A woman LPPD officer saw drops of blood on the ground and followed the trail they made to a building at the back of the shelter. They led to the area where the dogs were put to sleep. The door to one of the chambers used for large dogs was open, but as she stepped closer she saw that the chamber had been recently used. The body of the night manager was inside, along with a note:
HOCUS SET THE CAPTIVES FREE.
Hocus’s first murder.
6
THE DREAM HAD BEEN PLEASANT. He could still see her face, feel the whiskey warmth of her skin, her softness. He had already forgotten what had happened in the dream, was not sure if they had made love, but drowsily he thought perhaps they had, as his awakening was the slow, reluctant awakening of the sated.
Moments passed, and still sleep beckoned. He was not without pain, nor was he immune to disturbing thoughts. His head hurt. He was bruised. She was not with him. He didn’t know where he was, or with whom, or why he had been taken. He recalled, in fleeting images, a struggle, shots fired.
But in each case — from the aching where the first blow had been struck to the sensation of being lost — no sooner was any discomfort a part of his awareness than a billowing tide of lassitude swept over him, languor robbed him of his ability to react as anything more than a distant observer. Too tired, he thought, closing his eyes — too tired. He smiled to himself. Easier to dream….
Some long-practiced ability to sense trouble urged him awake again, and for a brief moment he opened his eyes. The room caromed wildly above him. He closed them again.
“God, I hate the smell of blood,” a voice was saying.
Other words drifted by.
“Pale.”
“Not yet….”
“…make it?”
“Nothing to worry about,” someone said.
He thought perhaps there were things to worry about, but they slipped the grasp of his mind and swam away from him.
The conversation between the others went on, but he couldn’t concentrate on it long enough to understand what they were saying.
The dreaming began again.
He was standing on the gravel drive, looking at the house.
He remembered coming out this way with his father, back in the late 1950s, in the old blue Buick sedan they had owned then — the one with a metal dash and fierce, toothy grille. From the passenger seat he watched the blur of dark green leaves and smooth, gray trunks of orange and lemon and grapefruit trees go by.
He had been in the area many times since then, of course, but today, standing on the drive, he was remembering a time when his father had needed to bring some papers to Riverside. The girls had had to stay home. “Just boys, this time,” his father had said.
It was a long drive from Bakersfield and a hot one. Frank didn’t care. His dad was a cop, and they didn’t often get this kind of time together.
With the windows down, he could smell the heady fragrance of the groves. They passed dirt driveways that began at the road, marked by tin mailboxes with red flags announcing who had mail, who didn’t. And down at the other end of each drive, there was almost always a modest white wood frame house.
The memory came back to him in the dream more vividly than it had in real life. In real life he had stood watching the house, wondering why he was feeling so spooky all of a sudden. Hell, the house looked haunted. The paint was peeling off the trim in large, curling flakes. The house was surrounded by a porch; the porch railing had supports broken out of it, leaving it gap toothed and sagging. Dead vines formed a thick and thorny gray lace that shielded the front door from view. Screens were torn or missing.
The ramshackle house sat on a large lot. Tall, dry grass grew in straw-colored clumps. A gnarled, leafless orange tree held two barren branches up to the cloudless sky as if in a gesture of despair.
He thought of the place as it might have looked thirty years before, of a bright red bougainvillea adding color to a white house surrounded by fruit trees.
He shook his head. He supposed a generation or two of heirs had carved up the original owner’s citrus grove and sold it off piecemeal. Nothing else could explain the odd mixture of lots and buildings that made up this street. A handful of trees remained here and there, but the groves were gone. The development that followed had been random. Train tracks ran along the far side of the street, parallel to the back fence of the industrial park that stood on the opposite side of the tracks. All that could be seen of the buildings beyond were windowless concrete walls and loading docks. He wondered if the industrial park had replaced a packing house.
As he stood on the gravel drive, a freight train came slowly rumbling by, horns sounding, echoing loudly off the concrete buildings. He watched it, read the names on the boxcars. AT&SF… Southern Pacific… Cotton Belt. Where was it going? Where had it been? Conrail… Golden West… GATX…. It slowed, stopped, began backing up, apparently switching or adding cars. As the head end passed him again, an engineer saw him and waved. Surprised, Frank waved back.
When he could no longer see the engineer’s face, he straightened his suit and turned back to the house. A mockingbird sang half a dozen verses of a borrowed two-note song, then fell silent.
He paused, listened. Nothing. Gravel crunched and grated as he walked up the drive.
He had never known any trouble from Ross, he told himself. And if Ross had information on the Novak case, he wanted to hear it. The Novak case had been a real pain. Absolutely no breaks in it so far. Probably all kinds of witnesses, but everybody too scared to talk. Nobody knew anything. It angered him. Novak had been a small-time dealer with all the wrong kinds of ambition; whoever executed him had probably saved the state a lot of money by ending his miserable life. But a murder was a murder, and as much as he hated the Novaks of this world, it bothered him more that people would aid a killer with their silence.
The porch steps creaked. When he came to the front door he halted, stepped to the side. It was open. Just a
