Never Fear

by Scott Frost

“Then why are you burning your things?”

  A piece of glass cracked under Harrison’s foot and Hazzard pressed his weight against the door and raised the barrel of his gun into the opening a few inches from my face.

  “Tell your partner to stop,” Hazzard yelled.

  Harrison froze.

  “You’re not a killer,” I said. “You just watch people die so you can go on with your quiet life of collecting baseballs and hockey sticks.”

  I couldn’t see Hazzard’s face anymore, but I could hear his breathing on the other side of the door, each breath more labored than the last.

  “Walk away, Lieutenant,” he said softly.

  “I can’t.”

  Harrison started to move again toward the door.

  “You used an innocent man to hide Fisher’s murder. You used my father,” I said. “You were Danny’s dark angel, pointing him in the wrong direction.”

  “You don’t want to know what I know,” Hazzard said. “Turn around and walk away.”

  “What don’t I want to know?” I said.

  “Leave, Lieutenant,” Hazzard said.

  “I’m not moving,” I said. “It all stops right here, right now.”

  “It’s not going to stop,” Hazzard said.

  “What the hell do you know, Detective?” I yelled.

  “Please,” he whispered.

  “What do you know?”

  Hazzard exhaled heavily and cried out.

  “Everything! . . . I know who he was in San Francisco, in Seattle, Portland. His name was Johnson in Minneapolis; Fisk in Philadelphia. He sold men’s clothes in Cleveland. He acted in little theaters in Dallas, Chicago, and New York, and a dozen other cities where no one knew him except for me, because I never let it go. I spent years tracking credit cards and money orders, and driver’s license applications. And before he ever touched another woman in any of those cities, I would make a phone call, and the next day a policeman would pay him a visit, and he would move on to find another shadow to hide in until I found him there, too.”

  A voice in my head began to say, Don’t, don’t, don’t, as I felt myself being dragged back into a dark closet full of nightmares.

  “My father,” I said.

  “Do you even remember the first two victims’ names?” Hazzard said.

  “Alice and Jenny.”

  He took a heavy breath.

  “You should have walked away,” Hazzard said.

  I shook my head.

  “You’re not going to do this to me,” I said.

  “I didn’t do this, he did.”

  “You can prove my father killed those women?”

  “I don’t have to prove it. I stopped him from killing again, that’s all that matters,” Hazzard said.

  “Where’s Cross?”

  “Forget Cross. It’s all here. I give you back your father. He’s yours now. Never let him slip away, never let him go. Do you understand? Never.”

  “No, I don’t understand. What do you mean?” I said.

  In the distance I heard the sound of sirens approaching.

  “I was a cop,” Hazzard said.

  “What the hell have you done?” I yelled.

  I felt Hazzard’s weight shift against the door as he looked around the edge of the door into my eyes.

  “I was a great cop,” Hazzard said.

  "No,” I started to yell as Hazzard lifted his gun toward his head.

  43

  Harrison was moving toward the door when I felt the heat of the concussion and Hazzard’s blood hit the door frame. He dropped straight down, his bulk hitting the floor with such force it seemed to shake the entire house.

  I staggered back from the doorway and Harrison caught me as I fell to the floor. For a moment the world seemed suspended in that moment of silence at a dinner when no one knows what to say next. My right ear was ringing from the sound of the gunshot as Harrison looked down at me, frantically saying something that I couldn’t understand.

  “Are you hit? Are you hit?”

  I reached up and touched the moisture on the side of my face and saw my fingers covered in blood.

  “No, it’s not mine.”

  “You’re sure?” Harrison asked, moving his hands over my shoulder and down my arm that had been trapped in the door.

  I nodded. “Do we need to call paramedics?”

  Harrison rose and forced open the door and looked inside, then rushed across the hall to the bathroom and came back with a towel, knelt down, and began to wipe the blood off my face.

  “He’s gone,” Harrison said.

  The ringing in my right ear began to subside, replaced by a dull silence. I tried to run back through what Hazzard had said.

  “He said, ‘It’s all here.’ What did he mean by that?”

  “I think he was talking about inside that room.”

  I got to my feet and stepped into the room. Hazzard lay facedown in a pool of blood that was slowly soaking into the carpet. A nickel-plated .38 revolver, the kind of old-school gun carried by older detectives, still rested in his hand.

  I turned and looked around the room, then retrieved my gun from where Hazzard had thrown it. A large table with documents spread out across it was against the far wall. Next to that were several file cabinets. On the wall above the table was a large map of the United States, red pushpins spread across the entire country in no apparent pattern.

  “Portland, Seattle, Dallas, Minneapolis, Cleveland.”

  I looked at Harrison.

  “It’s all here,” I said.

  “It’s like the room used by a task force,” Harrison said, then he picked up a folder marked GAVIN.

  He opened it and pulled out a sheet of paper and handed it to me. It was a surveillance report for the day my brother was killed. It was from a Hotmail account and listed the sender as Andi James, Sloan Investigations.

  “He hired James to follow Gavin when he learned they had discovered something. He alerted Cross to the situation and Cross took matters into his own hands.”

