by Tyler Dilts
I tried to imagine the crime. Beth, sitting at her desk, grading papers, looking up startled to see—who? That was the question. I couldn’t picture Harlan Gibbs on the other end of a blade like that. Maybe the last man she dated? He was still a cipher, though, just a name in her address book. Daryl Waxler. I couldn’t imagine him at all. Not yet. I was still searching for the story.
Three insight-free hours later, I’d practically memorized my notes, and the exhaustion was taking hold. I knew I couldn’t put off sleep any longer. I took another shot of vodka, brushed my teeth, and went to bed.
Once in a great while, in a small bar a block or two from a police station, an hour or so after last call, with empty beer bottles and shot glasses in front of him, a cop will speak in a quiet voice, almost as if embarrassed, of his dreams. Invariably, they are dreams of death. Images of those we find or of those we kill—or worst of all, of those who were our own. We don’t speak of these dreams out of any particular need for understanding or to vent our emotions. We do it simply so that when those long nights come, and we lie awake in the darkness, we’ll know that we’re not alone, that for cops the nightmares are par for the course.
SEVEN
The first time I killed a man, I was still a rookie in uniform, responding to a 911, armed robbery in progress. In a North Long Beach 7-Eleven, a fifteen-year-old gangbanger named Walter Jackson opened up on a pregnant Vietnamese teenager with a pump-action twelve gauge, which he then turned on the clerk. When the time-controlled safe took too long to spit out another twenty bucks, Walter put the clerk down too. I arrived just as he was coming out the front door, trying to manage both the shotgun and a case of malt liquor. When he saw me, he dropped the bottles and turned the sawed-off barrel of the Remington toward me. I tapped four 9mm rounds into his chest, and he died in a puddle of blood and Colt 45.
That was ten years ago, and Walter doesn’t visit often anymore. On this night, as on countless others, I dreamt of a Toyota Corolla northbound on I-5, not far past Valencia. The blue compact is following a tractor-trailer up a long incline. As they crest the hill, the truck brakes hard. The Toyota has left plenty of room to stop. The second eighteen-wheeler behind the Toyota, though, doesn’t. It slams into the back of the Corolla and rams it forward into the rear end of the trailer. The compact car is crushed like a beer can between the two rigs. Gas begins to leak onto the ground and is ignited by a stray spark. The drivers of the trucks are unhurt. As they scramble onto the highway, they approach the Toyota, but the flames begin to spread. The two men move in closer and see a red-haired young woman with freckled cheeks and shining green eyes pinned in the driver’s seat, bleeding profusely from her forehead, but the increasing heat drives them back.
I walk unseen past the two men, through the growing fire. The flames engulf me, but I feel no heat, only the cold wind blowing across the highway. The flames dance beside me as I approach the window of the Toyota, which has shattered. I move in very close, placing my hand on the roof and leaning over to look inside. The weather stripping and dashboard are already beginning to melt. The sheet metal pings. In quick succession the tires pop like gunshots.
From the driver’s seat, Megan looks at me, her eyes wet, and says, “Save the baby, Danny, the baby.”
“What baby?” I try to say, but no words come out of my mouth.
“Help us, Danny.” She looks at me, pleading.
I want to ask, “How?” but still I say nothing.
The flames are engulfing the car. I can smell her hair beginning to burn. “Danny, please!” Megan screams. “The baby! Danny, the baby!” Her voice trails off into whimpering cries as I watch her skin redden and begin to burn. Her green eyes beg me to help. They are the most beautiful eyes I’ve ever seen, but I do nothing. Seconds later, the life drains out of them, and they pop, oozing fluid down her blistering cheeks, like thickened, boiling tears. I stand unhurt in a world of flames and watch my wife burn.
A psychologist once told me that my dreams were likely not any more vivid than most people’s. The reason, she said, that I remembered them in such detail was that I was a light sleeper. Most people only remember the dreams they have shortly before waking, and because I wake frequently during the night, I remember more, she said. As for the disturbing images within the dreams and the fact that I place myself at the scene of Megan’s death, the doctor simply added that it is not at all uncommon to dream of the dead and even involve ourselves in events in which we had no part, especially when we feel culpable in the death. I nodded as if I understood, as if I were cataloging the information for future reference. But ultimately, she was of little help.
