What Waits for You Read online

  Nope, not gonna be that easy to figure out.

  Half a year had passed since he’d come to Los Angeles. That was the assumption, anyway—that he’d arrived from somewhere else. The idea that he’d emerged from among the city’s own ranks was unpalatable. Even by the rock-bottom standards of Hollywood sensationalism, this guy was bad for business. The crimes were too foul, the victims too sympathetic. No, he must be an outsider. Better yet, a foreigner. Still better, a demon.

  But in many ways the murders had only been the beginning. Whether it was a run of bad luck or divine retribution for the city’s collective sins, no one knew. The only thing all could agree on was that what once had been home was now somehow alien, as if it were now subject to the logic of dreams. As if anything could happen.

  * * *

  There’d been an earthquake just before the Lauterbach murders—a fearsome shaker that ran for a dozen seconds, darkening the southland from Castaic to Mission Viejo. An aftershock tipped the Richter scale to 6.4; some living near the epicenter in Lancaster said it was like “a shout coming from the earth”—a furious, accusatory blast. Others compared it to the roar of a lion. One woman said it sounded like a word: YOU.

  Following the discovery of the Lauterbachs, the Santa Ana winds—as if summoned by the fear and misery already beginning to settle on the city like a cowl—came sweeping in from the desert. They didn’t come alone. Pathogenic fungi, freed from the soil by the quake, were borne aloft by the hot gusts, and thousands soon came down with valley fever. For most, the infection presented merely as a nuisance—a cough, headache, and rash. Others experienced a sickness more at home in medieval Europe than modern-day SoCal. Joint pain, meningitis, weeping abscesses, and lesions in the skull itself. By the time death came to those so afflicted, it was welcomed.

  On the heels of the outbreak came the second murder, the one that would earn the killer his name. Like the Lauterbachs, the Rustads were a couple living alone, albeit two decades younger. Maja Rustad crafted art pieces from found objects and sold them online. Her husband, Steffen, had been in a New Wave band in Norway and found a niche teaching guitar to the kids of his Gen Xer fans out in LA.

  The crime scene was in Highland Park, putting it in LAPD’s Northeast Area and therefore under the jurisdiction of Central Bureau. Detectives Darla Mailander and Tom Claraty were dispatched from the Sixth Street headquarters. The extent of the carnage and antemortem brutality told them they were probably dealing with the same killer who’d struck in Los Feliz, but it wasn’t until they checked the crawl space beneath the house that they knew for certain.

  Mailander and Claraty wanted to hold back as much as they could from the press, but conceded to their captain that there was one detail in particular the citizens of Los Angeles needed to know.

  A press conference was held the following day, and even the hardest of the hardened crime reporters grew unusually quiet when Captain Cheng outlined the killer’s modus operandi. Heather Malins of the LA Weekly later said it was during that conference that she devised the nickname, mostly because of the way her skin had popped with gooseflesh as the captain spoke…

  The Eastside Creeper.

  It was as close to perfect as such things went, and everyone thought so. Even the Times, which was usually first in dubbing the city’s predators, thought Malins had captured the essence of the shadowy thing lurking among them. Not only did it describe the visceral reaction, the revulsion and terror people experienced when learning of his crimes, but it suggested the slyness of a crawling, climbing vine. By the time you noticed it, it was already coiled tightly in place.

  * * *

  The back row of chairs in the Hollywood Station conference room was empty, and Jarsdel picked the seat closest to the door so he could leave once it was over. A few turned their heads when he came in, regarded him with disinterest, and went back to chatting or checking emails. Just one offered him a smile—Kay Barnhardt, the only other detective in the department who’d been promoted straight from patrol to HH2, the new Hollywood Homicide.

