Tom walked Garcia to the front door.

‘Detective,’ he called as Garcia stepped on to the footpath that took him across the property’s front lawn.

Garcia turned around to face him.

‘You will catch the psycho who did that to Sharon, won’t you? Please tell me you will.’ His eyes glassed over one more time as he waited for Garcia’s reply.

Garcia nodded once. ‘Yes, we will catch him.’

As he began walking toward his car, Garcia hoped that his words had come out with a lot more conviction than he’d felt.

Forty-Seven

Alison Atkins had arrived in LA twelve years ago, at the tender age of sixteen. Back then she didn’t call herself Alison. Her real name was Kelly, Kelly Decker, but she swore that she would never use that name again. She could never use that name again. For her own safety.

Like so many before her, Alison’s suitcase was fairly empty of clothes, but overflowing with dreams and hopes. But unlike most who came to the City of Angels, her dreams and hopes weren’t for stardom, or a career in Hollywood or in the music business. All she really wanted was a better life. A normal life. And any life would be better than the one she had left behind in Summerdale, Alabama – population less than a thousand people.

Alison was an only child, born into a strict Jehovah’s Witness family. Her father was a storeowner. Due to complications, and the fact that Jehovah’s Witnesses aren’t allowed to receive blood, her mother had passed away while giving birth to her. Her father blamed the baby and not the stubbornness of his own faith for his wife’s death. That blame was made overly clear to Alison throughout her childhood and young teenage years.

With an iron fist, her father demanded that Alison follow the rules of his chosen religion to the letter. She was not allowed to associate herself with a worldly person – one who is not a Jehovah’s Witness. She also wasn’t allowed to salute the flag of her country, recite the pledge of allegiance, stand for or sing the national anthem or vote. Alison had also never celebrated a single one of her birthdays. Her father’s chosen religion forbade her to do so. But the date had never really gone unnoticed, as her father would always spank Alison’s naked back with birch branches until her skin was raw. He then would lock her inside a dark room with no food or water for twenty-four hours, so she could reflect on what her coming into this world really meant – a dark day full of suffering and pain.

Despite being an extremely religious man, Alison’s father was a vicious brute who used physical force to impose his ways. Alison couldn’t remember a single day, while living under his roof, where he hadn’t either yelled at her and made her feel like she had been a mistake, or slapped her across the face at least once. And those were the good days. Some of the beatings and castigations she received were so severe she would pass out. But he was also very skilled in his brutality – no deep skin rupture, and no broken bones ever.

Alison’s father remarried when she was only three years old and her stepmother was just as cruel as he was. She knew of all the beatings; in fact, she administered many of them herself and was present throughout most of the others, always cheering her husband on.

When Alison turned fourteen, her father told her that she was now a fertile woman and therefore was ‘ripe’ to bear children of her own. And ‘ripe’ had been the exact word he’d used.

One night, Alison overheard her father telling her stepmother that he had already chosen the man whom Alison would marry – the eighteen-year-old son of a fellow Jehovah’s Witness family from Tennessee they had met a year earlier. Those words had filled Alison with more dread than any of the beatings she had ever received. She promised herself that she would rather die than marry into her family’s faith.

Alison was no thief, but as desperate panic took over she saw no other way out. A few days after overhearing their conversation, as her father and stepmother slept, she grabbed half of the earnings that her father’s store had taken over the past few days and broke out of the house. Overnight, Alison jogged for seventeen miles, non-stop, until she got to the city of Fairhope, where she bought a one-way bus ticket to the City of Angels.

She sat on that bus for forty-eight hours and 2030 miles, planning the start of her new life. That was when she came up with the name Alison Atkins. Both names, first and family, came from outdoor billboards she saw during the two-day trip. The first was advertising the new album from some singer called Alison Krauss. She had never heard of her, but she loved that name and how beautiful the singer looked. A decision was made in just a few seconds. Kelly had all of a sudden become Alison. She also promised herself that she would find out what Alison Krauss’s music sounded like.

Alison saw the second billboard during a scheduled stop. This one was advertising some sort of diet plan. Alison had already planned on a complete change in the way she looked, behaved and sounded – hair color, hairstyle, body shape, accent, posture, the way she walked, everything she could change about her old self, she would. Her first thought upon seeing the billboard was that maybe she should give that Atkins Diet a try. Her second thought was: I like the sound of the name Atkins. A moment later, she began repeating the name out loud – Alison Atkins, Alison Atkins, Alison Atkins. She liked it . . . very much.

Yes, her new name brought a smile to her face. To her, it sounded like a new beginning. Maybe starting over wouldn’t be so difficult after all.

She was wrong.

Life in Los Angeles proved to be a lot harder than Alison had anticipated. Once she finally got there, she found a cheap room on the south side of the city. The landlord asked for no identification, which suited Alison just fine, but finding a job with no proof of ID didn’t turn out to be quite as easy, especially for someone who looked so young. With just about everything in LA a lot more expensive than back in Summerdale, the little money she had with her ran out a lot faster than she had expected.

The landlord, a short and bald man with dirty nails and weather-beaten skin, who always smelled of stale sweat and fried chicken, told Alison that he would cut her a deal. If she was nice to him, he would be nice to her, and she could stay without having to worry about paying rent. Alison, in her naivety, thought that the landlord was really trying to help her, and when he asked her to come to his apartment, she truly believed that she would probably clean his room and kitchen for him, or perhaps cook his meals.

The landlord was as streetwise as they came. He knew that a place like his, in a city like Los Angeles, attracted a particular crowd. It had always done, and he’d seen plenty of young girls and women just like Alison, frightened to death of the life they’d left behind in some ‘shit-kickers-ville’ town somewhere, to know that they’d probably rather die than go to the cops. Going to the cops meant giving them their real names, showing them some ID and telling them where they were really from. That wasn’t something they were prepared to do. At least not yet, anyway.

Until then, Alison had believed that her mother’s death, as she gave birth to her, and her father’s angry beatings throughout her life were the worse that could ever happen to her. That night Alison discovered a new type of fear and pain. A new type of body and soul violation that she’d never thought possible. She thought that she’d discovered hell.