Never Fear

by Scott Frost

  “He tried to tell us when we were at the hospital what we are missing,” I said.

  I stepped back to the door and looked at Danny’s map.

  “ ‘They all fell to the ground, but one of them,’ ” Harrison said, repeating Danny’s words.

  He stared at the map for a moment. “If there’s a connection pointing to something, it’s beyond me.”

  I reached for the light switch but stopped.

  “Or we just weren’t listening,” I said.

  “ ‘They all fell to the ground,’ ” Harrison said, shaking his head. “I don’t see it. It just doesn’t point us anywhere.”

  “Maybe we’re missing it because it doesn’t sound like something that can help us. What else did he say?”

  Harrison replayed the conversation at the hospital in his mind.

  “He told us it was ‘here, that’s where it is,’ as he pointed to his head,” Harrison said. “And inside his head is the one place we can’t go.”

  I glanced at the spiraling orbits and swirling lines of words on the map, and then Danny’s words seemed to fall into place.

  “Maybe we don’t have to,” I said.

  “Danny’s told me twice where it is, I just didn’t understand.”

  I looked at Harrison.

  “I thought it was just a picture of madness. But that wasn’t it. It was a message, it has to be, those words are too specific.”

  “What words?”

  “The ones he painted on the ceiling of my bedroom. ‘This is what it’s like in my head.’ He left it at my house. That’s why he went there.”

  39

  Electricity had been restored to most of the neighborhood, though that mattered little to my own block, where there were no longer any homes but my own. The glow of flames was visible in the distance in several directions. The scent of burned citrus still drifted on the wind from the scorched lemon tree on the next lot. I slipped the key into the lock and pushed the front door open.

  We stepped inside and shone our flashlights. The sight of what had happened to the inside of my house was still a jolt as I looked around. I thought I was beyond feeling or caring but I was wrong. Harrison stared in silence at the ash-covered furniture and the paint swirling across the walls.

  “We should look at the message Danny left,” Harrison said.

  Walking down the hallway where my family pictures had once hung, I began to feel like I had stumbled on an archaeological site. It wasn’t my house any longer. The memories once contained in these walls no longer felt as if they were mine, but rather just another part of a world that had vanished into the past.

  I pushed the bedroom door open and Harrison stepped in and looked up at the ceiling. He stared at it long enough to make out the words, then looked around the room.

  “Where do people hide things of value in houses?” Harrison said.

  “Sock drawers,” I said.

  I walked over to my dresser and pulled open the top drawer. The clothes inside were untouched by the gray ash that covered everything else. The whites and colors were as startling to look at as an open wound. I swept my hand through the clothes but found nothing there. I pulled open the next drawer and the next until I had gone through them all, but it wasn’t there.

  I looked over to the closet, but didn’t say anything for a moment. A set of footprints was visible near the closet.

  “Check the door,” I said.

  If he had guessed or understood anything about my past, he gave no indication of it. Harrison went over to the door and stopped. The knob was covered with a thin layer of ash that had been undisturbed.

  “It’s not here. This hasn’t been opened.”

  “We’re looking in the wrong places,” I said. “You hide things—rings or jewelry—in drawers and closets. We’re looking for a piece of paper that he wants us to find.”

  “Like a note you leave someone if you’re going to be out,” Harrison said.

  I turned and rushed down the hall to the living room and crossed over to the kitchen.

  “This is where you leave a note,” I said.

  I checked the small kitchen table by the window but there was only a set of silverware, salt and pepper shakers, and a napkin, all covered in ash. On the kitchen counter ash covered the phone book, and a pad of paper next to the wall phone was untouched. A half-filled wineglass, a coffee cup, and a few plates were scattered across the counter, but nothing else. I felt Harrison’s hand on my shoulder and he pointed the flashlight the length of the kitchen.

  “The refrigerator.”

  In the circle of light a single sheet of paper hung on the refrigerator door, held by a small yellow magnet in the shape of a pencil.

  “Did you or Lacy walk into the kitchen when you were here before?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t think so.”

  Harrison shone the light across the tile floor. There were two sets of prints in the ash.

  “Someone else has been here. Shoes are different sizes,” Harrison said.

  “Could have been a fireman checking gas lines,” I said, not really believing it.

  I stepped over and shone my light on the paper hanging next to a note, barely visible under the ash, that I had written to myself—Call Lacy.

  I slipped the paper out from under the magnet and pointed my light on it. It was a legal-size xeroxed copy. In the upper left corner was the letterhead of the Los Angeles County District Attorney and the official government seal. Below was a statement, several paragraphs in length. Below that two signatures appeared.

  “It’s a witness deposition,” I said. In the upper left corner was a date.

  “Eighteen years ago,” Harrison said.

  I slipped my reading glasses out of my pocket and began to read. It was handwritten, not typed, and had the appearance of being done in haste.

  Me and two friends, Darren and Walter, were walking home from a party when the police car stopped us.

  What time?

  Just a little before midnight.

  Had you done something to get stopped?

