SUMMER of FEAR

by T. Jefferson Parker

  "Horseshit," said Parish. His face had reddened. "We can dink around with this guy all we want and not get any closer. I say put a CNI intercept on Russell's phone, keep SWAT ready, and hope for the best. When the picture hits the papers, we'll have the whole county waiting for him to show his face wouldn't negotiate squat with this scumsucker, or give him one inch of ink. We'll look like idiots."

  Winters smiled and nodded, then looked at me. "Monroe, you're his dial-a-date, what do you think?"

  "Play him," I said. "I'm with Wald. The intercept is a bad idea—he assumes we'll do it. Why not build up some trust, keep him comfortable, talking? If he wants to know what Erik is doing, we might be able to work that. He wants me as a mouthpiece. I can stall him, question him, maybe even guide him."

  "Yeah, right," said Parish.

  "He is right," said Wald. "As long as he wants something from us, we should listen."

  "Goddamn classroom bullshit again, Erik."

  Wald smiled. "I didn't see you getting any closer to Cary Clough. If I remember right, you were trying to make latents left by a maid while Clough was sitting outside Madeline Stewart’s art's house with a ski cap, a pair of latex gloves, and hard-on: Get real, Marty. The twentieth century has actually arrived."

  The phone rang. Winters said, "Yeah," "No," and "Get your butt up here," then punched the intercom button and to his secretary to hold all calls for ten minutes. "This is the deal he said. "We go with the CNI intercept, but we keep the communication open. Carfax can rig one he won't be able to hear---he's a magician. We'll work him like Wald says. Erik, you'll need to coach Russell here on what to say—the last thing we want to do is set him off. Keep him hungry for what we can give him. Don't give him too much. Racial fucking cleansing. Man, I came to Orange County to get away from that shit. Martin, I know you'd trade a thousand words for one good fingerprint, and Chet Singer's working his ass off on the physical right now. We'll have a picture of him in the papers by this afternoon. Keep your leashes on.

  "Winters's eyes went to the knock on his door. "Get in here!"

  A disheveled Karen Schultz burst in with a large envelope, from which she pulled a stack of eight-by-ten glossies. "Lopez in Documents says it's the best he can get," she said.

  The photographs, mined from the neighbor's home video, depicted varying enlargements of a bearded Caucasian man behind the wheel of a Ford Taurus. In three of the shots he was looking at the camera; the others had him in profile, face to the road. The color was poor, but the car was clearly white, the man's shirt almost certainly red flannel rolled at the sleeves, and his hair and beard—which met and blended with the interior shadows of the car—were a chaotic mass of red-brown. Sunglasses hid his eyes. His left arm, dangling from the open window, was thick. His stubby fingers, ringless, were spread against the side panel.

  "Exactly what Kimmy Wynn described," said Wald. "Exactly what the general profile indicates."

  I stared for a moment at this man, this image. He looked like some demonic visage pressing in from the darkened background of a Caravaggio canvas. Was it his bearded heft that made him so totemic, or our assumptions regarding what he had done? It didn't matter. But I could feel the hair on the backs of my hands rise and a quick shiver wobble down my back as I contemplated the imprecise rendering of his face. Was it good enough for anyone to ID? That was the question that really mattered.

  "Copies ready?" asked Winters.

  "One hour," said Karen.

  "Stay on it, choose the best and load up the press with them. Get a separate phone-bank number for the public, for anyone with information on the photo. Everything okay out there?"

  "The phone lines are overloaded, so the bank isn't happening yet, the air conditioning is broken, and everybody pissed off at me because Russell here has the inside track."

  "He owes us," said Winters, fixing me with his black eye "Karen, get down to the dungeon and wait for Russell. You know what to hold and what to release. Marty, roll that dub for Monroe."

  Parish lumbered to one of the three TV monitors lined up to the right of Winters's huge desk, pushed a tape into the VC that sat below the middle set, and pushed a button.

  "What you're about to see is the first Citizens' Task Force evidence we can really use," said Winters. "Pure accident. Pure gold. The neighbor—Lisa Nolan—brought it to Wald."

