Deep into the Dark

by P. J. Tracy

  He gave her a rakish smile. “Whatever got in my way. I know what they say, but gator doesn’t taste like chicken at all.”

  Crawford snorted; Nolan rolled her eyes.

  “Good luck, you two.”

  “Likewise.”

  After Remy left, Nolan buried herself in work, collating reports and cueing up the most recent traffic cam footage. Crawford was uncharacteristically silent and it disturbed her. She’d been prepared for a passionate indictment of Sam Easton, not only a wife and boyfriend killer but now the Monster of Miracle Mile.

  After ten minutes, she couldn’t stand it any longer. “I know what’s percolating in your mind about Sam Easton.”

  “I’m not thinking about Easton, I’m thinking about whether or not you’re really pissed at me.”

  “Why would you care?”

  “I don’t care, I’m just curious. Remy’s the one who called it, you were blushing. Everybody knows your face gets red when you’re on a warpath. And it’s okay, you’ve got a temper and you don’t sit on it. It’s a fine quality.”

  “I’m not pissed.”

  “That’s what I thought.” He shrugged and leaned back in his chair, a smug smile lifting the corners of his mouth. “One of you will have to transfer, you know. You can’t have a relationship with somebody in the same shop.”

  He’d aced her, and now she was pissed off—at herself, for walking into an obvious trap. She wanted to tip over her desk, but she wouldn’t give him the satisfaction. A reaction was exactly what he wanted. “I don’t have a relationship with Remy.”

  “Not yet.”

  “I don’t date cops.”

  He gave her an uncharacteristically cheerful smile. “Then you have nothing to worry about.”

  “No, I don’t, so mind your own business and stop being a shit.” She returned her attention to the traffic cam footage, trying to block out Crawford and the juvenile taunts coming from a grown man, married twenty years. How did Corinne deal with his remedial, playground mentality?

  The obvious answer, at least from the Freudian perspective of the id, the ego, and the superego, was that she didn’t have to deal with it at all. Men in domestic situations were as docile as bunnies; but take them out of that vacuum, give them strength in numbers like they had at the precinct, and they all reverted to their puerile baseline. Their id. Short for idiot? Maybe.

  Men are idiots. Remy is a man; therefore, he is an idiot.

  Now Crawford had her thinking in syllogisms. This one mildly amused her, but as she toggled through the different street views of the traffic cam footage and saw a dark Jeep Rubicon parked two blocks down from Yukiko Easton’s bungalow at ten-thirty a.m., Freud, personal dilemmas, and office politics vaporized into meaningless brain dust. She enlarged the screen, but it was a side view; the license plates weren’t visible, and when she back-tracked she was frustrated by a gap in the film. Some kind of interference or temporary camera feed failure. It happened a lot, more than it should.

  “Al, call the cops handling Traeger’s break-in. See if they’ve got anything on a black Jeep yet.”

  “What do you have?”

  “Maybe proof you’re wrong about Sam Easton. Come here, I’ll show you.”

  Crawford’s brows pitched up when he looked at the frame. “Timing could work. Who parked it there?”

  “Don’t know. There’s a gap in the film.”

  “Fast forward and let’s see who gets in.”

  She did, jumping ahead, watching carefully as cars and people came and went. At two-thirty p.m., a Hispanic woman approached the Jeep casually, slipped behind the wheel, and drove away.

  “I’m guessing that’s not our killer. Or Melody Traeger’s stalker.”

  “But it might be his vehicle. It’s all we have right now, so check in with the cops anyhow. I’ll see what other footage we can get from Caltrans.”

  Chapter Fifty-eight

  SAM WIPED FOG AWAY FROM THE bathroom mirror and stared at his face again. He waited, but the red fizz didn’t appear on his forehead. The Colt was sitting on the vanity, its surface dulled from condensation. Bad environment for a gun. It was stupid to have brought it in here. The reasons for it were dubious, but he had no compulsion to examine them.

  Melody had been so sincere when she’d told him things would get better, and she was correct that he couldn’t see it right now. For now, he chose to believe her. Things couldn’t get much worse, and the good news was he was still here, elbowing for space on Earth so he would live to fight another day.

