Authors: Peter Robinson
Closer to home, Jack had shown her the earthquake damage, too: a three-storey apartment building collapsed to two; a Bullock’s store with the entire roof caved in; house after house fenced off, waiting for demolition. Jack’s parents had been lucky; all they lost was their chimney and a few roof tiles.
After heavy traffic on the Simi Valley Freeway, the limo finally pulled up at the cemetery at ten to eleven, ten minutes before the service was set to begin.
It was a small funeral, only immediate family members, a few personal friends, like Jaimie, and colleagues from the show, such as Sarah, Stuart and Lisa, who turned a few heads in a black gown cut just an inch or so too low for the occasion.
Network security and Jack’s family had done a great job of keeping the media at bay. There was a reporter from the
Los Angeles Times,
but that was about all. No TV cameras. Arvo Hughes was there, Sarah noticed as she followed Stuart into the cool chapel, and his presence felt like an intrusion into the privacy of her grief.
The service was brief. Jack’s parents had never been particularly religious, and though Jack himself had flirted briefly with the Catholicism his Italian background suggested, it hadn’t really taken hold. How could it, Sarah thought, with such a medieval attitude towards gays?
A non-denominational minister said something about the frailty of the flesh and how we must always be ready to face God because we never know when He will call us to His bosom. He made Jack’s murder sound like more of a blessing, a joyous occasion, than a tragedy.
Then Jack’s older brother, Denny, gave the eulogy. They hadn’t been close, Sarah knew, and generally when they met they argued. But the eulogy moved her to tears because it didn’t skirt the family problems; it confronted them head-on.
The brothers had fallen out partly because Denny couldn’t handle Jack’s being gay. This was his younger brother, his reasoning went, and he was supposed to keep up the family tradition of handsome, macho Italian maleness. Instead he’d become a goddamn sissy and shamed his family.
Jack’s parents, Sarah knew, usually avoided the issue altogether, pushing the question of Jack’s sexuality right to the backs of their minds. After all, they had a lot to be proud of. Jack had done well for them in so many ways and Denny was still only a glorified used-car dealer. So what if they were BMWs; they were still used cars.
In his eulogy, Denny spoke of their arguments, of the torment he suffered because
he
thought his brother wasn’t normal, about how he worried about Jack getting AIDS. But he also said he wished he’d sloughed off his prejudice and taken the time to get to know his brother better. And that Jack had been there for him when he needed it, no questions asked. When it came right down to it, maybe they were too much alike ever to get along easily. The circumstances were different, but what Denny said made Sarah think of the way she and Paula related, or failed to relate.
Dabbing her eyes, Sarah followed the others outside, still in a daze after seeing the coffin wheeled away. It was hot and humid outside the air-conditioned chapel. Sarah felt the beads of sweat gather around her brow and temples, and a tiny rivulet tickled as it coursed down the groove of her spine.
After she had given her commiserations to the Marillos, she felt someone touch her elbow and turned to see Arvo Hughes standing beside her. Sarah flinched at his touch. She wasn’t ready for him again right now. Not here. Not in this state. She had revealed too much of herself to him already. He must think she did nothing but break down and cry.
‘What are you doing here?’ she asked rather more sharply than she intended. ‘You didn’t know Jack. Are you expecting his murderer to turn up and gloat, or something?’
‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘But that usually only happens in your line of work. Believe it or not, the cases I work aren’t just numbers to me.’ He nodded towards the chapel. ‘I never met him, but he seemed like a decent guy.’
‘He was.’
‘And in case you’re beating yourself over the head about it, I still don’t think there was a hell of a lot you could have done to prevent what happened. Joe Westinghouse agrees.’
‘He does? Well, isn’t that wonderful. Thank you both very much. I feel so much better now.’
