by Scott Frost
“You tell LAPD this?”
“LAPD is looking for a cop killer. They don’t want to know what I think,” I said.
I glanced out the door. A shower of burning embers the size of golf balls were falling out of the sky, sending up puffs of smoke when they landed.
“I think you might be right about it being the end of the world, Detective,” I said.
Hazzard looked out the window, his face a mask of intensity.
“Just a matter of time,” he said.
I turned and looked at him. “You think Thomas Manning killed those girls, don’t you?” I asked.
Hazzard smiled, but there was no joy in it. “I spend my days buying baseball cards and playing golf. What I think doesn’t matter anymore.”
I imagined Hazzard was one of the saddest men I’d ever met in my life. His Hawaiian shirt, golf clubs, and the sports memorabilia were Band-Aids holding together a lonely house and a psyche that had been assaulted by years of violence.
“Thomas Manning was my father,” I said. “I’d like to know what you think.”
A flash of surprise registered on Hazzard’s face— something I would have guessed wasn’t possible.
“You sure, Lieutenant?”
I didn’t know the answer to that question. Until that morning my father had existed in a memory that was as faint and harmless as a thirty-year-old television show. Now I was asking to replace that with the knowledge that my father could be a monster.
“I just want to know who killed my brother,” I said.
Hazzard reached into a cooler I hadn’t noticed under the table, took out a can of beer, set it on the table, and just stared at it.
“I hope that’s what you want,” Hazzard said.
“Because I’d bet everything I own, your father murdered those young women.”
12
It was near dusk when Harrison and I finished laying out Hazzard’s case files on the conference room table and into some sort of recognizable order—evidence, interview records, search warrants, victims’ histories, and suspect histories.
Photographs were pinned on a bulletin board in descending order from living candid shots to crime scene and finally to autopsy. Two of the candid pictures were professional head shots used by actors; the third was a snapshot that looked to be from a family album. All three women were blond, or at least dyed blond. The first victim, Jenny Roberts, was twenty-two years old. The second, Alice Lundholm, was only twenty. The third, Victoria Fisher, twenty-five.
All three had been sexually assaulted though no evidence of semen was present in Victoria Fisher. Each had then been strangled with a piece of yellow plastic cord. The crime-scene photos showed all three victims were naked from the waist down, hands bound behind their backs and lying facedown. All died within a period of six weeks. Two of them had taken a class taught by my father. No known connection to the third victim existed.
When we finished laying everything out Harrison sat down without saying a word. Even the simple act of sorting through paperwork takes on a weight when its subject is murder. It was easy to understand why Hazzard was relieved to have the case files finally out of his house. All I wanted to do was lie down and sleep. Living with these files in your house would have been like living with a black hole that, every day, took another piece of you.
“There’s no reason to think Hazzard is right about your father,” Harrison said.
I stepped over to the window and looked out. The first line of flames from a new brush fire was just visible on a ridgetop above Pasadena in the San Gabriels. I turned and looked back into the room. The one folder out of the entire box that remained unopened was the one containing information about my father.
“We also don’t have a reason to think he’s wrong,” I said.
I took a seat next to Harrison and stared at the photographs on the wall. I could feel the tug of the investigation—inviting me to let go of the known world where people live day in and day out safely away from the shadow world tacked up on the wall. These three young women would know what I was thinking. They had been those people—safe and blissfully ignorant until they were yanked into the dark for a few terrible minutes.
I stared at the crime-scene pictures for a moment. At some point in every investigation you cross a line where what you discover from then on will forever change you. And I was staring at it. Beyond this there’s no turning back, I said silently to myself. Hazzard knew all about that. He had crossed into this world and then tried to return to the old world. But the more normal he attempted to make his home, the more knickknacks he put on the walls, the farther away that world seemed to be from him. And now he was neither a cop nor a civilian.
“Were the victims put in this position before or after death?” I said.
Harrison scanned the autopsy reports. “After.”
“Why?” I asked.
Harrison thought for a moment. “The killer didn’t want her to look at his face. Or he didn’t want to look at hers.”
“He couldn’t look them in the eye,” I said.
I glanced at Harrison. “He was ashamed.”
“The first two showed signs of hemorrhaging and abrasions from the cord used to strangle them. The third victim, only bruising, no damage from the cord.”
“He used his hands on the third victim,” I said.
Harrison nodded. “Why the change?”
“Victoria Fisher had dirt in her mouth, a tooth was chipped, a split lip, some bruising on the face. She fought back,” I said.
Harrison nodded and looked over the other two autopsies. “The first two victims showed no signs of a struggle; that could explain why there were traces of semen found on their clothes, and none on the third victim.”
I stood up and walked around to the other side of the table, closer to the pictures. The usual distance time gives to old crime-scene photos wasn’t present in these. They appeared fresh, as if they had just come out of the developing tray.
“Something’s missing,” I said.
Harrison shook his head. “You lost me.”
