In Dark Places

by Michael Prescott

  "But unofficially?"

  "I hope she kicked some butt. But don't quote me on that."

  Hammond ended the call and stared out the window at the blur of smog and speed. He had seen Dr. Robin Cameron on a few occasions. He remembered her trim figure and slender, suntanned legs. Now it turned out she was a bit of a street fighter. Quite a surprise. He didn't know too many Ph.D.s who could hold out against a pair of armed and dangerous homeboys. There must be more to her than he'd thought. He wondered what she was like in the sack.

  Better than Ellyn, he was sure. But lately, that wasn't saying much.

  Chapter Five

  It was one-seventeen, and he still hadn't shown up. Robin was beginning to think Sgt. Alan Brand of the LAPD had blown her off, and she didn't like that idea.

  After the carjacking attempt she had canceled all her morning appointments. But her one-o'clock with Brand had remained on her schedule. It would take more than a near-death experience for her to postpone her first session with him.

  And now he was the one standing her up. She had already called his home and his cell phone. No answer at either number. It was possible he'd been delayed by work or by traffictraffic was always a valid excuse in Los Angelesbut she didn't think so.

  Her gaze cut to the clock on the office wall. One-eighteen.

  Most likely he just didn't want to be here. Most cops weren't enamored of the profession of psychology. It was alien to their world. They thought it was safer not to look inside themselves, not to ask too many questions. To open up their emotions felt dangerous; there was no telling where it might lead. Better to drown all doubts and fears in alcohol and adrenalinedrink away the bad feelings, or chase them off with some cops-and-robbers action. If they really needed to talk, they would share what they felt with another cop, one of their own, someone who wore the badge and knew the job, not with some head doctor whose only contact with the criminal world came from books and university coursesor so they thought.

  And especially not with a woman doctor. No way a woman could understand them. Many of these guys had never had a deep, lasting relationship with a woman. They turned to women for sex, but they relied on their buddies for comfort.

  The clock ticked. One-nineteen.

  He should have been here at one. No, earliershe'd asked him to arrive a little before the hour so he could complete the necessary paperwork. She remembered his sigh over the phone as he echoed, "Paperwork." It was the voice of a man who'd filled out too many forms.

  A nice voice, she'd thought at the time. Mellow, tugged down into a low register by world-weariness. A man with that kind of voice might be cynical and tired, but he would not be empty inside. She had looked forward to meeting him.

  She was still looking forward to it nowat one-twenty in the afternoon.

  For a second time she called his cell number. No answer.

  She wasn't going to pace her office aimlessly for the rest of the hour. She intended to have a session with this man. If he wouldn't come to her, she would go to him.

  Quickly she walked through the waiting room, out into the hall, locking the door behind her. The hall door afforded access to the lot behind the building, where her battered Saab was still parked. She climbed into the car, wincing at the bullet hole and the spiderweb of fractures in the windshield.

  Sgt. Alan Brand worked out of the Newton Area station. She looked it up in a city map book, then pulled out of her reserved space, heading east, avoiding the street where the attack had taken place.

  Not that the other streets were any safer. Her office was a few blocks from MacArthur Park, which had once been a place for family picnics and was now the disputed territory of three rival gangs. A bad neighborhood, as the patrol officers had said. VFWwhatever that meant.

  She found herself clutching the steering wheel with both fists, aware of the rush of air through the glassless frame of the driver's-side window. She kept the CD player off. She was not in the mood for Bach, and besides, she wanted to maintain full alertness.

  She hooked onto Hoover Street, heading south, and tried Brand's cell phone a third time without success. Then she left messages for the two other patients with appointments for this afternoon, asking them to reschedule. They were paying customers, and Brand was a freebie, but it didn't mattershe had to have the session with Brand.

  Hoover Street took her down to the USC campus. She turned left onto Jefferson Boulevard, passing through a neighborhood of shotgun flats, liquor stores, and boarded-up minimalls. Knots of young people congregated on street corners or against walls tattooed with graffiti. She found herself wishing she could roll up her window.

