Authors: Cody McFadyen
I pad through my door, weapon drawn, hands trembling at the thought of someone in my house.
The noises come from the living room. Cackles have been added to the sibilant squishes.
When I enter, he is there. I cannot see his face, for it is obscured by the bandages around his head. His lips are visible, and they are huge, bloated, red. His black eyes are flat and dead, like bits of burned skin.
“Do you see?” he whispers, snakelike.
I can’t see what he’s pointing to. The back of the couch is hiding it. A certainty begins to rise in me that I don’t want to see. But I must.
I move forward, forward, forward.
“Do you see?” he whispers.
And I do.
She is lying on the couch. He has opened her from sternum to
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crotch, exposing her organs. Cemetery earth cakes her hair. And one grime-covered finger points at me.
“Your fault . . .” she croaks.
She is Alexa, and then she is Charlotte Ross, and then she is Annie.
“Why did you let him kill me?” Annie’s face asks me, as she points, accusing. “Why?”
The man with the bandaged face cackles. “Do you see?” he whispers.
“Their dirty fingers. They point at you, forever.”
“Why?” she asks.
“Do you see?” he whispers.
I jolt awake. The cabin of the jet is quiet and shadowed. James and Alan are dozing.
I look out the passenger window to the cold dark night and shiver. Dirty fingers. No need to search for symbolism there. I feel them always, pointing at me from the grave. The ones I did not save.
I’d called Jenny Chang at SFPD from the plane, and she is waiting for us.
“I’m not your friend anymore,” she says, tapping her watch to indicate the early hour.
“Sorry, Jenny. Things are pretty fucked up.” I fill her in on Callie. Her lips tighten into a straight, angry line.
“No further word on her yet?” she asks.
“No,” James replies.
“Christ . . .” she says, staring off.
I hold up my briefcase. “But we got a good hit from VICAP.”
The detective in her comes out, sharp and interested. “Tell me.”
I give her the gist of it.
“Twenty-five years ago. I came on the force when I was twenty-two. That’s before my time. Who was the primary on the case?”
“Detective Rawlings,” Alan says.
Jenny stops still. Looks at Alan. “Rawlings? Are you sure about that?”
“Yeah, I’m sure. Why?”
She shakes her head. “Because things may really be looking up for
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you now. Rawlings is a first-class fuckup. Always has been, from what I hear. He’s boozing it up, counting time till retirement.”
“And how is that good for us?” I ask.
“It makes it a lot more probable that he missed something back then. Something you guys wouldn’t miss.”
At SFPD, Jenny taps a pencil on the desk while waiting for the phone to be answered. “Rawlings? This is Jenny Chang. Yeah, I do know what time it is.” She frowns. “It’s not my fault you’re a drunk.”
I give her a pleading look. I need the guy to come in, not hang up on her. She closes her eyes. I get the idea she’s counting to ten.
“Look, Don. I’m sorry. I got woken up out of bed too. Made me cranky. The head of NCAVC Coord LA is here, about an old case of yours. A”—she consults a pad in front of her—“Renee Parker.” A look of surprise crosses her face. “Sure. Okay. See you in a few.” She hangs up the phone, musing.
“What?” I ask.
“The moment I said her name, he stopped complaining and said he’d be here right away.”
“I guess this one meant something to him.”
Don Rawlings shows up within the half hour. I can tell just by looking at him that Jenny was right on target. He’s about five foot nine, with a large gut, rheumy eyes, and the florid face of a dedicated drinker. He looks aged before his time.
I stand up and shake his hand. “Thank you for coming, Detective Rawlings. I’m Special Agent Smoky Barrett, head of NCAVC Coord in Los Angeles. That’s James Giron and Alan Washington, who also work in my unit.”
He squints at my face. “I know you. You’re the one whose home got broken into.” He grimaces. “Every cop’s nightmare.”
I notice he’s holding a folder in his hand. “What’s that?” I ask. He plops it down on the desk as he takes a seat. “That’s a copy of the file on Renee Parker. I’ve kept it all these years. Pick it up in the early hours sometimes when I can’t sleep.”
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Rawlings’s face undergoes a change when he speaks about Renee Parker. The eyes become more alert. His mouth grows sad. I was right. This case had meant something to him.
