Valley of Lights

FOUR

A wrong diagnosis. What else could it have been? They say that in most things you tend to get the results that you're looking for if you don't walk in with an open mind. Machines could be faulty, tests could be rushed, maybe there was a slapdash intern on the case who couldn't be bothered to wait around long enough for the little bumps and curves on the screen that meant somebody home.

You can see why it intrigued me. I was used to the bizarre… but bizarre things in sequence, that was something else. I'd been the first one in the room at the Paradise, and mine had probably been the last face that Gilbert Mercado had seen before he dashed to his death; I was closer to it than just about anybody else, but when I looked around me I couldn't see anything that made logical sense.

I found a place for breakfast, a twenty-four hour Denny's some way further down Van Buren. A tall youth in glasses and a dishwasher's apron was wiping down the counter as I went in, and the three men already sitting there were all turned to watch him as if he was putting on the most interesting show of the early morning.

As I waited for my order, I tried to think of somewhere that I could take Loretta and Georgie on the Wednesday. That would be tomorrow, I realised with a faint sense of shock; I tended to orient myself by my shift pattern rather than by the days of the week, and the regular order of things had become a little scrambled when I'd filled in for one of the other sergeants on my last two rostered days off. I could take them to the zoo in Papago Park, I decided. This decision wasn't entirely uninfluenced by the fact that I'd been given some guest passes by Frank, one of the assistant managers there, when I'd gone out on a call about a deer that had been running loose on the highway not too far from where I was sitting now. Three kids had let the deer out of the petting area and it had run out through a delivery gate; someone in a passing pickup shot the deer on the move and then drove on, we never found out who.

Okay, the zoo. How, how was I going to get any closer to the explanation of Mercado and his weird, walking, brain-dead menagerie?

The rest of the city had more or less come to life by the time that I got to the third floor of the main police building on West Washington. I didn't know many people around here, working as I did out of Sky Harbor station, but I knew Estelle in Information and Records. I'd even been out with her a couple of times, back before she'd been married. She ran me the last week's reports of fights and assaults and, with her knowledge of the new codes and categories, helped me to narrow them down to the two or three that might actually get me somewhere. With fights we get a lot of uncompleted calls, people ringing in because they want the police to appear and break it up but then not wanting to give their names or get involved; one of these was the one that attracted me most. Working on my own, I might have taken half a day just to get this far. Estelle had me turned around and out again in fifteen minutes.

The call had come from somewhere on the south side of Encanto Park; on my shift, as it happened. Travis and Leonard had responded to a call about a gang of white males pursuing and attacking a male Hispanic – the reporting system's phrasing, not mine – but had found nothing when they got there. They'd probably checked it with me, and I hadn't even remembered.

I got in the car and drove over. I knew the area well; it wasn't cheap, but then in the cheap areas they don't so much report their street fights as gather together and start making bets. Alongside the park the houses were neat and private, pastel shades of brick set well back from the avenues behind unfenced lawns. Housebreakers loved them. I put my uniform jacket on over my street clothes and walked up and down for a while; from here I could see a piece of the park through the trees, dusty sloping grassland running down towards the Kiddieland rides.

It was quiet; eerily so, as if the avenues slept all day and only came alive in the evenings and at weekends. I was about to give up and go back to the car when I saw movement behind a window in one of the houses; two minutes later, there was an old guy waiting at the end of the drive for me. Probably had his own room in his daughter's house, nothing to do all day but watch television. He didn't look as if he moved very well. He leaned on a stick as I walked down towards him, his head tilted slightly as if to get the best line of sight through his glasses. He was about the same age my father would have been, if he'd lived.

There are people like him everywhere, but it takes trust and a little time to draw them out. Once they're in the open, the difficult part is to get them to shut up; he told me everything, his life story included, and somewhere in the middle of it was this little gem of a scene with Gilbert Mercado being chased across the park by a group of assorted men, a couple of them in shirts and ties. They had him down and gave him a leathering, but then he got out from under and ran north up the avenue, cutting across the gardens and out the back so that they lost him.

Shirts and ties? That didn't sound like any gang warfare to me, but the description of Mercado was about right. After I'd managed to prise myself away from my witness, I checked my watch and saw that I had just enough time for one more call before I'd have to get down to Sky Harbor for the start of my shift. I went to St Joseph's Hospital, less than half a mile from the park in the direction in which Mercado had last been seen running.

From what I could remember of his face, I wouldn't have been surprised at a broken cheekbone under all that swelling; not something that anyone could easily shrug off or ignore. The emergency room nurse that I'd been hoping to see wasn't on duty, but one of the others was able to tell me that Mercado hadn't run to them for treatment, and that I wasn't the first one to ask; on the day in question three white males, two of them in shirts and ties and all of them damp and breathless from running, had wanted to know if 'a little spic with a sore head is hiding anywhere around here'. When the intern in charge had asked them to leave and then threatened to call the police if they didn't, they withdrew with a warning that 'he'll need more than a hospital if he comes hanging around the playground again'.

So there it was. Middle-class vigilantes, out to protect their children. I was one step further along, and it was getting even more complicated; it was like I was walking into a fog which grew denser and darker instead of clearing.

But the first ray of light was about to arrive.

