Turning off La Cienega onto Wilshire Boulevard, Kate ruefully reflected over Pilar Adams’s remark about leaving a million dollars on this street if driving into LA were the requirement to collect it. The prestigious six-lane boulevard, for which her LAPD Wilshire Division was namesake, had always been the most elegant of the thoroughfares stretching from downtown to the ocean, but over the years she’d borne daily witness to its transmutation into an ever denser corridor of massive office buildings, impressive hotels and department stores, imposing religious edifices, expensive high-rise residences, and more and more vehicles crawling antlike between them, toward or away from downtown.
“Everything changes, nothing stays the same,” Maggie chanted in Kate’s head, her standard phrase whenever Kate had lamented changes to the city.
“If you were here you’d be bitching too,” Kate retorted as a distant red light halted all progress. “Just try that drive in from your house in Encino these days…”
Finally she crossed Fairfax and turned onto South Curson Avenue. Glancing again at the street sign, she muttered, “Curse. On.”
The block she sought soon appeared before her, a quiet, pleasant middle-class street just as it had been twenty years ago when a murder and suicide were so shocking in their ramifications that news vans were encamped for days. Unbelievable and How could anyone do this had been common refrains from residents to the TV and print reporters. She drifted the Jeep along the very same row of shaggy untrimmed palm trees in curb cutouts. The same concrete stairs that led up to the doorways of a mixture of older homes and small apartment buildings elevated from the street, their slanted front lawns shaded by a variety of small trees and bushes, bordered at street level by hedges or low walls of stucco and used brick. It was trash pickup day: black and bright blue bins for garbage and recycling sat curbside in the street, an occasional green bin for garden clippings in the mix. Despite the only sporadic presence of attached garages, open spaces were available as they had been back then, thanks to two-hour daytime parking signs. In a city of dramatic change, this block seemed unaltered over the years since she’d been supervising detective on the Shuster case. Perfunctory supervising detective, came the acid bath reminder.
Kate pulled into the curb across from where the Shusters had lived. She sat head down, unmoving, engine idling, gathering herself against the urge to simply drive on. Since the murder, not once had she driven down this street. Nor to certain other murder scenes that had eaten away parts of her over the years. A block on Grammercy Place; another on Wheeler with its infamous alley. A section of Hancock Park. Most of all, a particular stretch of La Brea, scene of a crossroads case early in her career, where the Nightwood Bar had lived and died. Where Dory Quillin had lived and died, bludgeoned with a baseball bat at age nineteen beside the VW van she had made her home, believing she would be safe behind a secluded lesbian bar. The women in the Nightwood Bar, especially Maggie, had come into Kate’s life during that mid-eighties investigation, at first openly hostile—in those days all police were the enemy—only to have Maggie become her closest friend and the other women her enduring family over the decades.
Kate finally lifted her gaze to the green stucco duplex where fifteen-year-old April had suffered a fate similar to nineteen-year-old Dory—death by blunt force trauma—behind the Shuster house. The murder weapon for this homophobic murder had been far more symbolic than a bat: a heavy bronze crucifix. Kate gripped the steering wheel as stark memory broke through: the young body savagely ripped open by the sharp angles of the weapon, the grass around her submerged in crimson, T-shirt and cutoff jeans drenched, blond hair a reddish mass in her crushed skull, her eyes dull, dark, frozen. Far, far too similar to that other murder years earlier, that other crushed-in skull, those wide blue eyes of Dory Quillin fixed forever on her unimaginable killer.
That day twenty years ago she had taken one staggering step back from April Shuster’s body, knowing in an instant that she couldn’t do this. Couldn’t possibly bear up under another case like the Dory Quillin murder. But caught herself before anyone saw her recoil, knowing also that recusal was impossible. Display or admission of what would surely be interpreted as weakness would finish her police career, transform her into just another female proven unfit for the job, tainted and diminished beyond recovery in the eyes of superior officers and colleagues.
