Shadow Man

by Alan Drew

  “You know it is a suicide, right?” Ben said.

  “No,” she said. “No, I don’t know that. And there’s a protocol to follow here.”

  “Lucero was seeing a boy,” Ben said. “Helen Galloway over at the high school put me onto him.”

  “Sleeping with him?” she asked.

  “I don’t think so,” Ben said. “But it was pushing that way. They were having some kind of fight.”

  His voice didn’t sound right. She remembered his hands shaking the other day when he asked her about “unusual” sexual activity. She had thought it was just the late nights, the burden of two death investigations, but there was something else. He seemed rattled.

  “Fighting about what?”

  “I don’t know,” Ben said, his voice sharpening. “How am I supposed to know what two fags fight about?”

  She jerked her head back. In all the years she’d known him, she’d never heard him speak like this. Cops could be a macho group, assholish to the tenth degree at their worst, but not Ben, not as she’d known him. After a raid, he’d found foster homes for Thai girls prostituted out in a massage parlor. When he had to tell a loved one about a death, he did it in person, not over the phone like most of the guys did.

  “Probably the same things we all fight about,” she said pointedly.

  He glanced at her. “Sorry,” he said. “My head hurts.”

  “Could we get a water over here?” Natasha said. “God, and I thought I was the one who was going to get drunk tonight.”

  The bartender plopped a glass of ice water in front of Ben. Natasha lit another cigarette and twirled the ash to a point in the tin ashtray. A guy playing pool slipped a quarter into the jukebox, and Tom Waits’s “Shore Leave” came plinking out of the speaker.

  “You ever thought about doing it?” Ben said.

  “Suicide?”

  He nodded, his chin bowed toward the bar, his eyes fixed to the glass. He looked old suddenly—double-chinned, dark circles rimming his eyes, unshaven with patches of gray coming in.

  “Not really,” she said cautiously. “I don’t have the dramatic flair. You think about it?”

  He was silent for a moment. “A long time ago.”

  “Why?”

  “I was upset.”

  She gave him a sarcastic look, but he wasn’t playing.

  “What’d it feel like,” Natasha said, “ ‘a long time ago’?”

  “Like hope.”

  “Hope?”

  “For relief.”

  “Relief from what?”

  He gulped the water. She hoped that meant he was going to pull himself together, that he wasn’t going to go home and put his service revolver to his temple. It happened with some of the cops, the synapses gone haywire with the things they’d seen.

  “Look, this kid killed himself,” Ben said. “Prints on the gun are his, there’s no bruising on the body, no evidence there was a fight, no strangulation, so it’s not the serial’s MO.” He was counting the reasons off on each finger. “Everyone I talked to—Helen, Rutledge, Santiago the strawberry picker—said he was gay. Santiago said he found out and threatened to tell the kid’s mother.”

  “Who would do that to a kid?” she said, shaking her head. Something was off. Ben was never this sure about a case. He always had doubts.

  He looked at her, his eyes wet steel.

  “Santiago said it would be easier if he’d been killed by the serial.”

  “What?” she said.

  “They’re ashamed,” Ben said. “It’s that shameful.”

  “Jesus Christ,” she said. “The body wants what the body wants.”

  “No,” Ben said, his voice sounding as if something was unfastening inside him. “The body confuses things, works against you.”

  “What’re we talking about, Ben?”

  He pressed the heels of his hands to his eyes. For a moment she thought he was going to swing open the door and let her in. “Suicide,” he said. “We’re talking about suicide.”

  A rack of balls cracked in the corner of the bar.

  “This kid,” Natasha said. “This Lucero kid was a swimmer, right?”

  Ben emptied the vodka glass, let a piece of ice roll around in his mouth.

  “Yeah,” he said finally.

  “Wakeland was one of the witnesses the other night.”

  Ben gestured to the bartender for another vodka tonic.

  “You know what I want to know?” she said.

  “What do you want to know?” Ben said, not looking at her, his voice low and strangled-sounding.

  “I want to know why you haven’t interviewed Wakeland.”

  “What is it you always say?” Ben said, turning to her. “You do your job and I’ll do mine?”