  Conventional thinking was that the graffiti vandals and the other antisocial elements here, or anywhere, suffered from a deficiency of self-esteem. As a proactive measure, from preschool onward, kids were indoctrinated in the dogma of their own unassailable self-worth. Yet they kept turning into taggers and dealers and killers anyway.

  It was her view that a lack of self-esteem had little to do with criminal tendencies. The typical inmate in the county jail had sky-high self-esteem. He saw himself as superior to most of the population. He believed he was smarter than the policenever mind that they had caught himand more adventurous than the workaday civilians he characterized unkindly as clones, drones, or "normals."

  Felons could not be talked out of this attitude, or preached out of it, or medicated out of it. They had to be reached on a deeper levelthe level of neural programming itself, the hardwiring of their mental circuitry. It was the only way.

  If it worked, she reminded herself. If.

  At the corner of Jefferson and Central Avenue, the police station came into view. She pulled into the parking lot. She felt safe here, she thoughtbut when she got out of her car, a shudder of panic quivered through her, and she turned, quickly scanning her surroundings for danger. There was none.

  Damn, what was the matter with her?

  Then she smiled at herself. Of all people, she ought to know the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. This morning's fight-or-flight response had been burned into her neural circuitry. It would keep recurring at unexpected times. Meanwhile, she would seek to dissociate from the symptoms by rationalizing and intellectualizing the eventjust as she was doing now.

  "Physician," she murmured, "heal thyself."

  The lobby of the station house was crowded with civilians and uniformed officers. One man in a jacket and tie, in earnest conversation with a crying woman, looked at Robin as she entered. She felt his stare and looked back, wondering if he was a victim, a witness, or a plainclothes cop.

  People waited in line at the desk. When it was her turn to speak to the desk officer, she asked if she could speak with Sergeant Brand.

  "Brand's not here," the officer said without glancing up from a stack of papers.

  "Is he expected back soon?"

  "He's not here. Not on duty."

  Robin didn't get it. The appointment had been set up during Brand's normal working hours. "Are you sure?"

  The officer flicked a glance at her. "Can I help you?"

  She doubted it. "Who's in charge here?"

  "The WC is Lieutenant Wolper." WCwatch commander.

  "I'd like to speak with him."

  "He's pretty busy, ma'am."

  She held her ground. "I need to discuss something with him. It's urgent."

  The cop shrugged, eager to be rid of her, and gave her directions to the lieutenant's office. Robin proceeded down a hall lined with corkboards displaying memos and notices. Fluorescent light panels buzzed overhead. Coffee stains spotted the carpet.

  Lieutenant Wolper was protected from distractions by a civilian assistant, a heavyset, grim-faced woman with a butch haircut. Robin introduced herself, drawing a frown from the assistant. She didn't take it personally. The woman seemed like the type who frowned a lot.

  "The lieutenant is on the phone. Have a seat."

  Robin doubted this story. She had the feeling that the assistant mer
ely wanted to show who was in charge. It was a power play, but Robin didn't care. She sat and waited. She would wait all day if she had to.

  Noises echoed from other parts of the stationdrunken shouts, laughter, slamming doors. Men and women in uniform passed through the hall, gear rattling on Sam Browne belts, radios crackling with cross talk.

  None of it was unfamiliar to her. Though she had never been inside this station, she had spent time in many similar environments. The atmosphere was always the same. A police station, a county jail, a state prisonsuch places had been part of her life throughout her childhood, until the age of ten, when they took her father away for the last time.

  She wasn't surprised when he was taken. He had gone to jail several times before. The other kids in Mrs. Allen's homeroom teased her about it, said she had a dad who was a jailbird and a crazy man. They said her dad had held up a liquor store and beaten the proprietor over the head with a baseball bat even after he'd cleaned out the cash register. They said her dad had driven a car off a bridge and down an embankment during his failed getaway from another robbery. They said her dad was a drunken loser who got into fights in bars. She couldn't dispute any of this. It was all true.