In escalating distress as motive quickly emerged, also too similar to that earlier case, she’d improvised, directing partner Torrie Holden, around the murder scene, Torrie responding with alacrity at this wholly unexpected trust in her in a homicide that would have high visibility, that had already drawn a flock of news vans. Later in the day Kate had deferred to Torrie’s detailed presentation of the case to Lieutenant Bodwin, expressing a confidence in Torrie more wishful thinking than reality, promising close supervision of a D-1 with two years’ experience in homicide. With the approval of the divisional lieutenant and captain in place over what appeared to be a slam dunk case, Torrie had read it all as an initial test of her potential to take the lead on a future major investigation. As had everyone around her, admiring Kate for her generous mentoring of an up-and-coming female detective. No one had the remotest clue that for her the merest brush against the case was torture, her conscience-salving justification that, bottom line, it was indeed a slam dunk.
The arrest of the murdered girl’s mother the same day had allowed her to further withdraw to the sidelines. She’d not interviewed the prime suspect, quickly drawn away from the one-way glass of the interview room, scarcely able to look at her, merely scanning reports and witness statements. On the basis of experience and on principle she had not questioned Torrie’s contemptuous dismissal of Eleanor Shuster’s furious denials. Erupting behavior that Torrie considered further evidence, behavior that had similarly manifested itself in the rageful, premeditated killing of daughter April. Since Kate had not personally collected or assessed all the available evidence, Torrie Holden had given courtroom testimony on what was observed at the crime scene and discovered subsequently as supporting evidence.
If the investigation of the murder of April Shuster had been flawed, it was because it had been compromised by the weakest of links—herself. She now knew that her abdication had led to assumptions, misjudgments, missed steps. Which, quite possibly, might have made no difference whatever—she would never know how the investigation might have gone down had she been supervising detective in more than name only. Only one person had known how eminently culpable she was: Maggie, who’d waved it off as justifiable self-preservation in the face of the rabid machismo of police culture and, after the arrest and conviction of Ellie Shuster, harmless. Aimee had had no clue. Nor, later, Joe Cameron. Not even Calla Dearborn, to whom she’d described the murder scene only as a component of her PTSD, uncertain about the reporting requirements of Calla’s psychotherapy profession and any ramifications, given Calla’s previous affiliation with LAPD’s Behavioral Science Services unit.
Her worst misjudgment had been the naïve supposition that Torrie Holden being parent to a fourteen-year-old daughter would lead to maximum commitment and meticulousness. Not, as it turned out, to excessive emotional involvement, derailment of protocol, infuriated determination that maximum punishment be imposed for the unthinkable crime of filicide. Killing not just one teenager but two, in Torrie’s mind, since the murder had led to the compounding heartbreak of the same-day suicide of sixteen-year-old Stella Hayden in the adjacent duplex.
Letting memory free-associate, Kate took her time looking over the sage green stucco duplex, a simple but handsome square, an anomaly amid its more graceful neighbors, many of them Spanish style with tile roofs and arched windows. The long vertical windows of the duplex were shaded by translucent cream-colored curtains, aesthetic improvement over the blinds that had been the window coverings when she was last here. The duplex’s single front door led to a small foyer, she recalled, then adjacent doors to each identical two-story unit. Two bedrooms and bath upstairs; living room, dining area, kitchen and half-bath downstairs. Both units with back doors to a shared small lawn and hedged garden…
A shadow loomed over her window followed by a rap on the glass. Startled, Kate rolled down her window to a white-haired, hunched-over old woman leaning on a tall cane, peering in at her through oversize glasses fashionable in the seventies.
“I’m guessin’ you know there was a murder in that place you’re lookin’ at?” she quavered.
“Yes, I know,” said Kate.
“They let her go more’n a year ago, you know, the mother.”
“Yes. Yes, I know.”
The old woman’s rheumy hazel eyes narrowed. “I wondered back then, you know, I wondered.”
Kate’s interest had sharpened with each exchange. She, better than anyone, had learned that progress in any sort of criminal investigation rested all but entirely on people’s willingness to talk. And gossip. “You were a neighbor?”
A slight tilt of the woman’s cane indicated a house behind her. “Right next door. Been there fifty-two years. New people in that duplex now, a’course. Right nice people. Better people.”
She did not remember this neighbor, no surprise, but she would certainly have been interviewed, her statement amid the FIs in the murder book. Kate asked, “Did you know the Shusters and the Haydens well?”
“Hah. Not my kind of folk. Gospel music pumpin’ outta there—”
“Both families?”
