Self-Defense

by Jonathan Kellerman

  “Charming. Maybe you can teach him to shit adobe bricks, cut your masonry costs.”

  “Always the practical one, Milo.”

  CHAPTER

  2

  It had been a nomad year.

  Thirteen months ago, just before Jobe Shwandt had started climbing through bedroom windows and ripping people to shreds, a psychopath high on vengeance had burned my house down, reducing ten years of memories to charcoal. When Robin and I finally mustered the strength to think positively, we began plans to rebuild and looked for a place to rent.

  The one we found was on a beach on Malibu’s far west end. Old rural-route Malibu, nudging up against the Ventura County line, light-years from the glitz. The recession made it affordable.

  Had I been smarter or more motivated, I might have owned the place. During my hyperactive youth, working full-time at Western Pediatric Hospital and seeing private patients at night, I’d earned enough to invest in Malibu real estate, buying and selling a couple of land-side apartment buildings and turning enough profit to build a stocks-and-bonds portfolio that cushioned me during hard times. But I’d never lived at the beach, thinking it too remote, too cut off from the urban pulse.

  Now I welcomed the isolation—just Robin, Spike, and me, and patients willing to make the drive.

  I hadn’t done long-term therapy for years, limiting my practice to forensic consultations. Most of it boiled down to evaluating and treating children scarred emotionally and physically by accidents and crimes and trying to untangle the horror of child-custody disputes. Once in a while something else came along, like Lucy Lowell.

  The house was small: a thousand-square-foot gray wood saltbox on the sand, fronted on the highway by a high wooden fence and a double garage where Robin, after deciding to sublet her storefront in Venice, had set up her luthier’s shop. Between the house and the gate was a sunken garden planted with succulents and an old wooden hot tub that hadn’t been serviceable for years. A planked footbridge was suspended over the greenery.

  A rear gate opened on ten warped steps that led down to the beach, a rocky spit tucked into a forgotten cove. On the land side were wildflower-blanketed mountains. The sunsets were blindingly beautiful and sometimes sea lions and dolphins came by, playing just a few feet from shore. Fifty yards out were kelp beds, and fishing boats settled there from time to time, competing with the cormorants and the pelicans and the gulls. I’d tried swimming, but only once. The water was icy, pebble-strewn, and seamed by riptides.

  A nice quiet place, except for the occasional fighter jet roaring down from Edwards Air Force Base. Lore had it that a famous actress had once lived there with two teenage lovers before making the Big Movie and building a Moorish castle on Broad Beach. It was documented fact that an immortal jazz musician had spent a winter shooting heroin nightly in a rundown cottage on the east end of the beach, playing his trumpet to the rhythm of the tide as he sank into morphiate peace.

  No celebrities, now. Almost all the houses were bungalows owned by weekenders too busy to recreate, and even on holiday weekends, when central Malibu jammed up like a freeway, we had the beach to ourselves: tide pools, driftwood, and enough sand to keep Spike licking his chops.

  He’s a French Bulldog, a strange-looking animal. Twenty-eight pounds of black-brindled muscle packed into a carry-on body, bat ears, wrinkled face with a profile flat enough to write on. More frog than wolf, the courage of a lion.

  A Boston terrier on steroids is the best way to describe him, but his temperament is all bulldog—calm, loyal, loving. Stubborn.

  He’d wandered into my life, nearly collapsed from heat and thirst, a runaway after his mistress died. A pet was the last thing I was looking for at the time, but he snuffled his way into our hearts.

  He’d been trained as a pup to avoid water and hated the ocean, keeping his distance from the breakers and growing enraged at high tide. Sometimes a stray retriever or setter showed up and he romped with them, ending up winded and drooling. But his new appetite for silica more than made up for those indignities, as did a lust for barking at shorebirds in a strangulated gargling tone that evoked an old man choking.

  Mostly he stayed by Robin’s side, riding shotgun in her truck, accompanying her to the jobsite. This morning, they’d left at six and the house was dead quiet. I slid open a glass door and let in some heat and ocean noise. The coffee was ready. I took it out to the deck and thought some more about Lucy.