It was after four a.m. when I woke. My head was resting on a cold, sweat-soaked pillow. Sitting up, I whispered Megan’s name. Then I got out of bed, put on a hooded pullover sweatshirt, and went into the kitchen. I ran the tap until the water got as hot as it was going to get, filled a mug, and scooped in four teaspoons of instant coffee.
I stood in the living room for a minute, staring at the blank, black TV screen, thinking about turning it on. But I’d been here often enough to know that nothing that was on at four in the morning would come close to occupying my thoughts.
Behind the duplex in which I live is a small backyard I share with my upstairs neighbors. They keep a set of green, plastic Adirondack chairs on the well-tended lawn. I sat in one of them and sipped my bad coffee, staring at the sky and waiting for the first light of dawn.
EIGHT
The morning light came not in shafts of golden sunlight spilling over the horizon, but in the almost imperceptibly brightening grayness of the overcast sky. In a different season, we’d call it June gloom, but the Southern California weathermen hadn’t yet come up with a catchy name for the phenomenon when it occurred in November. When the streetlights shut themselves off, an idea occurred to me. I went back inside and pulled a pair of Nikes onto my sockless feet, slipped my gun into the waistband of my shorts at the small of my back, and locked the front door behind me.
Half a block north, toward Seventh Street, Warren High came into view. I stood for a moment, eyeing the backs of the football bleachers. A freshly repainted six-foot-tall cartoon badger leered out at me from the wall behind the visitors’ gate. He stood upright on his hind legs and flexed his biceps like a roidhead bodybuilder. His eyebrows were raised and his teeth bared in an expression that I assumed was meant to be a smile, but the fangs and the gleeful sparkle in the eyes came off as borderline psychotic.
Passing him, I began to walk along the fence around the school’s perimeter, stopping here and there to peer through the chain links at, around, and between the assortment of buildings. I wondered what the neighbors might think if they saw me—a disheveled man, unshaven and unshowered, gazing intently through the high school fence, trying to catch a glimpse of what exactly? After I completed the first lap of the campus and saw the psycho badger again, I turned around and retraced my steps. Not once, from anywhere around the entire perimeter of the school, was I able to see the windows of Beth’s classroom. Son of a bitch, I thought. Just might be on to something.
“News?” Ruiz asked. Marty, Jen, Dave, and I were crowded around the desk in the lieutenant’s office.
“One lead worth checking out,” I said. “Guy she met on the Internet and went out with a few times.”
“Grieving boyfriend?” Dave looked hopeful. A smear of powdered doughnut sugar clung to the corner of his mouth. “What are we waiting for?”
“Ex,” Jen said. “She cut him loose a while back. No priors.”
“Still…” Marty said.
“I know. We’re looking at him today.” Jen sucked smoothie through a straw. I couldn’t tell what kind it was, something with an orangey tint—at least it wasn’t the green weed juice. She’d brought me another strawberry banana.
“How are we working it?” Ruiz asked.
“Got through about half the faculty and staff yesterday,” Dave said. “Do the rest today. Nothing much yet. Nobody with a blo
ody knife in their back pocket.”
“ViCAP, NCIC?” Ruiz asked. The Violent Criminals Apprehension Program and the National Crime Information Center were both federally funded through the Department of Justice and ran databases through which local law enforcement agencies could run criminal MOs to compare them nationwide for possible matches.
“Still waiting.” Dave slurped out of a bright yellow mug. “They keep giving me some kind of weekend-backlog crap. Should know about any hits soon.”
“Marty?” Ruiz asked.
“Nothing new on forensics.” Marty rubbed his temples with the thumb and middle finger of his left hand and then slid his palm down his face, as if it were a wrinkled shirt that he was trying to smooth. “You know what we’re looking at here, Boss?” His eyes turned to Ruiz.
“No,” Ruiz said.
