Never Fear

by Scott Frost

  “LAPD still considers your brother’s death a suicide, and the coroner is probably going to agree,” Chavez said.

  “You think Detective Williams would agree if he could?” I said.

  “Gavin still died in an accident.”

  “And the day my brother died, he tried to contact me for the first time in his life. There would have to be a pretty good reason for him to have done that, something that affected us both.”

  “Your father would be the logical reason,” Harrison said.

  I nodded. “But as what?”

  “Only your brother knew that,” Chavez said.

  “Not only my brother—his killer knew, too.”

  “Have we found Dana Courson?”

  “She lives in Studio City. There was no answer on her phone, no answer at her door. The public defender’s office said she told them she would be out for a week. I left word for her to contact us if she calls in.”

  I looked at Chavez, whose soft, dark eyes were never very good at hiding even the most innocent of emotions.

  “Your father was questioned in a murder case eighteen years ago,” he said. “A bad arrest was made. My bet is it ends there.”

  “It didn’t for my brother and Detective Williams,” I said. “You think LAPD has made the connection between the River Killer and this?”

  “If there is a connection,” Chavez said. “They haven’t made it yet if they’re still looking for a cop killer.”

  “Can we get the complete case file on the River Killer?”

  “LAPD has made it very clear that if you stick even a toe into your brother’s or Williams’s death, they’ll arrest you for obstruction.”

  “All they have to know is that we’re looking at an eighteen-year-old murder case.”

  Chavez shook his head. “Once they get their heads out of their asses, they may make the connection.”

  “Can you get the files?”

  Chavez sighed. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  I looked down at the mug shot of my father. He was years older in the picture than the last time I had seen him. The charming good looks that had fueled a dream of stardom had faded. The sparkle in the eyes was gone; the sharp lines of his face had softened. I tried to imagine what his life had been like after he left my mother and me, but I couldn’t. Mug shots freeze a moment in time unlike any other photograph. The subject has no past, no future, just a single terrible moment in the white light of the camera’s flash. The truth was, if I met this man on a street this afternoon, I wouldn’t know who he was.

  I took the file and stepped into my office while Harrison called the doctor who had attended to Gavin. I glanced at the mug shot of my father one more time, then closed the file and picked up the phone. I knew the number but, as I did every time I called, I looked it up in my book. Perfect daughters don’t make mistakes.

  “It’s me,” I said when she answered. “I need you to tell me something.”

  “It’s one of those conversations, is it?” my mother said.

  “No, I just need you to be honest with me.”

  “When have I not been honest with you?”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “Well, that’s what it sounded like,” she said.

  “I’m sorry, I should have phrased that differently.”

  “You talk to everyone as if you suspect they’ve committed a crime.”

  I closed my eyes and took a breath.

  “It’s a bad habit,” I said.

  I thought I could hear the sound of a cigarette being lit, even though she swore she quit years ago.

  “Okay, now what do you need to know?” my mother asked.

  I thought I knew how to ask the question, but I suddenly realized I didn’t. Or at least I didn’t know how to ask without her thinking I was accusing her of something. I hesitated, and then asked it the only way I knew how. The way a cop would ask.

  “Did my father ever abuse you?”

  There was silence on the other end, as if the words had taken her breath away.

  “How can you ask something like that?” she finally said, a slight trembling in her voice. “How can you?”

  “I had a dream last night he was choking you.”

  “A dream? You accuse me of that because of a dream.”

  “Someone who is the victim of abuse hasn’t done anything wrong. I’m not accusing you of anything.”

  “You think I’m the kind of person who would stay with someone who did that to them?”

  “There is no kind of person who this happens to, they’re only victims.”

  “Well, I am not a victim. I thought you would know that by how I raised you. . . . My . . .”

  I let it rest for a second or two.

  “I’m sorry, it was just a dream, but I needed to ask,” I said.

  “I don’t know why I’m surprised. You spend your life walking through the filth of this world. God . . . never ask me something like that again.”

  I heard the sound of several deep breaths and then she hung up. I held on to the phone for a moment, staring at the redial button. I’d been to hundreds of abuse cases as a cop, and when asked for the first time in their life if they’d been abused, every victim answered my questions the same way my mother just had.

  There was a knock on the door and Harrison stepped in. He started to say something, then glanced at the phone in my hand.

  “Should I come back?”

  I shook my head.

  “Tell me something encouraging,” I said.

  “I just talked to the doctor who attended to Gavin,” Harrison said. “There was nothing surprising in his death given the extent of injuries from the car accident. ”

  “Did he talk to my brother?”

  “No. A nurse thought she remembered a cop asking him a few questions, but she couldn’t be sure.”

  “That would be usual after a fatal accident.”

  “Except she said it was a detective, not a uniform.”

  “Could she ID him?”

  “She only saw him across the room in emergency, and he didn’t talk to any staff.”

  We looked at each other for a moment, then I realized I was still holding the phone in my hand and hung it up.

  “You okay?” Harrison asked.

