In Dark Places

Chapter One

"Granola bars," Meg said without enthusiasm when she entered the kitchen, her blond hair freshly washed and pulled back with a purple scrunchie. "I hope they're not peanut butter again."

Robin Cameron had sworn over and over that she would start serving her daughter nutritious breakfasts, but in the usual frantic effort to get Meg ready for school and get herself ready for work, she hadn't seemed to find the time.

"We used up the peanut butter ones on Friday." Robin tried to sound upbeat. "These are cookies 'n' cream."

"Dessert for breakfast. Does this still count as the most important meal of the day?"

"Never complain about getting your daily sugar fix. When you're older, you'll learn that the regular intake of highly sweetened snack foods is the key to happiness."

"That's the slogan of the American Dental Association, isn't it?"

"If they know what's good for business, it is. Look, granola bars aren't any worse for you than those honey-frosted cocoa puffs, or whatever they were, that your dad used to buy for you in Santa Barbara. You practically lived on those."

Meg looked up from smoothing the wrinkles out of her gray-and-white uniform. "Mom, that was, like, a million years ago."

"That's a bit of an exaggeration. I don't think your father and I were actually married during the Ice Age."

"I don't know. Things got pretty chilly."

Robin couldn't argue with that. The marriage had been failing for years before it was finally put out of its misery.

"Anyway," Meg added, "sugar makes me break out."

"That's a myth."

"It is?"

"For the purposes of this conversation, yes." Robin placed two unwrapped granola bars on Meg's plate. "As a medical practitioner licensed in the state of California, I can assure you that millions of commuters subsist on this healthful and satisfying breakfast fare every day. They survive. So will you."

"I wish I could believe that," Meg said, but she ate the bars. "How about you?" she asked through a mouthful of oats. "Aren't you going to savor the joys of your own cooking? By the way, mentally, I put 'cooking' in quotes."

"Thanks for sharing that. I'll eat mine at the office."

"You'll probably stop at some gourmet restaurant after you drop me at school. You'll have eggs Benedict and croissants. This whole granola bar runaround is just a scam."

"My secret's out." Robin sat down at the table. "Get all your homework done?"

"Yeah, it was easy. Just had to write a report on Catcher in the Rye."

"Thumbs-up or -down?"

"The book was okay. I couldn't relate to Holden Caulfield as much as I was supposed to."

Robin took this as a good sign. "As I recall, he was a pretty mixed-up young man."

"He's alienated, I guess. That's a popular theme, isn't it?"

Robin made a quick literary survey, from The Odyssey to Hamlet to every modern book, movie, and TV series about suburban angst and disaffected youth. "Always."

"Hey, didn't they used to call people in your line of work alienists?"

"Way back when. The term referred to Freudian psychoanalysts more than to us cognitive-behavioral types."

Meg seemed uninterested in the distinction. "Alienation," she said a little too casually. "That's a bad thing, isn't it? To be cut off from society?"

Robin eyed her with suspicion. "I have a feeling you're going somewhere with this."

"Not really. It's just that, well, people who go to an exclusive private school are kind of alienated, wouldn't you say?"

"Nice try."

Meg wouldn't be deterred so easily. "The uniform alone is enough to make you feel alienated." She plucked at the white blouse. "No normal person dresses like this."

"You're a perfectly normal person. And Gainesburg is a perfectly normal high school. Not to mention one of the best schools in the city."

"There are plenty of good public schools. Magnet schools. They take the best and the brightest. Namely me."

"The Gainesburg School also takes the best and the brightest."

"They take anyone who can afford the tuition. Speaking of which, how do we afford it, anyway?"

"I sneak out at night and sell my body on Hollywood Boulevard."

"LA psychiatrist by day, Hollywood hooker by night. See, if I went to public school, you could give up your sordid double life."

"Is wearing a uniform really that onerous?"

"It's not just the uniform. It's the whole Gainesburg atmosphere. It's, like, a whole different world. Not part of the city at all."

"That's the idea."

"It feels isolated."

"It's supposed to feel isolated. The whole point of going there is to be isolated."

"So alienation is bad, but isolation is good?"

Robin sighed. Teenage sophistry was a powerful thing. "It depends on what you're being isolated from. In this case, yes, it's good."

"Why? What's so scary out there?"

"Do you ever read the newspaper?"

"Do you?"

