California Bear

by Duane Swierczynski

Genres: Amateur Sleuth; Crime Fiction; Suspense

Synopsis

This witty thriller from a "great storyteller" (Michael Connelly) follows four unlikely vigilantes who pit themselves against the villain behind California’s coldest case—and decide to take justice into their own hands.

NONE OF YOU ARE SAFE
 
“KILLER”: Jack Queen has been exonerated and freed from prison thanks to retired LAPD officer Cato Hightower. But when guilt gnaws at Jack, he admits: “I actually did it.” To which Hightower responds: “Yeah, no kidding.” You see, the ex-cop has a special job in mind for the ex-con…
 
THE GIRL DETECTIVE: Fifteen-year-old Matilda Finnerty has been handed a potential death sentence in the form of a leukemia diagnosis. But that’s not going to stop her from tackling the most important mystery of her life: Is her father guilty of murder?
 
GENE JEANIE: Jeanie Hightower mends family trees for a living, but the genealogist is unable to repair her own marriage. And her soon-to-be ex may have entangled her in a scheme that has drawn the bloody wrath of…
 
THE BEAR: A prolific serial killer who disappeared forty years ago, who is only now emerging from hibernation when the conditions are just right. And this time, the California Bear is not content to hunt in the shadows…
 
From two-time Edgar nominee Duane Swierczynski, California Bear is clever, moving, and surprising as it takes aim at the true crime industry, Hollywood, justice, and the killers inside us all.

Release date: January 9, 2024

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Print pages: 336

Sample

The California Bear, a serial torturer-murderer who had eluded justice for close to four decades, wanted a cookie.

He really shouldn’t. Not with the diabetes and all. And he knew his wife would kill him if she found out he raided her secret stash. But what was life without the little indulgences?

The man was seventy-two years old. Back when he was the Bear, he liked to bind his victims with ligatures found around their homes (extension cords, shoelaces, medical tubing) and beat them senseless with his meaty fists. But right now, all this man cared about was pushing aside the row of grease-flecked cookbooks on the top shelf over the fridge to gain access to the sweet, carb-laden motherlode: a family-size package of Nutter Butters — his wife’s favorite.

She thought she was so goddamned clever. But the man could easily follow her line of thinking. For years she’d nagged him to dust off the top of the fridge. He never did, because who the hell ever looks up there? So she hid the Nutter Butters there, behind cookbooks he’d never crack because — and this is a quote — “the day you boil an egg for yourself is the day they name me Queen of Mars.”

The California Bear used to delight in mauling his victims’ flesh with everyday household objects, relishing the terror he imagined this would invoke years later whenever the survivors would encounter these everyday objects again. But right now, he was focused on rooting around the fridge top until he found his prize. His fingers found the wrapping and he heard the crinkle. Yes. He pulled out the package and peeled open the top. The peanut-buttery scent was like mainlining his childhood. The man commanded himself to take just one. Fine, two. No more than four. He was a man used to keeping his impulses in check.

One of these days…

As he chewed, he toyed with the idea of lacing the remaining Nutter Butters with rat poison. See how the Queen of Mars would like that. Her throat seizing as her cow eyes registered all the dust on the fridge top. Dead little flecks of them. But like all his death fantasies involving his wife of thirty-four years, this would come to naught. The fun was the fantasy; the actual doing of the Thing would be counterproductive.

One of these days I’m going to…

Even though he’d eaten five — okay, six — cookies, his hunger remained. As the Bear, he had gotten away with dozens of horrors spanning four decades thanks to this highly disciplined restraint. But now the man was overcome with a great hunger inside him that couldn’t be satisfied by mere enriched flour and corn syrup solids. He realized that now; he’d been denying it for way too long.

One of these days I’m going to cut you into little pieces.

The man left the house through the back door and lumbered into his detached garage. It was well after midnight; he would have the privacy he craved.

Once inside, he shed his sweatshirt, followed by his damp T-shirt. He carefully draped both over the Weber kettle grill pushed up against the wall. The man heaved a dozen heavy boxes until the trunk was revealed. For a minute, he forgot what he was looking for, what he was doing out here. But then it came back to him, like a tap on the shoulder. Remember who you fucking are.

