Never Fear

by Scott Frost

  “That’s the starting point,” I said. “I don’t know what it’s about.”

  The chief looked across the street at the small army of LAPD personnel that had taken over much of the block.

  “We have to make this look like it’s entirely about your brother,” Chavez said. “Any hint that we’re interfering with the investigation of Williams’s murder, LAPD is not going to be happy.”

  I nodded.

  “I’ll need to find out what Williams knew so far,” I said.

  “I’ll see what I can do,” Chavez answered. “And I’ll find Dana Courson and have a squad watch her. I want a doctor to take a look at those ribs, and then Harrison will take you home.”

  He opened the passenger door, helped me gently into the seat, and wrapped my seat belt around me.

  “Worrying about you is turning me into an old man,” he said with a half smile.

  “You were an old man even when you were young,” I said.

  He looked at me with his big eyes that seemed to take on more sadness with every day on the job.

  “I’m sorry about your brother,” Chavez said.

  We looked at each other for a moment.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t know him,” I answered.

  I touched his cheek, and he closed the door and walked back toward the crime scene. I stared at the coroner’s van for a moment.

  “Williams apparently was a better cop than we realized, ” I said. “That could just as easily have been me in there.”

  Harrison let the silence swallow the thought for a moment and looked back across the street.

  “It wasn’t, though.”

  8

  The X-rays showed cracks in the fourth and fifth ribs on my left side, but they remained in one piece and hadn’t punctured a lung. The doctor rewrapped them, suggested as little movement as possible for several days, and gave me some pain meds to get me through the next twenty-four hours. He offered me hospital scrubs to replace my bloodstained slacks for the ride home, but I refused them. I didn’t want it to be easy to distance myself from what had happened in the apartment. Williams deserved at least that much, and I wanted to remind myself that I was only alive because Lopez wasn’t a killer.

  The winds were blowing harder up in the hills above Pasadena, where I lived. We pulled onto Mariposa and drove up to the end of the block where my house sat on the edge of the San Gabriels. Smoke from the fires in the Verdugo hills was west of us. The air was clear here. The glow of the flames was just visible above the ridgeline in the distance.

  Harrison pulled the car up to the top of the driveway and stopped. I reached for the buckle on the seat belt and a spasm of pain shot through my chest. It took a moment to catch my breath.

  Harrison reached over and unbuckled the belt, then got out, walked around, and opened the door. He took my arm and gently helped me to my feet. I looked into his eyes for a moment and felt my breath come up short but it wasn’t because of any pain, or at least not the kind a pill can dull.

  “I think I’ll need some help inside,” I said. “I don’t think I can get into the tub.”

  He reached up and carefully pushed several strands of hair off my face and smiled.

  “You want me to call Traver?” Harrison said.

  I shook my head.

  “Don’t worry about it,” he said.

  Harrison put his arm around me and walked me inside, placing me on a stool in the kitchen while he went into the bathroom and ran the water in the tub. A minute or two later he walked back out.

  “I found bath oils. I put some in.”

  He took my hand and eased me off the stool, then slowly walked me down the hallway to the bathroom. The scent of eucalyptus oil drifted out of the water as he helped me into the bathroom and closed the door. A candle was burning at the foot of the tub, softly illuminating the room.

  “I thought you might want to soak for a while,” Harrison said.

  I stared at the water for a moment, then reached for the first button on my shirt. Even the simple movement of raising my arm sent shock waves of pain through my chest.

  “Let me do that,” Harrison said, stepping around me. “I have done this before, you know.”

  I looked into his eyes.

  “Not with me,” I said.

  He reached down and gently pulled my shirt out of my slacks, then undid the buttons until my shirt fell open. He slipped it off my shoulders, then carefully folded it and walked around behind me, placing it on the vanity.

  “I’ll rewrap the bandage after the bath,” he said, and began to unravel the bandage around my ribs.

  “Does that hurt?” he asked as he eased the last wrap of the bandage off.

  I tried to say something but could only manage to shake my head. He placed his hand softly on my back between my shoulders.

  “Breathe,” Harrison said.

  I took a shallow breath and then another. He undid the hooks on my bra and let it slip off my shoulders into his hands. He laid it next to my shirt and I nervously began to fumble with the button on my slacks but my fingers didn’t seem to want to cooperate.

  Harrison stepped around from behind me and turned the water off in the tub, and then tested the temperature with his hand. I managed to just get the button on my slacks undone, but couldn’t bend enough at the waist to slide them down.

  “I can’t bend at the waist,” I said.

  Harrison turned and knelt in front of me.

  “Put your hand on my shoulder so you don’t lose your balance.”

  I reached out to take hold of his shoulder and realized my hand was trembling. I tightly gripped his shoulder to mask the trembling as he slid the zipper down. My heart was pounding against my chest so hard each beat caused a jolt of pain to shoot out from my cracked ribs. I took a deep breath and closed my eyes as he undid the zipper, then reached up and carefully slid my pants and underwear over my hips and down my legs.

  “God,” I said quietly without realizing it.

  “Just step out of them now, one at a time,” Harrison said.

