by Tyler Dilts
Jen took a step forward, reached into the freezer, and ran her fingertips over the package. Even through her latex glove and the layers of heavy paper, she had no trouble identifying its contents. She said, “It’s a kukri.”
“The other two…” Marty said.
I nodded. “They’re his trophies.”
TWENTY-SEVEN
We watched as Ruiz looked down at Daryl Waxler, slumped in the backseat of the unmarked cruiser. “Mr. Waxler?”
“Yes,” Daryl said, turning his face up and squinting into the sunlight.
“We’re going to need you to come to the station to answer some questions.”
Daryl’s face became more pinched, and he nodded, the confusion and pain in his eyes deepening by the minute. Ruiz closed the car door.
We waited for the lieutenant to turn his attention back to us. When he did, he said, “Who wants to take him back to the squad?”
“I’ll do it,” I said.
Ruiz looked at Jen. She nodded. He faced me and said, “Look, I know I don’t have to tell you this, but you don’t talk to him. Clear? Not until we finish here and everybody gets back. We don’t know what else we’re going to find.”
“Got it,” I said.
“What about Waxler’s son?” Jen asked.
“Well, maybe he’ll show up before we’re done. I’ll be sure the uniforms keep an eye out.”
After I’d gotten into the backseat next to Daryl, Jen slid in behind the wheel, started the car, backed into a three-point turn, and drove down the long driveway. Daryl watched through the side window until we passed through the gate, and then he turned his face forward and looked straight ahead. He seemed to whither as we put more and more distance between our car and his house.
At one point, as we sped south on the Harbor Freeway toward the Vincent Thomas Bridge, his eyes, still unfocused and bleary, grew moist and heavy. I waited for a tear to spill down his cheek. It never did. Instead, he closed his eyes for several seconds, as if he were willing himself not to cry. When he opened them again, he’d succeeded. They were dry. I wondered, my own eyes drilling into the side of his head, what he was thinking. I wondered if, perhaps, he was trying to conserve his tears. I wondered if he knew how much more he’d need them later.
We locked Daryl in the interview room and let him stew while we watched through the mirror of the observation room next door.
“Does he look smaller to you?” I asked Jen.
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know, just smaller.”
“No. He looks exactly the same size as he always has.”
“Okay.”
“You think he’s shrinking?”
“No, of course not. It’s just, I don’t know, he seems different.”
“Different how?”
“Smaller.”
“Is this some kind of ‘Who’s on First?’ routine?”
“I don’t know.”
“Third base.” That one got a smile out of me.
Daryl had been in the box close to two hours when the rest of the detail returned. “Anything?” Ruiz wanted to know.
“No,” I said. “He hasn’t said a word since we put him in there.”
Kincaid asked, “You think he’ll want a lawyer?”
“Probably,” I said. “He wanted one back at his house. He’s got a guy. Trevor—uh.” I tried to remember the lawyer’s last name. “Trevor somebody. Jen and I talked to him during the initial interview.”
Kincaid looked through the glass at Daryl. “What do you think, Jen? How should we go at him?” Kincaid’s teeth looked brighter in the darkness of the observation room. That was the first time I’d ever heard him ask a detective for advice. He was nothing if not persistent.
“Wait until Paula’s gone over the evidence,” Jen said. “If it’s as good as it looks, let him lawyer up for the interview. At that point, it won’t matter what he says, anyway.”
“Exactly what I was thinking,” Kincaid said. I didn’t believe him.
Paula positively identified the two severed hands we’d found in Waxler’s freezer as belonging to Beth and Mary Ellen. The tests on the kukri were inconclusive, but at the very least, the knife we found in the freezer was identical to the weapon used in both murders.
Daryl sat next to his attorney, Trevor Wells, on one side of the table in the interview room. Across from them sat Bob Kincaid, with Lieutenant Ruiz behind him, leaning against the cinder-block wall and ready to bust out the bad-cop attitude at a moment’s notice.