Growing excited now, he fumbled with the tiny key on his chain. Slipped it into the lock and opened his chest of treasures. So many things to choose from. The keychain with the rubber frog. The white-gold wedding band looped through a chain. The Lady Remington. The cheap plastic toy soldier pointing his rifle at an unseen enemy. Best of all, a plastic baggie stuffed with colorful plastic alphabet fridge magnets.

Current events had brought this all back in a real way. Planning, dreaming, storytelling, reminiscing… all those forces brought him here, into this garage, searching for tangible pieces of his former self. Was this actually him, once upon a time, or was it just an extremely vivid dream that he never managed to shake? More importantly: Could he become the Bear again?

The man rummaged through the trunk until he found what he was really looking for. He didn’t see them at first. He felt them cross his calloused fingertips. The metal claws, still sharp enough to draw blood.

This was a serious jam — perhaps her worst ever. Trapped in a windowless room, with no clear understanding of when she might be able to leave, or even why she was here… though she had her suspicions.

It was 4 a.m. on a Wednesday and she was utterly exhausted. Her brain felt lost in a thick marine-layer fog that had taken up residence in her skull. Which was unfortunate because her final English paper was due in just two days. If she blew the deadline, she might never make it to sophomore year. And as usual, she’d settled on a topic that was both ambitious and probably impossible:

She’d promised her English teacher she’d solve a murder.

Fortunately, she’d brought along her research materials. A few weeks ago, her uncle bought an armful of old mystery novels from the Iliad Bookshop in North Hollywood. His big idea was that he’d find some old detective story that just so happened to be in the public domain (meaning: free) so he could take (steal) the plot and modernize it for a screenplay. This idea was quickly forgotten, like so many of her uncle’s harebrained ideas. But those writers — Agatha Christie, Arthur Conan Doyle, Dorothy Sayers, and Wilkie Collins — could teach her everything she needed to know about solving a murder.

So the Girl Detective had tucked the books under her arm and transported them to her bedroom. And in turn, they transported her, at a time when she needed escape the most.

She hadn’t been feeling well and was nervous about telling her aunt and uncle. Often it felt like even the whisper of bad news sent them both into a spiral of anxiety and panic.

Friends told her: just eat a fucking cheeseburger already. All she needed was a little iron in her blood. And while it was true, the Girl Detective had been a vegetarian for four years now, she knew that wasn’t the answer. There was something else going on.

All this drama came to a head when her uncle offered to throw a cookout for the Girl Detective and her school friends one Thursday evening — mostly to blow off some steam before finals. Their apartment complex had a decent pool and a massive outdoor grill. The Girl Detective was chilling on one of the overstuffed wicker couches, waiting for her vegan hot dog to be finished… and the next thing she knew, it was an hour later. She had passed out. Worse yet, her bestie, Violet, said it had taken a few minutes to fully wake her.

Her aunt tried to make a doctor’s appointment the very next day, but there was nothing available until the day after Memorial Day. The Girl Detective assured her aunt she’d be fine; it was just freshman-year burnout. At this point she was also trying to believe the lie that it was merely a lack of iron in her blood. Maybe Uncle Louis would grill her a medium-rare steak.

Saturday: Her aunt and uncle thought a trip to the Broad Art Museum would perk her up. She loved art museums, right? Dear Reader, she did not. The day was a slog, and she spent most of it worried about her final English paper. You know, the one where she had to solve a murder.

Sunday: Oof.

Monday: On Memorial Day her uncle tried to cheer her up with another cookout, but all she wanted to do was nap.

Tuesday: Finally, a visit to the doc, who sent the Girl Detective to St. Joseph’s for bloodwork to see what was up with her being tired all the time. On the way to the hospital they found themselves following the pink Corvette driven by Angelyne. Which cracked up the Girl Detective. In LA, Angelyne was famous for being famous. No movie credits, no hit songs, no nothing. Decades ago she’d lucked into buying primo billboard space (to promote her nonexistent career) and somehow horse-traded that primo space into multiple billboards. Soon, a legend was born. Lucky denizens would spot her tooling around LA in her trademark neon-pink sports car. And there she was, idling directly in front of them, a neon-pink omen of California doom. The hospital drew blood and told her she just needed rest and (drum roll, please) some iron. But when the needle-stick site blew up like a balloon — a hematoma, she later learned — serious trouble was a certainty. She didn’t want to deal with any of it. Especially on a school night.

