by Scott Frost
I tried a breathing exercise that Lacy had learned from her PTSD sessions to relax, but my broken ribs made the exercise futile. I rolled onto my side away from the broken ribs and watched the gentle rise and fall of the curtains.
“Let it go,” I started to say, then stopped. There was no letting go of this. Maybe this was what John Manning had known, and it was why he became an investigator just as I had. It was the thread that connected us, except he had chosen to solve the one mystery I had forever tried to bury: Who was our father? And that search probably cost him his life.
I got out of bed and walked back out to the dining room, where I had left the case files. There wasn’t a sound anywhere. Not the wind. Not a distant car, a jet, anything. I realized I was shaking and eased myself down into a chair at the table and sat in the darkness. Tears began to well up in my eyes, and I wiped them away with the back of my hand. My brother had thought of me the night he died because he believed I needed the same answers he did.
Wind jostled the windowpanes. I heard the siren of a distant fire truck. A mockingbird began a wild singsong and then a crow let go with a series of shrieks.
I stood up and walked to the front door and stepped outside to get some air. The wind had shifted overnight and was blowing directly into my face. Smoke obscured the sky above. To the east over the nearest ridgeline, the orange light of fire glowed in the predawn. There were more sirens audible. The flashing lights of a fire engine appeared at the bottom of Mariposa. Other residents on the block were loading their cars with belongings.
I retrieved my phone from inside and hit the speed dial. Harrison answered on the second ring.
“Are you all right?” he said.
His voice was as reassuring as the feel of his hands on my legs. Fragile gray ash began falling out of the sky, covering the ivy on the hillside like new snow. The first wisps of flame were becoming visible, topping the ridge less than two miles away. A nervous deer came bounding out between two houses, its delicate hooves slipping on the pavement before it vanished into the shadows behind another house.
“The fire’s moving right toward me. I think I’m going to have to evacuate,” I said.
“I’ll be right there,” Harrison said.
“I think it’s possible my father could be a killer,” I said before I hung up.
By dawn the flames had crested the ridge to the east and began advancing. Three fire engines were parked in the cul-de-sac. My neighbors were packing their cars with pets, tax records, family photographs, and anything else that couldn’t be replaced and would fit in an SUV.
I watched through the dining room window the exodus of my neighbors. I had gone through the house and piled anything I thought I couldn’t live without in boxes by the garage door. The irony of my father’s case files from a murder investigation sitting on top of family memories was not lost on me.
“I bet I’m the only one on my block saving a case file from a murder investigation along with all their baby pictures.”
“You have a place to stay till the fire’s out?” asked Chief Chavez, who had arrived shortly after Harrison, when he heard of the evacuation notice.
“I have an extra bedroom,” Harrison said.
I glanced at him and his eyes revealed nothing more than an offer of shelter.
“Good, I don’t want you alone,” Chavez said.
“I’ll be fine. I can get a motel room.”
Chavez shook his head. “If your brother and Williams were murdered because they were a threat to someone, then that means whoever continues that investigation is also in danger.”
“Me, in other words,” I said.
Chavez looked out the door at the line of flames a mile from the house and shook his head in disbelief. “Do you really believe it’s possible your father is the one they are looking for?”
“You mean, do I believe my father could have murdered his own son?”
His eyes appeared to reveal a reluctance even to consider the question so directly.
“Eighteen years ago my father ripped open Jenny Roberts’s blouse and dragged her across a stage floor by her ankle as she screamed for help. A month later she was murdered. Does that make him a murderer? I don’t know. Until last night, all I knew of him were a few images on the TV.”
Chavez looked at me for a moment, hesitant to say what he was thinking. “Maybe you should walk away from this.”
I shook my head and looked over at my father’s file.
“I’ve already done that for most of my life. For an instant I had a brother in this world reach out to me. If I walk away, I’ll lose him again.”
“I don’t want you alone. You stay with Harrison.”
He gripped my hand and then walked out to his squad, parked on the street. The sun was fully over the San Gabriels now, though from the amount of light coming through the heavy smoke you would never know it.
“I heard someone who lost his house in a brush fire say that no one is as free as the person who has just lost everything,” I said.
I turned and looked at Harrison. “You believe that?”
He shook his head. “That sounds like something to believe when you have no other choice.”
Tiny embers carried on the wind began hitting the side of the house as firemen began to deploy their hoses, preparing to defend the block. I closed the front door and stood looking into my house. So much pain had happened here. How could it possibly matter if I lost it? I wondered.
Tears filled my eyes and I rushed into the kitchen, grabbed a paper bag, and began walking through the house picking up things that I thought needed saving—salt and pepper shakers from the dining room table, a refrigerator magnet, a drink coaster, a pen, a book that I had never read, a pair of shoes, clothes from Lacy’s closet that she hadn’t worn in years, her princess phone.