“Tell me about it, Detective.”
His eyes go distant. Empty, with no horizons. “Takes a little bit of backstory, Agent Barrett. Detective Chang here probably told you I’m an alcoholic fuckup. And she’s right. But I wasn’t always that way. Once upon a time, I was where she is now. The best homicide guy here. First grade.” He looks at Jenny, smiles. “Didn’t know that, did you?”
Jenny raises an eyebrow. “I had no idea.”
“Yeah. Don’t get me wrong, now. When I started on the force I was young, and I was a real prick. A racist, a homophobe, with a hair-trigger temper. I used my fists on more than one occasion where it might not have been needed. But the streets have a way of teaching you the way things really are.
“I stopped being a racist the day a black cop saved my life. Perp came up behind me. This cop tackled me out of the way and shot the perp down at the same time. We were fast friends for years, till he died. Killed in the line of duty.”
Those sad eyes grow even emptier and more distant.
“I stopped being a homophobe after a year in homicide. Death does that to you. Tends to give you a perspective on things. There was a young man who was—well, flamboyant about his homosexuality. He worked a roach coach near the station, and he picked up on my hate real fast. Little fucker would tease me, do all kinds of things just to make me uncomfortable.”
A faint smile ghosts across his lips. Disappears, torpedoed by sadness.
“God, he made me crazy. Well, one day a group of guys beat that young man to death because he was a homosexual. And wouldn’t you know it, I caught the case.” He gives me a sardonic grin. “How’s that for karma? During that case I got to see two things, and I was never a gay hater again. I got to see his mother scream and pull her hair out and just die inside right in front of me. I watched her world end because her boy was dead. Then I went to his funeral, looking for suspects. You know what I saw there? About two hundred people. You believe that? I don’t think I even
know
two hundred people. Not who would come to
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my funeral, that’s for sure.” He shakes his head in disbelief. “And they weren’t just people from the community, there because he was gay. They were people whose lives he’d touched. Turns out he volunteered all over the place. Hospices, drug-rehab centers, crisis counseling. That young man was a saint. He was good. And the only reason he was dead was because he was gay.” He clenches a fist. “That was wrong. I just couldn’t be a part of it. Not anymore.”
He waves a hand. “Anyway. So . . . yeah. Here I was, new to the homicide bureau, and a new man. No longer thinking words like
faggot
or
nig-
ger
. I was different, I was dedicated, life was good.
“Now jump forward five years. I was about three years past my peak and sliding down the other side fast. I’d started to drink; I was fucking around on my wife. I thought a lot about eating my gun. All because of those damn dead babies.” His eyes grow haunted, haunted in a way I recognized. I’d seen that same look in the mirror. “Someone was killing babies. I’m talking toddlers or younger. Snatching them, strangling them, and tossing them out on the sidewalks or the streets. All it took was six of them and no suspects, and I was dying inside.” He peers at me. “You know that feeling, I’ll bet, doing what you do.”
I nod.
“Imagine that it’s six dead babies you’re letting down. That you not only haven’t caught the guy doing it, you don’t even have any suspects. I was fucked.”
Just a year ago, I’d have looked at Don Rawlings and would have to have suppressed a sneer. I would have considered him weak. Someone blaming the past for the present, using it as an excuse. I can’t forgive him entirely for giving up, but I don’t feel that need to sneer at this moment. Sometimes the weight of this job is just too much. What I feel now is not superiority but compassion.
“I can imagine,” I say, looking at him. I think he sees that I mean it, and he continues his tale.
“I was already fucking up and not caring about it. I did anything I could to try and get those dead babies off my mind. Drinking, sex—anything. But they’d keep showing up in my dreams. Then I met Renee Parker.”
A genuine smile, one belonging to a younger Don Rawlings, appears.
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“I ran into her when her boyfriend got killed. He was a small-time dealer, pissed off the wrong guy. She was a stripper who’d only just started shooting up. You see it all the time and learn to write it off real fast. But there was something different about Renee. There was someone home. Some life in there, right near the surface.” He looks up. “I know what you’re thinking. Cop, stripper, end of story. But it wasn’t like that. Sure, she had a great body. But I didn’t think of her like that. I saw her, and I thought maybe this was my chance to do something good. To make up for the babies.