  I stepped out of my clothes, then he lifted each foot and slipped my socks off. I tried to take a breath but couldn’t. I was beginning to tremble.

  “Breathe,” he said.

  “I can’t.”

  Harrison reached out and placed his hand on my leg just behind the knee. I looked down and saw that he was examining the bloodstains that covered my legs from ankle to knee. My stomach began to turn and I felt myself beginning to gag.

  “I’m going to wash the blood off your legs before you get in the bath,” he said.

  Harrison looked up into my eyes and I nodded.

  “Thank you,” I whispered.

  Any self-consciousness or vulnerability I had felt standing in front of him vanished. I was safer at that moment than I had felt with a man for longer than I could remember. Harrison had once saved my life by putting his own at considerable risk. I didn’t think anyone would be capable of giving more than that, but I was wrong. He was doing it now. Fully clothed he was as naked as I was, sharing a trust I didn’t know could exist between two people. I had lost that ability to trust as a five-year-old girl when my father walked out of my life. Harrison lost it the day his young wife was murdered.

  Harrison took a washcloth and dipped it into the warm bathwater. He lifted my foot and placed it on his thigh, and he gently began to wipe away the blood in long, careful strokes down my leg.

  When my first leg had been washed he set my foot back on the floor and rinsed out the washcloth in the sink, then repeated the process, cleaning away the stains of violence stroke by stroke.

  He set the cloth in the sink, then stepped up behind me.

  “Hold on to my arms and I’ll lower you in.”

  I stepped into the water and let my weight sink into his arms as he lowered me into the warm bath. I lay back and let the water swallow me up. I took as deep a breath as my cracked ribs would allow, breathing in the strong earthy aroma of eucalyptus.

/>   “I’ll wait outside,” Harrison said.

  I looked up at him. In the candlelight, the scars on his face from Gabriel’s explosion softened, and he appeared to be transformed into the blond beach boy of his youth.

  “Please stay,” I said.

  He held my look for a moment, then nodded and sat down on the floor, leaning back against the door.

  “I’ll be right here.”

  I took a breath and closed my eyes, letting myself sink into the warmth of the water.

  “Do you want to talk about it?” he asked.

  “Williams?” I shook my head.

  “I was thinking about your brother,” Harrison said.

  I opened my eyes and looked at the candlelight flickering on the tile of the bathroom wall.

  “Someone loved him,” I said softly, barely conscious of my own voice.

  We looked at each other for a moment, and then I lay back and closed my eyes.

  Forty minutes later his hand touched my arm and I opened my eyes.

  “You fell asleep,” Harrison said. “We should get you out of there and rewrap those ribs.”

  He took hold of my arms and helped me to my feet, wrapping a towel around my shoulders. As carefully as he had washed away the blood on my legs, he gently dried me off and began rewrapping the bandage just below my breasts.

  “Tell me if this is too tight,” he said.

  I tried to say it was fine, because I either didn’t care about the pain anymore or just didn’t notice it. I wanted to ask Harrison a thousand questions, to take apart what was happening between us like it was a case we were working on, but I couldn’t do any of it. I just listened to a sound I hadn’t heard in a very long time— the beating of my own heart.

  Harrison finished wrapping the bandage, then draped a robe over my shoulders, closing it around me.

  “You should get some sleep,” he said.

  He walked me out of the bathroom and down the hall to my bedroom.

  “Can you get into bed all right by yourself?”

  I looked at the empty bed for a moment.

  “I have a lot of practice at that,” I said.

  Harrison looked at me and I saw his eyes wander for just a fleeting second.

  “I’m familiar with that feeling,” he said.

  I reached up and touched the crescent-shaped scar at the corner of his eye. He placed his hand on mine, holding it gently against his cheek.

  “If this was . . .” I started to say before he stopped me.

  “Yes,” he said. “The answer’s yes.”

  He closed his eyes and kissed my hand, seeming to lose himself for a moment, then his fingers slipped from mine, and he turned and left.

  I stood absolutely still listening to the front door close, and the sound of the car starting and backing down the driveway. When silence returned so did the dull ache under the bandage around my ribs. I carefully sat on the bed, turned out the light, and lay down in my empty house.

  9

  The voices down the hallway wake me. I reach for my gun in the drawer of the nightstand but it’s not there. I slip out of bed, walk over to the door, and press against it to listen. A man and a woman are yelling at each other. I can’t understand the words because they’re flying too fast, but I can hear the fear in her voice—that mixture of adrenaline and terror.

  And then it stops, and the silence begins to gather and take on the quality of a scream. I open the door and step into the dark hallway. A faint light glows at the far end and I slowly walk toward it. I think I hear a sound, but it’s only the silence. At the end of the hallway I stop, and then step into the light.

  My mother and father are in the living room. He’s holding her by the neck, her feet several inches off the floor. He turns and looks at me, then lets her go and she crumples to the floor like a bathrobe that has slipped off its hanger.