  “You’re not doing your job,” Natasha said. “Wakeland should have been at the top of your list. There’s something else you’re not telling me.”

  He stood up and slapped a twenty on the bar top.

  “Ben,” she said, placing her hand on his forearm.

  “Don’t touch me,” he snapped.

  “Okay,” she said, lifting her hand. He wouldn’t look at her, his eyes shifting in his head as if he couldn’t focus.

  “I thought you wanted to see me,” he said. “I didn’t think this was going to be some sort of interrogation. I thought we’d forget about all this stuff together for a little while.”

  “Ben.”

  “See ya,” he said, and then he was out the front door, a shadow against the traffic headlights.

  —

  HE DIDN’T REALIZE how drunk he was until he was on the 405 Freeway, four lanes clogged with swerving taillights. He pulled the truck into the emergency lane and rested his head against the steering wheel. He tried to recall his argument with Natasha, but only snatches of phrases rose to the surface of his muddied consciousness. It’d be easier if that serial killer had shot him. That was there; he couldn’t get that out of his head.

  He rode the emergency lane to the Seal Beach exit and slow-laned it to the Pacific Coast Highway, the streetlights blurring off the ocean, the crashing waves like phosphorescent explosions. The moon was almost full, its light casting the beach a grainy white. He found the pair of board shorts and his fins tucked behind his seat, fumbled them on in the dark parking lot, and dove into the ocean. The moonlight spread a greenish glow across the surface of the water, but three inches down it was inky black and silent. The swells flowing and ebbing, his body carried through ropes of bladder kelp and winged rib. The swells lifted him closer to the moon, before crashing him to the sand. He let himself be taken and dropped, lifted and thrown, until he got his head back and the horizon attached itself to the sky again and he noticed, for the first time, bonfires on the beach like burning eyes cast in a strip of bone.

  By the time he got home, at 10:46, the wind had torn loose the barn doors, the broken latches slapping the clapboard siding. He turned on the scanner in the barn—a robbery at a gas station, a drive-by in Little Saigon—and nailed the latch back onto the door. A dead frat kid at Cal State Fullerton choking on vomit in his sleep, but nothing about the serial.

  Inside, Ben slipped the cassette of the killer’s song into the boom box and listened to it three times while he transcribed the lyrics. There was power in the song—the sneer of the voice, the rawness of the guitar—and he sat there staring at the lyrics, his body pulsing. There’s nothing in my dreams, just some ugly memories. Something had happened to this guy, something in his past. The power of the song, Ben realized, was in its anger. Yeah you’re gonna feel my hand. This wasn’t about getting off. This guy was angry, raging furious.

  “273.5,” the box squawked. “Fourteen thirty-eight East Almond Avenue, Orange.” Some asshole beating his wife.

  A copy of the Rancho Santa Elena World News sat on his desk, a picture of April, the most recent victim, smiling on the front page. She was so innocent-looking, much younger in the picture, her blond hair curling around her neck. Maybe she was
a bitch in real life, maybe she’d hurt people, had affairs; maybe she drank too much or cheated on her taxes. But in this photograph she’d be forever innocent; the serial had transformed her into an angel beyond rebuke. Maybe the horror of her death had earned her that.

  Ben turned the page to Lucero’s face. His smile was crooked, but he was a handsome boy, too handsome to seem innocent. There was something guarded in his eyes, something dissembling in his look. Or maybe Ben was imagining it. He ripped the paper in half and set their pictures side by side. April and her sparkling eyes. April and her blond hair. April and the lacy collar around her neck, like some saintly churchgoer. And Lucero, his dark eyes that hid something, the wave of slicked black hair, as though oil dripped down the back of his neck. Both dead, but their deaths didn’t seem equal; one seemed purer than the other.

  That’s what Santiago and Lucero’s mother knew. If he’d been killed by the serial, Lucero would be transfigured into innocence, just like April. Ben knew how people thought about these things. A girl could be held down, overpowered. If it was a girl, it was a violent act, a rape. But a boy’s body couldn’t be so easily pressed into submission. Even if Ben could prove that Wakeland did to the boy what Ben suspected he did, people would forever look at Lucero’s face and see a faggot who must have wanted it. Blowing his brains out just made it worse. A selfish act, people would say. How could he do that to his poor mother?

