My Dark Places

yearning. I was afraid to resurrect her and love her body-and-soul.

I wrote my novel and sold it. It was all about LA. crime and me. I was afraid to stalk the redhead and give her secrets up. I hadn’t met the man who’d bring her home to me.

III

STONER

You were a ghost. I found you in shadows and reached out to you in terrible ways. You didn’t censure me. You withstood my assaults and let me punish myself.

You made me. You formed me. You gave me a ghostly presence to brutalize. I never wondered how you haunted other people. I never questioned my sole ownership of your spirit.

I wouldn’t share my claim. I remade you perversely and sealed you off where others couldn’t touch you. I didn’t know that simple selfishness rendered all my claims invalid.

You live outside of me. You live in the buried thoughts of strangers. You live through your will to hide and dissemble. You live through your will to elude me.

I am determined to find you. I know I can’t do it alone.

12

His ghosts were all women. They ran through his dreams interchangeably.

The decomp off Route 126. The waitress in the Marina. The teenager stunned mute by rape and blunt-force trauma.

Dream logic distorted the details. Victims moved between crime scenes and displayed conflicting signs of death. They came to life sometimes. They looked older or younger or just like they did when they fell.

Daisie Mae was sodomized like Bunny. Karen took the sap shots that knocked Tracy to her knees. The sap was homemade. The killers stuffed ball bearings into a length of garden hose and taped the ends shut.

The instant resurrections were unnerving. The women were supposed to stay dead. Murder brought them to him. His love began the moment they died.

He was dreaming a lot. He was giving up the chase and going through some kind of early withdrawal. It was time to get out. He gave it all he had. He wanted out unequivocally.

He was leaving debts unpaid. Karen would be sending him reminders. He failed her because the connections weren’t there and other murders scattered his obligations. He was a victim of confusion and chance—just as she was.

He’d try to pay her off with the love he still carried.

His name was Bill Stoner. He was 53 years old and a homicide detective with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. He was married and had twenty-eight-year-old twin sons.

It was late March ’94. He was leaving the job in mid-April. He’d served 32 years and worked Homicide for the past 14. He was retiring as a sergeant with 25 years in grade. His pension would sustain him nicely.

He was leaving the job intact. He wasn’t a drunk and he wasn’t obese from liquor and junk food. He stayed with the same woman for 30-plus years and rode out the rough times with her. He didn’t go the bifurcated route so many cops did. He wasn’t juggling a family and a series of girlfriends in the new gender-integrated law-enforcement community.

He didn’t hide behind the job or revel in a dark world-view. He knew that isolation spawned resentment and self-pity. Police work was inherently ambiguous. Cops developed simple codes to insure their moral grounding. The codes reduced complex issues to kick-ass epigrams. Every epigram boiled down to this: Cops know things that other people don’t. Every epigram obfuscated as much as it enlightened.

Homicide taught him that. He learned it gradually. He saw slam-dunk cases through to successful adjudication and did not understand why the murders occurred. He came to distrust simple answers and solutions and exulted in the few viable ones that he found. He learned to reserve judgment, shut his ego down and make people come to him. It was an inquisitor’s stance. It gave him some distance on himself. It helped him tone down his general temperament and rein in some shitty off-the-job behavior.

The first 17 years of his marriage were a brush war. He fought Ann. She fought him. It stayed verbal out of luck and a collective sense of boundary. They were equally voluble and profane and thus evenly matched. Their demands were equally selfish. They brought equal reserves of love to the war.

He grew up as a homicide detective. Ann grew up as a registered nurse. She entered her career late. Their marriage survived because they both grew up in the death business.

Ann retired early. She had high blood pressure and bad allergies. Their bad years put some bad mileage on her.

And him.

He was exhausted. Hundreds of murders and the rough stretch with Ann made for one big load. He wanted to drop the whole thing.

He knew how to let things go. The death business taught him that. He wanted to be a full-time husband and father. He wanted to see Ann and the boys up-close and permanent.

Bob was running an Ikea store. He was married to a solid woman and had a baby daughter. Bob toed the line. Bill Junior was more problematic. He was lifting weights, going to college and working as a bouncer. He had a son with his Japanese ex-girlfriend. Bill Junior was a brilliant kid and an inveterate fuck-head.

He loved his grandchildren to death. Life was a kick in the head.

He had a nice house in Orange County. He had his health and money socked away. He had a good marriage and