?”

  “He’s dead.” She recalled her last moments in the kitchen when she’d taken a final look at Persons’s charred body. “He … I …”

  She suddenly started shivering uncontrollably and could barely stand.

  He put his arm around her shoulders and walked her to the opposite side of the street where they sat on the curb.

  She turned her head into his chest and began to weep. Her teeth chattered so much, she could barely get out her words. “All these months, I dreamed of doing terrible things to him. I wanted to give him the most horrible, painful death possible.” She sobbed. “Now, I’ve done it, and it was horrible.”

  “I know. I know …” He held her and stroked her hair. “But hey, it was him or you, right?”

  FIFTY-THREE

  BEFORE DAYBREAK, KISSICK, CASPERS, AND A FLEET OF PASADENA and Covina police officers swarmed Tanner Persons’s trailer in the Country Squire Estates mobile-home park. They nearly shot a pale, spindly man whom they found wandering about looking dazed. He cowered when confronted with the bright flashlight beams and weapons, fleeing to crouch against the wall like a cornered spider. It was the same behavior that Vining had observed in the tagger who had painted the threatening message on the alley wall.

  Kissick recognized the disturbed man as Nitro, yet something was amiss— more amiss than usual. Kissick held off the officers and their guns as he moved toward the terrified man for a closer look. When he was finally able to move Nitro’s hands from his head and see his face, he was jolted
by the presence of an awl jutting from the corner of his eye beside his nose.

  A search of the trailer revealed the satin-draped shrine with fake marble columns in honor of Cookie Silva, Marilu Feathers, and Johnna Alwin. Nan Vining’s slashed photo and pedestal were on the floor, still there from when Persons had knocked them over in a fit of rage. A filing cabinet held massive amounts of exacting research on these four women and others too. The file on Vining was by far the largest and most current, including recent photos of Emily at home and school.

  More surprises were in store for the police in the little single-wide of horrors. Persons’s bedroom at the end of the narrow hallway provided its own unique charms. Persons, having generally ascetic habits, slept on a tidy army cot against a wall. A king-size bed took up most of the rest of the small room. It was a grand affair, four-poster with a lace canopy and a richly embroidered, satin bedspread. Laid side by side on top of the bedspread, dressed in frilly peignoirs, were two mummified corpses. An urn full of cremated remains took the place of a head above a third peignoir.

  DNA analysis would later prove that he’d robbed the graves of Cookie and Marilu.

  The remains in the urn turned out to be not human but canine. Johnna Alwin’s body had been cremated and her ashes scattered in the Saguaro National Park in Tucson, as per her wishes. The pooch in the urn was never identified.

  Tanner Persons’s neighbors weren’t completely surprised at the news that the neat man who was generally polite and kept to himself, but who could be quite prickly and unpleasant, was a serial killer.

  Further investigation revealed not only his neighbor Enrique’s grave beneath the trailer, but several other dismembered bodies as well.

  VINING DECLINED TO GO WITH KISSICK TO PERSONS’S TRAILER. THE OLD Nan would have pored over Tanner Persons’s possessions with perverse glee. The fire that had consumed Persons had also brought the beginnings of a transformation in Nan. She admitted to a morbid curiosity about the bric-a-brac of Tanner Persons’s life, but knew it wasn’t healthy for her to go to his home. It was a small step toward a different way of life for her.

  AS SOON AS THE POLICE HAD ARRIVED ON-SCENE AT 835 EL ALISAL ROAD, Vining sent a car to check on her grandmother. The officers soon reported that the old woman had been fast asleep in bed. Granny was delighted when they revealed the news that Nan’s attacker was dead. Tanner Persons had easily accessed her house through the front door, which Granny had forgotten to lock.

  AFTER SEEING THE TELEVISED NEWS REPORTS ABOUT THE DRAMA ON EL Alisal Road, Vining’s ex-husband Wes had driven Emily to the PPD to wait for her mother.

  When Vining had finished giving her statement, she briefly met with the chief. Afterward, Emily was waiting and ran into her mother’s arms.

  “Is it over?” the girl asked.

  Vining replied, “It’s so over.”

  FIFTY-FOUR

  MEDICAL SPECIALISTS WHO ASSESSED THE CASE OF TWENTY-five-year-old Robert Nickerson, aka Nitro, agreed that he had been the victim of a home lobotomy. In spite of Robert’s limited ability to describe what had happened to him, the doctors were able to determine that his half brother, Tanner Persons, had administered the lobotomy via the precise insertion of an awl into the brain after Robert had “been bad.”

  While Robert had not participated in Persons’s murders, he had assisted him in robbing the graves, which was a recent inspiration. Robert had been an avid audience for Persons’s tales about his lethal conquests. He identified the drawings in the spiral pad as his work. He’d made the accurate renderings of the attacks on the four policewomen based upon Persons’s lovingly detailed recountings of the events.

  Robert’s mother, Diana Nickerson, hadn’t heard from her son in some time. She knew he had been staying with his half brother in Covina. He normally checked in with his mother every few days when he was away. He had been living with her, splitting their time between homes in Vail, Colorado, and Sarasota, Florida. They had moved from Pasadena after Dr. John Nickerson’s death, which the already mentally fragile Robert had taken hard. After Robert had earned his bachelor of fine arts, his mother was pleased when he’d landed some freelance work for an ad agency.