  The screen flickered to life, a front-yard scene, daytime. The date and time appeared in the upper right: July 3, 4:26 p.m. Three kids—two blond girls and a plump red-haired boy—race on the grass of a suburban lawn, chasing each other into a new red four-wheel-drive Jeep. A panting golden retriever followed them in. The camera moved to the front of the truck, holding for a still on the shiny bumper and winch, the dealer advertisement on the plate holder, the entire gleaming front end. A smiling woman of perhaps forty sat on the passenger's side. While she waved, a similar vehicle (but this one was white) tracked past slowly on the street, stopped, and the driver—a pleasant-looking Asian man in his early forties—leaned out the window and said "Rick, you like to trade?"

  "Lisa would kill me, Tran!" yelled the camera operator. The lens dipped as he answered and chuckled. Lisa nodded and pointed a finger at the camera in mock warning. The drive in the white Jeep admired the new red one. A woman was visible beside him, leaning forward so she could see. Three children had their faces pressed to the glass of the rear windows—two small boys and a girl.

  "Recognize the girl in the white Jeep?" asked Parish.

  "Kimmy Wynn," I said.

  "Affirmative," said Wald. "Now take a look at her shadow."

  A white Taurus came into the picture from behind the white Jeep, the driver pulling the car to his left around the stationary Nolans. When the Taurus came around, the driver looked briefly at the camera, then quickly away. He had just turned to profile when his vehicle disappeared off screen.

  Parish stepped forward and rewound the tape for another look. On the second pass, I saw him more clearly: the bulk of his huge body stuffed behind the wheel, his red plaid shirt, his thick tangle of red-brown beard and matted hair, his apparently sunburned face, black sunglasses, and his arm and hand— broad and strong as a peasant's in a Rivera painting—hanging from the window, fingers spread in perfect relief against the white body of the car. Marty played it again. The focus was excellent, and the Taurus passed by about fifty feet from Rick, the cameraman. For almost a full second, this man—very possibly the Midnight Eye—was center screen, a star.

  Winters shook his head at the now-blank screen. "Russell, play up in your Citizens' Task Force article the fact that a citizen— Lisa Nolan—was bright enough to bring this evidence to our Task Force sheriff-adjutant, Erik Wald. We can't stress the need for public input enough. I'm praying somebody can ID this ape from a picture. If not, Chet has some physical that will help. Karen's waiting for you in Autopsy. After that, talk to Chet. After that, get to work and find a way to keep that county out there from going ballistic."

  "He's big, heavy, and strong," said Karen, taking a deep breath and leading me into the autopsy room—the dungeon.

  It smelled as it always did—a sweet putrescence of formaldehyde, blood, flesh. The overhead lights are bright but give no warmth. A chilly draft stays down low, clinging to your knee: easing into your joints. I hated this place, not for what it made me see but for the dreamlike unreality it forced upon me. To work the dungeon was always, for me, a matter of trying to chase detail through the silent, obscuring fog that surrounds the dead. The second I walked in, the ceiling dropped, the light lowered, the walls crept in a few yards. The longer you stay the worse it gets.

  "Six foot two, two ten," she continued once we were inside. "Right-handed is our guess, but it's still just a guess. Yee told me he struck Mr. Wynn too many times to count. There were parts of his gums and a molar stuck to the ceiling."

  I asked her how they got height and weight.

  "Size twelve foot from the blood tracks, a very wide foot, deep imprint. The spray painting
was done from a six-two height. Give or take some, Russell. You know that."

  "Blood type?"

  "None, but we've got his hair."

  "Latents?"

  "Dream on. We've found bits of black acrylic material where we might expect prints."

  "Gloves."

  "Gloves."

  "Semen?"

  "He's kept that to himself, so far. Or put it where we haven't found it."

  We stopped short of a stainless-steel table where examiner Glen Yee was working on Mrs. Wynn. The light seemed to dim again. I breathed deeply the sickening chemical-flesh air. You think it's never going to wash out of your nose hairs. My throat felt sudsy.

  Yee, elbow-deep, looked up at me and actually smiled. "All B-I-T," he said. "Except for Mr. Wynn."

