Never Fear

by Scott Frost

“Look at this,” he said.

  I stepped up next to him. Several of the chairs had been knocked over and the table pushed nearly to the wall. The glass covering a framed movie poster on the wall was broken.

  “She fought back,” I said.

  The adjacent living room was empty, with no sign that the struggle had spread there. On the far side a short hallway led to a bathroom and what were probably bedrooms. A series of photographs lined the walls on either side. Two of them had been knocked to the floor, shattering the glass. I pulled my weapon and stepped up to the closed door of the bathroom.

  “What’s that sound?” Harrison said.

  “Running water.”

  I took hold of the handle, quickly pushed the door open, and raised my weapon. The faucet in the sink was flowing; the door to the shower was closed. I could see something dark through the clouded glass. I stepped forward to the sink as Harrison remained in the hallway covering the doors to the bedrooms.

  “Anything?” he asked.

  The water spiraling down the drain of the sink made soft gurgling sounds that almost sounded human. I looked over at the dark shape in the shower.

  “There’s something,” I said as I stepped up to the shower and swung the door open. A dark terry cloth robe hung from a hook on the back of the door.

  I stepped back into the hallway and we approached the doors to the bedrooms.

  “We’ll take them at the same time,” Harrison said.

  I nodded as he stopped at the first door and I took another two steps to the bedroom on the other side.

  “Ready?” he whispered.

  We swung the doors open and swept the rooms with our weapons. The air inside was strong with the odor of bleach. The drawn shades made it difficult to see. I reached for the light switch and flipped it on with no success. The circuit breakers must have been turned off.

  I stepped into the room looking for the slightest sense of movement in the darkness. The bed appeared to be against the wall to my left. A chest of drawers was opposite that. Two steps in I stopped, letting my eyes adjust to the light level. On the floor a white bottle of bleach lay on its side. In front of the window, silhouetted by the dull light seeping through the blinds, was the shape of a person sitting in a chair. I raised my weapon.

  “Don’t move. I’m a police officer,” I said.

  The figure remained still.

  “Dana Courson?” I said.

  Again, no response. I glanced across the room one more time to be sure there was no one else present, then walked toward the figure. Three feet from her I could see the line of her arms stretched in back of the chair. The yellow cord around her wrists was just visible.

  “Dana,” I said softly, but there was only silence.

  I reached out and placed my hand on her neck. The skin was slightly warm to the touch, but not because she was alive. I holstered my Glock, then stepped around the body to the window and cranked open the blinds. As I turned around Harrison appeared at the door.

  He stared at the body for a moment, then looked down at the floor and holstered his weapon.

  “Son of a bitch,” he said softly.

  The spilled bottle of bleach had masked the odor of death, which I now realized was filling the room. I looked at the body for a moment, trying to place myself in the details of the crime scene, avoiding her face to keep my emotions in check. Her jeans had been pulled down to her knees, her green shirt unbuttoned and open.

  “You want to call LAPD . . .” I started to say, and then stopped as I looked at her face for the first time. “LAPD can wait a little longer.”

  “Why?” Harrison said.

  “This isn’t Dana Courson.”

  Her dark hair was shoulder-length. I guessed her to be about five-six. The decomposition that was beginning to swell her skin distorted her features slightly, but there was no doubt that this was not the woman I had met in my brother’s apartment.

  Harrison stepped around the body and looked at her, then turned and stared out the window. As much as he had tried since joining Homicide, he still wasn’t able to entirely distance himself from each victim he saw. And if the victim was a woman, I knew that part of what he was seeing each time was the face of his murdered wife.

  “You’re sure it’s not her?” he asked.

  “I’ve never seen this woman before,” I said.

  “Then who is it?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know.”

  I scanned the room quickly. On top of the dresser was a small photograph in a frame. A woman with her arm around my half brother was smiling gleefully at the camera. It was the victim sitting in the chair.

  “I think I’ve seen this before, in my brother’s apartment.”

  “You’re sure it’s the same picture?”

  I tried to remember what I had seen in the apartment, but it wasn’t clear. So much had happened that events were taking on the feel of a film played at three or four times normal speed.

  “I only glanced at it. I was looking more at the image of my brother than at the woman. Then I saw a photograph of my father that I remembered from childhood. It was just after that when Dana stepped out of the bedroom and pointed the gun at me.”

  I picked up the picture and stared at my brother’s face.

  “I remember his smile. It’s the same as in the photograph at the apartment, a different frame maybe. She took the picture with her when she left my brother’s apartment.”

  “But the woman you met in your brother’s apartment who identified herself as Dana isn’t the woman in the picture.”

  “No. She had shorter hair, and was at least five-eight. ”

  Harrison walked over and looked at the picture. “You’re certain?”

  “Of that, yes.”

  I looked back at the victim in the chair.

  “Who is she?” Harrison said.

  “Wasn’t there a shoulder bag sitting on the kitchen counter?”

  “Her ID.”

