the same man-in one shot, he was just a sullen boy. The last two picture bore dates: 12-24-82 and 12-25-80. The subjects were identical, a male Caucasian of varying age, in the last three photo graphs wearing his red-brown hair quite long, with a full bear and mustache. He looked like the man in the video.
'Billy,' said Mary quietly. 'William Fredrick Ing.'
'He's got a sheet,' proclaimed Parish. 'I've had a chance to study it. Interesting stuff. Schultz is burning copies right now.'
Karen came through the door, lugging the bulky file. 'Schultz is done burning copies,' she said as she strode to Winter's desk and plopped the bundle down in front of him. 'Gad, the media is a pain in the ass.'
Wald introduced Karen Schultz to Mary Ing. A moment of silence covered the office, then Dan spoke. 'Mrs. Ing, you might not want to be around for this. It's official business, and there's nothing in Billy's file you don't know about already. But if you'd like to, we want you to stay. Anything you can add to what we have might help. It's very possible, Mrs. Ing, that you may have already saved lives by what you've done.'
Mary Ing stroked the wrinkles from the lap of her patterned cotton dress. 'Of course.' She glanced very briefly at me, then lowered her blue eyes. 'I'll stay and do what I can.'
Karen handed a file copy to each of us.
Winters nodded to Parish. 'Martin, walk us through this- you had time to study it. Karen, keep Russell here on the straight and narrow.'
I got out my micro recorder, rewound the tape, and turned it on. I got out my notepad and pen. Mary Ing looked at me with sorry curiosity.
'William Fredrick Ing,' said Parish. 'Male Caucasian, thirty-nine, six-two, two ten. LKA Dana Point, but it's four years old and patrol's already checked it. Nobody there has ever heard of him. History of epilepsy since childhood, alcoholism as an adult, some uh… family problems. The raps seem random until you get them together for a long view back. Stack up the fact that he's killed eight people in the last two weeks and you can read his sheet like a 'how to create a killer' manual.'
'Don't quote him on that,' said Karen.
I followed the sheet as Parish read. Ing made his debut in the juvenile justice system on July 14, 1966, at the age twelve, for 'hunting' two girls with a BB gun at a junior h school campus. For reasons unfathomable, the girls had tried to hide in a glass phone booth. Ing had pinned them down with. BB fire for an hour before some older boys caught him, broke the gun and Ing's nose. The riddled phone booth cost Ing’s mother eighty-nine dollars to repair. Neither girl was hit or hurt. The girls' families didn't press. Billy was counseled at Juvenile Hall-six sessions-then the charges were dropped.
He was back a year later, when neighbors in his Santa Ana neighborhood told police that their pets were disappeared and that 'Crazy Billy' was their suspect. Billy denied know anything about the animals. The headless carcasses of the dogs and six cats were exhumed from shallow graves in a nearby orange grove a month later. Police found the head: 'crudely preserved with gasoline and newspaper stuffing '- a makeshift lean-to beneath the bridge of a flood-control ditch. Also found in the lean-to were a vise clamped to a piece scrap plywood, a blood- clotted coping saw, two containers pet snacks-one for dogs and one for cats-and a bloodstained Nelson Foxx model Louisville Slugger baseball bat. The Santa Ana cops could find no evidence that the lair 'belonged' to Billy although the same flood-control channel ran directly behind his house, which was less than half a mile away. It also ran along the grove where the bodies were found. Following Ing's Jul 6 interview with the cops and the dismantling of the lean-to, no more pets disappeared from the neighborhood.
'He's active this time of year,' I said. 'Look at the date
'Like a rattlesnake,' said Parish, making an embarrassed avoidance of Mary Ing's sad face.
'He always liked warm weather,' she muttered.
And then it hit me that Ing might have been leaving his name on the tapes he left at the scenes. 'Coming,' I said.
'Seeing… having… willing… they're all on the Wynn tape. Ing.'
'Right, Russell,' said Erik. 'Gamesmanship. Mrs. Ing, was Billy fond of trickery, deceit?'
