Burning Man

by Alan Russell

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Text copyright © 2012 Alan Russell

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Thomas & Mercer

  P.O. Box 400818

  Las Vegas, NV 89140

  ISBN-13: 9781612186092

  ISBN-10: 1612186092

  To Cynthia,

  Who never gives up.

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE: HELLFIRE AND DOGS OF WAR

  CHAPTER 1: NOBODY EXPECTS THE SPANISH INQUISITION

  CHAPTER 2: HAIL TO THE CHIEF

  CHAPTER 3: A ROSE BY ANY OTHER NAME

  CHAPTER 4: THE CRY IN THE WILDERNESS

  CHAPTER 5: CROSS-IMAGING

  CHAPTER 6: THE AGENCY AND THE ECSTASY

  CHAPTER 7: TOWER OF BABEL, TOWER OF HOPE

  CHAPTER 8: HIS PERSONALIZED LICENSE PLATE SAYS “SHAMAN”

  CHAPTER 9: A LITTLE HELP FROM MY FRIENDS

  CHAPTER 10: LA SAINTS AND LA AIN’TS

  CHAPTER 11: TOTALLY FUBAR

  CHAPTER 12: APPROVED BY THE VATICAN

  CHAPTER 13: DO NOT RESUSCITATE

  CHAPTER 14: NOT SO SAINT QUENTIN AS EXPLAINED BY THE DEVIL

  CHAPTER 15: SO SOON DONE, WHY WERE YOU BEGUN?

  CHAPTER 16: LIAR, LIAR, PANTS ON FIRE

  CHAPTER 17: THE EAGLE HAS LANDED

  CHAPTER 18: SCARECROW’S CONFIDENTIAL

  CHAPTER 19: MAKE-UP SECTS

  CHAPTER 20: NOT EVEN GOD CAN FIND ME

  CHAPTER 21: GONE WITH THE WIND

  CHAPTER 22: GRAVE CONFESSIONS

  CHAPTER 23: SURELY THERE IS A FUTURE

  CHAPTER 24: JUST ANOTHER BRICK IN THE WALL

  EPILOGUE: “867-5309/JENNY”

  ALSO BY ALAN RUSSELL

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  PROLOGUE:

  HELLFIRE AND DOGS OF WAR

  Even before I pressed down hard on the gas, Sirius was aware that something was up. The dog knew me better than I knew myself. The dividing window between us was open, and he pushed me with his muzzle. Sometimes he begs treats off me that way, but he wasn’t looking for a handout this time.

  “Whaduya want?” I asked in a Brooklyn accent three thousand miles removed from my own.

  He rested his muzzle on my shoulder and I felt his hot breath on my neck. “Doggy breath,” I told him, but he wasn’t shamed at all.

  “All right,” I said. “It could be a big call, a really big call. This might be your chance to make Rin Tin Tin look like a pussy.”

  I moved my head to get a look at him, and he took that as an invitation to give me a lick.

  “Cops don’t kiss other cops,” I told him, wiping away his slobber.

  His eyes were sparkling. That’s what Jenny noticed when I first brought him home. “Look at his sparkling eyes,” she said. “They look like little stars.”

  “Twinkle, twinkle,” I had said to her.

  “What’s his name?” she asked.

  The dog had kept his reserve with me for most of our first day together, but from the moment he and Jenny met they acted as if they were twins separated at birth.

  “His name is Serle,” I said, curling my lip and using my most authoritarian German accent.

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Armed,” I said, “as in armed and dangerous.”

  The way he was already cuddled up in Jenny’s arms didn’t make him look very dangerous. “That won’t do,” she said. “His name is Sirius.”

  “You can’t be serious?”

  Jenny ignored me. The dog’s ears had perked up when she dubbed him Sirius, no doubt because it sounded like Serle. “Just look at your sparkling eyes, Sirius,” Jenny had said.

  She named him after the Dog Star, the brightest star in the night sky. It wasn’t a name exactly in keeping with LA’s furry finest. His peers had names like Duke, Jake, Rico, Bravo, Tango, and, of course, Joe Friday.

