by Alan Drew
The boy—well, he was a sophomore in college, twenty—had parked the car, a nice car, a Camaro, on the edge of a ravine, the orange port lights of Long Beach spread beneath them like shattered glass, the mechanical hum of oil derricks pumping behind them. There was one other car parked on the edge of the hill, thirty yards away, and she remembered seeing the glowing point of a lit cigarette behind the darkened glass. And when the boy started pressing himself against her, she’d said no—at least, that’s what she remembered saying. And when he’d gotten his hands up her shirt, she had said no again, but he was drunk and moving quickly, and her back was pushed up against the door handle, and he was six foot four—something she’d admired about him, his lanky limbs, his butterflied back—and it was over quickly. Afterward he’d kissed her on the neck, tenderly, as though what had just happened held great meaning for him. And his passion, his belated tenderness, confused her.
Natasha washed around the woman’s breasts now, cleaning away dried sweat, and then moved to her neck, where the killer’s hands had clamped down, and dabbed the cloth on the crescent-shaped cuts surrounding her esophagus.
She didn’t think about that night often; it didn’t obsess her. It simply floated into her mind occasionally, when the deceased had been sexually assaulted, strangled. The submarine races. She had been drunk, and he had been speaking in code, a code she later discovered other girls spoke. She’d gone out on a date with him a week later, the boy using his fake ID to buy them a bottle of Blue Nun at a little Italian place strung with white Christmas lights. She’d even let him kiss her at her dorm room door. Let him place his fingers on the curve of her left breast, all of her insides cramping into knots. He called her again two days later, and she told him he was nice but that she wasn’t interested in dating someone right now. She could hear the disappointment in his voice, hear him saying, “But I thought—” and “What the hell, Natasha.” She hadn’t been a virgin, they’d both been drunk, he was mostly a nice boy, and she let it go, burying herself in her studies after that. Getting straight A’s the rest of the year, grades she’d never gotten before, grades that prompted her parents to take her out for a lobster dinner at Nieuport 17. “We’re so proud of you,” her father had said. “I knew you could do it.”
She pulled back the sheet to expose the woman’s face, Emily’s face. She washed the dried vomit from the woman’s lips. Then she washed the hair, too, combing out the tangles with her gloved fingers.
“You did nothing wrong,” she told Emily, while she strung out her wet hair on the stainless-steel table. “You did not deserve this.”
It was nearly 3:00 A.M., the coffee had worn off, and she could use herself as a cautionary tale in her classes. Don’t get attached; keep the heart for the outside world. Draw lines between work and home. Don’t lose your husband to an aerobic-dancing account executive. “It freaks me out,” he’d said to her once. “Spending all your time with dead people. It’s like you bring them home with you.”
She pulled the sheet over Emily’s face and was presented with only the body. She looked at the neck again and noticed something. After finding a tape measure, Natasha counted the span of the fingernail cuts. From bloodied crescent to bloodied crescent: 172 mm. She set the tape down and spread her hand across the body’s neck, her fingers shadowing the marks left by the killer.
She peeled off her gloves and found the phone on her desk.
“Wade,” Ben said when he picked up.
“You sleeping?” she said.
“You kidding?”
“Out in the barn?” she said.
“Can’t think at the station.”
“You should come over here,” she said. “It’s dead quiet.”
He chuckled, but she could tell he was troubled by the night, too, and sometimes black humor didn’t work no matter how much you needed it to.
“Small hands,” she said.
“What?”
“Whoever killed this woman has small hands,” she said. “No bigger than mine.”
“The killer’s a woman?”
“That’s your job,” she said. “But they’re woman-sized hands.”
—
BEN GOT OFF the phone with Natasha and put a call in to Rafferty to tell him what Natasha had discovered about the killer’s hands. He got the detective’s station voicemail. Probably at home asleep in bed with his wife. Rafferty was one of the few cops he knew who was still married, despite his taking liberties while working vice in L.A. Delia, his wife, had found out; that’s what prompted the move south, though Ben knew once a man started craving anonymous sex, no clean streets or nice parks or evenings by the pool with the kids would satiate that urge. The boredom of it all most likely fed the impulse. He left a message telling Rafferty to call him in the morning and turned on the scanner.
