Never Fear

by Scott Frost

  Pearce turned and looked at me. “You sure about that?”

  “Yes.”

  He took a deep breath. “It’s been my experience that few people really know what they think they know.”

  He looked back out toward the body, then reached into the bag and removed the wallet and opened it. Cross’s investigator’s badge was on one side, his ID on the other.

  “Looks like you’re right, Detective,” he said.

  “I want to look at the body,” I said.

  He gestured with his hand toward the river. “You want to walk in that shit, be my guest. Don’t touch anything. We haven’t determined if this is a suicide or a homicide.”

  The ranger handed Harrison and me hip boots and we slipped them on and made our way across the dark water. With each step, thick clouds of mud rose around our feet, creating a slick that began to flow downstream. We reached the body, which was hung up and twisted around several thin willows.

  His skin appeared unnaturally white against the dark water. Cross’s face lay half submerged, one dull eye staring upstream. A great blue heron stood in the water on the opposite side of the river, staring at us as if we were the objects of mistrust.

  I examined him as best I could in the water’s flow. There was bruising and a number of cuts on his face and neck, a contact bullet wound in front of the left ear.

  “I’ve never known a suicide to beat himself first,” I said.

  I turned and looked over to the riverbank.

  “Cross put up a fight at his house,” Harrison said.

  I nodded.

  “He lost,” I said.

  “This is why Hazzard told us to ‘forget Cross,’ ” Harrison said. “LAPD dragged him kicking and fighting from his house after rescuing Fleming, put a bullet in his head, and dumped him off the bridge.”

  “None of which we can prove because Candice Fleming never saw anyone other than Hazzard.”

  “It still doesn’t answer the question of why here of all places,” Harrison said.

  “No,” I said, looking at Pearce on the riverbank. “But there is a reason, and I imagine he’ll let us know.”

  I took one last look at the body, then turned and walked back to the riverbank, following the rope tied around Cross’s waist; the slick of mud drifting downstream now glistened from the oil we had kicked up.

  “You have an explanation for the bruising on his face and neck?” I asked.

  Pearce stared at the river without making eye contact with me.

  “The fall from the bridge did that,” he said.

  “You find the weapon?”

  He shook his head. “Not yet, but I bet we do.”

  “This was no suicide, Pearce,” I said.

  “Well, if you’re right, we have a strong suspect, with motive, and a long history with this river and the victim.”

  He motioned toward another detective, who reached into his pocket and handed Pearce a sheet of paper. “I think you may even be familiar with him.”

  He handed Harrison the sheet. It was a copy of my father’s New York driver’s license.

  “You can keep that, we have plenty,” Pearce said. “I believe his real name is Manning, not Powell.”

  “I guess we know now why they put him here,” Harrison said.

  I turned to Pearce. “If you think this will keep me quiet, you’re wrong.”

  “I’m just doing my job, Lieutenant.”

  “Old-fashioned police work.”

  He nodded. “That’s exactly what it is.”

  “Candice Fleming knows there were other people at Cross’s house. The district attorney might like to hear about that.”

  “Really? Because I was under the impression that she had been rescued by the lone work of a brave policeman’s final act before tragically taking his own life. What happened before that doesn’t really matter.”

  “It doesn’t work that way,” I said.

  Pearce stared into the swirling eddies of black water drifting along the edge of the river. “Of course it does; it’s always worked that way, Lieutenant. The guilty have been punished, Cross is dead, Hazzard’s dead. What more can you ask from a system? Go back to Pasadena.”

  I looked out as Cross’s twisted form half submerged in the water.

  “This isn’t the system,” I said.

  Pearce’s phone beeped and he answered. After a few quick words he held it out to me. “The district attorney’s office would like to speak with you.”

  I took the phone. “Delillo.”

  “This is Assistant Chief Deputy District Attorney Fuentes, Lieutenant. This is a courtesy call; the next one I make won’t be. If you continue to interfere in any way with an an ongoing LAPD investigation, you will be charged with obstruction and I will proceed with whatever investigation, in whatever direction, is necessary to bring this mess to a close. Do we understand each other?”

  “Perfectly.”

  “We didn’t create this, Lieutenant, but we are putting an end to it.”

  I handed the phone back to Pearce.

  “It is the system, Lieutenant,” Pearce said.

  “This isn’t over,” I said.

  He glanced at the copy of my father’s New York license in Harrison’s hand, then back out at the body.

  “It is for me,” Pearce said. “The rest is up to you.”

  Harrison and I walked back along the river as the eastern sky above the San Gabriels began to show the hint of the coming dawn. Near the gate where my brother had died, we stopped and looked back upstream. Both my brother and his killer had been found in the one section of river that flows over actual rocks and sand as if it were a wild living thing, but it wasn’t. And the more the river was made to look natural, the greater the sense of loss of what might have been, or once was.

  If Pearce was right and it was over for him, then Hazzard was equally as right and it wasn’t over for me.

