Memory of Murder

Chapter 3

The plans had been made long before. The boat, the darkness, the weights to take the bodies down. Everything went according to plan. Like clockwork.

Excerpt from the confession of Alexi K.

FBI Files, Restricted Access,

Declassified 2010

“So…what do you think? Is she crazy?”

Lindsey’s voice, speaking aloud the words that had been playing over and over in his own mind, jerked Alan back to the here and now. “What?” he asked, surprised to find they were nearly back to where they’d parked their cars.

She repeated it, her voice hardened by what he knew was only her attempt to mask an excess of emotion.

“She seems lucid,” he said, knowing it sounded flat, uncaring-a shrug in words. But he had his own ways of masking what was going on inside.

“She was having a very good day.” Lindsey’s lips tightened as she pressed the remote control in her hand. The Mercedes gave a welcoming chirp. She looked at him, squinting as the sun, already low in the west this early in November, struck her full in the face. And caught the look of skepticism he’d been careless enough to let show. “What? Do you think she’s faking? Look, I assure you,” she said, rushing on before he could reply, “she’s been evaluated by doctors-the best. We’ve gotten second opinions, and thirds. They’ve done tests.” She paused to draw a strengthening breath. “All agree she is in the early to middle stages of Alzheimer’s.”

The pain in her sun-washed face was hard to look at. But strangely, it was also hard to tear his eyes away. Recognizing that the pull the woman had on him was in danger of becoming a problem, he sucked in a chestful of willpower along with air. “I’m sure she is. Sadly. But maybe just not as far along as she’s letting you think she is.”

Lindsey paused in the process of digging in her purse for a pair of sunglasses to squint at him again. “So, you think there might be something to her story?”

“I think she remembers something terrible that happened to somebody. The question is who? And when? And where?”

She didn’t reply, being preoccupied with rearranging things in the cavernous depths of her purse. She pulled out the photograph of her father and was about to tuck it under her arm to get it out of her way. He held out his hand and said, “Can I see that?”

She glanced at him and handed over the framed photo without comment. He stared at it while she located her sunglasses and put them on, and knew without being able to see them that her eyes had gone wary again and were watching him from behind the dark lenses. There was tension in her body, and she clutched her purse like a shield-or a weapon-the way she had when she’d first come to his office that morning.

Richard Merrill didn’t look like anybody’s idea of a stone-cold killer-but then, in Alan’s experience, the stoniest, coldest killers seldom did. Merrill looked exactly like what he was-a successful banker and family man, now retired to the comforts of suburbia. King of the backyard barbecue. The photo Lindsey had chosen with which to confront her mother was a candid shot rather than a formal portrait, taken at some family outing, probably, a head-and-shoulders shot with blue sky and ocean as a backdrop. Alan’s impression was of a man who had been athletic in his youth and, while not yet running to fat, had thickened in the natural way men do as they get older. In the photo, his face was lifted to the sun and his thinning but still adequate salt-and-pepper hair was disarranged by a breeze from the ocean. He looked, Alan thought, like a happy man. A man completely content with his life. His eyes, smile-creased at the corners-

He looked up at Lindsey and tapped the photograph. “Your father’s eyes are dark.”

“Brown. Yes.”

“Yours are-”

“Blue-I know.” She made an impatient gesture. “It’s possible, you know. For brown-eyed people to have blue-eyed children. If they both carry the recessive gene.”

Alan nodded. “True.” But not likely they’d have a child with eyes as vivid a blue as yours.

“Anyway, what does it matter?” She opened her car door and tossed her purse onto the passenger seat, then turned back to him, her fair skin flushed with anger. “Do you think I care whether or not Richard Merrill is my biological father? Is that what you think this is about? If it was, I could find out easily enough, couldn’t I, through DNA. That man-” she nodded at the photograph in his hands, and her voice quivered “-is my dad in every way that counts. I’m not doing this for me, I’m doing it for him-because he doesn’t deserve to be shut out of what life my mother has left. And I’m doing it for her, because she doesn’t deserve to spend the time she has left being terrified of the husband who adores her. Do you understand?”