  The next-to-last time her dad had gone away, Robin had asked her mother if he would ever get out. She'd been almost disappointed to hear that he would. Life was easier when her dad wasn't around. Not easier in the financial sensenot with her mom struggling to pay the bills and raise a ten-year-old daughter on her own. But easier emotionally. When her dad was around, the little house where they lived on the outskirts of Phoenix, in the fast-growing suburb of Paradise Valley, was hot with tension and the certainty of violence. Her dad had never lashed out at her, but he'd whupped Robin's mom plenty of times. Whupped herthat was what he called it when he got angry and took his fists to her face and backside. Sometimes he was drunk when he did it, but mostly he was just pissed off. He got mad all the time for no good reason. The TV picture was snowy, there was an overdue electric bill, his supper was too cold, his beer was too warmany little thing was enough to get him riled, and for the next few days her mom would wear layers of makeup and long-sleeved shirtsin the desert, in summer, in one-hundred-degree heat.

  So Robin wasn't surprised when the police came and took her dad away. The timing might have been better. It was Christmas Eve, after all, and this year they had a tree and presents and everything. Some of the relatives were thereAunt Mazie from Denver, her mom's parents from San Diego, an aunt and uncle who'd driven up from Tucsonand naturally they made a fuss when the cops snapped the handcuffs on. Well, most of them did, though her grandparents sat quietly and watched with sad, knowing faces. Her mom begged the cops not to take him tonight, but her begging had a hollow sound, as if it were a script she had memorized for the occasion. Nobody listened to her. Then the police car was gone, not even bothering to run its siren or flash its emergency lights, and the huddle of family was left behind in uncomfortable silence.

  "It's hard for you," Aunt Mazie said to Robin at one point.

  She shook her head and said with a child's bluntness, "What's hard is when he gets out."

  They all told her she didn't mean that, and she agreed, but secretly everyone knew she had meant every word.

  Her mother served the Christmas ham. Nobody looked at the empty chair at the head of the table as the ham was sliced and doled out on the best china.

  When the meal was done and the presents were unwrapped, Robin retreated to her room, and there, alone, she cried. She knew she was crying for her father, but she didn't know why. He was a bad man and only got what he deserved. That was the hard logic she couldn't argue with. And yet amp;

  Yet there was a deeper truth she sometimes sensed. Her father was not always mean and dangerous and crazy. She remembered how he'd read from Treasure Island all night long when she had the flu, how she'd fallen asleep to his voice and awakened to find him still in her bedroom, watching her, the book shut in his lap. There had been other moments like thata hug, a shared secret, a special gift perhaps purchased with stolen money, but purchased for hermoments when a different man had been her father, a man who did not carry her father's load of rage.

  That man was real. He existed. But most of the time he was buried inside a shell of crazed violence. It was the shell of her father who did the bad things. It was the shell who deserved to be carted off to prison. And the prison could have that part of him. But why did it have to take the other part?

  In her room that night, as on other nights, she pressed her palms together and prayed. Her prayer was simple. "Give him back to us," she whispered up at the moon hanging in her window. "Give him back."

  The real man, she meant. The man trapped inside the shell.

  But he never did come back. A week later, on New Year's Eve, her father was killed in a disturbance at the county jail, where he had been housed awaiting trial for armed robbery and auto theft. Some inmates had attacked a guard. Other guards had broken out shotguns. The details were unclear, but at the end of it, her father and two other prisoners were dead.

  Robin had stopped praying after that. She hadn't prayed again for a long time.

  "Robin Cameron?"

  She looked up, startled out of her memories, and saw the man from the lobby who'd been watching her. A big man, tall and heavyset. "That's right."

  "The psychiatrist, right?"

