Good Morning, Killer

by April Smith

  “Not everyone can do what we do. I’m the kind of person who, when I hear the national anthem, I get all teary-eyed. It’s a feeling. Patriotism. I don’t know. But whatever that feeling is, you have it or you don’t. Like I said, I will keep you informed.”

  My legs were responding only stubbornly as I passed beneath the portico of the Federal Building, not letting up in their complaints of stiffness and neglect; shoulders and neck were being just as petulant, as I had not been to the pool since the case began, but we all dragged on, discombobulated body parts trying to keep up the march. The evening was muggy and overcast, and glancing at the disinterested sky, I remembered one fragment of a dream in which an owl had put its spiky wing around me.

  In the Bureau garage, four male prisoners were chained to a bench. I made them for Chinese mafia. There had been rumors of a deep cover operation about to end in a bust down in Garden Grove that involved the chief of police and a string of sex parlors owned by local Asians. This must be it.

  Two of them were businessmen wearing coats and ties, two looked like delivery boys in bad seventies shirts. They were sitting down, handcuffed with arms behind their backs. The handcuffs were locked to a thick chain that ran around the bench. Two agents I recognized from the white-collar-crime squad were walking a fifth prisoner, also wearing a suit, toward the cubicle where he would be fingerprinted and photographed. It was slow going because of the ankle irons.

  In the doorway of the cubicle—similar to the office where the manager of a parking lot might tally the ticket stubs—was Hugh Akron, looking like a shoe salesman eager to sell you shoes, but actually he was an English photographer who was working freelance for the Bureau. It would be his job to place the prisoners up against the wall—the most nondescript wall in the world, a little dark from head grease, a nothing piece of drywall—and snap their mug shots. He also did weddings.

  A tall, spidery man pushing sixty, Hugh favored oversized blue-tinted aviator glasses and bowling-style shirts made of rayon. He had been doing this a long time and it showed, in the strong knobby forearms and curved spine that thrust the narrow head forward, in the practiced joviality of a natural-born hustler. The scams he ran out of the photo lab were legendary.

  “Ana of a Thousand Days! Or should I say nights? You’re at the office late.”

  “Hey,” was all I could muster.

  They brought the prisoner to a box and told him to kneel. The box was covered with carpeting. I wondered if it was government policy not to stress the prisoner’s ligaments; the kneeling position kept them helpless as the handcuffs were removed. The man was talking rapidly in Chinese and one of the agents kept repeating, “Do you want a translator?”

  Suddenly he fell silent and bowed his head. Spellbound, I watched through the doorway as Hugh Akron inked the man’s fingertips, and one by one took possession of their uniqueness on behalf of the United States government.

  The man kept his face bent toward the ground. His expression, what I could see of it, was stoic.

  I stayed there and watched the whole thing: the ritual humiliation of the prisoner and its mysterious, erotic pleasure.

  Andrew and I never did meet up that night. I wish I had done what I said I would do and just stayed out of his way. Instead, when he didn’t call or answer his page, I went looking for him.

  The dull panic was rising.

  I drove my personal vehicle, a 1970 Plymouth Barracuda convertible, to Wilshire and Third, parked in a red zone and walked by the fountain where Juliana first encountered the offender. It was clever, a dinosaur made of leaves that grew on a wire form. Water cascaded from its snout and collected in a rectangular pool. There was a dark wax stripe left by skateboarders on the edge. A toddler in a pink parka was running along it now. Undercover cops mixed heavily with the crowd.

  I paged Andrew a second time, called his cell, got nothing, started to walk down the center of the mix. The sounds were clashing—a keyboard player only yards away from an Ecuadorian band of flutes and tambourines. It was a downhill stroll toward the indoor mall, a palace of dazzling consumption at the very end, during which you passed every manner of marketplace come-on—a mime spray-painted silver, portrait artists, trinket sellers, discount T-shirts off a cart, henna painters and one-man bands, a guy who would carve your fortune on a grain of rice.

