T. Parker: Summer Of Fear

"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 left 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 ugly ^ construct, 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."

"Not right to let them sleep with their screen doors open in a heat wave, if there's a serial out there."

Marty Parish's face went from ruddy tan to sick pink. He looked back down to that place on his floor where Amber had been. He picked up the nail clipper. It clicked, loudly.

"Shit," he said, raising his left thumb to his mouth. "Thanks for the shells, Russ. Maybe we'll go get some quail in October. I'll have a few days off by then."

It was Marty's opening farewell, but I didn't move. "Okay. Keep the physical and thanks for the peep show. But at least come clean with me, Marty. Are we talking common sense here, or is Herr Sheriff leaning on you?"

"Beat it, Russ. You want to know what the cops are doing, you should have stayed with the cops."

"What's your gut say?"

"Where will I read about what my gut says?"

"Nowhere. I've never burned you, Martin-you or anybody else with a badge."

"You burned Erik Wald."

"He doesn't have a badge."

"Neither do you. Look, Community Relations is calling the Ellison and Fernandez shots, but I'll tell you this much. Our evidence isn't matching up-that's the truth. We're looking at two different things, at least two different guys, not the same one. To be honest, though, whoever conked them didn't take anything."

The idea formed that Marty was playing with me, fueling my tank with enough bad information to get me down the wrong road, or at least out of his office. It struck me as odd that the CS photos he'd just meted out to me contained no establishing shots, no wide-angles, no walls. Just bodies. Why?

"Give me one thing on him, Marty."

"Them, Russ."

"Them."

"You've got what I've got."

"This happens again, how are you going to stomach yourself?"

"See you later, Russ. I read about any of this and it's all she wrote for you here. I don't have to tell you that."

"Don't worry."

I stood to go. Marty was examining the drop of blood on his cut thumb.

"Have you seen Amber lately?" I asked.

Parish shook his head without looking up at me. The phone rang. He reached out, but before he touched it, he wiped his brow with the crook of his elbow, moving his arm across his forehead, blotting up the sweat.

I lingered to see whether the call was Amber's 187.

"Hi, honey," Marty said.

I called my editor at the Journal from the car phone. Car phones are supposed to be for people who think they're more important than they really are, but they're also for people who don't want to be seen making calls they shouldn't be. Like one to Amber at 12:42 last night. Like this one.

My editor's name was Carla Dance. She is a short, heavy-set woman, fiercely intelligent and unceasingly levelheaded. Over the last ten years, she had a way of dangling assignments just when I needed the money. I like her very much, and I think she likes me. Her father has cancer, and Carla takes care of him, except when she's at work. When Isabella was diagnosed nineteen months ago, Carla and I spent some anguished afternoons together in a bar up by the Journal offices. Something about her reasoned outlook helped me. Carla already knew then what I have come to know: When someone you love has a bad cancer, the line between hope and despair is one that you crisscross a thousand times a day. It is a true crazy-maker. I also learned that we are a closed society-we who love and care for someone with cancer. To the outside world, we proffer only optimism. But among ourselves, we can admit without feeling weak or needy or unduly bleak that the one we love may very well not. be with us for nearly as long as we'd like. We are a society of helpless helpers. But there is something in our bond of foxhole faith, and something of the cleansing that I used to feel, long ago, in church.