April Smith - Good Morning, Killer

“Run that by me again? You’re telling me you’re not one of those nuts who tries to get you to believe in Jesus?”

He had taken a while to dial it in, but that was fine; I had managed to reach unobtrusively into the bag and hit 911.

“I talk to God,” he was saying, “so I don’t need your crap.”

“I don’t sell Bibles. I’m a federal agent.”

The phone inside the bag was lit. The screen was active. I was betting the farm that a well-trained emergency operator had picked it up and stayed on the line and that we now had an open channel to 911. Someone would be listening and relaying information to the team of negotiators, ten or twelve of them sitting in a squad car or having commandeered a neighbor’s kitchen table, roughing out their situation board, putting together a picture they could convey to SWAT.

“If you’re from the FBI, where’s your gun?”

“I’m not armed. Obviously.”

“Your badge.”

“Don’t have it.”

“And I’m Warren Beatty.”

“They took away my credentials.”

“I’m supposed to believe you?”

“Look — okay—” I used the old negotiator’s line: “Do you want me to lie to you, or do you want me to tell you the truth?”

“Hell, I can’t tell one from the other at this point,” and broke into a grin that was free of anger or guile.

“The truth is, I shot my boyfriend.”

He laughed, and I saw the appealing, easygoing world traveler Juliana had met on the bench.

“No shit?”

I smiled and spread my hands. “I’m not jiving you, man.”

“Was he screwing another woman?”

“Basically.”

Brennan shook his head. “What’d you shoot him with?”

“A thirty-two.”

“That don’t do nothing. You should’ve called me.”

“I’ll remember that.”

“You didn’t kill him?”

“He’s alive and well and testifying against me.”

“So”—the suspect wasn’t stupid, he could put two and two together—“what the hell are you doing here?”

“I’ve been after you, sir, for a long time.”

He liked that.

“I didn’t know I was so important to the FBI.”

“You have created a lot of interest in our office, sir.”

I did not want to feed his grandiosity even more by letting him know that the whole world was there — the suits from Culver City, LAPD and Santa Monica, as well as our SWAT team chief and the highest-ranking supervisors in the Los Angeles field, all gathered in a makeshift command center, all focused entirely on him.

And soon we would hear the helicopters from the local news.

I smiled at Ray Brennan, genuinely, and don’t know why. Perhaps because I saw his desperation, in the skittering tiptoe strut between the front windows and back, checking here, checking there, like a rat constantly smelling the air. Perhaps because, beyond whatever happened to me, I knew the way it would end for him: what SWAT guys call a “head shot,” quick and sweet.

I also knew the psychology of the bond between assailant and victim and so discarded what I was feeling for him, which was compassion. How could that really be? The naked house was unnerving — opposite to what a house should hold — and it was clear he had grown up exactly in this cold-wall emptiness, mother with a wooden tit. It was more than passing strange — Ray Brennan in his phantasmic tank top and camis, and I in black T-shirt and nail-torn jeans, standing almost casually together like strangers at a cocktail party who have just hit on a connection: I shot my boyfriend. He kills girls. What now?

We were not completely strangers. Over the long pursuit and struggle, had we not come to know each other well — both outsiders, way beyond the norm? Would those civilians in the crowded apartment buildings all around us, spooning mush into the mouths of babies, counting dollars from their minimum wages, ever breathe the pure oxygen of risk, of going over the edge, knowing superhuman power over other human beings, dancing easily across enemy lines because they were smart, smart, smart ?

Ray Brennan smiled genuinely back, as if this were true and complete, and we were man and woman of a different race.

Like strangers at a cocktail party, we were lying to each other and ourselves. The difference was that I knew this, and he did not.

“Inadequate personalities,” a New York City police negotiator once told me, “need to be told what to do.”

“Show me the other girl.”

He indicated with the knife that I should go ahead down the hall.

“On the left,” I said for the folks I hoped were listening. “That would be the north side of the house. Is that your studio? I bet I know why. Because of the light. Artists’ studios will generally face north,” I reiterated as clearly as possible, but the babble halted as we entered the studio and my breath caught in my throat: “You’re quite an artist, sir.”

For the next five and a half hours I sat on a metal chair, hands bound behind my back with flex cuffs, in a room white and clean as an operating theater. It was an ordered sanctuary where time made sense because time had been turned into action that was repetitive and understandable; you could contemplate the passing of the weeks in the razor-straight rows and rows of photographs of sexual assaults. The dates were right there, printed with bold precision, in the right lower corner of each shot.

Bridget, the girl from photo day, had apparently fallen off a chair and hit a rack of lights, which crashed while we were in the living room. She had been lying unconscious on her side in a mess of broken glass when we entered. She was still fully dressed, in cowgirl garb identical to her sister’s — denim jacket, tight jeans and red high heels — dark hair half covering her face. She had been bound wrists to ankles and gagged with her own red kerchief. Small rivulets of blood from superficial cuts made by the broken glass crisscrossed her forehead and ran down the side of her nose. A black Stetson hat and a small leopard purse stood on a counter beside a six-pack of Coke. One can had been removed. I saw the cooler Juliana had described on the sanded and finished floor.

Brennan crossed his arms and fingered his elbow skin and gave an appraisal of the quarry: “This one is an eight. Maybe an eight and a half. My preferred type has fuller lips. But she was trusting, the most innocent creature,” he said thoughtfully, gazing down at the sleeping girl.

“I’m concerned about her. Are you?”

“What for?”

“Well, is she all right? She’s bleeding, and she looks like she was drugged.”

“She’s happy.”

“You think she’s happy?”

“Yeah.”

“It makes you happy to look at her like that?”

“Not really.”

“Should we do something to make her look better, sir?”

“I’ll take care of that,” he said.

“You know, if you’re hungry, the folks outside will get you something. Pizza. Anything you want. All you have to do is pick up the phone.”

“That’s okay, I brought my lunch.”

“Is it in the cooler?”

“Yeah.”

And so it went, a hiccupping conversation, alternately dreary, charged, flat and hostile. They talk about “seeing the face of training” during situations of high alert, and I did. I saw the smooth kind face of the singer Harry Belafonte, who resembled our hostage negotiation training officer, whose name I had forgotten, and heard the trainer’s gently ironic voice— “Don’t forget to ask the guy to come out” —and it was a secret refuge to remember the time he admonished our class to set fitness goals: “Here is my challenge to you: If I don’t lose twenty pounds in six months, I’ll shave my head.”