  He took another palliative dose of Xanax, slipped back into his jeans and T-shirt, then decided to shrug on the button-down he’d grabbed on his hasty retreat from his house. It was the same one he’d worn for his last lunch with Yuki and it felt strange on his skin now, but he hadn’t wanted to leave it behind.

  Sam walked out into the hallway. Melody’s door was closed, but he could hear her humming “The Owl and the Pussycat” again. Either the luxurious accommodations had put her in a good mood or it was something she did when she was nervous, like whistling past a graveyard.

  Sam and his escort, Madame Xanax, weren’t quite ready to face Rolf and his unbridled enthusiasm yet, so he decided to take a closer look at the vanity gallery. He recognized all the stills from the movies, especially Magda in her Jaguar. Under normal circumstances, he would have been pleased by a glimpse into this private museum of film history, but images of fictitious murders now seemed like a mockery of the real thing. He was sick of death in every incarnation.

  He rapped on Melody’s door and the humming stopped.

  * * *

  They went downstairs and wandered the house until they found Rolf in what could only be described as a living room, lacking any distinguishing features aside from acres of comfortable seating that faced the primary focal point of an enormous fireplace suitable for roasting an ox. Well, maybe not an ox, but definitely a large hog.

  It was one of many rooms like it, although they all probably had special designations determined by their utility to avoid confusion, and nothing so lowbrow as “living room.” The room with the animal heads would be the Safari Room; the one with the pool tables would be the Billiards Room; the one filled with musical instruments would be the Conservatory. This was the Hog-Roasting Room. There was probably a Crossword Puzzle Room and a Gift-Wrapping Room somewhere, too.

  Rolf was standing behind a table laden with an elaborate sushi platter that rested on ice. He beamed at them and sloshed champagne into flutes. Maybe this was the Sushi and Champagne Room. He raised a remote into the air dramatically, clicked it, and a stuttering guitar track filled the room.

  “Listen up, this is ‘Telegram Sam,’ the Bauhaus version!” He did a jerky bop, then started singing along in a raw, off-key voice. “Telegram Sam, you’re my main man!” He passed them glasses and held up his own. “Cheers to new friends and the film we’re going to make together. It’s going to be genius.”

  Sam took a deep drink. It was excellent.

  “Do you like your song?”

  He didn’t really, but Rolf craved validation. It was pretty clear he didn’t get a lot of it anywhere else. It wouldn’t kill him to be a gracious guest. “Yeah. I’ll put it on my playlist. Hey, does this room have a name?”

  Rolf cocked his head in bewilderment. “What do you mean?”

  “There are a lot of rooms in your house, how do guests know where to go?”

  “You found me, didn’t you?”

  “Eventually.”

  “This is the living room.”

  What a disappointment. Sam pointed at the cloth-covered easel in the corner. “The storyboards?”

  “Yeah. Let’s take a quick look before we eat.” He hustled over, pulled off the cloth, and launched into a lengthy, passionate dissertation. Sam zoned out for the first five minutes, so easy to do when your central nervous system was on a beach somewhere far away. The only thing that brought him out of his anesthetized bliss was the gentle bump Melody gave hi
m with her hip, reminding him to play along.

  “So, these linear cells are chronological representations of the scenes in the film,” Rolf was saying. “Some of them are hand-sketched, some are computer-generated images. It’s like a comic book or graphic novel, and in this format we can move things around to work out the kinks before we commit to production.”

  Sam was anxious to end the charade as quickly as possible and retreat to his temporary aerie in the rarified skies of Beverly Hills, but the quality of the graphics impressed and intrigued him. “You did all this?”

  “Yeah, I love storyboarding. See, this is Dylan in his car in the first scene, and the next one is Bunny dead in the motel room. Then we do a smash cut to the past when Dylan gets hit by a car and suffers a brain injury. That’s when all his mental troubles start.” He shuffled to the next board. “Here, he meets Bunny at a concert. She’s a guitarist for a rock band and pretty messed up herself. They start a relationship and we follow them from there. Most of the film takes place in the past and tells the story of how he ends up in the desert with blood all over him, and why Bunny gets killed and who did it.”