  You don’t have to do anything to get stopped in L.A., lady. You just have to be breathing and black. We weren’t gang members. We didn’t break the law. Darren was an honor student. He was going to go to college in the fall.

  What happened after they stopped you?

  The cop told us to fall down and me and Walter did, but Darren wouldn’t because we hadn’t done anything. I think he was just tired of being treated like he had been stealing car stereos and selling dope from the day he was born. I didn’t see all that happened after that ’cause my face was on the ground. The cop told him again, and when he didn’t move the cop grabbed him around the neck, picked him up off the ground, and started choking him. All I saw was Darren’s feet in the air, kicking like he was being hung. He was making these sounds like a baby, and it went on and on until his feet were just hanging there. The cop dumped him on the ground next to me and I looked at his eyes and knew he was dead. There wasn’t no fight, he just wouldn’t lie down on the ground because we hadn’t done anything, and the cop killed him with his hands.

  What about the other cop?

  The other cop just stood there the whole time like we was nothing. They said Darren resisted arrest, that he fought back. They lied.

  Did anyone from the Internal Affairs Division ever question you about this?

  Not a cop, a lawyer, no one. It was like Darren never existed.

  I stared at the piece of paper for a moment, trying to calculate the amount of misery it had caused, but it was beyond me.

  “Everyone who’s touched this is dead. . . . In Danny’s mind he confused it with a nursery rhyme,” I said.

  The statement was taken from a Germaine Washington.

  “Look who took the statement,” I said.

  “Victoria Fisher.”

  “Do you remember what day she died?” I asked.

  “September twentieth, I think,” Harrison said.

  “This
is dated two days before that.”

  “If we search Homicide records I imagine we’ll find that Germaine Washington died shortly after this by a random gunshot or an unsolved drive-by shooting. Unless, of course, he stepped into the back of a police car one day and just vanished.”

  “It should be easy enough to match the details to that of the OID investi—” Harrison stopped himself, remembering what Larson had told us in the alley behind the restaurant. “What OID investigation?”

  We stood in silence for a moment looking at the deposition, trying to understand fully what we were seeing, and more important, what we weren’t.

  “Why didn’t Victoria put Hazzard’s name on the document?” I said.

  “Fear. She was accusing a cop of murdering an unarmed suspect. Maybe Germaine Washington didn’t know a name.”

  “But Victoria Fisher did, otherwise there would be no reason for the interview.”

  I let the idea settle for a second. “She didn’t include a name because she was afraid of the other cop who just stood there and did nothing.”

  “Cross,” Harrison said. “He claimed he wasn’t present at the scene and signed a statement that was handed to him.”

  “According to this, he lied.”

  “Which makes him just as culpable,” Harrison said.

  “It’s more than that,” I said. “It makes him dangerous.”

  We looked at each other for a moment, sorting out the pieces.

  “If Victoria didn’t know that Cross was the other cop, what would be the first thing she would have done with this?”

  “She would have showed it to Cross.”

  “And he picks up the phone and calls Hazzard.”

  “And Hazzard makes her death appear to be the work of the River Killer.”

  “Cross was telling the truth about a conspiracy . . . of two people. Himself and Hazzard.”

  The ash covering every inch of the inside of my home began to feel like it was part of the same lie that had buried the truth about Victoria Fisher’s death. You could see everything in front of you but the details were obscured just enough to make the thing unrecognizable.

  “My brother went looking for the truth about our father and stumbled on this.”

  I looked down at the footprints in the ash. Danny’s were clearly marked by the imprint of the athletic shoes he had been wearing. The others were flat, leaving no imprint other than the shape of the shoe and its size.

  “Who else was in my house?” I said.

  “Hazzard or Cross?”

  I shook my head.

  “If it was Hazzard or Cross, they wouldn’t have left this for us to find.”

  I stepped back into the living room and realized the extra set of prints had moved around the house. I looked in the hallway and saw that they led to Lacy’s room. I stared at the blank footprints in the ash and then an old uneasiness returned.

  “My father.”

  “We don’t know that,” Harrison said.

  I nodded my head. “Yes we do. He’s the only one left. What was he doing here?”

  Harrison motioned to the paper in my hand. “He could have been looking for that.”

  “If he knew about this, he couldn’t have known it was here.” I followed the footprints to my daughter’s door. “That’s why he was here.”

  My heart began to race. “He wanted to look at his granddaughter’s room.”

  “It could have been you he wanted to see,” Harrison said.

  I shook my head. “I don’t think so.”

  I looked down at the imprint of his shoes, and the sound of his rage on the other side of the closet door was as real as if it had just happened.

  “I was a little girl, maybe five. My mother hid me in a closet to protect me from him. I listened to him throw her about the house as she tried to stop him, and then he came for me.” I looked at Harrison. “My father didn’t come here looking for me.”

  I glanced at the footprints one more time, then walked back outside as quickly as I could. Harrison stepped out a moment later and we stood in silence. The shifting wind had taken away the scent of burned lemon. I hadn’t noticed before but the sounds that usually accompanied the night were also gone—no coyotes, no insect buzz, no birdsong or distant TV. The fire had taken it all.