Soon after he and Rachel had moved into the house from L.A., Ben had rigged up a den for himself in one of the unused stables in the barn. Desk, police scanner, boom-box stereo, a mouse nest in the corner behind the old empty feed trough. He had fastened a combo-locker to the wall where he kept his .40 caliber, empty of bullets, safety on. There was a 12 gauge, too, and his father’s Browning bolt-action, all of them under lock and key. He didn’t like bringing the ugly side of the job into the house—the gun, the handcuffs, the photographs; he wanted the illusion for his daughter and his wife that nothing ugly happened here. It was the illusion that all happy childhoods were built upon. To be happy in this world, you had to ignore some things.
It was the usual stuff on the L.A. County scanner tonight—drive-by on Whittier Boulevard in East L.A.; robbery in progress at Las Palmas gas station, both suspects “black and short,” according to the dispatch; DUI in West Hollywood, Ferrari, “a person of note,” the uniform said over the radio with a bit of glee: an actor, of course.
Ben had left the barn door open, the dry air blowing through the gabled rooftop. He watched the eucalyptus bow in the Santa Anas; gusts to sixty tonight, the forecast said, maybe seventy—a dry hurricane. The barn frame creaked; blasts of dry air puffed through gaps in the wooden slats.
Ben had a topo map of the basin, from Oxnard to Oceanside, hanging on the wall—the bowl of land terraced downward toward the beach, the shoved-together cities like detritus washed down the ravines of the San Gabriel Mountains. He found the Mission Viejo scene on the map and penciled a mark on the street: 1431 Mar Vista, just off the 5 Freeway.
The scanner went quiet, a white hush of static in the room, and he switched it over to the Orange County wire. He pushed a file on his desk aside—surveillance photos of a suspected cocaine dealer in Santa Elena. The man ran an RV dealership he’d taken over from his father in the seventies. He had three kids, a wife—a very thin, young, Mercedes-driving wife, who often suffered nosebleeds at the gym, according to one of the detectives. Ben had an informant, a frightened ad executive picked up for possession in the bathroom of a Bennigan’s out by the airport. Tell us your supplier and there’ll be no charges. Simple stuff. He’d been out to interview the dealer at Traveland, tailed him going in and out of restaurants, but had nothing yet to hang a search warrant on. He could ignore the guy, honestly, just let him keep snorting the stuff and selling the stuff to be snorted by his buddies. No one was fighting for market share, for territory; these weren’t people terrorizing a neighborhood to build an empire. They were wealthy and bored and wanted to get high. Polite criminals, the type Santa Elena could tolerate.
The scanner squawked: a woman on the number 54 bus in Orange threatening to shoot the driver for not pulling over at her stop.
A wash of static again, electricity humming the wires.
He ran his index finger up the Santa Ana Freeway and rode the interchange to the 405 up to the Seal Beach crime scene, the last place the serial killer hit.
Fullerton clicked in. 242. Frat-party fight.
A gust shook the rafters of the barn, and Annie Oakley—Rachel’s horse—kicked the boards next door. “Shh,” he said. “It’s all r
ight, girl. Just the wind.”
He slid his finger back onto the 405, traced the freeway past the industrial stench of Carson and the civil war that was Compton. A murder felt like a disruption in the atmosphere, but it wasn’t. You got used to it, mostly. Most of the time the killings made twisted sense—a dealer crowding in on another’s territory, revenge for stolen money, a man losing his mind when he discovers his wife’s lover. A serial killer, though, that was something different. The serial killed for the sole purpose of killing; that was like a hole opening up in the sky and letting out the oxygen.
He pushed his finger south onto the 110 toward the harbor, until he came to the estates of Palos Verdes. The third house the killer hit was right there, a few blocks off the highway. He’d already pinned it with a red wall tack.
The box squawked again. 503. Stolen car. Huntington Beach.