  “So the beginning is the ending?” Melody asked.

  “Yeah. It’s meant to challenge the viewers’ perceptions of reality through the characters, who are both unreliable narrators, so you don’t know what’s real or not. I could take you through the rest, but it would really be better if you read the script first. Maybe you can tonight, then you’d have a better sense of the tone and the visuals I’m looking for in the desert.”

  Melody looked stricken. “I’m Bunny?”

  Rolf nodded, draining his champagne and refilling all their glasses.

  “So I die.”

  “Yeah, but you’re a main character throughout. Tons of lines.”

  “And I’m Dylan, the crazy guy?” Sam asked.

  “You got it. But we don’t really know if you’re crazy until the end.”

  “I can’t wait to find out.”

  “That’s the idea. I haven’t incorporated those visions you have of how people will die. I’m planning to work on them tonight, but I think it’s a solid gold addition that will really add to the uncertainty and anxiety over Dylan’s mental state.”

  Sam swallowed some more champagne, soft and silky, with bubbles as soft as mousse, but it went down hard. “Yeah, it really would.”

  “Let’s grab some sushi and get to know each other a little better. Oh, hey,” he grabbed a book off a credenza and presented it proudly. “Deep into the Dark. I pulled it from Pops’s bookshelf today, I knew I’d seen it before. Lynette Frolich, she’s your shrink?”

  Sam took the book he saw several times a week on the shelf in her office. He’d only seen the spine, never the cover. It was glossy black with the title embossed in silver, each letter fading at the bottom until it was engulfed by darkness. A representation of dissolution and hopelessness, as depressing a cover as could ever be imagined given the subject matter. “Yes.”

  “I read it this afternoon. You should read it, too, it’s a total mind fuck, all about PTSD. Did you get PTSD from your farm accident?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Dr. Frolich is pretty famous, at least in shrink circles. I might want to incorporate a character like her in the film, too. What do you think?”

  “I’m sure she’d be really flattered.”

  “Can you see now how integral you are to this movie? I mean, you’re literally rewriting it.”

  Chapter Fifty-nine

  REMY HAD TRACKED DOWN TWO OF the former felons who’d left their fingerprints on some truly repugnant items from the Rehbein, but they both came up zeroes. One had overdosed a month ago. The second had been thrown back in the can on drug charges and aggravated assault in March, before the Miracle Mile killings had even started. On to the next scumbag.

  The third set of prints didn’t belong to a scumbag, at least on paper. They hadn’t popped because of a criminal history but because he’d served in the military. His name was Ronald Doerr, and his prints had been found on a scrap of paper near Froggy’s body. It was the lined notebook variety with wobbly letters and numbers written in blue pen: 3312NVY. Did NVY stand for Navy? That didn’t make a lot of sense, he’d been in the Army. A password? An address? A message? Maybe. Some serials liked to leave little notes and mess with investigators’ heads.

  He expanded his search on Ronald Doerr, and his dim optimism faded to black. He’d been killed in action two years ago, so whatever 3312NVY meant, it didn’t matter because he definitely wasn’t a suspect.

  A dead man’s prints at a recent crime scene. Curious, but not really such a mystery. Either Ronald Doerr had been in the building at some point and dropped a piece of paper or somebody who’d had contact with him had been.

  He slurped his disgusting, cold, vending machine coffee while frustration festered. They had similar fibers from two scenes that were meaningless without a garment to match, and useless fingerprints. No witnesses, no suspects, no place to go—maybe not until the Monster killed again. But that was a really shitty, defeatist attitude that didn’t cut it with the three, possibly four, butchered women who deserved justice, not to mention Froggy. You had to keep moving, keep groping for a thread, any thread. They were out there, you just had to find them.

