Behold the Child Read online

  “What happened next, Sam?”

  “My uncle Buck, he was a mean bastard. I suspect he took care of it.”

  Greenburg cleared his throat nervously. “Excuse me?”

  Kenzie looked up again, and his eyes were cold. “We didn’t call cops in my family,” he said. “Maybe that’s why I decided to become one, who knows.”

  Dr. Greenburg was perspiring. He wiped his forehead on his sleeve. “Uh, what happened?”

  Kenzie smiled thinly. “Red just up and disappeared, that’s what. My guess is he’s buried near Twin Forks, where the family used to plant dead livestock. Stinks up there anyway, you know? They probably beat the bastard senseless, then tossed him in the ground and covered him up while he was still breathing. Would have been the righteous thing to do.”

  Greenburg looked uncomfortable. Kenzie grinned. “Don’t worry Doc,” he said. “You don’t have to report anything. Everyone involved has been dead for years, and besides, it was in another state. It’s all over and done.”

  “Not if you have still not forgiven yourself, Sam.”

  “Maybe I shouldn’t let myself off the hook,” Kenzie said. “Maybe it’s best I go on owing Jenny something for letting her down.”

  Greenburg sat back. “I have a fantasy I’d like to share with you,” he said. Kenzie was annoyed by the psychobabble in the phrase, but Greenburg failed to notice. “I think the incident with your sister may have contributed to both of your problems, your ambivalence toward women and the reluctance to have a child.”

  “I don’t follow,” Kenzie said. He was starting to feel irritated at having been so skillfully exposed.

  “First, you divide women into Whores and Madonna’s,” Greenburg mused. “That’s classic. And yet you seem to have a strong and otherwise healthy relationship with your wife. Your love for your sister was probably the basis for that.”

  “I think it’s just that Laura understands me.”

  “Fair enough, and I suspect she does, but now answer me this,” Greenburg said. “Are you--perhaps unconsciously--loving a child by not bringing him or her into this world to suffer?

  “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  “Doesn’t that strike you as a bit perverse?”

  Kenzie smiled slowly. “There are endless perversions of love in this world, Doctor Greenburg. No one knows that better than a cop and a psychiatrist.”

  For some reason Greenburg started pedaling backwards. He coughed into his fist and tried to regain control of the conversation. “So your childhood was…miserable.”

  “In a word, yes.”

  “And you feel the death of your sister is why you became a peace officer?”

  Kenzie got to his feet. He had already composed himself; his eyes were bright and his expression guarded. “Could be,” he said. “Maybe yes, maybe no. But I do know one thing for sure.”

  Greenburg rose as well. Kenzie offered his hand, and Greenburg shook it from reflex. “I have done what my boss asked me to do,” Kenzie said. “And this is the last conversation you’ll ever have with me, unless we run into each other in a restaurant. Have a good day, Dr. Greenburg.”

  “Detective Kenzie? Sam? I really think we should meet again to discuss the impact of…”

  Kenzie shook his head. “Thanks anyway,” he said. “This is not for me. Just be sure to put down that I’m cured.”

  5.

  Kenzie wore a new suit to the funeral of the murdered girl’s father.

  The distraught man’s wife had come home from her night job cleaning offices for a large media conglomerate to discover her husband hanging from a belt in the shower stall. He had apparently been very determined, for his legs were touching the floor. That meant he had strangled slowly and probably had to bounce a few times before he finally succeeded in crushing his windpipe.

  “Are you sure you want to do this?”

  Laura’s face now carried a perpetual frown, and she had become as protective as a mother hen. For some unaccountable reason, that pissed Kenzie off something fierce. He took to drinking a bit too much and far too often. Laura’s response was to withdraw even further into her depression.

  The day before the funeral, Kenzie tried on every suit he owned, but suddenly they all seemed out-of-date or threadbare and worn. He started throwing them all on the floor and kicking them into a pile. Laura, with the wisdom of the female, understood his mood. She had stayed out of the room until he was over his rage, and then suggested a visit to a men’s shop. Kenzie dropped entirely too much money on a suit made in some obscure corner of Italy and a pair of shoes that pinched the shit out of his feet. The collar choked his neck, and all the way down the jammed, malodorous 101 Freeway he kept flashing on the father, wheezing as he strangled. How badly would you want to have to die to go through a thing like that?

