What Waits for You Page 8

  Jarsdel looked at Dr. Varma, matching her curious, clinical gaze with as much dead-eyed disinterest as he could muster. “What exactly is your role here? Are you my superior now? If I decide not to cooperate, what’s the consequence?”

  “You don’t wish to cooperate?”

  “Don’t do that. If you want anything from the people at this station, you’re going to have to answer questions directly. You don’t have to be in the Prometheus Society to spot Psych 101 from a mile away.”

  Again, Varma laughed. “Touché. Then I’ll do my best to be direct. No, I’m not your superior, and I’m not sure what the consequences are. I’ve been asked to inform command who met with me and who didn’t, but what they do with that is up to them. Fair?”

  “Fair as can be, I suppose.”

  “Good. Then see if you really can try to answer my question. How safe do you feel?”

  Jarsdel thought of the bodies, broken, savaged. He thought of the funerals. He’d been at each of them, heard the most desperate, soul-rending cries a human being could produce, seen enough shock and misery and hopeless, bottomless grief to last a hundred lifetimes. The names too. He’d read them so often they might as well have been seared onto his brain. Sometimes he recited them before he fell asleep: Lauterbach, Rustad, Santiago, Verheugen.

  There were others, too, those he’d come to think of as the Creeper’s secondhand victims. The first, only sixteen years old, was spotted sneaking out of his girlfriend’s house after her parents had come home unexpectedly. A vigilante, thinking he was witnessing the Creeper fleeing his latest crime scene, beat the boy into a coma. In another case, a middle-aged man with fragile X syndrome had wandered from his group home and into the wrong backyard. His trespass earned him a hollow-point round to the chest. A third, not so innocent, had been trying to steal a flat-screen from an apartment. He’d been chased by a mob of tenants and thrown down a flight of concrete stairs. And those were obvious cases. In a city this size, there were sure to be more.

  But above all, Jarsdel thought of the mundane moments he’d exchanged with his fellow Angelenos over the last year, and how telling they’d been. All the things that hadn’t been there before—dark half-moons under the eyes of cashiers and baristas and parking-lot attendants, how a hand trembled from exhaustion as it poured a drink, the suspicious flick of a stranger’s eyes if he passed too close on the sidewalk. Smiles, once freely given, were thinner, stiffer, or absent altogether. Park in an unfamiliar neighborhood and you could guarantee someone would copy down your license plate.

  “It’s under strain,” said Jarsdel.

  “Strain?”

  “Like everyone’s waiting for something to happen. So to answer your question, no, it doesn’t feel safe. It’s like…it’s like a coiled spring.”

  “Say more about that,” said Varma, scribbling on a legal pad.

  “Psych 101 again.”

  “Sorry.”

  “I guess, you know, the best way to put it is we’re tired, we’re all tired. It’s been going on too long.”

  “What’s been going on too long?”

  “The Creeper.”

  “Okay.”

  “It’s like we’re all kids again, and there’s a boogeyman in the closet.”

  Varma nodded, her pen flicking across the page.

  “Terror,” said Jarsdel, “is exhausting. It’s a war of attrition, and what’s being attrited is an overall feeling of relatedness, of connectedness. We’re all alone now, in a way. The boogeyman separates us.”

  “Separates you how?”

  “Saps our trust, our compassion.”

  Varma looked up from her notes. “Is that something you can really quantify?”

  “Crimes against persons has more than doubled in the past year. Little things—fighting over a parking spot, noise complaints, a dog shitting on someone’s lawn—that extra ingredient you need to push it over into something physical, it’s already there. Everything’s got some nitro on it these days.”

  Varma put down her pen and legal pad. “If you could make a single change, what would it be?”

  “What do you mean? Change what?”

  “Change anything. Within reason, of course. Something you could implement given adequate resources.”

  Jarsdel considered the question carefully. It was pie in the sky, of course, but no one had ever asked him that before. What—if given the power—would he change?

