I had never in my life seen more activity or confusion at the Sheriff's Department than I did an hour and a half later, just before nine that morning, when I was finally admitted to the inner sanctum of Sheriff Dan Winters's office, in which loomed the sweating, nervous figures of Winters, Martin Parish, and Erik Wald.
Of course, in the middle of our heat wave, the county building's air conditioning had overloaded and failed. Being a modern building, it had few windows that would even open. Outside, the smog lingered like smoke. Inside, the air was already stale and hot.
Waiting, I heard the phones ringing constantly, saw the double-time scurry of deputies and clerical workers, studied the drawn, tight-lipped faces on the officers who came and went in. a steady stream from Winters's lair. The mayor of the city of Orange and one of our county supervisors made what appeared to be abrupt and pointless appearances, then marched straight for the pressroom. I followed, to find Karen Schultz besieged and took for myself a dozen angry stares from the media a print people who had been treated, just a few hours earlier, to my rather major scoop. Channel 5 tried to interview me, but I walked away when the reporter excused herself to the lady room for a quick makeup check. Karen brushed me with an icy glance as I closed the door behind me.
But inside the sheriff's office, Winters, Parish, and Wald had the aura of the chosen. I could feel the energy in the hot room, the energy of organization and execution, of order method, purpose. And beneath that energy lay another: that the chaos and mayhem which had brought these men together, the silent and permeating force of their antagonist, the Midnight Eye.
Winters slammed down the telephone and looked at me "We don't have much time. First, forget Dina. The story now is, we're deputizing the entire county, calling on every citizen watch out for each other and report back to us anything they might see, hear, smell, or dream that will help us get this guy. We've called it the Citizens' Task Force, and Wald is in charge as sheriff-adjutant. We're setting up phone banks, printing shirts and caps, trying to get everybody involved. Interview Wald about it. If you can't make it interesting and get us good play, we'll find someone who can. Second, you can get the ME's stuff; through Karen but not without Karen. She'll edit out what we need for ourselves. Third, we've already got a damn miracle-Wynn's next-door neighbor was shooting video of her family the day before they bought it, and we've got a suspect right there on the fucking tape. Kimmy Wynn ID'd him as positively as a kid half in shock can ID anybody, but it's a damn good start. Documents is isolating a still we'll have within the hour, and every paper and TV station that wants one will get it. Your part is to get this Task Force idea off the ground. Your part is to make us look good. We're asking for help, Russell. We're begging for it."
Wald, standing by a window, looked at me.
"Think you can handle that?" asked Parish.
"You forgot point number four," I said to Winters, ignoring
Marty.
"Four what? What the hell are you-"
"He called. The Midnight Eye. I just talked to him."
A pressured silence fell over the room, as if a gun had just been cocked.
"I'm liking this," said Wald evenly.
Parish regarded me with his slightly droop-lidded stare.
"Yes!" shouted Winters, driving a fist into the air. "What'd the son of a bitch say? Are you sure it was him? Any idea at all where he's calling from?"
I told them everything we said, except our exchange about the murder of Amber.
"Dramatic statement," muttered Winters. "Goddamned animal. Erik, you're the psychobabbler here-what's your call?"
Wald crossed the room and stood in front of Winters. "Look at it this way, what would you do if you wanted twenty bucks from me?"
"I'd say, 'Give me a twenty,'" Winters snapped.
"And I'd say, 'Sure,"' said Wald, slipping out his wallet, which he dangled before Winters, showing him the Sheriff's Department Volunteer badge lodged inside. "You're busted, Dan. That's how we play him. Give him what he wants. Play along. Give him enough rope to hang himself."
"Horseshit," said Parish. His face had reddened. "We can dink around with this guy all we want and not get any closer. I say put a CNI intercept on Russell's phone, keep SWAT ready, and hope for the best. When the picture hits the papers, we'll have the whole county waiting for him to show his face wouldn't negotiate squat with this scumsucker, or give him one inch of ink. We'll look like idiots."
Winters smiled and nodded, then looked at me. "Monroe, you're his dial-a-date, what do you think?"