When the bag was full I sat down on Lacy’s bed and held it like it was a newborn. Harrison walked in a moment later and sat next to me.
“I don’t know what half the things in this bag are,” I said. “I was trying to find something happy to remember . . . I don’t know.”
I looked out the window at the smoke streaming by.
“There was a prosecutor from the DA’s office present at your father’s questioning. You want to start there?” Harrison asked.
“Okay.”
I quickly packed the boxes of family records into my Volvo, closed all the doors and windows, then drove away from my home of twenty years, not certain it would be there when I returned.
14
The lawyer with the DA’s office who had been present at my father’s interrogation eighteen years ago was now working as an investigator out of the Antelope Valley office, sixty miles north of L.A. on the edge of the high desert.
This was as far as you could get from the center of the city and still be within the county. Tract after tract of housing developments spread out in every direction where desert used to be. Lawns replaced tumbleweed. Ninety-minute commutes redefined the limits of community.
From the parking lot of the DA’s offices you could see extinct cinder cones rising out of the sand to the north. To the south, the column of smoke from the fire threatening my house climbed thousands of feet into the air, dwarfing the San Gabriels.
Outside of a few desert rats and dirt bikers, no one came to the high desert out of choice. You came because it was the last place you could afford, or you came for work. In every sense it was the end of the road before leaving L.A. entirely behind.
The investigators’ windowless offices were on the ground floor, far from the views of the lawyers three and four floors up. Frank Cross met us in the hallway and walked us back to his small office. Cross was a large man, over six feet, powerfully built, though far from fit. Why a former lawyer for the DA’s office was now working as an investigator I suspected had something to do with his presence here at the outer edge of the system. His eyes had the tired look of a traveler stuck in an airport with no hope of ever reaching his destination
.
On a wall of the office was a marker board with a list of open cases. A quick glance suggested the majority of them were spousal abuse, hate crimes, and property theft. Not the stuff investigators’ dreams are made of.
“Your call said you wanted to talk about the River Killer investigation?” Cross asked.
“A portion of it,” I said. “You took part in the interrogation of the only suspect ever arrested.”
Cross’s dull eyes appeared to focus.
“Manning,” he said without hesitation.
“You remember?”
The corners of his mouth turned as if he had stepped on something sharp. “Do you fish, Lieutenant?”
“No.”
He looked at Harrison, who responded without hesitation. “The one that got away.”
Cross nodded. “The one you never forget . . . no one forgets.”
“Was there a reason you were at the interrogation?”
“I was a cop before I became a prosecutor.”
Cross closed his right hand into a fist and flexed the muscles of his forearm. Then he got up from his desk and walked over and closed the door to the office.
“Victoria Fisher worked in my office. I demanded to be there.”
“You knew her?” Harrison asked.
Cross nodded. “I didn’t know her well. She was clerking for us during summer break from law school.”
“What can you tell us about Manning?”
He started to answer then stopped. “Why is Pasadena PD interested in this?”
“We’re investigating another crime that may be linked to the River Killings.”
Cross stood up from his desk, started to walk across the room, then paused mid-stride. He put his hand on the back of his neck and began to massage the thick muscles. “He’s alive, isn’t he?”
I didn’t answer.
“Manning’s alive, that’s why you’re here?”
“We don’t know that for certain,” I said.
“But you think he’s killed again, otherwise you wouldn’t be here.”
“Has anyone else questioned you about this recently?”
Cross looked at me suspiciously and shook his head. “You have someone in mind?”
“His son may have been investigating the River Killings and was possibly murdered.”
“He didn’t talk to me.” Cross appeared to replay the words in his head several times. “My God, you want to know if I think it’s possible he could kill his own son, don’t you? That’s why you’re here?”
Cross walked over to a filing cabinet, pulled out a set of keys from his pocket, and unlocked the drawer. He rummaged through it for a moment, then removed a videotape.
“He’s a monster. It’s all here. You want an answer, all you have to do is look and listen.”
He gripped the tape tightly, as if trying to protect it. “Who else have you talked to?”
“The detective who led the investigation.”
“Hazzard?”
I nodded.
“No one else, no one from the DA’s office? Not City Hall? You’re very certain about this?”
“Just Hazzard,” I said.
He stepped around his desk and gently set the tape and an envelope down in front of me. “You don’t make a copy, and I want it back.”
I agreed, then reached over and picked up the tape. I noticed Cross’s eyes follow it until I slipped it safely into the envelope and closed it tight.
Outside a fine coating of sand from the desert covered my Volvo. I got in out of the wind and set the envelope with the tape of my father’s interrogation on the seat next to me.
“Cross is in a windowless office. Why do I feel like he’s still watching us?” I said. “He’s afraid of something, and it isn’t just this tape, otherwise he wouldn’t have given it to us.”
Harrison looked around as the blowing dust obscured the surrounding landscape. The tiny particles of sand hitting the windows began to sound like rain.