“Where were you the night before last, Mr. Waxler?” Kincaid asked.
Daryl began to speak, but Wells took over. “He was at dinner at a restaurant in Redondo Beach. Zazou. Several witnesses can testify as to his presence there for several hours. He’s a regular, and most of the staff know him by sight. We’ll also be happy to provide credit card records that will confirm this.”
Kincaid spent another three-quarters of an hour dancing and shuffling with Wells over his client’s relationship with Mary Ellen Robbins and with her husband, trying—and failing—to convincingly draw a clear motive out of Daryl.
When Kincaid had pushed as far as Wells was going to let him, he dropped the bomb. “Mr. Waxler,” Kincaid said, “you should think this over very carefully. You know what we found in the refrigerator in your garage.” Daryl looked confused. A strand of brown hair fell across his forehead. Wells looked at his client and then at Kincaid.
“What are you talking about? What did you find?” Wells asked.
“Would you like to tell him what I’m talking about, Mr. Waxler?”
“I don’t…” Daryl said. “I don’t have any idea what you mean.”
“Well, Mr. Wells, you should know that we found, in your client’s refrigerator, not only the murder weapon, but severed hands taken as trophies from the body of each victim.”
Wells was surprised, but a look of horror and pain filled Daryl’s face, contorting it into an almost unrecognizable mask.
“We’ll give you a minute,” Kincaid said. He rose from the table, and Ruiz followed him out. Daryl wept.
“He’s falling apart in there,” Jen said. We were all gathered behind the mirror, watching Daryl and his lawyer whisper in each other’s ears. We couldn’t tell what they were saying, but it was clear that they were disagreeing about something significant. Wells would whisper and then Daryl would shake his head. When they seemed to have reached an understanding, if not an agreement, Kincaid and Ruiz went back into the room.
Kincaid took the same chair, Ruiz the same section of wall. Kincaid began. “Now that you’ve had a chance to talk about things, is there anything you’d like to tell us?”
Daryl spoke, his voice stronger and clearer than I’d ever heard it. He sounded fearless. “I did it,” he said. “I killed them both.”
When I saw the pain and sorrow in his eyes, I felt a tightness in my abdomen and I knew I finally understood. I pulled Jen out into the hallway and asked, “Do you know if anyone’s still at Waxler’s house?”
“No. Why? What’s wrong?”
I took a deep breath before I spoke. “I think we arrested the wrong Daryl Waxler.”
Jen shook her head. “What?”
“Think about it,” I said. “Daryl Senior’s got two alibis, no clear motive, and the killer instinct of a bowl of Jell-O. He’s bawling like a little girl until he finds out about the evidence that we found in his home. Then he grows a spine in about two seconds. How does that make sense?”
She still wasn’t biting.
“I’m just saying, maybe, all right? If Daryl knows he didn’t do it, but cops to the charge as soon as he finds out we found a smoking gun in his house, what does that suggest?”
Jen saw it then, but she still resisted. “You’re just speculating. That’s not even probable cause.”
“But what if I’m right?”
“We need to question him,” she said.
“What do you suppose is in that sealed juvie file? A
nd all those books? If he knows how to investigate a homicide—”
“Is anybody still at Waxler’s house?” she asked.
“Let’s find out.”
TWENTY-EIGHT
“No,” Marty said when we arrived. “The techs were wrapping up when we left.”
“What about the kid?” I asked.
“He didn’t show up. The boss left a business card on the kitchen counter.”
“The lawyer tried to call him when he got here,” Dave said. “Sounded like he just left a message.”
“Why?” Marty asked me.
“I was just thinking,” I said, “maybe we should have waited for him. Brought him in for questioning before he got a heads-up from the lawyer.”
Marty clapped me on the shoulder. “Don’t sweat it, Danny. We got a slam dunk here. You were right all along.”
“Lieutenant?” I knocked once on Ruiz’s open door. He looked up from the report on his desk.
“Yeah, Danny?”
