“And if you had practiced, you would know how to control a victim so they couldn't make a sound,” I said. “My father ripped open Jenny Roberts's blouse and dragged her across the floor of that stage.”
Harrison looked at me.
“Practice,” I said.
I took one more look down the block at the tree-lined sidewalk. Victoria would have had a few glasses of wine, and be feeling happy after a dinner with friends. As she reached for her car keys, she may have heard the sound of shoes on pavement, or seen the movement of a shadow across her path. It was over before she knew it.
I took a few steps down the sidewalk and closed my eyes to imagine the darkness she would have been in. The sensation of a hand closing over my mouth was suddenly as real as if it were actually happening.
“Are you all right?” Harrison said.
He placed his hand gently on my back where the bandage wrapped around my ribs and I flinched.
I nodded unconvincingly and walked back to the car and my boxes of possessions and a single arrest report that were possibly all I had left in the world.
“What is it?” Harrison asked.
I shook my head.
“I'm not sure,” I said.
I had never felt a sensation like that before, yet something about it seemed familiar. I looked over to the sidewalk across the street. Had my father been here? Did the pavement hold some fragment of memory like the sandstone of a fossil bed? Was that what I had sensed?
“All Victoria Fisher wanted to do was go home and kiss her son good night.”
16
Victoria Fisher's parents lived in the same house where they had raised their daughter, just east of Ventura Boulevard in Studio City. It was the kind of house that could have been used in a 1960s television show. A porch, a small white picket fence, a bed of roses, and a perfect lawn. The bougainvillea and a cactus along the property line were the only giveaways that we weren't in a small suburb in the Midwest.
Harrison rang the doorbell and a moment later a trim woman with short-cropped gray hair opened the door. She wore a light silk Japanese-style shirt and cotton pants that had grass stains on the knees. I guessed her to be in her mid sixties. I started to identify myself but there was apparently no need. A mother who loses a child to violent crime will forever know the look of a cop versus a civilian.
“Has something happened to Danny?” she said.
I shook my head and identified Harrison and myself. “We're here to ask you a few questions about your daughter.”
Even eighteen years after the crime, a cop saying she wanted to ask about her daughter still struck her like a physical blow. Mrs. Fisher's shoulders sagged for a moment and her clear eyes moistened. She took a breath and gathered her composure. “You're Pasadena police. I don't understand.”
“We're investigating another crime that could be related your daughter's death.”
She hesitated for a moment, as if not wanting to invite us, and the pain we brought along, back into her life, then she motioned us inside. The interior of the house held no traces of the tragedy that had marked the family. It was light and airy, as if it had come in one piece from the pages of
House & Garden
. If the inside of a house could wear a mask to hide its true identity, this was it. Scratch underneath the robin's-egg blue paint and no telling what one might find.
She walked us through to the country kitchen and offered us iced tea as we took our places around the kitchen table.
“What can I tell you that we didn't tell a dozen policemen hundreds of times?” she said.
“There may be nothing, but sometimes the smallest detail can mean more than anyone realizes.”
She considered this for a moment as if weighing the emotional cost of reopening the past. I started to follow up, but she interrupted me.
“What other crime are you investigating?” she asked.
“Someone who may have been investigating the River Killings was killed.”
“Killedâyou mean murdered?”
“It's one possibility we're following,” Harrison said.
Mrs. Fisher glanced out the window. “If this has anything to do with Danny, I'd prefer a lawyer to be present.”
“Danny?”
“Your daughter's son?” Harrison said.
She nodded. “Our grandâ My grandson. My husband died three years ago.”
“Why did you ask if something had happened to him when you answered the door?” I asked.
“He's bipolar, has bouts of paranoia. His medicine helps, as long as he's taking it.”
“And he's not taking it right now.”
“I don't think so.”
“Why do you think that?”
“He disappears, sometimes for weeks, then shows up in places and situations.”
She let the details slip away as she looked out the window and shook her head. “Well, you can guess what it's like.”
“I'm a mother, too,” I said. “We're not here to investigate your grandson.”
“Has he been violent to himself or others?” Harrison asked.
“Why do you ask that?”
“We can alert other departments to look for him if he's a danger to himself,” I said.
She considered the question for a moment.
“He's threatened suicide, but never overtly acted on it that I'm aware of.”
“What about others?”
“He struck out at his grandfather several times. On a couple of occasions he assaulted strangers on the street, but that's been several years. You have to understand, it's the illness, not him.”
“You raised him after your daughter's death?” I asked.
She took a breath that seemed to carry eighteen years of pain with it. “We tried. Can you imagine losing your mother to violence as a child? How that would change everything? How do you trust a world that would do that to you?”
“What about his father?” I asked.
“She got pregnant with Danny while on a trip through Europe during college. If she knew him, she never said who he was.”
Mrs. Fisher smiled, or nearly smiled. “She was a good mother; she didn't need anyone else.”
“Victoria was working in the office of a prosecutor named Cross. Is that correct?” I asked.
She sat for a moment as if she hadn't heard me, then she finally nodded. “I'd like to know what the connection is between all this and my daughter before I answer anything else.”
“The individual whose death we're investigating was named Manning.”
The look in her eyes changed from one of loss to that of a mother still protecting her child. “I know that name.”
“This individual's father was questioned in your daughter's death.”
“I remember,” she said.
The name appeared to bring back a flood of memories that began to overwhelm her. She shook her head at one of themâor all of themâand got up from the table and stepped to the window looking out over the backyard.