“A former DA who’s now working as a low-end investigator on the edges of the county.”
Harrison thought for a moment.
“Maybe he’s afraid of falling completely off the map,” Harrison said.
I picked up the envelope containing my father’s interrogation tape. “Or being pushed.”
15
On the day Victoria Fisher was murdered my father spent the afternoon rehearsing a play at a small theater on Santa Monica Boulevard. The street had changed little in the eighteen years since the murder. For a few hours every night a crowd of well-dressed theatergoers visit the half dozen or so small theaters in what is known as the theater district. When the stage lights are turned off, and the patrons retreat in their BMWs and Saabs, the street is taken back by transvestite prostitutes and crack junkies on the prowl for a fix.
An assistant to the director of the theater met us at the door and led us onto the stage, where we waited. It was a small auditorium that seated perhaps a hundred and fifty. I walked back to the wings. A door marked EMERGENCY EXIT was just twenty feet beyond the wings. A short hallway led to dressing rooms farther back past the stage manager’s office.
I heard the sound of the director’s voice greeting Harrison and started back out through the wings, but froze. This is the place, I said silently to myself. I replayed the actress’s words in my head. Her descriptions matched everything around me as if it had happened just days ago.
I looked out through the curtains. The light from a single spot illuminated the dark stage. I heard his voice in my head.
Take off your blouse.
I stepped onto the wood floor of the stage. As I reached center stage I realized it was here where his hand had come around and covered her mouth and he ripped open her shirt. When she stepped on his foot and he released her she would have started crawling stage left toward the steps that led up into the darkness of the seats. I looked over the boards of the stage. She would have gotten a dozen feet, no more, before he grabbed her ankle and started to drag her back. I knelt down and placed my hand on the wood. It was worn and marked from countless productions. I imagined she tried to find the smallest crack or raised seam to take hold of with her fingers and stop him, but there was nothing that would help.
“Lieutenant.”
I looked up and Harrison and the theater director were standing at the front of the stage, looking at me.
“What is it exactly you want to know?” the director asked. His name was Moore. He looked to be nearing sixty and holding on for everything he was worth to his youthful looks.
I let my hand linger on the cool wood for another moment, then stood up.
“You were interviewed by the police eighteen years ago about an actor named Thomas Manning.”
“I remember it very clearly.”
“Why is that?”
“Because it was the last day I ever saw Tom. He vanished after that. I had to take over the acting class he was teaching.”
I had never heard my father referred to as Tom; I couldn’t even remember my mother ever using the name.
“He was accused of molesting several actresses?”
Moore nodded. “I didn’t learn about those things until he vanished.”
“Did you believe them?”
The director paused dramatically, as if it were written in stage directions and we were working on a scene.
“I believe Tom was capable of anything, including greatness.”
“You liked him?”
He shook his head. “Envied his talent. The rest of him . . .”
“What?”
Moore looked over the stage as if replaying a moment in time. “With a look he could make you feel as if you were nothing.”
“According to the arrest report, you were the last person who could corroborate his whereabouts on the night of the murder.”
Moore shook his head. “No, he left the theater after class with one of his students, an actress.”
Harrison looked over the notes he had t
aken from Hazzard’s files, then shook his head. “There’s no mention of that.”
“I told the detective.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yes. I don’t know if they went any farther together than the parking lot, but they walked out of here together.”
“Do you know her name?” I asked
He thought for a moment, shook his head.
“I’ll have to make some calls, see if anyone remembers.”
Moore disappeared into an office and returned ten minutes later. “I think this is her, but no guarantees.” He handed me a piece of paper with a name and address.
“Has anyone else talked to you about this recently?”
“No.”
I handed Moore my card as we left, the picture of my father gaining more, if not better, detail.
“Doesn’t make sense that Hazzard would have missed a detail like that,” Harrison said.
“Moore could be right—maybe they didn’t get any farther than the parking lot.”
“You want to talk to Hazzard?”
“Not yet. If he left something out, let’s find out if there was a reason.”
I handed Harrison the paper with the name and address. “Let’s talk to her first.”
I glanced back toward Pasadena. The smoke from the fire that was threatening my house now completely obscured the mountains to the east.
“What time was it my father left here?”
Harrison checked his notes. “Shortly after seven.”
“About the same time Victoria Fisher was starting dinner at the restaurant on Melrose.”
“Two miles from here.”
The address was a small bungalow in Eagle Rock just west of Pasadena. A boy of about ten was rushing down the steps of the house carrying a backpack to a sedan parked out front. As the car drove away his mother appeared at the front door, waved, then glanced in our direction before stepping back inside. Candice Fleming was or had been her name on the day she walked out of the theater with my father eighteen years before.
“Did you see that?” Harrison said.
I nodded; it was a look familiar to any cop, but not in this kind of a neighborhood, or from a woman in a robe sending a son on a sleepover.
