Chapter 7

Daryl Garcia finished the evening edition of the Los Angeles Times with Rachael Pearce's two-part retrospective story of the Eastside Butcher and folded it up, placing it on the coffee table. He leaned back on the worn sofa in his living room. It was a damn good piece of investigative journalism. He had been worried that her exposé on the murder series and how the LAPD was handling it would be a blow to the department and hinder the investigation somehow. If anything, the article had helped them. Since publication of Part One yesterday, the department had been flooded with calls by people with tips. By this afternoon Parker Center had received almost four hundred tips from citizens ranging from people voicing suspicion of a neighbor or loved one, to people calling to voice concern over strange goings-on in their neighborhood. A few crackpots even called to confess to the murders but were quickly eliminated when they couldn't provide intimate details of the emasculations and post mortem sexual abuse performed on the corpses. They would probably be getting more false confessions in the weeks and months to come. Daryl reached for a glass of beer he had poured for himself upon returning home and drained the glass dry. He sighed again. It had been a long day and he was very tired.

He heard the click of toenails on the linoleum floor and looked up. A white and tan pit bull terrier was standing in the doorway, wagging its tail so hard that the animal's hindquarters were swishing back and forth. Daryl broke into a grin. “How ya doin', Petey?

Have a nice nap?"

The dog barked happily and trotted over to Daryl. He set the paper aside as the dog practically leaped into his lap and began smothering his face in dog kisses, wagging his tail harder. Daryl laughed, patting and rubbing the dog's back. “Yes, I love you too, you big mutt. Boy, are you happy today."

Petey grabbed Daryl's right hand gently in its jaws and tugged slightly. Daryl knew what the dog wanted. “Okay, but just for a little while. I've still got the paper to read, okay?"

He got to his feet and followed the happily bouncing dog through the living room and out to the back patio. He grinned. The few people he'd had over at the house were always amazed at how he allowed the pit bull to clamp those bone-crunching jaws over his wrist like that. Once most people spent a few minutes with Petey they realized he shattered all stereotypes of the breed.

Once they hit the back patio, Petey took off running. Daryl reached down for a tennis ball that had been sewn to an old rag. He threw the ball and Petey jumped up and caught it. The dog eyed Daryl, tail wagging, backing up towards the fence. Come get me, his eyes seemed to say. Daryl laughed and lunged for Petey, who feinted to his right and ran around him. “You little snot!” Petey veered closer, on purpose it always seemed, and Daryl grabbed the rag and pulled. Petey growled and shook his head and the two of them spent the next thirty minutes playing like this. It was Petey's favorite game: the human throws the ball, the dog runs after it, gets it, and runs away with the ball. Oh, but he has to let the human get the ball to make the human feel good about himself. Once the human got the ball, though, the dog had to pretend to be big and tough and engage the human in another game—tug of war. What dog didn't enjoy a game of tug of war with a human over some object?

As Daryl played with Petey, his mind tracked on how the pit bull came into his possession. He had obtained Petey when the dog had been only six weeks old. While performing a raid on a gang house in South Central Los Angeles, they had discovered a make-shift kennel in the backyard and a circular area of the yard that had been used for pit fighting. Three adult female dogs and one male were confiscated, along with twelve younger dogs and puppies. Most of the dogs were in bad shape with obvious wounds from fights. It had sickened Daryl and he remembered being tempted to kick holy hell out of the homeowner, a fifty-one-year-old long-time gang member who freely admitted to breeding the dogs for pit fighting. If it had been up to him, he would have forced a pit fight between the homeowner and one of his loser gang buddies—one to the death the way they forced it on these poor animals.

Among the twelve younger pit bull dogs and puppies was a six week old quivering puppy that Daryl had fallen in love with the minute he laid eyes on the critter.

Animal Control Officers were already on the scene doing their best to round up the animals, and Daryl had picked up the quivering puppy and looked him in the face.

Looking at that little puppy had reminded him of one of his favorite childhood shows The Little Rascals. The dog on that show was a pit bull and its name had been Petey. This puppy looked exactly like a miniature version of the dog that he had grown up with on that childhood show. He had stroked the dog's fur and the puppy licked his fingers, making friends. Daryl had smiled at the dog. “Nobody's ever going to hurt you ever again, little guy. Never."