  “What do we do with this?” Harrison said. “Without names on it, how much value does it have?”

  I looked at it for a moment, trying to connect all the acts of violence that had spun out from this piece of paper like the orbits in Danny’s map.

  “It’s not all we have,” I said, and turned to Harrison as one of those orbits became terribly clear. “They made a mistake . . . we made a mistake.”

  Harrison shook his head.

  “It’s Andi James, the PI at my brother’s apartment, who could ID the man she saw there. And she still can.”

  A pained understanding appeared in Harrison’s eyes.

  “We told Hazzard it was Dana Courson,” I said.

  “And they killed an innocent thinking she could ID one of them.”

  “Oh, God,” Harrison whispered as he realized something else. “We made another mistake.”

  I started to ask what, but stopped as I knew what we had done. “Candice Fleming.”

  Harrison nodded. “We told Cross.”

  40

  It was almost ten o’clock when we stopped in front of Candice Fleming’s Spanish bungalow.

  “No lights,” Harrison said.

  We had tried calling half a dozen times on the drive over and each time the line had been busy.

  “You would think a light would be on if someone is on the phone.”

  I stepped out of the car and scanned the street. The only movement was a man walking a dog halfway down the block; the only sound, distant traffic and the wind moving through a stand of palm trees.

  We started up the front walk, watching the dark windows of the house for any movement. As we approached the steps Harrison touched my arm. The front door was ajar and swaying in the breeze.

  I pulled out my Glock, rushed to the door, and pushed it open. Leaves had blown in the door and were scattered across the living room floor, but everything else seemed to be in place.

  “Something’s burning,” Harrison said.

  I crossed the dining room to the kitchen. The blue flame of a burner on the stove glowed in the darkness under a cooking pot that was beginning to smoke. Harrison walked over and turned off the burner.

  “Macaroni and cheese,” he said.

  Alarm bells began ringing in my head.

  “That’s kid food. She was cooking for her son,” I said.

  “Where are they?” Harrison said.

  I turned and looked into the darkness of the rest of the house.

  “Check and see if the car is in the garage,” I said.

  Harrison stepped out the back heading to the garage and I rushed out of the kitchen to the hallway leading to the bedrooms.

  “Candice?” I called, but there was no response.

  The room on the right was a small home office, the door open. I raised my weapon and reached around and flipped on the light. The room was empty. I checked the bathroom with the same result, then stopped at the master bedroom door when Harrison returned from outside.

  “Her car’s in the garage,” he said.

  I quickly pushed open the door and stepped in, and Harrison switched on the light. A pair of jeans and a T-shirt were on the bed. A pair of black two-inch heels lay on the floor beneath them.

  “She just got home from work and was starting to change,” I said.

  I turned and rushed across the hallway and pushed open the door to her son’s bedroom. The small bed was unmade. A few piles of clothes were scattered across the room along with a number of model cars and trucks and helicopters. There were posters of Angels and Lakers players on the walls, and a large crayon self-portrait with the words “Peter, the Great.” It was every little boy’s room I had ever seen, and that only made
it worse.

  “They’re both gone,” I said.

  My stomach began to turn with the realization that something I had said put them at risk.

  “We’ll need pictures of them both,” I said. “See if you can find her purse or wallet.”

  Harrison nodded and left, and I walked over to the bed and sat down. The bedspread was a print of a rain forest with animals hanging from the trees. A pair of sneakers lay on the floor next to the bed, exactly as his mother had done in her room. A T-shirt had been tossed on the end of the bed and I reached over, picked it up, and held it to my face, taking in the sweet scent of a little boy.

  As I set the shirt back on the bed I looked across the room and my eye stopped on a section of wall painted to look like a bear. In the center of the bear’s paw was the doorknob for the closet. The air in the room seemed to vanish as I took a breath. I rose and walked over to the closet.

  “Peter,” I said softly.

  I reached out and closed my fingers around the knob, turned it until the bolt cleared the jamb, then slowly opened it. I watched the line of light from the room slice across the darkness on the floor of the closet, stopping on two small sock-clad feet that flinched as the light touched them.

  “It’s all right, Peter, I’m a police officer,” I said as gently as I could.

  The feet drew back from the light, trying to cling to the darkness in the corner. I slowly knelt down in the doorway as Harrison stepped back into the room. I motioned with my hand for him to call for help and he silently stepped back out.

  In the back corner of the closet a small hand reached out of the darkness and pulled a foot out of the light. From the darkness I heard him fighting to quiet his breathing.

  “You’re safe there,” I said softly. “I won’t move. I’ll stay right here until you say it’s okay.”

  I waited for a response but none came.

  “If you run your hand along the edge of the light, you’ll see it’s still safe.”

  A moment later his small fingers emerged slowly from the darkness and moved along the edge of light as if testing its strength.

  “You see, just like before, no one can see you, or hurt you there. . . . I know about this because I’m a police officer. It’ll be our secret, we won’t tell anyone.”