Into the Dark

Robert Bowen was alone.

He was sitting on the table of the examination room. The faint ringing in his ears had stopped. He stared at the large clock on the wall above the eye chart and scales. Outside the closed door he heard the loudspeaker’s muffled dispatches over the bustle in the hall while here, in the quiet, he listened to the whir of the clock’s movement.

It was only a moment ago that he’d held the baby...

...then hands grasp his legs, drag them from the car...clear, the explosion, lift the wreckage, rattle the debris, the flames, heat, hands drag them...the ensuing mayhem, the baby’s cries, the sirens, the paramedics: “Can you hear me, sir? We’re taking you to the hospital... The baby’s going to be okay!”

Everyone had survived, they’d told him, with no life-threatening injuries.

A miracle.

The clock’s minute hand swept time.

He was still shaky. His few scrapes had been cleaned and dressed. A nurse had said Claire was on her way.

The room smelled of rubbing alcohol and held a trace of gas. His white shirt, torn, streaked with road grime, along with his pants, was stuffed into a clear plastic bag in the corner. They’d given him a surgeon’s T-shirt and pants to get home in.

He stared at nothing, contemplating the last few moments. Adrenaline was still rippling through him. He massaged his temples, shut his eyes and again he was cast back to the accident.

An ominous wave rolled over him then suddenly...the hands that had grasped his legs became talons pulling him into the inferno, dragging him down, down, down, through the burning recesses, through the lava slime of every shame, to the breathing, heaving bubbling pit of every foul, cursed thought, every bestial urge. Every vile desire, until he came to... It calls to him now, demanding he answer: Why did you let the woman and her baby live?

Bowen said nothing.

No one knew the battle raging within him.

The soft buzzing of the clock’s movement filled the silence that passed.

He continued massaging his temples. For how long, he didn’t know. But he kept rubbing until his heart rate slowed, his breathing slowed, until he heard the clock, the subdued sounds of the loudspeaker and activity in the hallway as the door to his room swung open and Claire entered.

“Hey,” she said.

“Hey.”

She hugged and kissed him.

“How are you doing?” She brushed his hair lightly, taking quick inventory of his scrapes.

“I’m fine, how about you?”

Tears filled her eyes as she nodded and smiled.

“Good. Let’s get you home.”

An administration staff member and a nurse helped Claire expedite Robert’s discharge. As they stepped out of the hospital, Claire saw Ruben Montero turn from talking with a half a dozen reporters.

“That’s him, with that lady, the man who saved my family.”

Microphones and bright TV lights collected around them.

“Sir, are you Robert Bowen?”

“Yes.”

“Carmen Chow, First Witness News,” said a woman in her twenties wearing heavy makeup. “Sir, this man says you saved his family. Do you consider yourself a hero?”

Bowen looked at Claire then at Carmen Chow.

“No, I just did what anyone would’ve done in the same situation.”

“We’re told a lot of people at the scene were afraid,” one reporter said.

“Not this man.” Ruben Montero beamed, taking Robert’s hand and shaking it. “This man is a good man, a great hero!”

A razor-thin line of unease cut behind Bowen’s smile.

He knew the truth.

9

Downey, California

Standing in the kitchen of his bungalow, Joe Tanner watched the old video playing on his cell phone of his wife, Rebecca.

“Hi, Joe. I’m feeling pretty good today, I almost think I can beat this, I—” She tried to smile from under the bandana covering the fine tufts that used to be her hair. “If I don’t beat this, just hug Sam today for me, okay.”

As she touched a tissue to the corners of her eyes, he traced her face on the screen with his finger.

“That’s it for this one, sorry,” she said.

The video ended.

It was among several hundred Becky had left him, and even though it had been two years, just seeing her and hearing her gave him comfort. It helped him through the hard days, like today. He was anxious about his meeting and what he was going to do about the big break in the Bradford case.

It’s what I have to do.

He checked the time on his phone. He was running late. He went to the fridge for milk and eggs, smiling at the watercolor flower framing a photograph of Becky, when she still had beautiful hair. This latest piece of art was created by Samantha Tanner, Age 6, according to the artist’s signature. It was titled “My Mommy,” and was fastened to the door with a banana magnet, next to Samantha’s paintings of a polar bear, a house—“Our House”—and a smiling stick man and smiling stick girl holding hands, titled “Daddy and Me.”