“Yes, I do,” Alan said, and meant it. He understood very well what she wanted; he just wasn’t sure he could give it to her.

“So? Are you going to help me?”

He let out a gusty breath, looked down at the photo in his hands. Lord, help me, he thought. He shook his head, but said, “I’ll see what I can find out. Can I keep this?”

“Oh-of course. Yes. Sure.” She held herself still, but he could almost feel her vibrating with suppressed hope. “Anything I can do to help…”

“We’ve got the approximate when-roughly forty years ago, right? It would help a lot if we could narrow it down as to the where. What we’re doing is looking for a needle in a haystack, in a whole damn field of haystacks. It would be nice if we knew which haystack to start looking in.”

She gave a shrug and a helpless little laugh, and something about the sound of it made him wonder if, behind those sunglasses, she might be crying. “How do I do that?” Her voice was barely a whisper. “You saw her…heard her.”

“Yeah, I did. And just talking to us, she remembered a detail that seemed to be new to her, didn’t she? That thing about floating. You said you visit her just about every day, right? See if you can get her to talk about her life before the trauma. Maybe she’ll remember some little thing that will help us pinpoint where this thing happened. Can you do that?”

She nodded, quick and hard. “Yes-okay.”

“Good. Meanwhile, I’ll start running what we have through our various databases. See if anything pops up. Okay?” He waited-one hand on the top of the car door-while she slid behind the wheel and put the key in the ignition. The engine fired, and she settled back in her seat and looked up at him.

“Thank you,” she said. Just that.

He couldn’t even see her eyes. But something about her mouth…the hint of a flush beneath her skin, a touch of pink on the tip of her nose. He felt a thickening in his throat, a tightening in his chest, and for a long moment couldn’t make himself look away. Couldn’t seem to move. The moment stretched, then snapped with a sizzling he could feel in his scalp, like the warning tingle just before an electric shock, the one that makes you jerk your hand away just in time.

“Okay, then,” he said. “I’ll call if I find anything.” He took a card and a pencil out of his jacket pocket, jotted his cell phone number on the back of the card and handed it to her. “You do the same.”

She nodded. He shut the car door, then stepped back and watched her back out of the parking spot and drive away. He looked down at the photograph of Richard Merrill in his hand, and felt excitement stir and his pulses quicken. And wondered whether it had more to do with the possibility of a very cold case, or a very warm and desirable woman.

Back at his desk, Alan scanned the photo of Richard Merrill and entered it and all the information Lindsey had given him on her parents into the system, started a data search, then turned his attention to writing the reports on the Marchetti case.

His plan was to finish the report and get a head start on the weekend, since it was his weekend to have Chelse. He’d been thinking about maybe taking her to Sea World or the zoo while the weather was holding so fine. Chelse loved the zoo, always had-Sea World, too-but the way she was growing up, Alan figured it was only a matter of time before she started thinking she was too old for that stuff. He hoped it wouldn’t happen, but was realistic enough to know it always did.

Maybe, he thought, he’d get lucky and Chelse would stay her daddy’s little girl forever. Maybe, like Lindsey Merrill, she’d still think he walked on water when she was forty. Although he considered the odds of that weren’t good, being as how he only got to spend every other weekend with her. It was hard to admit, even to himself, how much he looked forward to those weekends. How much he looked forward to not going home to his empty house.

Even more so this weekend, he realized. For some reason.

He found himself wondering whether Lindsey liked the zoo. Or Sea World. His mind flashed on an image of the three of them-him, Chelse and Lindsey-strolling the wide, eucalyptus-shaded avenues of Balboa Park. Just a flash, and then his mind said, Nope. Bad idea. Are you nuts?

All the same, he was glad it was Chelse’s weekend. And, he reminded himself, if anything interesting popped up in her parents’ backgrounds, he would have a real reason to call Lindsey.

Maybe Sunday.

