Never Fear by Scott Frost Page A

own son, don’t you? That’s why you’re here?”
    Cross walked over to a filing cabinet, pulled out a set of keys from his pocket, and unlocked the drawer. He rummaged through it for a moment, then removed a videotape.
    â€œHe’s a monster. It’s all here. You want an answer, all you have to do is look and listen.”
    He gripped the tape tightly, as if trying to protect it. “Who else have you talked to?”
    â€œThe detective who led the investigation.”
    â€œHazzard?”
    I nodded.
    â€œNo one else, no one from the DA’s office? Not City Hall? You’re very certain about this?”
    â€œJust Hazzard,” I said.
    He stepped around his desk and gently set the tape and an envelope down in front of me. “You don’t make a copy, and I want it back.”
    I agreed, then reached over and picked up the tape. I noticed Cross’s eyes follow it until I slipped it safely into the envelope and closed it tight.
    Outside a fine coating of sand from the desert covered my Volvo. I got in out of the wind and set the envelope with the tape of my father’s interrogation on the seat next to me.
    â€œCross is in a windowless office. Why do I feel like he’s still watching us?” I said. “He’s afraid of something, and it isn’t just this tape, otherwise he wouldn’t have given it to us.”
    Harrison looked around as the blowing dust obscured the surrounding landscape. The tiny particles of sand hitting the windows began to sound like rain.
    â€œA former DA who’s now working as a low-end investigator on the edges of the county.”
    Harrison thought for a moment.
    â€œMaybe he’s afraid of falling completely off the map,” Harrison said.
    I picked up the envelope containing my father’s interrogation tape. “Or being pushed.”

15
    On the day Victoria Fisher was murdered my father spent the afternoon rehearsing a play at a small theater on Santa Monica Boulevard. The street had changed little in the eighteen years since the murder. For a few hours every night a crowd of well-dressed theatergoers visit the half dozen or so small theaters in what is known as the theater district. When the stage lights are turned off, and the patrons retreat in their BMWs and Saabs, the street is taken back by transvestite prostitutes and crack junkies on the prowl for a fix.
    An assistant to the director of the theater met us at the door and led us onto the stage, where we waited. It was a small auditorium that seated perhaps a hundred and fifty. I walked back to the wings. A door marked EMERGENCY EXIT was just twenty feet beyond the wings. A short hallway led to dressing rooms farther back past the stage manager’s office.
    I heard the sound of the director’s voice greeting Harrison and started back out through the wings, but froze. This is the place , I said silently to myself. I replayed the actress’s words in my head. Her descriptions matched everything around me as if it had happened just days ago.
    I looked out through the curtains. The light from a single spot illuminated the dark stage. I heard his voice in my head.
    Take off your blouse .
    I stepped onto the wood floor of the stage. As I reached center stage I realized it was here where his hand had come around and covered her mouth and he ripped open her shirt. When she stepped on his foot and he released her she would have started crawling stage left toward the steps that led up into the darkness of the seats. I looked over the boards of the stage. She would have gotten a dozen feet, no more, before he grabbed her ankle and started to drag her back. I knelt down and placed my hand on the wood. It was worn and marked from countless productions. I imagined she tried to find the smallest crack or raised seam to take hold of with her fingers and stop him, but there was nothing that would help.
    â€œLieutenant.”
    I looked up and Harrison and the theater