  I nodded. B-I-T—blunt-instrument trauma. It struck me that it shouldn't take a doctor to figure out that much. But I had been wondering how the Eye had managed two adults and two children with nothing but a club.

  I looked at Karen, but she was staring at her own feet, arms crossed, hands clenching and unclenching.

  Yee reached into a plastic basin that stood at the head of the table and held up something with his fingers. Between them was the instantly recognizable shape of a .22 long rifle bullet, slightly mushroomed, lopsided, bent from the middle.

  "One in the head for Mr. Wynn," said Karen without looking up.

  "He didn't really have much of a head left," I said. It wasn't supposed to sound like it did: It was just a numb observation.

  "Oh, he did," said Karen. "It was just spread around the room. The techs brought it back in bags. Dr. Yee used all his skills to put it back together. Shit."

  Karen, blanched and sweating, hustled across the autopsy room to a big stainless sink, into which she vomited. Yee watched her go by, looked at me, and shrugged, giving a small embarrassed smile. He carefully put the bullet back. The air conditioner—which can run by generator in case of power outage—blew a death-heavy breeze by me. The ceiling came down another foot.

  Yee sighed. "I've never seen anything this traumatic in seventeen years, except the car accidents."

  Karen, her back still to us, shook her head, coughed, spat.

  "Did you get a shell to go with that bullet?"

  "CS brought in no shell. Revolver, maybe, or a single shot. He used a knife to disembowel."

  I nodded, staring stupidly into the open carcass of Maia Wynn. "I'm done in here if you are, Karen."

  "Take your time," she said. "Don't rush a good thing.

  "I said, I was done."

  We passed through the sliding doors and down the hallway, the residual sweetness of formaldehyde lessening in my nostrils. Karen Schultz's heels hit the linoleum with a hurried resolve.

  "The bullet we don't release," she said. "We don't wanr him ditching the gun. The knife we don't release—same reason. Don't talk about the wall writing or the tapes—we don't want to put any ideas into any other sick heads. We're trying to get a better description from Kim, but she won't tell us anything all. She gave me what she gave you back at the house, then went mute. I've never in my life felt sorrier for another hum being. All she does is stare."

  "Where is she now?"

  “No."

  "I won't talk to her unless you say I can."

  "Damn straight you won't. Kim's going to live with what happened last night for the rest of her life. She's not here for you to draw quotes from. And leave her out of the Journal. That's the least you can do."

  "Maybe I could—"

  Karen stopped, drove a finger straight at my face, and glared at me with her fatigued green eyes. "No. No. No. You don't talk to Kim. End of discussion. Besides, I've got more for You in Hair and Fiber."

  I put up my hands in mock surrender. "Okay. I'm sorry about all this, Karen."

  "Your sorrow doesn't do the Wynns any good."

  "You're not the only one who feels bad here."

  "Stop, Russ. I know. I know. Please, just stop."

  Karen's eyes were filled with neither rage nor sadness, but with a churning, undisguisable fear. "We should have put together the first two sooner. Maybe this wouldn't have happened."

  The Hair and Fiber section of county Forensic Science Services was presided over by an aging, overweight man named Chester Fairfax Singer—Chet for short. He wore suspenders, white shirts, and bow ties and affected a professorial deliberateness that seemed at first a mark of either arrogance or dullness. He was unhurried, quiet. As I had learned over the years, Chet's bearing wasn't born of arrogance, academic overtraining, or stupidity, but of a broad and genuine gentleness. He was a lifelong bachelor, never mentioned family, seemed to spend virtually all of his free time alone, and though he'd never to my knowledge intimated such a thing to anyone at the county, there was an almost unanimous decision that he was homosexual. But Chet had never been the butt of those secret jokes that follow homosexual men around, especially in the flagrantly hetero world of law enforcement. I think this had less to do with Chester's spotless reputation than with the sense of vulnerability he projected. Chet was a man who'd cried openly when the Challenger went down. Chet was a man who remembered the birthdays of every female who worked in Forensic Services, and honored each with a single white rose—grown himself—in a simple white vase. Chet was a man who arranged to be escorted to his car each night rather than negotiate the dark county-employee parking lot alone. Chet was a man who, despite his sizable quirks, commanded respect.

