Robert Crais - Chasing Darkness

“A picture isn’t a part of the experience like a more traditional trophy-it’s a composition outside of the experience. The photographer chooses the angle. He chooses what will be in the picture, and what won’t. If the picture is a world, then the photographer is the god of that world. This dude got off by being God. He needed to take the pictures because he needed to be God.”

I couldn’t see Lionel Byrd feeling like a god, but maybe that was the point. I tried to imagine him stalking these women with the clunky, out-of-date camera, but I couldn’t picture him with the camera, either.

“I don’t know, Starkey. That doesn’t sound like Byrd.”

Starkey shrugged, then looked at the canyon again.

“I’m just sayin’, is all. I’m not trying to convince you.”

“I know. I didn’t take it that way.

“Whatever this jackhole did or however he was involved, you need to understand you aren’t responsible for his crimes. You played it straight up and did your job. Don’t eat yourself up about it.”

I met Carol Starkey when Lou Poitras brought her to my house because a boy named Ben Chenier was missing. Starkey helped find him, and the friendship we developed during the search grew. A few months later, a man named Frederick Reinnike shot me, and Starkey visited me regularly at the hospital. We had been building a history, and the friendship that grew with it made me smile.

“I ever thank you for coming to the hospital all those times?”

She flushed.

“I was just trying to score with Pike.”

“Well, thanks anyway.”

She kept her eyes on the canyon.

“Hear much from the lawyer?”

The lawyer. Now I turned toward the canyon, too. Once upon a time I shared my life with a lawyer from Louisiana named Lucy Chenier. Ben was her son. Lucy and Ben had moved to L.A., but after what happened to Ben they returned to Louisiana and now we lived apart. I wondered what Lucy would think of Lionel Byrd, and was glad she didn’t know.

I said, “Not so much. They’re getting on with their lives.”

“How’s the boy?”

“He’s good. Growing. He sends me these letters.”

Starkey suddenly pushed from the rail.

“How about we go somewhere? Let’s hit the Dresden for a few drinks.”

“You don’t drink.”

“I can watch. I’ll watch you drink while you watch me smoke. How about it?”

“Maybe another time. I want to catch the news about Byrd.”

She stepped back again and raised her hands.

“Okay. I got it.”

We stood like that for a moment before she smiled.

“I gotta get outta here anyway. Hot date and all.”

“Sure.”

“Listen-”

Her face softened, then she lifted my hand, turned it palm up, and touched the hard line of tissue that ran across four fingers and most of the palm, cut when I was fighting to save Ben Chenier’s life.

“You think you have scars, mister?”

She touched the side of my chest where Reinnike put me in the hospital with a 12-gauge shotgun. Number-four buckshot and two surgeries later.

Starkey smiled.

“You oughta see my fuckin’ scars, Cole. I got you beat all to hell.”

The bomb that killed her in a trailer park.

She dropped my hand.

“Don’t watch the news, man. Just forget it.”

“Sure.”

“You’re not going to forget it.”

“No.”

“Maybe that’s why I love you.”

She punched me in the chest and walked out of my house.

That Starkey is something.

I put on the TV to get ready for the news, then took out a pork chop to thaw. Service for one. I drank a beer standing in the kitchen, offered myself another, then returned to the television when the news hour rolled around. Earnest news-jock Jerry Ward looked Los Angeles in the eye and intoned in his best understated delivery: Murders solved by bizarre discovery in Laurel Canyon.

Then Jerry arched his eyebrows.

When Jerry arches his eyebrows, you know you’re in for something bizarre.

I had plenty of time to grab another beer. The lead story was a visit by the president, who had arrived in town to survey the recent fire damage. The second story reported on rebuilding efforts and the decreasing chance of more fires in the coming days. News of the fires segued nicely to the bizarre discovery of Lionel Byrd. I was probably on my third beer by then. Or fourth.

Jerry gave the story almost three minutes, intercut with a clip of Marx at his press conference. During the clip, Marx held up a clear plastic evidence bag containing what appeared to be the actual album, and described the “portraits of death” as “trophies taken by a deranged mind.” The only victims mentioned by name were the most recent victim, a twenty-six-year-old Pasadena native named Debra Repko, and Yvonne Bennett. My stomach tightened when I heard her name.

The Bennett mention was a simple statement that Byrd had been charged at the time of her murder, but the charges were dropped when conflicting evidence surfaced that apparently cleared Mr. Byrd. Neither I nor Alan Levy was mentioned. I guess I should have been thankful.

Marx looked pretty good with his full-dress uniform and his finger in the air, proclaiming the city safer, as if he had personally rescued another victim instead of finding a rotting corpse. He declared he was personally offended by Byrd’s release when he had been brought before the altar of justice in the Bennett case, and promised to do everything in his power to ensure such outrages never happened again.

I said, “Wow. Altar of justice.”

Marx was flanked by a city councilman named Nobel Wilts, who congratulated Marx on the fine police work. The woman I had seen across the street from Byrd’s house was interviewed in a ten-second clip, saying she would sleep easier tonight; and the mother of Chelsea Ann Morrow, the third victim, was interviewed at her Compton home. I wondered how the cameras had gotten to the mother and the neighbor so quickly, since the press conference had happened within the past hour or so. Marx or Wilts had probably tipped the media so they could set up for the prime-time coverage.

When the story changed to a toy recall, I brought the remains of my beer out to the deck.

The winds blow fiercest at sundown in a last furious rush to the sea, and now the trees filling the canyon below me whipped and shivered. Grey eucalyptus; scrub oak and walnuts; olive trees that looked like dusky green beach balls. Their branches rattled like antlers, and their brittle leaves fluttered like rice paper. I listened and drank. Maybe Marx and his task force were right about Tomaso. Tomaso had seemed like a bright, conscientious kid who wanted to help, but maybe he had tried too hard to be helpful. Change his answer by half an hour, and everything changed. Make a mistake by thirty minutes, and suddenly Lionel Byrd had the time to kill Yvonne Bennett, drive back to Hollywood, and stop for a fast one before heading home. Nothing like a double shot of Jack after crushing a woman’s skull.

I was still listening to the trees when the phone rang, and a quiet female voice came from two thousand miles away.

“Is this the World’s Greatest Detective?”

I immediately felt better. I felt warm, and at peace.

“It was. How’re you doing?”

Lucy said, “Was?”

“Long story.”

“I think I know part of it. Joe called.”

“Pike called you?”

“He said you could use an ear.”

“Did Joe really call?”

“Tell me about Lionel Byrd.”

The canyon grew dark as I told her. As the outside darkness deepened, the houses dotting the banks and ridges of the canyon glowed with flickering lights.

When I finished, she said, “So what do you think?”

“It’s just the thought of it, I guess. Sometimes you can’t duck the blame even when you do everything straight up and by the book.”