Never Fear

by Scott Frost

  “We need to get your hands cleaned up.”

  I glanced at them and saw that they were stained with Lopez’s blood.

  “There’s nothing else we can do right now,” Chavez said. “We’ll do everything we can to make this right.”

  I looked back at Lopez lying on the pavement, his eyes quickly dulling with death, staring up at an unseen sky.

  “How do we make up for this?” I whispered.

  I glanced back at two of the SWAT team members as they bumped congratulatory fists, then as I turned to walk away, I saw a face in an unmarked LAPD squad pulling away.

  “What is it?” Chavez asked.

  I watched the squad until it was out of sight, trying to be certain I recognized the face.

  “Hazzard,” I said. “Hazzard was in that squad.”

  19

  It took an hour to drive from Highland Park to Harrison’s small house on a rise in Santa Monica. I had passed on driving back up into the foothills to see if my home was still standing. It seemed oddly unimportant now.

  We should have known that LAPD would be tapping Lopez’s mother’s phone. We should have known they would be there. And he should still be alive. Had Hazzard played me to get information that would help to find Lopez?

  I had tried closing my eyes on the drive but each time I did I heard the shots echo in my head, and I saw Lopez crumple to the ground.

  Harrison walked out onto the small deck that looked out toward the Pacific and handed me a glass of wine. The inland heat had given way to a cool ocean breeze on the coast. The sliver of the crescent moon was just cutting into the horizon out past Catalina.

  “Every time I close my eyes I hear those shots, I see him fall. I didn’t do my job very well tonight.”

  “You didn’t kill him.”

  “I didn’t save him, either. Hazzard played us. He gave us those files, and we handed him Lopez.”

  “Hazzard was Robbery Homicide. Most of those guys still carry their shield and weapon after they retire. He bleeds LAPD blue. We couldn’t have done anything differently.”

  “We could have been smarter.”

  Harrison let the silence settle over us for a moment.

  “Lopez said something to you, didn’t he?” he asked.

  I took a sip of wine and nodded.

  “I asked him if the cop who took the tape gave him a name. I think he said ‘Powell.’”

  “Does that mean anything to you?”

  “I think so, but I don’t know why,” I said.

  I stepped back into the small living room that was furnished as sparsely as a classic Japanese wood-and-paper house from the nineteenth century. Bamboo floors, a few simple pieces of furniture. It had the feel of a sanctuary more than a house. A retreat from the world of cops and all that comes along with it.

  On the mantel over the fireplace was a photograph of Harrison and his young wife looking into a camera held at arm’s length. They were both smiling broadly, frozen for a perfect moment in time before her murder shattered Harrison’s world. It was the first time I had ever seen her picture. She had shoulder-length jet-black hair, an Asian face that I guessed was Japanese.

  Harrison stepped inside and I turned away from the photograph, feeling like an intruder. He walked over next to me, his eyes on the picture as I looked back out toward the ocean.

  “Her parents met at Manzanar during the war.”

  “The relocation camp in the Owens Valley?”

  Harrison nodded. “Her family lost their businesses, homes, everything.”

  He stared at the photograph for a moment, leaving another memory unsaid. “Her marrying a white guy was a challenge for her parents. Then their only daughter was murdered, and I couldn’t even bring her killer to justice.”

  I started to reach out to touch Harrison’s face but stopped myself. His eyes were far away, still wrestling with a past, torn apart by violence, that hadn’t yet been pieced fully back together.

  “You’re a good man,” I said softly.

  “You would think that would matter, but it doesn’t,” he said.

  “It did to your wife.”

  His eyes met mine and held them as gently as if I were being cradled in two arms. Without realizing I was doing it, I took a step toward him, and then it hit me.

  “My God,” I said in astonishment.

  “What?” Harrison asked.

  “Powell,” I whispered.

  Harrison looked at me for a moment. “The name Lopez said?”

  “The officer who took the tape.”

  I ran it through my memory several times, trying to prove to myself that I was wrong. But each time I did, it became clearer, like a home movie coming into focus.

  “It means something to you, doesn’t it?” Harrison said.

  I nodded, then stepped out onto the deck into the cool night air. Over the horizon the moon slipped out of sight into the ocean. The only light on the Pacific was a cruise ship lit up like a Christmas tree floating in the darkness.

  Harrison walked up behind me.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “Powell was the name of the cop my father played in the horror movie,” I said.

  “You’re sure?”

  I nodded. “What are the chances that someone would know the name of a character who’s on-screen less than five minutes in an obscure B monster movie?”

  “Not very good,” Harrison said.

  “I keep hoping that somehow he’s dead, and all this can be explained another way, but every time that seems plausible, something happens to pull it back to the one obvious truth: He’s alive, and he wants me to know it’s him.”

  I caught a wisp of movement over my head—a bat hunting insects. I looked up and saw dozens of them darting through the darkness like pieces of crepe paper swirling in the wind.

  “What does he want?” I said.

  “I don’t know.” Harrison placed a throw over my shoulders, his hands resting gently on me for a moment.