  The dog nudged me again. The traffic was beginning to slow us down and Sirius was anticipating my next move. “All right,” I said and flipped on the siren. Sirius added to the sound effects with a few high notes of his own. One of the occupational hazards of being a K-9 cop is loss of hearing because of your partner’s barking and howling.

  I probably should have given him the German command of Nein or Pfui, but instead I said, “Shut up, Elvis.” Sirius had been born and raised in Germany, but three years in California had him well on his way to becoming a surfer dude. He knew my slang well enough and stopped his howling.

  The siren had its Moses-like parting effect, and once we were able to navigate through the blockage of traffic I flipped off the horn. Most of LA’s K-9 units work out of Metropolitan Division, which means on any given shift we can be called out to handle situations over an area of 470 square miles. No one puts more miles on its cars than a K-9 unit does. When the call had come in, we were dispatched because we were the closest to Benedict Canyon.

  The city of Los Angeles is rife with canyons, with neighborhoods built up and around them. Benedict Canyon is an affluent area, and its residents usually feel far removed from urban LA. The ravine starts in the Hollywood Hills and drops down in a north-to-south direction, ending in Beverly Hills. Even small homes in the BC area usually command seven figures. Residents are enthusiastic about their special enclave, but occasionally snakes slither into paradise. Decades earlier, the Manson Family visited a house in Benedict Canyon on a fateful August night and when they left, five people were dead, including the actress Sharon Tate, who was eight months pregnant.

  As if on cue to that bad history, the wind began to whistle and wail. To my right I caught a glimpse of a huge shadow moving past a streetlamp, and turned to see a body-sized palm frond drop from the sky. As the branch struck the street, I could hear its impact even through the squad car’s closed windows. The Santa Ana winds were blowing again, and it was a good thing LA was living up to its stereotype of not being a pedestrian town. No one was out walking, and those in their cars looked as if they just wanted to get home safe and sound. It was on nights like this that it was easy to imagine being back in the Old West. LA is the largest city in the country, but during Santa Ana conditions dust devils do their spinning, and tumbleweed can often be seen rolling on its streets. I had seen neither tumbleweed nor devils yet, but the night was young.

  In that morning’s LA Times there had been an article on the Santa Ana winds, which had been blowing for much of the week. The article had quoted from Raymond Chandler’s story “Red Wind,” describing those hot “winds that curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch.” Chandler had said that when the Santa Ana winds blew through, anything can happen.

  My partner was ready; he wagged his tail.

  It was too dark to see much of the dusty movement of the hot air being funneled down through the canyons, but I could feel its surge. Every so often my squad car rocked back and forth as if it was being shaken by the draft of some big rig. The blow was pushing everything in its path, an unseen big, bad wolf huffing and puffing. Down the street I could see traffic lights throwing their colors around. It was like looking at the light show of a kaleidoscopic lighthouse. Nobody I knew liked Santa Anas—except for the serial murderer the media called the Santa Ana Strangler.

  The Santa Ana winds blow hardest between November and March, and over the last two windy seasons the Strangler had strangled eleven women, each taken during a Santa Ana condition. Some of the tabloids were calling hi
s murders “Gone with the Wind.” Only minutes earlier there had been a hot call. A woman in Benedict Canyon had fought off an attack by a masked man with a garrote. Neighbors had heard her screams, and their pounding at the door had driven off the woman’s assailant. Her attacker had been spotted fleeing into the darkness of the canyon.

  In the distance a fire truck’s siren called out, and then a few moments later another joined in, and then there came the sounds of a third. Sirius’s ears were up and at the ready. I could tell he was considering joining the chorus, so I said, “Don’t even think about it.”

  One of his two ears wilted.

  I lowered the window and sniffed. A hairy muzzle joined me in that pursuit. Somewhere not too far away a fire was burning. Santa Ana winds and fire are a fearsome combination. As a patrolman, I had worked evacuations of neighborhoods during a few bad burns and been a reluctant witness to the winds whipping up the fires. It wasn’t a detail I had ever liked. Up close you could see why Santa Anas are called the “devil winds.” The Spanish word for Satan is Satanás; some believe “Santa Ana” is just the anglicized Satanás. The hot winds don’t come from the desert, it is whispered, but from hell.