  When Tanner Persons had tracked down Robert and his mother with the help of a private investigator over ten years ago, Robert fell in thrall to his older half brother, telling his mother that he’d lost his father, but at least he’d found a brother. Tanner and Robert got tight fast, with Robert tailing Tanner to the places he lived— Tucson, Morro Bay, and the Pasadena area, among others. This last visit, to Tanner’s Covina home, had been the longest. Robert had been there for nearly two months and had spoken of moving in permanently with Tanner.

  This was not welcome news for Diana Nickerson. She hadn’t cared for Persons. While there was nothing specific she could put her finger on, she had found his presence unsettling.

  The police made educated guesses about the blanks in Robert’s story. Inventorying the pills in his prescription containers showed that Robert had gone off his meds shortly after arriving at Persons’s Country Squire mobile home. As Robert’s mind traveled off the reservation, the already significant influence of his brother grew. This may have been when Persons revealed his secret life to his half brother. Trouble started when Robert did some freelancing of his own, streaking nude through Pasadena with his drawing pad and the pearl-and-sapphire necklace. Robert’s spray-painting the “Vining 187” tag on the building near where Persons worked was presumably another of his own initiatives.

  Robert had become a liability for Persons. Persons couldn’t bring himself to murder his half brother and cherished blood relative, so he neutralized him with a home lobotomy

  Tanner Persons’s desire to connect with family had led to his downfall.

  FIFTY-FIVE

  AS MARVIN “CHINA DOG” LI SAT IN A JAIL CELL, WEIGHING HIS OPTIONS, and Victor “Kicker” Chang’s corpse cooled at the county morgue, the Pasadena Police detectives met in the Detectives Section conference room to sort out what had happened.

  “As you can see, Nan is not here,” Kissick said. “She’s … um … been suspended for three weeks.”

  Caspers had been tapping the eraser end of a pencil on the table and stopped, to Kissick’s relief, at the statement about Vining. “Three weeks? Nan? What did she do to earn three weeks’ suspension?”

  Louis Jones and Doug Sproul were less overt, but their faces betrayed their surprise.

  Sergeant Early exchanged a glance with Lieutenant Beltran, who inclined his head in her direction, signaling her to explain. Early leaned forward in her chair. “The details of Detective Vining’s infractions are confidential, but I can make a general statement and say that she was guilty of conduct unbecoming a sworn officer of this police department.”

  Kissick privately recalled the scene that night when he’d arrived at the burning house at 835 El Alisal Road and found Vining and Chief Gilroy on the parkway in front. Betsy Gilroy was wearing the pearl-and-sapphire necklace. When patrol cars descended, Sergeant Terrence Folke, who had been involved with the Nitro escapade in Old Pasadena, recognized Nitro’s necklace. When he asked Gilroy about it, she readily said that Vining had given it to her. More accurately, had thrown it at her.

  Vining, instead of fabricating another lie, came clean about how she had confiscated the necklace from Nitro’s personal possessions when he’d been incarcerated in County General’s psych ward. Kissick knew that no one had yet found out that she had also absconded with Johnna Alwin’s pearl necklace from the Tucson P.D. She’d likely be terminated if that ever came out. He’d be in big trouble as well for having kept her secret.

  Early said, “Nan’s discipline could have been much worse, but the chief took into consideration all she’s been through over the past year and a half.” She added, “I’m disappointed that someone under my command would tarnish the reputation of this department.”

  Kissick found Early’s last shot unnecessary, especially since Nan wasn’t there to de
fend herself. He knew that Sarge was hard on officers who violated their sworn oaths. So was he, but if Nan hadn’t pressed the envelope, they wouldn’t be here reviewing a slew of closed cases. He wondered if Sarge’s harshness toward Nan was residual emotion over the downfall of her once-revered friend, Betsy Gilroy.

  “Sarge, I can’t condone Nan’s act that caused the suspension,” Kissick began, “but she had the guts to stand up to criticism and question the official investigations into the murders of Officer Cookie Silva and Detective Johnna Alwin. Ranger Marilu Feathers’s loved ones now know who was responsible for her murder. Also, Nan asked the Azusa P.D. to reopen the Sandra Lynde murder case. Sandra is the mother of LAPD vice officer Frankie Lynde, a homicide we worked a few months ago. Azusa P.D. got a cold hit on old DNA evidence. Their guy’s in Folsom for a different robbery and was about to be released.”

  Early turned tired eyes on him.

  Kissick thought it best to drop it. He was about to move on when Caspers asked, “So what’s going to happen to Chief Gilroy?”

  When it appeared that Sergeant Early wasn’t going to take the question, Lieutenant Beltran leaned forward, folding his hands on the table. He tapped his thumbs together. “The State Attorney General’s office will be doing the investigation into the charges against Chief Gilroy. Due to the chief’s long relationship with local law enforcement agencies and the L.A. County District Attorney’s office, there were conflicts of interest preventing the situation from being investigated locally.”

  Beltran said nothing further. Most in the room privately thought: Chief Gilroy’s going away.

  Breaking the weighty silence, Kissick said, “Alex, please present your overview of what we’ve learned about the goings-on at New castle Street.”

  Caspers became lively, happy with his moment in the spotlight. “Grace Shipley, who lives on that block of Newcastle Street being guarded by Marvin Li’s felons, is the longtime girlfriend of this guy, Sun Kao. He goes by the moniker Weasel.”