  “The tape,” I said. I had forgotten about it.

  Harrison shook his head.

  “From Cross—the interrogation. I need to see it.”

  “Maybe it would be better to let it go for a few hours,” he said.

  “How do you do that?”

  Harrison smiled gently. “I wouldn’t know.”

  Harrison slipped the tape into the VCR but hesitated for a moment before he hit play.

  “Do you want to be alone with this?” he asked.

  I shook my head. “I can tell you what a policeman fighting a Cyclops sounds like, or an Indian who falls in love with a white girl, but I haven’t heard his voice since I was a child. I need you to remember the things I might be reluctant to, or unable to, hear.”

  Harrison promised he would, then stepped back from the TV and pressed play on the remote. The screen was filled with electric noise for a moment, and then I heard the sound of a mike being rustled and the voices of several detectives uttering words I couldn’t understand.

  The image on the screen flickered and settled into a static, unmoving shot. At a table in a stark white interrogation room, a man sat looking at something or someone just off camera.

  “State your name,” said a voice that could have been Hazzard, though I wasn’t certain.

  The man at the table turned slightly away from where his questioner must have been sitting and looked directly into the camera.

  “Thomas Manning,” he said.

  It wasn’t the voice I remembered from television, but I knew it just the same. An octave lower maybe, less assured. It was the voice or a piece of the voice I had heard in dreams. The good looks that had fueled his ambition had faded, but his hair was still dark, his eyes as penetrating as pieces of coal on a field of white.

  The off-screen detective asked if he had been read and understood his rights and my father acknowledged that he had.

  “Did you murder Victoria Fisher?”

  My father didn’t hesitate. “No.”

&nbs
p; “Did you kidnap and murder Jenny Roberts?”

  “No.”

  “Did you strangle Alice Lundholm and leave her body on the banks of the river?”

  “I’ve done none of those things.”

  “You did rip open Jenny Roberts’s blouse and drag her across the stage at the Players Theater.”

  “We were rehearsing a scene; that was part of it. She became frightened. I can show you the script.”

  “A month after that she was murdered.”

  “Not by me.”

  “You asked Alice Lundholm to take off her blouse?”

  “She came on to me. It happens all the time in the theater. Some people are unable to turn emotions off after intense work.”

  He said the words with the practiced ease of an actor playing the same part in a long-running play.

  “Why did your first wife file a restraining order against you?” Hazzard asked.

  “You’ll have to ask her.”

  “Did you abuse her?”

  Every muscle in my father’s body seemed to stiffen. He looked away from the camera and glared at his questioner. I knew the look. I had seen it in my dream the other night when he was standing in the hallway of our house holding my mother by her throat.

  “As is my right, I’ll wait for my lawyer to arrive before I answer—”

  Hazzard cut him off. “What did you do to your wife?”

  My father looked away from his questioner and down at his hands.

  “In one year she made three trips to the emergency room. Why was that?”

  The camera zoomed in for a close-up of his face as question after question began to fly.

  “What did you do to her?”

  He said nothing.

  “Did you beat her?”

  Silence.

  “You twisted her arm, causing bruising . . .”

  The list kept growing.

  “You hit her . . . you choked her by the neck . . . you threw her against a wall . . .”

  He didn’t react. It was as if he had stepped into another room and was no longer hearing his interrogator’s words. My father closed his eyes and began to lower his head.

  “What did you do to your daughter, Mr. Manning? ”

  My father froze.

  “Your daughter?”

  He slowly lifted his head and glared into the lens.

  “What did you do to her?”

  The blackness of his eyes seemed barely able to contain the rage let loose inside. And then just as quickly it seemed to pass.

  “I loved her,” he said softly.

  The questions continued but I didn’t hear them. I don’t know what else, if anything, he said, or what details he was asked. A minute passed, another, maybe ten, I wasn’t sure. When I looked at the screen again, there was only static. Harrison walked over and turned it off.

  “I’m not . . .” I started to say but couldn’t finish the sentence. I got up from the chair and walked back out into the cool night. Where there had been lights from ships out on the ocean, now there was only darkness. Harrison stepped up behind me but didn’t say a word.

  “I think I missed some of that,” I said. “Did you hear it all?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did they . . . Did my father give any more answers after he spoke of me?”

  “No, he didn’t say a word. Hazzard kept asking questions until Gavin arrived.”

  Harrison picked up the throw and placed it over my shoulders again.

  “What do you think?” I asked.

  “I don’t think a child should ever hear a parent in that situation.”

  “Do you believe him . . . my father?”

  “That he loved you . . . yes, I believe that.”

  “What about the rest?”

  Harrison shook his head. His hands pulled me against his chest and I could feel his heart beating against my back.

  “I don’t know,” Harrison said.

  “When we were on Martel where Victoria vanished, I had this sense that . . .”

  “What?”

  “I’m not sure how to say this without sounding like a frightened little girl instead of a Homicide lieutenant.”

  “You don’t have to prove anything to me,” Harrison said.

  “Standing on that sidewalk I felt a hand close on my mouth. . . . I think it’s possible I was my father’s first victim.”