  We rushed back to the kitchen, where she had set her keys and bag down on the counter. The groceries lying on the floor took on a whole new meaning after finding her body in the bedroom. The events were there to retrace in terrible clarity.

  “He must have been inside already and came up from behind her as she turned to go back for the second bag in the car,” I said. “She may have pushed the bag at him or he knocked it off the counter as he came toward her. Then he pulled her into the dining room and she fought back, breaking the glass in the poster and knocking the table and chairs aside.”

  Harrison stared at the contents of the bag spread out on the floor for a moment.

  “It wasn’t enough,” he said softly.

  Her purse was a small black leather bag in the shape of a pack. Inside were some Altoids, a small zippered bag for Tampax, lipstick and a nail file, a plastic toy in the shape of a sheepdog, some loose change, a cell phone, and a green wallet embroidered around the edge in purple.

  Her driver’s license was in a clear plastic sleeve. In the photograph she smiled broadly into the camera—the same smile that was on her face in the picture taken with my brother. I looked at her name and address, then handed it to Harrison. He studied it for a moment.

  “Dana Courson?” Harrison said.

  I nodded.

  “The woman you met at your brother’s apartment wasn’t his girlfriend.”

  “No,” I said.

  Harrison thought for a moment, trying to put it together in his head.

  “If she wasn’t his girlfriend, who was she?”

  “I don’t know. She knew about his family history, his job . . . everything a girlfriend should know. I don’t even think she was surprised about me,” I said.

  We looked at each other for a moment in silence.

  “What the hell is happening here?” I whispered.

  I ran it backward and forward, looking for a solution. My eyes stopped on the groceries on the floor. There were several pints of ice cream, fruit, vegetables, small candles th
at you put on a birthday cake.

  “Who buys party candles after finding out her boyfriend is dead?” I said.

  “No one,” Harrison said.

  “I don’t think she knew John had been killed. Yet she’s dead because her killer believed my brother told her something, or she saw something.”

  Silence settled over us with the uneasiness of a bad dream.

  “So why did the woman I met in his apartment identify herself as Dana Courson?”

  Harrison considered it.

  “To get out of there without you knowing who she really was,” he said.

  I nodded. “That’s why she took the photograph with her—so I wouldn’t be able to identify her.”

  “None of which answers how she knew the things she knew, and why,” Harrison said.

  “Whatever she was doing there, she was up to her neck in it,” I said. “She was afraid, and it wasn’t just because I had surprised her.”

  “You think she made the call to bring us here so we would find the body?” Harrison asked.

  “Somebody did, and they knew the name Powell.”

  “The name Lopez said before he died.”

  “Who may or may not be my father.”

  “But why call you? She could have called any cop.”

  “She didn’t have to tell me the things she did in the apartment, but she did. She was trying to help without telling us who she is.”

  Harrison thought it through for a moment, but there was no putting this into a simple order. We walked back to the bedroom to look over the scene once more before calling LAPD. I hadn’t bothered to look for a cause of death when we were in the room before so I examined her. The nails on her hands looked clean. If there was any tissue under the nails from her struggle with her attacker a sample should be easy to find.

  Even though her pants were down around her knees and her shirt open there were no obvious signs of sexual contact.

  “How many days do you think she’s been dead?” Harrison asked.

  “Sometime within a day of my brother, and before we put a squad on the house to watch for her. The receipt in one of the grocery bags should tell us nearly to the hour,” I said.

  There was a thin line of discolored and broken skin on her neck where the cord had been wrapped around. I suspected from the indentation in her throat that her windpipe had been broken as she was strangled. She would have lost consciousness within the first minute of the attack. Death would have taken another three or four minutes after that. And if we were right about what had taken place, she never knew why she was dying.

  “Who made the call telling us to be here?” Harrison questioned.

  “Someone who wanted us to know she was dead.”

  “But why? To help, or to take credit?”

  I shook my head as Harrison took out his phone.

  “What do you want to tell LAPD?”

  I pictured Lopez crumpling to the ground like a rag doll. I wasn’t going to let that happen again.

  “We tell them a young woman was murdered who should still be alive,” I said.

  23

  We stayed at the scene long enough to turn it over to LAPD and then left without giving them anything more than the vaguest of information to keep them from connecting it to my brother’s death. In LAPD’s ordered world I could easily imagine them finding my brother responsible in some way for her death—his suicide, then, the obvious result. I couldn’t stop them from making the connection, but I wasn’t going to help them.

  If Hazzard had managed to create doubt in my mind about my father being alive or dead, Dana Courson’s murder buried all notions that my brother’s hand held the weapon that took his life. She was dead because her killer believed she was a threat, just as John had been. That she died not understanding why made the tragedy even more complete.

  At the end of the afternoon I drove Harrison back to Santa Monica. For the first time since the day of my brother’s murder the Santa Ana winds had stilled, though forecasters were predicting “the event,” as they called it, would begin again by dawn.

  Harrison made a simple dinner and we tried to make some sense of what we didn’t know. I watched the sun fall into the ocean, the thin layer of smoke from the fires still burning, turning the horizon the color of flame.

