T. Parker: Summer Of Fear

"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.

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-the 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."