  I felt Harrison’s chest rise against my back as he took a breath.

  “He denied hurting you.”

  “He said he loved his daughter; that’s not the same thing.”

  I started to turn to look at Harrison but I couldn’t.

  “And if he did something to his own daughter, is it such a leap for him to have murdered three women?”

  A gust of warm wind blowing out toward the ocean swept across us. For a brief second the air held the scent of jasmine, but it didn’t last.

  “You should get some sleep,” Harrison said.

  “How?” I whispered.

  I reached for Harrison’s hand but it had already slipped from my shoulder.

  20

  The sound of gunshots jarred me out of sleep. It had been the same all night long. Four quick pops in succession, again and again and again. There was nothing else to the dream. Not Lopez’s face, no muzzle flashes, no circles of blood on his shirt.

  I was lying on the daybed wrapped in the blanket Harrison had placed over my shoulders. The light of dawn was just breaking in the east. I realized the sound I had thought was another gunshot was the ringing of my cell phone in the pocket of my jacket. I pulled the blanket around me and answered.

  “This is Frank Cross,” a man said. “You came to my office.”

  It took a moment to connect the voice with the investigator on the edge of the high desert.

  “Yes,” I answered.

  “Have you looked at the tape?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s not the whole story. There’s more, much more. Can you meet me?”

  “When?”

  “Now.”

  “Yes, I can meet you.”

  “How far are you from the beach?”

  “I’m in Santa Monica.”

  “At the bottom of Sunset there’s beach parking. Park there and start walking south on the sand. When I see that you’re alone, I’ll meet you.”

  I started to ask a question but he was gone. I gathered my things and walked into Harrison’s bedroom. In the half-light I could just make out the contours of his body under the white sheet. I started to take a step toward the bed to tell him that I was leaving, but stopped and left him to sleep.

  It was just past five-thirty when I pulled into the parking lot at PCH and Sunset. A marine layer of clouds had shrouded the ocean in thick fog. There were half a dozen cars parked in the lot. Joggers were moving up and down the running path next to the beach.

  I stepped out and walked to the edge of the lot overlooking the water. The air was heavy with the scent of brine and decaying matter. To the north the beach looked deserted, covered in places by a layer of drying kelp and tiny orange crustaceans that had been caught on the beach by the tide. To the south a few figures either walked or jogged along the expanse of dark gray water. I stepped over the parking barrier, slipped off my shoes, and began walking south.

  I walked for ten minutes, stopping every few to look around, but there was no sign of Cross. I tried to replay Cross’s words in my head, thinking I might have missed something, but each time I did I drifted instead to the night before, the touch of Harrison’s hands on my shoulders, the beating of his heart against my back.

  By the time I had followed him back inside he was asleep in bed. I sat and watched him—the rise and fall of his chest, the line of his leg under the sheet, the bend of his wrist and the curve of his fingers. Half a dozen times I stood up from the chair to slip into bed next to him, and each time I stopped myself, a voice in my ear whispering, “Don’t go there.” So I just watched him a little longer, telling myself that wa
s enough. And each time I knew it wasn’t.

  Half a mile down the beach several figures were standing in a tight group staring at the water’s edge. I picked up my pace, and as I drew closer I saw they were looking at something lying in the surf. Fifty yards out I could see a figure being rolled by a small wave.

  As I reached the group, one of them turned to me.

  “It’s dead,” the woman said.

  It was the remains of a large seal partly wrapped in kelp. A large open wound was visible on its back where a shark had struck. One of its big dark eyes stared ahead like a piece of glass.

  I glanced at the other faces looking at the seal but Cross wasn’t there. Farther down the sand the beach was deserted. To the north I saw a lone woman jogger. The others looking at the seal began to drift away and I waited for a few more minutes for any sign that Cross would appear. At six o’clock I started walking the mile back, trying to guess what he wanted to talk about on a deserted beach at dawn, and why he hadn’t come.

  I reached the parking lot and brushed the sand off my feet. There were a few more cars in the lot than when I had arrived. A surfer stood looking at the water as if he knew something the rest of us didn’t.

  I got in my car and sat looking at the gray water disappearing into the fog offshore. I had never understood people who found peace looking at the ocean. It always made me nervous—a repository of secrets. Not unlike the body of a homicide victim. You can understand how they died. You can do all the work of a cop and know the precise angle of entry, the caliber of the round, why the blood splatter had this pattern as opposed to another, or which blow, or stab wound, caused the fatal injury. But you can never know what they saw, or how fast they were breathing in panic, or what or who they thought about the moment before their death.

  As I put the key in the ignition, a hand reached in the open window and took hold of the wheel. Cross was dressed in sweat clothes, the hood of a sweatshirt pulled over his head. His eyes, or rather the look in them, didn’t appear to belong to the same person I had met in his office. There was panic in his eyes, maybe even fear. He walked over and sat on the guardrail overlooking the ocean and I followed.

  I sat on the railing and waited for him to tell me why we were there. For nearly a minute he just stared out at the water.