He had taken Petey home with him that day, gotten him neutered, and invested in a professional dog trainer. And unlike those who breed pit bulls to fight, he had left the Petey's ears uncropped and his tail intact. He had just gotten divorced a few months before from his second wife and he felt that he needed a companion. Petey had become that companion, and as the dog grew up they had become quite close. Petey grew to be a loyal, obedient, gentle, and very intelligent animal. So intelligent, in fact, that Daryl had to spell certain words in the dog's presence lest the animal go into a frenzy if he uttered the words car or ride. Petey loved riding in the car.

“That's it, boy. I'm beat.” Daryl held the ball up and Petey leaped around the yard, as if begging one more, just one more time. Pleeeaaassseeee!

“No more, guy. Really, I'm tired okay?” Daryl put the saliva soaked ball in the basket he had set by the patio and opened the sliding glass door. Petey stopped leaping in the air and trotted over, content that he had still gotten a good game out of his master.

Daryl let them back in the house, closed and locked the patio door. Petey padded into the kitchen and Daryl heard the animal slurp water out of his bowl. Daryl sat back down on the sofa, feeling tired. Not much else on the agenda tonight except read the paper and kick back. He picked up the paper, found his place, and continued reading.

Rachael Pearce's two part story had started with a detailed history of the murder series, beginning with the discovery of Lorenzo Cardena and Louis “Goofy” Hernandez in September of last year. She delved into all the theories of both murders and drew a strong parallel that they were related to the murder of an unidentified woman washed ashore in Newport Beach a year previously, which Daryl had told her privately was no doubt the work of the same killer. Then she quickly went through the rest of the murders, to Gloria Aldrete, Rick Perez, the unidentified man found in the San Gabriel Mountains, and the most recent victim found in the LA River. She also drew a strong correlation to a lone African American victim killed in 1989 and an unidentified victim, whose nude decapitated body was found in a railroad boxcar in Riverside County this past June. Nine bodies all together. In addition, she also interviewed the parents and loved ones of the murder victims, getting their reaction to the murders, their feelings about losing a loved one to such a heinous crime. As usual, many of them expressed the same sentiments against the Los Angeles Police Department: “The police don't do enough to protect us,”

or “the police don't care about the people who live in these neighborhoods.” She noted all their reactions, positive and negative, then continued on. And as part one of the article wound down, she was able to get the investigators reaction to the murder series. One of the detectives, a guy named Tony Butler, who was assisting in the investigation, was quoted as saying: “Serial killers are the worst because you never know when they will strike, much less who they could be. Thankfully the FBI is able to profile them, which gives us some help. But for the most part they're very difficult to catch."

She had quoted Daryl as well. Daryl read his quotes three times as he scanned both parts of the article. He had been quoted once before in the LA Times during his investigation into a spate of gang killings, and hadn't given the coverage much attention.

But this piece of journalism was different. It was written by Rachael Pearce, a journalist he not only admired, but was finding difficult to stop thinking about on a personal level.

Part two of her story delved on a deeper level. It was this piece that focused more on the social background of the murder series. The fact that all but two of the victims were believed to have ties to the same geographical area, and had ties to street gangs, was a thread that deserved exploring. The article started at the hub of the East Los Angeles barrio, the recreation center where many of the area kids hung out and played basketball or football. One of the kids she spoke to, when asked if the Eastside Butcher scared him, shrugged and said: “Nah. He only cuts up the gang bangers and their homies."

It was this quote which she used as a focal point of her piece: why was it that the area gang bangers and their associates were targets of this serial killer? To get the answer she had talked not only to the gang members under the Eight-first Street bridge, who were represented accordingly with three color photos that Lance had taken that day, but also to the gang counselor at Our Lady of Guadalupe, Danny Hernandez. She had also talked to a couple of probation officers and beat cops. And most of what she got as quotes was always the same: some felt that the murders were the work of several different people, perhaps different gangs; others felt that maybe the killer lived in the area, a sentiment shared by members of law enforcement. In exploring this issue, she had pointed out that it was very feasible that the killer resided in the area. After all, how else could he manage to gain access to hardcore gang members and their associates and roam the area for victims and dumping sites without being noticed? Therefore it had to be somebody who wouldn't look out of place in the area.

One thing that hadn't made it into the article, that Rachael mentioned to Daryl casually the night after their adventure under the bridge, was the question of whether the killer might harbor some personal grudge against those he killed. “How do you mean?”

Daryl had asked.

