Memory of Murder

“Guess they were told to report on Merrill’s movements, so that’s what they did. Anyway, from the description, sure sounds like Lindsey. Who else would it be?” There was a long, empty pause, while Alan fought back all sorts of emotions, none of them familiar to him, the most prominent of which was fear. Then Carl said, “What do you want me to do? Should I tell ’em to go in?”

“No. God, no. The last thing we want to do is provoke a hostage situation. No…just tell ’em to sit tight. I’m on my way.”

His car was equipped with emergency lights and siren, which he didn’t use often. He switched them both on now.

“I had no way of knowing,” Richard-or Alexi-said. “Sometime between when I was told where to find my targets, and my arrival in Baltimore, they fled. And another young couple-innocents-moved into their apartment. How was I to know? They were the same approximate age…fit the general description…”

“They had a child!”

He hesitated, then seemed to steel himself. “That was unfortunate, but I didn’t consider it important. After all, I’d been raised in a culture in which the bonds of family, even between parents and children, were considered less important than duty…loyalty to country. I had lived in America long enough to know the boy would be taken care of, perhaps even grow up stronger because of it. No, he wasn’t a consideration to me at all.” He waved a hand, then sat for a long moment gazing across the barrancas, disappearing now in the purple haze of sunset.

“Most of the rest…I think you probably already know. Everything was in place-the boat, the weights to take the bodies down…”

The bodies…my parents. Lindsey sat still, crying quietly. She felt empty.

“Everything went like clockwork. I waited…took them when they were away from home, and there were no witnesses. They seemed more bewildered than afraid…”

The words went on and on, falling on her ears like raindrops on windowpanes…she heard them, but they couldn’t reach her.

I can’t let them reach me. It would be unbearable, too terrible to imagine…to feel what it must have been like for them. To be taken, to know at last that they were going to die, and not to know why.

Oh, how she wished she could stop the words. Wished she could press Pause, then Rewind…go back to the day before she’d walked into the San Diego Police Department headquarters, back to before she’d met a homicide detective named Alan Cameron.

“When I saw the newspapers…when I knew she’d somehow survived, I went to the hospital. I went there to kill her, not only because she could identify me, but because it was my mission. I was a soldier, and I had to finish the task I had been ordered to do. But when she didn’t know me at all…and I found out she was pregnant…” He lifted his hands, held them out in a gesture of entreaty. “What was I supposed to do? I couldn’t justify killing a child. And then…I found out-my ‘control,’ the voice I only knew from the telephone, told me-I had made a terrible mistake and that she-they-weren’t the people I was supposed to kill. So I ran. I cut my ties to my country, my duty. I took her away with me, and I prayed her memory would never come back. I grew to love her, and you, her child. You became my child. And for forty years I have tried to atone for what I did. I don’t ask you to forgive me, Lindsey, only maybe to-”

“Forgive you?” Her voice was a whisper; she felt as though all the air had been sucked from her lungs. She recoiled from him, closing her eyes tightly, trying to shut out the images he’d imprinted on her brain.

So, she didn’t see him go. Only heard the soft sigh of an exhalation, like a surrender.

“Okay, sweetheart,” he said quietly, and it was her dad’s voice again. “I understand.”

She sat hunched in her chair with one arm pressed across her stomach, the other hand over her mouth, holding back howls of anguish, and listened to the patio door slide open. Listened to footsteps crossing the tile kitchen floor. Heard the door to his office open…then close.

She didn’t know what made her rise, cold with nameless fear, and dash into the house. Or how long it was after that-seconds…minutes-when she heard the gunshot.

Alan was pulling onto Merrill’s street. He’d just reported his position and ETA to his partner when he heard Carl’s radio, the sound coming through clearly on the hands-free cell phone transmission:

“Shots fired! Shots fired!”

Carl swore. “Did you-”

“I heard.” Alan dropped the phone onto the seat and stepped on the gas.

He’d never been crazy about the so-called “adrenaline rush”-not like some thrill junkies he knew-but he was glad to have it kick in now. Knew it was what made him able to function as a police officer while on another level, one completely separate from the trained cop, he was just an ordinary man and more terrified than he’d ever been before in his life. Fear knotted his belly and hollowed his chest, but his hands were steady on the wheel as he aimed the car into the driveway of Richard Merrill’s house, and screeched it to a halt. They were steady as he drew his weapon from its holster. He got out of the car and his voice was firm and clear as he shouted at the two uniforms who were dashing up the street toward him.

“How many shots?”

“Just heard the one,”

“Take the front-I’m going in the back.”

He sprinted through the open garage, and he could hear the two officers pounding on the front door, shouting, “Police-open up!”

Then he was in the backyard, on the patio where such a short time ago he’d stood chatting with Richard Merrill while Chelsea played in the pool nearby. Now he crossed the open area in a half crouch, his weapon in a two- handed grip, every muscle, every nerve on full alert.

“Lindsey!” he yelled, and got no answer. “Richard Merrill-this is the police! Put down your weapon and come out of the house-now!”

He paused, frozen, but heard no sound. Cold to his core, he approached the open sliding glass door. There was no sound, no movement from within. From the other side of the house he could hear a thump and a crash as the front door was forced open, and he heard one of the uniforms yell again: “Police-put down your weapon!”

Alan crossed the dark kitchen and from a position beside the door, peered around it and down the hallway. Partway down, he saw light pouring from an open doorway. Merrill’s study, if he remembered correctly. From the other direction he saw movement-the uniformed officers, advancing with guns drawn. He waved them back with a quick, emphatic motion.

“Lindsey?” he shouted again. “Lindsey, are you there? Are you all right?”

He heard nothing. The fear inside him grew…became a monster that threatened to overwhelm him. He fought it down. Breathed deeply…in…out. And then, on legs he no longer felt, he moved slowly, steadily toward that open doorway. Moving in a nightmare, feeling nothing else but dread, he flattened himself against the wall, his weapon pointing at the ceiling. Lindsey…he prayed silently, and looked around the door frame, into the room.

And this time he said it aloud, on a rush of anguished breath. “Oh, God…Lindsey…”

She was sitting on the floor, where Richard Merrill lay sprawled on the patterned rug beside his desk. Merrill’s head was in her lap. There was blood on the rug and on her hands and her clothes, even a smear on her cheek where she’d wiped it. A manila envelope lay on the desktop. A small handgun, a revolver-looked like a.38 caliber-lay on the rug near the body. For that’s what it clearly was.

Hearing Alan’s voice, she lifted her eyes to stare at him, her beautiful eyes glittering like jewels in her marble- white face. And she spoke in a voice that was clogged with tears but strong and fierce nonetheless.

“He would never have hurt me,” she said.

It was later, Alan didn’t know exactly how much. He’d become so engrossed in the typewritten document he’d been reading that he’d lost track of time.

He was leaning against the fender of his car, reading by the light of the floodlamps that had been set up in the street in front of the Merrill house. Crime scene tape surrounded the house and blocked off access to the street