Which brought her to her current predicament. At crazy o’clock this morning, her aunt received a panicked voicemail from the doc: Get that girl to Children’s Hospital LA on the double. And now here lies the Girl Detective, in a glass-and-metal cell, waiting for the (sure-to-be) bad news. They don’t rush you to the hospital for shits and giggles.

But she didn’t want to think about that right now.

Instead she wanted to focus on the murder she had to solve.

It was technically a cold case, from just two years ago. A local real estate tycoon had been run over and killed inside an underground Burbank garage. Two witnesses saw the make and model of the car as well as a partial plate. That was enough to arrest someone for the hit-and-run, but the conviction didn’t stick, thanks to a technicality. So, did their suspect do the crime, or did someone else get away with it? That possibility was what fascinated the Girl Detective. Maybe someone did this and just… walked. And they were out there, living their best life, not a care in the world.

Not if the Girl Detective could help it.

At first her English teacher, Mr. Wisher, was a little taken aback by her proposal for her final paper. He had been expecting what — the millionth essay extolling the virtues of freakin’ In Cold Blood? How does a murder investigation qualify as a work of literature? But the Girl Detective played it smart. She knew Wisher was a big Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson fan, so she framed her paper as a New Journalism take on a crime that happened in her backyard. Shockingly, he bought it! Which was handy because the Girl Detective was going to pursue this investigation regardless.

She had the case file in her bag, along with many articles about California hit-and-run laws as well as background pieces on the real estate tycoon — a man named Julian Church. To know the crime, you must first know the victim. Yes, she tumbled down a rabbit hole of research. Yes, she should have stopped the research (which was the most fun part) and started the actual writing of the paper weeks ago. The Girl Detective had no defense other than she worked best under pressure.

She was lost in murder thoughts when the door opened with a loud, whiny creak. Someone needed to WD-40 that, stat. Her aunt and uncle and a man she presumed to be a doctor stepped into the room. She quickly closed the file before they could see.

“Hi, honey,” her aunt Reese said.

Her inner Sherlock ignored the “honey.” Instead she scanned for the telling details, the ones Aunt Reese was desperately trying to hide. The puffiness around their eyes, the lingering sniffles. The forced smiles on their faces, expressions completely at odds with being at a hospital at 4 a.m.

So before they told her what the doctor had said just a few minutes ago, the Girl Detective already knew. This was not something like a flu or a case of low iron levels in your blood. This was a moment most human beings dreaded, despite having seen it hundreds of times in movies and TV shows. This was the Moment You Hear Incredibly Dire News.

The doctor told her the dire news.

The Girl Detective looked at him and straight up asked: “Am I going to die?”

Just after 5 a.m., ex-con Jack “Killer” Queen shuffled over to the motel fridge, opened the door, and drained an entire liter of bottled spring water. He took his time, enjoying the feeling of cool refrigerated air washing over his bare legs. Nobody telling him to hurry up, move it along now, no dawdling.

The restaurant below the motel didn’t open until seven. Jack decided to walk down to the beach, stick his feet in the ocean, maybe look up at the fading stars. When was the last time he’d seen them? So long ago that someone else was president.

Making it to the beach wasn’t as easy as he’d thought. There was a six-lane highway blocking his path and metal guard rails up the middle. After some wandering about like an idiot, Jack finally spotted a traffic light about fifty yards to the right of the roadhouse. But there was no pedestrian path. Even at this early hour traffic was constant in both directions. What, were people supposed to just stand here and squint at the ocean?

After a while Jack discovered a staircase that looked like it led down to a subway platform. Instead it was a pedestrian tunnel that burrowed under the six-lane road. The tunnel was dark and smelled like piss and salt.

Well, what choice did Jack have, if he wanted to step into the Pacific?

Halfway through the tunnel he started having those bad feelings again, as if the miraculous reversal of these past few months were nothing more than a dream, as if he were still inside, and he’d reach out and feel the concrete wall again and hear the rusty springs groan beneath his weight.

The temptation to turn back was strong. His heart raced. The animal part of his brain screamed this was a trap. Run. Run away now. But the perverse part of his brain — Jack liked to think this was his genuine self — forced him to keep going anyway. So what if it was a trap? If he wasn’t fooled by this one, it’d be another one. Might as well get it over with.