"Play him," I said. "I'm with Wald. The intercept is a bad idea-he assumes we'll do it. Why not build up some trust, keep him comfortable, talking? If he wants to know what Erik is doing, we might be able to work that. He wants me as a mouthpiece. I can stall him, question him, maybe even guide him."
"Yeah, right," said Parish.
"He is right," said Wald. "As long as he wants something from us, we should listen."
"Goddamn classroom bullshit again, Erik."
Wald smiled. "I didn't see you getting any closer to Cary Clough. If I remember right, you were trying to make latents left by a maid while Clough was sitting outside Madeline Stewart’s art's house with a ski cap, a pair of latex gloves, and hard-on: Get real, Marty. The twentieth century has actually arrived."
The phone rang. Winters said, "Yeah," "No," and "Get your butt up here," then punched the intercom button and to his secretary to hold all calls for ten minutes. "This is the deal he said. "We go with the CNI intercept, but we keep the communication open. Carfax can rig one he won't be able to hear-he's a magician. We'll work him like Wald says. Erik, you'll need to coach Russell here on what to say-the last thing we want to do is set him off. Keep him hungry for what we can give him. Don't give him too much. Racial fucking cleansing. Man, I came to Orange County to get away from that shit. Martin, I know you'd trade a thousand words for one good fingerprint, and Chet Singer's working his ass off on the physical right now. We'll have a picture of him in the papers by this afternoon. Keep your leashes on.
"Winters's eyes went to the knock on his door. "Get in here!"
A disheveled Karen Schultz burst in with a large envelope, from which she pulled a stack of eight-by-ten glossies. "Lopez in Documents says it's the best he can get," she said.
The photographs, mined from the neighbor's home video, depicted varying enlargements of a bearded Caucasian man behind the wheel of a Ford Taurus. In three of the shots he was looking at the camera; the others had him in profile, face to the road. The color was poor, but the car was clearly white, the man's shirt almost certainly red flannel rolled at the sleeves, and his hair and beard-which met and blended with the interior shadows of the car-were a chaotic mass of red-brown. Sunglasses hid his eyes. His left arm, dangling from the open window, was thick. His stubby fingers, ringless, were spread against the side panel.
"Exactly what Kimmy Wynn described," said Wald. "Exactly what the general profile indicates."
I stared for a moment at this man, this image. He looked like some demonic visage pressing in from the darkened background of a Caravaggio canvas. Was it his bearded heft that made him so totemic, or our assumptions regarding what he had done? It didn't matter. But I could feel the hair on the backs of my hands rise and a quick shiver wobble down my back as I contemplated the imprecise rendering of his face. Was it good enough for anyone to ID? That was the question that really mattered.
"Copies ready?" asked Winters.
"One hour," said Karen.
"Stay on it, choose the best and load up the press with them. Get a separate phone-bank number for the public, for anyone with information on the photo. Everything okay out there?"
"The phone lines are overloaded, so the bank isn't happening yet, the air conditioning is broken, and everybody pissed off at me because Russell here has the inside track."
"He owes us," said Winters, fixing me with his black eye "Karen, get down to the dungeon and wait for Russell. You know what to hold and what to release. Marty, roll that dub for Monroe."
Parish lumbered to one of the three TV monitors lined up to the right of Winters's huge desk, pushed a tape into the VC that sat below the middle set, and pushed a button.
"What you're about to see is the first Citizens' Task Force evidence we can really use," said Winters. "Pure accident. Pure gold. The neighbor-Lisa Nolan-brought it to Wald."
The screen flickered to life, a front-yard scene, daytime. The date and time appeared in the upper right: July 3, 4:26 p.m. Three kids-two blond girls and a plump red-haired boy-race on the grass of a suburban lawn, chasing each other into a new red four-wheel-drive Jeep. A panting golden retriever followed them in. The camera moved to the front of the truck, holding for a still on the shiny bumper and winch, the dealer advertisement on the plate holder, the entire gleaming front end. A smiling woman of perhaps forty sat on the passenger's side. While she waved, a similar vehicle (but this one was white) tracked past slowly on the street, stopped, and the driver-a pleasant-looking Asian man in his early forties-leaned out the window and said "Rick, you like to trade?"
