photographer who was working freelance for the Bureau. It would be his job to place the prisoners up against the wall — the most nondescript wall in the world, a little dark from head grease, a nothing piece of drywall — and snap their mug shots. He also did weddings.
A tall, spidery man pushing sixty, Hugh favored oversized blue-tinted aviator glasses and bowling-style shirts made of rayon. He had been doing this a long time and it showed, in the strong knobby forearms and curved spine that thrust the narrow head forward, in the practiced joviality of a natural-born hustler. The scams he ran out of the photo lab were legendary.
“Ana of a Thousand Days! Or should I say nights? You’re at the office late.”
“Hey,” was all I could muster.
They brought the prisoner to a box and told him to kneel. The box was covered with carpeting. I wondered if it was government policy not to stress the prisoner’s ligaments; the kneeling position kept them helpless as the handcuffs were removed. The man was talking rapidly in Chinese and one of the agents kept repeating, “Do you want a translator?” Suddenly he fell silent and bowed his head. Spellbound, I watched through the doorway as Hugh Akron inked the man’s fingertips, and one by one took possession of their uniqueness on behalf of the United States government.
The man kept his face bent toward the ground. His expression, what I could see of it, was stoic.
I stayed there and watched the whole thing: the ritual humiliation of the prisoner and its mysterious, erotic pleasure.
Andrew and I never did meet up that night. I wish I had done what I said I would do and just stayed out of his way. Instead, when he didn’t call or answer his page, I went looking for him.
The dull panic was rising.
I drove my personal vehicle, a 1970 Plymouth Barracuda convertible, to Wilshire and Third, parked in a red zone and walked by the fountain where Juliana first encountered the offender. It was clever, a dinosaur made of leaves that grew on a wire form. Water cascaded from its snout and collected in a rectangular pool. There was a dark wax stripe left by skateboarders on the edge. A toddler in a pink parka was running along it now. Undercover cops mixed heavily with the crowd.
I paged Andrew a second time, called his cell, got nothing, started to walk down the center of the mix. The sounds were clashing — a keyboard player only yards away from an Ecuadorian band of flutes and tambourines. It was a downhill stroll toward the indoor mall, a palace of dazzling consumption at the very end, during which you passed every manner of marketplace come-on — a mime spray-painted silver, portrait artists, trinket sellers, discount Tshirts off a cart, henna painters and one-man bands, a guy who would carve your fortune on a grain of rice.
We had been over this territory during the kidnapping. It was familiar ground. But the nighttime masquerade suited my mood of self-pity and longing, as I kept hands in pockets, kicking it, scanning for Willie John Black or Andrew, guessing he’d go back to his witness to corroborate what we now knew about the man with the camera from Arizona who called himself Ray.
I swerved down the alleys, asking bag ladies and parking valets if they’d seen the guy who lives on a bicycle or the big cop in the black leather jacket. Nobody knew anything. I passed the bench where we had dreamed of Amsterdam, occupied now by a balding man singing “Happy Birthday” into a cell phone.
We were apart, but we would get it back. We were not rotting meat like the M&Ms, withdrawn to opposite sides of a bleak corridor. Riding the Harley, playing golf, seven-layer bean dip and the Lakers on TV, or just falling asleep, Andrew made everything better. We were alive, we had juice. We genuinely cared for each other. What could be luckier than two buddies who had great sex with no other entanglements? This was a temporary blip. Another case, another bottom-feeding offender not about to knock
I felt exhilarated, on a mission, zigzagging up Santa Monica Boulevard and down Broadway, out to the Pier and along the Palisade, maintaining a pace, cleansed in cool damp air, imagining Andrew at every turn. Then I realized it was 11:30 p.m. and I had been doing this two hours, and it had stopped being fun a while ago. The going was much less dense as I trudged up the Promenade one last time, giving up the game and stopping at the police kiosk to do the rational thing, which was to ask if other officers of the Santa Monica Police Department had seen Detective Berringer.
“Who’s looking for him?” asked a uniform behind a narrow desk. There were a couple more sitting around.
I badged him. He gave me the lookover and I wondered if rumors of our affair had reached the distant outposts. Or maybe he was just curious to see a female Fed with long frizzy hair wearing a beat-up vintage denim jacket embroidered with peace signs.
“Nope. Haven’t. Have you?”
General shaking of heads.
“I think he’s mainly doing morning shifts, am I right?”
Shrugs.
“We’re working a case together. The Santa Monica kidnapping?”
Empty stares. I decided to go home.
“Tried his mobile?”
I nodded. “He was looking for a transient named Willie John Black.”
“We know Willie,” said someone else. “The guy with the bike. Usually he’s up behind Second Street. In the alley, half a block north of Wilshire.”
I felt hopeful again. “Appreciate it very much.”
“I’ll pass it on to Detective Berringer that you were here. Got a card?”
There was nothing and nobody in the alley where the cop had told me to look. A Dumpster. Evidence of a nest — trampled cloth and flattened cardboard boxes. A man’s shirt on a wire hanger hooked to the chain-link. If this was Willie’s place, he’d taken his contraption and gone somewhere else.
A shy, stealthy figure appeared, a young Hispanic busboy dumping a bag of trash. There were no residences here, just the hind sides of office buildings and a deserted parking lot. A black-running stream issued from who knew where.
I thought about foul play.
There could be plenty.
I paused, alone, in the middle of the dark alley. Out on the street, a bus was idling. A string of European tourists ambled past.
The space inside my ears was full of pounding.
Thirteen
By the following morning we had a prime suspect, Richard (Ray) Brennan. The name had come in the night before, in a fax sent by the Tempe, Arizona, Police Department.
The fax was already posted on Rapid Start when I got to the office, sometime before 7 a.m. As Galloway would say, where else did I have to go? Normally I check personal e-mail first thing — open the curtains, crack the sliding doors, let in the marine layer, look at the boats, grab some OJ and sit down at the glass dining table and plug in — but you can access Rapid Start only from the computers at the Bureau, and stress was waking me up early, anyway. Just before dawn there would be that jolt, as if dropped on the bed from a great distance, the rapid heartbeat and the racing thoughts. The circles under my eyes had gone from puffy to charred black.
We had taken the pile of sex offenders from Arizona, isolated those who were former military, and asked local police to search their files again, using our prompts. It only took one keyword—“sadistic”—to identify Ray Brennan.