“I was just thinking, maybe we should question the son before Wells has a chance to coach him.”
“Good idea. Run it past Kincaid, and if he’s okay with it, go grab up the kid.”
“Thanks, Boss.” As I turned, I gave Jen a thumbs-up.
She called Kincaid on her cell as we were on our way down to the garage. I listened as she gave him the same line I’d given Ruiz. “Thanks, Bob,” she said and folded her phone and slipped it into her jacket pocket. “We’re good.”
I checked my watch as we started up the hill into Palos Verdes. It had been just under three hours since we’d last left Daryl’s house. There were still faint purple-orange traces of the sunset hanging over the horizon.
“Money,” I said.
“What?” Jen asked.
“The motive. He’s twisted to begin with. Homicide fanboy, that whole pathology. Toss a little good old-fashioned greed into the mix. Then his mom dies.” I thought about it. The story was starting to hold. “Makes him even angrier at his father, so he sets him up for the murder. Daryl Senior gets the needle or a lifetime’s supply of prison. Even after the lawyers got through with him, there’d still be a shitload in the bank.”
She thought a moment. “Except we screw it up. Close the case with the tail pinned on the wrong donkey.”
“So he has to kill Mary Ellen,” I said, “to set us straight.”
“Jesus,” Jen said. “That fits.”
“I want to hit him hard. See how he holds up.”
“Think he’ll spook?”
“Don’t have a clue. Only one way to find out.”
It took four rings of the doorbell and two minutes for Daryl Waxler Jr. to answer the door. We were almost ready to give up and start peering in the windows when we saw his shadow behind the peephole. The door swung open slowly.
“Hi,” he said.
“Hey, D.J.,” Jen said, her voice warm and thick as honey. “You’ve heard about your father?”
He nodded.
“What took you so long to answer the door?”
“I was down in the game room, eating dinner.” He wore a sleeveless T-shirt and gray shorts. His arms and shoulders looked pumped up, as if he’d been lifting weights.
We’d seen the game room for the first time earlier that day. The house was built on a slope, with the lower level carved out of the hillside, so what appeared from the front to be a relatively modest two-story was, in actuality, much larger. The game room was built in the former basement, and it filled nearly the entire lower level of the house. It was easily fifty feet long and half again as wide, with four thick concrete columns that were equidistant from the corners and supported the main floor.
The room held an enormous television, a horseshoe-shaped, leather-covered sectional sofa that had space enough for at least a dozen people, a full-sized bar right out of the neighborhood pub, billiard and air-hockey tables, and a large felt-topped card table. On the far side of the room, ten yards of French door looked out over the pool and the hill that sloped away from the house.
“We need to ask you a few questions,” Jen said.
“About my dad?”
“Yes.”
“Mr. Wells called me,” he said, the sadness heavy in his voice. I eyed him. If he was feigning the emotion, he was doing it well.
“Come in,” he said.
“Thanks, D.J.,” Jen said, flashing her teeth at him. I thought I saw his chest swell slightly, but it might just as easily have been my imagination.
“I wasn’t sure what to do. So I ordered a pizza. You guys want some?” he asked, leading us through the kitchen. “I got a large, so there’s plenty.”
“Sure,” Jen said.
We followed him downstairs and sat with him, facing the muted big-screen TV. I watched a nearly life-sized skateboarder rolling up and down the curved sides of a large half-pipe. Statistics I didn’t understand scrolled across the bottom of the screen in six-inch-high letters. On a wide, glass-topped coffee table in front of D.J. was an open Domino’s Pizza box with three-quarters of a Canadian-bacon-and-pineapple pizza still uneaten.
“What’s going to happen to my dad?”
“It’s a little too soon to know for sure,” I said.
“You guys must have had probable cause to arrest him, right?”
Jen answered. “We really can’t be too specific.”