  Ben unlocked the rifle cabinet and found the box hidden behind his father’s bolt-action. It was dust-covered and unlabeled, sealed with duct tape. It hadn’t been opened in a decade or more, yet he’d taken it with him to his apartment when he’d entered the police academy; he’d carried it with him to their place in Marina del Rey and stuffed it in the attic; he’d packed it up again, too, into the back of the U-Haul that brought them here.

  Now he set the box on his desk. He knew what he would find inside, so why did he still doubt himself? As a cop, his doubt made him look professional, conservative, always dotting every i and crossing every t. But in civilian life, it was like constantly forgetting, a sort of denial of himself, of the simple facts of his life. He didn’t know when that doubt crept in, but he knew there was an archaeology of that change in this box.

  He cut open the tape with an X-Acto knife—releasing the smell of mold and yellowing paper—and pulled an envelope from the stack inside. The letter had been opened years ago but had resealed itself with the hardening of glue and saliva. He set the envelope on the desk, his name written on the front in neat script: the same neat cursive as on the slip of paper Ben had found on Lucero’s body, the same writing—the elegant loops of the B, the aggressive sweep of the j—as on the papers Ben had found this afternoon at Esperanza’s. Black marks against paper as identifiable as fingerprints, the geometric intersections of letters as damning as ballistics on a bullet.

  A scream punctured the roar of the wind. Ben, startled, dropped the envelope back into the box and stepped out into the spark-dry air, the song still playing in his head. The eucalyptus were bent to the wind like penitents. Dust deviled across the gravel driveway, lifting clouds over the drainage and into the grass of Quail Hill. Say gotta give me danger, wild little stranger. The scream cut the air again. It sounded like a woman out there in the hills, crying in terror. There it was again—a fox. Something had it spooked—a coyote, a mountain lion. It was farther away now, and when he caught it a fourth time it was deeper into the canyons, where soon only the darkness would hear it.

  Then Ben remembered something Neil said the other day: Someone had been at the camp that night, when Neil was waiting to see Lucero. Back in the barn, Ben locked up the box, found his service revolver. Five minutes later he was driving down Junipero, heading east.

  —

  BEN CLIMBED THE aluminum fence with the NO TRESPASSING sign and passed through two rows of orange grove before the canyon opened up, cliff-lined and shadowed where the hills blocked the moonlight. He found the deer trail and followed it through the thigh-high brush to the Loma Canyon cabin.

  Inside, the cabin stank of piss and spilled beer, of animal hide and dried blood. His flashlight scanned a snout moth caught in a web, one wing shuddering loose of the threads. In the corner next to him, six 40-ouncers were stacked in an unstable pyramid. Pushed up against the west wall was an old mattress, one corner gnawed open to the stuffing. He scanned the plaster walls—wood-rat holes tunneled to the grass outside. Names were scratched into the walls, too—Alejandra + Emilio; Dead Kennedys; an anarchy sign, crude drawings of penises and mouths. On the east wall, the high school’s mascot, the Vaquero, was spray-painted into the plaster. Then, near the broken window frame, to the left of the torn-up mattress, he found it: find a little strangr. He didn’t know if it had been here the other day. It was small, scratched faintly along the joist of a broken windowsill like a whisper, surrounded by other indecipherable scratches and symbols, but it was there.

  Beneath the spot were twists of opened paper clips, a half dozen of them. He was about to head out to the cruiser for an evidence bag when he heard something crashing through the brush outside. He flipped off the flashlight, drew his revolver, and slid alongside the broken window frame. The moon, above the cliff ridge now, lit the canyon white, bowling it out of the hillsides like a pelvic bone. A trio of deer threw shadows across the ground as they leapt toward the underbrush on the other side of the canyon.

