JF Gonzalez - Fetish.wps

by phuc

  She had quoted Daryl as well. Daryl read his quotes three times as he scanned both parts of the article. He had been quoted once before in the LA Times during his investigation into a spate of gang killings, and hadn't given the coverage much attention.

  But this piece of journalism was different. It was written by Rachael Pearce, a journalist he not only admired, but was finding difficult to stop thinking about on a personal level.

  Part two of her story delved on a deeper level. It was this piece that focused more on the social background of the murder series. The fact that all but two of the victims were believed to have ties to the same geographical area, and had ties to street gangs, was a thread that deserved exploring. The article started at the hub of the East Los Angeles barrio, the recreation center where many of the area kids hung out and played basketball or football. One of the kids she spoke to, when asked if the Eastside Butcher scared him, shrugged and said: “Nah. He only cuts up the gang bangers and their homies."

  It was this quote which she used as a focal point of her piece: why was it that the area gang bangers and their associates were targets of this serial killer? To get the answer she had talked not only to the gang members under the Eight-first Street bridge, who were represented accordingly with three color photos that Lance had taken that day, but also to the gang counselor at Our Lady of Guadalupe, Danny Hernandez. She had also talked to a couple of probation officers and beat cops. And most of what she got as quotes was always the same: some felt that the murders were the work of several different people, perhaps different gangs; others felt that maybe the killer lived in the area, a sentiment shared by members of law enforcement. In exploring this issue, she had pointed out that it was very feasible that the killer resided in the area. After all, how else could he manage to gain access to hardcore gang members and their associates and roam the area for victims and dumping sites without being noticed? Therefore it had to be somebody who wouldn't look out of place in the area.

  One thing that hadn't made it into the article, that Rachael mentioned to Daryl casually the night after their adventure under the bridge, was the question of whether the killer might harbor some personal grudge against those he killed. “How do you mean?”

  Daryl had asked.

  Rachael had called to thank him once again for pulling strings to get that interview with the gang members. Daryl had been so taken with her phone call that her question at first didn't register. “I mean,” Rachael had continued. “It's no surprise that most people could really care less that most of the victims of this particular serial killer are gang members. People hate them; they could care less if they die. Suppose whoever is doing this is sort of playing God. Ridding the world of what he sees as a cancer to society."

  Daryl had mulled it over, but deep down he knew she had nailed it on the head.

  He didn't want to admit it to Rachael, or any of the other cops in the department, but part of him secretly admired this guy. If it wasn't for his fear that innocent people might get killed in a retaliation shooting sparked by the Butcher's work, Daryl would be all for letting the killer behead gang members for as long as possible. “You may be on to something."

  “Of course the fact that one of the victims was a prostitute and the other two had no ties to gangs blows that theory out of the water,” she had said. “But I just can't help thinking that even if you add those elements in it make sense. The prostitute had ties to one of the gangs in the area, and it's believed that the woman found at Newport Beach resembled a missing person from the area who also had ties with the Los Compadres gang."

  “Let's just suppose this theory is correct,” Daryl had said, letting the idea run with him. “What could it mean to the killer? Obviously this person is of reasonable intelligence, since most serial killers are. There are over one hundred thousand gang members in Los Angeles County alone; what makes whoever is doing this think that killing a few here and there is going to make a big difference?"

  “It makes a big difference to him,” Rachael had said. “In his mind it makes a huge difference. Maybe something happened to him that was traumatic, something involving gangs in general. Maybe his motivations are religious and he sees himself as the Judgmental Hand of God. A lot of serial killers work on their own paranoid delusions that are very similar. What may not make sense to most of us regarding their crimes makes perfect sense to them."

  Daryl had winced inwardly when she mentioned that perhaps something traumatic happened to the killer that involved gangs. His mind tracked briefly on what he had gone through with Shirley being killed, and then he quickly turned it off. He couldn't go down that road now. Time to get back to the problem at hand, and the fact of the matter was Daryl knew Rachael was right. Ted Bundy's victims were overwhelmingly Caucasian women with brunette hair parted in the middle and worn long. It turned out that Bundy had a personal fetish for women with that particular hair-style and color. Jeffrey Dahmer's victims were overwhelmingly African-American for a particular reason as well. Dahmer also chose African-American males over Caucasians because he guessed that law enforcement wouldn't be so quick to investigate when black males from the inner city disappeared. Could it be that the Eastside Butcher was choosing his victims for the same reason?

  Daryl had mentioned this to Rachael. “This guy could be choosing gang members and people associated with them because he thinks that the investigations into their deaths won't be taken so far. And it's true; gang murders usually aren't investigated very thoroughly. It's only when the murder involves a victim that had no gang ties, say a person caught in gang crossfire or something, that the investigation is taken more seriously. But in reality? For the most part we simply don't have the time to thoroughly investigate every gang-related murder. Oh, and another thing, Rachael?"

  “Yes?"

  “That was off the record."

  Now as he sat in his living room, the remnants of the conversation casting a warm glow, he folded the newspaper back up and filed it into the wooden magazine rack beside the sofa. He was going to keep this particular edition of the Los Angeles Times. Not only because Rachael wrote the feature story, but because of his own burgeoning interest in the case at hand.

