12th of Never

the fog didn’t worry me.

I just wanted to get there, let Randy Fish do his thing, and get back to my family.

Two hours later, under a dull afternoon sun, we parked in the Atwater penitentiary’s north lot. Conklin and I met Ron Parker at the front gate, then a group of us trudged down cement steps, through echoing corridors, through a gauntlet of profanity-spewing prisoners, and at last confronted Randolph Fish, who was seated behind a triple layer of Plexiglas.

Fish looked bad—bruised, small, and broken. If you didn’t know better, you’d think that he was as dangerous as a sparrow.

“Tell me about Debra Lane,” I said.

Fish didn’t look at Parker or Conklin or the menacing, muscle-bound guards.

“Debby Lane,” he said to me, “was a cute girl, but she had no fight in her, Lindsay. She wouldn’t talk to me. She didn’t bargain. She just screamed until I couldn’t take it.”

I stared at him. I’m pretty sure my face was frozen in horror as Fish complained about his teenage victim.

“She just screamed and screamed,” Fish said again. “I hardly touched her. I wanted to, but I just ended up cutting off her air. She was a bad choice, I have to admit.”

Conklin was also looking at Fish, but without expression. However, out of the killer’s sight, my partner was clenching his fists, punching his thighs. I knew he was flashing on the remains of Fish’s victims, wanting to do something illegal to get Fish’s head on straight. Knock out a few teeth. Shatter a few bones.

Well, that’s what I was thinking, anyway.

Fish told me, “I locked up Debby’s body in a self-storage facility out by Pier 96. I was going to dispose of her later, but you changed my plans for me, Lindsay. You remember. You caught me outside the movie theater. Where you and I met for the first time.”

“Why should we believe you?” I said. “You’re a good liar, Randy. First class. In fact, when have you ever told the truth?”

“It’s in my best interest to help you, Lindsay. Because I want something—and telling you the truth is how I’m going to get it.”

“What do you want?”

“I want to prove to myself that I can change.”

I looked into his deep brown eyes, something a lot of women had done while begging for their lives. Despite Ron Parker’s magical belief in me, I had no leverage. Fish would take us to Debra Lane’s body. Or he wouldn’t.

“Let’s go,” I said.

Chapter 94

WE WERE BRINGING up the rear of the Randy Fish motorcade, the cherubic serial killer and his armed guards bumping along ahead of us on the patchy road.

I swore as our right front wheel slammed into a pothole on Amador Street, jarring my teeth and snapping my last nerve.

Conklin muttered, “Sorry.”

A thermos rolled off the front seat into the foot well, and as I bent to pick it up my partner jerked the wheel and I banged my head into the underside of the glove compartment.

“Hey!” I said.

“The road is like Swiss cheese, Linds. I’m doing my best.”

“Do better.”

It was getting late, sometime after five, and as the sun bled out, I felt a strong pull to be with Joe and Julie. Yesterday at this time, I’d been checking in with Martha’s dogsitter, then heading down to the basement cafeteria for mac and cheese with Joe.

My heart and soul were at Saint Francis.

But I was also being pulled toward a self-storage locker down the street, on the outskirts of nowhere. We hit a good length of road and Conklin gunned the engine. We sped past a rendering plant on our right and a cement factory on our left. Straight ahead, a spotlighted American flag flew at the entrance to the USA U-Store-It facility.

On Parker’s tail, we took a right turn into the asphalt-paved lot lined with rows of garage-type storage units, with their alternating red, white, and blue roll-up doors. We braked next to Parker’s SUV, in front of a red unit marked with the number 23.

We got out of the car and watched as the transport van containing the prison guards and a chained and shackled Randy Fish was unlocked and unloaded.

Parker tacked a notice to the wall, then took a bolt cutter to the padlock and rolled up the door. Fish swung his head around, saw me, then grinned and said, “Hey, Lindsay. It’s great that you’re here. This is going to be a very big moment for you.”

I looked at him, but I didn’t trust myself to speak. I might tell him that he disgusted me, that the next time I saw him, I hoped he’d be strapped to a gurney, looking at the people whose daughters he had killed, parents who had come to witness his last breath.

Randy Fish didn’t read my mind, or, if he did, he didn’t care what I was thinking. He looked excited, but under control. Like one of those guys on the show Storage Wars who had just won an abandoned unit at auction for cheap, and suspected that a ‘64 Corvette was inside, all its original parts in mint condition.

I followed Fish’s gaze, but it was getting too dark to see into the shadows.

Conklin left my side, turned on our headlights, and the storage unit brightened. Everyone turned to face the locker as if an alarm had gone off.

No one coughed or fidgeted or said a word.

We were all waiting for Randy Fish to produce the body of a teenage girl who wouldn’t stop screaming.

Chapter 95

RANDY FISH STEPPED forward, his chained hands in front of him, sweeping his gaze from side to side as he took in the contents of the storage unit.

I saw dinged-up, mass-produced furnishings; a well-used desk; a table with a metal top; a rolled-up carpet; and stacks of cardboard cartons, about a hundred of them, each about eighteen inches long by fourteen inches high and wide. What I didn’t see was a freezer, or a fifty-five-gallon drum, or anything big enough to hold a body. Even the carpet was too thin to conceal a person. I didn’t smell decomp, either.

“I remember now. There’s a map in one of those,” Randy said, indicating the stack of boxes with his chin.

“Map?” Parker said. The anger in his voice was almost palpable. “You said you put Debra Lane in here.”

“I was confused. It’s like a dusty attic inside my head, Ronnie. I thought ‘body.’ Now I’m thinking ‘map.’”

“Map to what? Where’s this map?”

“Those cartons,” said Fish. “My books are in the boxes and the map to where I left the girls is in one of my books.”

“You’ve got three seconds to tell me which carton, which book,” Parker said. “Or I’m gonna cancel this outing and send you back to the smallest, darkest hole in the block. No privileges, Fish, and that includes no phone calls, no access to vending machines, no mail, and especially no books—for whatever remains of your miserable life.”

Fish said, “Sweet-talking me isn’t going to help, Ronnie. I don’t know which box. I was in a coma for two years, remember? I could have some brain damage. Maybe if I can look at the labels on the boxes, it’ll come to me.”