I was driving back along the park, telling myself that I ought to be leaving the detective work to the detectives, when I saw a big clot of vehicles around the Encanto Boulevard entrance and had to slow as I joined the short tailback. There were several of our vehicles plus the KOOL television news van; the patrolman waving traffic by on the road didn't recognise my car, and I didn't pull in. I'd find out what was happening soon enough. I glimpsed more vehicles in the park itself, and one of our helicopters out of Deer Valley making a low pass over the trees.

Down at Sky Harbor I saw Travis in the parking lot, but he'd only just arrived himself and knew no more than I did. We went in through the side door, supposed to be an exit-only from the gym but a regular shortcut to the locker room used by everybody, and found the place even more crowded than was usual at the changeover of the watch. Attention was focussed right down at the far end of the room, where I could just see a pale face that a recognised as belonging to Vincent Avery, the youngest of our probationary patrolmen. The kid was in shock and didn't even know it, I could read as much from where I was standing. Then somebody moved, and I couldn't see any more.

Bernie Horowitz, in the sergeants' office, said, 'You didn't hear? We got a child torture-murder in Encanto Park. Little kid taken from his house sometime this morning, his mother didn't even know he'd gone until she called him through for lunch. Thought he was quiet because he was reading comic books. Some sicko had taken him out to the park, abused him, and then tried to eat him. Avery and Timms were cruising the park after a noise complaint, somebody down on the bandstand with a ghetto blaster, and some kids flagged them down. That's how they found him. At that stage he was still alive, but he didn't make it. Timms went on home already, but Avery's trying to be tough about it.'

'A mistake.'

'Tell him that. I'm just glad it wasn't me. I've seen most things, but I can't take child abuse.'

When I went past the locker room again, I heard Avery saying, too loudly, I was covering him over while we waited for the ambulance to get there, and he was thanking me… I got into uniform and then went up to see if I could find Lieutenant Michaels. He'd come in early and all of the officers were now in some kind of meeting concerning the murder, so I took the spare chair by his desk and waited.

On the other side of the partition wall, I could hear somebody on the phone. Yeah, I saw the body, he was saying. Believe me, you do not want to know.

Damn it, I had something here. I wasn't exactly sure what, but I couldn't wait to tell Dave and see what he thought.

He came through from the meeting a couple of minutes later. He left the office door wide open like he always did, and as he dropped his sheaf of mimeoed notes onto the desk and walked around behind it to sit, he said, 'I hear you've got a theory for me.'

'Not a theory, Dave,' I said, 'but it's a line I think we ought to follow.'

'Okay,' he said. 'Fire away.'

So then I started to tell him about my morning's work, and after a couple of minutes I was starting to be sorry that I'd even begun. It was like when you try to tell somebody about a dream you had which made perfect sense at the time, but then you can feel that sense slipping away even as you speak. I was okay on Mercado keeping three empty shells in a darkened motel room as he cruised the city's parks and playgrounds, but beyond that everything started to sound very shaky. Michaels stopped scanning his meeting papers as he listened. I hadn't meant it to come out as any kind of a theory, but that's how it was starting to sound; and after another minute or so, he cut in.

'Alex,' he said, 'we don't have a sequence here. Nobody walked out of the hospital.'

'But what about the witnesses?'

'One heavily-doped Reverend and a psychiatric patient who has regular conversations with dead presidents. Are these witnesses you'd care to take into court?'

'I've had worse. What about the stolen clothes?'

'Just another petty theft from the County General. According to the patient's brain scan, he'd no right even to be breathing. Can you imagine those doctors being wrong?'

'I can imagine them seeing the proof and then firing a few junior people and saying it was what they'd always suspected,' I said. I'd stopped subscribing to the popular view of doctors as gods walking the Earth when I'd butted heads with a group of them ten years before, and Dave knew all about it. He conceded the point with a brief smile, but that was as far as he was prepared to take it.

'Listen,' he said, 'I think I know why you're doing this. The dead stay dead, Alex. It's about the only damn thing we can be sure of in this world. What we're looking at here is a case of bodysnatching for the usual kind of reason.'

The usual kind of reason being the desire of close relatives to avoid identification so that they couldn't be stiffed for the medical bills… something else that I knew plenty about. I didn't like the sympathetic streak that had crept into the Lieutenant's manner here, and I also didn't like the feeling that I was somehow being managed. I could see that I was on the road to nowhere, and that it was time to let the whole thing go. It was out of my system and I couldn't ask for more than that.

Michaels said, 'Look, what you've said is noted. If we get any more and it's enough to be worth passing along to the detective division, I'll do it. But until then, what have we actually got?'

'Nothing,' I said, and I stood up to leave.

I was halfway out of the door when something else occurred to me. I said, 'Tomorrow's supposed to be a leave day for me. Is that going to be cancelled now?'

'No,' he said, 'the manpower side of it's all covered. Stay home and relax, you've done two straight weeks without a break. Don't you have anything fixed?'

'Yeah,' I said, remembering. 'I'm going on a picnic.'

The rest of the day was more or less normal. The detective squad diverted most of its personnel into the new investigation, and the uniforms added extra patrols of parks and playgrounds which were now mostly deserted anyway.

Life went on.