Mary looked at Erik with her blue, red-rimmed eyes. 'I don't know if he was fond, Mr. Wald. But he… well… he was what I would call a born liar. He lied about almost everything, just as a matter of course. Did he enjoy it? I don't know. Billy's emotions were almost never… visible.'
I stared for a moment at one of the glossy blowups of the photograph taken from the video. Ing's bearded, wild-haired face was a fear-inspiring thing to behold, precisely for the absolute lack of fear that it contained. Beneath the deep brow, his eyes had a look of determination, boldness, cunning. I saw something else there, too- superiority and arrogance. Here was the face of a man proud of the horror he could personify, a horror he had worked a lifetime to possess.
'He was in some kind of trouble with the police or juvenile authorities every summer until he turned eighteen,' said Parish. 'At which time he dropped out of continuation school and took a job as-get this-a live-in attendant at a veterinary hospital.'
'Perfect,' said Wald. 'He was searching for integration.'
'Integrating what?' said Parish.
'His hatred, which was directed at helpless animals. He was trying to find a way to live with that hatred, for the hatred to become manageable. If he could integrate the animals into his life, he could accomplish this, at least on a surface level. For Billy, it would have been a start.'
'Either that or he was looking for more animals to kill,' said Parish stubbornly.
'No,' said Mary Ing. 'He took that job against his own fear of dogs. Mr. Wald is right-Billy was trying to overcome his fear.'
'Of course he was,' said Erik. 'I'll bet he didn't look forward to his first days on that job.'
'He came down with the flu,' said Mary.
'I'll rest my case,' said Wald. Then, to Parish, with a smile. 'Read on, Captain.'
Ing had managed to keep the job for four years. He was fired after an argument with the doctor, who filed a police report in the summer-of course-of 1976, claiming that Ing had be stealing various drugs stored at the facility. The doctor had a claimed that Ing had 'removed' bodies from the hospital freezer, though exactly what the night attendant had done with them he 'couldn't imagine.' Police interviewed Billy, who denied any wrongdoing. No charges filed.
With Parish's mention of the word freezer, I looked hard at him, while he stared dully back at me. It had been clear to me how Martin's work in Amber's bedroom was supposed to turn out: the bloody walls, the bludgeoned woman, even the tape in the stereo would have been more than enough to aim investigators straight at the Midnight Eye. Parish had practically signed the Eye's name to the scene. Then, for reasons I still hadn't be able to decipher, he'd changed his plan and was trying instead to stage my and Grace's guilt by removing the body to my property and documenting its burial. Why the change of plan? What had Martin learned between the time he killed Alice on July 3 and the time on July the Fourth when he removed his victim and the 'evidence' of the Midnight Eye? Why had he laid it on me? I remembered something that Chet Singer had told me once-that premeditated murder required audacity. Parish's just-spoken words rang in my mind-that the doctor 'couldn't imagine” what Ing might have done with the carcasses stolen from the deep freeze. It was only the doctor's limited imagination that kept him from the truth. And that concept-the unimaginable-was always applied to the serial killer, to the fact that Randy Kraft would drive around with his latest victim in the seat beside him; to the fact that Art Crump would return to the rental yard a chain saw still clogged with blood and hair; to the fact that Richard Ramirez would simply walk into quiet suburban homes late at night; to the fact that Jeffrey Dahmer would cut up his victims with an electric saw right there in his little apartment while the smell of rotting human flesh crept out from under his door and filled the hallway. The audacity! It was all, truly, beyond imagination. So as I returned Martin Parish's stare, I understood the secret he had kept-that behind his calm exterior and his badge lived a man capable-quite literally-of the unimaginable, a man intimately familiar with audacity.
He smiled at me and said, 'What do you think Ing was doing with the bodies from the freezer, Russ? You writers are supposed to have imagination.'
And that was when it occurred to me that the only way to bring Martin Parish to any kind of justice was to out imagine him, to meet him on his own audacious turf. But how?
'Maybe he had a friend bury them and taped it with a video camera,' I said.
Martin retreated behind the blankness of his smile, while Wald, Winters, Schultz, and Mary Ing all looked at
