Try Fear (37 page)

“Dude, your boy just sent another e-mail to the nun,” he said.

“You’re kidding.”

“I don’t kid about my work, I just create magic.” He held up his PDA and showed me a map. “He’s at the branch library at Exposition
Park, even as we speak. Station 15. If he takes the full hour they usually give, you might even be able to catch him.”

The elevator doors opened. Sid hit a key and handed me his PDA. “It’s got the GPS now. Just listen to the voice. Go get him.”

The voice gave me a straight shot east on the 10, south on Western. The branch was located right there at Martin Luther King,
Jr. Park.

I still had that Indiana Jones hat in my trunk. I put it on, and some shades, so I would look like any other eccentric trying
to hide his identity.

Nobody noticed me.

I snatched a book off the new release shelf, a Robert Crais as it turned out, and kept looking at it as I walked by the computer
stations.

It was 10:37. And there was a skinny guy sitting at number 15, intent on the screen.

He could have been eighteen or thirty. He was one of those types with fair skin and baby features. Hair long and ignored.
Earbuds plugging both ears.

I circled behind him.

He was playing a game.

Could it be him?

I found a chair by the CDs where I could keep an eye on him. I opened the Crais book and made with the fake reading.

At 10:52 the guy stood up from the station. He flipped some hair out of his eyes and started getting funky with whatever was
coming out of his earbuds. It was not pretty. It was a bad case of white man’s overbite, the bane of every inept nerd who
thinks two wires running up to his head plug into cool.

I nearly laughed. At myself. This couldn’t be the guy. Not this Bizarro world hipster.

And yet, what better profile to hide behind if you wanted to send anonymous e-mails threatening a nun?

He bopped right out the door.

I
CAUGHT UP
to him as he was about to get in his car. An old, dirty Chevy Malibu. I wasn’t thinking more than one move ahead. My move
now was to bluff him into a facial tell.

I took off my hat and sunglasses and tapped him on the shoulder.

He spun around like he’d heard a gunshot.

Appropriate.

Up close, he looked closer to twenty than thirty.

He took out one of his earbuds.

“Hi,” I said.

His close-set brown eyes did a little side-to-side move. Like he was trying to recognize me.

“What?” he said.

“Harassed any nuns lately?” I said.

He swallowed. “What?”

“I know about the e-mails.”

“Um, I think you think I’m somebody else.”

“I know who you are.”

His eyes widened with urban paranoia. “Hey, I don’t know what you’re talking about, but just leave me alone.”

“But you don’t leave other people alone, do you?” I said.

He kept his eyes on me as he fished out his keys. Then he turned toward the door of the Malibu. I stepped in front of him
and leaned on the door.

His face broke out in full-on fright. He ran toward the library screaming, “Help!”

I started after him.

“Help!” he shouted again. And then a car leaving the lot almost hit him. It screeched to a stop and the driver leaned on an
angry horn.

It came so close Earbuds slapped his hand on the hood, then ran right up to the library doors. “Help!”

The car, a black LaSabre, stayed put a second. The driver was looking at the backside of Earbuds and maybe saying something
through the passenger window.

I started after Earbuds myself.

Then stopped. I saw the front plates on the LeSabre.

Oklahoma plates.

My mind kicked on its alarm system.

The driver turned his head and looked directly at me. He had black hair in a bowl cut, with straight-edged forelocks. Glasses
with black rims. Pudgy. Drew Carey’s less successful brother.

And the worst poker face in the world. His eyes got owl-big behind his lenses, his mouth opened, and then he burned rubber
out of the lot.

M
OVIE CAR CHASES
are ridiculous, of course. And not half as dangerous as the real thing done by complete amateurs.

But one thing this one did was confirm I had the right guy. How many Oklahomans at a branch library flee in fear when they
see me?

Sister Mary had advanced the theory that her tormenter was from her home state. I believed it now.

I caught up to the LeSabre at Jefferson. He started ignoring the lights.

So did I.

At Adams he almost hit a woman in a crosswalk.

So did I.

He sped right through the red.

