Demons began to lift off inside me; I could feel them swirling up through my arteries, coiling along my spine. They felt like sea creatures that live down where there's no light--- knife-toothed, blunt-headed, colorless. I could feel the vein my forehead throbbing.
What I did next went against all my training as a police officer, against my instincts as a writer, against the logic of the situation, even against the emotions I felt boiling up inside. Somehow, I lost it. I panicked. I let out the fear. Maybe it was only a nod of respect for Amber Mae Wilson's well-being--- would like to believe it was just that.
I jumped inside, found a light switch, flipped it on, and yelled her name.
"Amber."
"Amber."
Amber!
No answer. I charged through all the downstairs rooms---empty. I threw on lights willy-nilly. I tripped over my own feet charging up the stairs, hit my shin on a step, hard. I couldn’t get enough breath. The light seemed arbitrary, beveled with the darkness into treacherous edges, planes, drops. Everything was moving. I crashed into a low credenza in what appeared to be her study. Magazines slipped off the top; the lamp tilted and fell over and the bulb burst with a soft pop.
Amber!
Then I was running down a long hallway toward a half-open door. Paintings on the walls streaked past; the ceiling pressed down low. My heart was working so hard, there was hardly a space between beats. I was inside the door. The switch was just where it should have been. The room snapped to attention with light. Nothing could have prepared me for what I saw.
At first, I thought it was blood. My second thought was a correction: Red spray paint. The biggest words were on the mirrored walk-in closet:
SOJAH SEH
Across the wall over the headboard of the bed:
AWAKEN OR DIE IN IGNORACE
On the far wall:
MIDNIGHT EYE IS RETURN
And everywhere the peace symbols, those hideous sixties ankhs or chicken feet or modified crosses or whatever in hell they were—everywhere, trailing around the room in poorly formed, inarticulate red circles.
Amber lay on the floor by the bed, face-up, her arms and legs spread. She wore a blue satin robe. Her hair—thick dark brown waves—spread out against the carpet. Big pieces of white and pink were scattered through that dark hair, strewn from what I could see had once been her head. And her face! Amber's lovely, ageless, beguiling face—somehow lifted back now, flap-like, hinged on only one side, turned almost down, as if contemplating her own hair afloat in that pond of blood.
In ten years of police work, I had never—
In ten years as a crime writer, I had never—
Never. Not once. Not even close.
I can remember standing there, weight back on my heels, thighs quivering, face raised to the ceiling, mouth stretched open to release a howl that I instead choked dead in my throat. The throttled scream came from deep inside, from my very toes, felt like—a wild discharge that left my eyes throbbing and terrible pain from my stomach clear up to my jaw. The peace symbols swirled around me.
I went to the side where her face was. I turned toward her and, bending low, looked into her dull gray eyes. They were lifeless and remote as old glass.
Never, in ten years—
Reaching out from the red that had settled over me--- everything I saw was red, tinged in red, outlined in red, steeps in it, drenched in it—I touched my fingers to my lips, then stretched my hand toward hers. From my mouth to Amber's, a distance it seemed my hand would never cover, how much farther could it be? And what a cold and trembling arrival, fingertip to cool gray lip!
I stood. In the bathroom, I got a handful of toilet paper went back to Amber, and for a moment looked around the room again. I noted the packed suitcases—still open—on the floor beside the walk-in. Where had Amber been going? I force myself to look at her again. Then I knelt, reached out my hand, hesitated, then reached out again, wiping her lips with it. Then the light switch in her bedroom as I turned it off. The other switches, too—all of them, even ones I was sure I hadn't touched. Then the spot where I'd fingered the screen-door flap, the front doorknob, and a few red, dreamlike moments later, finally, the same cold brass handle of Amber's gate that Martin Parish had cleansed.
It was roughly ten thousand miles to my car.