Tanner tucked his tie into his dress shirt, draped a dish towel over his shoulder and started scrambling eggs. While they cooked he went down the hall calling to his daughter.

“Come on, Sam! You’re going to be late for school!”

“I can’t find my socks, Dad!”

“Laundry room! Let’s go!”

Back in the kitchen he poured two glasses of orange juice and checked on the eggs. Then he flipped through yesterday’s mail: junk, a few bills and a letter from a local charity he’d supported after they’d lost Becky.

Dear Mr. Tanner:

As someone personally affected by the disease, we’re hoping we can once again count on your participation to make this year’s fundraising event...

Sure, he thought, he’d be there. He set the mail aside and checked the eggs when the phone rang. It was Kim, his sister.

“Joe, do I pick up Sam today, or tomorrow?” she asked while munching. Sounded like an apple.

“You know I hate it when you do that.”

“Do what? Help my little bro?”

“Chew in my ear, wiseass.”

“Somebody’s tense. So—” she kept chewing “—is it today?”

“Hang on.” He consulted the calendar on the fridge. The notation “Sam—dentist checkup” occupied the next day’s square.

“It’s tomorrow. Sign her out of school at one, and thanks.”

“Got it. Then I’ll take her shopping for new clothes, just us girls.”

Tanner wedged the phone to his ear and served eggs from the frying pan onto two plates, then made toast.

“Oh,” his sister added, “my friend Remmie is wondering if you’re ever going to call her?”

“Stop trying to fix me up.”

Everybody in his circle had a desire to see him paired, including his relic of a partner, Harvey Zurn. “I keep telling you Joe, you should meet my cousin Linda, recently divorced with a little boy. She’s ex-military, a good cook with a good figure.”

On the other end of the line, Tanner’s sister sighed.

“You need to meet some women, Joey.”

“I’m fine— Sam, breakfast! Listen, Kim, I love you for helping me and looking out for me but my new unit’s keeping me pretty busy. Don’t forget, tomorrow at one. Thanks, sis. Please finish eating before calling people. I love you. Bye.”

As he set the plates down, Samantha entered the kitchen and before getting into her chair, pulled up her pant legs to reveal one blue sock and one pink sock.

“See? Everybody’s doing it, Dad.”

She had Becky’s eyes and her curls. At times, he could hear her voice.

“You’re a weird little kid.” He laughed, shaking his head. “Eat up.”

Afterward, while Samantha brushed her teeth and her hair, Tanner went to his small study for his badge. He then opened his gun safe for his weapon, clipped on his hip holster and collected his files.

During the drive through North Downey to Samantha’s school, he stole glimpses of her in the rearview mirror, sitting in the backseat in her booster seat.

“So how are you doing today, Sam?”

“A-OK, Dad.”

“Anything on your mind? You said something was bugging you?”

“How much longer do I have to sit in this seat for babies?”

“Two more years.”

“Two years? That’s like forever!”

“Don’t be in too big a hurry to grow up.” He grinned.

When they arrived at the school drop-off zone, Samantha climbed out of her seat and the car. Then she appeared at his window, her backpack strapped on. She drew her face to his and he leaned out to hug and kiss her.

“Love you, Daddy.”

“Love you, kiddo.”

He watched her enter the school, thinking how much she was like Becky. Then he looked at the files on his passenger seat and the summaries of several unsolved homicides. The first had happened ten years ago.

A wave of sadness rolled over him.

He could measure his life against these cold cases.

He couldn’t stop his wife’s killer, no one could. His challenge now: Would he be able to find the monster behind these slayings? He didn’t know if this meeting and what he needed to do were smart moves. Given the issue of timing, dates and some long-shot theories, it looked like his only option.

He picked up the stack of folders and the note affixed to it.

Mark Harding

Reporter

AllNews Press Agency,

Los Angeles Bureau.

10

Commerce, California

“I’m Mark Harding, here to see Detective Joe Tanner.”

