Mostly he stayed by Robin’s side, riding shotgun in her truck, accompanying her to the jobsite. This morning, they’d left at six and the house was dead quiet. I slid open a glass door and let in some heat and ocean noise. The coffee was ready. I took it out to the deck and thought some more about Lucy.
After getting my number from Milo, she’d taken ten days to call. Not unusual. Seeing a psychologist is a big step for most people, even in California. Somewhat timidly, she asked for a 7:30 A.M. appointment that would get her to Century City by 9:00. She was surprised when I agreed.
She arrived five minutes late and apologizing. Smiling.
A pretty but pained smile, rich with self-defense, that stayed on her face almost the entire session.
She was bright and articulate and full of facts—the small points of the attorney’s legal wranglings, the judge’s mannerisms, the compositions of the victims’ families, Shwandt’s vulgarities, the yammerings of the press. When the time came for her to leave, she seemed disappointed.
When I opened the gate to let her in for the second session, a young man was with her. Late twenties, tall, slender, with a high brow, thinning blond hair, Lucy’s pale skin and brown eyes, and an even more painful version of her smile.
She introduced him as her brother, Peter, and he said, “Nice to meet you,” in a low, sleepy voice. We shook. His hand was bony and cold, yet soft.
“You’re welcome to come in, take a walk on the beach.”
“No, thanks, I’ll just stay in the car.” He opened the passenger door and looked at Lucy. She watched him get in. It was a warm day but he wore a heavy brown sweater over a white shirt, old jeans, and sneakers.
At the gate Lucy turned to look back, again. He was slumped in the front seat, examining something in his lap.
For the next forty-five minutes, her smile wasn’t as durable. This time, she concentrated on Shwandt, intellectualizing about what could have led him to sink to such depths.
Her questions were rhetorical; she wanted no answers. When she began to look beaten down, she switched the topic to Milo and that cheered her up.
The third session, she came alone and spent most of the time on Milo. She saw him as the Master Sleuth, and the facts of the Bogeyman case didn’t argue with that.
Shwandt had been an equal-opportunity butcher, choosing his victims from all over L.A. County. When it became apparent that the crimes were connected, a task force involving detectives from Devonshire Division to the Sheriffs substation in Lynwood had been assembled. But it was Milo’s work on the Carrie Fielding murder that closed all the cases.
The Fielding case had brought the city’s panic to a boil. A beautiful ten-year-old child from Brentwood, snatched from her bedroom in her sleep, taken somewhere, raped, strangled, mutilated, and degraded, her remains tossed on the median strip that bisected San Vicente Boulevard, discovered by joggers at dawn.
As usual, the killer had left the crime scene impeccable. Except for one possible error: a partial fingerprint on Carrie’s bedpost.
The print didn’t match the little girl’s parents’ or those of her nanny, and neither was it a mate for any swirls and ridges catalogued by the FBI. The police team couldn’t conceive of the Bogeyman as a virgin and went looking through local files, concentrating on newly arrested felons whose data hadn’t yet been entered. No leads emerged.
Then Milo returned to the Fielding house and noticed planter’s mix in the dirt beneath Carrie’s window. Just a few grains, virtually invisible, but the ground beneath the window was bricked.
Though he doubted the importance of the find, he asked Carrie’s parents about it. They said no new planting had been done in their yard since summer, and their gardener confirmed it.
The street, however, had been planted extensively—magnolia saplings put in by a city crew to replace some blighted old carrotwoods—in a rare show of municipal pride stemming from the fact that one of the Fieldings’ neighbors was a politician. Identical planter’s mix had been used around the new trees.