by Scott Frost
17
AS THE WEATHERMEN had predicted, the storm that had been laying down a dreary rain was moving east over the mountains and into the desert. Patches of pale blue sky were beginning to show like holes in a tattered blanket. Tomorrow would be perfect, the mountains covered in snow, Colorado Boulevard in dreams of every imaginable color.
Harrison stopped the car in front of Philippe’s apartment building in Hollywood. Sheets of soaked newspaper and plastic bags littered the pavement. A Mexican street vendor who looked Mayan walked past carrying a pole with bags of cotton candy hanging from it like bright pink clusters of flowers.
Walking up the stairs of the building, life had returned to normal without missing a beat. The same smell of cooking spices drifted out from under doors. The same music pounded out its rhythm. The same angry voices in Armenian and Arabic and Spanish drifted through the dark hallways like a New World nightmare.
Philippe’s door was sealed with FBI crime-scene tape that warned of prosecution should it be tampered with. A tagger had spray-painted his homeboy’s name over the tape in fluorescent orange paint. I peeled back the tape, pushed the door open, and stepped inside.
The room had been turned upside down. Every piece of evidence linked to Gabriel had been removed. Everything that remained was covered in print dust. The only thing that appeared unchanged was the chair where Philippe had sat with explosives in his lap.
It was the only space we definitively knew of where Gabriel had spent some time. Knowing what we knew of him now I held out a faint hope that we would see some small detail that had been overlooked because we had thought we were looking for a terrorist instead of a serial killer. I replayed in my head what had happened in the room. Philippe had survived because Gabriel had wanted us to know it was him. But how could Gabriel have been so sure that someone like Harrison was going to walk through that door and be able to disarm the bomb in Philippe’s lap? Gabriel was too smart to leave anything to chance.
“How do you guarantee that you get exactly the results that you want?”
“Simple,” Harrison said. “You eliminate all other possibilities.”
“So how would Gabriel have done that in this room?”
We both looked around the room in silence.
“Do you think it’s possible that Philippe was working with Gabriel?” I asked.
Harrison looked at me in surprise, then glanced at the chair as if replaying events in his head.
“You mean do I think it’s possible from the way the bomb was constructed, or from the look in his eyes as the timer clicked down?”
“Both.”
He raised his hand to his upper lip as if he were fiddling with a phantom mustache.
“What I saw in his eyes looked real.”
“What about the bomb?”
“It was simply constructed,” he said.
“The bomb in Sweeny’s bungalow wasn’t, so why was this one?”
“There was less required of it. All it had to do was kill a single person sitting motionless in a chair.”
“Unless it was designed not to kill him.”
“How do you prove a negative?”
“You eliminate all the other possibilities.”
Harrison cocked his head as if to go at the thought from a different angle.
“Unless I cut that lead, it would have exploded.”
“If you hadn’t walked in, could he have stopped it himself?”
Harrison shook his head. It was like trying to juggle melting ice cubes.
“That’s like asking which are the stripes on a zebra,” he said, “the black or the white. It all depends on how you look at it.”
“If he had the knowledge, would it be possible?”
“If he knew how . . . yes, it’s possible. But that still doesn’t answer why.”
“So we would get a description,” I said.
“Philippe could have given us the description without the explosives.”
“But would we have believed him? By turning Philippe into a human pipe bomb, he immediately gained complete credibility.”
“For what?”
I could see the answer to his own question appear in his eyes. “A false description.”
I nodded. “Except it matched the one from the French police.”
“So that leaves us right where we started,” Harrison said.
“Yeah . . . we got lucky.”
I looked around the sad little room. From somewhere in the building came the sound of a dog furiously barking and throwing itself against a door that someone was passing by.
I walked over to the corner of the room where Philippe had placed a thrift store dresser. The drawers had been pulled out and all the contents dumped on the floor. His scattered clothes gave nothing away other than he shopped at the Gap. Above the dresser, a mirror mounted on the wall had half a dozen snapshots of him stuck in the frame. I reached up and pulled one down. Philippe was standing in front of a large white building. On his face was the kind of smile the bearer of a secret would have. It reminded me of the photograph of Lacy in the sequoias. I reached up and took down the rest of the photographs and placed them in my pocket in case we needed them for an ID.
“If he’s not dead by now, he probably wishes he was,” I said softly.
I walked over to the window and looked outside. The faint glow of the setting sun had begun to shine through the breaks in the clouds. A shaft of light was painting a soft, pink square over a window on the adjacent apartment building less than thirty feet away. Inside the apartment I could see a mother nursing a child in her arms, gently rocking it back and forth as if they were floating on water.
“How do you understand something that is only measurable by its loss?” I said.
Harrison glanced out the window at the mother and child in the apartment. He looked away almost immediately as if his intrusion into the moment made him uncomfortable. I imagined that even secondhand intimacy had been difficult for him since the murder of his wife.
