In contrast to my silent deliberations, both Parish and Wald argued heatedly about how to handle the Midnight Eye. Their voices seemed to cascade over me like the roar of a waterfall behind which I was standing. How did the Eye get access to the lines?
The key question for Parish and Wald was whether to reveal him as Ing or not. He had threatened massive violence if we did, but, as Parish pointed out, keeping Ing active was the key to finding him. Wald took the opposite view, that to enrage Ing was to endanger the county, and that any time we could purchase with mollification was time we badly needed. At one point, Wald and Parish were yelling and Winters had to shout them both down.
"What's your call, Russell?" he asked me.
"ID him," I said absently. "Make him feel the pressure. I'm with Martin. Smoke him out."
Wald looked at Winters, visibly aghast. "It's going to backfire," he said.
"First decent idea Monroe's had in a week," said Parish.
"Thanks. Here's another one. Ing works around phone lines. He knows how to work them, like taking apart the phone when he was a kid. That's why he can place the calls around the intercepts."
"We've already talked to everyone we could think of said Winters. "Right, Martin?"
"Right. The linemen at the phone company, the utilities people, the city maintenance crews. Everyone."
"What about the phone company? Not the field crew but right there at the hub, in Laguna?"
"Wald covered it," said Parish.
"You covered it," said Wald.
An utter grayness descended over Martin's face. "I haven’t screened the hub people—that was Wald's damned Citizen Task Force's job. He asked for it."
"Bullshit," said Wald. "You said your people were handling it."
"Oh no," said Winters. "I can't believe what I'm hearing. You mean nobody's been out there to the goddamned phone company with that picture?"
The silence that reigned again seemed, logically, to focus upon Martin Parish. "No."
"Enough of this shit!" bellowed Winters, hurtling up from his desk and backhanding a pile of files to the floor. "This is what we do! No more games. No more crap between you people I'll fire all of you motherfuckers if I have to. Now you will listen and you will obey. One, Monroe, file the article about Mrs. Ing' identification. File the one on Ing's childhood. See if the Journal will run the graphic without the damned beard. Karen, give them one of Mrs. Ing's snapshots of this bastard. Parish, get out to the phone company right now. Wald, either get those citizens to come up with something or get them the hell out of this building. They're using up my air conditioning. Now get out of my sight and do it!"
I gathered my notebook and left the room. Behind me came the sound of Wald and Parish yelling again, the same accusations and warnings.
In the pressroom, I used a fax machine to file my story suggesting that the Midnight Eye was William Fredrick Ing. I talked to Carla Dance about the photographs and she was only too willing to run another picture of the suspect. She thanked me again for the best series of scoops she could remember printing.
"Gosh, I hope this doesn't come back to haunt us," she said.
"Carla, I don't know what else we can do. And, by the way, can you hurry along those checks? I'm broke."
"I'll talk with Accounting."
Then I went out to my car and drove back down the freeway toward Erik Wald's house in the Tustin hills. I wanted to have a conversation with the walls of his home, and then I wanted, very badly, to see my Isabella.
The same overpowering heat that was allowing the Midnight Eye into the homes of innocents also gave me easy entry into Wald's study. I pried off the screen of an opened window in the rear, slid up the glass, and climbed in, well concealed beneath the towering eucalyptus and oak that ran down Wald's property line to the east.
I went to the desk, opened the drawer, and took out Wald's glasses. From the pen in my pocket, I removed the screw I'd found in Amber's room. Working under the light of Wald's desk lamp, I placed the screw into the empty temple hole and twisted it in. The fit was perfect. It had the same coppery finish that the metal of the frames did. I tilted the glasses over, wiggled them gently, and watched the screw fall to the blotter. Stripped, I thought, exactly what had allowed it to fall out in the first place. I could feel my heart pounding in my fingertips as I gathered up the little part and replaced it in my pen.
I left the study and broke into the house with an old set of lock-picking tools I'd used during my deputy days.
I stood in the darkened hacienda-style living room and wondered what I was looking for and where to start. The very idea that Wald had been in Amber's room had opened an entire fresh pathway in my thinking, and I was still trying to accommodate his presence there. Was he in this with Parish, two men with grudges against her and money to gain by her death, two men connected to the upper levels of law enforcement? Was he in this with Grace? I knew not what to make of the Strange tension between them, of the flirtatious belligerence one often sees in couples married for years. Surely, Grace and Erik had history, as did Grace and I, but was I sensing the all of it? Or imagining too much?