I gave her a moment, then walked over and stood next to her. The yard was awash with flowers of every shape and color. I imagined it was her way of dealing with the ugliness that had taken so much of her life from her. At least in the thousand square feet of soil that she could control, there would be a perfect world.
“I'm not here to do anything that would harm your daughter's memory, Mrs. Fisher. She was a victim in this. I wouldn't betray that.”
Her eyes remained straight ahead, though I doubt she was seeing anything other than the thoughts she was wrestling with.
“It never ends,” she said softly.
“I know,” I said.
She glanced at me and took a breath. “I'm not protecting my daughter, Lieutenant. The dead are the only ones who are truly free.”
She walked over to the kitchen door and opened it. “I have to show you something.”
She stepped out and started walking toward the garage as Harrison and I followed. The garage had been converted into an apartment. And then I knew what she meant.
“It's your grandson you're protecting, isn't it?”
She nodded. “Yes.” She took a key out of her pocket and unlocked the door. “We built this for him when he was in high school.”
She opened the door, reached inside, and turned on the light. It was a simple room: a bed in one corner, an old overstuffed chair, TV, stereo. Then I saw it.
“Look at the walls,” Harrison said. “Even the windows.”
Every available inch inside the apartment was covered with photographs, newspaper clippings, and pages and pages of single-spaced notes.
“What is this?” Harrison said.
I shook my head and stepped over to one of the covered windows. I started to read one of the pages, but it was very nearly unintelligible, except for one thing.
“It's all about his mother,” I said.
“Like a shrine,” Harrison said.
“It's more than that,” I said. “He's doing something else here.”
I walked over to the wall next to the bed. A clipping from a
Los Angeles Times
article reported the arrest of a suspect for questioning in the River Killings, and then his release. My father's name wasn't mentioned.
“It started about a year ago,” Mrs. Fisher said. “He said he began to receive messages from someone claiming to know the truth about who killed his mother. He referred to them as notes from the dark angel.”
“What kind of messages? Phone calls? Letters?” I asked.
“I'm not sure.”
“You never saw them?”
“You mean do I believe they really existed?”
I nodded.
Mrs. Fisher remained standing at the doorway as if stepping inside was too much of an emotional leap. “I don't know if they were real or not. Danny said he was told if anyone else ever saw them he would no longer receive help.”
“To find his mother's killer?” I said.
“Yes. It became the sole focus of his lifeâhis obsession.”
I walked over to the back wall of the apartment. A crude curtain hanging from the ceiling reached nearly to the floor.
“Pull it back,” Mrs. Fisher said.
I slid the curtain back and saw what had been hidden. A series of circles drawn in ever-greater size spread out from the center until they covered most of the wall. There were hundreds of lines, some connecting, some not. In places there was writing. In others what at first looked like an area blacked out was instead line after line of handwriting so minute I couldn't read it. Harrison stepped over next to me and stared in wonder.
“This is . . .” He let the words go.
“Madness,” I whispered.
“It's drawn like a solar system, or a universe,” Harrison said. “Planets intersecting the different orbits, lines connecting one planet to another. All of it spinning out in ever widening orbits from the center like it's the sun.”
“It could also be a family tree of sorts, a genealogy chart. All starting from a central point of origin,” I said. “Look what's written in it.”
“City Hall.”
Harrison studied it for a moment. “Cross asked us if we had talked to anyone at City Hall.”
Around the central circle were drawn a series of smaller circles, with names written in them.
“Look at the name in the second circle,” I said.
“Cross.”
I turned to Mrs. Fisher, who hadn't moved from the doorway. Her eyes pleaded with mine before she looked away. Harrison reached out and touched my arm to draw my attention to the third ring out from the center, where a number of circles had been drawn.
“T. Manning,” I whispered. “My father.”
I followed the same orbit my father's name was on around to another circle, with another name drawn inside. “The Iliad.” A reference to Homer?
“He could be equating his journey to Homer's epic,” Harrison said. “Any way we look at it, this will take days to decipher. If we can understand it at all.”
“We can understand this,” I said, pointing to two more circles drawn on successive rings out from my father's.
“The names of the two other River Killer victims,” Harrison said.
I walked over to Mrs. Fisher. “Do you know how long he has been working on this?”
She shook her head. “I found it several months ago when he disappeared for a week. He could have been working on it for years. I just don't know,” she said.
“How long has Danny been gone this time?” I asked.
“Three nights.”
Harrison made eye contact with me to make note of the timing. Danny would have disappeared the night my brother died.
“This doesn't make Danny guilty of anything, Lieutenant,” Mrs. Fisher said. “He just wants to know why he lost his mother. He wants his world to finally make sense, that's all. He's been lost his entire life.”
“Someone else trying to do the same thing may have been killed because of it,” I said.
“Are you saying Danny's in danger?”
“It's something we have to consider.”
She stared at the wall for a moment, trying to connect the various dots.
“I always assumed this was about the illness. I hated it because it was taking my grandson from me. And now you tell me this may be real.” She shook her head in disbelief.
“I was prepared for any of the possibilities except that one,” she whispered.
She reached up and wiped a tear from the corner of her eye, then stepped outside and sat on a bench next to the door. Harrison and I stood in front of the massive drawing for a moment in silence.
“Whatever the rest of this means, the one thing that's clear is where it begins,” Harrison said.