“More the Haydens. But they coulda had a cross tattooed on their foreheads, the lot of ’em. Sunday mornings them four and the two daughters’d all be marchin’ off to their crazy church and I’d be out here doin’ stuff for my place and them four parents’d look at me like I was a heathen sack of sin.”
Kate nodded. Religious extremism was all over the reports, had been all over the news. The major motive at the trial.
The old woman was staring at her. “Who are you with all these questions, what’re you doin’ here? Another damn reporter? Rubberneckin’? Casin’ the place?” She cackled at her last query.
“I was one of the detectives involved in the investigation back then.”
The old woman backed away, immediately somber, shaking her head at Kate. “Don’t remember you, you’re not one that talked to me. The mother locked up all those years—you must feel like a pile of manure.”
“I do,” Kate said. The note this morning with its unnerving Yucca Valley postmark had been the impetus for this visit, but she was at a loss to actually explain her presence. Why was she here? What did she think she’d accomplish?
“So who did kill that poor girl?”
“It’s under investigation.”
The old woman heaved a sigh. “So nothin’ new, you’re tellin’ me. Your people came ’round again when the mother got let go, but nobody since. Been months and months. I expect you’re wantin’ to take a look inside the place again.”
“With new owners—”
“Away.” She waved a shooing hand. “France or whatever they’re tourin’ this week. Been gone a month. I’m lookin’ after their pitiful excuse for a dog.”
She brightened at Kate’s smile. “Well, you know, one of them bitty things that just bark. So, you wanna take a gander at the place again? Wait, I suppose I should look at some ID.”
“I wish I could show you some,” Kate said, opening her door. “I’m retired.”
Looking Kate over as she stepped out of the Jeep, the old woman nodded. “Shoulda guessed. If you were still there I might be thinkin’ about applyin’ for a job myself.”
“Thanks,” Kate said with a grin. “My name’s Kate.”
“I’m Agatha. Lookin’ your age ain’t no sin,” she said, shaking off Kate’s assisting hand on her arm as they crossed the street. “I get myself around just fine with this cane. Up them steps too.”
Inside the foyer, a sharp yapping began as Agatha inserted a key she pulled from the pocket of an ochre dress that looked like a monk’s robe, heavy for a warm spring day. “Stand back so I can get Peaches before she runs out. Silly name for a silly dog.”
The door opened to a frenzied miniature dachshund which Agatha scooped up and cradled as it excitedly jumped about in her arms and licked the grinning woman’s neck and face. “She’s a sweet little thing,” she conceded sheepishly. “I’ll give her some treats while you have your look.”
Kate was already viewing with inordinate relief a living room transformed from her agonized memory of it. Gone were the religious posters crowding the walls, the furniture surfaces spilling over with stacks of doctrinal books, pamphlets, bulletins, symbols, and artifacts. Color-accented walls supplanted the previous universal beige paint; hardwood floors replaced carpet; a wood-burning fireplace, forbidden and useless long before these days of climate change, had vanished in favor of a solid wall. Rigorous simplicity was now the norm—leather furniture in pastel shades not unlike her own was a considerable visual improvement over the Shusters’ fussy floral-patterned sofa and armchairs. And instead of the pervasive, sickening aroma of incense she remembered, the air now held the musty scent of absence.
“The Johnsons—them’s the new owners—bought this whole place for a song,” Agatha commented, watching Kate’s scrutiny. “Two girls dead here, who’d want it? Stripped both units, redid ’em top to bottom. Only the backyard’s pretty much the same.”
Why wouldn’t the first priority be altering the scene of a horrific murder, Kate wondered.
“Outta some sort of respect for the dead,” Agatha offered as if reading her mind. “Can’t get you in next door,” she added. “I don’t much see them people but they look okay, you might ask ’em. That’s the place I can’t see anybody buying. God almighty, sleepin’ in that bedroom where Stella died?” Her gaze sharpened behind the oversize glasses. “What I heard, she found out about April and cut herself open like she was in a great big hurry to go with her.”