  He noticed the now empty mug of beer on the arm of the sofa. Rising, he picked up the mug and headed for the kitchen for a refill. Petey was lying on his favorite spot on the kitchen floor—near the refrigerator—and he lifted his head and smiled a doggy smile at Daryl. “Hey dog face,” Daryl said. Petey's tail wriggled in happiness. Daryl searched the pantry for a bag of tortilla chips—he had had a big lunch earlier and wasn't very hungry for dinner, but nonetheless he had the urge to nibble—and returned to the sofa with the chips and a fresh mug of beer. He turned on the Minolta wide screen TV with the remote and settled in for an hour of channel surfing, letting his mind drift.

  Mostly he thought of the case. And Rachael. He wanted to go out with her badly.

  But he was afraid.

  What if we go out and really hit it off? What if we wind up back at my place or hers and in bed and it happens?

  What he was afraid of letting happen was falling in love with Rachael. When he had fallen in love with Diane Sterling, his second wife, he had the same problem. He was never able to let go of the past hurt he had experienced when Shirley and their unborn baby had been killed. Of course he didn't know this at the time; when he met, dated, and married Diane, he was practically married to his work as a cop. Diving into the police academy and then his work as a law enforcement officer had been part of his method of dealing with the loss of Shirley and their unborn child.

  Dealing with the aftermath of Shirley's death had been very hard. For one, her personal effects were all over the two-bedroom apartment they'd shared. Shirley had been the decorator, and she had had a ton of clothes in the closet that he had not been able to bring himself to touch for close to two years. For the first year and a half he was numb to the fact that she was really gone. He would sit in the apartment after getting home from wor
k, drink a beer, and look around the apartment, remembering every piece of furniture, every knick-knack that she had picked out. It all brought back memories of her. Clearing the apartment of her stuff would feel like getting rid of her and he couldn't do that, not so soon after the funeral. But the days stretched into weeks, the weeks into months, and before he knew it almost two years had passed and he found himself in their bedroom going through her side of the closet, pulling dresses out and putting them in plastic green garbage bags to take to her parents. He had worked in a blind stupor that day, packing her clothes from the closets and dressers, boxing up her books and the knick-knacks she liked to decorate the entertainment center with. He had collected her high school yearbooks and put them in a box. Then he had driven them over to her parents and told them that they could have the items if they wanted them. They hadn't questioned his reasons. They had simply accepted them.

  The hardest part was cleaning out the second bedroom. He did that two months after Shirley's murder. Daryl had been slowly converting it into a nursery in the months prior to Shirley's death. Dismantling the crib, taking down the baby things Shirley had put up, had been emotionally draining. But he'd done it. It had been the first thing he'd done because seeing the baby stuff in there just made him more angry and grief stricken.

  Daryl sat back in his chair and mused on the past twelve years. As much as he'd tried to erase the physical remnants of Shirley from his life, he still stumbled over some of her belongings. Occasionally he came across a favorite record album of hers that had been salted into their collection, or a favorite book. One time he had found a notebook of hers in a desk drawer that she used to keep notes in. Some of the picture frames he still had were those that she originally bought. The sofa he had was the one she picked out when they had first gotten married. The dishes he used had been given to them by Shirley's parents. He supposed he would never be totally rid of the physical memory of her, but that was okay. He didn't want her to be totally absent from his life; he needed to hold on to a few things to keep her close to his memory and his heart.

  He finally moved out of the apartment three years after she died. He moved to a bigger apartment in Torrance. When he and Diana got married, they rented a house in Silverlake. By the time they got divorced, Daryl had saved up a pretty healthy nest egg.

  Thankfully divorce proceedings had been civil; neither side had gone for the throat, and Daryl got to keep his retirement package and his savings. Diana kept the house they were renting and Daryl moved into an apartment in Studio City. Two years later he bought a home in Burbank.

  He didn't date for a long time after Shirley was killed. He didn't want to see other women: Shirley had been his life. He had loved her more than life itself. After the tragedy, he pushed back returning to school to complete his Master's degree. He took a job in a warehouse and immersed himself in the physically exhausting work. Because it was physical work, it allowed him time to think. And the only thing he could think about during his work day was how Shirley and their unborn child had been murdered. And the more he thought about it, the angrier he got.

  The gang members responsible for Shirley's murder had criminal records a mile long. One of them had served time for second degree murder and been released after having served five years of a fifteen year sentence. Five years. What a joke.

  It was this anger that fueled his decision to enter the police academy. It took him six months to muster up the nerve and prepare for it. He passed the written examinations with flying colors and he aced the psychological exams—hell, he lied on a lot of questions just so he could get his foot in the door. He knew that if he related that he had once been the victim of a violent crime that he would be denied. So he hadn't even mentioned it.