  Ben holstered the revolver, but new footsteps crunched the pebbled dirt. He stepped back from the window, reaching for the gun again before he saw the shadow of the man through the open doorway. The shadow stood there for a moment, cast spindly and elongated in the moonlight. Then it stepped forward, one skeletal foot easing its toes to the dirt. Ben took another step back, pressing himself against the wall to get a shot if he needed to, and then something crashed behind him: the pyramid of beer bottles.

  The shadow bolted. Through the broken window Ben glimpsed the figure—small, like a kid—running along the deer path. Ben stumbled through the door and down the white line of the deer path, the man ahead kicking up clouds of dust. Then the man cut left, through the underbrush and into the orange grove, the fog of his escape floating out across the canyon.

  Shit. Ben ducked into the grove three rows down and pushed through the hanging fruit.

  “Santa Elena Police,” Ben hollered. “You run, I shoot.”

  Ben heard a shuffling up ahead, and he dropped to his haunches to peer beneath the limbs.

  “Turn yourself in and we can talk,” he said. Mottled moonlight and darkness. He couldn’t see a damn thing. “So far you’re only trespassing.”

  Then he saw him—legs opening and closing like scissors as he snuck through the grove. Ben dove through the trees, the branches scratching at him, fruit falling at his feet. When he hit the row, the moonlight illuminated the man sprinting ahead of him, his hands stretched out, knocking branches out of the way. Ben was closing the gap, the man raking his hands across the trees as he ran. The fruit rolled and popped beneath Ben’s feet, the tangy citrus flesh cracking open. He could hear the man’s breath now, wheezing with fear. Ben could take a shot, but what if it was a panicked teenager? What if it was one of the pickers looking for a place to throw back a 40 in private?

  Ben was about to dive for an ankle when his foot twisted on the fallen fruit and he face-planted. He pushed himself up, stumbled back into a sprint, and tore into the open on the other side of the grove. A black car peeled out, fanning gravel across the road. Ben ran into the road, trying to see the license plate: 6MV2— The car swerved around a corner before he could read the last numbers, and he was left alone, catching his breath, listening to the rev of the engine as it descended into the grid of the city.

  12

  NATASHA SPENT EARLY TUESDAY MORNING with Lucero, sliding him out of the cooler and examining his body again, wondering if she’d missed anything. Adductor, pectineus, rectus femoris, the scrotum, the corona, the glans penis—so exposed, in some ways more vulnerable than
a woman’s body. There were no bruises, no lacerations, nothing to indicate anything other than a bullet to the brain.

  It had been a week since Lucero’s body was found in the field, a week of the boy lying here on this stainless-steel table. The boy was seventeen, had pool water in his lungs, chlorine in his hair follicles. Ben himself had said that Lucero was a swimmer. But Ben hadn’t interviewed Coach Lewis Wakeland. She’d done her job, but Ben hadn’t, not this time. Wakeland should have been at the top of his interview list. She couldn’t get over that, had thought about it all last night and was still turning it over in her head this morning. Ben always followed protocol, always filled out the right paperwork, always tied up every loose end, and it pissed him off when other cops didn’t do the same.

  Twelve years ago, nearly two weeks after the boy took her up to Signal Hill for the “submarine races,” she had gotten up the courage to go to the Long Beach Police. It was a rape. She had been raped. The first thing they asked her, two uniforms hovering over her in an interrogation room, was: “What were you wearing?” The second: “Had you been drinking?” They took her name and number, but she knew as soon as she left the station that they weren’t going to do a damn thing about it.

  After the police, Natasha spent three days in her dorm-room bed; Kris, her roommate, brought her soups from the cafeteria, thinking Natasha was sick. The police wouldn’t do their job, the police wouldn’t protect her; it had been terrifying, that realization. It was like a crack opened up in the façade of the civil world, and she had glimpsed the chaos behind it. She had grown up in Santa Elena, and she had naïvely believed the world to be as safe as its organized streets. On the fourth day, she finally got herself out of bed and immersed herself in her studies. She spent whole days in darkly lit alcoves in the School of Medicine, in a corner behind the biology stacks in the Darling Library—and snuck into bed after Kris was asleep or stayed away completely, resting her head on the open pages of her quantitative-chemical-analysis textbook.