One Day You'll Burn

by Joseph Schneider

  * * *

  By page twenty, Jarsdel was grateful he’d only had a light lunch. As far as he could tell, the story was about the rise of Phalaris, a Greek general who’d been granted absolute rule in the town of Akragas, Sicily. He seemed to spend most of his time either pontificating or putting suspected traitors to death, and these in the most gruesome ways possible. One man was hung upside down while two executioners sawed him in half. Another was condemned to be boiled in urine. Jarsdel had managed to shrug off most of it, but a moment toward the end of the third scene sent a queasy twist through his stomach. A guard had been accused of abandoning his post so he could be at his wife’s bedside as she gave birth.

  PHALARIS

  Be not gentle with him, for his weakness offends me.

  EXECUTIONER

  What would you have me do, o Lord?

  PHALARIS

  Remove the flesh that houses such a feeble soul, but take care! Peel first each finger to the bone, then each toe, and from there treat similarly the hands and the feet. Slowly, mind, but continue on until naught but the face remains. If he cries for food, give it, and if he cries for water, give it also. It will displease me much should he gain rest premature. Let him live as long as he may, a tortoise without its shell.

  Jarsdel read on, skimming the following pages where the torment was actually depicted, then happening upon the scene Richie had warned him about—Phalaris eating the newborn baby of the doomed guard. Jarsdel wanted to take a break but reminded himself he still had nearly 150 pages to go. He took a breath and dove back in.

  * * *

  PHALARIS

  You’ve journeyed far. From Athens, I am told.

  PERILLOS

  Yes, My Lord.

  PHALARIS

  And you wish the patronage of this court?

  PERILLOS

  I do humbly ask it, My Lord.

  PHALARIS

  Why should such privilege be granted?

  PERILLOS

  I am well-schooled in the arts and have cast many great figures in both bronze and stone. I would do likewise for Your Lordship and any personage he so deems worthy. It would be my crowning honor to be known as the sculptor of the great Phalaris.

  PHALARIS

  Very well then, here is your task. I take delight in small amusements but have grown weary of late and find no joy in old games. Craft for me a tool to wring fresh sport from the bodies of mine enemies, and you will be rewarded with the position you seek.

  Jarsdel turned the page and continued reading. Something about the scene struck a chord with him—some long-ago lecture, back when he was an undergrad, about the sculptor Perillos. He paused, trying to dig up a dormant bit of trivia, but it didn’t come. He went on. The next few pages weren’t any more illuminating, and Jarsdel found himself skimming again until Perillos reappeared on page 110.

  PHALARIS

  You come before me once more, and at a time when I am in the most ill humor. Did you bring me what you promised? Your life may well depend upon my satisfaction.

  PERILLOS

  Yes, My Lord. If I may flatter myself, I have brought you a unique gift, one whose construction demanded the utmost in skill and ingenuity and which you shall find unsurpassed in all the Mediterranean. You will be the envy of kings, and your enemies shall quake with fear.

  PHALARIS

  (aside) He dares to presume both are not already so? Perhaps he wishes to try his invention firsthand! (to Perillos) Bring it before me.

  Jarsdel felt a kick of excitement and read faster. And at the top of the next page, without any more ceremony, there it was. Yes, he now saw why the name Perillos had seemed familiar. He’d heard the story once but tucked it away at the very back of the storehouse of knowledge he’d accumulated since. Why would he have any use for it, other than as a ghastly curiosity? Even now, it was almost impossible to believe Dinan had actually gone through with it. But everything fit. Tully Jarsdel took out his phone, centered the page in his viewfinder, and snapped a picture. He now knew, in painstaking detail, exactly how Grant Wolin had died.

  Chapter 20

  Based on Jarsdel’s discovery, Judge Monson happily authorized as many copies of Dinan’s script as were requested. By the next day, Kingdom of Sorrow could be found on all four desks in HH2. Abe Rutenberg highlighted some of his favorite passages and lured over curious detectives from Vice, Gangs, and Auto Theft. The results usually involved his prey retreating after a minute or two, faces bunched in disgust, as Rutenberg called after them, “Whatsa matter? I just set up a Kickstarter page for it. Five bucks. C’mon, let’s get it made.” Eventually, Morales yelled at him to get some new material.