  We had been over this territory during the kidnapping. It was familiar ground. But the nighttime masquerade suited my mood of self-pity and longing, as I kept hands in pockets, kicking it, scanning for Willie John Black or Andrew, guessing he’d go back to his witness to corroborate what we now knew about the man with the camera from Arizona who called himself Ray.

  I swerved down the alleys, asking bag ladies and parking valets if they’d seen the guy who lives on a bicycle or the big cop in the black leather jacket. Nobody knew anything. I passed the bench where we had dreamed of Amsterdam, occupied now by a balding man singing “Happy Birthday” into a cell phone.

  We were apart, but we would get it back. We were not rotting meat like the M&Ms, withdrawn to opposite sides of a bleak corridor. Riding the Harley, playing golf, seven-layer bean dip and the Lakers on TV, or just falling asleep, Andrew made everything better. We were alive, we had juice. We genuinely cared for each other. What could be luckier than two buddies who had great sex with no other entanglements? This was a temporary blip. Another case, another bottom-feeding offender not about to knock us out. Hadn’t we each been stung by garbage like Ray so often that we had become immune?

  I felt exhilarated, on a mission, zigzagging up Santa Monica Boulevard and down Broadway, out to the Pier and along the Palisade, maintaining a pace, cleansed in cool damp air, imagining Andrew at every turn. Then I realized it was 11:30 p.m. and I had been doing this two hours, and it had stopped being fun a while ago. The going was much less dense as I trudged up the Promenade one last time, giving up the game and stopping at the police kiosk to do the rational thing, which was to ask if other officers of the Santa Monica Police Department had seen Detective Berringer.

  “Who’s looking for him?” asked a uniform behind a narrow desk. There were a couple more sitting around.

  I badged him. He gave me the lookover and I wondered if rumors of our affair had reached the distant outposts. Or maybe he was just curious to see a female Fed with long frizzy hair wearing a beat-up vintage denim jacket embroidered with peace signs.

  “Nope. Haven’t. Have you?”

  General shaking of heads.

  “I think he’s mainly doing morning shifts, am I right?”

  Shrugs.

  “We’re working a case together. The Santa Monica kidnapping?”

  Empty stares. I decided to go home.

  “Tried his mobile?”

  I nodded. “He was looking for a transient named Willie John Black.”

  “We know Willie,” said someone else. “The guy with the bike. Usually he’s up behind Second Street. In the alley, half a block north of Wilshire.”

  I felt hopeful again. “Appreciate it very much.”

  “I’ll pass it on to Detective Berringer that you were here. Got a card?”

  There was nothing and nobody in the alley where the cop had told me to look. A Dumpster. Evidence of a nest—trampled cloth and flattened cardboard boxes. A man’s shirt on a wire hanger hooked to the chain-link. If this was Willie’s place, he’d taken his contraption and gone somewhere else.

  A shy, stealthy figure appeared, a young Hispanic busboy dumping a bag of trash. There were no residences here, just the hind sides of office buildings and a deserted parking lot. A black-running stream issued from who knew where.

  I thought about foul play.

  There could be plenty.

  I paused, alone, in the middle of the dark alley. Out on the street, a bus was idling. A string of European tourists ambled past.

  The space inside my ears was full of pounding.

  Thirteen.

  By the following morning we had a prime suspect, Richard (Ray) Bren
nan. The name had come in the night before, in a fax sent by the Tempe, Arizona, Police Department.

  The fax was already posted on Rapid Start when I got to the office, sometime before 7 a.m. As Galloway would say, where else did I have to go? Normally I check personal e-mail first thing—open the curtains, crack the sliding doors, let in the marine layer, look at the boats, grab some OJ and sit down at the glass dining table and plug in—but you can access Rapid Start only from the computers at the Bureau, and stress was waking me up early, anyway. Just before dawn there would be that jolt, as if dropped on the bed from a great distance, the rapid heartbeat and the racing thoughts. The circles under my eyes had gone from puffy to charred black.

  We had taken the pile of sex offenders from Arizona, isolated those who were former military, and asked local police to search their files again, using our prompts. It only took one keyword—“sadistic”—to identify Ray Brennan.