"I would if I had more time. And if I did, I would read about gang shootings, drug overdoses, teenage pregnancies"

"I'm not going to get pregnant or take drugs just because I go to a public school. You don't trust me. That's what this is really all about."

"Meg, you'll have a better chance of getting into a good college if you have Gainesburg on your application."

"I'll get into a good college anyway."

"You have friends at Gainesburg."

"I can make friends anyplace. Will you at least consider a magnet school?"

It would be easy to lie and put the issue to rest, at least temporarily. But Robin made a conscious effort never to lie to her daughter. She had not lied during the divorce or the painful months of relocation and readjustment that followed, and she wouldn't start now.

"I feel better having you in Gainesburg," she said. "Sorry."

"It's for my own good, right?"

"Partly. It's also for my own good. My peace of mind."

Meg showed a sly smile. "You know, even Gainesburg students get into trouble sometimes."

"But you won't. Will you?"

She deflated. "I'll never get the chance."

That's the way I like it, Robin thought. "Get your book-bag, and I'll set the alarm."

Their two-story, three-bedroom condo had come equipped with a security system, a major selling point in Robin's estimation. Meg chided her for her obsession with the alarm, but Robin was taking no chances.

West Los Angeles was a safe neighborhood by local standards, but within the last month there had been a break-in down the street, an armed robbery at a jewelry store two blocks away, and shots fired from a moving car on a Saturday night.

It wasn't that safe, no matter what people believed.

No place in this city was safe.

That thought stayed with Robin as she picked up Meg's friend Jamie, who carpooled with Meg, then drove them both to the private school on Barrington Avenue. She waved good-bye and hit the freeway, her Saab speeding east toward downtown, the CD player on. The disk on the tray was Bach's Brandenburg Concerto No. 4, the rich tones pumping through the dashboard speakers.

She wondered if she was too hard on Meg. But exiting the freeway, entering the wasteland of a burned-out neighborhood, she saw the ugliness and desperation of the city. It might seem exotic to her daughter, like the backdrop to a music video on MTV, but there was nothing exotic about drive-bys and drug deals. Nothing exotic about the patients she treated or their life stories, many of which had gone wrong in their teenage years when they'd fallen in with bad company and started making bad choices. She intended to shield Meg from that. And if her daughter thought she was overprotective amp; well, too bad.

Although the day was mild, with highs expected only in the seventiesseasonable for LA in the middle of Mayshe kept her windows up, the AC on. The closed windows, like the enveloping cocoon of music, were her way of holding the outside world at bay.

She had spent the last two years in Los Angeles, a city of transients, a place of people lingering nowhere, always on the move. But in the neighborhoods around her now, there was no place to go. The people here were transients who stayed put, or maybe it would be less paradoxical to say that their travels had been circumscribed by the narrow dimensions of their livesfrom slum apartment to prison cell, from motel room to abortion clinic, from desolation to degradation. There were people here, less than twenty miles inland, who had never seen the ocean. There were people here, a bus ride away from downtown LA and one of the largest public libraries in the country, who had never read a book.

She passed from the remains of a residential district into an industrial section, largely deserted, the businesses gone. Around her stood bleak commercial structureswarehouses and windowless brick buildings bearing faded signs with words like Packing and Processing.

Idling at a stoplight, she noticed two teenagers staring at her from a street corner. She'd seen hundreds of young men like them on the streets of LA. Even the details were familiarthe baseball caps pulled low over their foreheads, the black sweatshirts, the oversize baggy pants. Every day, after leaving the comparative safety of the freeway, she drove past these young men or others like them. It wasn't just this part of town. They were everywhere in this city.

She looked away, afraid that her gaze might be misconstrued as a challenge. The music continued, but she couldn't focus on itnot when her first session with Alan Brand was scheduled for one o'clock. It was an appointment she'd been anticipating all week, ever since she'd received the go-ahead from Deputy Chief Wagner, her liaison with the LAPD.

She remembered Wagner asking why she was so gung ho to poke around in a cop's psyche.

"What I'm gung ho about," she'd explained, "is the chance to show how effective my method of treatment can be. But I need a more diverse pool of patients than the inmates of the county jail."

It hadn't been easy to get the LAPD on board. She had put months of effort into securing a police officer as a patient, invested hundreds of hours in writing and rewriting proposals, meeting with the police brass, working her way through the tiers of bureaucracy. She had lost nights and weekends. She had lost sleep.