  “If I don’t walk away, they’ll pin this on my father,” I said.

  Harrison looked at me for a moment and nodded. “Then you walk away from this.”

  “The guilty have been punished,” I said.

  “Something like that.”

  I shook my head. “Do you remember what Hazzard said about my father?”

  Harrison shook his head. “No.”

  “He’s yours now. Never let him slip away . . . ever.”

  I looked out into the darkness at the last few spots of fire still burning in the distant mountains.

  “Eighteen years ago my father strangled and raped two young women on the banks of this river. And now he’s my responsibility. . . . How do I walk away from that?”

  45

  I laid out the files of my father’s history that Hazzard had gathered in the same room where Danny’s map still covered an entire wall. Fourteen different names in eighteen years. An equal number of cities. He had a beard and glasses in one place, he was gray-haired and clean-shaven in another. Each face slightly different from the one before. In each picture he stared straight into the camera as if testing its ability to see who he really was.

  I had known only three different faces, flickering images on a TV screen, but I understood now that they were probably no closer to the real person than the faint memories of the Richard Widmark look-alike.

  For a year in each place he would live quietly in the shadows, and then he would step out into the light, and Hazzard would find him, and it would start over. The pages on the table were the journal chronicling it all.

  “Why did he come back here?” I said. “It wasn’t just to walk in his granddaughter’s room. Not after this many years. It couldn’t have been to prove himself innocent of one of three murders. It wasn’t to reach out to his son or me. Something brought him back here.”

  Harrison stared at the files laid out in a row, then looked up at Danny’s map. “Maybe he had to.”

  I looked at Harrison and shook my head.

  “Gravity,” Harrison said. “He was pulled back.”


  “By what he did?”

  Harrison nodded. “Or didn’t do.”

  “A reckoning.”

  “Maybe.”

  I walked over to the window and looked out at the mountains. Toward the east a few wisps of smoke rose straight up like snuffed-out candles into the bright blue sky. We had spent the morning and now much of the afternoon going through websites and working the phones to the theaters in and around Los Angeles, looking for a match with any of the names my father had used in the past. We found nothing. We did the same with all the acting schools and came away with the same result. If he had stepped out of the shadows since returning to L.A., we had missed it, or were looking in the wrong places.

  “What day of the week is it?” I asked.

  Harrison had to think for a moment. “It’s Sunday.”

  It had been a week since that call from the coroner’s office. Tomorrow they would release the body to me and I would make plans to bury a brother I never knew.

  “What if my father came back for another reason?” I said.

  Harrison studied me for a moment, filling in the rest of what I was thinking. “To be Thomas Manning again?”

  I nodded.

  “Which one?”

  “Maybe there is only one,” I said.

  “Hazzard never proved your father was guilty of killing those two young women.”

  “He couldn’t. It would have implicated him in what Cross did to Victoria Fisher. But he was still a cop, so he did the next best thing—tracked him for eighteen years.”

  I looked at the line of different men my father had taken refuge in.

  “There could be a thousand reasons for his return,” Harrison said.

  “But none of them is more compelling than his own history,” I said.

  “I’ll run a search against all sexual-assault complaints since he returned,” Harrison said. “If there’s a match for a theater or an acting school, you have your answer.”

  I nodded. Harrison looked as if he was about to say something, but he didn’t and started to leave the room.

  “What?” I asked.

  He hesitated for just an instant. “If we come up with nothing—no assaults, no complaints—are you sure you still want to find him?”

  In the past week I had imagined standing in front him dozens of times, and each time when it came to the moment to confront him, I remained silent.

  I nodded. “I’m sure.”

  “Why? You can’t arrest him or charge him with anything . . . and you can’t go back and fix the past just because it’s broken.” Harrison’s eyes fixed on mine for a moment. “I have a little bit of experience with this.”

  “I want him to understand that I know who he is, that I know the names of Alice and Jenny and every one of those women who stepped on that stage with him thinking he was a teacher, someone they could trust.”

  We looked at each other in silence for a moment.

  “It’s more than that,” Harrison said.

  I nodded. “He has to know that I remember what the view is from inside a closet. And that I’m no longer afraid.”

  There was a knock on the door and Traver stepped in, holding a notepad.

  “Maybe I got something,” Traver said.

  “Go on.”

  He walked over to the table and looked at the papers. “When we didn’t get a match on any of these names I started trying to match actors’ bios and places where they had performed in the past against all these different cities.”

  “You found something?”

  “There are a dozen actors who match a few of the cities. Two performed in four, another in five, all three women. But one of them performed in eight of the fourteen cities your father was in. Those seemed like good odds.”

  "You have a name?”

  Traver nodded. “The name he used is Brooks.”

  “Where’s the theater?”

  “Venice.”

  Both Harrison and I started moving toward the door.

  “There’s more,” Traver said, and we stopped.

  “According to the theater director, a little over two weeks ago Brooks lost his belongings in a fire.”