  FD-823 (Rev. 8-26-97)

  RAPID START

  INFORMATION CONTROL

  Case ID: 446-702-9977 The Santa Monica Kidnapping

  Control Number: 5201 Priority: Immediate

  Classification: Sensitive Source: Tempe, Ariz., Police Dept.

  Event time: 2:05 AM

  Method of contact: FAX

  Prepared by: Conrad, Angela Component/Agency: Tech clerk, FBI

  Transcript attached.

  * * *

  Subject: Unknown offender/serial rapist, The Santa Monica Kidnapping

  From: Sgt. D. Mader

  To: Special Agent Rick Harding, Supervisor, FBILA

  In response to your request to cross-reference arrests of sex offenders in the Tempe, Arizona, area going back five years, I found a couple that fit your profile, which I am faxing to you, Richard (Ray?) Brennan in particular. I personally remember this case because it was out of the ordinary. Officer Kip Ward arrested Mr. Brennan four years ago on suspicion of sadistic cruelty to farm animals after finding evidence of duck feathers and crossbows in his residence where he resided with wife and five-year-old daughter at the time. Basically, the suspect wounded three ducks in a lake in a condominium complex with a high-powered crossbow. Brennan is a former marine, which also fits your profile. He was arrested five times for assault with intent to commit rape, but the cases never went anywhere. The DA declined prosecution for lack of sufficient evidence. I ask you, how does a guy like that keep getting arrested but never prosecuted? A search warrant of the Tempe residence at the time turned up 20 semiautomatic rifles and handguns along with militia literature and pornography. When he was sixteen, an elderly neighbor called police to her home on several occasions to complain Richard Brennan was spying on her, but no charges were filed and she is deceased. Brennan skipped bail on the weapons charge and left this area. Duck feathers nailed to plywood were also found in the suspect’s home. Let me know if I can be of further assistance.

  Sincerely,

  Sergeant Donna Mader

  I sat back and watched the tender morning light stalk Los Angeles, savoring a bite of cinnamon twist and then a sip of French roast coffee. Arizona, the military background, the rape assaults all added up like aces, but it was the wonderful way Ray Brennan had spiked some innocent ducks with a steel shaft going high velocity, then nailed the trophy feathers to some random piece of plywood, that made me know he was my guy. This was the twisted, grandiose offender I knew.

  I drove against traffic to the Santa Monica Police Department. It was just before 8 a.m. I figured Andrew would be there or on his way. I cannot pretend the move was wholly case-related. I was under siege and running in crisis mode: every encounter held an equal urgency, and I was powerless to stop the stream of guidelines and commands that multiplied and split inside my head. I had a stunning piece of news to present to Andrew which might in some way justify the unsettling search from the night before. That is all I hoped for.

  The dewy roofs of cars ticked by as I jogged the aisles of the crowded Civic Center parking lot, skimming for the unmarked burgundy Ford. Instead I came upon Margaret Forrester, sitting in her vehicle, pounding the steering wheel and howling with rage.

  Even through the rolled-up windows you could hear it—throat-scraping screams, like an infant in pain. I have never experienced such sounds. They were what you might have heard if you had woken up in primal Africa, the first human on earth, surrounded by a jungle full of hostile, incomprehensible bellowing.

  She saw me approaching and popped the door of the gold Lexus sedan.

  “Look what he did to me!”

  She got out and stood by the car. Her face was clear red, the way an infant’s entire body turns red when it’s yelling. The door was a barrier that stopped me cold. I was forced to look.

  “What?”

  She wrenched the back door open, too.

  I was unable to detect any damage to the car. Except for the fading scarlet patches in her cheeks, she also appeared intact, a little tousled, the short cream-colored leather skirt and long legs in slingbacks none the worse for wear.

  “What?” she mimicked. “This!”

  And reached into the backseat, dragging out twenty, maybe thirty pieces of fresh dry cleaning in plastic bags, which slid to the pavement in a glimmering pile.