And now everything was signed and delivered, and she finally had the approval she needed. She had permission to use one police officer, just one, as a test subject. If she didn't get results with Sergeant Brand, she wouldn't be given a second chance. So she would get results, starting today.

It was taking a long time for the light to change. Maybe she should just run the red. The intersection was empty of traffic. She didn't like to break the law, but

A heavy thump, a crunching sound.

Glass pellets sprayed her lap.

She whirled in her seat in time to see the crowbar's second impact against the window on the driver's side. The remaining fringe of safety glass was swept away in a shower of glittering crumbs, and then a hand reached through the window frame and unlocked the door.

It was the two young men she'd seen a moment ago. The nearer one had the crowbar.

The CD kept playing, the concerto bursting from the speakers.

A sharp rap on the windshield. Her eyes cut in the direction of the noise. She saw a gun, a large steel-frame pistol, held sideways, movie-style.

"Outta the car, bitch!" the one with the crowbar screamed over the music.

His voice was higher than she'd expected, almost a girl's voice. Distantly she wondered how young he really was.

"Okay," she said. "You can have it. You can have the car."

"Get out!"

"I am." But she wasn't, because she couldn't seem to unhook her seat belt, couldn't get her shaking fingers around the buckle.

"Get the fuck out!"

Finally she popped open the buckle, and the lap belt and shoulder belt slid away, freeing her.

"I'm coming," she said, "I'm coming."

Something hit the windshield. The spot in front of her face shivered into a meshwork of fractures, bending inward but not crumbling, held in place by the thin layer of plastic embedded in the safety glass.

It was the second thug, the one with the pistol. He'd delivered a hard swat to the glass with the gun barrel.

The first one grabbed her by the shoulder, hauled her out of her seat. She looked into his face, his eyes. Wild eyeshe was high on somethingpupils dilated, the whites bloodshot.

His voice was a whisper. "Gonna mess you up, kitty cat."

In that moment she knew they didn't want only the car. They wanted her. They were going to hurt her, kill her.

She bent her left leg at the knee and kicked at the one with the crowbar, catching him in the stomach, surprising him. He let go of her, and she ducked back into her seat, bending low, and slammed her foot on the gas.

There was another smack against the windshieldthe assailant with the gun must have hit it againand then the Saab's front end thudded into him and knocked him reeling. She powered forward while a nasty scraping noise rasped along the rear of the car.

The intersection was still empty of traffic. She tore through it and around the corner, slamming the door shut as she took the turn, keeping her head down out of some unsuspected combat instinct. A block away she cut into the parking lot behind the building where she worked, pulling alongside a huge sport-utility vehicle that concealed her from the street. With a shaking hand she shut off the CD player.

There was a cell phone in her purse. She ought to call the police. But she couldn't do it right now. She had to know if they were still after her.

They had been out for blood. That was certain. Any possible doubt had been removed by that second impact to the windshield. It had not been another strike by a blunt object. It had been a gunshot, one that had punctured the glass with a neat round hole, surprisingly small. The bullet itself was lodged in the headrest of the driver's seat. If she hadn't ducked amp;

"But you did," she told herself. "So it's okay."

A lie. There was nothing okay about any of this. Since when had a morning drive to work become an exercise in survival?

She waited another couple of minutes, the Saab's engine idling, gearshift thrown into reverse. If the two menboys, they were boysappeared, she was ready to back out of the parking space at top speed.

But they hadn't pursued her. How could they, when they were on foot? They had no way of knowing where she worked, no way of knowing she was still in the neighborhood. They had given up on her, moved on to another victim, easier prey.

She shut off the engine and got out of the car. Her knees briefly failed, and she had to lean against the open door. The scraping noise she'd heard as she sped away had been the sound of the crowbar leaving a long, ugly groove in the trunk lid. A parting gift from the lead attacker.

Gonna mess you up, kitty cat.

She could ask the obvious questionWhy me?but she already knew the equally obvious answer. There was nothing personal about it. She was not any special target. They had simply spotted her, a woman alone in an expensive car, a Saab 9-5 sedan, and they'd decided to make their move. They would have beaten her or raped her or killed her because she had money and they didn't, or because she took too long to comply with their orders, or because it would be fun.

Just kids. Two of them. How many more were out there? And how many other kids, a few years younger, would be following in their footsteps?

You can't save the world, Robin, her mother used to say.

She had always answered, You can try.

She restarted her car and parked in her reserved space. When she was ready, she took the cell phone from her purse and called 911.