So did I. And saw, as we passed the Met Medical Center on the left, a cop car about to turn right out of the lot.

I gave the black-and-white a huge honk and waved at him to follow.

Then scorched over the double yellow lines for good measure.

The cop car made a beautiful U, its lightbar flashing.

The LeSabre hopped onto the freeway, heading east.

So did I.

So did the cops, starting with the siren now.

I stayed with the LaSabre and called 911. I told dispatch I was chasing a possible felon who had almost killed a woman and
was now heading east on the 10. I gave her the make of the car and the Oklahoma plate number and answered a few more questions
and clicked off.

Traffic was semi-heavy. Oklahoma was trying to weave in and out and get an advantage. Dork. Nobody drives like L.A. drivers.
We do this every day. He wasn’t pulling away from me, and never would.

The cop car, on the other hand, was getting pretty impatient.

It was now a double high-speed chase. The kind that shows up on the news, live.

Good. The more the merrier.

O
KLAHOMA TOOK THE
Harbor Freeway south, back toward Exposition Park and USC. In effect, he’d done a horseshoe.

Traffic was lighter here and he stepped on the gas.

So did I.

So did the cops. I kept wondering when the rest of the cavalry would get here.

The answer was Slauson. Another black-and-white got on and joined the festivities.

At Manchester, we got the attention of a Chippie on a motorcycle.

We convoyed to El Segundo Avenue, where Oklahoma decided to hit the street again.

Bad choice.

He went east, and just past Avalon ran right into road work and a jam.

In front of us, on the left, was, of all places, Magic Johnson Park.

Which is where Oklahoma headed, right over the curb. I followed. He was Larry Bird on a fast break. I was Magic running him
down.

The cops were the referees, blowing their whistles.

And then it got deadly.

O
KLAHOMA FISHTAILED ON
the grass between two California oaks. The LeSabre was now facing me, two cop cars and a California Highway Patrol officer.

For a long moment nobody seemed to breathe.

Then, calmly, Oklahoma got out of his car and walked around to the trunk.

Out of one of the cop cars’ speakers came a warning to stop immediately and get facedown on the ground.

What happened next you probably saw, like half the nation did later that night. It was caught by a Mr. Frank Jones of Watts
on cell-phone video.

That’s how I viewed it, anyway, because the moment I saw Oklahoma step out with what looked like an AK-47 in his hands, I
dove to the floor of my car. My face did, that is. My poor, abused keister stayed seat high.

But I could hear the gunfire. The pinging of rounds into my car, and over it.

What Mr. Jones’s vid later showed, fuzzy though it was, was a fattish man in glasses and bad hair blasting the living tax
dollars out of two police cars.

And wounding one highway patrol officer.

And walking steadily forward, firing from what turned out to be a 100-round drum magazine. Doing so with a confidence that
belied his looks.

Then the return fire starts, with me right in the middle.

The video shows Oklahoma getting peppered with an AR-15 and shaking for two seconds, like an abridged version of Sonny Corleone
at the toll gate.

Then crumbling to the ground.

Suicide by cop, they later said. But not to me. They screamed at me and got me out of my car at gunpoint, then smashed me
into the ground, cuffed me, and screamed at me some more.

Not that I cared. My butt was safe. I had no fresh holes in me. I could wait this one out.

Face on the ground, I could see a man behind an oak tree, peeking out, holding a cell phone and shouting “Day-uhm!”

T
HEY HELD ME
for six hours at South Bureau, questioned me up and down. I told them to get in touch with Detectives Fronterotta and Stein
and Zebker.

Finally, they let me go. But not before telling me I’d be on the hook for emergency services and maybe even reckless driving.
I didn’t care about the money, or the citation. I felt horrible about the CHP officer. When they said he was in stable condition
I felt better than I had all day.

I was now up to seven bucks.

I counted my blessings.

O
N THE
T
UESDAY
following the shoot-out, I got the info that the shooter’s name was Milton Markley. Last known address, Oklahoma City. A
computer programmer.

And until his death living in a rented house in a remote part of Canyon Country.