  “My parents had this book when I was a kid,” he said. “It was bound in black velvet. Title was silvery white—just jumped out at you when you picked it up, and maybe that’s why it’s the first thing I ever remember reading. It was called We Who Bump in the Night. And below that it said, ‘No matter where you lay your head, there’s always something under the bed!’ Each two-page layout was a profile of a boogeyman from a different culture, accompanied by a piece of original art.

  “I’m not sure if this book was, you know, deliberately, thoughtfully engineered to terrify children, but that’s the effect it had on me. Each profile was written in first-person, from the point of view of the monster. Even the title—We Who Bump in the Night… I don’t even know how to describe it to you, but from my perspective as a little boy, a young kid, I thought that somehow this book was actually written by these creatures. That made it so much more frightening to me, for some reason.”

  He paused, collecting his thoughts. Varma let him take his time. Jarsdel was glad she didn’t ask him to get to the point. He wasn’t even sure yet what that point was going to be.

  “Funny thing was,” he continued, “as scared as this book made me, I’d read it over and over again. Sometimes between little gaps in my fingers, just letting bits of images and words in at a time. Anyway, they’d tell you their names, where they lived—what country, I mean—and what they’d do to you if they got hold of you. They seemed to take such delight in all the suffering they caused, and all the fear they’d work up inside you while they were doing it. Mètminwi was the worst, for me anyway. The Haitian boogeyman. It doesn’t sound like a scary name, but then he tells you what it translates to in English: the ‘Master of Midnight.’ He’s tall as a house, with glowing yellow eyes, and he lurks the streets and slips between houses, snatching anyone who’s out late.”

  “What’s he do with them?” said Varma.

  “Sometimes he eats you, other times he takes you away someplace and you’re never seen again. I used to tape my blinds to the walls at night so not even the tiniest bit of window glass would be left uncovered. He was tall, and he’d be able to see me in there while I slept, right through my second-story window. I couldn’t take a chance he’d change his routine—or as I’d say now, his MO, right? Because maybe a night would come when he hadn’t caught anyone outside, and he’d be frustrated, and hungry, and thought he’d bend his rules a little. All he’d have to do is break my window, reach in with one of those long, spidery arms of his, and that’d be it.”

  Jarsdel noticed his heart was beating faster, and marveled at a fear so powerful it could stalk the adult the child had become. Then he noticed Varma sneak a glance at her watch, and that shook him from his reverie.

  “I don’t know what I’m getting at,” he said.

  Varma offered a reassuring smile. “You don’t have to.”

  “Right. I know you’ve got someone else coming in a couple minutes.”

  “I do, but I think this has been helpful.”

  Jarsdel stood, barely able to resist giving the kind of disdainful grunt his partner was so fond of. “All right. Good meeting you.” He was almost out the door when Varma spoke.

  “You didn’t answer my question.”

  Jarsdel turned to face her. “Which?”

  “If you could do anything, make any realistic change, what would it be?”

  This time Jarsdel didn’t need to think. The answer came quickly and easily.
“I’d make it harder for him to hide during the day.”

  4

  Less than an hour after Ben Bauman was declared brain dead, detectives were on their way to arrest Ted Degraffenreid for second-degree murder. He was out on half-a-million-dollars’ bail for the initial assault, but the toxic publicity had gotten him fired and he now spent his days tinkering in the garage of his Hancock Park home.

  He’d been expecting the knock on his door for a week, ever since Bauman’s parents had announced they were planning on taking their son off life support. Now that it had finally come, Degraffenreid was ready.

  “Door’s open—c’mon in.”

  Two detectives and two officers entered Degraffenreid’s house to find him in the kitchen, pouring something from a two-gallon plastic container into a large stockpot. “Just doing a little cooking,” he said, as a pale gas began rising from the pot. Degraffenreid suddenly collapsed, striking his head on the kitchen counter as he fell. The container he’d been cradling slammed onto the tile next to him, spraying liquid everywhere.

  “Ah shit, what’d he do?” one of the cops asked. He hurried forward and knelt by the man’s side, checking the pulse on his carotid. “It’s weak, I think…” The cop shot to his feet, clawing at his right pant leg, which was now soaked through with whatever Degraffenreid had been pouring. “Whoa! Whoa—shit! My leg!” His eyes bulged in pain, then, without warning, rolled back to the whites as he too collapsed to the floor.