As it turned out, none of the things he’d planned on doing with his weekend came to pass. He didn’t take Chelsea to the zoo or Sea World, didn’t see her at all, in fact. Nor did he go home to his empty house, call Lindsey Merrill, or even check back to see what his search had turned up. Because the shooting of Juan Miguel Alviera was only the opening salvo in what came to be called, in the news media, at least, the East Village War.

At six-thirty Friday evening, two carloads of Alviera’s homies from the Eastside Diablos armed with automatic weapons shot up a fast-food restaurant where the suspected perpetrators of the Alviera homicide, members of the rival East Village gang known as the Calle Reyes Amigos, were enjoying dinner. One of the Amigos was killed, the other escaped unharmed. Seven innocent bystanders were wounded, three seriously. And the city’s barrios-which had been enjoying steadily declining gang violence rates since the horrendous highs of the early 90s, thanks to the combined efforts of the SDPD’s gang suppression unit, the DEA and the FBI-erupted.

All patrol personnel, plus the gang and homicide units, were called out in force in an effort to nip the flare-up before it could escalate into all-out war. Alan called Chelsea’s mother to tell her he wouldn’t be able to take her for the weekend, and prepared to bed down on the couch of a friend who lived in the central city. Chelsea’s mom wasn’t happy about having to cancel the plans she and her current husband had made to go away for the weekend, and made sure he heard all over again each and every one of the reasons why she’d divorced him in the first place, and why nobody in their right mind should ever marry a cop. But what could he do?

On Saturday, the Amigos retaliated against the Whataburger shooters by crashing a wedding of one of the shooter’s sisters, at which the shooter was the best man. The hail of automatic weapons fire did manage to take out the best man, and also sent the groom, three wedding guests, and the six-year-old flower girl-the bride’s niece-to the hospital with major injuries.

Whether it was the shock of that tragedy-augmented by photos splashed all over the media, of the little girl in her blood-soaked flower girl’s dress-or the SDPD sweep that hauled in off the streets every known affiliate of the two rival gangs that could be found, by Sunday night things had settled down. The thinking behind the sweep was, by the time the collars had all been sorted out and processed-most back to the streets of their respective neighborhoods-passions would probably have cooled off some. At least for the time being.

Sunday night, home for a shower and change of clothes, Alan called the hospital to check on the flower girl. He was told she was “critical but stable-holding her own.”

Lindsey couldn’t decide what to do. At least a dozen times she’d picked up the card with the penciled phone number on the back and stared at it. And a dozen times had put it back on her desk without dialing. She’d done it so many times, the number was now etched in her memory. Why couldn’t she bring herself to call him?

It was true that Alan-Detective Cameron-had told her to call him if she found out anything that might help narrow down the location of the traumatic events in her mother’s past. But this was such a small thing. Would he think it significant enough to warrant bothering him on a weekend? He had made it pretty clear he was looking into this without much enthusiasm or real hope of success. And he had said he would call her if he found anything. Which meant, since she hadn’t heard from him, that he didn’t have anything to tell her. She didn’t want to be a pest.

Oh, grow up, Lindsey. At least be honest with yourself. You know the real reason you can’t let yourself call the man is because you want to so badly.

There. She’d done it-spoken inside her head the truth she’d been trying not to acknowledge. She wanted to call Detective Alan Cameron. Wanted to hear his voice again. Better yet, wanted to see him again.

His face hovered in her mind wherever she went, whatever she did, always there, following her the way she used to think the moon followed her when she was a little girl. His eyes…the unexpected softness that came into them when he spoke to her mother, in such stark contrast with the hardness, the speculation, the cop look that was there all the rest of the time. She wondered what it would be like to see that softness when he looked at her.

Silly, of course. So very junior high school. She’d just barely met the man. Ridiculously, demoralizingly stupid to have his voice, the words and phrases he’d spoken, playing over and over in her mind like a song that had gotten stuck there.