“When my husband died, the love had long since faded, but it was different for Lacy. I tried my best to understand what she had lost, but it just wasn’t possible. And my inability to understand what she was feeling just pushed her further away.”
I glanced once more at the mother with her child, then turned and looked over Philippe’s room.
“You would think someone whose job it is to investigate death would have understood better than I did.”
Harrison’s eyes met mine briefly, then he looked over to the chair where Philippe had been sitting.
“I’m sorry, this isn’t helping,” I said. “It’s just . . .” I let the thought drift.
He shook his head as if to say okay. His eyes searched out a distant point of memory. “I don’t think our understanding is ever equal to grief. I think it’s that way by design.”
We were both silent for a moment. I tried to step back to the investigation to ground myself in the debris Gabriel had left behind in his rampage. It was already after five o’clock. Lacy had no more than fifteen hours left. If I was ever to hold her again, I needed to focus enough so that I could do my job. But it was difficult. I wanted to go back through her childhood, step by step, and fix all the mistakes I had made. A part of me wanted to believe that by reconstructing her life I could change the direction it had taken in the last twenty-four hours.
But I knew better. Standing in this room wouldn’t allow it. If there were answers, they were here—the one place in the world that I understood better than all others. Crime scenes were one of the few places I had ever found there to be something approaching absolute clarity. It might not be immediately evident, but the evidence left behind in the wake of violence is as declarative a sentence as anyone has ever written. Blood, bone, skin, body temperature, hair, carpet fibers, DNA, the trajectory of a bullet, a forced lock, the angle of a wound, the position of a body . . . all of it spoke in truths that were undeniable.
I looked over the room one more time
in hopes of seeing that one clue that had been missed. If it was here, it still eluded me.
“If you were to draw a profile of Gabriel right now with what we know, where would you begin?”
“His intelligence.”
I nodded. “When we discovered that Gabriel wasn’t a terrorist, it frightened me because I thought it made him more dangerous.”
“Yeah,” Harrison said.
“But it also made him fallible.”
“How?”
“Twenty to thirty percent of most homicides go unsolved. But with serial killers, less than ten percent of their crimes go unsolved.”
“Why?”
“What goes hand in hand with brilliance?”
Harrison thought for a beat.
“Ego.”
I nodded.
“Gabriel believes he’s the absolute top of the food chain. He can kill anyone, at any time, with absolute impunity. He knows as he walks among us that every face he looks into, every person passing on the street or driving in their car, is a potential victim. They’re only alive because he chooses to let them remain that way. Think of the feeling of power that must give him.”
“God’s strongman,” Harrison said.
“We’re his prey, and the last thing a predator with no rivals fears is the victim he’s about to slaughter, and that’s why at some point he’ll make a mistake. He’ll get careless exactly because he doesn’t believe we’re capable of recognizing it.”
“Gods don’t make mistakes,” Harrison said.
That was what I had come back to this room for—it wasn’t to find a clue, it was to find something approximating hope.
“We know one thing that Gabriel doesn’t, maybe the only thing,” I said.
“What?” Harrison asked.
“We know he’s no god.”
DARKNESS WAS settling in when we stepped onto the late Daniel Finley’s porch and rang the bell. Before Sweeny had died inside my car he told us in the motel room that he knew his late employer’s wife—a detail so small that it would seem unimportant except that Mrs. Finley had denied to us the very same fact the first time we met her at this house. If she had lied about something trivial, then I had to consider the possibility that she had also lied about something that would lead me to Lacy.
When she opened the heavily chained door, Mrs. Finley had the pale wispy look of a nineteenth-century photograph that was beginning to fade into oblivion. Her exhausted, empty eyes looked at me, but I got the impression they were incapable of registering information.
“I would like to see some identification,” she said, her voice tense with fear.
I held my badge and ID up for her to see.
“We were here yesterday.”
Through the crack of the open door, I saw the dull steel of a machete gripped in her right hand. It looked comically large in her thin fingers. I doubted very much that she could summon the strength to slice an orange with it.
“Do you remember me?”
She nodded, her face not registering any change in demeanor.
“Would you put the weapon down and open the door so we can talk?”
She hesitated, then placed the machete in an umbrella stand, closed the door, and slid the chain off the lock.
Inside, the air had the stale, lifeless quality of a locked storage closet. The dining room table was covered with empty files and drawers that the detectives had gone through. I noticed the windows behind the table had several large nails crudely pounded into the sashes in an attempt to seal them shut. The dark oak trim around them was marked with missed hammer strikes.
“I don’t know why they didn’t clean this up,” she said, looking at the mess on the table. She moved in continuous, small steps when she talked, as if standing still would place her in jeopardy.
“Are you afraid of something, Mrs. Finley?” I asked.