  “Mike!” His partner, Emilia Torres, made a move toward him but one of the detectives held her back.

  “Out! Everybody out! It’s gas!”

  The three stumbled outside, Torres yelling into her shoulder mic. “Officer down! Need backup and hazmat now! It’s gas. Oh God.” Questions came shooting back through her radio from dispatch, but Torres didn’t answer. She braced herself against the door jamb as a thick rope of drool came spilling from her mouth. She clutched her stomach. “I’m not well. Not very well.” The crotch of her uniform darkened with urine.

  The detectives, as if responding to a prearranged cue, dropped in unison and began to convulse, their heels tapping a frantic tattoo on the flagstone path.

  “What?” Torres raised her head, brow furrowed in confusion. “Oh. Yeah. Not too well. Not too well at all.”

  The entire block had to be evacuated, and it took hazmat until sundown before residents were allowed back into their homes. Degraffenreid had filled the stockpot with nearly two pounds of potassium cyanide crystals—more than three thousand times the lethal dose, but harmless unless ingested or, as Degraffenreid had done, mixed with sulfuric acid. The result was a cloud of hydrogen cyanide gas, the same stuff the state had once used to carry out executions in its death chamber. The engineer and erstwhile vigilante had even made sure the temperature inside his house was above eighty degrees, so the gas wouldn’t condense. Cleanup teams had to fumigate the site with anhydrous ammonia to neutralize the poison. Even a stray pocket of gas hiding in a closet or between the slats of a bookshelf was enough to maim someone for life.

  Torres and the two detectives were all expected to make partial recoveries, but their careers were over. All had suffered brain damage and were expected to develop seizure disorders. Torres was the worst off of the survivors, requiring a tracheostomy and gastric feeding tube.

  Mike Bradford, the patrol officer who’d rushed to save Degraffenreid, was pronounced dead on arrival at Cedars-Sinai. Both the chief of police and the mayor spoke at his funeral, praising the fallen officer’s selfless bravery and urging the city to unite in peace and brotherhood. After the service, dispatch issued Bradford’s end-of-watch call.

  “7-Adam-5.” Every police radio in the city fell silent a moment, as if waiting for the dead man to respond. Then dispatch spoke again. “No answer 7-Adam-5. 7-Adam-5 out of service. Officer Michael Bradford, you are end of watch. Gone but not forgotten.”

  That night, the Creeper struck for the fifth time.

  5

  There’d been four in the Galka family. Benjamin and Margot, in their late forties, and their two sons—Bowie, nineteen, and Zephyr, seventeen. Together they’d made up the Galka Players, a bluegrass band that had performed at the LA County Fair only a week before.

  Their house was in Topanga Canyon, a sparsely inhabited range of the Santa Monica Mountains, with Malibu on one side and the San Fernando Valley on the other. Those who made the canyon their home liked the solitude, liked the clear, cool nights in a place you could actually see the stars.

  The Galka house was far back from the twisting boulevard, high up in the woods. The trees and dense brush separating their property from their closest neighbors on Nuez Way gave the impression they lived in some remote corner of Old California. You could easily imagine running into a gold prospector or a band of Tongva Indians. It was a perfect place for musicians, who could play as often and as loudly as they wanted without getting any noise complaints. It was also why no one had heard their screams.

  The Creeper hadn’t had any trouble getting in—didn’t even need to carve one of his signature holes into the roof or crawl space. His method of entry was likely the doggie door belonging to Banjo, the Galkas’ husky. Most adults wouldn’t have been able to squeeze through; even otherwise skinny men would’ve been blocked by their own shoulders and hips. But for the Creeper, the front door may as well have been wide open.

  Jarsdel struggled to get to work that morning. He’d had trouble falling asleep the night before, which in turn made him anxious he wasn’t getting enough rest, which naturally made it even harder to doze. The cycle continued until his body succumbed to pure exhaustion, casting him into a troubled corner of his subconscious, where his dreams were strange and full of dread, and he always sensed the presence of something just out of sight, watching, pursuing him.