  I shook my head.

  “I’ve spent my life walking through the filth of the world, according to my mother,” I said.

  “I was actually wondering about how your ribs feel,” he said.

  I looked up at him and his eyes met mine, making no attempt to let go.

  “Thank you for last night,” I said.

  “You don’t have to.”

  “I worked up the speech in the car on the way in, but I suddenly can’t remember any of it.”

  I remembered doing the same thing in junior high school the first time I called a boy at home. I had hung up without uttering a single word.

  “I’m a lieutenant, you’re one of my detectives, it might not be such a good idea if we were to take it any further, particularly for you. You know how cops can be.”

  A voice in my head was screaming, Idiot, idiot, idiot.

  “I think you have enough to worry about right now without any of this,” Harrison said, letting me off the hook.

  “I think about standing there last night, and what you did for me, your touch. . . . You make it very hard for me to act like a lieutenant.”

  The faint hint of a blush rose in his face. His reached up and touched the scar at the corner of his eye and smiled.

  “I’ve never been with a naked lieutenant before.”

  His eyes held mine for a moment.

  “When this is finished,” he said.

  The idea that I could be finished with what I was uncovering seemed a remote possibility. I glanced back at the phone and then at the report in front of me.

  “Something else has happened, hasn’t it?” he asked.

  I nodded.

  “If I don’t need to know . . .” he star
ted, but I cut him off.

  “I had what I thought was a dream last night, but I think it was more than that.”

  “A memory?” Harrison said.

  “Yeah. I think my father abused my mother,” I said.

  Harrison sat on the arm of the chair in front of my desk. “You’re sure?”

  I shook my head. I opened the file and removed the mug shot of my father.

  “He’s a stranger. I’m not sure about anything. But I don’t imagine a therapist would consider the timing of the memory a coincidence.”

  “You talked to your mother.”

  I nodded. “It didn’t go particularly well.”

  “She denied it?”

  “Badly. Everything she said and didn’t say to me suggests I’m right.”

  The wheels in Harrison’s head turned for a moment.

  “Even if it’s true, that doesn’t make your father a killer, particularly a serial killer,” Harrison said. “They usually contain their rage from their everyday lives.”

  I nodded. “But it does make him violent.”

  I looked one more time at the mug shot, hoping to discover a detail, a window into some part of my father that would lead me in a different direction. It wasn’t there. I looked out the window at the strange orange light from the smoke. The line separating reality from nightmare seemed to be getting thinner by the moment.

  “I thought it was the dark I remember being afraid of as a little girl, but it wasn’t,” I said. “I think it was him.”

  11

  Len Hazzard, the detective who led the investigation into the River Killer murders, had retired three years ago from Robbery Homicide and was living on the western edge of the San Fernando Valley in Chatsworth.

  The Santa Anas were gusting to forty miles an hour through the canyons where subdivisions had replaced chaparral. The fires to the east of Pasadena had produced a surreal glow but no danger. Driving into the canyons was like entering a city under siege. Burning embers were falling out of the sky from a fire two miles to the north and starting spot fires on roofs. The tops of palm trees would explode in flames as if hit by a bomb. Cars packed with family valuables streamed out of neighborhoods while convoys of fire trucks poured in.

  Harrison stopped the squad at a Highway Patrol roadblock and we showed our IDs, then turned into the subdivision. Detective Hazzard lived at the end of a cul-de-sac tucked into a rocky canyon. One side of the street was lined with palm trees that had been charred as black as charcoal.

  Hazzard was standing on his front lawn wearing shorts and a Hawaiian shirt, holding an unlit cigarette and watching a slurry bomber make a run on a ridge a canyon away. He looked to be in his mid sixties, with thinning light hair, but was still powerfully built and tanned from hours in the sun every day. He shook our hands and invited us inside.

  The inside of the house looked as if it had been decorated by a committee of VFW vets intent on fulfilling all their boyhood dreams through this one house. The upholstery matched the colors of NFL and NBA teams. Autographed sports memorabilia and baseball cards covered nearly every wall. I noticed a Yankees jersey of Babe Ruth’s, another belonging to Jackie Robinson. From a quick glance at the rest of the collection, I imagined it was incredibly valuable. I wondered if I was the first woman other than a maid to set foot inside in a decade. We followed him into the dining room, where a large box sat in the middle of the table under a chandelier made of deer antlers.

  “It’s all here—every report, note, everything, I copied it all before I left,” Hazzard said, staring at the box like he held a grudge against it. “I had it in the pickup when your chief called. It was going with me if I had to evacuate.”

  He looked out the window at the burnt trees across the street.

  “I’ll never be done with it,” he said. “You have a case like that, Lieutenant? The one you can’t let go of ?”

  I nodded.

  A helicopter passed overhead, shaking the house.

  “It’s like the end of the fucking world,” Hazzard said.

  When the copter moved off, he turned to me. “Anything you want, it’s yours. All I ask is that you keep me informed of everything, and if you make an arrest, I be there when you do it.”

