Valley of lights

by Stephen Gallagher

  Bernie Horowitz, in the sergeants' office, said, 'You didn't hear? We got a child torture-murder in Encanto Park. Little kid taken from his house sometime this morning, his mother didn't even know he'd gone until she called him through for lunch. Thought he was quiet because he was reading comic books. Some sicko had taken him out to the park, abused him, and then tried to eat him. Avery and Timms were cruising the park after a noise complaint, somebody down on the bandstand with a ghetto blaster, and some kids flagged them down. That's how they found him. At that stage he was still alive, but he didn't make it. Timms went on home already, but Avery's trying to be tough about it.'

  'A mistake.'

  'Tell him that. I'm just glad it wasn't me. I've seen most things, but I can't take child abuse.'

  When I went past the locker room again, I heard Avery saying, too loudly, I was covering him over while we waited for the ambulance to get there, and he was thanking me… I got into uniform and then went up to see if I could find Lieutenant Michaels. He'd come in early and all of the officers were now in some kind of meeting concerning the murder, so I took the spare chair by his desk and waited.

  On the other side of the partition wall, I could hear somebody on the phone. Yeah, I saw the body, he was saying. Believe me, you do not want to know.

  Damn it, I had something here. I wasn't exactly sure what, but I couldn't wait to tell Dave and see what he thought.

  He came through from the meeting a couple of minutes later. He left the office door wide open like he always did, and as he dropped his sheaf of mimeoed notes onto the desk and walked around behind it to sit, he said, 'I hear you've got a theory for me.'

  'Not a theory, Dave,' I said, 'but it's a line I think we ought to follow.'

  'Okay,' he said. 'Fire away.'

  So then I started to tell him about my morning's work, and after a couple of minutes I was starting to be sorry that I'd even begun. It was like when you try to tell somebody about a dream you had which made perfect sense at the time, but then you can feel that sense slipping away even as you speak. I was okay on Mercado keeping three empty shells in a darkened motel room as he cruised the city's parks and playgrounds, but beyond that everything started to sound very shaky. Michaels stopped scanning his meeting papers as he listened. I hadn't meant it to come out as any kind of a theory, but that's how it was starting to sound; and after another minute or so, he cut in.

  'Alex,' he said, 'we don't have a sequence here. Nobody walked out of the hospital.'

  'But what about the witnesses?'

  'One heavily-doped Reverend and a psychiatric patient who has regular conversations with dead presidents. Are these witnesses you'd care to take into court?'

  'I've had worse. What about the stolen clothes?'

  'Just another petty theft from the County General. According to the patient's brain scan, he'd no right even to be breathing. Can you imagine those doctors being wrong?'

  'I can imagine them seeing the proof and then firing a few junior people and saying it was what they'd always suspected,' I said. I'd stopped subscribing to the popular view of doctors as gods walking the Earth when I'd butted heads with a group of them ten years before, and Dave knew all about it. He conceded the point with a brief smile, but that was as far as he was prepared to take it.

  'Listen,' he said, 'I think I know why you're doing this. The dead stay dead, Alex. It's about the only damn thing we can be sure of in this world. What we're looking at here is a case of bodysnatching for the usual kind of reason.'

  The usual kind of reason being the desire of close relatives to avoid identification so that they couldn't be stiffed for the medical bills… something else that I knew plenty about. I didn't like the sympathetic streak that had crept into the Lieutenant's manner here, and I also didn't like the feeling that I was somehow being managed. I could see that I was on the road to nowhere, and that it was time to let the whole thing go. It was out of my system and I couldn't ask for more than that.

  Michaels said, 'Look, what you've said is noted. If we get any more and it's enough to be worth passing along to the detective division, I'll do it. But until then, what have we actually got?'

  'Nothing,' I said, and I stood up to leave.

  I was halfway out of the door when something else occurred to me. I said, 'Tomorrow's supposed to be a leave day for me. Is that going to be cancelled now?'

  'No,' he said, 'the manpower side of it's all covered. Stay home and relax, you've done two straight weeks without a break. Don't you have anything fixed?'

