T. Parker: Summer Of Fear

"I may have something for you," I said.

"Sunday magazine would pay best, if it's not too grisly.”

"It's too grisly. I'd call this hard news. Real hard."

"Breaking?"

"Yes."

"The Ellisons?"

I didn't mention that Carla Dance is also prescient.

"Yes again."

"What's the angle?"

"That he'll do it again."

"We'd have to be real careful, Russ. The racial overtones are touchy."

"Well, let the story slip and see how touchy it can get.

"I've worried about that, too."

"I need something first-space for another Dina story, wouldn't have to be front of the section."

"Dina again?"

"The big game starts next week."

Dina was the DNA typing apparatus that the county crime lab bought the year before. It cost $800,000, it hadn't produce a shred of admissible evidence yet, and, worse, defense attorneys were just then getting the hang of demonstrating what "genetic fingerprinting" had been from the very start-complex, unproven, and without agreed-upon standards. There had been two reversals from higher California courts in the last six month and one acquittal by a jury that believed the defense had put genetic typing well within the shadow of doubt. Dina, needless to say, was supposed to become the county's biggest crime-busting star. But her luster was fading before she had even gotten to trial, and nobody at the crime lab, or the Sheriff's, or the DA's office could seem to talk fast enough to quell the increasingly vocal critics. The first trial in which she would be used-the Ballard rape case-was set to open next week. The defendant was on trial, but so was Dina. A pro-Dina story by Russell Monroe in the Journal could help set a more comfortable atmosphere for her tryout. For me, it was a bargaining chip.

"Can the police link the Ellisons and the first couple- what's their name, Fernandez? We ran the story today that says they can't."

"They can, but they don't want to."

"We'd like it first, if and when they do. I'll make space for

Dina."

"Thanks."

She told me to take care of myself, then hung up. I knew she wouldn't ask about Isabella, the same way I didn't ask about her father: The subject of cancer was not something you tagged onto the end of a business call, even one about murder. There were other times for that.

Next I called Martin Parish's boss-Sheriff Dan Winters- and pitched him my deal: a good solid Dina piece in trade for pole position on… I almost said the Midnight Eye.

I explained.

He acted as if I was a fool, which I knew he would, pretended to dismiss my offer, which I also knew he would. But the seed was planted, and that was all that mattered. That, and perhaps the fact that I'd generously volunteered my minor celebrity (and less-than-minor money) to Daniel Winters's reelection campaign two years ago. Now Dan was knee-deep in bad ink: jail overcrowding, lawsuits, rising crime stats, shrinking budget. My offer of good ink would get under politician's skin and it wouldn't cost him much. He said he’d think about it.

I kept the police scanner in my car turned up for the 187 at Amber's. I've got a scanner in every room of my house-a questionable luxury I paid for with the movie money from Journey Up River. In my early years as a successful news writer, I left the scanners on every minute that I wasn't asleep, and often when I was. Isabella put an end to this shortly after we were married. It wasn't hard for her to do-any man on earth would rather listen to Isabella's dusky smooth voice than a dispatcher droning code numbers.

But the 187 didn't come. It was 5:30 and I was starting to wonder.

So I called Amber's agent in Los Angeles and said I was Erik Wald. Erik Wald, like myself, was a former "companion' to Amber. I had introduced him to her, just as Marty had introduced her to me. That was six years ago, long after Amber and I were over, and I was escorting her socially, occasionally, without romantic interest on her part. It was my own somewhat pathetic way of keeping the possibilities open, but I brought what dignity I could to the job. Shortly thereafter, Amber and Erik were item. I was briefly jealous, but their affair was short, and I had since fallen deeply in love with Isabella. I tracked the dashing couple in the society column of the Los Angeles Times. From my occasional social and professional contact with Erik, I know that Amber had managed to keep him immersed in the quagmire of her financial affairs as surely as she had managed keep me immersed in the swamp of my own desire. It seemed to me that Wald had gotten the better terms.

Erik Wald had never been one of my favorite people, though I was a distinct minority in this matter. As do most people in semipublic life, Erik groomed an outward persona that, like the copper casing around the softer lead of a bullet, protected his passage through the perils of media coverage, county politics, and-in Erik's somewhat unique case-the often mercurial world of academia.

He was a professor of criminology at the local state university. He had been tenured twelve years ago, at the age of thirty-one, shortly after applying the principles of his dissertation, "Aspiring to Evil: Transference Identification in the Violent Felon," to help successfully discover the identity of a rapist who had claimed eight victims in the north part of our county in six short months. The gist of Wald's paper was that because certain paranoid types are subject to delusions of grandeur (a fact), these persecuted "geniuses" could act out scenarios in which they willfully play a role totally opposed to the higher behaviors approved by society. In effect, Wald argued, they were providing their own "evil" at which to gaze in their daily lives, while at the same time satisfying their inner needs for superiority/persecution.

What it all boiled down to, he said, was a well-read, middle-class suspect of sterling reputation (possibly a churchgoer) who had aspired to a higher station in life than he had achieved, likely because of some profound unsuitably in his character, or perhaps even physiognomy. All eight of the women had been elderly, some enfeebled. While the police and sheriff combined forces to round up the usual suspects, Wald fed his thesis to an ambitious black Sheriff's Department lieutenant named Daniel Winters, who linked two of the victims to a Meals-on-Wheels service provided by a church located in the north county. An investigation of the volunteer drivers revealed nothing, but Wald pressed Winters deeper into the congregation, to find that one of the actual Meals-on-Wheels cooks fit the profile rather neatly. He was thirty-four years old, a bachelor with a law degree from a Catholic (!) university who had failed the California bar three times and seemingly retreated to a quiet of Christian service and paralegal work. He lived with his grandmother, who, it turned out, was a friend of three of the other victims. Winters's closing net ended in a stakeout and tail done after hours and without pay, which resulted in observing suspect-one Cary Clough-driving early one morning to a quiet suburban street, where he sat in his car until daybreak. The same afternoon, Winters established that eighty-two-year-Madeline Stewart lived alone in the house outside which Clough had parked. Madeline was a recent sign-up for the Meals-on-Wheels program. The following night, Winters waited for Clough in an unmarked station wagon, and when Clough approached the house in the dark morning hours, Winters shook him do for suspicious behavior. Winters's yield was a red ski cap and a pair of latex gloves. He made the collar, took Clough downtown, and after some exemplary work by the crime lab, matched not only fibers from the cap to those found on four of the victims but Clough's teeth prints to those left behind in a decorative wooden apple that Clough had mistakenly tried to eat after raping his third victim!