  “That would be about when Danny found him and tore the apartment to pieces,” Harrison said.

  “An assistant stage manager apparently put him up in an extra room in her house.”

  I felt the same flush of blood I had felt when I first stepped back into my childhood home.

  “She’s a woman,” I said.

  Traver nodded, and my heart began to beat faster.

  “Did he describe her?” I asked.

  “Mid-thirties, with long blond hair, pretty. According to the director, she’s missed the last two performances.”

  “Why?”

  “She left a message about not feeling well, but they haven’t heard from her since. That was over two days ago.”

  “What’s her name?”

  Traver tore a sheet from the notepad and held it out to me. “That’s her address. She lives down by the beach.”

  I looked at the name and then looked at Harrison. “Her first name is Jenny.”

  46

  “It could be nothing more than a coincidence,” Harrison said as we drove west on the 10 toward the beach. He didn’t believe it any more than I did, but I wanted to.

  Eighteen years ago a young woman named Jenny Roberts stayed late after an acting class to work on a scene with my father. He ripped open her shirt and dragged her across the stage. A month later she was dead.

  In the world that exists within the confines of crime-scene tape, coincidence doesn’t exist.

  Passing over the 405, the thick gray clouds of a marine layer returned for the first time since the fires had begun to burn. The temperature dropped ten degrees and with each mile we drove the light failed just a little more until it seemed we had driven straight into a late winter afternoon instead of the height of fire season.

  We exited on Fourth and headed south on Main. Harrison knew the area. It was the one section of Venice where the old canals had been restored. One side of each house fronts the street, the other the canal.

  As we drove into the neighborhood the fresh smell of the ocean that filled the rest of the beach communities became heavier, carrying the scent of the decaying sea life that dies from lack of oxygen in the water.

  “The tide can’t flush it,” Harrison said. “It always reminds me of opening the door to a shuttered house.”

  We stopped on Howland in front of a small bungalow that was almost entirely hidden by lush tropical vegetation. A small picket fence painted bright yellow wrapped around the back of the property. The front door was bright blue, though even from the street I could see the paint had faded and chipped.

  We stepped through the front gate and started toward the door. Two copies of the Times lay on the front walk. Half a dozen flyers for takeout were spread across the front step.

  Behind the thick banana plants the front windows all appeared to have the shades drawn. Harrison rang the bell, and when there was no response he knocked heavily on the door.

  “Miss Lowe, this is the police,” Harrison said, but there was still no response.

  “See if we can find an open window,” I said, and started around the side.

  The windows on the east were closed as tight as those at the front. On the canal side a tall row of bird-of -paradise obscured the house from the waterway. The back door was painted the same yellow as the picket fence, but it, too, seemed dulled. A small arched window in the door appeared to offer the only view inside.

  I looked in the window. A thin blade of faint light cut across the room from one of the windows on the west side of the house, but the rest of the interior was nearly black with darkness.

  “There’s something on the floor in the center of the room,” I said.

  My eyes began to adjust and I saw the thin line of what looked like a snake coiled on the floor.

  “Force the door,” I said.

  O
n Harrison’s second kick the lock gave way and the door swung in. In the center of the room, light from the open door revealed several long coils of rope lying on the hardwood floor.

  “Miss Lowe . . . Jenny, this is the police,” I called out, but there was no response.

  Harrison pulled out his weapon and flicked on the light.

  “Look at the windows,” he said.

  An attempt had been made to secure them shut by tying one end of a length of rope to the window’s handle and the other to a heavy piece of furniture pushed up against the wall.

  “She’s trying to keep something or someone from getting in,” Harrison said. “It doesn’t make any sense. All you have to do is break the glass and cut the rope.”

  I looked around the room and could feel fear as if it were still present.

  “It makes sense if you’re panicking,” I said.

  I stepped across the room to the entrance to the kitchen. A half-eaten meal sat on the table.

  “This is days old,” I said.

  A shattered wineglass lay on the floor, the dried wine spread out in a pattern as if it had been thrown.

  “One broken wineglass. Nothing else is out of place.”

  I walked over to the windows by the table, which had been secured like the others, only this time tied to the heating grate in the floor. My eyes drifted over the rest of the room, trying to find something that might reveal what had happened. The dead bolt on the inside of the door required a key to lock and unlock it. On the kitchen counter a butcher-block knife holder sat empty.

  “We’re missing something,” I said.

  I stared at it for a moment, then began opening the kitchen drawers one at a time, going through the silverware, plastics, teas, spices, towels, everything just as you would expect in a kitchen.

  “There’re no knives here. Nothing sharper than a butter knife,” I said.

  The creak of a floorboard somewhere in the house drew our attention. I slipped my Glock out of the holster and stepped into the hallway. The sound was coming from behind the door at the far end.

  We eased along the wall to the door and took positions on either side and listened. It wasn’t a floorboard that was creaking, it was a mechanical sound that seemed familiar but I couldn’t place it.