“No, I understand. Here’s some paper towels,” he said, pulling two sheets from a roll on the floor and sliding the pizza box toward Jen. She spread the sheets like a placemat on the glass, took a slice, and placed it down on the paper. “What did you need to know?” D.J. asked, taking a bite of pizza. Too much cheese slid off, and he tried to catch it between his fingers before it fell onto his chin.
“Okay,” I said. “Just one question, really. Why are you trying to set your father up for the murders you committed?”
D.J.’s jaw tensed for a fraction of a second and then relaxed again. He finished chewing. He looked at me the way a poker player looks at someone who’s just raised the bet a little too high. And I knew.
He hooked the glass top of the table with both hands as Jen and I went for our guns. The glass was in the air and falling toward us before we had finished our draws. D.J. sprung himself over the back of the couch and made a break for the French doors. We each put up a hand to catch the tabletop and shove it away. The glass shattered when its center caught the corner of the table’s wooden frame.
“Don’t let him get to a car,” I said, hopping over the couch, pistol drawn, following him outside.
As we passed through the doors, there was a large deck overhead, extending fifteen feet off the back of the house. I heard footsteps above me. The stairs were on my right. I took them two at a time and made it to the top of the stone-and-tile deck just in time to hear one of the doors slam shut. I tried the knob, but he had locked it as he went through.
I took two steps back and threw a hard front kick at the wood next to the knob. The door cracked and splintered, but the lock held. One more kick, and the door exploded open. I took two quick peeks inside, one to each side of the door, and then went in. I didn’t see him. I moved through the living room. He could have gone any of half a dozen ways. Into the kitchen. The dining room. The foyer. Three hallways.
I stood silently in the middle of the room and listened. The sound came from downstairs. Just a second or two of noise from the TV, then silence—as if he’d hit the wrong button on the remote, then quickly corrected himself.
He’d doubled back.
As I started down the stairs, the room was darker than it had been. The TV was turned off. So were the lights on the ceiling fans. Slowly, my Glock extended in front of me, I went down. The only light in the room was spilling in from the yard beyond the French doors.
Motionless at the bottom of the stairs, I listened, waiting for my eyes to adjust to the low light. When they had, I swept along the back wall of the room, moving slowly into the far corner, looking anywhere he might be able to hide.
When I’d cleared the area behind the bar, I surveyed the room. Darkness and shadow.
If he was still here, he was quiet. And patient.
I worked my way around the perimeter of the room, breathing slowly through my nose. As I passed in front of the TV screen, the broken glass crunched beneath my feet. I’d given away my position.
I’d also made it halfway around the room. There weren’t many places left for him to hide. I started across the room, my eyes on the air hockey table. Halfway there, in the periphery of my vision, I saw the flash of steel.
I turned toward him as he spun out from behind the concrete column, a kukri raised above his head. The knife in the freezer had been a decoy.
He charged me.
I raised my left hand into a defensive position and pulled the trigger of my pistol. By the time he had closed the distance between us, I’d gotten off six rounds point-blank into his chest, but his momentum carried him into me. I shoved him back, and he collapsed into a pile on the floor. I kept my gun leveled on his chest.
I heard Jen yelling from upstairs. I stood over D.J.’s convulsing body and tried to catch my breath. Then I noticed something odd. I was covered in blood. Too much to have been back splatter from D.J., even at such close range. Odd, I thought.
I looked down to see my feet in a puddle of blood. That’s when I noticed my left wrist. I held it up. My hand was hanging from my forearm at an impossible angle, as if I had an extra joint in my wrist, allowing my thumb to fold flat against my arm.
Something was wrong.
I knew I shouldn’t be able to see the bone protruding from my wrist. And I knew I shouldn’t be able to count my own heartbeats in the thick flow of blood pulsing from the wound.
Something was wrong.
The lights came on then, and I heard Jen scream from somewhere far away. “Danny!”
Then I was sitting on the floor. I could feel the warmth of the blood soaking though my pants. Jen was there. She did something to my hand. “It’s going to be okay,” she said. She looked scared.