  I ran through the details of my brother’s movements on his last day, and just as James had told us, she lost contact with the subject at County USC.

  “He was already way ahead of us when we met him that first time in this house,” Harrison said.

  “He was ahead of us long before that,” I said, stepping over to the table.

  Laid out in neat, straight rows were more than a dozen thin files, all labeled with a different name and a different city. I picked one up.

  “Fisk, Philadelphia.”

  I opened the file. The top sheet was a copy of a driver’s license.

  “Edward Fisk, 1628 Fourteenth Street South. This is four years old.”

  The only other thing inside the file was a program from a theater company.

  "The Iceman Cometh, by Eugene O’Neill.”

  I handed it to Harrison and he opened it, looked it over. “Edward Fisk as Harry Hope.”

  I looked at the names and cities and realized that my father was all of them. More than a dozen different names, in a dozen cities. I started looking in the files one after the other, city after city. A year and two months in Portland. The same in Dallas. A year and four months in Minneapolis. And in each city the face on the driver’s license grew a little more weary, the lines a little deeper.

  “He’s been hiding from Hazzard for eighteen years,” I said.

  Harrison stepped over and picked up one of the files.

  “Andrew Keller, 3416 Puente Drive, Dallas. A Sam Shepard play.”

  Harrison stared at it for a moment, then looked over at Hazzard lying on the floor. “In each place he’s there for a little over a year before Hazzard found him.”

  I looked over the table full of the people my father had lived as. On the wall were photographs of the first two victims of the River Killer, Jenny Roberts and Alice Lundholm. I stared at them for a moment, not wanting to believe what I was looking at, what I had feared from the moment this all began and the memorie
s started crawling out of their dark hiding place.

  “My father killed these two women. And Hazzard has spent the last eighteen years following him to make sure he never killed again.”

  I looked at Harrison. “My father was the River Killer.”

  For the first time since I had met him, Harrison appeared to be at a loss for words. I looked up at the map, trying to find my way back to the police work that would put all this madness back within the safe confines of the crime-scene tape that separates this job from the rest of the world. Work it. Find something in this nightmare to hold on to.

  “There wasn’t a file for Los Angeles, or a pin in the map,” I said.

  “He hadn’t found him here yet. Why?”

  “He was still using his last license from New York.”

  “Which would have made it even easier to track him. Why didn’t Hazzard find him?”

  Harrison worked it for a moment, his eyes going over the room, stopping on one of the file cabinets marked THEATER LISTING.

  “He hasn’t been in a play yet,” Harrison said.

  I looked across the table at the different faces of my father. How many secrets had he left behind with a different name? Was there another half sibling in one of these cities asking the same questions I had for thirty years about our father?

  “Collect all these. I don’t want to lose them to LAPD.”

  I took a breath but could not get air into my lungs. I realized the taste of spent gunpowder was on my lips, and the smell of blood was beginning to fill the room. I rushed past Hazzard’s body on the floor as fast as I could and didn’t stop until I stepped outside into the night air.

  A moment later Harrison stepped outside carrying a stack of folders. The sirens we had heard before were now coming up the block. Candice Fleming was sitting in the front seat of my car staring out the window at me.

  “When she’s able to talk more, she should be able confirm Cross as the one who abducted her,” I said.

  “But where is he?” Harrison said.

  Looking back through the house I could see that Hazzard’s bonfire had burned down and was now little more than ashes.

  “Cross is dead or is about to be.”

  “If Hazzard is right,” Harrison said.

  “Did you see anything in that room to suggest he was wrong?”

  Harrison looked at me for a moment. “No.”

  The flashing lights of several squad cars came around the corner.

  “Check every theater in southern California that has either opened a play in the last week or is going to this weekend. Match the cast list against the name Powell, and then every name in those files.”

  “I’ll get it done,” Harrison said.

  The two squads slid to a stop and the doors flew open.

  “LAPD,” Harrison said.

  We looked at each other for a moment as the officers took positions behind the doors with their weapons raised.

  “I hope they’re here to help,” Harrison said.

  44

  “He was pulling me by the hair when I heard what sounded like a car accident,” Candice Fleming said. She was sitting on the couch in my office, her son wrapped around her, sound asleep.

  We had left Hazzard’s in the hands of LAPD Devonshire division and the coroner and returned to Pasadena to reunite her with her son.

  “Then I heard the sound of breaking glass and he let go of me,” she said.

  “Cross,” I said.

  Fleming nodded. “There was shouting after that, and someone picked me up and I was carried outside and put in a truck.”

  “That was Hazzard,” I said.

  “He was the one driving when I took the blindfold off. I don’t know if he was the one who carried me. It could have been him.”

  “You saw no one else?” asked Chief Chavez, who was sitting on the edge of my desk.

  She shook her head. “No, but I’m certain it was more than one person who got me out of that house.”

  “But you saw no faces, heard no voices that you could identify?” I said.

  She took a breath and looked down at her son. “No.”

  I looked at Chavez. He looked more tired than I had ever seen him. In his world, cops were the good guys, and he had spent a career making sure that it was the truth in Pasadena. That cops, even ones so historically prone to excess as LAPD, had gone so far over the line tore him apart inside.

