He drove into the lot and to its darkest corner. He turned off the engine and settled to wait.
~ * ~
Ryan emerged from university with a good degree. He’d always been skilled at arguing, presenting the facts of a situation - or selected subsets of them - to his advantage. He’d evidently developed the ability to perform this task on behalf of clients. His mother was delighted when he elected to return to Santa Cruz, and Jonathan had been pleased too, while privately wondering whether it betrayed a lack of ambition. Ryan quickly got himself taken on by a small local firm, however, and used this as a stepping stone to a larger and more prestigious outfit over the hill in Los Gatos. His success was not conspicuous, but solid and sustained. The kind of success, in fact, that his father had always counselled him to seek.
After six years, he got married. Jonathan liked Maria the first time they met, an informal bar-snacks meal upstairs at The Crow’s Nest restaurant, by the beach. She was very pretty, of course, but he could see at once that she possessed a good deal more character than the previous girls his son had been aligned with. She was smart, and excellent company, and Ryan’s parents were delighted when the engagement was announced.
For several years all went well. Ryan achieved further promotions, taking him within a step of junior partner. He and Maria moved into a large house in Scott’s Valley, halfway between his work and Santa Cruz. The two couples met for dinner once a month (Maria’s family lived on the opposite coast, and were not involved in these events). Elaine increasingly allowed herself to speculate - with pleasure, and only to her husband - about how long it would be before they became grandparents.
Then one night Maria was absent from a dinner. Ryan brought her heartfelt apologies, explaining that an excess of Dungeness crab the night before (they were in season, and Maria an ardent fan) had turned bad on her. Jonathan and Elaine emailed their condolences. At the next gathering, Maria was amusing at her own expense.
Four months later it happened again.
Crab was no longer in season. This time it was a revised deadline for a report relating to the environmental agency for which she worked. A shame, but Ryan’s parents agreed that her commitment to her job was admirable, and sufficiently within character that it raised no flag.
Two months after that, it was the flu.
By chance, Jonathan’s schedule took him through Scott’s Valley the following afternoon. He stopped by his son’s house with a vial of the foul-tasting herbal concoction Elaine swore by when plagued by viral demons (and which genuinely seemed to lop a few days off the recovery period). At first there was no answer, but Maria’s car was in the driveway and so he persisted.
When she eventually opened the door she stood well back, and the extra make-up had been well applied. The bruising was obvious nonetheless.
~ * ~
By the end of the year, the marriage was over. Aided in the closing stages by Elaine (who remained ignorant of what he’d seen that afternoon, and the previous instances which had prevented Maria’s attendance at other meals), Jonathan did what he could. The relationship could not be saved, however, and privately he admired his daughter-in-law for her decisiveness in determining that there was a point after which it was no longer worth trying.
She finally left town one Thursday morning. She stopped by Jonathan’s office, told him what she was doing, and explained that Ryan did not yet know she wouldn’t be there when he got home from work.
Jonathan hugged her tightly and implored her to keep in touch. He watched her drive away toward the highway south, his hands bunched down by his sides. He then drove to his son’s place of work, hauled him from his office and into a discreet corner of the parking lot. Within ten minutes he had secured a promise that Ryan would never behave in this way again. So far as Jonathan knew, he had not.
Not in that precise way, anyhow.
~ * ~
After forty minutes Jonathan saw his son coming up the street. He watched him head into The Jury Room. He knew Ryan couldn’t have walked the ten miles from Scott’s Valley, and so he must have parked on the street nearby. That was something, at least.
Jonathan put his head in his hands. He thought about going home, or calling his wife, but not seriously, and not for long. The love between a boy and his mother is a wonderful thing, of that there is no doubt.
The responsibility for a son and his life, however, lies with the father.
Of course it does.
~ * ~
A year-and-a-half after the break-up of his marriage, Ryan made partner. That night there was a celebratory dinner with Jonathan and Elaine, three at a table that would have felt better with four. The regular dinners they’d enjoyed during their son’s marriage had never resumed. Instead there had been occasional brief encounters with Ryan and a succession of partners, most of whom appeared rather bemused by the experience. Few of these women lasted long. None was on hand to help celebrate his partnership.
Eventually the tickling in the back of his mind grew too acute to ignore, and Jonathan tracked down his son’s most recent girlfriend (the only thing he remembered her saying was that she worked in administration for the Santa Clara mall, but that had been enough). Six weeks after the end of her affair with Ryan, a limp was still discernible. She declined to discuss their relationship.
By now wearily, and with a growing, leaden anger that felt horribly impotent, the next week Jonathan found and spoke to one of his son’s high-school girlfriends, making it look like an accidental encounter. Jessica Friedkin had gained three children and sixty pounds in the intervening years. She remained as cheerful as he recalled, however, until the subject of her break-up with Ryan came up (or had been laboriously engineered). At this point she became evasive. Jonathan persevered gently.