"Lisa would kill me, Tran!" yelled the camera operator. The lens dipped as he answered and chuckled. Lisa nodded and pointed a finger at the camera in mock warning. The drive in the white Jeep admired the new red one. A woman was visible beside him, leaning forward so she could see. Three children had their faces pressed to the glass of the rear windows-two small boys and a girl.
"Recognize the girl in the white Jeep?" asked Parish.
"Kimmy Wynn," I said.
"Affirmative," said Wald. "Now take a look at her shadow."
A white Taurus came into the picture from behind the white Jeep, the driver pulling the car to his left around the stationary Nolans. When the Taurus came around, the driver looked briefly at the camera, then quickly away. He had just turned to profile when his vehicle disappeared off screen.
Parish stepped forward and rewound the tape for another look. On the second pass, I saw him more clearly: the bulk of his huge body stuffed behind the wheel, his red plaid shirt, his thick tangle of red-brown beard and matted hair, his apparently sunburned face, black sunglasses, and his arm and hand- broad and strong as a peasant's in a Rivera painting-hanging from the window, fingers spread in perfect relief against the white body of the car. Marty played it again. The focus was excellent, and the Taurus passed by about fifty feet from Rick, the cameraman. For almost a full second, this man-very possibly the Midnight Eye-was center screen, a star.
Winters shook his head at the now-blank screen. "Russell, play up in your Citizens' Task Force article the fact that a citizen- Lisa Nolan-was bright enough to bring this evidence to our Task Force sheriff-adjutant, Erik Wald. We can't stress the need for public input enough. I'm praying somebody can ID this ape from a picture. If not, Chet has some physical that will help. Karen's waiting for you in Autopsy. After that, talk to Chet. After that, get to work and find a way to keep that county out there from going ballistic."
"He's big, heavy, and strong," said Karen, taking a deep breath and leading me into the autopsy room-the dungeon.
It smelled as it always did-a sweet putrescence of formaldehyde, blood, flesh. The overhead lights are bright but give no warmth. A chilly draft stays down low, clinging to your knee: easing into your joints. I hated this place, not for what it made me see but for the dreamlike unreality it forced upon me. To work the dungeon was always, for me, a matter of trying to chase detail through the silent, obscuring fog that surrounds the dead. The second I walked in, the ceiling dropped, the light lowered, the walls crept in a few yards. The longer you stay ^ the worse it gets.
"Six foot two, two ten," she continued once we were inside. "Right-handed is our guess, but it's still just a guess. Yee told me he struck Mr. Wynn too many times to count. There were parts of his gums and a molar stuck to the ceiling."
I asked her how they got height and weight.
"Size twelve foot from the blood tracks, a very wide foot, deep imprint. The spray painting was done from a six-two height. Give or take some, Russell. You know that."
"Blood type?"
"None, but we've got his hair."
"Latents?"
"Dream on. We've found bits of black acrylic material where we might expect prints."
"Gloves."
"Gloves."
"Semen?"
"He's kept that to himself, so far. Or put it where we haven't found it."
We stopped short of a stainless-steel table where examiner Glen Yee was working on Mrs. Wynn. The light seemed to dim again. I breathed deeply the sickening chemical-flesh air. You think it's never going to wash out of your nose hairs. My throat felt sudsy.
Yee, elbow-deep, looked up at me and actually smiled. "All B-I-T," he said. "Except for Mr. Wynn."
I nodded. B-I-T-blunt-instrument trauma. It struck me that it shouldn't take a doctor to figure out that much. But I had been wondering how the Eye had managed two adults and two children with nothing but a club.
I looked at Karen, but she was staring at her own feet, arms crossed, hands clenching and unclenching.
Yee reached into a plastic basin that stood at the head of the table and held up something with his fingers. Between them was the instantly recognizable shape of a. 22 long rifle bullet, slightly mushroomed, lopsided, bent from the middle.
"One in the head for Mr. Wynn," said Karen without looking up.
"He didn't really have much of a head left," I said. It wasn't supposed to sound like it did: It was just a numb observation.
"Oh, he did," said Karen. "It was just spread around the room. The techs brought it back in bags. Dr. Yee used all his skills to put it back together. Shit."