  'Yeah,' I said, remembering. 'I'm going on a picnic.'

  The rest of the day was more or less normal. The detective squad diverted most of its personnel into the new investigation, and the uniforms added extra patrols of parks and playgrounds which were now mostly deserted anyway.

  Life went on.

  FIVE

  'You told a lie,' Loretta said to me the next morning.

  'When?'

  'When you said that you weren't going to spend any of your own time on this. I heard you go out at the crack of dawn yesterday.'

  I'd been telling her about how I'd almost made myself look like one of those guys who stands on street corners and shouts about the FLYING SAUCERS that are in the sky above us RIGHT NOW and the government knows it but WON'T TELL THE PEOPLE. We'd walked all of the way around the city zoo's three different habitat zones and had finally come to rest on a bench near the birds of prey. School holidays and yesterday's scare had made the zoo a popular place to be, but there was so much of it that it still seemed to be almost deserted. Georgie, with the typical perversity of small children, had paid far less attention to any of the exotic breeds than she was now paying to a tray of day-old chicks in a low shed across the way; she was pressed up against the window, watching them as they milled around like street extras in Blade Runner.

  I looked at Loretta. She was shading her eyes against the sun, smiling. I said, 'I couldn't sleep, that was all.'

  'I've been watching you, Alex,' she said. 'You're a workaholic.'

  'A workaholic wouldn't have made such a hash of the lieutenant's exam.'

  'I don't mean in that way. But outside of the job, what else do you do?'

  'Lots of things,' I said uncomfortably. 'I've done evening classes. I'm in a couple of clubs.'

  'The evening classes were in law, and the clubs are rifle clubs.'

  'I told you that?'

  'You did.'

  'Are you saying that I'm dull company?'

  'Not at all. But I'm wondering what I'll have to do to keep your interest. Perhaps if I went out and committed a robbery, then you could catch me and put the cuffs on me.'

  I feigned surprise. 'That the kind of thing you're into?'

  'If that's the kind of thing that it takes,' she said. The way that the shadow was falling across her eyes, I couldn't see how serious she was being. Perhaps that was deliberate.

  Georgie came over then, and said, 'Mom, if we get the right kind of eggs, could I try hatching them?'

  'And then what, sugar? I don't think Mr Peabody's likely to let us put a hen run in the trailer park.'

  I could just imagine it; first the hen run, then a few cars up on blocks, then a moonshine still, and then the rest of us sitting out on our porches playing banjos. And in the middle of it all, old Peabody the site manager with his hand clutching at his heart and with his lips barely moving.

  I said, 'Try suggesting it at school. That way you get all the fun, and somebody else gets all the problems.'

  'Yeah,' Georgie conceded, seeing all of the gleam slowly fade from her plan. 'But then they'd be everybody's.'

  She thought it over for a moment longer, and then seemed to sense a new tactical avenue; she said, 'How about a cage bird?'

  'Maybe someday,' Loretta said in that parental tone that really means maybe never. 'Are you all done over there? Alex says he's got some other places for us to see.'

  'I'll go say goodbye,' Georgie said, and ran off down the unmade path
. She was in jeans and sneakers and a cowgirl shirt, and she raised more dust than a dirt bike.

  Loretta was shaking her head. 'Would you believe it?' she said. 'A million dollars' worth of imported wildlife, and the kid goes crazy over a box of ten-cent chicks.'

  'You going to tell her what they're being bred for?'

  'I think she probably knows.' Georgie was back at the broader shed window now, on her toes and looking inside again. 'But some things are best if you don't say them out loud.'

  Amen to that, I thought.