  By the time he graduated from the police academy a year later, it had been two years since he had been with a woman. His first sexual experience after Shirley's murder had been with a graduate student in her apartment one drunken summer night. He'd met her at a nightclub and they wound up at her place. If he hadn't been intoxicated he probably wouldn't have gone through with the act. But because he was drunk he was able to put the image of Shirley out of his mind as he and the woman screwed with lustful abandon. What ruined it was afterward, when she told him she loved him.

  She had been a very nice girl; he still remembered her name. Rita Something. Rita had been very nice, very sweet, but he couldn't deal with her being in love with him. He avoided her in the days following their sexual encounter, didn't return her phone calls, and she got the message. Word floated back to him through a mutual acquaintance that she thought he was the worst asshole she had ever met. The barb hadn't even stung. He was sorry he had avoided her following their one-night stand, but when she had told him she loved him that brought him back to his relationship with Shirley and the vows they'd made to each other: that they would always love and cherish each other, that they would never leave each other, that they would never cheat on each other. Daryl had still felt committed to Shirley even though by this time she was two years in her grave. To him, they had never broken up. Going out with another woman, having another woman tell him she loved him, felt like he was throwing everything he'd ever felt for Shirley into the toilet.

  Daryl sipped his beer, randomly scanning channels. He watched the History channel: this evening's segment was on Theodore Roosevelt. He watched the various segments on Roosevelt's life in a blind stupor, drinking sullenly as the past fast-forwarded quickly to the present.

  He didn't start steadily dating until he was actually on the force. By this time he had already entered therapy at the suggestion of a priest he knew at the church he attended, St. Mary's in Pasadena. With the help of counseling, he was able to put his life with Shirley in perspective; it was better to have loved than to not have loved at all; in the brief time Shirley was alive he had provided joy in her life, the best gift a loved one can give to another human being; and that old standby—you will love again.

  And he had. In the next three years, before he met Diana, he dated a succession of women. He had enjoyed their company, was able to perform sexually with them with only a minimum of thinking about Shirley. He found that he had to completely forget about Shirley if he was to resume a normal life. And for awhile he had. When he was seeing those other women Shirley never once entered his thoughts. It wasn't until the eve of his wedding to Diana that he was sitting alone in his apartment, the nervous jitters of the following day's wedding mass fluttering through his stomach, that Shirley's face came to him as his mind played a quick movie of his life with her. He lost it. He buried his face in his hands and cried until the tears ran dry.

  After that, he couldn't help but think of his long lost love and the child they had created together whenever he made love to Diana. Diana noticed the sudden change, asked him what was bothering him, and he made the mistake of telling her. She almost left him then, but she could clearly see that this was troubling him. Of course he had told her about the tragic incident with his wife and she had appeared sympathetic. Now she was just getting irritated at his inability to get over it.

  By this time he was well into his career as a law enforcement officer. He had quickly climbed the ranks to detective, and was assigned to the anti-gang CRASH unit.

  And when he was able to, when he knew he could get away with it, Daryl poured his frustrations and hatred out on the gang members he arrested. He did whatever he could to keep the vermin off the streets; even if it meant planting evidence and lying on the witness stand to do it.

  A year after the marriage Diana suggested he seek counseling, which he probably should have sought after Shirley's death but never did. He followed Diana's advice and sought therapy. The problems between them got worse.

  To escape from the pressures his problems were causing, he buried himself more in his work. Diana, likewise, became more embroiled in her job as a financial auditor.

  She also started an affair with a co-worker that Daryl didn't find out about until they separated. Sur
prisingly, he wasn't angry with her over it. He didn't blame her. He had abandoned her emotionally.

  Before their marriage ended Daryl renounced his Catholic faith. In the years since he was married his belief in the Catholic structure of salvation, heaven and hell, God and Satan, were waning. And in the last year of his marriage they crumbled completely. Part of it had to do with the reading material he dived into the more he got into his job as a homicide detective. He began to read a lot of psychology: Freud, Jung, as well as the major philosophers. He had grown especially fond of Nietchze. He slowly began to suspect that everything he had been taught by the Catholic Church, everything he had been led to believe in, was all a delusional lie. He had been duped. Because if there was a God, He wouldn't have taken Shirley away from him so cruelly. If there was a God there wouldn't be so much human suffering. There wouldn't be so much hunger, so much poverty, so much hopelessness. He saw it himself on the streets when he went to work his beat. When he saw the viciousness of human nature—the drunks that drove and killed, the gang members that fired indiscriminately into a crowd, killing innocent people; the father who beat his six-month-old baby to death because its crying bothered him—he thought that if mankind was truly God's crowning achievement than He must be seriously flawed. And because He had seen fit to take Shirley and their child away from him was only the icing on the cake.

  So he had renounced his Catholic faith. He had trashed the idol of the Virgin Mary he had received after taking First Communion and likewise disposed of an old wooden crucifix with a striking life-like image of Christ pinned to it. He had ripped the pages of the only Bible in the house and burned them in the kitchen sink. Then he had gone through the house and destroyed everything relating to his Catholic upbringing—the nativity scene his parents had given him when he was eighteen; the painting of the Blessed Mother, hands clasped together in prayer, that Diana's aunt had given them as a wedding present.