  Command personnel were also each provided a copy, though neither Jarsdel nor Morales expected Captain Sturdivant to bother reading it. They thought the same of Bruce Gavin—when Jarsdel first brought him the script, he’d taken it without a word and tossed it on a pile of forlorn papers near the edge of his desk. Soon, however, glimpsed through the glass walls of his office, he began carving his way through Dinan’s house of horrors. For the next two hours, HH2’s division commander was riveted. Bent over the script in his pressed black uniform, lieutenant’s silver bar glinting on his arm, he resembled what a movie producer in a totalitarian regime might look like.

  Jarsdel was preparing the file they’d present to Dinan when they brought him in. There were crime scene and autopsy photos, the postmortem report, a copy of the incriminating scene from Kingdom of Sorrow, and a letter from Dr. Ipgreve affirming that the state of the victim’s body could be explained by the manner of death described in the script. The finishing touch was a stack of miscellaneous dog-eared reports and circulars Jarsdel had intercepted on their way to the shredder. They wouldn’t be shown to Dinan, of course, but they’d add weight to the folder and imply the police had been building its case against him for some time.

  Morales sat heavily across from him. “Kinda funny, all this.”

  Jarsdel looked up. “How do you mean?”

  “I was just thinkin’, here you have this writer who can’t get a break, movie doesn’t get made, but now he’s got some of the most important people in the city reading it. Finally got some attention.”

  “Probably not the kind he’d hoped for.”

  Morales picked up his copy of the script and opened to a page he’d marked with a sticky note. He read for a moment, then exhaled, shaking his head. “I don’t get it, man. Life’s hard enough, you know? And then guys like this come along and they’re like, ‘Hey, you really wanna see how fucked up shit can get? Let me show you.’ You get the same feeling working serials. You just want them to go away. Enough already. Life’s hard enough without you assholes. You work a serial case yet? Besides Dog Catcher, I mean?”

  “No.”

  “Then you’re lucky.”

  Jarsdel selected the last of the dummy documents, an intradepartmental memo outlining the penalties for failing to follow grooming guidelines, and shoved it into the folder. He stood, leaving the inflated case file on his desk, ready for the interrogation soon to come.

  Morales got to his feet. “You sure you wanna play it like this? We got no physical evidence. No way we can charge him just with what we got. Best we can hope is to scare him into a confession. He doesn’t crack, it’s your standard forty-eight-hour hold, then he walks.”

  “True,” said Jarsdel, “but while he’s on that hold, we’ve got Judge Monson’s warrants for his car and apartment. You can’t do what he did without leaving some major evidence behind.”

  Morales picked up the script and pointed to the page he’d been reading. “And you actually think he did this? For real? What are we looking for, then? A storage unit somewhere? Maybe his grandmother’s basement?”

  “We’ll find it, wherever it is. Pretty tough to hide.”

  “I don’t know. I got doubts, man.
Maybe we should sit tight just a couple more days, see what else we can turn up. Can’t hurt, ’specially if he decides to give us the silent treatment in there. Or gets a fuckin’ lawyer.”

  Jarsdel knew Morales was right. A few more days on top of the months that had already elapsed wouldn’t make a difference. A deeper investigation could only strengthen their case and increase the chances of pushing Dinan into a confession. But then he thought of the twisted, tormented body, its eyes two hollow pits, cooked muscles wrenching the mouth into a jack-o’-lantern’s grin.

  “No,” he said to Morales. “I want him in custody. Once he’s in an interview room, he’ll want to know what we’re finding on those warrants, and we can tie him in knots with any story we like. Make him sweat. Meanwhile, we’ll have two days’ carte blanche to dig through his life. If we can’t find anything to charge him with after that, we never will.”