‘Christ, you’re pricklier than a porcupine. There’s no need to be sarcastic. What I’m saying is, letters or no letters, there’s no way we could have predicted this would have happened. No way. And even if we could have, do you think we could have found a way of protecting everyone you knew? No. So don’t go blaming yourself. What could you do, anyway? Has
M
given you any choice about when and who he kills? All we’ve got is twenty-twenty hindsight.’
‘Well it’s a pity you policemen don’t have a lot better vision than that, isn’t it? Have you ever thought about that? Maybe if you were doing your jobs instead of . . . instead of . . . Oh!’ She pushed him aside and walked away in tears. She felt embarrassed and phony doing it – like she was playing the prima donna or something – but she knew she would only have felt worse if she had stayed.
‘What you doing here? We did not invite you.’
Sarah heard the raised voice and turned. Oh no. It was Jack’s mother, and she was waving her fist at Jaimie Kincaid.
‘You no-good pervert,’ she went on, her voice getting louder. ‘You kill my Jack. Is
your
fault my Jack’s dead. You hear me? Police should have keep you locked up. You go away now. I call police.’
She saw Jaimie walk off, slump-shouldered. Jack’s father put his arm around his wife to calm her down. Denny went after Jaimie. Sarah hoped, after the eulogy, that he would have a few kind words to say rather than simply repeat what Mrs Marillo had said, punctuated by blows.
Christ, Sarah thought, is everyone looking for someone to blame? The detective was right; she did still blame herself, especially after he had told her about the heart carved into Jack’s body. She knew that, logically, he had been right today, too. Even if she had told the police everything right from the start, it still wouldn’t have saved Jack. She also felt guilty for suspecting Stuart, even for one fleeting moment. Since she had overcome her reservations and gone to Brentwood, he had been nothing but solicitous and steadfast.
But the truly frightening thing was that there was an evil force out there, and she was beginning to wonder if anyone could stop it before it reached its intended destination: Sarah herself.
29
Waiting. Waiting. Waiting. Sometimes life seemed to consist of nothing but waiting. He remembered those hours in the woods at the back of the canyon house, so focused and unmoving he had felt himself become an animal, operating only on instinct, out of appetite and necessity.
He had crept so stealthily across the dirt that his prey hadn’t heard a sound before the hammer came down with a sharp crack on the back of his head and he pitched forward onto the kitchen floor. It had been perfect.
And it had been perfect because he had waited so long. Anticipation heightened awareness; it honed all his senses to razor-edge sharpness, and brought into play some he didn’t even know he had.
Afterwards, he decided that luck was a sense, too, not just some random deal of the cards; if you got into the right state of mind, you could use luck the way you would use sight or smell. Courage, too, perhaps, and maybe even silence.
Now he was sitting in his car on a street in Santa Monica, waiting again. The light was on in the house; he could see it through the slats in the shutters. It was New Year’s Eve, and a block north someone was holding a loud party. But his quarry seemed to be alone. At least the house was quiet, and he had seen no one go in during the hour he had been waiting there.
He knew this one had to be next, but he also knew he had to think it out clearly. For a start, he didn’t have a gun, and his quarry did. Somehow guns didn’t fit with the kind of hunt he had set himself. He knew where to get one easily enough, but they were too distant, too abstract. You pointed and pulled the trigger and someone far away fell down dead.
With guns, there was no real contact, no sense of flesh yielding to hammer or the knife. And that was what he liked about killing. The sound the hammer made, for example, when it fractured the skull, or the way flesh resisted cutting far more than he had thought it would, then how the fat, muscle and sinew under the skin seem to peel back in layers as you cut, presenting colours you had never imagined inside the human body. Maybe he should have been a surgeon.
But not having a gun was definitely causing a problem here. He needed total surprise on his side. And tactics.
And it wasn’t as if there was any choice in the matter of who it had to be. This person had spent the night at Sally’s, keeping her prisoner, and people must be made to see that they shouldn’t do things like that.
He was certain nothing had happened. In fact, it never even entered his mind for a moment that she would be unfaithful to him or that she had been anything other than an unwilling captive. But someone had been in the house, keeping him away, and all night he had suffered headaches and stomach pains. She must see that was not good. These people would only exert a bad influence on her, and she was so impressionable.