  “And you never saw Cross after that?” Chavez asked.

  Fleming shook her head. “I don’t know what happened to him.”

  Chavez stepped over from the desk and placed his big powerful hand on Fleming’s sleeping son’s head like it was a talisman that could lead him back to the world where right and wrong were separated by a cleanly discernible line.

  “We’ll keep you here until we’re certain you’re safe,” he said.

  Fleming smiled as if she had just been told a very old and familiar joke.

  “How will you know that, exactly?” she asked.

  We stepped out the door, leaving Fleming alone with her son.

  “Five people are dead because Cross strangled a kid twenty years ago, and then a law clerk in the DA’s office discovered it,” Chavez said.

  I nodded.

  “Hazzard sent letters to Danny about my father to throw him off the trail—his ‘dark angel.’ My father came back to town, Danny found him and tore his apartment to pieces. My father went to Gavin, and Gavin went to Hazzard thinking the cops were harassing his client. Hazzard hired Andi James to follow Gavin, and Cross followed them both. When Gavin and my brother found the witness deposition Fisher took, it all began to spin out of control.”

  “And Hazzard did nothing as Cross killed three people and was responsible for the deaths of two others, ” Chavez said.

  “If he had, it would have exposed his involvement in the cover-up of the other murders.”

  “What about LAPD?” Chavez said. “How much did they know?”

  “Enough to make an OID investigation into that kid’s death vanish. Maybe enough to help Hazzard save Candice Fleming? Certainly enough to protect themselves.”

  Chavez looked at me for a moment in silence. “And your father?”

  I reluctantly looked into Chavez’s eyes. “My father took the lives of two young women.”

  “You’re certain of this?” he asked, tears beginning to form in his eyes.

  “I can’t prove it,” I said. “But for eighteen years Hazzard believed every morning, every night, and every time he looked in the mirror that he had let a killer walk away.”

  Harrison stepped over from his desk in the squad room holding a phone. “I think you need to take this.”

  I glanced at my watch; it was nearly three-thirty in the morning

  “Larson,” Harrison said. “The IA officer who met us in Chinatown.”

  I took the phone and answered. “It’s late, Detective, even for IA.”

  “A citizen reported that they saw a body fall into the river from the Glendale Avenue Bridge. The caller said they believed they saw an unmarked police car drive away from the scene. I thought that might interest you.”

  “Why would that interest me?” I said.

  “Because all good things come to an end.”

  Before I could say another word the line went dead.

  At four A.M. we pulled off the 2 freeway and stopped on the Fletcher Street Bridge over the L.A. River. The wind that had been a near constant presence since the morning I learned I had a brother had finally stopped. The sound of water rippling over the rocks and vegetation of the riverbed had replaced the din of wind and traffic. From the sidewalk we could see north nearly a mile to where the black ribbon of water began its turn around Griffith Park and the Los Feliz Bridge—the section of river where my brother had died.

  “There,” Harrison said, pointing upstream several hundred yards.

  Two white-and-green ranger units were parked at the top of the sloping concrete banks. Beyond them were severa
l LAPD black-and-whites and a number of unmarked squads.

  “Why here?” Harrison said.

  An uneasiness in me seemed to make the ground shudder, and I looked over to the bank where my brother’s life had ended.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  We walked through the gate to the river where my brother’s body had been discovered and walked the quarter mile upstream toward the vehicles. A ranger wearing waders was walking back to the bank of the river. The air held the strong scent of algae and the odd mix of every fluid that drains from L.A.’s streets into the river. A hundred yards from the scene a uniformed officer stopped us and checked our IDs. The detective from Robbery Homicide who had been at the shooting of Lopez and who had ever so subtly threatened us at the courthouse was on the phone at the bottom of the slope next to the water when we approached.

  “Pearce,” I said.

  He looked at me for a moment, said something into the phone, and hung up. “Lieutenant, this has nothing to do with you.”

  “If that’s Cross in the river, I think it does.”

  He looked at me for a moment, then shook his head. “Why would you think an investigator for the DA is laying out there?”

  “The citizen who reported the body seemed to think a police car drove away afterward,” I said.

  Pearce stretched his neck to the side and I heard the crack of vertebrae realigning. “Nothing so unreliable as eyewitnesses, particularly unidentified ones.”

  I looked out into the dark water. Thirty feet out, a body was bent unnaturally around a small cluster of tall willows. The ranger wearing waders had secured a rope around the body to keep it from slipping downstream. He reached out and handed Pearce a plastic bag containing a waterlogged wallet that had belonged to the victim.

  “Hazzard’s dead,” I said.

  Pearce’s jaw tightened, but he continued to stare out toward the body.

  “He put a bullet in his head.”

  Pearce leaned back and looked at the row of trees flanking the fence at the top of the riverbank.

  “Always seems to happen when the wind blows, people hurt themselves . . . others,” Pearce said. “Sometimes they don’t even know why.”

  “Hazzard knew why, Detective. Twenty years ago he helped cover up the murder of an unarmed suspect by his partner, and then the murder of a pretty young law student in the DA’s office who stumbled on the truth.”