I began in the master bedroom. It was also done up in a masculine, heavy style, with the same rough dark wood of the sofas and chairs of the living room. I noted that the bedspread was of crimson satin and the sheets of black silk. It WAS unmade. The scent of some cologne—a musky incense-like aroma—was deep and cloying. The wardrobes were of purposefully crude design and construction, massive things with handles wrapped in leather. I looked at the clothes inside. There were not a lot of them. Most were still in the thin plastic sheath used by professional cleaners—Wald, the bachelor who could afford such a service. I noted the name of the company. I also noted the labels, which bespoke Wald's expensive tastes and in turn, accounted for his limited quantity. Piles of neckties were draped over pegs in the right-hand side. Likewise, belts and suspenders hung on the opposite. A stack of underwear—silk by appearance—caught my eye. I felt a little ridiculous. I looked inside a matching wardrobe on the other side of the room and found mostly winter and sportswear. Hanging on the far right side was a woman's satin robe, with matching pajama top and short-short bottoms. They were red, size ten. Next to them hung a rather skimpy black dress. I recognized the store's name on the tag, Ice Blue—the same one in which Grace had worked until being hounded underground by two men hired to torture her. My heart fluttered and wouldn't settle. I closed the door.
I looked through the personal items on and inside both bed stands. Wald's bedside reading was eclectic: forensic and psychiatric periodicals; Ian Fleming; Joe McGinniss; James Hillman. Three videotapes of National Geographic specials were stacked in the corner of the top drawer. He kept a journal, which I browsed. A bottle of Xanax prescribed to him sat beneath the lamp. It was not hard to imagine Erik, with his ceaseless energy, having trouble falling asleep. A remote control lay upon the stand, though I saw neither television nor stereo anywhere in the room.
The other bed stand belonged, quite obviously, to a wholly different personality. Two books sat upon it—my own Journey Up River: The Story of a Serial Killer, and Ellis's American Psycho. I had not inscribed the copy of Journey. A small but very plump panda bear with a pink ribbon around its neck leaned against the lamp. The top drawer contained copies of Elle, Interview, and Vanity Fair. Amidst the generalized disorder of the second drawer, I found a small bottle of perfume, a box of condoms—a brand different from the ones I'd noted in Grace's car—and an assortment of body lotions and creams.
I closed the drawer, thought, and leaned for a moment on the large wooden console that sat at the foot of the bed.
Strictly on instinct—or maybe because of the loomings I felt inside me—I left the bedroom and went again into Erik's study.
First, perhaps because I am at least in part a literary man. I went to the bookshelf. Wald's collection of forensic/psychiatric literature was extensive, ranging from copies of Diller's early studies with fingerprints, to pilfer
ed syllabi from FBI lectures that Wald had both attended and delivered, to Ressler's tome on profiling, Whoever Fights Monsters. I removed a copy of Wald’s own dissertation, "Aspiring to Evil," and opened it midway
Thus, the violent psychotic mind is an ever-shifting labyrinth inside a constantly careening ego. No combination of pathology and consciousness is more potentially dangerous, nor more difficult to predict. But when these condition: are coupled in an individual of high intelligence, profiling methods can easily yield faulty results, as the subject is— by his very purpose—fluent in the behavioral disguise: which lead so many profilers to make wrong assumptions erroneous connections, and, inevitably, false conclusions
Exactly what he was propounding with regard to William Fredrick Ing, I thought. So far, he had been right.
I replaced the book and stood in the middle of the room, gazing at the sundry video equipment, the computers and printers, the endless file cabinets, and the ubiquitous testimonies to Wald himself. The room seemed to ring with his presence: I could sense his personality there, the way one hears a diminishing echo. But still, it was only an echo I could hear, not sound itself. I thought of something Izzy had told me about composing music: You hear the echo first.
Yes, but how do you follow it backward in time and it to the original sound?
I took a videotape of one of Erik's lectures—his entire collection of tapes seemed at first glance to be of himself something—put it in a VCR, and hit the PLAY button. It was dated February of last year and featured Erik behind a podium, delivering a rather dry account on the basic principles used in DNA typing. He droned on about probes and probabilities. The tape itself was shot, apparently, from a fixed position at the back of the lecture hall, and the cameraman—a student, no doubt---had made only occasional attempts to close in, scan the attentive crowd, establish the larger context of the hall.
I tried another, dated some five years ago, with the cryptic title, "Motivation, Opportunity, and the Leap of Faith."
The hall was different, Erik was more youthful then, and his delivery was more enthused. Even the cameraman had had more spirit—he'd zoomed in and out, trying to anticipate Erik's tonic notes; he'd panned the students (actually, the backs of their heads and an occasional profile were about all he'd been able to capture); and he'd used, as some kind of symbolism, I supposed, several shots of the wall clock ticking away.
Something caught my eye, a head and partial profile in the front row. I could have sworn I recognized the face. I pressed REWIND, then watched again. I hit FREEZE FRAME. Yes, without doubt it was my daughter, Grace. She was looking up at Wald in a respectful way, her pen poised over her notebook. I hit PLAY again. As Erik made a crack about religious fanatics making good murderers, Grace smiled and shook back her dark wavy hair. She was approximately thirteen then—that would have been the time that Amber was involved romantically with Wald. I removed the tape and played several others, all dated within weeks of the first, all part of a course. And in each sat Grace in the same seat of the first row—precocious, poised, beautiful.
Like first daylight illuminating the rudimentary outlines of a room, an understanding began to form in my mind.