In said house, in the crawl space, cops found an arsenal that included an illegally modified Heckler & Koch HK 41, two Glock
semi-automatic pistols, 400 bottleneck rifle cartridges, 900 rounds of nine-millimeter ammunition, two improvised explosive
devices, and one Kevlar vest.

In the trunk of his LeSabre they found a Mauser hunting rifle with scope, and several rounds of ammo. Ballistics confirmed
this to be the rifle that shot Sister Mary.

Reconstructing Markley’s computer use, a detective found him to be an expert user of several violent games, including the
latest version of
Grand Theft Auto.

Nice.

They also found a skin cream he was using for a rash running down his neck. It had a strong, semi-sweet smell. Stein wanted
me to know that. Maybe he thought it would make me feel a little better about my methods of investigation. Though he did tell
me not to go door to door with any more tire irons.

They also found a computer file containing links to and clips from every Internet mention of the trial of Eric Richess.

In the kitchen, laid out on the table, was a map of L.A., with markings in red of locations for St. Monica’s, the downtown
courthouse, Nick Molina’s neighborhood, and several places in the Valley I knew well.

The guy had been following me.

“Almost like he was making it a big game,” Detective Stein told me two days later at the station. He’d debriefed Sid about
his gamer theory, and now had something else to add—that Markley killed Douglas Aycock and took his name with him. To assume
the role. At least, that’s what he wanted to talk to Sister Mary Veritas about when she arrived.

Only she was no longer using the Latin. Or the Sister.

She was now simply Mary Landis, from Oklahoma City. She wasn’t wearing her habit, of course. A hoodie and jeans. It was the
first time we’d seen each other since she left St. Monica’s.

“I did know him,” she told Stein in the interview room. “In high school. He was a year behind me. He was one of this group
of gamers led by Doug Aycock. Doug was the charismatic one. Milton was more of a follower. I was on the basketball team and
he was the manager and scorekeeper. He seemed nice enough. Then he gave me a ride home one night after a game but instead
of taking me home to Deer Creek he took me out toward Tinker Air Force Base, and we ended up off the highway on a dark, dirt
road. He told me he loved me. He tried to kiss me and then tried to do more than that, and I ended up slugging him in the
face a couple of times and he cried like a baby. Then I jumped out of the car and ran back to the road, and jogged all the
way home. And he was suspended because my dad went down to the school and made sure they knew.”

“And you never saw Markley after that?” Stein said.

“Never,” she said. “This is all so bizarre.”

“But not as uncommon as you may think,” Stein said. “Obsessives are on the rise for some reason. National stats on it, it’s
just about everywhere. They often carry around a slight for years before it fully festers and bursts.”

She thought about that for a moment. “Maybe when he heard I was a nun?”

“Might have snapped him,” Stein said. “How do you think he heard?”

Mary looked at me.

“Publicity from previous cases,” I said. “It’s what happens when you work with celebrity lawyers.”

M
ARY WAS STILL
shaking her head outside the station. I filled her in on everything else, just as I’d gotten it from Detective Lonnie Zebker.

“It seems Eric and Fayette are falling all over themselves to make deals, and trying to implicate each other,” I said. “Isn’t
marriage a wonderful thing?”

“I still can’t believe he did it. He was such a cool liar.”

“He’s singing now. Trying to drag Turk Bacon down and Jamie MacArthur with him. Claims Bacon’s guy, remember the Mafioso-looking
guy from Addie Qs? Claims that guy killed Morgan Barstler. A real web. Well, good luck to Eric. The politicians have levels
of protection we mere mortals don’t.”

“So who vandalized your car?” she said.

“I don’t know. Maybe the Oklahoma Kid, part of his game. Maybe Bacon had it done to keep me believing Eric was innocent. Leave
the impression the real guy was out there. Or maybe it’s just a sign that I need a new car. Especially now that the engine
block has bullet holes.”

“In your lovely Benz?”

“I’m in a lovely Buick now. Rental.”

“Whatever happened to Nick Molina?” she said.

“He skipped town, as far as we know. I’m sure he got scared of the whole thing coming down on him and took off. Right before
we got to him.”