“The fourth victim.”
“There was no fourth victim.”
“Exactly.”
I saw in Harrison’s eyes that he understood. “Why did he stop?”
I nodded.
“Serial killers don’t stop,” Harrison said.
“Not usually, not unless they’ve been caught or are dead. And we’re assuming he’s not dead because of my brother and Detective Williams. So there has to be a reason there were only three victims.”
“He could have moved away.”
I went through one of the piles of documents until I found a series of requests to the FBI spanning a period of ten years after the three murders.
“Hazzard spent years looking for hits on the FBI national database. He got two close matches, but arrests were made in both cases with no connection to Los Angeles.”
“He could be killing in different ways that were unrecognizable to Hazzard. Over the last eighteen years there would have been hundreds of unsolved cases in L.A. County,” Harrison said.
“Three victims, same body type, same ages, two killed the same way, the third strangled with his hands. All left in the same exact position. He wanted us to know it was him,” I said.
“So why would he stop after he’s gotten our attention? ”
I walked back over to the windows. The smoke that had laid down a blanket over Pasadena from fires to the east was now rising in columns straight up twenty-five thousand feet, forming thick mushroom clouds that gave L.A. the appearance it was ringed by nuclear explosions.
“What if this isn’t a serial killer? What if it was something else?”
“Such as?”
“The third victim wasn’t an actress. Who was she?” I said, turning back to the photographs.
Harrison began going through her file. “A law student, single mother, worked part-time at the district attorney’s office downtown as a clerk.”
"She had a child?”
Harrison nodded. “A boy, four years old at the time of her death.”
“Why her? How was she picked? The actress would have been easy. A predator wants to find beautiful young blondes, an acting school in L.A. is the first place he’d look. But a law student? How did he find her?”
Harrison quickly scanned another page of the file. “She was last seen leaving a restaurant on Melrose after dinner with others from the DA’s office. No shortage of beautiful women in restaurants on Melrose. Wrong place, wrong time.”
I looked over at the folder containing the files on my father.
“Where did my father teach the acting classes?”
He started to reach for my father’s file, then hesitated and glanced at me.
“Go on,” I said.
He opened the folder and began going through reports until he found it. “A theater on Santa Monica Boulevard near La Brea,” Harrison said.
“Maybe two miles from where she would have been eating the night she died,” I said.
Harrison replaced the report and closed the file. “You should sit down.”
I raised my hand to my face and realized I was trembling. I looked at a chair but I couldn’t move. As I tried to take a breath, the injured rib felt like a knife slicing into my chest. I looked across the table at the crime-scene pictures of the three young women lying on the banks of the river.
“Do you think my father killed them?”
I felt Harrison’s hand on my arm and he guided me over to a chair.
“We’re a long way from that,” he said.
I tried to find another way to look at what was staring me in the face, but I couldn’t. I closed my eyes and managed to gently get a breath of air.
“Someone identifying themselves as a cop took the surveillance tape from the Western Union office,” I said. “John Manning’s girlfriend thought the man who took his computer was a cop.”
“You know something else?” Harrison said.
I looked at the bodies of the women one more time until I couldn’t any longer, then got up and walked over to the window. The sun had dropped into the ocean; a dark orange shadow had fallen over Pasadena. The mushroom cloud of smoke rising out of the fire in the mountains had turned blood red.
“War of the Colossal Beast,” I said.
“You lost me,” Harrison said.
“It’s a movie. A monster is destroying Los Angeles. My father played a cop in it.”
Harrison joined me at the window, staring at the plume of smoke rising into the sky.
“The report mentions the name of a DA who was present at his questioning. See if you can find him. If my father did these things, I have to know,” I said. “We’ll start with the third victim, Victoria Fisher. I want to know everything my father is alleged to have done the day she died. Talk to everyone my brother may have talked to.”
Harrison nodded.
I walked back to the table and looked down at my father’s file. If Hazzard had done his work properly, every known violent act my father ever committed would be here. How many were there? How far back did the history go? And if my own mother was abused, would I find her in these pages?
“Half of the Screen Actors Guild has played cops,” Harrison said.
“I don’t have nightmares about them,” I said.
It was after ten when I finally sat down at the dining room table to open my father’s file. I had talked to Lacy, as we promised we would every night. She hadn’t heard about Detective Williams’s murder, or my involvement, and that was just fine. I thought about calling my mother back but didn’t.
Maybe we’re not supposed to know the secrets of our own families. It might be love that brings people together, but it’s the secrets they keep to themselves that sustain them over time. I didn’t want to believe that, but staring at my father’s unopened file, it would be easier to believe it.
I took a sip of wine along with a pain pill for my ribs and began to learn who my father was. The first complaint against him came when I was eight years old. He had already been gone from my life for three years. A nineteen-year-old woman named Kelly. She was in a dressing room after a show when she heard a sound behind her and he was standing there. He told her to take off her blouse.