  Morales shook his head. “Nah, I see what you’re sayin’, but I’d still wait. Do some more field work. See what he was up to as a juvenile. Sealed court records and shit. A guy who does something like this has to have a history, but we got nothin’ on him as an adult. We’re missing some major pieces.”

  “I don’t care. I want him in here. What if he does it again? Could you live with that?”

  “We could put a tail on him. That’d—”

  “Gavin won’t okay that, not on what little we got, and you know it. We have to bring him in. Besides, it’s my call. You made me lead on the case, remember?”

  * * *

  It was early, not quite six, and still mostly dark. Heavy clouds had rolled in during the night to blanket the sky. Hopefully, Dinan would still be asleep and wearing nothing more than his briefs. If all went well, he’d wake to the pounding on his door feeling groggy and confused. Confronted with the surprise show of force—two detectives, plus the pair of uniformed officers backing them up—he’d be shocked into acquiescence.

  “Maybe in my prime I coulda taken him,” said Morales as they rode over to Dinan’s apartment. “Did Golden Gloves in my teens. Now, though…” He gestured at his legs in disgust.

  Jeff Dinan was a very big man—a towering hulk somewhere in the neighborhood of three hundred pounds. Jarsdel and Morales figured it would take two sets of cuffs to span the width of his back. They also figured that if he became combative, they’d be in serious trouble. Richie Berman had been right about that. To stop someone that big, you had to go beyond the application of mere pain. You had to either cause a major dysfunction in the body, which the Taser usually accomplished, or resort to lethal force. The prospect of the arrest ending in Dinan’s death gave Jarsdel a feeling of tightness in his chest.

  Morales glanced at him from the passenger seat and seemed to pick up on his thoughts. “Never had to draw on a guy, huh?”

  “Once. Had a note robber at a bank on Western—you know, no gun, just a piece of paper with ‘Gimme the money or die.’ The teller hit the 211 button and stalled him long enough for our patrol car to show up. Also threw in a dye pack, which exploded in his bag just as he was coming out the door. So he was on edge, and we didn’t know if he had a weapon or not, and he just stood there staring at us. It was pretty tense.”

  “Was he armed?”

  “He was high. Turned out he’d just fled from a complaint a block down the street where the manager of a Burger King caught him stealing all the ketchup packets. It was actually because of that call that we were already on our way to the area.”

  “But no weapon?”

  “No.”

  “So in the end, nothing happened.”

  “We just kept yelling at him to get down on the ground, get down on the ground, then a backup officer flanked and tackled him. He’d soiled himself by then, so I’m glad it wasn’t me who had to do that.”

  Morales nodded. “Don’t think they’ll be telling that story at any of our recruitment drives.”

  At those words, Jarsdel felt a profound wave of sadness and doubt pass over him. He thought of the pledge he’d made to Brahma—to the universe as a whole—to be among those who renew the world. It had been a reaffirming of the reasons Jarsdel had decided to become a police officer in the first place. A pledge to fight the tide of entropy, to act as an agent of order and sanity and justice. To not merely theorize and pontificate from a professor’s lectern but to actually do something, however small, to help speed humankind toward a new age of enlightenment—one he believed could be predicted with near-mathematical certainty.

  Just look where we once were, what we used to do to each other, and look at us now. If we could chart human cruelty on a graph, the line would step ever downward, barring the occasional plateau. If the trend were to continue, violence and its terrible fallout would someday retreat toward the realm of statistical insignificance, of anomaly. Eventually perhaps, they would pass into history as a strange relic of our species’ evolution.

  But Morales had just pointed out, correctly, that one of the most fraught episodes of Jarsdel’s career in law enforcement—and of his entire conscious existence—was hardly worth recounting. What, then, had he accomplished? His last five years had seen him take on an endless stream of shoplifters, identity thieves, petty fugitives, noise complaints, DUI stops, he-said/she-said domestic abuse cases, and unsolved car break-ins. Even the murder cases he’d worked as a detective, even the ones he’d solved, had felt somehow primitive, offering no sense of achievement or progress.