I locked the study, replaced the key in the kitchen, and went back into the master bedroom. It was here I felt Wald's personality most intensely—his discipline and hedonism, his mixture of the rough and the sensual, of the mundane and the fantastic. And it seemed to me that if I was to believe Erik had been in Amber's room that night—with Grace—I needed locate the very core of his character in order to understand WITH my mind what my heart was telling me was true.
So I looked at everything again. Then I went through guest rooms, the kitchen, the living and dining rooms, both baths. There is no end to what objects can suggest.
I found myself back in the bedroom again, drawn by one last desire to locate Wald's character through the reverberate of his absence. Erik and Grace. Grace and Erik. I again searched the bed stand belonging to Erik's female partner, again wondered at the contradictory powers emanating from the cute panda bear and the dreary books on her stand. Grace, I thought is this you I am looking at?
I stood beside the nightstand—Grace's nightstand?— considered the large wooden console at the foot of the bed. I found the switch, hit it, and watched the large TV monitor rise from its base. What manner of program could someone watch, this hugely displayed, from so short a distance?
I confess some shame at how easily I answered question. Perhaps my quick understanding was prompted in part by the shrine to himself that Erik had erected in his study. But I understood the power of image. Why would Narcissus choose the pond when he could capture himself on tape?
As I removed "Polar Alert"—a National Geographic special on polar bears—from the bottom drawer of Erik's nights' I was convinced that nothing of bears would appear on screen in front of me. I inserted the cassette into the built-in player and pressed PLAY.
All I can say now is that I found what I was looking for and hoping not to find, that the image of a girl sitting up in this very bed brought with it all the excitement and all the sorrow of revelation. Grace looked about sixteen. She was smiling sweetly, shyly, seductively. Then the screen flickered and the first frames of the documentary overtook the image of my daughter. I replaced the cassette in the box and slipped it into my coat pocket.
The last thing I did before leaving was to put the window screen back in place.
I was not five miles toward the Medical Center when my car phone rang. It was Erik.
"Foolish move back there, Russ." My heart sank. "We won't help this county by infuriating a madman."
I managed some semblance of composure. "I think it beats the alternative. Between you and Parish forgetting to check the phone company people, I'd say that was pretty lame police work. Especially for a professor of criminology."
"Parish dropped the ball. Maybe he had a little extra on his mind—like framing you and Grace."
"He's done a pretty damned good job of it, too. Where do we stand, Erik?"
"I've laid the groundwork to get Parish believing that Amber will be home alone. Tonight. I managed this with some creative thinking in the voice-mail department. Basically, it sounds like Amber left a message for me, but at the wrong extension. All Martin has to do is call in for messages, recognize her voice, and he's hooked."
"What time?"
"Eleven. We should meet there at ten."
"Amber was willing?"
"Eager."
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
At three that afternoon, I helped the nurses of UCI Medical Center transfer Isabella from intensive care to a room on the neuro floor That is to say, I walked alongside the wheeled hospital bed, holding a vase of roses in one hand and pushing the IV unit with the other, looking down at her swollen face. She seemed lost to gauze and puffiness. But from the center of those, her eyes focused on me with a calm clarity, and I could see—yes, even then—the shine of Isabella's lovely spirit twinkling through at me.
"How is my man?"
"Holding up, and proud to be yours. Do you hurt?"
"My head doesn't. Just my throat, where the tube was, and my wrist, where the IV is."
"Do you realize what you're doing?"
She smiled slowly, a smile limited by swelling and drugs. "I'm talking without stuttering. Dr. Nesson is proud of me."
"You've made him look good."
"I'm already lobbying heavily to go home. He said tomorrow maybe, or the next day."
"Baby, that would be great."
The room was a dreary affair with a view of Interstate 5, Anaheim Stadium, and a six-plex movie dome. But it was ours, and it was private. The nurses arranged Izzy, took vitals, got the IV pump working right, gave her a dinner menu to order from, and were gone.
"Isabella, I'm so happy to see you."
"I'm so glad you're here. How was your night?"
"Interesting."
She gazed at me from beneath the gauze turban, with eyes tha
t I am sure—for a moment at least—were assessing the impact of her gift, offered through Amber Mae Wilson.
"I hope it was interesting in a good way, love."
"The nights I look forward to are ones with you."
"I'm so lucky."
"No, you're not. But I am."
"You look tired, Russ. Everyone here is talking about the Midnight Eye. The nurses are scared to go home, so they're w-w-working overtime."
"They're getting closer to him, Izzy. I think they'll have him soon. The whole county seems paralyzed."
I told her a little about the last two days, but what could I really say that wouldn't depress and frighten her even more? I avoided the essentials of Grace, Martin, and Wald and told her instead about the manhunt for the Midnight Eye, and as much as I thought she wanted to hear about our plan to bait him with the article. The article itself, I read in the afternoon edition of the Journal while the nurses helped Izzy to the bathroom. Beside it was the computer-aided picture of beardless Billy.
SUMMER of FEAR Page 27