  After getting my number from Milo, she’d taken ten days to call. Not unusual. Seeing a psychologist is a big step for most people, even in California. Somewhat timidly, she asked for a 7:30 A.M. appointment that would get her to Century City by 9:00. She was surprised when I agreed.

  She arrived five minutes late and apologizing. Smiling.

  A pretty but pained smile, rich with self-defense, that stayed on her face almost the entire session.

  She was bright and articulate and full of facts—the small points of the attorney’s legal wranglings, the judge’s mannerisms, the compositions of the victims’ families, Shwandt’s vulgarities, the yammerings of the press. When the time came for her to leave, she seemed disappointed.

  When I opened the gate to let her in for the second session, a young man was with her. Late twenties, tall, slender, with a high brow, thinning blond hair, Lucy’s pale skin and brown eyes, and an even more painful version of her smile.

  She introduced him as her brother, Peter, and he said, “Nice to meet you,” in a low, sleepy voice. We shook. His hand was bony and cold, yet soft.

  “You’re welcome to come in, take a walk on the beach.”

  “No, thanks, I’ll just stay in the car.” He opened the passenger door and looked at Lucy. She watched him get in. It was a warm day but he wore a heavy brown sweater over a white shirt, old jeans, and sneakers.

  At the gate Lucy turned to look back, again. He was slumped in the front seat, examining something in his lap.

  For the next forty-five minutes, her smile wasn’t as durable. This time, she concentrated on Shwandt, intellectualizing about what could have led him to sink to such depths.

  Her questions were rhetorical; she wanted no answers. When she began to look beaten down, she switched the topic to Milo and that cheered her up.

  The third session, she came alone and spent most of the time on Milo. She saw him as the Master Sleuth, and the facts of the Bogeyman case didn’t argue with that.

  Shwandt had been an equal-opportunity butcher, choosing his victims from all over L.A. County. When it became apparent that the crimes were connected, a task force involving detectives from Devonshire Division to the Sheriffs substation in Lynwood had been assembled. But it was Milo’s work on the Carrie Fielding murder that closed all the cases.

  The Fielding case had brought the city’s panic to a boil. A beautiful ten-year-old child from Brentwood, snatched from her bedroom in her sleep, taken somewhere, raped, strangled, mutilated, and degraded, her remains tossed on the median strip that bisected San Vicente Boulevard, discovered by joggers at dawn.

  As usual, the killer had left the crime scene impeccable. Except for one possible error: a partial fingerprint on Carrie’s bedpost.

  The print didn’t match the little girl’s parents’ or those of her nanny, and neither was it a mate for any swirls and ridges catalogued by the FBI. The police team couldn’t conceive of the Bogeyman as a virgin and went looking through local files, concentrating on newly arrested felons whose data hadn’t yet been entered. No leads emerged.

  Then Milo returned to the Fielding house and noticed planter’s mix in the dirt beneath Carrie’s window. Just a few grains, virtually invisible, but the ground beneath the window was bricked.

  Though he doubted the importance of the find, he asked Carrie’s parents about it. They said no new planting had been done in their yard since summer, and their gardener confirmed it.

  The street, however, had been planted extensively—magnolia saplings put in by a city crew to replace some blighted
old carrotwoods—in a rare show of municipal pride stemming from the fact that one of the Fieldings’ neighbors was a politician. Identical planter’s mix had been used around the new trees.

  Milo set up fingerprinting sessions for the landscaping crew. One laborer, a new hire named Rowland Joseph Sand, didn’t show up, and Milo went to his apartment in Venice to see why. No sign of the man or his registered vehicle, a five-year-old black Mazda van.

  The landlord said Sand was paid up for another two months but had packed some bags and driven off yesterday. Milo got permission to search and found the apartment scrubbed neat as a surgical tray, reeking of pine cleaner. A little more searching revealed a disconnected hot water heater and the seams of a trapdoor barely visible underneath.

  An old cellar, said the landlord. No one had used it in years.

  Milo removed the heater and climbed down.