She wasn’t sure what she was going to do about it, but one thing she was not going to do was make an idiot of herself over a man she didn’t even know. And a cop, for God’s sake!

It had been such a long time since any man had made an impression on her-why did it have to be a cop?

Needing to get out of the house, away from the phone and the temptation it presented, she changed her clothes and went out for a run along the cliffs, taking her house key on a chain around her neck as she always did and leaving everything else, even her cell phone, behind.

Tomorrow, she told herself as she ran. Monday, a work day-will be better. I’ll have plenty of things to distract me-with any luck, a flood or a hurricane or some sort of disaster. You know I don’t mean that, God, right? And if he hasn’t called by the end of the work day, well, that’s a reasonable length of time to wait.

She felt better, somehow, having made that decision. Stronger. More disciplined. If he hasn’t called by five o’clock Monday, I will call him.

Monday morning when Alan reported in, police headquarters was still a zoo. But at least there hadn’t been any more shootings overnight. No more bodies. Thank you, Lord.

By around four o’clock, with the short November afternoon already sliding toward dusk and the lights in the squad room turning the windows to mirrors, he finally found a moment to see what the make he’d run on Richard and Susan Merrill had turned up. He wasn’t expecting much-was pretty sure he knew what he was going to find-nothing. No warrants, no arrests, no priors. The Merrills were undoubtedly exactly what they seemed to be: Two nice, law-abiding, upper-middle-class Americans with no more than the usual number of skeletons in their family closets. Sad about the wife’s Alzheimer’s, but, those things happened, even to nice people.

For a few minutes after he brought up the screen, his sleep-deprived mind refused to process what he was seeing. He read through the results for Susan Merrill, then for Richard, scrolled back to the beginning of Susan’s and read through both again. Nope-he hadn’t missed anything. He tipped back his chair and gazed at the data neatly boxed and itemized on the screen, frowning and tapping a pencil on his desktop. He straightened abruptly and reached for his phone, but hung it up without dialing and shoved back his chair instead. A few minutes later he was knocking on the door of his captain’s office.

Getting the answer he usually did-an unintelligible growl-Alan opened the door, stuck his head through the crack and said, “Sir, got a minute?”

Captain Ron Tupman hitched back in his chair and snapped, “Just about that much.”

Alan gave him about half a grin. “Yeah, been a crazy couple of days, hasn’t it?” Captain Tupman was in charge of both the gang and homicide units, among others. “If you’d rather not-”

“Already got my attention, don’t wimp out now.” The captain tossed a pen onto the mess of paperwork on his desk. “What’s on your mind, Detective Cameron?”

Alan filled him in, beginning with Lindsey Merrill’s visit and ending with the results of the background search on Richard and Susan Merrill. The captain listened without interrupting, a habit that was one of the things Alan liked and respected about the man, and no doubt at least part of the reason why he was currently occupying an office with a nameplate on the door.

“Now that things have settled down a bit, if you can spare me, I’d like to take a couple of days to follow up on it,” Alan concluded. “See where it goes.”

Captain Tupman stuck out his lower lip and contemplated the mess on his desk for a full ten seconds. Then he leaned forward and picked up the pen. “This mess is Gang Unit’s headache, they’re coordinating with the feds, so yeah, unless any more bodies turn up, might as well go with it.” He looked up and leveled his patented black stare at Alan. “If this thing grows legs, I want to know about it.”

“Sure-you bet. Thanks.” Alan was on his way out the door when his cell phone vibrated against his side. He waved an apology and a farewell to his captain and exited, glancing at the caller ID as he thumbed the talk button. He didn’t recognize the number immediately, but somehow knew it was Lindsey, and was surprised by the little zap of electricity that shot through him. Not adrenaline-he got enough of that in his job and it wasn’t a sensation he enjoyed, not like some thrill junkies he knew. This was different-and entirely pleasant.

“Hey,” he said, after she’d identified herself in a hushed and breathless voice, as if she were doing something illicit, “I was just going to call you.”