  As they neared Griffith Park, some kid in a green Ford Mustang hatchback cut in front of them. He was greasy-haired, shirtless and probably half stoned. His baseball cap was turned backwards, a trend Kenzie found infuriating for reasons he could never quite explain. The kid flipped him off after their bumpers tapped. Kenzie felt his face turn purple with rage. He was instantly consumed by a vivid fantasy: He would pepper the trunk with 9 mm shells, roll up alongside the little prick to blow the top of his head off. Then he’d plant a “throw-down” 22 automatic and claim the kid had pulled it on him. The scenario made him smile. Meanwhile, Laura slowly released a pent-up breath and wiped her brow.

  The cemetery was large, verdant and colorful. Tall lawn sprinklers were hissing mist over the flat, white gravestones. They drove down the circular driveway and located the chapel. They timed it to arrive late and stayed in the back of the crowd to avoid attracting attention. Kenzie had expected members of the media to be in attendance, but the people there were all Latino and he saw no cameras. He and Laura stood out like white grains of rice in a bowl full of wheat cereal.

  The service was quiet and primarily in Spanish. Kenzie understood very little of what was said, but didn’t really care. An impossibly young-looking minister named Ernesto Alvarez spoke for a few moments and performed some calming rituals. Kenzie knew that many Hispanics were Catholic, and that Catholics considered suicide to be a mortal sin. But Alvarez appeared not to judge or condemn the dead man. Kenzie was pleased the family had been spared that much. As the service came to a close, several people saw Kenzie and Laura. They began to whisper among themselves, as if debating what to do. Kenzie felt his face grow hot. Laura tugged at his arm, but he found himself unable to look away.

  After a long moment, the young minister excused himself and walked across the moist grass to where Kenzie and his wife were standing. Close up, Alvarez was a mild-looking young man, balding prematurely, and his brown suit was shiny at the elbows and knees.

  “Good day,” he said. “You knew Senor Ruiz?”

  Kenzie swallowed. “Not really. I hope I haven’t created a disruption,” he managed. “I just wanted to pay my respects.”

  Alvarez squinted in the sunshine. “You are that policeman,” he said, finally, in a voice without rancor. “The one who accidentally shot his poor little Carmelita.”

  Kenzie nodded. “Yes.”

  “My husband feels terrible about what happened,” Laura interjected gently. “He still doesn’t sleep well at night.”

  Having Laura explain his weakness to a stranger made Kenzie cringe. He tried to gather his thoughts. “Look, I wanted to…I don’t know. To be here. Maybe because I was still in the hospital when the girl was buried.” He forced himself to say her name aloud. “Carmelita.”

  Alvarez nodded. “I can understand that, but I must tell you that the family has mixed feelings about your being here. They do not wish to be impolite, but…”

  “We’ll leave right now,” Kenzie said. “I understand.”

  “Thank you,” Alvarez said. “God be with you.”

  “And with you,” Kenzie replied.

  They turned their backs and crossed the wet grass again. Their s
hoes made tiny sucking sounds. As they walked towards the cars in the parking lot, a shard of reflected sunlight glanced off a tinted windshield and momentarily blinded Kenzie. He was stunned to feel his eyes tear up and his shoulders begin to shake. Laura gripped his forearm and helped him remain upright.

  “Sam, this was not your fault,” she said. “None of it.”

  Kenzie did not answer. His mind was elsewhere. He was debating if he should have taken that shot, or waited a second longer. But then who would have lived and who would still have died? He pondered twists of fate and destiny, thought about the very fabric of the known universe. Spiritual matters had never concerned him before, but now he felt consumed by a hunger to know the unknowable: How one child could be driven mad by torture while another is raised in a loving home; a third aborted and still another consigned to an early grave by the split-second decision of an exhausted police officer.

  But no answers came. All he did was grow angrier at God and His relentlessly violent universe.

  Not that it did him any good.

  6.

  Kenzie was drunk.