  I nodded my approval, and he motioned to the chairs and we sat down.

  “You arrested a Thomas Manning. What can you tell me about him?” I asked.

  He appeared to study the name as if it were suspended in midair in front of him, then his eyes focused and he turned to me.

  “Something’s happened, hasn’t it?”

  I nodded. Hazzard waited for me to add more to the admission than a nod of the head.

  “His son was found shot to death on the banks of the L.A. River,” I said.

  “Where on the river?”

  “A few hundred yards north of the Fletcher Bridge.”

  The location clearly struck a chord with him and for an instant he appeared lost in memory.

  “That’s Northeast division. Why is Pasadena interested? ”

  “LAPD thinks it’s a suicide.”

  “And you don’t. Why?”

  “Manning’s son worked for a lawyer named Gavin,” I said.

  Hazzard began massaging the back of his neck as if he had to ease the name out of the past.

  “Gavin was Manning’s lawyer.”

  I nodded.

  “Have you talked to him?”

  “He died in a car accident the same day as Manning. ”

  Hazzard got up from the table and looked out the window.

  “We found the first victim, a twenty-two-year-old named Jenny Roberts, by the Fletcher Bridge.”

  He turned and walked over to the box containing the files and began riffling through it until he found what he was looking for, and then he placed a file in front of me. I opened it up to an eight-by-ten glossy, the kind actors use for auditions, of a beautiful young woman with shoulder-length hair, smiling at the camera.

  The lines at the corners of Hazzard’s eyes deepened as he stared at the picture. Lines that I imagined weren’t there before he had seen her for the first time lying dead next to the river.

  “Try forgetting that face,” Hazzard said.

  “What did you have on Manning?” Harrison asked.

  Hazzard rummaged through the box again and removed another file.

  “A month before she was killed, she filed a complaint against Manning alleging she had been sexually assaulted by him after an acting class he taught.”

  “Was he questioned in the assault?” I asked.

  “Yeah. He was interviewed but there wasn’t enough evidence to support an arrest.”

  “That’s not enough for you to have arrested him on a murder charge,” Harrison said.

  “There were other complaints against him, similar incidents; he was a real piece of work. But he was never charged with anything. They’re all in that box.”

  “But that’s not why you arrested him,” I said.

  He shook his head.

  “He knew one of the other victims?” I asked.

  Hazzard nearly smiled, though he seemed unaccustomed to it.

  “Chavez said you were a good detective,” Hazzard said. “The second victim also took an acting class from him.”

  He tossed the folder onto the table in front of me.

  “It’s all there, everything you want to know about Thomas Manning. And it will get you exactly what we got: nothing.”

  “Was there a connection between Manning and the third victim?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “Not a goddamn thing.”

  I stared at the folder for a moment as if it were the family album I never had.

  “Was Manning the only arrest you made?” Harrison asked.

  Hazzard nodded. “We had a possible witness to the killings, but he died.”

  “How?”

  “He was a transient. We questioned him on two occasions. A week later he was beaten to death in the rail yards east of downtown.”
>
  I picked up the file on my father as another helicopter roared overhead.

  “Did you question Manning about the transient?”

  He shook his head. “Manning disappeared. We never found him.”

  “And then the murders stopped,” Harrison said.

  Hazzard nodded.

  “Do you believe he’s alive?”

  “I’ll believe he’s alive until the day I see him lying on a slab.”

  “I’d like to take the files with us,” I said.

  Hazzard looked at the box for a moment as if it were a relative who had come for a weekend visit and never left.

  “I’ve lived with those files for eighteen years. It would be a relief to be rid of ’em.”

  “I’ll want to talk to you more,” I said.

  “As long as I don’t burn to the ground, I’ll be right here.”

  I slipped the folders back into the box with the rest of the files, thanked Hazzard, and started for the door with Harrison.

  “You never said why you’re interested, Lieutenant,” Hazzard said. “Manning’s son’s death is still a long way from Pasadena.”

  I stopped by the door.

  “What aren’t you telling me?” he added.

  “Two witnesses may have seen the man who killed Manning’s son. A girlfriend who saw him leave the apartment with a computer, and a clerk at a Western Union office.”

  “And you’re wondering if Manning has come back from the dead and murdered his own child?”

  “The LAPD detective in charge of the case was murdered last night.”

  “Detective Williams. I saw the news.”

  I nodded. “I think they’re after the wrong suspect.”

  “And why do you think that?” Hazzard asked.

  “Because he told me he didn’t do it just before he attacked me with a bat.”

  “You were the injured cop on the scene?”

  I nodded. “I think the man who killed Thomas Manning’s son also killed Williams, and I believe it’s possible that that individual is connected to the River Killer.”

  “Why would a serial killer of young women suddenly kill two men?”

  “He’s trying to protect himself. I’m guessing that Gavin and Manning’s son may have uncovered something about the River Killer.”

  “Do you have any proof of this theory?”

  “The night Manning died he tried to contact me but wasn’t successful.”