  Expecting nothing, he plugged 3312NVY into a search. Stranger things had broken cases. It yielded a house for sale on Navy Day Drive in Maryland. He refined his parameters to Los Angeles and instead of an address found articles on a Los Angeles-class fast attack submarine. He tweaked his search some more, and five minutes later he found 3312 Navy Street in Mar Vista. The owner’s name sounded oddly familiar, so he did a search on the police database and it lit up his computer. There was a BOLO out on the homeowner, courtesy of Nolan and Crawford.

  It was easier to call than to run back to the Homicide pen, and Maggie picked up on the first ring. It bothered him that he was thinking of her hair and long legs instead of the reason he was calling, but he pulled it together before he spoke. “Tell me about Sam Easton.”

  Hesitation. “His wife was murdered this morning.”

  “He’s one of the runners Al mentioned.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And you don’t think he did it?”

  “No. Why are you asking about him?”

  “Prints popped on a scrap of paper from the Rehbein, and it had cryptic letters and numbers written on it. I ran some searches and his address came up as a possible match. I just saw the BOLO on him and it seemed like weird coincidence.”

  “Who do the prints belong to?”

  “Ronald Doerr, formerly U.S. Army. He was killed in action two years ago, so that doesn’t go anywhere. But when you find Easton, I’d like to talk to him.”

  “Easton was Army, too. Maybe there’s some kind of a connection that can help you.”

  “I’m hoping. Keep me in the loop, Maggie.”

  “I will.” Nolan hung up and stared at the wall behind Crawford’s head, where a spidery crack from the last earthquake was metastasizing, creeping down toward the floor.

  “Who’s asking about Easton?”

  “Remy.”

  “No shit? What’s up?”

  “He said a weird coincidence.”

  “Nobody believes in coincidences, especially not Remy.”

  Chapter Sixty

  UNLIKE ANY OTHER SPECIES ON THE planet, humans possessed the vexing capacity to dwell in the past or speculate about the future, which sometimes made life unreasonably difficult. Tonight, Sam was trying to embrace the gift of lesser creatures: the ability, the purest necessity, of living in the moment. Even in combat, your dense focus on survival was still influenced by your past and thoughts of the future; but if you were a mouse running from a cat, instinct was your only reality, your only tool. There was no past or present, and things became very simple.

  He had become that mouse. Life was now and there was no cat, no hallucinations, no blackouts. His world was the drink in hi
s hand, the numbness in his brain. He was being incredibly reckless; but the alcohol, tranquilizers, and the Shangri-La fantasy of the Hesse mansion dulled his mental anguish—the horror of Yuki’s murder, his fears about confronting Nolan and Crawford, the real possibility that he might be losing his mind. If Rolf knew how close his script paralleled reality, he’d be dancing a jig.

  Rolf had opened up an expansive, luxe room that served as a bar-slash-club, as well stocked and appointed, if not better, than Pearl Club’s. Bauhaus was still droning, and Rolf was jerking around to the dark Goth music while he mixed drinks with exotic ingredients like crème de violette and Aperol. It seemed like every five minutes he was gustily pushing a new creation across the bar for their approval, particularly interested in Melody’s opinion since she was a real bartender. He was spilling more than he was serving now, and his eyes were bleary and unfocused. Like Melody, his former heroin addiction didn’t interfere with ardent alcohol use. Maybe it was a new trend in treatment.

  In truth, they were all getting bombed, and Sam knew it was time to slip away. Things were starting to seem a little off-balance, more than a little surreal. And it was getting late, although he’d had no sense of time passing. He was going to be seriously hurting tomorrow morning.

  He looked over at Melody, who was watching him with a concerned expression.

  “Maybe you should go to bed,” she whispered, which wasn’t necessary because the music was so loud.

  He nodded. Time for a day of horror and questionable decisions to end. “Hey, Rolf,” he shouted to get his attention.

  “What’s up, Telegram Sam, do you need another drink?” he shouted back.

  Sam looked up at the ceiling-mounted speakers and made a slashing gesture. Rolf cut the music. “I need to go to bed. If I don’t, I’m going to regret it.”

  “Yeah, it’s getting pretty late, and I still have some work to do on the script.” He knocked back a shot of something green and licked his lips. “But man, we had fun, didn’t we? That’s nothing to regret.”