  Straight down to hell, Alex.

  Spatter and shreds and gobbets in formalin. Needles and blades and beakers and flasks.

  In one corner of the cellar stood sacks of peat moss, sphagnum moss, planter’s mix, human excrement. A shelf of pots planted with things that would never grow.

  A background check showed Sand had given the city a false name and ID. Further investigation showed him to be Jobe Rowland Shwandt, alumnus of several prisons and mental hospitals, with convictions for auto theft, exhibitionism, child molestation, and manslaughter. He’d been in prison most of his life but had never served more than three years at a time. The city had given him a chain saw.

  He was picked up a week later, just outside of Tempe, Arizona, by a highway patrolman who spotted him trying to change a tire on the black van. In his glove compartment was a mummified human hand—a child’s, not Carrie’s, and never identified.

  The fingerprint on the bedpost turned out to be a false lead, belonging to the Fieldings’ maid, who’d been in Mexico during the week of Carrie’s murder and hadn’t been available for comparison printing.

  I sat silently through Lucy’s recitation, recalling all those meetings with Milo for late-night drinks, listening to him go over it.

  Sometimes my head still filled with bad pictures.

  Carrie Fielding’s fifth-grade photo.

  Shwandt’s methedrine eyes and drooping mustache and salesman’s smile, the oily black braid twisting between his long white fingers.

  How much restoration of innocence could Lucy hope for?

  Knowing more about her background might educate my guess.

  So far, she’d kept that door closed.

  I did some paperwork, drove to the market at Trancas to buy groceries, and returned at two to catch Robin’s call telling me she’d be home in a couple of hours.

  “How’re things at the money pit?” I said.

  “Deeper. We need a new main for the sewer.”

  “That’s metal. How could fire burn through that?”

  “Actually it was clay, Alex. Apparently that’s how they used to build them. And it didn’t burn. It was demolished by someone’s heavy equipment.”

  “Someone?”

  “No one’s ’fessed up. Could have been a tractor, a Bobcat, one of the hauling trucks, even a pickax.”

  I exhaled. Inhaled. Reminded myself I’d helped thousands of patients relax. “How much?”

  “Don’t know yet. We have to get the city out here to take a meeting with our plumbers—I’m sorry, honey, hopefully this is the last of the major damage. How’d your day go?”

  “Fine. And yours?”

  “Let’s just say I’m learning new things every day.”

  “Thanks for handling all the crap, babe.”

  She laughed. “A girl needs a hobby.”

  “How’s Spike?”

  “Being a very good boy.”

  “Relatively or absolutely?”

  “Absolutely! One of the roofers had a pit bull bitch chained up in his truck, and she and Spike got along just fine.”

  “That’s not good behavior. That’s self-preservation.”

  “Actually she’s a sweet dog, Alex. Spike charmed her—she ended up grooming him.”

  “Another conquest for the Frog Prince,” I said. “Want me to fix dinner?”

  “How about we go out?”

  “Name the place and time.”

  “Um—how about Beauvilla around eight?”

  “You got it.”

  “Love you, Alex.”

  “Love you, too.”

  The beach house had cable hookup, which meant foolishness on sixty channels instead of seven. I found an alleged hard news broadcast on one of the local stations and endured five minutes of happy talk between the anchors. Then the male half of the team said, “And now for an update on that demonstration downtown.”

  The screen filled with the limestone facade of the main court building, then switched to a ring of chanting marchers waving placards.

  Anti–capital punishment protestors bearing preprinted posters. Behind them, another crowd.

  Twenty or so young women, dressed in black, waving crudely lettered signs.

  The Bogettes.

  At the trial, they’d favored ghost-white face makeup and satanic jewelry.

  They were chanting too, and the admixture of voices created a cloud of noise.

  The camera pulled in close on the preprinted placards:

  LOCK THE GAS CHAMBER, GOVERNOR! ALL KILLING IS WRONG!

  NO DEATH PENALTY!

  THE BIBLE SAYS: THOU SHALL NOT KILL!

