SUMMER of FEAR Read Online Free PDF

of the Los Angeles Times. From my occasional social and professional contact with Erik, I know that Amber
had managed to keep him immersed in the quagmire of her financial affairs as
surely as she had managed keep me immersed in the swamp of my own desire. It
seemed to me that Wald had gotten the better terms.
    Erik Wald had never been one of my favorite people, though I was a
distinct minority in this matter. As do most people in semipublic life, Erik
groomed an outward persona that, like the copper casing around the softer lead
of a bullet, protected his passage through the perils of media coverage, county
politics, and—in Erik's somewhat unique case—the often mercurial world of
academia.
    He was a professor of criminology at the local state university. He had
been tenured twelve years ago, at the age of thirty-one, shortly after applying
the principles of his dissertation, "Aspiring to Evil: Transference
Identification in the Violent Felon," to help successfully discover the
identity of a rapist who had claimed eight victims in the north part of our
county in six short months. The gist of Wald's paper was that because certain
paranoid types are subject to delusions of grandeur (a fact), these persecuted
"geniuses" could act out scenarios in which they willfully play a
role totally opposed to the higher behaviors approved by society. In effect,
Wald argued, they were providing their own "evil" at which to gaze in
their daily lives, while at the same time satisfying their inner needs for
superiority/persecution.
    What it all boiled down to, he said, was a well-read, middle-class
suspect of sterling reputation (possibly a churchgoer) who had aspired to a
higher station in life than he had achieved, likely because of some profound
unsuitably in his character, or perhaps even physiognomy. All eight of the
women had been elderly, some enfeebled. While the police and sheriff combined
forces to round up the usual suspects, Wald fed his thesis to an ambitious
black Sheriff's Department lieutenant named Daniel Winters, who linked two of
the victims to a Meals-on-Wheels service provided by a church located in the
north county. An investigation of the volunteer drivers revealed nothing, but
Wald pressed Winters deeper into the congregation, to find that one of the
actual Meals-on-Wheels cooks fit the profile rather neatly. He was thirty-four
years old, a bachelor with a law degree from a Catholic (!) university who had
failed the California bar three times and seemingly retreated to a quiet of
Christian service and paralegal work. He lived with his grandmother, who, it
turned out, was a friend of three of the other victims. Winters's closing net
ended in a stakeout and tail done after hours and without pay, which resulted
in observing suspect—one Cary Clough—driving early one morning to a quiet
suburban street, where he sat in his car until daybreak. The same afternoon,
Winters established that eighty-two-year-Madeline Stewart lived alone in the
house outside which Clough had parked. Madeline was a recent sign-up for the
Meals-on-Wheels program. The following night, Winters waited for Clough in an
unmarked station wagon, and when Clough approached the house in the dark
morning hours, Winters shook him do for suspicious behavior. Winters's yield
was a red ski cap and a pair of latex gloves. He made the collar, took Clough
downtown, and after some exemplary work by the crime lab, matched not only
fibers from the cap to those found on four of the victims but Clough's teeth
prints to those left behind in a decorative wooden apple that Clough had
mistakenly tried to eat after raping his third victim!
    This story, such a resonant marriage of the biblical a scientific, made
great headlines, television fodder, even a "60 Minutes" segment.
Wald's entry into the public eye was swift and certain. The state university
tenured him a year later. Dan Winters was bumped up to the rank of captain, the
youngest one in county history, and the