I drove to Main Beach and waded along the shore, soaking myself to the thighs. I jammed my hands in the sand, threw the seawater against my face. I stood there, knee-deep, and scrubbed my arms with the rough, dripping mud. Now what? I could call the cops—anonymous tip. I could call the cops, tell them who I was, and that Martin Parish had killed his ex-wife. I could do nothing, sit back, wait, and watch them go to work. The one thing, though, that I was not going to do—even with the smell of murder in my nostrils—was to admit that I had been at (inside!) Amber Wilson's home, ever. For Isabella, I told myself. For us.
I had one more thought. And though it seemed as dismal a product as my mind had yet rendered, I will confess also to the sizable thrill that accompanied it down my spine and into the chaos of my heart. As I stood there, earnestly grinding my fingernails into the abrading Pacific sand, I realized I might have just stumbled onto the biggest story of my life. Golden material, pure and mine only. Play this smart, I told myself. For here was more than a secret life, more than a diversion. Here upon my platter was the kind of event—event!—that, if handled right, could do more for my career than a dozen secondhand crime books. I knew these people. I'd been there. I felt a little sick to see finally, in all its hidden rapacity, the true face of my own ambition. But at that moment, with the chill of the ocean working its way up my legs and arms, what shame could find airtime in a soul still writhing with the image of pure horror that was Amber's face?
Finally, I went back across the beach to my car in the light of the half moon. Couples walked arm in arm. Lovers kissed on the boardwalk. A dog trotted by.
Sojah seh.
So God speaks.
Suddenly, it hit me how badly I wanted to be home, in bed beside Isabella. The yearning surged over me as if a dam had been blown. Gad, take me back. I drove fast out the canyon, up the winding road that ends at our precarious, stilted horne.
In the kitchen, I checked my knees for blood. I saw none but sprayed them with a stain lifter, anyway. Stripping down upstairs, I threw everything washable into the hamper.
I showered forever—hot at first, then cold.
Isabella whimpered and placed her arm across my chest when I got in beside her. Her face was next to mine and I could smell the breath of sleep from her.
"Your heart is pounding," she whispered.
"It's because of you." She "hmmed." I knew what it meant: a small smile, tender and brief, already drifting back toward the sleep from which it had come.
"It's late, R-R-Russ."
"I only had three."
"Hmm..."
"I love you, Isabella."
"I love you, too."
"I really, truly love you."
"Hmm. You're my h-h-hero."
The pounding in my chest got louder and faster. I remember it getting so big, it finally just picked me up and carried me, with the sound of boots descending steps, down into the detailed silence of dreams.
CHAPTER THREE
I spent the next morning at the Laguna police station, waiting for the call. I was going to get them to take me along. Although Amber's home stood on unincorporated land, the Laguna force was contracted to respond to emergencies and felony calls. So I flattered the chief about a book he wanted to write, but I had to cut off the conversation and head for the bathroom, where I threw up, camouflaging it by flushing the toilet. I had never vomited in revulsion in my entire life, before that day.
My need to talk about what I'd seen—to confess—was an actual ache, located near the center of my chest, just an inch right of my heart. I began to understand what a guilty suspect feels under interrogation. Oh, to know. I spoke frankly, with grave sincerity, to the detectives—th
e subject was the drought in California, I believe. I sneaked off to the rest room and threw up again. I yakked with one of the narcs, the watch commander, the dispatcher, a couple of meter maids. They all looked at me with suspicion.
But the call never came. No reported homicide at 1316 Ridgecrest. It was a slow morning, considering it was the Fourth. It made sense, I thought; someone might not find Amber for days.
Besides, the Laguna cop house wasn't where I really wanted to be anyway. Where I wanted to be was in Marty Parish's face—right, straight in it, looking directly at him when he got the news. Finally, by noon, I couldn't stay away from him any longer and I drove up to the county buildings in Santa Ana, where the Sheriff's Department is headquartered.
He was at his desk, clipping his fingernails, when I walked in. I knew he'd work the Fourth of July. Marty always had a thing about holiday pay: He could get almost two days' pay for one day of work, then take off some time during the season and go hunting on the county's nickel.