  Months had gone by and the boredom was becoming relentless. Shuffling papers had done little to improve his disposition. He missed being out on the streets and in the thick of it. So he found himself hanging around O’Halloran’s, even at lunchtime, listening to end-of-shift anecdotes with a lustful heart. He also started smoking again.

  Patrick O’Halloran had worked Homicide. He’d put in his twenty years before dropping nine large to take over a small pool hall near the station. Now it was a cop bar, and a good one; by far the most popular in the area. Kenzie was seated alone in a corner booth, his weary ass squeaking on the red plastic; ash tray overflowing and third beer just pissed out, when Kelly Robbins strolled in. She had some cub with her, probably a morgue guy at the newspaper.

  “Hey, Paddy.”

  O’Halloran looked up, eyed her taunting breasts, then nodded curtly and returned to wiping down the wooden bar. He didn’t care much for reporters. Kelly had cut her hair short and put on a few pounds. The effect was not flattering. She caught Sam Kenzie’s eye and he winked. He saw a quick flicker run behind her eyeballs, probably the night of that LA Tribune Christmas party, four or five years ago, when he’d banged her silly in the broom closet. He’d never called her after that. She took the arm of the geeky, freckled kid, who was maybe half her age, and tugged him a bit closer. Her features melted into a cool smile.

  “Hey, Kenzie. They keeping you busy these days?”

  “Hello, Kelly,” Kenzie drawled. “I think you know better than that.” You look like shit, he thought, and you know what? You weren’t that good a lay, either.

  Kelly and her geek sat at the bar and started talking. Kenzie pulled out his cell phone and checked for messages. Just two bored cops following up on warrants and an ancient Chinese man named Ting, who had been calling on a daily basis to see if LAPD had finally found his stolen bicycle. Kenzie started to dial home, but stopped and closed the cell phone instead. He realized, one more time, that he had nothing new to say.

  He looked up and noticed the bartender following Kelly’s conversation. He focused and decided he’d had enough beer. Kelly was entertaining the kid with horror stories.

  “It all started with some spooky phone calls to the neighbors, kiddy shit like panting and heavy breathing. So a couple of calls are traced back to the same block, but nothing much comes of it. But then it hits the fan.”

  The men were hooked. Kelly sat forward. “This poor rookie goes in to check out the complaint,” she said, “and the house in Van Nuys he goes to just stinks. This was last weekend, so it was fucking hot, you know? Nobody answers the bell, but the side gate is open. He goes back there. The back yard was a mess, man. Dead and dying pets everywhere, some of them looked tortured, real creepy shit.”

  “I read about this,” the kid said. “It was Peterson’s story.”

  Kelly nodded. “He broke it. It was like a Satanist lived there or something. So the rook figures he’s got enough with animal cruelty, neighbor complaints and an open gate to start peeking in windows and trying the locks. He makes the rounds.”

  Kenzie walked the scene in his imagination. His pulse began to race with the old, familiar excitement. He lit a cigarette and leaned forward. He tried to be quiet. He wanted to hear the rest.

  The kid cracked. “What was it he saw again?”

  Kelly let a dramatic pause hang in the air like smog. Then she made her eyes bulge out like a teen telling campfire stories. “He saw body parts, the chopped-up legs and arms and trunks and heads of little children. Some really sick stuff.”

  O’Halloran nodded. “And the fucking perp, he wrote on the walls.”

  The kid swallowed. “In human shit.”

  “Among other things.” Kelly grinned wickedly, her overly made-up eyes prancing. “Something in Latin, and Peterson told me what it was. The cops held it back so they’d be able to weed out all the crazies who call up to confess.”

  “What was it?” The kid asked, although his stricken face said he wasn’t sure he really wanted to know.

  Kelly fumbled the ball. “I don’t remember,” she said. “Probably shouldn’t tell you anyway, right?”

  O’Halloran shrugged, his thick eyebrows mating like caterpillars. “Right. Best forget you ever heard it.”

  Kenzie pondered, then decided to have one last beer. Kelly finished hers, belched in a dainty fashion and got up to go to the ladies room. Almost as an afterthought, she said: “I think it translates to something like ‘I revoke death,’ according to Peterson. But he’s always fucking something up.” She went into the john and slammed the door. The kid stayed at the bar, twirling his coaster with one finger.