  Then, one of the hand-scrawled squares: pentagrams and skulls, gothic writing, hard to make out:

  FREE JOBE! JOBE IS GOD!

  The marchers came up to the court building. Helmeted police officers in riot gear blocked their entry.

  Shouts of protest. Jeers.

  Another group, across the street. Construction workers, pointing and laughing derisively.

  One of the Bogettes screamed at them. Snarls on both sides of the street and stiffened middle fingers. Suddenly, one of the hard hats charged forward, waving his fists. His companions followed and, before the police could intervene, the workers knifed into the crowd with the force and efficiency of a football offense.

  A jumble of arms, legs, heads, flying signs.

  The police got in the middle of it, swinging batons.

  Back to the newsroom.

  “That was—uh, live from downtown,” said the woman anchor to her deskmate, “where there’s apparently been some sort of disturbance in connection with a demonstration on behalf of Jobe Shwandt, the Bogeyman killer, responsible for at least . . . and—uh, we seem to have regained our . . . no, we haven’t, folks. As soon as our linkup is restored, we’ll go right back to that scene.”

  Her partner said, “I think we can see that passions are still running pretty high, Trish.”

  “Yes, they are, Chuck. No surprise, given the fact that it’s serial murder we’re dealing with, and—uh, controversial issues like the death penalty.”

  Grave nod. Shuffle of papers. Chuck fidgeted, checked the teleprompter. “Yes . . . and we’ll have something a little later on the situation regarding capital punishment from our legal correspondent, Barry Bernstein, and some face-to-face interviews with prisoners on Death Row and their families. In the meantime, here’s Biff with the weather.”

  I turned off the set.

  The death penalty opponents were easy enough to understand: an issue of values. But the young women in black had no credo other than a glassy-eyed fascination with Shwandt.

  They’d started as strangers, standing in line outside the courtroom door, sitting through the first few days of trial, sullenly, silently.

  The gore level rose, and soon there were six. Then twelve.

  Some press wit dubbed them the Bogettes and the morning paper ran an interview with one of them, a former teen hooker who’d found salvation through devil worship. Personality-cult magazines and tabloid TV picked them as freaks-of-the-week, and that attracted a dozen more. Soon the group was huddling to
gether before and after each court session, a uniformed cadre in black jeans and T-shirts, ghostly makeup, iron jewelry.

  When Shwandt entered the courtroom, they swooned and grinned. When victims’ families, cops, or prosecutors stepped up to the stand, they put forth a battery of silent scowls, prompting protest from the DA and warnings from the judge.

  Eventually, some of them earned jail time for contempt: exposing breasts to Shwandt; shouting “Bullshit!” at a coroner’s sworn statement; flipping off Carrie Fielding’s mother as she got off the stand, sobbing uncontrollably.

  While locked up, they granted interviews full of sad autobiography—all claimed abuse; most had lived on the streets and worked as child prostitutes.

  Low self-esteem, said the talk-show therapists. But that was like trying to explain Hitler in terms of artistic frustration.

  Restricted from the courtroom during the last weeks of the trial, they assembled on the steps and howled for justice. The day of the verdict, they promised to liberate Shwandt at all costs and to seek their own “personal justice.”

  Milo had seen them up close, and I asked him if he thought they might act on the threat.

  “I doubt it. They’re publicity whores. When the talk-show morons stop calling, they’ll crawl back into their holes. But you’re the shrink, what do you think?”

  “You’re probably right.”

  The person who’d stalked me had warned me first. Other victims had died without warning.

  Sometimes I thought about the others and thanked God that Robin and I had been lucky.

  Once in a while I thought about the night the house had gone up in flames and found my hands clenching so hard they hurt.

  Maybe I wasn’t the right therapist for Lucy.

  On the other hand, perhaps I was eminently qualified.

  CHAPTER

  3

  Robin and Spike came home at 4:15. Robin’s green sweatshirt was smudged with dirt. The green played off the auburn in her hair.

  She kissed me and and I put my hands under the shirt.

  “I’m filthy,” she said.

  “Love a dirty woman.”