Karen, blanched and sweating, hustled across the autopsy room to a big stainless sink, into which she vomited. Yee watched her go by, looked at me, and shrugged, giving a small embarrassed smile. He carefully put the bullet back. The air conditioner-which can run by generator in case of power outage-blew a death-heavy breeze by me. The ceiling came down another foot.
Yee sighed. "I've never seen anything this traumatic in seventeen years, except the car accidents."
Karen, her back still to us, shook her head, coughed, spat.
"Did you get a shell to go with that bullet?"
"CS brought in no shell. Revolver, maybe, or a single shot. He used a knife to disembowel."
I nodded, staring stupidly into the open carcass of Maia Wynn. "I'm done in here if you are, Karen."
"Take your time," she said. "Don't rush a good thing.
"I said, I was done."
We passed through the sliding doors and down the hallway, the residual sweetness of formaldehyde lessening in my nostrils. Karen Schultz's heels hit the linoleum with a hurried resolve.
"The bullet we don't release," she said. "We don't wanr him ditching the gun. The knife we don't release-same reason. Don't talk about the wall writing or the tapes-we don't want to put any ideas into any other sick heads. We're trying to get a better description from Kim, but she won't tell us anything all. She gave me what she gave you back at the house, then went mute. I've never in my life felt sorrier for another hum being. All she does is stare."
"Where is she now?"
“No."
"I won't talk to her unless you say I can."
"Damn straight you won't. Kim's going to live with what happened last night for the rest of her life. She's not here for you to draw quotes from. And leave her out of the Journal. That's the least you can do."
"Maybe I could-"
Karen stopped, drove a finger straight at my face, and glared at me with her fatigued green eyes. "No. No. No. You don't talk to Kim. End of discussion. Besides, I've got more for You in Hair and Fiber."
I put up my hands in mock surrender. "Okay. I'm sorry about all this, Karen."
"Your sorrow doesn't do the Wynns any good."
"You're not the only one who feels bad here."
"Stop, Russ. I know. I know. Please, just stop."
Karen's eyes were filled with neither rage nor sadness, but with a churning, undisguisable fear. "We should have put together the first two sooner. Maybe this wouldn't have happened."
The Hair and Fiber section of county Forensic Science Services was presided over by an aging, overweight man named Chester Fairfax Singer-Chet for short. He wore suspenders, white shirts, and bow ties and affected a professorial deliberateness that seemed at first a mark of either arrogance or dullness. He was unhurried, quiet. As I had learned over the years, Chet's bearing wasn't born of arrogance, academic overtraining, or stupidity, but of a broad and genuine gentleness. He was a lifelong bachelor, never mentioned family, seemed to spend virtually all of his free time alone, and though he'd never to my knowledge intimated such a thing to anyone at the county, there was an almost unanimous decision that he was homosexual. But Chet had never been the butt of those secret jokes that follow homosexual men around, especially in the flagrantly hetero world of law enforcement. I think this had less to do with Chester's spotless reputation than with the sense of vulnerability he projected. Chet was a man who'd cried openly when the Challenger went down. Chet was a man who remembered the birthdays of every female who worked in Forensic Services, and honored each with a single white rose-grown himself-in a simple white vase. Chet was a man who arranged to be escorted to his car each night rather than negotiate the dark county-employee parking lot alone. Chet was a man who, despite his sizable quirks, commanded respect.
IChet was a man, I came to understand, who had a secret life. I never got to know him well enough even to guess what it was.
He was sitting on a stool at his light table when Karen and I came in, staring through a swing-out magnifier at something in an evidence bag. He set the bag on the glass and rotate his bulk on the stool, offering me his hand. Chet looked pale and nonvigorous as always, though I knew from my days on the Sheriff's that twelve-hour days were standard for him.
"One of my favorite fellow students," he said, smiling, was part of a phrase he'd mumbled once to me years ago while working on a perplexing rape case, and I'd reminded him of often: "We are students of the incomplete." The other statement of Chet Singer's that I will never forget, he made drunkenly to me over the punch bowl at a department Christmas party back in 1982: "Violence is the secret language of the race, and we, are its translators."
Chester and Karen exchanged wary looks, and Karen nodded. "Winters says we can talk to him," she said. "I tell him what to leave out."