Soon Jack found a set of stairs leading up to the dimly lit beach. Out in the darkness the waves smashed onto a surf he couldn’t see.

He sat down on the sand and waited for God to turn up the dimmer switch.

When he saw the first glimmer of pink on the horizon, he wept. He wasn’t exactly sure why. But he knew it had been years since he’d allowed himself to feel so intensely.

A strange thing, bottling up the tears for so long. But it was a matter of survival.

During the trial he had still been in a state of shock. He listened to his attorneys. His attorneys told him how to feel and what to project to the jury. When things didn’t go his way, he clamped down on his emotions. You never want to show weakness behind bars, because that would mean certain death. He kept on clamping down until just yesterday, when he was finally released. Only now could he feel.

He was surprised by the power of his grief. It was almost like a seizure, the way it wracked his body. For a while he thought he might be permanently deranged by grief. He thought he might keep crying forever, that his tears would overwhelm the Pacific and kill a lot of people on the other side of the ocean.

But then the sun finished climbing its way into the sky, and pink turned to blue. Jack clamped it down again and felt the cool breeze off the water, the spray on his face. The Pacific seemed to tell him: Your tears are nothing. I’ve been collecting them from your kind for millennia.

A while later he started back toward the roadhouse. Only then did it occur to Jack that he was wearing skivvies and nothing else.

He also had no idea what time it was. He didn’t own a watch. The one Jack used to wear was still locked up in Evidence somewhere.

On the way back Jack skipped the tunnel and decided to take his chances with the road, which turned out to be the Pacific Coast Highway. Now that he could see properly, there was a way to make it across if you timed the cars making the left turn from Entrada Drive.

Jack didn’t see the roadhouse very clearly last night since they’d arrived so late. But now in the bright sun it revealed itself as bright green and absurd. Plaster dinosaurs and vampires and pirates and mummies and oversize insects lined the roof, as if gathered on the two-story building for a cocktail party. If you gave a five-year-old a shoebox and asked him to design a motel, this was pretty much what they’d come up with.

He didn’t mind it. He couldn’t wait to show his daughter in a few days.

As Jack walked across the parking lot, he could hear the 1940s swing music they piped over the loudspeakers all day. Last night, when he checked in and heard Artie Shaw’s “Begin the Beguine,” he thought that some old dude or young hipster had seized control of the jukebox. But now he was hearing Woody Herman’s “Woodchopper’s Ball.”

Jack smiled. Matilda would appreciate the swing tunes. She was a modern teenager but a lover of all things retro. Maybe he could bring her down here later this week, when she was back from her school trip and his business with Hightower was over.

The bottom floor of Patrick’s Roadhouse was all restaurant; the top floor was a series of “cozy” private rooms. One of them was Jack’s — for the time being anyway. He went around back and walked up the creaky wooden steps. Once inside, he changed into his only set of clothes: a navy-blue suit they gave him at the prison gates.

Cato Hightower’s door was ajar. Jack pushed it open with his fingertips and found the retired cop in his boxers, smoking a joint. Without even looking, Hightower held it out to Jack.

“It’s legal now. Go ahead, enjoy yourself.”

Jack dismissed the idea with a wave. “Never smoked it before. Can’t see a reason to start now.”

“That is exactly the reason to start. This shit is wasted on teenagers! They don’t have fully formed minds, so what’s there to expand? Middle-aged guys like you and me, we’re perfect for the wacky weed.”

Hightower was about as middle-aged as Jack was a member of a boy band. The man’s thinning hair was spread over his skull in a vain attempt at full coverage. This fooled no one.

“No, I’m good.”

“You telling me as a former jazz musician, you never got high? I’m calling bullshit on that. All you guys smoke reefer.”

“Nah. Booze was my thing. As you may recall from the circumstances of my… arrest.”

“Huh,” Hightower said, as if the idea had never occurred to him. “Anyway, got some papers for you to sign, then we can go out and have some fun.”

Hightower’s room was identical to Jack’s but in reverse. Same tiny kitchenette, same narrow bed, same beach art. Only this room had boxes all over the place. The floor was covered in them — overstuffed cardboard boxes with imitation wood grain, all with varying degrees of mildew and yellowing.