I felt a chill run up my back as I continued reading the complaint. My father didn’t move, he didn’t strike her, didn’t touch her, he just stared at her and told her again to take off her blouse. The victim refused and he walked away as if nothing had happened. Nothing. Another actor found Kelly an hour later, still crying.
I reached for the wineglass and noticed my hand was trembling as I picked it up. I wanted to close the file, right then and there. Let the brush fires make a run down out of the mountains and take the house. I could walk away from it. It would be a small price to pay for letting these pages turn to ashes. I emptied the glass of wine and then poured another.
A woman named Jan was next, Chris after that. Then Anne, Morgan, and Perry.
I emptied another glass, and just as quickly filled it again.
None of them had been touched; none had filed legal complaints, only with the theater’s management. But they were people to me now, with names. They were the age of my own daughter. And I knew that if they hadn’t experienced fear before that day, they knew it from that moment on because of my father. Whenever a door opened behind them, whenever they heard a footstep, they would be afraid.
A makeup artist named Terry was the first one he touched. It was in the middle of a performance. She was in the dressing room going through her kit when she heard him enter the room. She began to turn when he reached out, put his hand over her mouth, and pulled her out of the chair. She tried to scream but couldn’t, then just as quickly he let go and backed away, repeating, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”
He touched two more women, mirror images of the first encounter that ended with an apology. I didn’t look at their names. I wanted to open a second bottle of wine and turn the clock back to when my father existed as little more than an image on a television screen, but I didn’t. I moved to the last report in the file—the only assault where police questioned him. Jenny Roberts, the first victim of the River Killer. The perfect young blond actress who did community theater and wanted to be on a TV series.
I had just finished an acting class. The other students had already left. The director, Manning, asked me if I wanted to work on a scene with him for an audition he had for a small movie role. We started walking out to the stage and I noticed he had slowed his walk and was a step behind me. Then he said, “Don’t move.”
I thought it was in the script, but I couldn’t find the line. His hand covered my mouth, and his other hand began to tear open the front of my shirt and touch my breasts. I tried to pull away but I couldn’t, so I stood there and let him feel me until I felt his arm begin to relax. Then I drove the heel of my shoe into his ankle. He threw me to the stage floor and I began crawling away, screaming for help. He grabbed my ankle and began dragging me back across the stage on my stomach. I was screaming and crying. And then he let me go. He didn’t say anything, he didn’t move. He just stood there like he was surprised. Then he said, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” and I got up and ran out the stage door.
I quickly scanned the report from the officer who had questioned my father. “She came on to me,” my father said. “It happens all the time in the theater. Some people are unable to turn emotions off after intense work.”
No charges were filed. He was fired from the theater a week later. A month after that, Jenny Roberts was found on the riverbank, strangled, her hands tied behind her back with a thin yellow cord.
I closed the file and pushed back from the table. It was nearly one o’clock. I poured the last of the bottle of wine into the glass and stepped out the front door. The dry air that had been flowing out of the desert into the basin was warmer than it had been earlier in the day. The smoke wasn’t visible in the darkness, but the aroma of fire was th
ere. I took a breath and it stung my throat. It was different than it had been when Pasadena was shrouded in orange light. Instead of just burning brush and chaparral, there was the sting of something else hanging in the air now.
Houses were burning—roofs, furniture, plastics, cleaning chemicals under kitchen sinks, fabrics, books, shoe leather. All physical evidence of lives lived was being consumed.
“It happens all the time in the theater,” I whispered.
The words sent a chill through me as if I’d stepped into a cold room. All through my childhood I had pretended my father was a salesman trying to sell bicycles to cowboys. One day I dreamed he would come back. And now I hoped to God he hadn’t.
13
Twice in the night I bolted out of sleep as I felt a hand reach around my neck and try to pull me into the darkness. Each time I sat up in bed and searched the dark corners of the room to make sure I was alone, then I lay down and tried to force myself back into a dreamless sleep that I knew wouldn’t last.
The third dream was different. He didn’t touch me this time, but he was there, standing behind me. I tried to fight off the dream, but it held a grip on me as surely as if he were in the room. Then I heard my mother. “It’s okay now. It’s okay.”
The sound of her voice shook me from the dream and I jumped into consciousness. My ribs ached from lying on my side. The sheets were damp with perspiration.
The alarm clock read 5:10 A.M. I looked around the darkness and noticed the curtain blowing into the room. I lay back on the pillow and tried to think of something that would allow me to slip back to sleep. I attempted to picture my daughter, then to remember the touch of Harrison’s hands as he gently washed my legs, but I could only hold on to either thought for a moment before the shadow of my father intruded, and another terrible question formed in my mind to push sleep further away.
Was I one of his victims?
Was that why I became a cop, to undo some terrible wrong that had been swept from my memory? Was that why my mother was so upset at the prospect of my wearing a badge? That inevitably the one investigation she knew I would have to undertake was my own past, a past she had spent a lifetime concealing from me?