"Of course. Well… where to begin?"
Chet folded his hands over his ball-like midriff and beheld me through the thick lenses of his glasses. "Let me describe picture for you, and you can tell me what you see."
Chester's "picture" of the Midnight Eye was of a tall, right-handed Caucasian male, age thirty-five to forty, with Iong straight red-brown hair and a full beard of a slightly darker shade.
"If we use the 'all hairy' description that Kim gave you, we can say his hair is unkempt-wild-looking," said Chet. "Three of the five hair samples are nearly eight inches long. They contain some polymers I suspect are a fixative of some kind. Very thick in places."
"Hair-spray?" I asked "Apparently."
"A genuine sweetheart," said Karen. Karen was still uncharacteristically pale, the freckles on her nose still standing out in relief against the white skin.
Chet nodded. "Dina can't match the genetic print of the hair with a blood sample from a suspect unless there's root tissue connected to the follicle. So far, I've found none. I don't feel that we're in a strong position right now for typing."
"And we've got no suspect," I said.
"I remain an optimist," said Chester. "Though at times, I don't know why."
According to footprints left in the Ellisons' vegetable garden-through which the Eye had walked-the man would have been wearing size twelve shoes.
"Now, the soils."
The soil was a mixture of decomposed granite and beach sand, and the CS techs had found it in various locations in all three scenes-the Fernandez apartment, the Ellisons' suburban home, the Wynn's big custom house. An alert CSI had checked the blood smears on the walls at the Wynns' and found the sand granules mixed with the blood, along with acrylic fibers most likely originating from the Eye's gloves. A small mound of the granite/sand mix had been found on the floor next to Shareen Ellison's side of the bed. The word mound told me how it got there.
"Why a mound?" Chet asked me.
"He knelt down to look at Mrs. Ellison before he attacked-one knee up, one down. The sand came out when his cuff emptied."
"How did it get into his cuff to begin with?"
"The beach. It's beach sand, right?"
"Correct."
Chester's next finding was contrary to what Kim had described, though her mistake was understandable. The murder weapon was not a baseball bat at all, but a heavy length relatively soft steel alloy, commonly used to make standard irrigation pipe. Yee had found microscopic shards of the metal in the skulls of Mr. Ellison, both Wynn adults, and Sid Fernande He found no wood or aluminum that would indicate a sporting bat. From the relatively controlled fury that the Eye had employed on his first three victims-the Fernandezes and Cedrick Ellison-Yee had been able to establish that one end of the pipe was fitted with what was probably a standard threaded cap, giving the weapon a rounded rather than a sharp edge. "I suspect that the other end is capped also," said Chet, "Or at least drilled."
I waited, as did Karen. Chet had the same smug, almost flirtatious look that he always got when he'd made a tough leap and landed squarely.
"Picture this," Chet continued. "He must find a way in the homes. In the Fernandez apartment, he was lucky and used an open door. At the Ellisons', he climbed through a window At the Wynns', he cut a five-foot slot through the screen-door mesh and slipped through it. We must assume he arrived at all three scenes by car or motorcycle-surely he can't cover so much of the county by foot and not be noticed-so in each case he must've walked from the vehicle to the home."
I waited again.
"Where does he keep a two-to three-foot-long, one-and a-half-inch-diameter-I would guess-club? Does he waste free hand on it? Does he risk being seen holding it as he approaches the scene? No. He fits one end with a loop. Leather or maybe thick twine, even a strip of cloth. He cinches the knot up against the cap, or maybe he's drilled a hole for it-remember, this pipe is manufactured to be relatively soft and rust resistant because it's often buried. The loop goes over his left shoulder, leaving the weapon to lie against his side. It's hidden, out of the way, but quickly accessible."
"Raskolnikov's MO," I said.
Karen frowned.
"Yes," said Chet. "He's taken the page from Dostoyevski, although I doubt he's read Crime and Punishment."
"How do you know what he reads?" Karen asked.
"Nobody who misspells hypocrite or ignorance reads the masters," I said maybe a little snottily. I was hoping to buy Karen's kindness with forensic competence, but the tone of voice came out wrong. She colored and looked away from me.