I put my briefcase on his desk and took out three boxes of new .20-gauge shot shells. My hands felt flighty and cold. "Bought these by accident," I said, which was true. "Thought they were twelves. They're yours for the Browning."
He nodded, set down the fingernail clipper, then stood and shook my hand. His eyes were blue, shot with blood. The left lid hung just slightly lower than the right, giving Martin his usual expression of sleepy calculation. His skin, as always, had the weathered tan of the outdoorsman. He was forty-two years old but looked to be in his upper forties.
Marty was a born predator. He had 20/15 vision, fine hearing, and a heavy, muscular body that he could deploy with surprising speed and agility. He was a superb marksman, one with a seemingly inborn understanding of distance, trajectory, and lead lines. Years ago, in our hunting days, we had made each other gifts of game freezers, along with an annual wager as to whose would be filled with the most birds by end of season. (Marty always won.) Parish had the thick hands and blunt fingers of a carpenter, though I never knew him to be handy with hammer or saw.
The bags under Marty's bloodshot blue eyes were dark and heavy. He had cut himself shaving, and a little horizon line was visible directly on top of his Adam's apple. It had bled onto his shirt collar, which was open. Even in the air-condition county building, the Fourth of July heat was a presence.
"How's Isabella?"
"Doing well. Strong."
"She's an incredible woman. You don't deserve her."
"People keep telling me that."
"I guess the chemo is about over?"
"One more, then we wait and see."
"I admire you, Russell. You've been good about all this
"I don't see much choice."
"Some guys would just give up. Take a hike or something."
"No."
Marty was a soft-spoken man, and he seemed to get even quieter when Amber left him those many years ago. But when excited or drunk, he could be loud and demonstrative. At time he struck people—me included—as almost dull. But if Marty Parish was a little slower on the uptake than some, he never had to be told something twice. Some people were convinced that Marty's brooding, big-jawed silences were the mark of some deeper understanding. I was convinced of that. There was, I had always believed, a certain moral force in Martin Parish.
He had remarried since Amber, to a very pretty woman named JoAnn. They were going on fourteen years together. They had two daughters. Marty was uncommonly devoted to his family, if his well-known humorlessness about womanizing was any indicator. Martin Parish was a private man. He drank too much.
He pointed to the chair and I sat. "So, what's up?"
I had prepared my cover, although my curiosity was real enough. "The Ellisons," I said. What a strange, terrible thing it was to have seen what I saw—and what I knew Marty had seen, too—and not say a word about it.
"It was bad," he said.
"You guys serious about a two-eleven?"
"That's what it was—started as, anyway."
"Hmm."
"Hmm shit, Monroe. A robbery is a robbery no matter how it ends up. Want to see the pictures?"
"Thought you'd never ask."
He threw a manila envelope onto my lap and I opened it.
Mr. and Mrs. Ellison—Cedrick and Shareen—had not strictly parted, even in death. Shareen had gone down in about the middle of her bedroom, one cheek against the hardwood floor. Her husband had come to rest on top of her. They were both naked. Someone had done the same thing to their heads and faces that had been done to Amber Mae Wilson's. I felt a cold wash break out on my face, and that vein in my forehead beating.
There is something even more obscene about CS photographs than the crime scene itself. The scale is reduced, the horror concentrated and depersonalized at the same time. And there's always the sense that you're intruding needlessly into some great, miserable intimacy. At the scene itself—if you're a cop, at least—there's the redeeming belief that you are there to, well, strange as it seems, help. In the case of these pictures was the added mystery of where the blood began and the flesh left off, because the Ellisons were both black, and the photographic contrast is different from that of people with lighter skin. The sprawl of their young, strong bodies was dreadfully graceful.
"You figure one creep, or two?" I asked.
"Two. That's a lot of bashing for one guy to managed drop them both in their tracks."
"Have any physical yet... that shows two and not one?