“I got her story. Went to LA to act, ended up dancing topless to make ends meet. Met a scumbag, he said, ‘Hey, try a little bit of this, you won’t get hooked.’ Nothing original there. But there was something original with her. This kind of desperation in her eyes. Like she was still hanging on to the edge of the cliff and hadn’t fallen off it yet.
“I grabbed her and I slammed her into rehab. When I was off duty, I’d go see her. Hold her while she was puking. Talk to her. Encourage her. Sometimes we’d talk all night. And you know what? She was my first female friend.” He looks at me. “You know what I mean? Think male-chauvinist stereotype. Women are for marrying or fucking. You understand?”
“I’ve known a few in my time,” I say.
“Well, that was me. But this twenty-year-old girl, she became a friend. I didn’t think about fucking her, and I didn’t want to marry her. I just wanted her to be okay. That’s all I wanted.” He bites his lip. “You see, I was a good detective. I was never on the take; I usually caught the bad guy. I never hit a woman. I had rules, right and wrong. But I was never really a decent man. You understand the difference?”
“Sure.”
“But what I was doing with Renee, it was decent. Selfless.” He runs a hand through his hair. “She came through it and got out of rehab. I mean, really came through it. One of the ones who was going to make it. I lent her some money and she got her own apartment. She started working a job. A few months later, she even started night school. Taking drama classes. Said if she never made it as an actress, she could always be a waitress, but she wasn’t ready to give up on her dream yet.
“We’d hang out every now and then. Go to a movie. Always as friends. I never wanted anything else. It was the first time it was more
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important to me to have a friend than a piece of ass. Best of all, the babies went away. I stopped drinking, made up with the wife.”
He falls silent, and I know what’s coming, can hear it like a phantom freight train. I already know the end to this story. Renee Parker, firecracker, saved from herself, gets murdered in a hideous fashion. What I didn’t know until now is what that meant to the people around her. For Don Rawlings, it was a point where fate turned on a dime and began hurtling into the black. The point where the dead babies came back and never left.
“I got the call at four in the morning. Didn’t know who it was until I got out there.” His eyes look like ghosts in the fog. Lost and howling and doomed to wander. “He’d burned her good. The ME said she had almost five hundred separate cigarette burns on her. Five hundred!
None of them fatal.” His hand trembles on the desk. “He’d tortured her and raped her. But the worst was what he did after. Cut her open, took out some of her organs, and dropped them next to her body. Just dropped them there on the concrete, to rot with her.
“It’s hard to remember that feeling. How I felt when I saw her there. Maybe I just don’t want to. What I do remember is one of the uniforms looking down at her and saying, ‘Oh yeah, I know her. Stripper, used to work over in the Tenderloin. Great tits.’ That was it for him, all the explanation he needed. He looked down at Renee, remembered her tits, and labeled her. Not a human being, or a bright girl who was turning her life around. Just a stripper.” He traces a finger over an imperfection in the desk. “They had to pull me off him. Not that it mattered. Can you believe this—that little bastard went in and pulled the file, years later. Under
profession,
he whited out
waitress
and wrote in
stripper/poss.
prostitute.
Even sent it in as a correction to VICAP.”
I’m appalled. I suppose it shows on my face, because he looks at me and nods.
“Believe it.” He sighs. “So anyway, I kept my past relationship with her quiet so I could stay as the primary on the case. I wanted to catch this guy. Had to catch him. But he was good. No prints, not a damn thing. We didn’t have DNA back then, so”—he shrugs—“I went looking where you always do when you come up dry on the physical evidence.”
“Who knew her, who’d been around her,” I say.
“That’s right. She was going to night school. Turns out she’d met a
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guy there. Been seeing him for a week or two. Good-looking kid named Peter Connolly. But right off, I knew something wasn’t right with him. Something about the way he talked when I questioned him, like he was making fun of me. Getting away with something. On a hunch, I flashed his photo around at the strip joint she used to work at. Sure enough, people remembered him. The times they placed him there matched what Renee’s schedule had been. Then it got better. Turns out Peter had a little drug problem. He’d attended rehab. Can you guess? At the same place and at the same time that Renee had been cleaning up. Now my antennae are way up. Once I found out he’d enrolled in college only a week after she had, I knew, I knew, he had to be my guy.”