“He was my first,” she admitted, eventually. “He was ... I don’t know. Well, I didn’t know then. I had no comparison. But... he was kinda ... rough. I’m sure he was just finding his way, though, right? None of us knew anything about that whole kit and kaboodle back then.”
Jonathan nodded and smiled, and stayed long enough to steer the conversation back to more positive matters. Then he paid for coffee and left.
On the way back to the house he took a detour and parked close to the vast expanse of meadow and redwood forest that bordered the upper west side of town, stretching unbroken up into the Santa Cruz Mountains. He walked out into it, not knowing what to feel or what to do. Along the path he came across the sturdy sign showing a map of the area. He had walked past it many times before. Occasionally, as now, there was a handmade addition stuck on one side, warning of recent mountain lion sightings.
Wild animals, in the neighbourhood. Creatures that could not be trusted to treat humans kindly - who did not even comprehend the rules by which others felt honour-bound to live; and who in the dead of night lifted their heads to listen to the silent call of the wilderness.
Jonathan looked at the sign for a while and then walked back to his car.
~ * ~
He didn’t know how much to blame himself for not having connected his son to the intermittent spate of local rapes. Area women enticed from cafés and bars, then brutalized in cars or alleys: all resistant to the idea of discussing their assailant, a man whose methods of operation seemed different every time. Local police - and the Santa Cruz Sentinel - took this to indicate that a number of men were attacking women within the same period.
Jonathan was less sure. He came to fear - though he tried to push the idea away - this merely meant that one man was being crafty about his deeds, and that he’d been able to firmly impress upon his victims the dangers of trying to identify him to the authorities.
Why did Jonathan care? Because one long evening after his wife had gone to bed, it finally occurred to him to wonder whether he might know who that man might be.
There was no reason to think it was his son. Not really. Ryan evidently nursed a tendency toward excessive physical dominance wi
th women, but there were plenty of marriages and partnerships that worked this way, and (though the idea was abhorrent to Jonathan) he could see how, within the strange shorthands and hidden language of relationships, such a situation might continue without a couple splitting up. Maria had clearly tolerated it for a number of years, and Jonathan would always ask himself whether his visit to her the day after the alleged flu might have provoked her departure; whether, had he been engaged in business on some other side of town, things might have gone differently. Having your weakness and pain witnessed makes it real. Jonathan had done that for Maria, for better or worse. And she had left.
He’d only received one email from her afterward. He knew enough about technical matters to notice it had been sent via a means that stripped all geographical information from the chain of servers that had delivered it to his computer. Either Maria had not been sure whether or not to trust her erstwhile father-in-law, or had simply been very cautious indeed. He didn’t blame her. In the conversation they’d had the afternoon of the opened door and facial bruising, she’d eventually - in a whisper, her head hung low with shame - revealed some of what it was like to share a sex life with Jonathan’s son.
This was despite the fact that Ryan had loved Maria. Of that Jonathan had no doubt. The nagging question was what he might be prepared to do - what dire avenues he might feel drawn to explore - with girls casually picked up in clubs and bars.
Somebody was doing this to women in town. Once the idea had entered Jonathan’s head that it might be his son, it proved tough to dislodge, however hard it might be to reconcile with his internal collection of images of Ryan as a little boy, looking up at him with amusement, or love.
It was also difficult to dislodge the notion that, should someone not step in, the results could get worse.
~ * ~
Thirty-five minutes later Jonathan sat upright when he saw a woman striding along the street toward The Jury Room. It was hard to tell much in a darkness slashed by harsh street lights, but she looked young and had a tight body in a short dress, and also - despite the confidence in her walk - betrayed signs of drunkenness. About twenty feet from the door she lost her balance for a moment, teetering on very high heels. Jonathan’s window was open. He heard her swear under her breath. She regained control. He watched as she went inside, poise more-or-less re-established.
The die was cast, he knew.
Three weeks previously, Jonathan had spent the evening in a similar way. That time the bar had been The Grinder, in Watsonville, a twenty-minute drive from Santa Cruz. It, like The Jury Room, had featured in news reports as a place where a victim had been picked up. This evidently hadn’t been enough to stop women coming there.
Or Ryan, either.
Jonathan had recognized his son’s car in the lot as soon as he arrived. He parked and went over to check. Then he returned to his own vehicle and sat in darkness for two hours.
At a quarter of eleven a couple emerged from The Grinder, spilling loud music and light for a moment before the door slammed behind them. The man had his arm around the woman’s waist, and was leading her firmly.