The receptionist at the Homicide Bureau of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department greeted him with a weak smile and a cool assessment.

Harding stood just over five and half feet tall and was sensitive to his height and slight overbite.

“Good morning, Mark. And you’re with...”

“I’m a reporter with the AllNews Press Agency.”

Charmed, her smile broadened. “Are you British?”

“Yes.”

“I love your accent.”

The receptionist typed on her keyboard, spoke softly into her headset then looked to Harding. “You’re a bit early. Please have a seat. Detective Tanner will be here shortly.”

The lobby’s cushioned chair gave a vinyl squeak as Harding pondered how he’d come to be here to see Tanner. He didn’t know the guy and had never heard of him until a few days ago when Tanner called him.

“We understand you’ve been inquiring about doing a feature on homicides for your newswire service. Would you be interested in talking about some older, unsolved murders?” the detective had asked.

Tanner had been cryptic during the brief call, declining to get into details over the phone. Still, Harding had said yes because any reporter worth a damn knows that when a homicide cop invites you to a meeting, you don’t say no. At the very least, he might leave with a new source.

God knows I need new sources and a kick-ass story.

He’d been working at the L.A. bureau for a few months, but in that time the pressure to break a major exclusive was mounting. Since he’d relocated back to California, he hadn’t hit anything out of the park.

You blink and nearly all of your life goes by.

Harding was thirty-seven and grew up in Birmingham. He’d worked for several tabloids in London before getting a green card and landing a job with the Los Angeles bureau of Rumored Today, a despised but top-selling U.S. supermarket tabloid.

If reporters failed to break huge, shocking stories, they were fired. Harding hated every bit of it and got the chance to leave the sleaze behind when he broke a huge story about corruption in Hollywood. It resulted in a job with the AllNews Press Agency, the global wire service, first at its head office in New York.

Then Harding was forced to go to the dreaded Los Angeles Bureau, where he was expected to deliver huge stories.

So here I am in L.A., months without scoring a big story.

Harding rubbed his chin.

He had the idea of trying to pull off an exclusive, looking into homicides for any new breaks. In the past couple of weeks he’d put in calls, even sent letters with his card, to the LAPD, L.A. County, the FBI fishing for leads.

Nothing happened until now, when he got a call from Tanner.

Harding had to land a good story.

Sure, other people had it harder and he’d faced worse. He was reflecting on a few of the tense moments he’d had on assignments over the years when something vibrated near his heart.

He reached into his jacket for his phone and checked his messages. He had an urgent one from his boss, Magdalena Pierce, the L.A. Bureau Chief. She’d told him earlier that she disdained gritty crime stories and was reluctant to give him the morning for this meeting with an L.A. County detective. Her new text said:

We’ve just learned that a studio is under investigation for tax evasion. We need you here, pronto.

Harding rolled his eyes. Same old, same old. Magda just didn’t get it.

“Excuse me, Mark Harding?”

“Yes.”

He put his phone away, shook hands with a man he’d pegged at his age but about six feet. He was wearing a crisp shirt, tie, sidearm.

“Joe Tanner. Thanks for coming. Sorry to keep you waiting.”

“Sure. Look,” Harding said, “forgive me, I don’t mean to sound rude, but my bureau chief’s yanking my chain. Could we do this another time?”

“You have to go? You just got here.”

“Yes, I apologize.”

“I see.” Tanner was taken aback. “I’m sorry to hear that. Well, I suppose I could always call the Associated Press or Reuters.”

No, Harding could not let that happen.

“Hold on, wait. Can you give me a bit more so I can get my editor off my back, something to convince her this is more than a local Crime Stoppers type of cold case, something that holds national interest?”

“This concerns a number of homicides,” Tanner said.

“Homicides? Plural?”

“That’s correct and only one other person outside this building knows what I’m going to tell you.”

“Who’s that?”

“The person who committed them.”

“Jesus,” Harding said. “Let me call my desk.”

11

Commerce, California

Tanner escorted Harding beyond the homicide squad bay to the Cold Case Unit and a staff kitchen that was heavy with the aroma of freshly brewed coffee.