  IChet was a man, I came to understand, who had a secret life. I never got to know him well enough even to guess what it was.

  He was sitting on a stool at his light table when Karen and I came in, staring through a swing-out magnifier at something in an evidence bag. He set the bag on the glass and rotate his bulk on the stool, offering me his hand. Chet looked pale and nonvigorous as always, though I knew from my days on the Sheriff's that twelve-hour days were standard for him.

  "One of my favorite fellow students," he said, smiling, was part of a phrase he'd mumbled once to me years ago while working on a perplexing rape case, and I'd reminded him of often: "We are students of the incomplete." The other statement of Chet Singer's that I will never forget, he made drunkenly to me over the punch bowl at a department Christmas party back in 1982: "Violence is the secret language of the race, and we, are its translators."

  Chester and Karen exchanged wary looks, and Karen nodded. "Winters says we can talk to him," she said. "I tell him what to leave out."

  "Of course. Well... where to begin?"

  Chet folded his hands over his ball-like midriff and beheld me through the thick lenses of his glasses. "Let me describe picture for you, and you can tell me what you see."

  Chester's "picture" of the Midnight Eye was of a tall, right-handed Caucasian male, age thirty-five to forty, with Iong straight red-brown hair and a full beard of a slightly darker shade.

  "If we use the 'all hairy' description that Kim gave you, we can say his hair is unkempt—wild-looking," said Chet. "Three of the five hair samples are nearly eight inches long. They contain some polymers I suspect are a fixative of some kind. Very thick in places."

  "Hair-spray?" I asked "Apparently."

  "A genuine sweetheart," said Karen. Karen was still uncharacteristically pale, the freckles on her nose still standing out in relief against the white skin.

  Chet nodded. "Dina can't match the genetic print of the hair with a blood sample from a suspect unless there's root tissue connected to the follicle. So far, I've found none. I don't feel that we're in a strong position right now for typing."

  "And we've got no suspect," I said.

  "I remain an optimist," said Chester. "Though at times, I don't know why."

  According to footprints left in the Ellisons' vegetable garden—through which the Eye had walked—the man would have been wearing size twelve shoes.

  "Now, the soils."

  The soil was a mixture of decomposed granite and beach sand, and the CS techs had found it in
various locations in all three scenes—the Fernandez apartment, the Ellisons' suburban home, the Wynn's big custom house. An alert CSI had checked the blood smears on the walls at the Wynns' and found the sand granules mixed with the blood, along with acrylic fibers most likely originating from the Eye's gloves. A small mound of the granite/sand mix had been found on the floor next to Shareen Ellison's side of the bed. The word mound told me how it got there.

  "Why a mound?" Chet asked me.

  "He knelt down to look at Mrs. Ellison before he attacked—one knee up, one down. The sand came out when his cuff emptied."

  "How did it get into his cuff to begin with?"

  "The beach. It's beach sand, right?"

  "Correct."

  Chester's next finding was contrary to what Kim had described, though her mistake was understandable. The murder weapon was not a baseball bat at all, but a heavy length relatively soft steel alloy, commonly used to make standard irrigation pipe. Yee had found microscopic shards of the metal in the skulls of Mr. Ellison, both Wynn adults, and Sid Fernande He found no wood or aluminum that would indicate a sporting bat. From the relatively controlled fury that the Eye had employed on his first three victims—the Fernandezes and Cedrick Ellison—Yee had been able to establish that one end of the pipe was fitted with what was probably a standard threaded cap, giving the weapon a rounded rather than a sharp edge. "I suspect that the other end is capped also," said Chet, "Or at least drilled."

  I waited, as did Karen. Chet had the same smug, almost flirtatious look that he always got when he'd made a tough leap and landed squarely.

  "Picture this," Chet continued. "He must find a way in the homes. In the Fernandez apartment, he was lucky and used an open door. At the Ellisons', he climbed through a window At the Wynns', he cut a five-foot slot through the screen-door mesh and slipped through it. We must assume he arrived at all three scenes by car or motorcycle—surely he can't cover so much of the county by foot and not be noticed—so in each case he must've walked from the vehicle to the home."