“It’s got all the signs of a disorganized serial,” Marty said.
“News flash, partner,” Dave said, the fluorescent light glinting on his scalp, “one murder ain’t a serial.”
“Still,” Jen said, “Marty’s right. That’s exactly what it looks like. Serial or no, this is a textbook disorganized sexual predator.”
“So?” Ruiz asked, as if he didn’t follow. He’d always been big on the whole leading-question, Socratic-method thing.
No one said anything. I was staring out the window at the unbroken gray sky when Jen turned her head toward me. “What?” she asked.
“I didn’t say anything,” I said.
“What?” Ruiz was rolling with the monosyllables.
“It’s not that simple,” I said.
“Why not?” Marty asked.
“Think about it. What are the signs of a disorganized predator?” I asked.
“Extreme violence,” Jen said. “Trophy taking.”
“No attempt to dispose of the body,” Marty added.
“Makes a fucking mess,” Dave said.
“Random victim.” Ruiz was beginning to see it.
“Leaves physical evidence.” Jen picked it up too.
Marty shook his head slowly. “I don’t know…”
“Somebody wanna fill me in here?” Dave asked.
“Danny thinks we’ve got us a criminal mastermind on our hands,” Marty said.
“I’m not sure I’d go that far,” I said, “but think about it. Number one—and I checked this out this morning—there’s no way the doer could have seen Beth alone in her classroom from outside the school. Makes it unlikely that she’s a random victim. Two, there’s no trace of physical evidence. Means he’s either very careful or very lucky. So, we know he’s done his homework picking the vic. It follows he’s going to be careful with the evidence, right? Then why such a mess?”
“Okay,” Dave said. “I’m with you so far.”
“We’ve got to wonder,” I went on, “is it just a set of contradictory facts, which I’m not ruling out, or was the whole thing planned to look exactly the way it does?”
“You’re asking how sharp is the doer?” Dave asked.
Marty spread his hands. “Come on,” he said. “You know what you’re suggesting? He plans this whole thing out, every detail, in advance, just to make it look like he didn’t plan it out? Why?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe to throw us off.”
“Are you serious?” Marty shook his head. “What? The killer’s some kind of evil genius? Come on.” He snorted a laugh. “How often we bust one of those?”
“Oh, evil geniuses,” Dave chimed in. “They’re right up there with the crack whores and gangbangers.”
“I’m just saying we have to be open to the possibility that he may be smarter than we want to admit,” I said. “What’s the alternative?”
“The alternative?” Marty thought for a moment. “The doer is a planner, okay? Takes his time, plans it out, all the details. But it’s his first time, right? So he doesn’t know what’s going to happen to him when he actually starts. Once he’s in there, hacking away, he loses it—can’t keep control, shoots his wad, whatever. He gets so excited the plan goes out the window. The organization goes to shit, and we wind up with the mess he left us with.” Marty sat back in his chair.
“Maybe,” I said. “Maybe. Either way, though, we’re looking for someone who planned the crime. That means access to Beth of one kind or another before the murder. And it means we have to go at him like an organized, no matter how the scene ended up.”
“Touché,” Marty said.
“Still,” Ruiz said, “don’t rule anything out.”
“Especially evil geniuses,” Jen said.
Upstairs, Pat Glenn sat in the blue glow of three computer monitors, his fingers working the keys in front of him with short and sudden bursts of speed that sounded like suppressed automatic weapon fire.
“Hey, Danny,” he said, without looking up. “Check this out.” He swiveled the monitor toward me, and I saw a screenful of knives. On display was an online cutlery catalog for a company called The Cutting Edge. “Right here,” Pat said, pointing to a large blade at the bottom of the screen.
“Can you make that bigger?”
He slid the little arrow onto the blade and double-clicked. A full-color photo of what the catalog copy called a Gurkha kukri filled the screen. The knife looked something like a lopsided boomerang, with the cutting edge curving downward and widening before tapering into a point. According to the specs, the stainless-steel blade was eleven inches long, and the handle was made of a black plastic called Micarta. A small inset photo showed a burly man chopping though a piece of lumber, and the caption proclaimed, “Our kukri cuts through a 1x3 in a single stroke!”