Her eyes glanced toward the windows, then quickly away.
“There’s nothing wrong with being safe.”
“You nailed your windows shut and you’re walking around with a machete in your hand.”
She drew her arms in, clutching her chest.
“My husband was murdered,” she said softly, her eyes focusing on some distant, unseen spot.
“Not just your husband.”
She looked toward the floor and whispered, “No.”
“Were you involved in any of the direct action with your husband?”
She continued to look at the floor without betraying any emotion.
“Mrs. Finley, you may know something that can help us and not be aware of it. I need you to answer my questions.”
She closed her eyes as she took a breath like an exhausted runner.
“In college we did things, little things, stupid things. I stopped believing we could change the world a long time ago.”
“What about lately, Mrs. Finley? Did you know about what he was involved in?”
“I’ve already answered these questions.”
“And you lied.”
She looked up at me; her eyes held the weight of something heavier than grief.
“Were you part of your husband’s plans involving the parade?”
“I wasn’t involved with my husband at all.”
I recognized the look in her eyes. I’d seen the same reflection in my husband’s eyes once, a very long time ago. It was what love looks like when the light has been replaced by deceit.
“Tell me about the temporary employee Sweeny,” I said.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Lying won’t help either of them or you.”
She glanced at me defensively for a moment, trying to steel herself against the question, then the protective shell she was hiding in began to fracture and fall apart around her like a collapsing building.
“We were only together a few times . . . that’s all.”
“When was the last time?”
She held back from answering, then an exhausted breath let out what was left of her resistance.
“Night before last.”
“Where was this?”
“Where we always went, a motel on Colorado.”
Harrison glanced at me.
“The Vista Palms.”
She nodded silently. “I went to end it . . . that’s why I went.”
Her eyes filled with tears and she buried her face in her hands. Apparently she had failed in her task.
“Was Sweeny a part of what your husband was doing?”
She shook her head.
“Why an affair with Sweeny?”
“Because he meant nothing to me, because I was angry. Because I wanted to hurt my husband. Do you need me to draw you a goddamn picture?”
She almost imperceptibly shook her head. “What have I done?”
“Your husband wasn’t killed because you slept with Sweeny,” I said.
Her haunted eyes had the look of an animal locked in a cage.
“How do you know . . . how do you know why anything happens?” she whispered.
I slipped a photograph of Lacy and the sketch of Gabriel out of my pocket and laid them on the table in front of her.
“Have you seen either of them?”
She looked at them and shook her head.
“They already showed me those.”
She reached out and picked up the photograph of Lacy and stared at it. “She’s the girl who’s missing.”
“She’s my daughter.”
Her eyes met mine for a brief second, then she looked away as if in shame and covered her mouth with her free hand to suppress a gasp. I took her by the arm and sat her down.
“Do you know anything about your husband’s involvement with the environmental group that can help me?”
“I . . .”
“Anything?”
Mrs. Finley flinched as if I had just struck her with the back of my hand. She drew her knees up to her chest and began to rock gently back and forth in the chair. She began to say somethin
g, but the words silently slipped away.
I looked at Harrison, then returned the photograph of Lacy and the sketch of Gabriel to my pocket. I glanced around the shuttered house and anger began to rise inside me. I had wasted precious time chasing down a tawdry infidelity while a madman had my daughter. I wanted to grab Mrs. Finley and shake her out of her stupor. She wasn’t to blame for what was happening, but she was sitting in front of me and at the moment, that was enough.
I started toward the door but stopped.
“You can take the nails out of your windows, Mrs. Finley. If you knew something that could have helped me, you would already be dead.”
Whether from the flush of anger or the stale, lifeless air, I felt light-headed and rushed out of the house onto the porch. I took several deep breaths trying to regain my equilibrium, but the ground still fell away from under my feet. Harrison’s hand gently landed on my shoulder and guided me to the squad, where he sat me down and placed my head between my knees.
“Long, slow breaths,” he said softly.
With each breath the world began to settle back into place beneath me. I became conscious of his hand on my shoulder and his fingers gently stroking my neck. God . . . I couldn’t remember the last time I had been touched by anyone. I wanted to lean into his hand and disappear into his touch. To be held and told that everything would be all right. I ached for it the way someone afraid of the dark craves the light. But instead, each stroke of his fingers was like a fresh wound opening in my heart, reminding me of what I had and what I was losing.
I slowly raised my head and sank back into the seat. Harrison withdrew his hand as if retrieving a long-lost heirloom that had been misplaced for many years.
I glanced back toward the house. The door was already bolted again. Mrs. Finley’s shadow passed across one of the windows. I imagined she was slowly walking from room to room, holding the machete in her hand, checking all the windows to make sure that the nails were in place.
“I wonder if she’s protecting herself from death or from love,” I said softly.