“How do you take yours?”

“A little of both,” Harding said. “I’m curious. Why did you decide to call me?”

“You showed some initiative with your letter, looking to do something on homicides. And I needed to be sure I went to the right guy for this.”

“How am I the right guy?”

“We needed to go to a wire service, because their stories go everywhere. I needed someone I could trust.”

“How did you decide that?”

“I remembered you from way back with the Hollywood Washington corruption story when you were with that awful rag, Rumored Today.”

Harding had uncovered corruption and bribery between production companies, some owned by Hollywood’s biggest stars and lawmakers in Washington, D.C.

His solid reporting had forced the national mainstream media to follow and credit Rumored Today. As the pressure for an investigation mounted, one angry superstar implicated in the scandal used a film premiere to humiliate Harding during a press conference where he was surrounded by reporters who were ignoring publicists’ demands they only talk about the new movie.

The enraged star singled out Harding.

“There’s the little sewer-dweller. Look at the tiny troll.” The star, who was over half a foot taller, stepped closer to tower over him. “Your stories are crap, Harding. Garbage. And when this is over, I’ll still have enough money for a thousand lifetimes, but as long as you live—” the star patted the top of Harding’s head as if he were a lapdog “—people will look down on you. You should get those teeth fixed, buddy.”

Embarrassed, Harding kept his cool while the star was globally chastised online and on news shows. Harding’s reporting led to a federal investigation. Several people were charged, convicted and jailed and the star who had demeaned Harding narrowly missed being charged and going to prison for his role in the corruption scheme.

“I knew some of the investigators on that one,” Tanner said. “You stood your ground with egocentric stars.” He handed Harding a mug of coffee that had a bulldog insignia on it. “You’ve sure gotten around over the years. How long you been back in L.A.?”

“A few months.”

Harding stared into his coffee for a few seconds.

Tanner let a moment pass before saying, “Let’s get started.”

He led Harding down the hall to an empty squad room.

“This is my partner, Harvey Zurn.”

Zurn was in his late fifties and had the warmth of a ball-peen hammer. Harding offered his hand and Zurn crushed it in his. His dark eyes burned into Harding over a thick dark moustache. The room’s blinds were drawn, dimming the light. Updates on a handful of murders written in a felt-tip pen ran across the board on one wall. Faces of the dead stared down from photographs. A laptop sat on a table, a large screen hung over the far wall.

“As I was saying earlier, we discovered some disturbing elements in several homicides and we want to reach out to the public, through a story by you,” Tanner said.

“What did you find?”

“I’ll get to that. We’re dealing with five specific unsolved homicides throughout greater Los Angeles, going back six to ten years. Find a seat. I’ll give you an overview.” Tanner settled at the laptop. “The first victim...”

A key clicked and the screen filled with the title One over a clear color photo taken in a wooded area. The corpse of a naked white woman rested on the tall grass, with her hands bound behind her back and a cord stretching from there to wrap around her neck. A clear plastic bag covered her head.

“Leeza Meadows. Age twenty-one. A birdwatcher found her body November 9, 2003, at the edge of Santa Clarita. She had been sexually assaulted, among other things, as you can see here.”

The screen filled with an enlarged photo of her head. Harding stared, blinked a few times then started making notes as Tanner continued.

“She was last seen leaving her job at the Misty Nights Bar & Grill. Leeza never went anywhere without her cell phone. It was not found at the scene. Two weeks after her body was discovered, someone used Leeza’s cell phone to call her home. Her father answered. The caller never spoke but her father insisted someone was on the line, refusing to answer his questions. Investigators determined the call was made from downtown L.A., but that’s as far as they got. No other calls were ever made on the phone, which is still missing along with a second item.”

“Which is?”

“We’re not saying. That item is holdback, a key fact known only to a few investigators and the killer.”

“Do you suspect it was the killer who called?”

“That’s one theory,” Zurn said.

Tanner’s laptop displayed another victim’s image, labeled Two, which showed a woman’s naked torso, on its back, in a shallow grave.

