Eyes Wide Open Part 20

"Phil, I know what you're thinking. I was thinking the same thing too. But two nights ago, someone called Erlich at his motel, threatening him to back off."

"Back off what?"

"What he's been sticking his nose into. The caller mentioned something about him getting burned if he didn't. When Erlich went to the door he found a lit cigarette sitting on the mat outside."

"Could be anyone." The lieutenant chuckled. "You admit he hasn't made a whole lot of friends since coming to town."

"The next day his sister-in-law found the family cat that had been missing-toasted. I'm not talking about hara.s.sment, Phil. Two people are dead. Then this . . ."

He opened the file that was on his lap-the one on Thomas Greenway that had come in that very morning. The FBI investigator who had written a book on the Houvnanian case, he explained, whose pool drowning in Las Vegas may not have been a suicide after all.

"The doc was pus.h.i.+ng me to look into it. He was sure it was connected somehow. What's interesting is what came up-in the autopsy." He took out the photo. "The victim swallowed something. Or, more likely, something was stuffed down his mouth."

"What?"

From his own pocket, Sherwood took out a dollar bill, folded it in half, and placed it in front of his boss. He pointed to the eye above the pyramid.

"This." Then he pushed forward the Vegas ME's snapshot from the police file-a reluctant understanding slowly forming in his lieutenant's widening eyes.

"You're trying to say this is some kind of series of murders? Zorn. The kid from Grover Beach. This guy, Greenway. Going back what?" He squinted. "More than twenty years?"

"Maybe longer," Sherwood said. He ma.s.saged his jaw joint with his thumb. "Trust me, Phil, a couple of days back I was sitting there rolling my eyes the same as you."

"And now?"

"Now I guess they're no longer rolling."

Perokis picked up the file. He stared almost dumbly at the Vegas ME's photo of the dollar bill, then paged quickly through the rest. "You have a motive?"

"I don't know the motive. Just that something's going on. And whatever it is, it somehow connects to this Erlich kid's father-who isn't exactly textbook when it comes to lucidity and isn't doing a whole lot of talking to be sure. And who insists he wasn't even there with Susan Pollack or Houvnanian at the time of the murders."

Perokis folded his fingers in front of his face. Sherwood knew he didn't like this. He was lucky Phil had made a place for him after the transplant. Otherwise he wouldn't even have had this job. Otherwise, he'd have been on disability. Watching soaps during the day.

"So what do you want to do?" the lieutenant asked. "You want to find out if everyone else is crazy in this mess-or just you?"

Sherwood gave him a halfhearted smile. "Maybe that pastor's liver is getting to me more than I know.

"Let me see it through, Phil. I know what my job is here. I know I've got, what, maybe a year left before the hatchet falls my way. Call it a good-bye gift. I've earned that, haven't I? I need this."

The lieutenant's phone rang. He picked up and asked Carol out front to take a message. Sherwood knew no one in homicide would touch this thing any more than they would a pile of dog t.u.r.d on the street.

This was his dog t.u.r.d.

"You got three days," Perokis said. "And don't even think of putting in for mileage on this. And if it doesn't pan out by then, I don't want to hear of it ever again. Understood?"

"Completely." Sherwood closed the file and got up.

"So what's the next step?"

"The next step?" Sherwood headed to the door. "The next step is I want to see Houvnanian."

"Houvnanian? You must be joking, Don. You'll need a judge's order to get in to see him. If he'll even see you. And where the h.e.l.l is he these days anyway?"

"Pelican Bay."

"Pelican Bay?" The lieutenant rolled his eyes. The California super-max. About as hard to get into, even for a law enforcement officer, as it was to leave.

"I think he'll see me . . . ," Sherwood said. "A wolf likes to eye his prey before he kills it. That's why I'm bringing the doc."

Chapter Forty-Four.

I spent the rest of the afternoon reading through Greenway's book, searching for any kind of connection between my brother, who wasn't anywhere in the narrative, and Zorn.

I called in to my office. Even consulted on one of my cases. Finally I went back to my room and dozed a little in the afternoon.

I had a dream-my unconscious restlessly connecting images and dots.

I saw Paul Riorden's estate in Santa Barbara. The ugly, awful crime scenes, blood on the walls. And I was at the dinner table-not Riorden-and my wife, Kathy, next to me. I had a fear that something truly terrible was about to take place. I kept saying to Kathy that we had to get out. Before it happened. Then there was a knock at the door. I went to open it and Russell Houvnanian stood in front of me at the door-the same chiseled face and probing eyes I had seen those years ago.

Except my brother Charlie was at his side.

And suddenly I heard my father, laughing-that same mocking tone with which he had humiliated Charlie with Phil. And I tried to warn him. "Dad," I said, "please, stop!"

I screamed out loud: "Stop!"

But this time Houvnanian took out a blade.

And plunged it into my father's gut. The laughing stopped. Lenny's eyes bulged. He looked down. Blood ran into his hands.

And then Charlie was stabbing him too.

"Stop, stop!" I cried. Over and over. "Stop!"

My father looked at me. Helpless. Like, Do something, Jay . . .

"Stop!"

I woke up, and I was sweating. Blinking and disoriented.

My cell phone was ringing.

I found it on the night table and looked. Sherwood was on the line. My heart beat like a metronome on speed. It took a second for me to regain my composure. To realize in relief that it had all been just a dream.

I put the phone to my ear and answered. "Yeah, Sherwood, it's me."

He didn't even say h.e.l.lo. "You got a dollar on you, doc?"