  “I have been going there six years. Then suddenly today, out of nowhere, he says, ‘Take your dry cleaning and don’t come back!’”

  “Who did?”

  “Sam! The dry cleaning man! I’ve been going there six years!”

  Instinct told me not to ask normal questions or offer common sense (Take your laundry somewhere else) because Margaret’s eyes were darting around like little black panicked fish, and I had the sense that whatever she had done to cause trusty old Sam to blow would prove beyond reason, anyway.

  “I’m sorry that happened, Margaret.”

  It was as if she had been pierced with a sharp instrument. She fairly yelped with hurt.

  “I don’t want your empathy! Don’t you dare empathize with me!”

  “Hey, look—”

  “I’m a widow and my husband died, but that doesn’t mean you can empathize with me! Don’t you dare. I don’t want your empathy. Who the hell do you think you are?”

  I put my briefcase down and said, “Let’s just pick this stuff up.”

  There must have been a hundred dollars’ worth of dry cleaning billowing around, drifting slowly underneath parked cars.

  “It’s like this all the time,” she complained. “When I was growing up, we had nothing. But people didn’t treat you like dirt.”

  I was trying to lay the clothes on the backseat, but they kept slipping off and there were too many to hang. The Nextel was suddenly as unrelenting as she. Two calls in a row from Rick. Now the pager, too. My arms were full of sticky plastic bags.

  “Can you open the trunk?”

  “Nobody helps,” she said. Then: “Don’t help me!”

  “Fine. Whatever you want.”

  I dropped the whole pile on the ground. Now she looked at me, appalled.

  “Why did you do that?”

  “You said you didn’t want my help.” I bent to lift my briefcase.

  “Don’t go!” She grabbed my forearm. “Please don’t go,” pleading desperately. “He’s leaving us, Ana.”

  These sudden shifts were scaring me—the tossing blur of shining hair and scrabbling fingers seemed out of place and vulgar in the remorseless sun. Was this a hissing fit on a bad hormone day, or could the woman be delusional?

  “Who is leaving? Not your husband.”

  “No, Andrew!” she cried shakily, on the verge of tears. “Believe me, he won’t stick around while the crap hits the fan.”

  “What crap?”

  “He’s going up north, to Fresno.”

  “Fresno?”

  “The Fresno Police Department. I saw a request for a recommendation he passed on to the chief. He wants to get a job up there and—just—never come back.”

  She covered her mouth with her fingertips and st
ared at me with a look of alarm.

  What sense did this make? My first thought was, no, he would never leave his father’s house. Not quit the department this close to retirement.

  “You seem awfully upset about Andrew leaving. If he’s leaving.”

  And what about us moving in together?

  “You don’t know,” she breathed.

  Margaret’s eyes were small and wounded with an aggressive kind of deprivation. Her arms were folded and her shoulders pinched as she peered out from a nest of resentment. She was hurting and would find somebody to blame—me, the dry cleaner, Andrew. She would gather her powers and punish us all.

  “There’s no way you could know,” Margaret said. “You’re not inside the department. Andrew is the greatest guy on earth, but he’s fickle, very fickle, so be forewarned. He was the exact same way with me, after my husband died. I needed the comfort, understand what I’m saying?”

  I did, all right.

  “Andrew was the only one who really, really knew me.”

  Watching her. His best buddy’s sexy and ambitious wife. Margaret had retrieved a water bottle from somewhere and was taking a drink, keeping watch on me over the glinting plastic.

  “I’m not going to apologize for it. You’ll be happy to know, he dumped me, too.” She kicked at the dry cleaning. “He thinks he’s angry, but my anger is bigger than his. Ha! I am the Thunder Goddess!”

  “Is this a joke?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, are you a joke, Margaret, or just unbelievably cruel?”

  The thing I resented most was how Andrew got us to fight over him in a parking lot.

  “No, it’s terribly, terribly sad. I’m sad for you because you’re going to get hurt.”

  “Enough.” I gripped the briefcase. “I don’t want to hear it.”