“Look like a murder weapon to you, Danny?” Pat asked.
“Maybe so,” I said. “How soon can we get one?”
“Already ordered two.” He leaned back in his ergonomic chair and grinned. “Be here tomorrow. Rush order.”
“Good work.”
Pat opened the small refrigerator at his feet and pulled out a can of Coke. It popped and fizzed as he opened it. “So,” he said, “what brings you upstairs?”
“E-mail,” I said. “Can we get into Beth’s account?”
“Legally or practically?”
“Both.”
“Well, mostly it depends on her ISP.” He took a long drink from his Coke and swallowed. “See, if she had an account through the school district—or any employer, really—we’d just need their permission because, technically speaking, it’s their property. But she has AOL. That’s a private account, so it’s hers, and that gives her a reasonable expectation of privacy.”
“So we need a court order?”
“Legally, yes.”
“Practically?”
He wrote his answer on a Post-it note. Jen and I had some work to do before I’d have a chance to pry into Beth’s e-mail.
NINE
Daryl Waxler lived in Palos Verdes, an exclusive community on the peninsula that jutted from the LA County shoreline and divided the South Bay from its less well-heeled neighbors, Wilmington and San Pedro. We were riding in Jen’s Explorer as she drove out of Long Beach and across the Vincent Thomas Bridge over Los Angeles Harbor. Along the deepwater canals on both sides of us, cranes towered above worn docks, surrounded by thousands of multicolored containers that looked like huge rusted LEGOs, waiting to be snapped onto the flatbeds of trucks and trains. The unmistakable smell of the harbor—a mixture of engine oil, smog, and dead fish, carried on a fresh ocean breeze—blew in through the vents. At the other end of the bridge, we spent thirty seconds southbound on the Harbor Freeway and then headed up the hill into some of the priciest real estate in Southern California.
“Find out anything interesting about our pal Daryl?” I asked.
“Not much,” she said. “Forty-six. Widowed three years ago. One son, Daryl Jr., eighteen, with a sealed juvie record. A little bad fathering, maybe?”
“Might be,” I said. “What else?”
“Works as some kind of real estate develo
pment exec. Minimalls and such. Made close to five hundred thou last year and lives on two acres.”
“Two acres in Palos Verdes? That’s worth what? Five or six million?”
“Not even close. He’s got an unobstructed view of the bay. Try eleven or twelve.”
“Shit. Where’d the rest of the money come from?”
“Apparently, Daryl’s an astute investor. Bought Microsoft and Cisco back in the trickle-down years.”
“Anything hinky about him?”
“Had his Range Rover towed from a no-parking zone last year, but apparently the kid was driving, so I don’t know if that counts.”
“How’d the wife die?”
“Complications from breast cancer.”
“Probably safe to assume he didn’t kill her then, huh?”
Jen gave me a courtesy smile and turned onto Malaga Cove Road. The blue-gray expanse of the Pacific came into view. It was a nice view, but not one I’d pay ten million for. Maybe it was better on sunny days.
We drove through an open gate that split a long brick wall into two massive halves. “Daryl must not be too big on security,” I said.
“It’s Sunday. Maybe he put his faith in God.”
Expansive lawns planted with huge oak trees flanked the long, curving driveway. Beyond the trees, the edges of the property faded away into well-tended greenness. The inside of the wall was hidden completely by lush plant growth. This was the kind of neighborhood in which the residents didn’t want to be reminded that seven-foot brick walls were the only things separating them from the rest of the world.
Jen slowed to a stop in the circular parking area in front of a surprisingly unassuming two-story, Spanish Colonial–style home. But the landscaped gardens, the fresh tan stucco, the leafless red-tile roof, and the five-car garage matched the price tag of the address. We got out and followed a walkway that had been tiled to match the roof, inset with polished blue and brown squares, until we reached the expansive porch. I pushed the doorbell button next to the double oak doors and looked at Jen.