  What had originally been conceived as a stop-gap measure to address rising crime stats in West Bureau was now an established—if not wholly respected—investigative branch of the police force. The brainchild of Deputy Chief Cynthia Comsky, HH2 had seen a rocky start. Those who’d labored for years to make detective watched with gut-punched amazement as Jarsdel and Barnhardt swept past them. Virtually all the rank and file at Hollywood Station harbored some degree of resentment toward the rookie whiz kids. Even their own newly assigned partners, homicide veterans Oscar Morales and Abe Rutenberg, made no effort to hide their disgust at command’s decision. Earning their respect, grudging as it was, had taken a very long time. Jarsdel nearly had to die at the hands of a murder suspect to convince Morales he wasn’t just playing at being a cop.

  Barnhardt stood and made her way along her row, excusing herself and pretending not to hear the annoyed sighs from those who had to move their feet. She was perhaps forty, though some long-ago sun damage had given her premature wrinkles and made her look a decade older. She had on wire-rimmed glasses, just as Jarsdel did, and kept her thick brown hair in a regulation ponytail. The sober gray suit she’d dressed in that day did her no favors—baggy in the arms and legs, but pulled taut across her oversized bosom. Jarsdel imagined her figure presented more than a few difficulties in a career like law enforcement. Female cops learned to deal with obscene commentary from criminals, but Barnhardt had had to endure the same from her own colleagues. At least two officers so far had been formally reprimanded for making double entendres in her presence.

  “Hey,” she said, sitting down.

  “Hey.”

  “You’re all by yourself. Mind if I join?”

  “Please.” Jarsdel liked Barnhardt. She’d been a clinical psychologist before she joined the force, and Jarsdel had tracked down a few of her published articles. One, on the pathology of vexatious litigants, impressed him with its originality and stringent scholarship. She was a good thinker, methodical and more than a little relentless. Suspects entered her interview room with the typically flat, steely affect of the career criminal, and often emerged broken, blubbering, and handcuffed.

  “Where’s your partner?” Barnhardt asked.

  “Flu.”

  “Didn’t he get his shot?”

  “Yup. Got sick anyway. Isn’t happy. What do you know about this?” Jarsdel gestured toward the front of the room, where a woman he hadn’t seen before shuffled through some papers at a lectern. She was petite and attractive, with dark skin and East Indian features, her glossy black hair pulled back in a bun.

  “Not a whole lot. But I do know her,” said Barnhardt. “She’s famous.”

  “Famous?”

  “In my field, anyway. She’s a behaviorist, teaches all over. President of the Pavlovian Society. Specializes in operant conditioning.”

  “Ah.”

  “You know what that is?”

  He didn’t. “I think so. Refresh my memory.”

  “You know, application of reward and punishment. There was some controversy a few years back about her methods, though no one could deny they worked. Measurably reduced violence in two prisons, while those in the control group stayed the same.”

  Jarsdel looked again at their guest speaker. Her most noticeable feature was her lips, which she’d painted a vibrant red. It seemed a strange choice, one that conflicted with her conservative charcoal skirt and blazer, but Jarsdel guessed it was some technique of covert influence. He grunted, wondering what the city had forked over for the benefits of her expertise.

  “What’s funny?”

  “Bit pop psych, isn’t it? Just seems like a bunch of woo-woo the department’s throwing our way to make themselves feel better. We don’t need a behaviorist. We need a thousand new sworn officers.”

  Barnhardt shrugged. “It’s not all just theory. She’s
pretty brilliant. Designs security systems for missile silos.”

  Lieutenant Gavin entered and hurried past them to the front of the room. He’d undergone a transformation since Jarsdel’s first year in HH2. Then, Gavin had been a surly, myopic blowhard, a candidate for central casting’s no-nonsense police commander—if absent the wit and charisma such a role usually required. But at some point he’d gotten hold of Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything, and now—unbelievably—Gavin seemed to consider himself an intellectual, even something of an amateur scientist. He kept spare copies of the book in his office, doling them out with sage authority to those he favored.

  Most surprisingly, he’d taken down a photograph of himself posed with the governor, hanging in its place a framed eight-by-ten glossy of Max Planck. The bald, mustachioed physicist gazed morosely back at Gavin’s puzzled visitors, most of whom assumed it was a picture of his great-grandfather. Anyone unfortunate enough to inquire was given a sour, disapproving look. “That’s Max Planck,” Gavin would say, and proceed with an error-riddled précis of energy quanta and blackbody radiation. The routine culminated with Planck’s winning the Nobel Prize, an honor the lieutenant pronounced as the “noble” prize.