  For the picnic and for the afternoon, we went out to the Pioneer open-air museum and wandered around the old and reconstructed buildings. We spread the checkered cloth in some shade by the pond overlooked by John Marion Sears' Victorian mansion, broke out the food, and waited for the ants. Watching Georgie, I couldn't help wondering if she was lonely and if, in some ways, she wasn't having to grow up too fast. I suppose it was the cage bird business that had set me thinking. By the time that I was her age I'd been through just about every kind of animal that walked, crawled or flew, including a big yellow dog that had died of a tumor at five years old. I grew up believing that kids ought to have pets, but Georgie didn't have any. She lived in a place where the nearest person to her in age was her own mother. She had her own house key, kept her own hours, and had more freedom and responsibility now than I'd had when I was fifteen.

  But at least if she was unhappy, none of it showed.

  When the day had begun to fade, we headed for home over the mountain road. We came over the crest and there it was, a whole valley of lights against the black velvet of a desert evening, a low-rise city tricked into beauty by a fierce sunset and an unexpected approach. We pulled off for a while and watched as the sky flared through from blood-red to black and the city pulsed with evening traffic. It hadn't been a bad day, if you considered my lack of experience as an entertainments manager.

  And it wasn't to end there, because even before we were out of the car Loretta was announcing dinner and I was being pushed back behind the wheel so that I could go and find somewhere to sell me some wine. It was almost five miles down the road to the nearest liquor store – the only one that I could be certain of, anyway – and it took me more than half an hour to complete the round trip, returning with something French that I'd never tried, but which looked awfully classy.

  I didn't make it entirely unscathed. When I was back at the site and getting out of my car, I heard a voice call, 'Sergeant Volchak?' It was a voice that I recognised with a sinking heart.

  'Yes, Mrs Moynahan?' I said.

  'He was here again.' Mrs Moynahan was short and stocky, and always looked as if she was ready to leap to the attack. She lived in the most old-fashioned looking unit on the site, a silver Jetstream like an aluminium bullet. She was coming across the road to me now, mostly a silhouette just slightly warmed by the reflected glow of Loretta's curtains.

  I said, 'And who was this?'

  'The man from the ClA. Snooping around, knocking on everybody's door.' She thrust a piece of paper towards me. 'I made a list of all the places that he went. This is a copy, you can keep it.'

  I hesitated, and then took the paper. Where was the harm? I said, 'Did you speak to him?'

  'No. I pretended I wasn't in. Are you going to..?'

  'Yeah,' I said, 'we'll put it all into the police computer. Then when he makes a wrong move, we can grab him.'

  It was my standard answer, but it was the only thing that ever seemed to satisfy her. Poor old stick. I pushed her piece of paper into my pocket as I went up the wooden steps and into Loretta's house, reflecting that I'd at least escaped without having to listen to the usual half-hour of theories and observations. I can handle these things on the street, but with neighbors you have to approach it differently.

  There was no sign of anybody when I got inside. The table wasn't set, apart from two glasses, and there wasn't even a light in the kitchen; but then I heard Loretta, calling to me from somewhere in the back.

  'Who were you talking to?' she said.

  'Mrs Moynahan, from across the way.' I set the bottle down alongside the glasses. 'She gives me reports on everybody who goes by. There's a salesman been calling around for the last week trying to get the whole site to bulk-order its toilet paper, she's got him marked down as a government agent. Where's Georgie?'

  'With her friends.'

  'Running loose? Loretta, I don't think…'

  'She's not running loose, she's with the Hendersons. The Hendersons have a pool and an Old English Sheepdog and they're having a poolside barbecue for Jilly Henderson's birthday. I drove her there while you were out.'

  What was this, a conspiracy? Georgie hadn't said anything about it. 'Loretta…' I began.

  'Yes, Alex?' Loretta said patiently.

  'Why are we shouting from opposite ends of the house?'

  I heard movement, and then a moment later she appeared in the doorway. She was mostly backlit from the bedroom, and she was wrapped in a towel.

  As far as I could see – which was quite a lot – she wasn't wearing anything else.

  'Damn it, Alex,' she said, 'is it too much trouble just to come through and get a surprise?'

  'Try it without the towel,' I suggested, 'and I'll tell you if it's worth the walk.'

  One stunned second later, I was walking.