Lindsey felt quivery inside. “Oh,” she said, and laughed. She took the phone away from her ear to check. But the hand holding it appeared to be steady. She cleared her throat, and when she spoke, so did he.

They both said together, “Did you find something?” And Lindsey laughed and said, “You first.”

“Uh-uh,” Alan said, “you called me. You go first.”

Her heart was pounding. She thought, This is silly. I’m being silly. “I don’t know if it’s any help. It probably isn’t.”

“Why don’t you tell me and let me decide?”

She took a breath, closed her eyes and said, “Snow.”

“Snow?”

“I told you. It’s probably nothing. My mother says she remembers Jimmy liked to play in the snow. At first, I thought, at least that tells us it wasn’t in San Diego. But then I realized, you can drive a couple of hours from here and be in snow. I’ve played in the snow. So maybe…”

“Yeah,” he said. He sounded distracted, and again Lindsey thought, Stupid, stupid. I’m wasting his time. Then he said, “Look, I need to talk to you. How about if I meet you somewhere?”

A breath gusted through her like a freshening wind off the ocean, chilling her, but at the same time filling her with what could only be described as joy. She tried to believe the cause was the thought that he must have found some information on her mother’s memories, but she knew it wasn’t only that. She wasn’t in the habit of kidding herself. This thing she was feeling, this junior high school excitement, or whatever it was, was because she was going to see Alan again.

Demoralizing, she thought, for a forty-year-old businesswoman who should certainly know better. She was being ridiculous and in grave danger of making a fool of herself. She had to get a grip, now.

The silence on the phone had lasted no more than a moment. “Tell you what,” she said, and was pleased and a little surprised at how calm and adult her voice sounded. “I’m about to go for a run. Why don’t you meet me at Sunset Cliffs Park? By the time you get there I should be about finished.” There, she thought. That should demonstrate that she wasn’t falling all over herself to accommodate him.

And, she thought, a brisk run along the cliffs should give her a chance to expend some nervous energy and get her head on straight. A good dose of endorphins was just what she needed.

Her heart lurched into her throat as she realized he’d said something that hadn’t registered. “What?” she asked, feeling rattled again.

“Where, exactly? That’s a mile and a half of cliffs.”

“Uh, okay, how about the little parking lot just north of the rock where the peace sign used to be. Do you know the one-”

“I know it well,” Alan said. “I’m on my way.”

The sun was setting when Alan pulled into the postage stamp of a parking lot wedged between Sunset Cliffs Boulevard and the cliff’s edge. After parking and turning off the motor, for a few moments he just sat in his car, taking in the spectacle of the sun setting into the Pacific Ocean, missing the dark silhouette of the peace sign that had once-briefly-graced the top of the forty-foot rock formation, before mysteriously disappearing one January night. Too bad, he thought. Somehow, maybe, that universal symbol of peace and brotherhood would have helped to cancel out some of the ugliness of his weekend.

He got out of his car, then realized the ocean breeze had grown chilly with the going of the sun and took his jacket out of the backseat and put it on. Leaning against the car with his back to the fading sunset, he watched joggers chugging past on the dirt pathway that wound along the cliffs. Anticipation raced under his skin, ebbing and flowing like the waves beating against the rocks far below as each runner hove into view, then drew close enough for him to see it wasn’t the one he was waiting for. When he did finally see the lone figure bobbing toward him, coming from the south, he knew her instantly, even in silhouette against the lavender sky.

She was wearing sweats and a tank top, and had a warmup jacket tied around her waist by its arms. She was also wearing a sun visor, which she took off as she veered into the parking lot, leaving a sweatband in place, stark white against her dark hair.

She slowed to a walk and her face broke into a smile. “Hi-been waiting long?”

The smile had accomplished, it seemed, what the sunset and the missing peace sign hadn’t been able to, because he found himself wearing a smile, too, and there was a lightness in his heart for no particular reason he could think of.

He shook his head, then nodded toward the two other cars in the lot. “Which one’s yours?”

