Michael Prescott - In Dark Places

He might have made a mistake telling her Brand's whereabouts. But he hadn't believed she would be crazy enough to go there. Even now, he couldn't believe it. When she saw the neighborhood, she would back off.

At least, he hoped she would.

Wolper had been right about one thing, Robin decided.

It was a bad neighborhood.

But he was wrong if he thought she'd turn back.

She guided the Saab deeper into the maze of streets that ran parallel to Imperial Highway, heading east, toward Watts. The fractured windshield and blown-out side window and dented trunk were not out of place here. She actually welcomed the damage. It helped her fit in.

After leaving the police station, she'd continued south on Central Avenue, past Florence Avenue. It was at the corner of Florence and Normandie, about a half mile away, that the 1992 riots had erupted. She hadn't lived in LA then. She had watched the news coverage from the home she and Dan had shared in Santa Barbara, until four-year-old Meg had wandered in to ask what was going on. Then Robin had switched to a cartoon show.

She had always tried to protect her daughter. But if that was true, why had she brought Meg here, to a city of random carjackings and drive-bys, a city that seemed to be losing its mind?

The address Wolper had given her was near the intersection of Imperial Highway and Compton Avenue. The spot was six miles south of the Newton Area station, but that distance was deceptive. If Newton was a borderland, this was enemy territory, one that a middle-class white woman with an expensive car and a postgraduate degree was not expected to enter.

She didn't know which gangs fought over this turf, but she could see their markings on every wall and fence and trash bin, the loops and squiggles of spray paint visible everywhere, even on the boles of drooping, sickly palm trees. The thump of rap music pounded from boom boxes set on curbs and from the radios of jacked-up cars, cruising the streets. Most of the people were dressed in black, and she wondered about that at first, until she realized that it was dangerous to wear colors on gang turf. Although it was a school day, kids lounged on street corners and in vacant lots and alleys, wearing loose T-shirts and do-rags, watching her roll past with suspicious eyes.

Every pair of eyes was a flashback to this morning's attack, the thump of the crowbar, the crunch of glass amp;

Not too late to turn back, she reminded herself.

She kept going. The address wasn't far now.

She thought of how narrowly she had escaped this kind of poverty after her father died in jail. Her mother had worked two jobs to keep up the mortgage payments.

If they'd lost their home, if they'd had to move to a neighborhood like this, would it have changed her? She already had a father who was a felon. Throw in an environment seemingly designed to breed criminals, and what would have been the result? She liked to believe she could have maintained her sense of self even under that kind of pressure. But she couldn't be sure. What dictated the direction of a human life? Nature, nurture, free will, destiny? What was the formula, or was life too complex to be expressed as a formula?

She shook her head. If there was an answer to that question, she wouldn't find it here, now.

She continued driving east, deeper into Watts. Part of her wanted to be angry at Brand for putting her through this ordeal, but she couldn't entirely blame him. He had been given no choice about taking part in the program. In the LAPD, a troubled officer could be ordered to undergo any form of counseling. Being sent to the bank, it was called, because the LAPD's Behavioral Sciences unit, where the psychologists worked, was housed above a bank in Chinatown. To be sent to the bank was to face the possible closing of one's accountthe end of a career.

Brand had been spending a lot of time at the bank. His new course of treatment was only an extension of the mandated therapy he'd been receiving from Dr. Alvin, one of the Behavioral Sciences shrinks. When Alvin had failed to make progress, Brand's case had been labeled treatment-refractory, suitable for experimental intervention. And now he was required to see a new doctor for a therapeutic technique that the patrol cops this morning had characterized as "putting wires in their heads."

No wonder Sergeant Brand was resistant to the idea. He didn't seem like the docile type, anyway. From Alvin's briefing, she knew that Brand had grown up in Pico Rivera, a tough, blue-collar town south of LA. He had been in the department for fourteen years, working the high-crime districts of Southwest, Rampart, and now Newton. His ID photo showed a man with rough-hewn features and a thick neck starting to wrinkle into a double chin. His eyes were dark and hard to read under the heavy tufts of his eyebrows. His head was shaved at the sides, his hair thin and short like black bristles on top. He looked older than his age, forty-one.

Not a man who could be pushed around, she thought. And also not a man who would be easily traumatized. But a fatal shooting was enough to traumatize anyone, especially given the fact that Sergeant Brand had never fired his gun on duty before the night of February 9, three months ago.

That night had changed him. Brand had become a different man. Now, facing a new form of therapy, he was scared, and he was hiding. But not for much longer. She would find him, and in the end, she hoped, he would thank her for it.

The address she was seeking was one-half of a duplex on a cul-de-sacnot a reassuring location, since it afforded no easy escape route. Bungalows and small apartment buildings curved around an oval patch of dead grass that had been a small park. The park's swing set was broken, its seesaw overgrown with weeds. No kids played there. Liquor bottles and cigarette packs lined the sandy verge of the play area.

Robin studied the duplex, two stories high, the ground-floor windows barred, the upper-story windows mostly boarded up. An air conditioner chugged in one window, dripping condensation. Cars were parked around the cul-de-sac, taking up most of the curb space, and more cars rested on the narrow front and side lawns of the duplex. Something was going on inside. She heard no music or voices, but the cars told her of a large gathering of people.

"This is crazy," she whispered as she sat behind the wheel of the Saab, double-parked on the street, staring at the house.

The smart thing was to drive off, hit the freeway, and keep calling Brand's cell phone until he answered. If he never did, she could report him to his superiors.

But then Brand would be even more hostile to her for having squealed on him, and the LAPD brass would have cause to reconsider greenlighting the treatment program. She could hear Deputy Chief Wagner now: "If you can't handle the challenge of establishing a rapport with one of our officers, Dr. Cameron, maybe we'd better reevaluate the whole idea."

She wouldn't let that happen. If Brand was in this house, she would find him.

She got out of the Saab and locked it, activating the alarm, which might offer some protection even with a busted window. Quickly she approached the house, checking her purse to confirm that her cell phone was inside and turned on. It would probably be her only lifeline once she was inside.

The two front doors of the duplex were closed. A hand-scrawled, misspelled sign on one of them read GO ARROND BACK, the same message repeated underneath in Spanish.

She threaded her way between the parked cars on the side lawn and came to a small, fenced backyard, empty except for two preschoolers squatting in the grass and examining a crowd of ants. Neither child looked up as she found the open rear door.

Inside, there was a great deal of noise, all of it electronic in originTV sets blaring different channels in different rooms, a radio competing with the din. She saw a man with a shaved head and a bodybuilder's physique lounging on a sofa with a dazed look on his face. He was no more interested in her than the children had been.