  Sirius offered a throaty growl to all the unseen demons. If the demons had any sense, they fled the scene. Jenny had always been convinced the dog was privy to a world lost on us poor humans, and not just because some of his senses are so much more keen than those of any of us Homo sapiens. Jen and I used to laugh when Sirius tilted his head and cocked his ears, as if listening to a voice. Sometimes he’d even carry on conversations with that voice, making pleased and excited sounds. “Sirius is talking to God,” Jenny would say; her tone was always playful, but I could never tell if she was kidding or not. Jenny thought Sirius was special.

  The sirens were all converging on one spot: the same place where I was going. I was waved through several checkpoints; a cordon had been set up around the area. Even from two blocks away the smoke was bad, and where I was going it was worse. As I turned a corner I saw a house in flames.

  Firefighters were running around, positioning their hoses. Winds were driving the flames high into the air, pushing the fire perilously close to neighboring houses. Fire trucks took up most of the street, and their played-out hoses made for hard speed bumps. An orange glow covered the area, and the shooting flames looked contagious enough to make me position my squad car for a quick getaway. Maglite in hand, I ran forward, scanning house numbers. Sirius stayed closer to my side than my own shadow.

  There was shouting all around us. Some of the residents were grabbing hoses and filling buckets of water, ready to make a stand, while others were scrambling for prized possessions and in the process of evacuating. Everyone was looking for guidance, even the cops on the scene. Officers were being besieged for answers they didn’t have. The night showed a lot of white eyeballs. Fire gets everyone’s attention like nothing else.

  Only one house on the street was on fire—so far. It was torching up like a bonfire, the flames licking high above the roof. The attack on the woman had taken place a few doors down from the house on fire, so I hurried past it. Squad cars and unmarked sedans were parked in front of the house I was looking for, and two officers were posted on the walkway outside. Their attention was more on the nearby fire than guard duty, but at our approach both of the uniforms stopped their eyeballing of the flames. One of them pointed to the front door and said, “The detectives are waiting for you inside.”

  As we passed by, both men inched away from Sirius, allowing us a wide berth. Fellow officer or not, my partner was a close relative of the wolf, and he did have big, bad teeth.

  At the entryway I told Sirius, “Setz!” His body language showed me his unhappiness with the command. Every week, handlers practiced exercises called long sits and long downs, training designed to try our charge’s patience. It was the dog’s job to assume the designated position and wait for hours if necessary. Sirius would stay put even if he didn’t like it. Inside, I could see that evidence techs were already working the scene, and from past experience I knew they preferred dog hair to not be a part of their trace evidence.

  “Bleib!” I told Sirius, the German command to stay. He deflated and made a sound somewhere between an exasperated sigh and a moan that voiced doubts about my decision-making ability. The sound was familiar to me. I was known to make similar noises when given orders by superiors that didn’t know their asses from a hole in the ground. I liked to think I could make that distinction. My partner’s eyes tracked me, hoping for a reprieve, until I disappeared inside.

  Crime scenes are normally handled in very deliberate fashion, but the nearby flames had everybody jumping. Two detectives from Homicide Special, along with a crime scene unit, were working the family room. Anything that might have a connection to the Santa Ana Strangler had the highest priority in town.

  One of the suits recognized me and came over. I seemed to remember his last name was the same as some Ivy League school. Brown, I thought, or Yale.

  “Cornell,” he said.

  On a multiple-choice test I would have gotten it. “Gideon,” I said.

  As he wrote down my name, Cornell said, “Where’s the mutt?”

  At another time I might have told him it wasn’t my responsibility to know where his wife was, but not now. The room was already tense enough.

  “Front door,” I said.

  He gave a quick, preoccupied nod. “We’ve gathered some clothing and other items the suspect came in contact with. We want your dog to get a nose full of eau de bad guy and see if he can pick up on his scent. We’re pretty sure he’s still in the canyon. The SOB must have known we’d try to seal off the area. I’ll bet you dollars to cents he snuck out of the brush and set that house fire as a diversion.”