First, he had presented her with a random offering; now he was working on real obstacles, on cutting them all out of her life so she could come to him and they could live or die the way destiny intended. It would be soon.
Then, suddenly, a car pulled up outside the house and someone else went in. Two of them. One would have been difficult enough, but two would be too much of a risk. Unless he could think of something, maybe come up with a new sense.
And so he kept on waiting. It was only ten o’clock. Plenty of time. If he remained still and focused his mind completely on the image of Sally hanging from his rear-view mirror, he knew that whatever he needed to do would become clear. And how to do it.
30
Shortly after ten o’clock on New Year’s Eve, Arvo was thinking of going to bed. He was watching Roger Corman’s
Attack of the Crab Monsters
on video, and it was no insult to the 1957 black-and-white B-movie that he couldn’t seem to keep his eyes open.
It had been a rough two days, ending with Jack Marillo’s funeral. He had checked the rest of the M’s from the list Stuart had given him and come up with zero. One promising lead – a key grip called Kim Magellan who had once been arrested for stalking her ex-girlfriend – proved to be unconnected after Arvo had spent a couple of hours interviewing her.
He had also spent an uncomfortable afternoon closeted with the lieutenant and the Chief, laying out every bit of evidence and speculation in the Sarah Broughton case. While the pressure had been intense, the result was satisfactory. He and Joe were to coordinate the investigation, with plenty of resources at their disposal, and the department would try to keep the letters out of the media. Everyone agreed that excessive media attention would make it even more difficult to protect Sarah Broughton and the people around her.
It was only a matter of time, though, Arvo knew. They would find out. They always did. As the Chief had pointed out, there was already speculation about a member of the TMU being present at the Marillo crime scene. So far, however, the main theory seemed to be that Jack Marillo had been blackmailed or somehow harassed by a gay ex-lover.
Arvo sat with his feet up, shutters partly open, leaves rustling, traffic whooshing along the freeway, a cool breeze from the window about the only thing keeping him awake. It was the first time he had felt so completely relaxed in a while.
Then the doorbell rang.
By instinct, he picked up his nylon holster from the table beside him before he went to the door and grasped the handle of the gun. He wasn’t expecting any visitors, and in LA it was almost unheard of that someone would simply drop by without phoning first. Even under normal circumstances, there were always plenty of people who wanted to do a cop harm, and some of them could even get hold of his address. And these were not normal circumstances.
Carefully, he opened the front door on its chain, and found Maria Hernandez standing there, a bottle of champagne in her hand.
‘It’s the real stuff,’ she said, noticing him look at the bottle. ‘At least that’s what the guy in the liquor store said.’
‘How did you know where I live?’ was all Arvo could manage.
‘Hey, I’m a very resourceful woman. I have a university education and I’m good with computers, too. Can I come in?’
Arvo stood aside and ushered her in. She was wearing a long black PVC raincoat against the evening chill and the earlier shower. Her black hair tumbled in waves over her shoulders.
‘How did you know I’d be home?’ Arvo asked.
‘You told me, the other day. Remember? Said you hated New Year’s parties and always stayed in alone watching a video. Aren’t you pleased to see me?’
Arvo felt awkward. ‘Of course. But, look, what . . . I mean is . . . you must have a party or something . . .?’
She fluttered her eyelashes and laughed. ‘Pretty girl like me? Sure I do. But I didn’t feel like going. Then I remembered what you said and I thought you might like some company. So here I am. Did I do wrong?’
Arvo felt himself grinning like an idiot. ‘No. No, not at all.’
‘Good.’ She smiled and took her coat off. Underneath she wore a black-and-white polka dot dress. Polka dots, Christ. Arvo hadn’t seen them for years. At least he didn’t think he had. But what he knew about fashion wouldn’t fill the back of a postage stamp.