Rachael had called to thank him once again for pulling strings to get that interview with the gang members. Daryl had been so taken with her phone call that her question at first didn't register. “I mean,” Rachael had continued. “It's no surprise that most people could really care less that most of the victims of this particular serial killer are gang members. People hate them; they could care less if they die. Suppose whoever is doing this is sort of playing God. Ridding the world of what he sees as a cancer to society."

Daryl had mulled it over, but deep down he knew she had nailed it on the head.

He didn't want to admit it to Rachael, or any of the other cops in the department, but part of him secretly admired this guy. If it wasn't for his fear that innocent people might get killed in a retaliation shooting sparked by the Butcher's work, Daryl would be all for letting the killer behead gang members for as long as possible. “You may be on to something."

“Of course the fact that one of the victims was a prostitute and the other two had no ties to gangs blows that theory out of the water,” she had said. “But I just can't help thinking that even if you add those elements in it make sense. The prostitute had ties to one of the gangs in the area, and it's believed that the woman found at Newport Beach resembled a missing person from the area who also had ties with the Los Compadres gang."

“Let's just suppose this theory is correct,” Daryl had said, letting the idea run with him. “What could it mean to the killer? Obviously this person is of reasonable intelligence, since most serial killers are. There are over one hundred thousand gang members in Los Angeles County alone; what makes whoever is doing this think that killing a few here and there is going to make a big difference?"

“It makes a big difference to him,” Rachael had said. “In his mind it makes a huge difference. Maybe something happened to him that was traumatic, something involving gangs in general. Maybe his motivations are religious and he sees himself as the Judgmental Hand of God. A lot of serial killers work on their own paranoid delusions that are very similar. What may not make sense to most of us regarding their crimes makes perfect sense to them."

Daryl had winced inwardly when she mentioned that perhaps something traumatic happened to the killer that involved gangs. His mind tracked briefly on what he had gone through with Shirley being killed, and then he quickly turned it off. He couldn't go down that road now. Time to get back to the problem at hand, and the fact of the matter was Daryl knew Rachael was right. Ted Bundy's victims were overwhelmingly Caucasian women with brunette hair parted in the middle and worn long. It turned out that Bundy had a personal fetish for women with that particular hair-style and color. Jeffrey Dahmer's victims were overwhelmingly African-American for a particular reason as well. Dahmer also chose African-American males over Caucasians because he guessed that law enforcement wouldn't be so quick to investigate when black males from the inner city disappeared. Could it be that the Eastside Butcher was choosing his victims for the same reason?

Daryl had mentioned this to Rachael. “This guy could be choosing gang members and people associated with them because he thinks that the investigations into their deaths won't be taken so far. And it's true; gang murders usually aren't investigated very thoroughly. It's only when the murder involves a victim that had no gang ties, say a person caught in gang crossfire or something, that the investigation is taken more seriously. But in reality? For the most part we simply don't have the time to thoroughly investigate every gang-related murder. Oh, and another thing, Rachael?"

“Yes?"

“That was off the record."

Now as he sat in his living room, the remnants of the conversation casting a warm glow, he folded the newspaper back up and filed it into the wooden magazine rack beside the sofa. He was going to keep this particular edition of the Los Angeles Times. Not only because Rachael wrote the feature story, but because of his own burgeoning interest in the case at hand.

He noticed the now empty mug of beer on the arm of the sofa. Rising, he picked up the mug and headed for the kitchen for a refill. Petey was lying on his favorite spot on the kitchen floor—near the refrigerator—and he lifted his head and smiled a doggy smile at Daryl. “Hey dog face,” Daryl said. Petey's tail wriggled in happiness. Daryl searched the pantry for a bag of tortilla chips—he had had a big lunch earlier and wasn't very hungry for dinner, but nonetheless he had the urge to nibble—and returned to the sofa with the chips and a fresh mug of beer. He turned on the Minolta wide screen TV with the remote and settled in for an hour of channel surfing, letting his mind drift.

Mostly he thought of the case. And Rachael. He wanted to go out with her badly.

But he was afraid.

What if we go out and really hit it off? What if we wind up back at my place or hers and in bed and it happens?

What he was afraid of letting happen was falling in love with Rachael. When he had fallen in love with Diane Sterling, his second wife, he had the same problem. He was never able to let go of the past hurt he had experienced when Shirley and their unborn baby had been killed. Of course he didn't know this at the time; when he met, dated, and married Diane, he was practically married to his work as a cop. Diving into the police academy and then his work as a law enforcement officer had been part of his method of dealing with the loss of Shirley and their unborn child.