  The family room had a view out to the canyon, but at night it was like looking at a sea of black. The nearby fire hinted at the expanse of foliage in the ravine, but the light from the flames didn’t penetrate far into the brush. A sudden flare of light in the darkness caught my eye; moments later there was a torching of undergrowth and shrubbery.

  “I’ll pass on that bet,” I said. “Apparently one diversion wasn’t enough.”

  Cornell turned to see what I was pointing at and then cursed. We watched the wind begin to whip up the flames. Both of us knew we were looking at a tinderbox. Under these conditions it was likely that dozens of homes would soon be in jeopardy.

  “He must have brought some kind of accelerant with him,” I said.

  In a wishful voice Cornell said, “Maybe, if we’re lucky, he’ll burn up in his own hell.”

  From what I knew of the Santa Ana Strangler, his crime scenes were very organized. If this was the Strangler, he would have planned for an escape route even under extreme conditions.

  “He would have expected a call to go out for dog teams,” I said. “He set the fire to discourage pursuit and eliminate the possibility of being tracked.”

  “That’s probably not the only escape plan in his bag of tricks,” Cornell said. “At one of his other crime scenes a fire was also set and a witness described a fireman that was never accounted for.”

  It would be easy for a sooty firefighter to make his escape with all the chaos going on. Only seconds had passed since the canyon fire had been lit, but I could already see the orange glow spreading. The tracking conditions were already poor and would only get worse.

  LA’s K-9 units have weekly field exercises where officers take turns wearing padded bite suits and acting out the role of bad guy. Whenever the chief trainer for Metropolitan Division puts on his bite suit and calls for a dog to be unleashed, he always shouts one particular line from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.

  I voiced the same line: “Cry ‘Havoc!’” I said, “And let slip the dogs of war.”

  Cornell gave me a look. “Huh?”

  “If my partner is going to have any chance of picking up the scent, we have to act now.”

  Sirius was on a thirty-foot lea
d. His nose was to the ground and his body language told me that he had the scent. Handlers like to describe the way a dog tracks in missile terms: Sirius had the target on his radar. Whether he’d be able to close on that target and stay on the scent was another matter. The air was smoky. A wet cloth covered my face, but Sirius didn’t have that luxury. He needed his nose fully functional, which meant he’d have to endure the smoky conditions without any buffers.

  We entered the brush, following a trail into the canyon. The fire was about a hundred yards away, but it felt closer than that. The swirling winds were hotter now. I could hear the hunger of the fire as it feasted on the undergrowth. The snapping and crackling of the dry chaparral, and the gusting of the wind, filled the natural amphitheater with whistling and howling. Anyone sensible would have retreated from the chorus of hell. It’s not natural to walk toward fire, but that was where my partner was leading me, and he was doing that because I asked it of him.

  The fire was unchecked; firefighters weren’t yet ready to take on the canyon’s blaze. With every step I remembered why I had never wanted to be a fireman. My wet mask wasn’t stopping my throat and nose from hurting, and the smoke was making my eyes tear. Most of the time I walked with my eyes shut, trusting to the senses of my partner. I was used to playing blindman’s bluff with Sirius. Part of our K-9 exercises involved blindfolding handlers and then ordering our dogs to track. The training gave the dog the confidence to lead and the handler to follow. We were a team forged over thousands of hours of working together, and the death of the woman we both loved.

  I made encouraging sounds. Sirius was no bloodhound, but his sense of smell was still about a million times better than mine. LA police dogs do a lot of cross-training, and tracking was a frequent exercise.

  “Such!” I encouraged, using the German pronunciation, tsuuk, and telling Sirius to track or find, but even more often than that I said “Good dog” or the German words of praise “So ist brav.”

  In stops and starts, we continued into the canyon, the elusive scent drawing us forward. We traveled on anything but a straight line. Sirius tugged me one way and then the other. Most of the time his nose was to the ground, but sometimes he raised it up and sniffed the breeze, doing his best to pick up the scent over the smoke that filled the air. He seemed oblivious of the nearby fire; I was anything but.