  She stood, preferring to face him at eye level, but even standing, she was a head shorter than he was. "Yes," she said.

  "Bill Tomlinson. Detective. I work the homicide table around here." He extended his hand, and she took it, feeling his strong grip.

  "What can I do for you, Detective?"

  "I saw you come in. Recognized you from that awards shindig a while back." The statement was innocuous enough, but she sensed an undertone of tension. "I wanted to talk to you, if you've got a minute."

  "About?"

  "Sergeant Brand."

  "I can't discuss"

  "Your patients. Right. I know. The privilege thing, like attorney-client. But Brand's not your patient yet, am I right?"

  "I can't confirm anything about his status, even whether I am or am not treating him."

  He chuckled. "You're like the White House. Can't confirm or deny. Got it. But you can listen while I talk, right?"

  "I suppose so."

  "Look, I don't know Brand real well, but I see him around, work with him. He's a good man, Doctor. He's been through a lot."

  "I'm sure he has."

  "Been treated like crap by the department, too. You know they gave him only two days off after the shooting? Two days of stress release; then he's back on the job. That seem fair to you?"

  "No. But that's something you'd have to take up with the appropriate authorities."

  "Oh, I'm just venting some steam. I could go on all day about the way they treat us." He shrugged away the topic. "But that's not the point. What you need to know is how they're treating you."

  "Me?"

  "You want my opinion, Dr. Cameron, they're setting you up. I think you've gotten a raw deal here."

  "How so?"

  "Look. Brand is a good cop. But he's amp; unsociable, I suppose is the word. Not antisocial, you understand. Just unsociable. He's not somebody who opens up. He's not a talker, and he doesn't want anybody's help. He'll be fighting you every step of the way."

  Robin said nothing.

  "The higher-ups selected Brand," Tomlinson went on, "because they knew he would be uncooperative. They want you to fail. You hear what I'm saying?"

  "I'm surprised you're so interested in my welfare."

  "I just don't like the games they play. I don't like to see them screwing you over when you're just trying to help out. If I were you, I'd go back to the brass and tell them you want a better candidate. Somebody who'll work with you, not against you. Somebody you've got a chance with. Because with Brand, you've got no chance at all."

  "Maybe I enjoy a challenge."

  "He's not a challen
ge. He's a brick wall."

  "I'll take it under advisement. Thank you for your concern."

  "Just trying to be helpful. You keep in mind what I said. Don't let them play you. They will, if they think they can."

  He pantomimed a tip of his hat to her, an old-fashioned gesture made more quaint by the fact that he was, of course, hatless.

  She watched Tomlinson walk away, while wondering what that had been about. Perhaps he really was trying to help. Perhaps something else was going on.

  Whatever his reasons, she wasn't going to be deterred. She would find Brand and she would work with him, whether anyone wanted her to or not.

  Chapter Six

  Roy Wolper was having a bad day.

  He sat at his desk in his uniform, ramrod stiff, his black hair brushed back from his high forehead. As always he felt strong and vigorous and vital and not at all like a dinosaur, which was what he was.

  A dinosaur in the new LAPD, anyway. He jogged four miles every day, ate only lean meat and fresh vegetables. There was no flab on him. He was steel hard, his body a carefully tended machine.

  Cindy, his wifeex-wifehad thought he was a fitness fanatic. She hadn't complained about it in bed, as he recalled, but at other times she seemed almost embarrassed by his dedication to health and strength. But then she had been unhappy with everything about him by the end. When they divorced two years ago, there had been nothing to hold them togetherexcept Zach, of course.

  At first there had been no more than the usual conflict between ex-spouses, the usual wrangling over weekend custody. Then this attention deficit thing had started. Some doctor had decided that Zach's Cs and C-minuses were the result of a learning disability that required therapy and special schooling, both of which required extra money, which Wolper didn't have. For the past six months Cindy had been on his case nightly, at first requesting and then demanding more child support. Now she was talking about taking legal action.