  The ringing of the alarm yanked me out of the dream. I lay still for a moment measuring my breath. I didn’t remember ever having the dream before. Why now? My hand touched the bandage around my ribs. Dreams and violence both come from places that are beyond our control. My daughter’s screams in the night for months after the killer Gabriel touched our lives were testament enough to the connection.

  The clock read nearly eight-thirty. I’d been sleeping through the electronic buzz of the alarm for an hour. I sat up, the broken ribs forcing me to make even the smallest of motions as if they had been carefully rehearsed. I looked into the dull light filtering into my bedroom through the curtains. The light wasn’t right, and then I smelled the smoke that had settled over the city like a shroud.

  I looked at my robe lying at the end of the bed and I was standing naked in front of Harrison again, his hands gently moving over my body. I tried to take a breath but could hardly manage it. A shiver ran through me and I closed my eyes, trying to hold on to that moment, but instead I saw the image of my half brother lying on the table at the morgue, a small bullet hole in the side of his head.

  The phone on the nightstand began to ring. I let it go, trying to find my way back to the memory of Harrison, but it already seemed to be slipping away faster than I could hold on to it. I wasn’t even sure it had happened. I reached over and answered the call.

  “How you feeling?” Chief Chavez said.

  “I’ll have to give that a little thought,” I said.

  He hesitated a beat too long. “What?” I asked.

  “We’re on tactical alert. The whole damn county seems to be catching fire.”

  “That’s not why you called me,” I said.

  “No. An officer is on the way over with your car to pick you up. I found something you need to see.”

  10

  The hills above Pasadena hadn’t begun to burn yet, but a fire to the east was laying down a heavy blanket of smoke over the city that turned the sunlight to the pale orange of a melon.

  Chief Chavez and Harrison were in his office when I stepped inside. My eyes met Harrison’s briefly, but he gave nothing away about the intimacy of the night before. A manila folder sat in the middle of Chavez’s usually empty desk.

  “Tell me that’s Detective Williams’s case file on my brother,” I said.

  Chavez nodded.

  “How did you manage that?”

  “Let’s just say I didn’t use your name,” Chavez said.

  “Any word on the Western Union clerk Lopez?”

  Chavez shook his head. “Every media outlet has his picture. Every agency is looking for a cop killer.”

  Chavez pulled his chair back and I stepped around the desk and took a seat.

  “It’s not exactly what I thought might be in there,” Chavez said.

  I began to page through the file. There were the usual crime-scene reports from the riverbank where John was found. Coroner’s report, preliminary autopsy, a few cursory biographical facts. Toxicology and the complete lab work were missing because they hadn’t been finished yet.

  “There’s nothing here of any use,” I said and looked at them both. “What was it you wanted me to see?”

  Chavez motioned toward a brown envelope paper-clipped to the bottom of the folder.

  “Take a look at that.”

  I opened it and pulled out a faded arrest report. It was dated 1987. I started to run down the lines of information.

  “It’s an arrest in a murder case,” Chavez said.

  My eyes stopped on the name of the suspect arrested.

  “Thomas Manning,” I said.

  A mug shot was clipped to the back of the report, and I pulled it free and looked at the photograph.

  “That’s my father,” I said, barely speaking above a whisper.

  I quickly began scanning the rest of the report. “It refers to the River Killer murders.”

  “I remember them,” Chavez said. “I made a few calls to refresh my memory. Three young women were murdered, their bodies left on the banks of the L.A. River.”

  “Where on the river?” I said.

  �
�Same general location as your brother. The murders were never solved.”

  In my mind’s eye I saw the image from my dream the night before, only it wasn’t a dreamlike image anymore. It was real. I was a little girl staring at my father choking my mother.

  I felt a hand on my shoulder yanking me back to the present.

  “Alex, you okay?” Chavez said.

  I took a deep breath.

  “Yeah, I’m okay.”

  “Look at the name of the counsel present at the questioning of your father,” Harrison said.

  I flipped to the second page of the report and found it in the middle of the page. “Gavin . . . He was my father’s lawyer.” I looked at Harrison.

  “Your father was released within hours of his arrest, no charges filed.”

  I tried to let the pieces fall together in my head, but all it added up to were more questions than I had started out with.

  “It can’t be a coincidence that my brother was working for Gavin,” I said.

  “Unlikely,” Harrison said.

  “And if you carry that logic further, the fax my brother sent probably had something to do with this. One or both of them must have been looking for something to do with that case.”

  “Or looking for someone,” Harrison said.

  I couldn’t help but connect the dots that they had just laid out. My father had been questioned as a suspect in a serial murder case, and my brother died in nearly the identical place as the victims of that killer while working for the man who represented my father eighteen years before.

  “A serial killer, and the murders of my brother and an LAPD cop. And the one connecting thread is my father,” I said.

  “That doesn’t make your father guilty of anything, Alex,” Chavez said. “Hell, you don’t even know if your father is alive.”

  “No, but that’s why you called me. It’s probably what brought my brother and Gavin together, and now they’re dead, and so is a cop who saw this file and was thinking the same thing we are. One way or the other my father is at the center of this.”

  “But how?” Harrison said. “Williams may also have just gotten a random hit on the name Manning linking your brother and father to the river.”