Chet gave me a very odd look at that moment but nodded, first to me, then to Karen, then studied me again. "Yes."
"Nice, Chet, but a yard-long pipe dangling from a man's shoulder isn't exactly hidden," Karen said.
"That is correct. And that is why, as Kim told Russell, the Midnight Eye wears the green robe."
The green robe turned out to be a blanket-an inexpensive acrylic blanket, fibers from which Chester had already placed at all three scenes. It was likely old. It was very dirty. Fibers of it were found at the Wynns', mixed with decomposed granite and beach sand just inside and to the left of the master suite's door.
"Holding a blanket around you still takes a free hand," I said. "If you're going to keep it over your shoulders."
"He takes it off once he's inside-the CS team found the fibers tightly grouped in all three scenes. He has set down the blanket, in each case, just inside the bedroom door, always on the left, using his freer right hand to slip it down and off."
"Like taking off his warm-up jacket," said Karen. "I wonder if he uses pine tar on his club, for a better grip."
"No evidence of pine tar, Karen. But I had Evidence send up the Wynns' screen door this afternoon, for a closer look the cut. The jagged ends of the mesh were rich with green acrylic fiber-the top, where his shoulders went through, and the bottorn, too, where the blanket dragged across."
Karen looked at me a little wearily. "Nothing on the blanket, Russ. It's too easy to ditch and get another. Winters said okay on physical description and method of entry only."
Chester coughed quietly. "I would not release information on his facial hair, for roughly the same reason, Karen. A man with a full beard is much easier to spot than one who is clean shaven."
"Too late, Chet. We're going with the picture."
Chester shrugged.
Karen hesitated for a moment. A flutter of confusion crossed her eyes. It was then that I realized she was truly making the calls for me, that for all her carping about Winters this and Dan that, Karen Schultz herself was in charge of me and what I wrote. That's why she'd been sitting on me so hard. A mistake was hers and hers alone.
Chet coughed again, cupping his hand to his mouth. It struck me as a little nervous. I assumed he was plugged into Karen's distress at my presence.
"We know he carries a knife-short-bladed, and I would guess a substantial handle for… leverage. It is likely a hunting knife, or one for skinning. So," he said. "That is the picture I've drawn for you. What do you see?"
I gathered my thoughts for a long moment, drawing Chester's images and information, extrapolating what I could, trying to let a coherent whole emerge. "A beach bum. One of the homeless you find in beach cities. He's got long hair and beard because he can't afford to have them cut. He wears blanket for warmth, and to hide the club. He spends his time at the beach because it's free, he can panhandle, use the public rest rooms, check the dumpsters for edible trash, steal from the tourists. On the tapes he made, I heard waves in the background, and voices. He hangs out at a place where the cops are halfway lenient, where other homeless people congregate-no use standing out, and at six two he's not exactly inconspicuous to start with. Venice Beach is a possibility, but it's too far north. The cops would run him out of Huntington or Newport, so Laguna is the best bet. I'd look for him in Laguna. He steals cars to get around because he's too poor to afford one of his own. He gets them in Laguna, leaves them there when he's done. You'd find beach sand in the floor mats, green acrylic fiber on the upholstery, and if you were lucky, Chet's mystery polymer on the headrests. He's a Rastafarian-or thinks he is-from all the Jah shit he paints all over the walls. Rastas smoke a lot of dope-it's part of their religion-so I'd expect him to be around the smoke. Again, he can't buy it, not much of it, so he hangs with people who supply him. We know he's got access to a tape recorder, so I'd guess he stole it from a tourist who was out in the water, not looking after his things. He's either got a speech impediment or he's heavily under the influence when he makes the tapes-maybe both. Epilepsy is possible. We could figure out only half of what he said, and that didn't make a lot of sense. Last, I'd say he's pretty smart. He wears gloves, hides a three-foot steel club under his blanket. He's brave and he's getting braver. First, two people alone in an unlocked apartment, then a couple in a locked house, then a family of four. He won't stop because the more he kills, the hungrier he is for more. There's no sexual turn-on for him in it; he does it because he thinks he has to. Probably hears God-Jah-telling him he has to do this shit. Maybe that's who's talking on the tapes. That's what I see."