Dealing with the aftermath of Shirley's death had been very hard. For one, her personal effects were all over the two-bedroom apartment they'd shared. Shirley had been the decorator, and she had had a ton of clothes in the closet that he had not been able to bring himself to touch for close to two years. For the first year and a half he was numb to the fact that she was really gone. He would sit in the apartment after getting home from work, drink a beer, and look around the apartment, remembering every piece of furniture, every knick-knack that she had picked out. It all brought back memories of her. Clearing the apartment of her stuff would feel like getting rid of her and he couldn't do that, not so soon after the funeral. But the days stretched into weeks, the weeks into months, and before he knew it almost two years had passed and he found himself in their bedroom going through her side of the closet, pulling dresses out and putting them in plastic green garbage bags to take to her parents. He had worked in a blind stupor that day, packing her clothes from the closets and dressers, boxing up her books and the knick-knacks she liked to decorate the entertainment center with. He had collected her high school yearbooks and put them in a box. Then he had driven them over to her parents and told them that they could have the items if they wanted them. They hadn't questioned his reasons. They had simply accepted them.

The hardest part was cleaning out the second bedroom. He did that two months after Shirley's murder. Daryl had been slowly converting it into a nursery in the months prior to Shirley's death. Dismantling the crib, taking down the baby things Shirley had put up, had been emotionally draining. But he'd done it. It had been the first thing he'd done because seeing the baby stuff in there just made him more angry and grief stricken.

Daryl sat back in his chair and mused on the past twelve years. As much as he'd tried to erase the physical remnants of Shirley from his life, he still stumbled over some of her belongings. Occasionally he came across a favorite record album of hers that had been salted into their collection, or a favorite book. One time he had found a notebook of hers in a desk drawer that she used to keep notes in. Some of the picture frames he still had were those that she originally bought. The sofa he had was the one she picked out when they had first gotten married. The dishes he used had been given to them by Shirley's parents. He supposed he would never be totally rid of the physical memory of her, but that was okay. He didn't want her to be totally absent from his life; he needed to hold on to a few things to keep her close to his memory and his heart.

He finally moved out of the apartment three years after she died. He moved to a bigger apartment in Torrance. When he and Diana got married, they rented a house in Silverlake. By the time they got divorced, Daryl had saved up a pretty healthy nest egg.

Thankfully divorce proceedings had been civil; neither side had gone for the throat, and Daryl got to keep his retirement package and his savings. Diana kept the house they were renting and Daryl moved into an apartment in Studio City. Two years later he bought a home in Burbank.

He didn't date for a long time after Shirley was killed. He didn't want to see other women: Shirley had been his life. He had loved her more than life itself. After the tragedy, he pushed back returning to school to complete his Master's degree. He took a job in a warehouse and immersed himself in the physically exhausting work. Because it was physical work, it allowed him time to think. And the only thing he could think about during his work day was how Shirley and their unborn child had been murdered. And the more he thought about it, the angrier he got.

The gang members responsible for Shirley's murder had criminal records a mile long. One of them had served time for second degree murder and been released after having served five years of a fifteen year sentence. Five years. What a joke.

It was this anger that fueled his decision to enter the police academy. It took him six months to muster up the nerve and prepare for it. He passed the written examinations with flying colors and he aced the psychological exams—hell, he lied on a lot of questions just so he could get his foot in the door. He knew that if he related that he had once been the victim of a violent crime that he would be denied. So he hadn't even mentioned it.

By the time he graduated from the police academy a year later, it had been two years since he had been with a woman. His first sexual experience after Shirley's murder had been with a graduate student in her apartment one drunken summer night. He'd met her at a nightclub and they wound up at her place. If he hadn't been intoxicated he probably wouldn't have gone through with the act. But because he was drunk he was able to put the image of Shirley out of his mind as he and the woman screwed with lustful abandon. What ruined it was afterward, when she told him she loved him.

She had been a very nice girl; he still remembered her name. Rita Something. Rita had been very nice, very sweet, but he couldn't deal with her being in love with him. He avoided her in the days following their sexual encounter, didn't return her phone calls, and she got the message. Word floated back to him through a mutual acquaintance that she thought he was the worst asshole she had ever met. The barb hadn't even stung. He was sorry he had avoided her following their one-night stand, but when she had told him she loved him that brought him back to his relationship with Shirley and the vows they'd made to each other: that they would always love and cherish each other, that they would never leave each other, that they would never cheat on each other. Daryl had still felt committed to Shirley even though by this time she was two years in her grave. To him, they had never broken up. Going out with another woman, having another woman tell him she loved him, felt like he was throwing everything he'd ever felt for Shirley into the toilet.