  Whereas before Gavin had been obnoxious but predictable, he’d now entered the realm of insufferable pedantry, and he was growing bolder by the day. Physics textbooks—always conspicuously placed—had begun appearing in his office, along with grade-school science paraphernalia like Newton’s cradles and Rubik’s cubes. A NASA bumper sticker showed up on the break-room fridge one day:

  JUST WHAT PART OF

  GxmxM/R=mxVesc2/2

  DON’T YOU UNDERSTAND?

  IT’S ONLY ROCKET SCIENCE

  The whole business infuriated Jarsdel because, for one, the man hadn’t earned his pretensions. He was the worst sort of imposter, surrounding himself with the trappings of a culture that wasn’t his own, as if those books and the bumper sticker and that ridiculous picture of Planck could compensate for what was plainly an average brain.

  And he was getting away with it.

  Jarsdel had picked up the first few murmurings, things like, “Gavin’s no fool,” or “Guy must be pretty smart.” The most irritating had come from an attractive patrol officer who, upon leaving Gavin’s office after a meeting, remarked, “Wow, did you see what he was reading? I didn’t even understand the title.” It wasn’t so much her words but the awed delivery that made it sting.

  Gavin shook hands with their guest speaker, then edged her out of the way. He spoke into a mic clamped to the side of the lectern. “Okay, folks—hey.” Gavin flicked the mic with his finger, sending a percussive bolt through the speakers. Conversation quieted down. A few officers winced and rubbed their ears.

  “Okay,” Gavin repeated. “Thanks. Okay. We’re gonna get started. As you know, we have a special presenter today, right? But what you may not know is that our presenter is Dr. Alisha Varma, president of the Pavlov Society. These are people who do all kinds of very complex, very deep research on pressing scientific concerns related to behavior. You know who Pavlov was?”

  No, thought Jarsdel. He’s not really going to—

  “Ivan Pavlov was a doctor who discovered he could condition his dogs to salivate by ringing a bell. That’s because every time he was about to feed them, he rang that bell, so even when he wasn’t about to feed them and rang the bell anyway, the dogs still got excited. That’s called conditioning. And that’s what Dr. Varma does.” He pointed at her without taking his eyes off the audience, as if challenging anyone to contradict him. A silence followed. Varma endured it with a frozen smile, reminding Jarsdel of a bride weathering a speech by the drunken best man.

  “So that’s what’s going on,” Gavin said with a nod. “Your department’s provided you with the top, absolute top in her field. I expect your full attention, obviously. And your cooperation with anything Dr. Varma wants to move ahead with. Okay. Let’s give her a round of applause.”

  Gavin backed away, clapping his hands, and waved at Varma to step forward. She adjusted the mic, glanced down at her notes, and looked out over the audience.

  “Good morning.” Jarsdel realized he’d been expecting the accent of a Maharashtrian Brahmin—the dusky, mellifluous, vaguely erotic offspring of the British raj and Indian aristocracy. Instead, he got the flat, CNN-standard timbre of Grosse Pointe, Michigan.

  There were a few mumbled replies from her audience. Varma smiled at the anemic reception. “And that’s about what I expected,” she said. “I get much the same at every department I speak at. A few months ago I gave a seminar to An Garda Síochána cadets in Dublin, and I’m not embarrassed to say the ones that weren’t asleep were playing Jewel Quest on their phones. At first, anyway. And I’ll tell you something else. You don’t need me.”

  A few heads that’d been bowed toward handheld screens glanced up, mildly curious. Most consultants didn’t start off by asserting their own uselessness.

