Self-Defense Read Free Page A

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 7:30A.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 Sheriff’s 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