Daryl sipped his beer, randomly scanning channels. He watched the History channel: this evening's segment was on Theodore Roosevelt. He watched the various segments on Roosevelt's life in a blind stupor, drinking sullenly as the past fast-forwarded quickly to the present.

He didn't start steadily dating until he was actually on the force. By this time he had already entered therapy at the suggestion of a priest he knew at the church he attended, St. Mary's in Pasadena. With the help of counseling, he was able to put his life with Shirley in perspective; it was better to have loved than to not have loved at all; in the brief time Shirley was alive he had provided joy in her life, the best gift a loved one can give to another human being; and that old standby—you will love again.

And he had. In the next three years, before he met Diana, he dated a succession of women. He had enjoyed their company, was able to perform sexually with them with only a minimum of thinking about Shirley. He found that he had to completely forget about Shirley if he was to resume a normal life. And for awhile he had. When he was seeing those other women Shirley never once entered his thoughts. It wasn't until the eve of his wedding to Diana that he was sitting alone in his apartment, the nervous jitters of the following day's wedding mass fluttering through his stomach, that Shirley's face came to him as his mind played a quick movie of his life with her. He lost it. He buried his face in his hands and cried until the tears ran dry.

After that, he couldn't help but think of his long lost love and the child they had created together whenever he made love to Diana. Diana noticed the sudden change, asked him what was bothering him, and he made the mistake of telling her. She almost left him then, but she could clearly see that this was troubling him. Of course he had told her about the tragic incident with his wife and she had appeared sympathetic. Now she was just getting irritated at his inability to get over it.

By this time he was well into his career as a law enforcement officer. He had quickly climbed the ranks to detective, and was assigned to the anti-gang CRASH unit.

And when he was able to, when he knew he could get away with it, Daryl poured his frustrations and hatred out on the gang members he arrested. He did whatever he could to keep the vermin off the streets; even if it meant planting evidence and lying on the witness stand to do it.

A year after the marriage Diana suggested he seek counseling, which he probably should have sought after Shirley's death but never did. He followed Diana's advice and sought therapy. The problems between them got worse.

To escape from the pressures his problems were causing, he buried himself more in his work. Diana, likewise, became more embroiled in her job as a financial auditor.

She also started an affair with a co-worker that Daryl didn't find out about until they separated. Surprisingly, he wasn't angry with her over it. He didn't blame her. He had abandoned her emotionally.

Before their marriage ended Daryl renounced his Catholic faith. In the years since he was married his belief in the Catholic structure of salvation, heaven and hell, God and Satan, were waning. And in the last year of his marriage they crumbled completely. Part of it had to do with the reading material he dived into the more he got into his job as a homicide detective. He began to read a lot of psychology: Freud, Jung, as well as the major philosophers. He had grown especially fond of Nietchze. He slowly began to suspect that everything he had been taught by the Catholic Church, everything he had been led to believe in, was all a delusional lie. He had been duped. Because if there was a God, He wouldn't have taken Shirley away from him so cruelly. If there was a God there wouldn't be so much human suffering. There wouldn't be so much hunger, so much poverty, so much hopelessness. He saw it himself on the streets when he went to work his beat. When he saw the viciousness of human nature—the drunks that drove and killed, the gang members that fired indiscriminately into a crowd, killing innocent people; the father who beat his six-month-old baby to death because its crying bothered him—he thought that if mankind was truly God's crowning achievement than He must be seriously flawed. And because He had seen fit to take Shirley and their child away from him was only the icing on the cake.

So he had renounced his Catholic faith. He had trashed the idol of the Virgin Mary he had received after taking First Communion and likewise disposed of an old wooden crucifix with a striking life-like image of Christ pinned to it. He had ripped the pages of the only Bible in the house and burned them in the kitchen sink. Then he had gone through the house and destroyed everything relating to his Catholic upbringing—the nativity scene his parents had given him when he was eighteen; the painting of the Blessed Mother, hands clasped together in prayer, that Diana's aunt had given them as a wedding present.