He ran the basin with his finger, cruising the freeways, trying to find a thread, a connection, a symbol etched into the map between red pins—La Cañada, Santa Monica, Palos Verdes, Seal Beach, Diamond Bar, Yorba Linda, and now Mission Viejo. Nothing. Just freeways, off-ramps, seven houses and seven murders spread over 1,200 square miles.
The scanner was quiet, the static hum of the early-morning calm. Even killers sleep. He switched it off, clicked a cassette tape of Marvin Gaye, and stared at the map.
“Ah, things ain’t what they used to be, no no…”
He pictured the woman on the floor of her kitchen tonight, contorted with stiffened muscles, and that memory collided with the memory of Emma falling off Gus. The way she went down—backward, headfirst—was just the way it had happened to his father. Sitting there on Tin Man, he was terrified Emma was going to break her neck. He was sure of it, and he couldn’t shake the feeling of that knowledge; for a moment, in his heart, she had died. Talk about an atmospheric disruption.
“Poison is the wind that blows from the north and south and east…” Marvin crooned.
The afternoon of the day his father was killed, they had been pushing the cattle into Bommer Canyon, where the grass was still knee-high. His father, up on the ridge, herded the cows toward Ben, down in the flats. A heifer was bawling at a clump of manzanita, her cries echoing off the limestone wall of the hillside. It was early summer, just a few months after birthing season, and when Ben came up along the side of the cow he saw her calf in the bushes, its head flopping up and down. Camouflaged in the brush, a mountain lion had its nose buried in the calf’s stomach, devouring the still-living animal’s intestines. The lion was ten feet away, just ten feet. Ben could have taken a shot, could have blasted open the lion’s skull, but his stomach upended and he dry-heaved into the bushes. By the time Ben got his stomach back, his father was racing down the hill, popping off shots at the lion. All three shots missed, and the lion bolted up the rocks, all claws and sinew, into the deep brush beyond.
“Put that animal out of his misery,” Ben’s father said to him, before he heeled his horse into pursuit down the finger canyon.
Ben stood there, his .22 in hand, watching the dying calf. Behind him, the heifer bawled, a sound he never imagined an animal could make—something almost human about it. Ben heard the clap of his father’s rifle echo down the canyon, and he cocked his own rifle. But Ben couldn’t make his finger work; he was eleven and his mind wouldn’t send the necessary impulse to his finger. He watched the calf’s head go rigid in the underbrush before he sighted the space between its eyes and pulled the trigger. A useless cover for his cowardice.
“Wipe those tears,” his father had said when he got back. Two important lessons: Kill when necessary, and don’t cry about it. You’re almost twelve, for Christ’s sake, not a little kid anymore.
They hunted the lion up Moro Ridge, rode a deer trail along the cleft of the hill, the evening sun cutting geometry out of the ridges, the grass in the valley below bruising purple in the approaching fog. They rode for three hours, down into splinter canyons, both their rifles cocked, picking along the edge of limestone outcroppings as the fog blanketed the sage and manzanita, the gray sky swallowing the gray hillsides, the clouds erasing the landscape.
It was nearly dark when they left, fogged in and sunless, and the paved road was so new on the landscape that Ben forgot it was there until he heard the clip-clop of his father’s horse’s hooves. Ben’s horse, Comet, balked at the cement, and Ben steadied him just in time to see a streak of green metal flash in front of the horse’s nose. A Chevelle, a ’66, he was sure of it. It never stopped, just appeared out of the darkness and clipped the hindquarters of his father’s horse. In the headlights, the horse spun, and in the taillights, Ben watched his father and the horse flop into the ditch.
His father’s neck was snapped against an aluminum irrigation pipe, his body horribly still. His father’s horse stood, miraculously, at the bottom of the ditch, a two-inch gash bleeding on his hindquarter. Ben stumbled into the ditch, tried his father’s pulse, held his hand to his father’s open mouth, hoping for a breath, but necks weren’t meant to turn that way. Crying, Ben tried three times to run the horse out of the irrigation ditch, the dry ground giving beneath their weight, until he found a purchase on the cement and led the horse out. He walked both horses home to the barn, cleaned the cuts with Betadine, combed the sweat out of each, and put them in their stables for the night. He must have been out there for forty-five minutes, the wires gone crazy in his head.