Kate did not reply or react. The description was more accurate than Agatha could imagine. Inspection of that scene had been relatively brief, this time justifiably—the box cutter in Stella’s limp, bloodied palm, no sign of a struggle, and a final entry in her diary couldn’t have been more conclusive of suicide. But even the abbreviated view had permanently etched the image of staring blue eyes in a snow-white face, the throat, wrists, even the ankles slashed open, the bleached body outlined in a vast red pool on pale cream sheets. Every drop of blood in Stella’s face and body appeared to have drained into her clothing and the bed.
“I’d like to go upstairs,” Kate said. But an overall uneasiness about being in here escalated into uncomfortable awareness that this was an invasion of privacy. She was not a cop, she did not have an approved search warrant, she was in here illegally.
“Then go ahead.” Occupied with the exuberant dog, Agatha lowered herself to the sofa and waved her on with a shooing motion.
Kate gingerly climbed a set of stairs, once carpeted but now gleaming hardwood, to what had been the parents’ room, the area of most interest to her. It too had been transformed. Teakwood dressers and a headboard, replacing heavy mahogany, enlivened a room further lightened by white carpet and white-curtained windows.
Kate focused on the far wall, site of her single contribution to the investigation, which now held a large feature clock with radiating rainbow spikes. Some hours after medical examiner Walt Everson had opined from April Shuster’s torn flesh that the likely weapon would be a heavy, sharply angular bludgeon, she’d noticed the crucifix hanging slightly askew on this bedroom wall, a faint smear next to it. An on-scene swab test had revealed dried blood in the crevices, later determined to be from the murdered girl, the smear on the wall also hers. Clearly the initial act after the murder had been to hastily rinse and replace the weapon, accounting for the stain on the wall—transfer probably from blood-spattered clothing to the killer’s fingers.
Even more damning had been the results of an additional thorough search and inventory of the house, its purpose to rule out the theory of an intruder. April’s father, inspecting the contents of his arrested wife’s jewelry box, had visibly recoiled from the sight of a tiny silver crucifix. The cross was suspended from a broken chain, and, he reluctantly admitted, the chain and its cross had hung around April’s neck every day of her young life. Photographs of her confirmed this, but tests on the smaller cross had come up negative for the presence of blood. The prosecution presented a closing argument theory that the mother’s initial act had been to symbolically rip the cross from her daughter’s neck before bludgeoning her to death for her mortal sin against God. Afterward, unwilling to consign so revered a religious object to casual disposal, she had concealed it among her own pieces of jewelry.
Lost in thought, Kate examined the room. It fronted the street; April Shuster’s bedroom was the one that overlooked the backyard murder scene, a key fact at the trial to explain why discovery of the body had not occurred for several hours. Time of death, reckoned by body temperature and lividity, had been estimated between eight and eleven that morning, confirmed by the pathologist. But Eleanor Shuster had not reported her daughter’s death till early afternoon—a 1:11 p.m. timestamp for the 911 call—believing April was in Bible class and claiming that in the busyness of the morning she had not once glanced into the backyard from the expansive kitchen window. Eleanor Shuster’s whereabouts included errands and a visit to an ATM, for which the defense had produced electronic receipts. But the prosecution effectively countered with their own timeline, asserting that she had performed those activities only after she had murdered her daughter, rinsed and replaced the bronze cross on the wall, and left the house to dispose of blood-soaked clothing that had never been located. No traces of blood had been found in the bathroom sink and drain by SID, but could well have been washed away by an open, gushing tap.
Overriding all the testimony pro and con was Ellie Shuster’s motive, fury with her daughter. Vividly recounted in Stella Hayden’s diary over an eighteen-month period, the growing rage over her discovery of their lesbian relationship was so damning, so undeniable—even though the defendant characterized it as farfetched exaggeration—and so convincing that an outraged jury had deliberated only an hour to pronounce a first ballot verdict of guilty of first-degree premeditated murder with the special circumstance of lying in wait. Subsequently, they required only one additional hour to condemn to death one of the few women ever consigned to the Central California Women’s Facility in Chowchilla to await execution at San Quentin. Not that it would happen—for decades, death row had been in name only in California, the last woman executed in 1962. But the California Supreme Court, five years into the sentence, had reduced the death penalty to twenty-five years to life. Its reasoning: imposition of the death penalty was the result of an overzealous prosecution and an emotion-driven verdict based on the unsupported and insufficient evidence of a diary. And special circumstances did not apply to a crime-of-passion homicide. Parole was then made possible, but had been about as likely as it was for the Manson family. Until, fourteen years later, the Innocence Project intervened with its definitive DNA results.