Marty glowered at me and picked his fingernail clipped back up. We were approaching a sore spot for him, and w both knew it. One of the consequences of my quitting and getting rich and famous (ha) was that cops like Marty thought they should hold out on me, as a matter of principle. It was a game If I suspected something that they didn't want to see in the paper (I was taking newspaper work from the Orange County Journal then), they tried to steer me away from it. If I almost knew something for certain, they'd deny it. If I'd start to look in the right place, they'd point me someplace else. A game.
But this particular point—the one we both knew I was getting to—was not part of a game at all. It was as dead serious as anything can get.
"Hell yes, we've got physical. We don't sit around here and dream things up."
"If it was a robbery, what'd they take?"
"I can't release that now."
"No."
"No's right."
"So what about the Fernandez couple?"
"What about them?"
"Can I see the shots?"
If Marty didn't show me the Fernandez pictures, the assistant medical examiner would, and Marty knew this.
The two envelopes passed in midair. I studied the CS shots of Sid and Teresa Fernandez, both age twenty-six, brained while sleeping in their apartment. Neither had even made it out of bed. The sheet was hardly disturbed. Sid was scrunched down under it like any working man might be after a long day in the shop. Fernandez painted cars. His head was broken open and most of what had been inside it was sitting on the pillow beside his face. Teresa was beside him, turned the other way, her face and right arm hanging over the mattress and her dashed skull leaking hugely onto the floor. It looked as if their heads were growing devils, and I thought of Isabella and wondered how big it was now. It was the size of a golf ball thirteen months ago. Was this a better way to go, all at once, or one cell at a time? The clammy wash had come to my face again. I'd showered again that morning but already stank like a man who knew too much.
"And of course, this was one creep," I said. "And you've got physical evidence to prove it."
"We don't prove things. The DA does."
"You're avoiding the point."
"What is the point, Russ?"
"A serial."
"Two incidents don't make a serial. Maybe there's another book in it for you, is what you hope."
"Look at this, Martin. Four bashings in a month. All in the county. All around midnight. Point of entry the same—a sliding glass door lef
t open because of the heat. You say the Ellisons were robbed, but nobody's found out what got taken. I talked to some of the evidence techs last week and they found an eighteen-inch pearl necklace in the bed-stand drawer."
"The evidence techs ought to keep their mouths shut."
"While you tell me it started as a two-eleven? The Fernandez couple goes the same way, but you're not calling them a robbery. Look at the Ellisons. How about this? He clubs the mister first, to calm him down. But the woman is faster than he thinks—she gets up and starts across the room. She's clear on the other side of the bed, remember. He catches up halfway and lets her have it. By then, Mr. Ellison is coming at him, but Mr. Ellison is naked, hit once already, and doesn't have weapon. Down he goes, with his wife."
I could see Amber on Marty's floor now. She was so close, I could have touched her lips again. My throat got so tight, I had to cough to get it open.
Marty didn't look much better. His eyes had that low gloss, matte finish that comes from not enough sleep. He was looking at the same spot on the floor that I was. Way out on the edge of my mind, somewhere between thought and fear, I let the idea float by that Martin Albert Parish had killed not only Amber but the Ellisons and Fernandezes, too. It was an uglyconstruct, one of those notions that start up high in your head then quiver down into your heart, which then beats harder trying to get rid of it. The same thing a heart does when it finds out that something horrible is real and true. Broken Badge, From Cop to Killer, by Russell Monroe.
Christ.
"You're going to cover this for the Journal?"
"Not as yet."
"Maybe they can't afford you."
"And maybe you're right—four unrelated homicides."
"Well, then what do you want?"
"Let me in on some of the physical."
"No can do."
"Because you don't have any?"
"We've got it. If we can link these killings, we'll do it. You'll know; the county will know. But, Monroe, I'm not going to start yelling fire until I'm goddamned sure there is one. Two incidents, Russ. I've got plenty of physical that tells us we're looking al two, maybe three shitheads at the Ellisons and one at the Fernandez place. We're working on it. We've released what we can release, and there isn't more to say. It isn't right to send people into a panic over a coincidence."
SUMMER of FEAR Page 2
