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My mother had died eleven years before, when I was twenty-four and just entering the Police Academy. She had been diagnosed with breast cancer, and my last two years of college, I helped take care of her, rushing back from class to pick her up at the Emporium, where she worked, preparing her meals, watching over my younger sister, Cat.
My father, a San Francisco cop, disappeared on us when I was thirteen. To this day, I didn’t know why. I had grown up hearing all the stories—that he handed his paycheck over to the bookies, that he had a secret life away from Mom, that the bastard could charm the pants off of anyone, that one day he lost heart and just couldn’t put the uniform back on.
Last I heard from Cat, he was down in Redondo Beach, doing his own thing, private security. Old-timers down in the Central district still asked me how Marty Boxer was. They still told stories about him, and maybe it was good someone could think about him with a laugh. Marty, who once nabbed three perps with the same set of handcuffs… Marty Boxer, who stopped off to lay a bet with the suspect still in the car. All I could think about was that the bastard let me tend and nurse my mother while she was dying and never came back.
I hadn’t seen my father for almost ten years. Since the day I became a cop. I’d spotted him in the audience when I graduated from the police academy, but we hadn’t spoken. I didn’t even miss him anymore.
God, it had been ages since I had examined these old scars. Mom had been gone for eleven years. I’d been married, divorced. I had made it into Homicide. Now I was running it. Somewhere along the way, I had met the man of my dreams….
I was right when I told Mercer the old fire was back.
But I was lying when I told myself I had put Chris Raleigh in the past.
Chapter 18
IT WAS ALWAYS THE EYES that got him. Naked on his bed, in the stark, cell-like room, he sat staring at the old black-and-white photographs he had looked at a thousand times.
It was always the eyes… that deadened, hopeless resignation.
How they posed, even knowing that their lives were about to end. Even with the nooses wrapped around their necks.
In the loosely bound album, he had forty-seven photos and postcards arranged in chronological order. He had collected them over the years. The first, an old photograph, dated June 9, 1901, his father had given him. Dez Jones, lynched in Great River, Indiana. On the border, someone had written in faded script: “This was that dance I went to the other night. We sure played afterwards. Your son, Sam.” In the foreground, a crowd in suit coats and bowler hats, and behind them the limply hanging corpse.
He flipped the page. Frank Taylor, Mason, Georgia, 1911. It had cost him $500 to get the photo, but it was worth every penny. From the back of a buggy parked under an oak, the condemned man stared, seconds before his death. On his face, neither resistance nor fear. A small crowd of properly dressed men and women grinned toward the camera as if they were witnessing Lindbergh arriving in Paris. Dressed up as if it were a family portrait.
Their eyes conveyed that the hanging was something proper and natural. Taylor’s, simply that there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it anyway.
He got off the bed and dragged his slick, muscular frame to the mirror. He had always been strong. He had lifted weights for ten years now. He flinched as he drew blood and mass into his swollen pecs. He massaged a scratch. That old bitch had dug her nails into his chest as he wrapped the coil around the ceiling pipes. It had barely drawn blood, but he looked at the scratch with contempt. He didn’t like anything that disturbed the surface of his skin.
He posed in front of the mirror, looking at the seething lion-goat tattooed across his chest.
Soon, all the stupid assholes would see that it wasn’t just about hate. They would read his pattern. The guilty had to be punished. Reputations needed to be restored. He had no particular antipathy for any of them. It wasn’t
hate. He climbed back on the bed and masturbated to the photo of Missy Preston, whose tiny neck was snapped by a rope in Childers County, Tennessee, in August of 1931.
Without even a groan, he ejaculated. The forceful rush made his knees quake. That old lady, she had deserved to die. The choir girl, too. He was pumped up!
He massaged the tattoo on his chest. Pretty soon, I will let you free, my pet….
He opened his photo scrapbook and flipped to the last blank page, just after Morris Tulo and Sweet Brown, in Longbow, Kansas, 1956.
He had been saving this spot for the right picture. And now he had it.
He took a tube of roll-on glue and dabbed all over the back of the photo. Then he pressed it onto the blank page.
Here’s where it belonged.
He remembered her staring up at him, that sad inevitability etched all over her face. The eyes…
He admired the new addition: Estelle Chipman, eyes stretched wide, looking at the camera just before he kicked the chair out from under her feet.
They always posed.
Chapter 19
FIRST THING THE FOLLOWING MORNING, I called Stu Kirkwood, who ran a hate crimes desk assigned to the police department. I asked him, personally, for any leads on these types of groups that might be operating in the Bay Area. My people had talked to Stu earlier, but I needed action fast.
So far, Clapper’s CSU team had scoured the area around the church with nothing to show for it, and the only thing we came back with on Aaron Winslow was that no one had a negative thing to say about him.