  At a nightclub, a man feels slighted when another steps on his foot. After an argument, he shoves the offender, who strikes his head on a table leg and suffers a fatal subdural hematoma. A dozen witnesses identify the pusher, whom Jarsdel arrests early the next morning. He is charged with involuntary manslaughter, pleads guilty, and is sentenced to three years’ probation.

  A pair of muggers attack a woman as she leaves an ATM. They yank on her purse. She yanks back. One of the attackers produces a steak knife and plants it in her neck. The ATM’s security camera records the whole thing. The footage is processed using facial recognition software, and the thugs—who both have extensive criminal records—are apprehended within a week. It’s a charge of first-degree murder with two special-circumstances enhancements—lying-in-wait and commission of felony robbery. The trial is short, and the sentence is death. The state hasn’t executed anyone since 2006, however, so the men expect to spend the rest of their lives in CCI, outside Los Angeles, where they’ll find some protection as associates of the Mexican Mafia. The judge sends them instead to San Quentin, deep in rival Nuestra Familia territory, while they await execution. The men are very quiet as they’re led from the courtroom.

  A twenty-eight-year-old addict drops out of rehab for the third time. Ashamed, she can’t face her parents and finds a spot near the LA River where a band of homeless people live under the shade of a rumbling overpass. A charity van stops there each morning to drop off day-old sandwiches. That’s plenty of food for her; she’s gone much longer with much less and hardly even noticed. She has heard, however, that these encampments can be dangerous, so enlists an alcoholic Iraq War veteran to protect her in exchange for sex. He’s out one day, scrounging money to buy liquor, when his charge is raped and strangled by one of the other men living in the camp. He throws her body in the river, but it snags on a tangle of marsh plants and is quickly discovered. The vet returns to camp and learns of the murder. He quickly deduces the identity of the killer—the only one who’s suddenly abandoned his tent. The vet tracks him all the way to MacArthur Park, where he proceeds to shove a beer bottle, neck first, into the man’s mouth. It doesn’t fit, but the vet is strong, and eventually, most of the bottle is in there. The screams of bystanders attract police, who confront him with guns drawn. He gives a crisp salute and allows himself to be taken into custody. The charge is first-degree murder. It’s later reduced, with the help of a plea bargain, to voluntary manslaughter. The sentence is only six years, but the vet dies
of cirrhosis in the Kern Valley infirmary after just a month.

  Jarsdel reflected upon these and other cases he’d worked. Very quickly, his promise to Brahma—to “make it right”—seemed not merely naive but arrogant. What had he meant by “it”? The grand human condition? Did he really believe he could improve its overall character by locking up a handful of the lost and desperate? That by some mysterious mechanism, fewer of the lost and desperate would therefore be produced? Baba had referred to his zeal as a kind of idiocy. It appeared the man, right as always, was right yet again.

  But surely Dinan was different. His brand of mayhem wasn’t an understandable—if not excusable—product of moral weakness or addiction or social pressure. There weren’t a million others like him born every year, ready to take his place, until the conditions that helped create them were changed. Dinan’s darkness was organic, innate, and decadent. If there was indeed such a thing as evil, then Dinan, like his hero Phalaris, was evil. Removing him from society would be akin to purging a toxin from an organism. It would, in the purest sense of the phrase, make a difference.

  The unmarked detective car and the black-and-white slipped into a red zone in front of the Chiswick Arms on Hyperion. Officer Will Haarmann, he of the “Sexiest Cops in America” feature in Los Angeles magazine, climbed the short flight of stairs and woke the manager. The rest followed, and soon a bleary-eyed woman in a bathrobe was leading them to Dinan’s room on the second floor. Morales got into position, standing to the side of the door in case Dinan decided to put a bullet through it, and raised his fist. Jarsdel gestured for the manager to stay back, and Morales struck the door—one, two, three heavy blows.

  “LAPD! Open up!”

  Silence.

  Three more knocks. “Open up, Mr. Dinan. This is the police.”

  A door opened across from them, and a young man’s lean, irritated face poked out. “Okay, do you have to, like, wake up the entire fucking building?”