Chet said nothing for a moment, then finally looked Karen. She had her back to us, staring out the vertical slot window that constituted-twelve hours a day-Chet Singer view of the outside world.
"Good," said Chet. "I understand you have actually talk to him."
"News travels fast around here," I noted.
"Are you done?" asked Karen.
"I'm done. Thanks, Chet. I'll be careful with this."
"Good of you to visit," he said. "I'm sorry we lost you."
Karen had already pushed through the door ahead of me when Chet quietly called me back inside. He gave me that odd look again, as if I were a specimen under his microscope. "That was perceptive of you to remember the Eye misspells simple words, and to mention the similarity to Dostoyevski."
I waited, wheels turning inside my head, wondering what I'd done. "Thanks."
"But nowhere, in any of our crime scenes, did he write the word ignorance — correctly or not."
I could see ignorace on Amber's wall, clearly, as my mind streaked for the nearest plausible excuse. Even as I stood there, slack-jawed, probably, I saw a way to employ my befuddlement It was a superb lie, delivered with humility and aplomb. "I write and edit hours a day," I said with a minor smile. "I must have mistaken my ignorance for his."
Chester continued to study me hard for a moment, then smiled. "Well," he said, "we all certainly have enough of that go around."
For the next hour, I interviewed Erik Wald and Dan Winters to get Citizens' Task Force's information. The formulation of this force, I saw, was clearly a promotional move on Winters's part, a way of enlisting not only public support for the case but of enlisting votes in the next election-still two years away. I tried to remain uncynical. It was also, I understood, some kind of atonement-overatonement perhaps-for the fact that the department had taken so long to connect the Fernandez and Ellison killings. Still, the task force was theoretically a good idea, if it brought results. I personally thought the T-shirts and caps a bit much. Wald seemed almost to glow in his moment; he was sincere, glib, earnest, arrogant. I was reminded again that Erik was an outsider here and that no amount of infiltration of this department would ever render him a sworn officer. But for now, Wald would have heavy coverage, and his Task Force had already produced a potentially huge piece of evidence-the video and resultant photograph. Carla Dance dispatched a photographer who shot Wald during the last few minutes of our conversation. Before the shoot started, Erik brushed his hand through his curly hair and loosened his necktie.
"Hurry up," he told the photographer. "I need to get to work."
The last thing I did before heading home to write the article was make a quick stop by Sorrento's up in the Orange hills.
Brent Sides was indeed tending bar. He was tall and tanned, with a swatch of thick blond hair, and eyebrows sun-bleached to white, which hovered over his blue eyes like frosted comets. But in spite of his tan, he blushed deeply when I introduced myself as Grace Wilson's father.
"I like your books," he managed. "And the article today about the killings. The waitresses here are all freaking out."
I watched him drying glasses with a clean white towel before I spoke again. When I did, it was to tell him that Grace was in some very deep trouble with some very unfriendly men. He did not seem surprised by this.
I asked him about his whereabouts on the night of July 3, and he said he had been with Grace-first dinner, then the movies, then drinks. He took her back to her place, late.
"How old are you?"
"Twenty-three."
He blushed again and looked away.
"Do you love her?"
He nodded. "We've never been to bed, if that's what you mean, but I love her."
A cocktail waitress ordered a round of drinks, and Sid was relieved to be away from my prying eyes while he made them, set them on the counter, and recorded his action onto keyboard. He eased back my way when the waitress swung away from the service bar, tray loaded.
"Have you seen these men?" he asked. "The ones who are after her?"
"No. You?"
"Yeah. They look heavy. I've got some friends, though
"That's not the point, Brent. Describe them."
He did, and his portraits were very close to those of Grace: one fat man with big ears and one slender young man with close-cropped hair and sunglasses.
I was quiet while he wiped the counter, apparently deep in thought.
"I'd never hurt her," he said finally.
"You'd do just about anything for her."
He nodded.
"Would you lie?"
"Probably. If she asked me to."
I suddenly liked Brent Sides for his guilelessness, his boy’s shyness regarding my daughter, his obvious affection for her.
"Please ask her to call me," he said.
"I'll do that."
I paid up, shook Sides's cool, moist bartender's hand, and stepped back out into the heat of the afternoon.