  Kenzie felt a chill sink deep into his bones. He flashed on Oso, eyes rolling like a maddened beast, crying: “I can’t stand the pain, ese.” He stood up, dropped some money on the table and forced himself to sound casual.

  “Paddy, just out of curiosity, who was it caught that case?”

  7.

  “Pretty thin, Kenzie.” Jack Talbot was a large, dyspeptic man with a broken nose and deep-set, porcine eyes. He clasped hands across his ample belly and leaned back. The hinges of his chair complained. “We run a link all the way from San Bernardino, where Ortega dies, to Van Nuys? Even if we do that, we don’t have any evidence suggesting these two knew each other. Hell, we don’t even know who the other clown is, for Chrissakes.”

  “Jack, hear me out. Oso was tweaked out of his mind, but he was also fed up about something. He kept saying he couldn’t stand the pain, and one other thing.”

  “What?”

  Kenzie lowered his voice, so the cops near the water cooler wouldn’t overhear. “He said ‘no more of this I poke death’ shit.”

  It took a moment to register, and then Talbot sat up and plopped his elbows down, rattling the metal desk. He looked pissed. “Who the hell told you about that?”

  Kenzie shrugged. “That doesn’t matter, Jack. Now just walk through this with me, okay? We get word off the street that our boy Ortega has suddenly started kidnapping children. We don’t know why, so we assume it’s because he was abused and he’s getting off on doing the abusing now.”

  “That was logical, knowing these freaks.”

  “Sure. But when I track Oso and his buddy down and pop them, there’s only the one kid. And she is still alive. Not one mutilated corpse, not a single trace of any of the others.”

  “And?”

  “Maybe that’s because he never kept them for very long.”

  Talbot frowned. “You’re thinking that’s because he just passed them along to some cult back here in the San Fernando Valley?”

  “Cult, group, person. Whoever.”

  “Kenzie, give me a break,” Talbot said. He sighed theatrically, wearily. “Somebody writes Latin phrases in human shit on the walls and hacks up little kids, you got to figure he’s on the wrong side of the God business, okay? It was a cult.”<
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  Kenzie decided to butter him up a bit. He nodded. “You’re probably right. Makes sense to approach it that way.”

  “Damn straight,” Talbot said. He seemed somewhat mollified. Kenzie let him bask in it for a while, and then winked.

  “But it also makes sense to check into my theory and see if you can find some way to connect the dots.”

  “You win, Sam,” Talbot said. “I’ll look into it, okay?” He started fussing with his file folders, as if to signal that the interview was over. Kenzie sat quietly. Talbot looked up, frustrated. “Sam, I give you my word. I’ll look into it.”

  Kenzie got up and turned to leave. He paused in the doorway. “If there’s any way I can get back on duty, I’d like to work on this one with you. Would you have any problem with that?”

  Talbot considered. Finally he just shrugged. “You can pull it off,” he said, “then be my guest.”

  Kenzie smiled brightly. “Talbot?”

  “Uh oh. No. No way, Sam.”

  “Oh, come on. What would it hurt?”

  “Sam, Kramer would have my sorry ass, you know that.”

  “Just run me one copy, Jack.”

  Talbot got to his feet. He indicated the huge pile of folders on his metal desk. Then he said: “Fuck off, Kenzie. Let me put it to you this way, I am officially telling you to keep your hands off my case. I am officially refusing to let you have a copy of the murder book on those kids.”

  Kenzie sagged. “I understand, Jack. Sorry I asked.”

  Talbot tapped the third file from the top. “This one, for example, which Popeye Kasper did from scratch as a reference summary for everybody looking into this thing, like those FBI assholes, is only thirty-odd pages long, plus some black-and-white photos reduced to thumbnail size. You are not to touch this folder, or use my cheap little fax machine to copy it.”

  Kramer nodded soberly. “Okay.”

  “And especially not right now when I’m on my way to take a shit and expect to be gone for maybe ten minutes. Do we understand each other, here? Are you receiving me, Detective?”