“August 11, 2004, during some construction work for a new subdivision in Topanga, a grader flattening the ground unearthed the body of Esther Fatima Lopez, age twenty-nine. She had been sexually assaulted and her throat had been slashed. She’d worked for an escort agency.”

A new photo titled Three showing a winding nature trail appeared on the screen. The image changed to a small hillside and the naked corpse of a white female, semiburied under branches.

“On June 3, 2005, in Lakewood’s Monte Verde Park, a grade-nine science class on a field trip found the body of Monique Louise Wilson, a thirty-year-old accountant from Artesia. She’d been sexually assaulted and strangled with her own panties.”

Slide Four showed an old factory and its storage area, followed by a slide of a steel drum containing a woman’s corpse.

“On April 16, 2006, in San Dimas, two teenage boys flying a radio-controlled airplane that crashed into the barrels near this abandoned fruit-packing plant discovered the body of Fay Lynne Millwood, age twenty-seven. She was an aspiring actress who’d been working in a bar in Burbank. She had been sexually assaulted. Family members confirmed her remains through tattoos and surgical scars.”

The fifth photograph was of a ranch-style bungalow, with children’s bicycles, balls and toys scattered across the front yard. The next image featured a kitchen, cereal boxes and empty bowls on the table, a cluttered family bulletin board.

Then the screen changed to an image of horror. In the bedroom, a naked woman in a spread-eagled position on a blood-drenched bed, each arm and leg tied to each corner. The walls cascaded with blood.

“On February 10, 2007, a neighbor discovered the body of Bonnie Catherine Bradford, age thirty-four, in her home in Temple City. Bradford was a script writer and a divorced mother of an eight-year-old son and six-year-old daughter. She had been sexually assaulted and stabbed more than fifty times according to the autopsy report.”

Tanner shut down the laptop.

“The L.A. County Sheriff’s Department handles more than a thousand homicides a year,” he said. “I won’t go into discussion on our clearance rate other than to say it’s a fact that a lot of murders go cold. But no homicide is closed until the investigation is resolved.

“For years these five cases remained unsolved and unconnected among the hundreds of other cold cases. Recently, in reviewing the Bradford murder, we discovered a piece of critical evidence that had been overlooked—a cryptic message left at the scene by the killer.”

“What did it say?” Harding asked while taking notes.

“We’re not going to reveal that. It’s holdback,” Zurn said.

“What? You call me down here and hint at a big exclusive—”

“Easy, Mark,” Tanner said. “No one has this story. Listen, after we had the overlooked evidence analyzed, we found that it was irrefutably linked to these five cases with a solid common factor.”

“What could be the common factor among—” he flipped through his pages “—a waitress, a hooker, an accountant, an actress and a screenwriter? Did these victims know each other? Belong to the same book club?”

“Nothing like that. They’re linked by the physical evidence we found.”

“DNA?”

“We’re not prepared to go into details, but we realize that this killer left us a message,” Tanner said. “He wanted us to know what he’d done, that he’s responsible for these five murders across L.A. He’s very smart.”

“Are there more victims?”

“We used the information we’d found and ran it through local, state and national databases, ViCAP and others. So far, nothing’s surfaced to suggest other murders are linked to these five, but we can’t rule out the possibility. The evidence ties the five together, five murders in a string that began ten years ago and stopped cold five years ago with the Bradford case in Temple City.”

“Any theories on why they stopped?”

“The killer is dead,” Zurn said. “Or in prison, or moved on.”

Tanner resumed. “In any event we think these serial murders have ended and that the case is solvable.”

“Really? You believe that?”

“We’re forming a task force with the LAPD, the FBI and other major police agencies,” Tanner said. “We’re going to follow every lead or clue to find the killer and clear these cases. We’re asking anyone anywhere who has information on any of these homicides to contact us.”

Before they wrapped up, Harding asked Tanner several more questions. Tanner gave him a file of information and photos along with the offer to help him reach relatives of victims, or to call him with any questions.

“The tenth anniversary of the first homicide is coming up,” Tanner said. “The profilers said an anniversary story may jog someone’s memory or yield a lead.”

“You’re using me to reach out to the killer, aren’t you?”

“We want him to know that while it took a little time, we got his message and now we’re sending him one.”