“Neither.” She wiped sweat from her face with a dangling sleeve of the warm-up jacket, seemingly only a little winded from her run. “I live about half a mile north of here. I usually run down to the stairs at the southern end of the park and back, which is about three miles. If I want a longer run, I go to Pacific Beach or Mission Bay.”

“Lucky you,” Alan said. He nodded toward the darkening cliffs, and the sea still gilded with the remains of the sunset. “This is one of my favorite places. I bring Chelse here sometimes. You know-to explore the caves and tidepools.”

She untied the warm-up jacket, then gave him a startled look when he took it from her and held it for her so she could slip her arms into the sleeves. So close to her he could feel the moist heat rising from her body, he felt her shiver suddenly.

“Why don’t we sit in the car out of the wind,” he said. “You don’t want to get chilled.”

She nodded, and he opened the passenger-side door, waited for her to settle into the seat, then closed the door and went around and got behind the wheel. He closed the door and the dusk and the quiet and an unexpected sense of intimacy enveloped them. And for a moment, for some reason, he couldn’t think what he’d come to say.

Lindsey stared through the windshield at the darkening sky, listening to the thumping of her own heart. Other than that, the silence seemed profound, and she thought, This is weird. One of us has to say something. And felt herself on the edge of panic, unable to think of anything.

But then, miraculously, she heard herself say, in that blessedly calm and grown-up voice that came from she knew not where, “What was it you wanted to tell me? The reason you wanted to meet me.”

Instead of answering her question, he looked at her and said abruptly, “Tell me more about the snow.”

“There isn’t any more. Just that.” She shrugged. “Mom said Jimmy loved to play in the snow. That she would dress him in his snowsuit and he looked like a fat little penguin.” She looked at him expectantly, and her heart continued to beat too fast.

He let out a hissing breath and for a few long moments, just stared out at the ocean and sky. Finally, he glanced over at her, and in the remaining light she could see the frown on his face. “Before she got sick, did your mother ever talk about her childhood? When she was a girl? Did she have any photographs? Mementos? High school yearbooks?”

Her stomach gave a queer little lurch. She looked at him for a moment, then shook her head and looked away. “I used to ask about that. Mom would just laugh and make some general remarks about being a bookworm, not very popular-which I always thought hard to believe, since she was-” she caught a quick, painful breath “-so beautiful. If I pressed her for more details, she would get upset and sort of look to my dad for help. So…” She paused again, this time to clear her throat, to give a small laugh of apology. “I’m sorry,” she said, “I didn’t think this was going to be so hard.”

He nodded and murmured something encouraging, and after a moment she went on.

“Anyway, one day he took me aside and explained that there had been a house fire when my mother was still in her teens and that everything was lost, including both her parents. Mom was injured-she has a scar on one side of her head. The way she wears her hair, you can’t see it at all. Dad says there’s a lot she doesn’t remember about her childhood. So, naturally, it was upsetting for her to talk about. After that…” She shrugged.

After that, she’d never asked again. But she remembered still the feeling of walls going up and doors slamming shut. She almost told Alan about that, and about the nightmares she’d had for a long time after, of watching her mother slide away from her down a long, long corridor, growing smaller and smaller, until she could barely see her, and crying out to her to come back, and feeling bereft, like a small child abandoned in the woods. She’d never told anyone, not even her husband, about that dream, or the loneliness she’d felt then. What would make her think this man, a police detective with a hard face and sharp eyes, might understand?

“Why?” Her voice was harsh because of the ache in her throat.

Instead of answering, he muttered, “That could explain it.” He sounded distracted, distant, and the impulse to bare her soul to him vanished like smoke. “Maybe.”

He was silent for a moment, then abruptly shifted in his seat, turning so he almost faced her, left arm draped across the steering wheel. “You wanted to know what I’ve found out so far. The truth is, precious little. In fact, Lindsey, according to public records, your mother, Susan Merrill, didn’t exist before roughly forty years ago when she appeared in San Diego as the wife of Richard Merrill.”