The woman was very drunk.
The man was Ryan.
Brazen, calculated, or dumb? It was hard to be sure. This didn’t prove that Jonathan’s son was the attacker, of course. He could simply have been at The Grinder hoping to score cheap and easy sex, coincidentally visiting a venue the local attacker had also frequented. Nonetheless Jonathan was glad he’d taken the opportunity to shove an expensive four-inch vegetable paring knife - borrowed from Elaine’s kitchen, purchased at some expense from Williams-Sonoma in Los Gatos - into three of the tyres of his son’s car.
Ryan’s fury at seeing the damage had been enough to convince his companion that he wasn’t the right guy to be going home with. She tottered back to the bar and went inside. Ryan watched her go, hands on his hips, then got out his phone to call AAA.
Jonathan started his car and drove quietly away.
It wasn’t proof.
But it was.
~ * ~
Brazen, calculated, dumb.
Or innocent?
That was the question that had plagued Jonathan over the last three weeks. Had Ryan gone to The Grinder because he was too arrogant to believe he might be caught, because he was crafty enough to think the cops would assume no one would be dumb enough to return to the scene of a previous crime, or because he was too dumb even to consider the question?
Ryan wasn’t dumb. He never had been. So he was brazen or calculating.
Or ... innocent, of course.
Still there remained that possibility, and that’s why Jonathan had come out again tonight, to wait in the dark outside The Jury Room. He’d waited there the previous night too, and the night before, and the night before that - in vain. But tonight Ryan had finally come, and an hour-and-a-half later he emerged back into the night, lurching slightly, the hard-body girl in the short skirt by his side. Jonathan didn’t think Ryan’s stumbling was genuine, but tonight he’d left the tyres on his son’s car alone.
To be sure.
He watched, his breathing shallow, as Ryan led the girl across the lot and let her into his car. He waited as his son drove out on to the street, and then followed.
~ * ~
He thought it would only be a little while before he saw his son indicate and turn on to a side road, somewhere close by. That’s what had happened in the previous attacks, according to the victims’ accounts. His heart sank - and his stomach turned cold - as he realized this wasn’t going to happen. Before long he understood that Ryan was heading on to Highway 17 instead, taking the most direct route back to Scott’s Valley. Where he had a house.
Innocence remained possible. But if not, then neither brazen, calculating nor dumb would describe Ryan’s actions any more. If his son was the attacker, and had now decided to take a woman back to where he lived - with the far higher risks for identification that entailed - then it was likely he’d done so in order to give himself the time and freedom in which to do very bad things.
If that’s what he had in mind, Ryan was now out of control. And, as his father’s position on his tail demonstrated, incapable of adequately covering his tracks.
~ * ~
Jonathan stopped following when Ryan’s car turned off the highway. He was horribly confident of the destination now. He parked a mile from his son’s house, around the back of a tacqueria long-ago closed for the night. He walked at a steady pace up the long incline that led into the upscale neighbourhood where his son lived. His palms were damp. The front of his mind felt empty, the back heavy and dark.
He drew to a halt at the end of the driveway. This was long, snaking through a front yard that had once been striking in its design and planting. Maria’s work. It was still presentable - this neighbourhood had its share of hard-working Mexican gardeners, too - but had lost focus, and looked dead in the moonlight. Ryan’s house was hidden from the street by a stand of cypress trees, but Jonathan could hear the faint sounds of music. There was a party going on, evidently. A party for two.
He took a deep breath and started up the driveway, knowing this was an event he had to break up, before a little boy grown big started to snarl and shout, before he swept his arm across the table. Before something got broken.
~ * ~
On the other side of the trees he saw a light in the kitchen. The music was coming from there, too.
When he got to the window, however, he could see the room was empty. A bottle of wine stood on the counter, half-empty. Ryan’s jacket had been thrown over a chair. Nearby on the floor lay a pair of black high-heeled shoes.
Jonathan moved silently to the French doors. He let himself in. The music was very loud. Grotesquely so. He hadn’t done much preparation for this moment. All he saw ahead was telling the girl to get out of here, then trying to have a conversation with his son.
Assuming he wasn’t too late.
He
felt panicky, wondering whether he should have driven right up to the street instead of parking down the way. Surely half-an-hour wouldn’t have been enough for things to have gotten out of hand, even if that’s what Ryan had intended all along?
And assuming his son wasn’t innocent after all?
In a break between songs Jonathan heard the sound of a voice, deeper in the house. A woman’s voice.
That was a relief, but he had to stop wasting time.
He hurried into the corridor on the other side of the kitchen and toward the door which led to the large living space at the heart of the house. He heard the woman’s voice again, raised now.
Psychomania: Killer Stories Page 55