  “What’s going on in your city right now is painful. And as is the case with any painful experience, you can’t conceive the end of it. It’s especially upsetting considering last year marked nearly two decades of consecutive annual drops in homicide, down to 238—or 4.3 per 100,000. That’s a record low. But since January you’ve already topped 250 homicides, with six months left to go before they hit the reset button on stats. If the trend continues, you’re looking at numbers you haven’t seen since ’81. But I’m telling you right now, it’s unlikely my ideas are going to be of any help at all.”

  Jarsdel scanned the room. Nearly everyone now had their attention on Dr. Varma.

  “I say that because, mathematically speaking, Los Angeles has been following in step with the global decline in violent crime. These last few months, then, have been anomalous—a freak drift toward lawlessness spurred on by a cocktail of factors. Now we can speculate on what those factors may be and try to address them piecemeal, but we may never know exactly how it happened and, really, it’s not even that important. What’s important is recognizing what’s happened as an anomaly, meaning that regardless of anything you or I do, odds are your numbers are going to stabilize, then return to an approximation of their previous downward trend. Any system, whether it be simple or complex, tends to regress to its mean level of performance after an extraordinary event.

  “Let’s say the situation was flipped, and you’d only had—say—ten homicides so far this year, and instead of me standing in front of you, it’s the chief of police. And he’s telling you what a great job you’ve done. Now would you think it actually had anything to do with you? Probably not. And you’d probably be very skeptical such a pattern would continue. Complex systems generally don’t change overnight, not for the better and not for the worse. In other words, things are going to get back to normal with or without my help.”

  Gavin looked uneasy. This didn’t appear to be part of the script. His arm twitched, as if he wanted to raise his hand to ask a question, then stilled.

  Varma shrugged. “Then again, history provides us with countless examples of the status quo being upturned—events that would’ve been considered unlikely or even impossible before they occurred, but which of course happened anyway. We try to assign some inevitability through hindsight, but that’s a classic bias. So, yes. It could be as bad as it looks. It could be the city’s been plunged into a terrible and unforeseen crisis. The point is, we don’t know one way or the other. But what we can’t afford is to take the chance that things will get better on their own. We simply can’t.”

  Jarsdel looked at Gavin, who now nodded along with Varma’s speech. Apparently it had once again found its moorings. Varma glanced at him, then looked back at her audience—left, center, right, center, left.

  “I have the feeling you agree. Good. Let’s get started.”

  * * *

  The house is bleeding.

  Those had been the
last words Officer Evan Porter remembered speaking before waking up in Hollywood Presbyterian’s ICU. A weapon had been found at the scene, a thirty-two-ounce claw hammer stolen from the Lauterbachs’ tool chest. It was consistent with Porter’s injuries.

  He’d only been struck once, but the blow had been devastating—a bone-pulverizing crack that ruptured an eardrum, shattered six teeth, and collapsed the orbit of his right eye. When it was determined that vitreous fluid was leaking into his bloodstream—which would’ve caused a catastrophic, ultimately blinding autoimmune attack—a complete enucleation of the damaged eye was performed.

  Upon admission, Porter was given a dose of thiopental and put into a coma until doctors could be sure he hadn’t suffered brain damage. In this, he’d been lucky—the CT scan showed no evidence of cerebral contusions, edema, or hemorrhage. After five days, and during a brief abatement of the January rains, Jarsdel and Morales had paid him a visit.

  He was sitting up when they came in, his remaining blue eye fixed on the TV opposite the bed. The rest of his face was in bandages.

  “Officer Porter,” Morales said, “I’m Oscar Morales, and this is Tully Jarsdel. We’re detectives at Hollywood Station.”

  Porter raised the remote and turned off the TV. His eye shifted from one man to the other, then he pointed to his mouth.

  “I know, your jaw’s wired,” said Morales. “They said you might be able to get some words out, but it’d hurt. We don’t wanna put you through anything, but we need some answers. Can always get you something to write on, so let’s just do our best and see what happens.”

  Porter gave a single nod.

  “I guess the first question is obvious. We already talked to Officer Banning, and she didn’t see his face. What about you? You see it?”

  Porter closed his eye. The detectives exchanged a look, uncertain if he’d fallen asleep.