  When Jarsdel arrived at Hollywood Station and found himself confronted with the news of another Creeper slaying, he simply didn’t have enough strength left to remain professionally aloof. A profound helplessness pressed in on him. He’d joined the police just to avoid that sort of feeling. No longer would he be a spectator, a passive academic who did little but complain. No, he’d be a vigorous participant in the evolution of human consciousness.

  If ever there were a case to prove his worth, it was the Creeper. Appalling sadism, unimaginable suffering. And it had been within his reach—his to solve, and now it was gone.

  After three hours of unproductive desk work, he decided on an early lunch. He might be hungry again by the afternoon, but if he ate now he’d probably have the break room to himself. That decided him. He retrieved his food from beneath his desk and made his way down the station’s main hallway.

  His lunch was uninspired—a few disks of cold falafel—but he had one of his Arnold Palmers to look forward to. He’d gotten into them recently, making his own black tea and lemonade at home, then mixing them in a thermos with plenty of ice. Not too sweet—just a kiss on top of the tea. He found the potion calmed him.

  Once inside the break room, he brought out his copy of Matter over Mind. The chapter he was currently slogging through was titled “Contemporary Themes in Security Ethics.” But at least he was alone, and at least it was quiet.

  It lasted perhaps ten minutes.

  Haarmann arrived first, but he was quickly joined by three other officers—all patrol, all rock-jawed and buzz-cut. As they entered, they each gave Jarsdel the classic “SWAT nod,” a single jut of the chin that managed at once to both acknowledge and dismiss. Jarsdel didn’t return the greeting. He went back to his book, found the spot where he’d left off, and continued reading.

  Ours is really the first generation to concern itself with the rights of the trespasser. It has long been an accepted truth—worldwide and across every civilized culture—that an interloper gambles his life when he breaches a restricted area.

  “Hey, check it,” someone said.

  Ref
lexively, Jarsdel looked up. Haarmann had his phone out, holding it so his buddies could see. The screen wasn’t visible to Jarsdel, but as Haarmann swiped through the images, the men hooted in approval.

  “What’s her name?”

  “She’s—”

  “That’s an ass.”

  “Madison. My new badge bunny.”

  “Trampolicious.”

  Jarsdel tried tuning them out. He’d almost succeeded when two of the men took their spots at the arm-wrestling table, clamped their hands together, and began.

  “Pull! Pull!”

  “Go, go, go!”

  “You tired already? Oh man, don’t quit on me, baby. Whoo! That’s it…that’s it!”

  Jarsdel glanced up, enraged, then tried to find his place again in his reading.

  …rights of the trespasser. It’s long been an accepted truth—But he’d read that already, hadn’t he? He skimmed ahead.

  While the decision in Hynes v. New York Central Railroad (1921) did not expressly mandate duty of care for trespassers, it did set precedent in expanding the responsibilities of landowners beyond immediate property lines.

  “Check it out, he’s got long arms. Look at him go. Long arms generate more torque.”

  There was a terrific groan. It was answered by another, equally passionate. These were both followed by a volcanic grunt as the match ended.

  “Whoo! Holy shit, Will—you see that?”

  “It’s grip strength, that’s what I’m telling you guys. Spend as much time’s you want on your vanity muscles, but in the end it’s all about grip strength.”

  “You use the Gripmaster?”

  “—Captains of Crush, he uses—”

  “Oh yeah, for real? How you know you’re makin’ progress?”

  “Got a dynamometer. Rated for two hundred pounds, and I got the fucker maxed out. Figures that puts me ahead of just about anybody.”

  “Shit, that’s—”

  “Excuse me.” Jarsdel spoke with his teacher voice, the same one he’d used with college freshman, the same one he used while testifying. It got their attention; all four looked over at him. “Yes, thanks. That’s actually extremely loud, and it makes it difficult to enjoy my break time. Would you gentlemen consider maybe finding another place to put that thing?”