But the damage was too far gone. Diana divorced him. He tried to reconcile with her, but she wouldn't even attempt it. She had tried to help him, tried to work with him for three years. She had had enough.

Daryl glanced at the clock that sat on the bookshelf on his right. It was only eight-thirty. The night was still young.

He walked to the kitchen and poured himself another beer.

And spent the rest of the evening drinking, watching TV, and thinking about Rachael Pearce and wondering if he'd ever find love again.

Rachael Pearce was peddling at a steady forty-five miles per hour on the lifecycle when Daryl Garcia came into her mind without warning.

Her evening until then had been spent in virtual “routine mode"—out of the office at 5:00, home by 6:00, a quick dinner of pasta and chicken and then up in her office by 7:00 to work on her notes for the book she had thought of a few days before. The Eastside Butcher piece she had written for the Los Angeles Times had inspired her to begin keeping a working diary of the case for a possible book. She had always wanted to write a true-crime book but had never found a particular case that interested her despite all her years of journalism. She had come close a few times; five years ago she had an idea to do a book on the plight of child sex offenders after running a two-part story in the paper, but after three days of research the subject had depressed the hell out of her. The thought of delving further into the minds of ten-year-old boys who took perverse pleasure in raping four-year-old girls had been so alien, so horrifying, that she had abandoned the project. It was simply too disturbing for her.

And the Eastside Butcher case isn't? She thought to herself as she pedaled away.

After all, you're dealing with the same kind of sickness, only the perpetrators and victims are adults. For all you know our anonymous butcher might have been very much like that lost, sick, nine-year-old boy you interviewed for that aborted book that got his jollies by sticking pins in little girls.

She shuddered at the thought. And made a note to mention that correlation in this evening's writings.

After she had written for an hour or so, she headed straight to the third bedroom of the two-story condo where she kept her workout equipment. In this room, the smallest of the three bedrooms, she kept a stair master, a lifecycle, and a multi-purpose weight machine. A small stereo system was erected in the corner of the room. She liked to work out a minimum of forty-five minutes every evening, minus weekends.

Iron Maiden's Killers was blasting out of the CD player. She loved working out to heavy metal music. The fast beat, the heavy drumming and bass lines, the loud guitar riffs, all seemed to lend an energy which created the perfect atmosphere for working out.

It was muscle music, providing perfect adrenaline spurts for her evening work-outs. And to think she thought she would grow out of listening to the stuff when she graduated from high school. As it turned out she wound up buying the latest Metallica CD's the week they were released.

The CD's title track was beginning its thunderous assault. The song's lyrics, which were ironically about a serial killer stalking the London tubes, made her think about the Butcher case, and then Daryl. She had called him the night after the interview with the gang members under the Eight-first Street bridge and they had wound up talking for twenty minutes. They had talked about the case for awhile, trading their different theories, and Rachael found that she really liked Daryl. He had wit, a sharp intellect, and a genuine, caring personality. And he had a great sense of humor. Their conversation on the Eastside Butcher led to comparing him to other serial killers, and before she knew it he was cracking jokes in the same vein Victor and Joker from Los Compadres had a few days ago under the bridge. “Why wouldn't you want to play poker with Jeffrey Dahmer?

He might come up with a good hand.” Despite the crude nature of the joke, she found herself laughing.

There were other things she was beginning to like about Daryl as the days went by. In addition to being very handsome he was nice and he listened to her. She could tell he was attracted to her, but unlike most men, when he talked to her he talked to her; his eyes remained focused on hers, never straying to other parts of her body. Most men kept their eyes glued to her breasts during conversations. Not Daryl. Both times they had been together he had paid attention to her as a person, not as a pair of tits. Another thing that was nice about Daryl was that he was closer to her own height of six feet tall. Daryl was a tad shorter, but that was okay. With the exception of her ex-husband, all the men she had ever dated or slept with had been shorter than she, in one case by a full eleven inches.

The thought of her ex-husband created a black cloud and she quickly banished it.

It was no good to dwell on that crap. She had been young and stupid when she married Bernie Jackson, who had been an up-and-coming basketball player for the UCLA Bruins when she was a student. She married him upon completing her Master's degree. The man that she dated—who was kind, considerate, sweet, incredibly sexy and a great lover—

turned from Dr. Jekyl to Mr. Hyde shortly after they said “I do". No sooner had they returned home from their honeymoon in the Caribbean than he was chasing other women, running up their credit cards on expensive toys, sticking most of the salary he made as an assistant sportscaster on a small television station up his nose, and using her as a verbal punching bag for his frequent and unpredictable outbursts.