Since the killer was not Ellie Shuster, Kate mused as she glanced into the retiled bathroom, maybe it was April’s father. Perhaps the likeliest suspect now, his motivation would have been the same as his wife’s. Back then he’d been alibied airtight by Mathew Hayden, Stella’s father, and four followers who claimed they’d all been in an activities planning session in the church all morning. Also a clerk who received Shuster’s cash payment for gas at a Chevron station on Olympic. But Shuster’s alibi had now acquired quotation marks. Eleanor Shuster’s defense had contended that Mathew Hayden and any of the worshipful flock would have supported a claim of innocence if Daniel Shuster or any of the churchgoers had mowed down children in a playground. The four followers had indeed finally reneged on their testimony to attorneys from the Innocence Project. Even though reneged testimony was insufficient in overturning a conviction, they’d offered this supporting evidence in sworn statements, declaring they’d taken Daniel Shuster’s word for his innocence and had simply closed ranks to protect their members from any shadow of suspicion. The eyewitness cashier remained steadfast, but his testimony had been rendered worthless within the timeframe of the murder.
So the Haydens, Veronica and Mathew, as well Daniel Shuster, had now become viable suspects with the same homophobic motive. All had been members of the Church of the Eternal Word, headquartered in a small white frame structure on the modest western end of Pico Boulevard. Identified only by a simple cross, the church had boasted a congregation of a mere sixty, its single financier aged Brentwood millionaire Andrew Pulman. After the deaths of the two girls, amid blistering TV and newspaper investigative reports and editorials characterizing the church and its tenets as a clone of the Westboro Baptist Church, the building had been vandalized and then shuttered. Pulman had withdrawn his support and himself, remaining in seclusion in Northern California until his death eight years ago. According to Joe Cameron, who had queried the current case detectives, the Haydens and Daniel Shuster left the country immediately after the trial, reportedly to take up missionary work in homophobic Uganda—the perfect alternative location, Kate thought, for their medieval theology. To this day, to anyone’s knowledge, they had never returned.
Coming back down the stairs, she asked Agatha, “Could we step outside?”
“Peaches would love it,” the old woman replied, hoisting herself from the sofa with the help of her cane. Moments later she opened the kitchen door into the backyard and the harsh bray of a nearby leaf blower, Peaches straining before her on the end of an extendable leash.
Kate braced herself in the doorway, inhaling the scent of mown grass, and stepped outside onto lawn deeply shaded within a circumference of tall ficus trees. She noted the changes over the past two decades: a lavish scarlet bougainvillea now climbed up the far side of the duplex; a row of lantana, bird of paradise, and fan palms lined the foundation of the duplex. She walked across the strip of lawn to where the ficus trees formed a corner.
“This where the poor girl was killed?” asked Agatha from beside her, the dog straining at its leash as it scampered around the yard.
Kate nodded, standing on pristine grass exactly where once a gory corpse had sprawled. She looked carefully back at the duplex. With the body in place, none of the photographs and drawings made at the scene had been from this exact perspective. April was killed in full view of her own family’s kitchen window and at clear viewing angles from bedroom and kitchen windows of both units.
If Daniel Shuster’s alibi was now in question, she mused, where had he actually been? Where had the Haydens been?
“What I can’t figure,” Agatha said, “is with me livin’ just there”—she pointed beyond the ficus trees with her cane—“why didn’t I hear a thing? Nobody did. Wouldn’t the youngster scream?”
“The theory is she was incapacitated by the first blow.” She did not mention the other theory, that April had been rendered mute with horror at the source and ferocity of the attack.
“Thank you, Agatha,” Kate said quietly, and gestured that she was ready to head back inside. “I think I’ve seen enough for now.”
“Glad to do it. I’m thinkin’ I’ll stay awhile and let Peaches run off some a’ that energy.” She nodded at Kate. “You just let yourself out.” Her face softened. “Comin’ here again after all this time…You just do your best to find some peace with yourself.”