Hightower also had great thick lumps of clothes covering his bed, raising the question of where he’d slept last night.

But the real head-scratchers were the three ladies in the room with him. Topless, with flowing hair and stained-glass vaginas.

“What’s the deal with these things?” Jack asked.

“Jack, meet the Weird Sisters. Weird Sisters, this is Jack.”

“They’re weird all right. Where’d they come from?”

“Had ’em commissioned from a metallurgist up in Ojai. The wife, though, doesn’t quite appreciate their beauty. She’s not a fine art person.”

The Sisters were made of wrought iron twisted into curvy, seductive female shapes, detailed down to the pointy metal nipples.

“Can’t imagine why.”

“They were supposed to go on the deck at our place up in Port Hueneme,” Hightower said. “We’re still, ah, negotiating that point.”

“Speaking of… I thought that’s where I’d be crashing until Matilda was back home. Your place in Port Hueneme, I mean. I hate the idea of you shelling out for two rooms down here by the beach.”

“The wife’s juggling a few work deadlines, which means she’s not exactly going to be feeling social. I thought we’d kick back for a few days. What better way to make plans for the future than to relax near the bosom of the Pacific Ocean? Besides, the rooms come with free breakfast. Are you hungry? Because I’m fucking starving.”

Jack gestured to the Weird Sisters. “They gonna join us?”

Hightower stubbed out the joint in a stone ashtray, then plucked an impossibly loud Hawaiian shirt from the pile on his bed and pulled it over his bulky torso.

“Nah. They’re watching their figures.”

Look at that skinny harlot dance! Not a care in the world. Framed by her picture window, as if she were a starlet on a private movie screen.

Back in the old days, the Bear would do his scouting in the daylight hours. So that’s what the man did now. Nobody would give a second glance to an old man out for a leisurely stroll around Los Feliz on a hot and sunny Wednesday afternoon. Nobody in this town gave old men a second glance at all. In some ways Los Feliz had changed a great deal since his first trips here. Rife with petty crime in the late seventies, the neighborhood was more or less gentrified these days.

But this little slut in the window brought him back to that hazy sunbaked decade, when women looked and acted exactly like this. She was a living throwback, wearing shorts that were once denim jeans, the legs cut off so high that he could practically make out the outline of her vulva. She wore nothing else but a bra. It was as if she were performing a private dance for him, or whoever happened to be walking by.

Incredible.

He had been watching her for several days now to learn her routine. She had no husband, several boyfriends (apparently), and no visible means of support. Stealing mail had revealed little in terms of her financial life. No utility bills, and phone bills were a thing of the past. The catalogs were addressed to another — most likely previous — resident.

The man reached into his pocket and felt the handle of the vintage razor blade. He was instantly transported back in time to this very house — a two-story single-bedroom on Rodney Drive.

Back then, the man hadn’t put much thought into it. He’d followed an intoxicated woman here from a dive bar on Hillhurst after failing to work up the courage to talk to her. If that had been the era of smartphones, maybe he would have surreptitiously snapped a photo or three, just to have something to make sure she stayed in his memory bank. She was that fucking beautiful. Instead, he broke inside and terrorized and murdered her and took a souvenir before he left. In this case, the Lady Remington. It had been perched on the edge of the bathroom sink.

12 JULY ’80 — that was what he’d scrawled on the side of the razor’s handle. Followed by LF — RD.

Los Feliz, Rodney Drive.

A potential nightmare if a prosecutor ever got their hands on these souvenirs. But the man was glad he’d saved them all, especially now that it was so important that he remember exactly where and when these objects were acquired. These tangible relics were a direct hotline to the past. They were bringing back the Bear in him.

Now, in the present, the harlot had disappeared from her window. For a moment the man was confused, wondering if he’d just hallucinated her little dance…

But no. There she was, on her porch. She’d dressed herself in something slightly more appropriate. A thin hoodie shrouded her torso, and the denim cutoffs had been replaced by equally immodest running shorts. She stretched in the sun, this way and that, and then hopped off her porch and began walking with great purpose in his direction. This gave him a small jolt. Had she spotted him looking at her? Was she about to confront him?

When the lithe slut jogged straight past him, the man knew his worry was for nothing. She paid no attention, didn’t even make eye. . .