  SIX

  Later on, after the wine and some Mexican food out of Loretta's freezer, Loretta went to pick up her daughter and I walked the half-dozen yards back to my own home. There you go, Georgie, I was thinking; it all worked out the way you wanted, and you weren't even around to know it. I messed around, straightening a few things and moving some unpaid bills from one drawer to another, until I heard them get back.

  Even then, I couldn't relax. One of those lights out in the valley stood for a child-killer, a torturer, and I still couldn't shake the feeling that I was almost within reach of some kind of understanding. A light had gone out when Mercado had died but then another, just as surely, had blinked on somewhere else. It was the pattern, the damned pattern, so persuasive that it hardly seemed to matter that it wasn't actually possible.

  I pulled my canvas gun roll out from under the bed, and started on the cleaning-and-oiling routine. Hardly realised what I was doing, until I looked down and saw that I was holding the hunting rifle almost as if I was expecting Mercado to appear outside and say, Hi, Alex, I've come for the kid.

  Was that it? Was I getting all raw and protective because, for the first time in years, it was starting to look as if I had something to protect? Not that my eyes weren't wide-open; I'd noticed without commenting on the picture in Loretta's bedroom that was supposed to be hidden behind a stack of her Romance paperbacks, and I'd said nothing to break the long silence afterwards. We'd both been around, we weren't children; but I wanted to think that there was still some of that special innocence in us both, the kind that Georgie showed when she looked at a tray of day-old chicks destined only to survive long enough to be live food for the reptiles and hawks. The kind that can be lost so easily, like when somebody says the obvious out loud.

  Mercado could still come, I was thinking. His body may be in the morgue, but he's still out there.

  But I couldn't say it.

  Not to anybody else.

  SEVEN

  I hit paydirt with my twelfth residential motel, just as I was starting to get weary and to believe that I was taking a long shot that would get me nowhere. Most of the desk monkeys so far had known me already, which meant that I didn't have to show my badge and make it official, thereby risking the trouble that this might cause if word ever got back; but the young man behind the counter at the Sunset Beach Motor Court didn't know me, and I didn't know him. He was tall and skinny and wore glasses and had the air of somebody with an education who hadn't been able to make any good use of it. He was two or three years too old for this job to be any kind of a stop-gap.

  I said, 'I'd like to see your registration cards for the last coupl
e of days.' I showed him my ID as I said it. He seemed to shrink back nervously, as if I was suddenly giving off heat.

  'Uh, listen,' he said, 'let me get the regular manager in on this one. I'm just relief…'

  'No, you listen,' I said patiently. 'I'll start again. I want to see your registrations for the last couple of days. I'm looking for a white male, alone and without luggage, five-eleven, medium build, dark hair. He's kind of pale and wasted-looking, as if he's been lying around in the dark for a long time.' Which, of course, he had; I was describing the body in the business suit that I'd last seen slumped in a Paradise chair with urine stains down its pants, the one that had suddenly upped and walked out of County General within moments of Gilbert Mercado hitting the concrete. One of my details seemed to strike a spark with the clerk, and I said, 'You've seen him?'

  'Kind of white like a slug?' he said.

  'And probably no car. Is he in now?'

  'No. He went out.'

  'When did he arrive?'

  He moved down the counter to an indexed carousel. 'Mid-evening,' he said, starting to check through, 'the night before last. Right at the end of my shift.' He pulled out a card, and passed it down the counter to me. 'He paid cash in advance. I saw a gold American Express card in his wallet, but he didn't use it.'

  For the simple reason that it had been stolen, I was thinking. He'd taken it, along with most of the rest of a surgery chief's clothing, from a locker in the scrub facility right next to the Operating Rooms. According to the surgeon, he'd have about two hundred and fifty dollars in cash on him. When I heard that, I knew I'd taken up the wrong profession.

  Bodysnatching, huh?

  The card told me nothing; utterly anonymous handwriting, a name I'd never heard of, an out-of-state address that was probably false. I said, 'Let's go and take a look at his room, shall we?'

  'Hey,' he began, 'I don't know,' but I said quietly, 'Come on. This could be serious,' and that swayed him.