  “We need to find the woman I met in John’s apartment.”

  “Tomorrow,” Harrison said. “I should rewrap your bandages.”

  I looked into his eyes and then shook my head.

  “If my house is there, I need to know it,” I said, almost unaware of my own words.

  I wanted to walk through it, to touch my things. I wanted to stand in the middle of something that at least for the moment had the appearance of permanence. Even if I knew it was only an illusion.

  “And I need to see it with my daughter.”

  “You still shouldn’t be alone,” Harrison said.

  The last piece of the sun slipped below the edge of the Pacific.

  “If it’s gone, we’ll come back here, or I’ll stay at her dorm.”

  Harrison walked over, stepped behind me, and placed his hand on the wrap around my ribs.

  “And I should still check these.”

  He slipped his hand under my shirt and gently tested the tension in the bandages, resting his hand on the small of my back before slipping away.

  Lacy was waiting on the corner by her dorm as I drove into UCLA. I hadn’t seen her since she left for school. I half expected her to have changed, but on seeing her I quickly realized that she had already grown up way beyond her years before she ever set foot on campus.

  “I guess this couldn’t wait,” she said as we drove away.

  I shook my head. “I really need to see if it’s there, and I need to do it with you.”

  “I really need to be back here in a couple of hours.”

  I nodded that she would be.

  Lacy started to say something, then stopped. “Why do you need to see it now? Something’s happened, hasn’t it? It’s why you didn’t call last night. You didn’t call the night before, either.”

  We had promised we would talk every night when she left; this was only her first week in school and I had blown it.

  “I thought it was a little much to call every night,” I said, breaking the second promise we had made to each other: no more lies.

  “It’s more than that. You have that look.”

  So much for lies.

  “What look?”

  Lacy stared at me the way a parent would at a teenager they knew was lying.

  “What happened?”

  I would have to tell her something.

  “An arrest went badly last night. LAPD killed our suspect as we were trying to take him in.”

  I pulled onto Sunset and headed toward the 405, trying to decide how much to tell her. A part of me still wanted to protect her from the uglier bits of the world, even though she already knew more about that darkness than most people ever would in a lifetime.

  “I’m okay,” I said. “Tell me about college.”

  As we drove over the pass to the valley she told me about her classes, the dorm, her roommate, the food, and the number of men who had already hit on her. I wanted her to be like every other college kid. But I knew she wasn’t.

  “No matter how hard I try, I know I’m different from everyone else,” she said. “I haven’t figured out how to tell a guy on the first date about being kidnapped and having a bomb strapped around my neck.”

  She wasn’t searching for sympathy. She knew I understood. It was simply her reality—our reality. The idea of burdening her with any more right now seemed too much. The news about what kind of man my father was or wasn’t, or if he was even alive, could wait, at least until I knew what that news was.

  There was still no electricity in the neighborhood when we reached the bottom of Mariposa. As I started up the street past my neighbors’ homes, the moonlight was just bright enough to illuminate what was no longer there. No walls on t
his lot, no roof on that one, nothing more than ash and brick on another, a lone picture window standing intact, smoke rising out of the charred rubble around it. Neither of us said a word.

  I made the gentle curve and my lights swept the end of the cul-de-sac. The house to the north of ours had been reduced to a chimney and a water heater lying on its side. A house across the street was intact except for the south wall, which was gone, the wood frame exposed like the bones on the back of a hand. I pulled to a stop in my driveway and got out, leaving the headlights on. A charred lemon tree next door filled the air with a bitter citrus scent.

  Lacy walked around to my side of the car and took my hand.

  “I didn’t think I would care this much,” she said softly.

  The hillside of ivy sloping down to the street had been burned down to the roots. The grass was little more than a blanket of ash. I stopped on the front walk as my heart began to pound in my chest. I thought I had prepared myself for any possibility, but I was wrong. The fire had swept around the house, leaving it untouched.

  I walked back to the car, turned off the headlights, and removed a flashlight. At the front door I stood holding the key in my hand, staring at the lock for nearly a minute before slipping it into the slot.

  Why, of all the houses on the block, would ours still be standing? I couldn’t imagine. It certainly wasn’t because what had taken place here over the years merited a level of grace that my neighbors didn’t deserve. The pile of rubble next door belonged to a couple with two children in grade school. The mother was a teacher, the father an emergency room doctor. But it did nothing to protect them. The doctor would understand that. He saw it every day, just as I did. The good are hurt, and even die, while the bad walk away. It would be more difficult for his wife. The teacher in her would try to find the fairness in it so she could understand it. And the more she questioned it, the less sense it would make.

  “Doesn’t seem . . .” Lacy started to say but stopped.

  I pushed open the door and we stepped into the entryway. Fine particles of what appeared to be ash drifted on air currents in the middle of the room. The air tasted almost metallic and was as lifeless as the surrounding landscape. The room was covered in powdery gray ash.