"A dollar? You woke me up to ask me that?" I rolled over and dug into my khakis. "Is this a joke? Yeah, I have one here. Why? Things hurting that bad?"

"Flip it over," the detective said without responding. "To the back."

"Flip it over . . . ?" I said, still a little fuzzy. I stared at the familiar words, In G.o.d We Trust. The bold, large "ONE," spelled out. "Okay."

"Now fold it in half. What do you see?"

"What do I see? An eagle. The seal of the United States. What am I supposed to see?"

"No," he said, serious now. "The other half."

Testily I blew out a breath and did what he asked me. "I'm really not into games like this. A pyramid," I said. "A bunch of Latin . . ."

Then I saw it. What I was staring at. The metronome came to a stop. My whole body did.

"I see an eye!"

"That's what the Vegas ME pulled out of Thomas Greenway's stomach during his autopsy in 1988. A crumpled dollar bill. Or half a dollar. Like the one you're looking at now."

"Oh my G.o.d . . ."

"You were right, doc. All along. So what do you do when everything seems to point in one direction and you want to know how it all connects?"

"I don't know. You're playing games with me again, Sherwood. Go to the source?"

"Yeah, doc, let's go to the source. Where it all connects. You're not heading home on me again, are you?"

"No." I sat up, my blood surging. "Of course not."

"Good. You wanted your case reopened . . . I don't know how the h.e.l.l it happened or where in G.o.d's name it's going to lead, but consider it reopened. I'm in now, doc. I'm all in!"

I felt alive with validation.

"And the source is where?" I asked, the hair rising on my arms. But I already thought I knew.

"The source? And I figured you for a smart guy, doc. The source is Russell Houvnanian. I thought maybe after all these years you'd like to renew your acquaintance with him."

PART III.

Chapter Forty-Five.

The loud thwhack-thwhack-thwhack of the helicopter drummed in my ears as the aircraft descended over the dense redwood forest near the California-Oregon border.

Sherwood pointed out the window.

Cut into the sea of green was a patch of cleared land, with a group of interconnected white buildings, almost like an X carved out of the remote forest.

Pelican Bay.

My heart tightened from the antic.i.p.ation of soon being face-to-face with the psychotic killer who had been a part of my youth.

Pelican Bay was California's most remote and secure prison, housing only Level Four offenders, the worst of the worst. To be sent there you had to either be convicted of a particularly violent crime or have earned your way through habitually violent behavior at the state's other penal facilities.

The centerpiece of Pelican Bay was the pod of four intersecting two-story halls known as the SHU, the Security Housing Unit, the giant X that I spotted from the sky. Russell Houvnanian was the SHU's most celebrated resident. It had essentially been built for him. He had been transferred there, to the isolation of the remote forest, in 1989, after spending his first fourteen years incarcerated at San Quentin.

The copter came down on a landing pad on the prison grounds. The propeller whirred loudly and came to a stop. The landing steps dropped down and we stepped out, squinting into the bright sun.

"Detective Sherwood," someone yelled. A guard in a khaki uniform came up as we stepped onto the tarmac. "Sergeant Ray Tobin. I'm supposed to escort you over to the admin center. To a.s.sistant Warden Hutchins."

"Thanks."

We stepped into a large golf cartlike vehicle, the guard hopping in at the wheel, and it was only a short drive over to the white, two-story administration building. We went in through the main entrance, where we were directed through a law-enforcement security checkpoint and put through a metal detector.

Sherwood checked his weapon with a clerk there.

"The AW is up here," Sergeant Tobin said, leading us up a flight of stairs, past a grid of offices and the secretarial desks.

A nameplate that read ROBERT HUTCHINS, a.s.sISTANT WARDEN was affixed to the door.

His secretary asked us if we wanted anything; we both asked for some water. Then she took us in.

Bob Hutchins was a trim, pleasant-looking man with a long forehead and hair closely cropped around the sides. He stood up at his desk to greet us. He had a military bearing. In fact, the pictures on the wall of him with a bunch of bra.s.s confirmed that he had once been a sergeant major in the military police. He held out his hand. "Gentlemen . . .

"Good to see you again, Don," he said to Sherwood. Years back, Sherwood had been the arresting detective of a couple of high-profile inmates who had ended up there, and the two had collaborated on the convicts' parole hearings.

He introduced me.

"So you're up here for a tete-a-tete with Russ," Hutchins said. "He's like royalty up here. Our longest-running inmate. And one who's not likely to leave."

Hutchins patted what appeared to be a prisoner file. "We've got him sequestered in a holding cell for you over in SHU A. Try to keep in mind, he may not resemble exactly what you might expect. Not many requests to see him these days, and he rarely accedes to the few that come. You ought to consider yourself lucky."

Sherwood glanced my way. "I have a feeling the good doctor here should take the bow on that one. Apparently they've met."

"I was just a kid," I said. "He and my brother came up to my father's house looking to raise money to cut a record. Apparently, my brother had been living on the Riorden Ranch. This was around 1972. A year before it all happened . . ."

The warden nodded, shaking his head, then glanced back at Sherwood. "You say this is related to a string of new killings? That they may have some connection to the original case?"

"A possibility . . . ," Sherwood said. "Almost two weeks ago, Dr. Erlich's nephew was found dead at the bottom of the Morro Bay Rock, in what we first deemed to be a suicide, but are now looking into further. Last week, a retired police detective from Santa Barbara was murdered as well, who had played a role in the Houvnanian investigation."