And three hours later, after Ben had told his mother, after the sheriff had pulled his father’s body out of the ditch and inspected the horse’s wound, after he’d taken a statement and declared to Ben and his mother that the police would find the car, Ben’s mother eyed him across the kitchen table.
“You put the horses away,” she said, swollen pillows of skin beneath her eyes. “Why didn’t you come get me immediately?”
“I don’t know,” he said.
Shock, Ben knew now, but then he didn’t know why, had no way to explain it.
“You left him there and cleaned the horses?” She narrowed her eyes as if she identified something new in him that she didn’t like, and she looked at it hard. “Maybe he could have been—”
He burst out sobbing. His mother’s eyes softened then and she held out her arms and he tried to curl his eleven-year-old body, all lanky legs and knobby joints, into her lap.
Now he sat on the metal folding chair and listened to the freeway rush, the white noise of millions of cars speeding on pavement, Marvin singing, the boards and slats moaning in the wind. One shot, and none of it would have happened. If he’d made that one shot and killed the mountain lion, his father might still be alive. He thought about that a lot—when he was a kid, after his mother remarried, when he went off to the police academy, even now: the necessary things left undone.
The wind was picking up again, and through the open barn door he watched the trees bend, their thin bodies outlined by the orange glow of the distant city. There was a killer out there somewhere, a woman’s body growing cold on a stainless-steel table at the county medical examiner’s office. A gust scuttled sand across the floor of the barn. Ben pulled a red pin from a bowl and stabbed it into the map at the Mission Viejo address. He shut off the lights and sat in the dark, the trees arcing and swaying, arcing and swaying.
3
AT 6:07 THE NEXT MORNING, he got the call. He stumbled, half asleep still, from the couch to the kitchen to grab the phone off the hook.
“Sleeping in today, huh, Ben?” It was Ken Brady, the overnight desk sergeant.
“Yeah, Ken,” he said, rubbing his eyes. “Beauty sleep.”
He had finally crawled into bed at 4:12 and tossed until 4:53 before retiring to the couch, listening to the house beams buckle and moan in the wind, before nodding off into a half sleep.
“Shame I have to bother you, then,” Ken said. “Must be a blue moon. Got a body out in the strawberry fields. Serrano Canyon and Junipero.”
On a legal pad, he scribbled the time of notification, then called it
in to Lieutenant Hernandez and Natasha. He ran his head under the kitchen faucet to jolt himself awake and grabbed an apple from the fridge. In the barn, he snatched the .40 caliber out of the locker, and he was on the road in three minutes.
There were three black-and-whites on scene—two parked on the south edge of the field, near an irrigation ditch, and another patrol car pulling a perimeter on the west. He radioed dispatch to get more units out to cover the corners, parked his car on the south side, near the two patrol cars, and surveyed the scene from a distance. The body lay a hundred to a hundred twenty yards away, on the western third of the field; he couldn’t see it from here, but he saw that a uniform was standing over it. On the eastern edge of the field stood tenement camps but no squad cars.
The uniform next to him nodded. “Detective.” He was leaning against his cruiser door, smoking.
“Officer,” Ben said. “Put that cigarette out. I need you over at that camp. No one in or out.”
The officer flicked the butt into the dirt and slid into the squad car, muttering something before driving the black-and-white down the dirt service road bordering the field.
Ben took latex gloves out of the trunk of his cruiser and scrambled into the irrigation ditch, hopping the trickle of water dripping into the metal drain. He held his breath as he made it across the field, counting the beats of his heart. Calm, man. Calm down.
It was a kid, just a kid, not much older than Emma. A boy. Ben leaned on his haunches to take it in. It was the worst when it was a kid. Something twisted up inside you with the waste of it.
“You first on scene?” he asked the beat cop standing a few feet away. The cop had a notebook in hand and flipped to the previous page to look at his notes.