She filed for divorce the day after he graduated from using her as a verbal punching bag to a physical one.

But through it all, she stayed with him. For two years. She killed herself over it the two years following the divorce, continually asking herself why she could have been so stupid to have stayed with him for so long. But the simple truth of the matter was that she loved him. Or thought she'd loved him. She had loved him, and by loving him she had hoped that staying with him through whatever hard times he was going through would see him—would see them—through this terrible, rocky time.

It hadn't worked. The Mr. Hyde part of Bernie Jackson had been a part of his personality. He had merely kept it well hidden during their initial courtship.

Either that or I was too enamoured to notice, she thought, pedaling furiously. The sweat that had built up like a sheen over her shoulder blades and down the small of her back spread to her arm pits, her forearms, her neck and throat, built up further like a second skin. It dripped down her forehead. She had another quarter of a mile by the lifecycle's odometer. There was no reason to beat herself up for past mistakes now. She had gone past them. She had survived. And perhaps that was really the best revenge of all.

Because let's face it, she thought. No sooner did our relationship start hitting the rocks then I dived into my work at the paper to escape the pressures. And it was when I put myself into my work that I started succeeding at what I really wanted to do, which is investigative journalism. So my marriage fucked up my credit rating and knocked me down a few levels on the ladder of love. Big deal. I got something out of it. My self esteem. And professional recognition.

She gladly kissed a healthy good riddance to Bernie Jackson and her marriage. It had been six years since they split up. She hadn't seen him since. Nor did she care or wonder about him.

For a long time she didn't date. She felt she had to heal from the destructive nature of her marriage and repair the wounds, and the only way she knew how to do that was to get back into the martial arts training she had studied briefly when she was in college.

That, and her usual workout, was what brought her back into shape, and once she achieved brown belt status in Kung Fu, her attitude began to change. She took on a healthy attitude at work and dived into it with a new found zeal. Two years later when she was recognized as a major journalist on the Time's staff, she found herself at a nightclub one night after work with a couple of old friends. They had promised to get together for Friday night happy hour drinks and she had obliged them. It wasn't until she was on the dance floor moving to the beat of Gloria Estefan with an incredibly handsome Latino man who had asked her to dance, that she realize that she was completely over the hurt and anger of her broken marriage. And that she was ready to date again.

She had taken the Latino man home with her that night and it had been one of the best fucks she'd ever had. When he found out she wasn't interested in jumping into a relationship, he seemed more than eager to continue the relationship on a purely carnal level. They saw each other sexually off and on over the next several months. It was what she felt she needed.

Rachael slowed down her pedaling, nearing completion of her mileage. Since her affair with Robert Sanchez, she had dated a few other guys, bedding exactly three. She felt no incredible spark of attraction from these men other than the purely physical. She had nothing in common with any of them. In conversation she found most of them downright dull.

But Daryl Garcia was different. She found him both intellectually stimulating, attractive, kind-hearted and good-natured. She tried to remember the last time she had ever met a man who possessed those qualities whom she had gone completely ga-ga over, and found that she hadn't. She had thought that Bernie Jackson had been intelligent, but he had merely used his wit and charm to create the illusion that he was. His true nature had showed itself when they got married. Rachael got the impression that Daryl Garcia wasn't like that; what she saw now in Daryl was exactly the kind of man he was. He was a very straightforward, no bullshit kind of guy.

She stopped pedaling and climbed off the lifecycle, rubbing a sweaty forearm over her brow. She reached for a towel draped over the weight machine and wiped the sweat from her face. She sat down on the weight machine bench and took her shoes and socks off slowly. A plan was formulating in her mind; she could sense that Daryl was interested in her, and she would have thought by now that he would have asked her out. She was used to men asking her out who displayed even half the interest Daryl showed her. Maybe he was shy. If that was the case it could take him forever to muster the nerve. The next time they spoke she was going to ask him out.

She thought about that for a moment, her breathing slowing down. She smiled to herself. She liked that idea just fine. What could it hurt in asking him out? A night on the town in each other's company would give her the opportunity to get to know him better.

And if a romantic relationship didn't blossom from it, maybe they would wind up friends.

That surely wasn't too much to ask for.

After showering and putting on a nightgown, she crawled into bed thinking of Daryl Garcia.