They’d laughed again.
She was always laughing, thought the detective, and she accelerated through the night. The explosive whiteness of the downtown night lights burst beside her, illuminating the edges of the great buildings as they rose up in the Southern sky. Then Detective Barren felt a great rush of heat in her heart, choking her, and she forced herself to concentrate on her driving, trying to wipe her mind free of memory, thinking, Let’s see, let’s find out, trying not to connect the scene she was heading toward with the memories in her brain.
Detective Barren turned off Route 1 and drove through a residential area. It was late, well past midnight and closing rapidly on dawn; there was little traffic and she had hurried, filled with the emergency sense of speed that accompanies any violent death. But a few miles short of her destination she slowed precipitously, until her nondescript sedan was barely crawling down the empty streets. She searched the rows of trim, upper-class houses for signs of life. The streets were dark, as were the homes. She tried to envision the lives that slept behind the ordered suburban darkness. Occasionally she would spot a light burning in one room and she wondered what book or television show or argument or worry kept the occupant up. She had an overwhelming urge to stop, to knock on the door to one of these houses with their meager sign of life, to stop and say, Is there some trouble that keeps you awake? Something that probes at the memory and heart and prevents sleep? Let me share.
She turned the car onto Old Cutler Road and knew the distance to the park’s entrance was only a few hundred yards ahead. The nighttime seemed to permeate the foliage; great melaleuca trees and willows hid blackness in their leaves and branches, stretching over the road like enveloping arms. She had the eerie sense that she was entirely alone in the world, that she was a sole survivor heading nowhere in the midst of an endless night. She could barely make out the faded white lettering on the small park entrance sign. She was startled when an opossum ran in front of the wheels of her car, and she slammed on her brakes, shuddering with fear for an instant, breathing out harshly when she realized that the animal had avoided the tires. She rolled down the window and could smell the salt air; the trees around her had shrunk in stature, the giant palms that rode the edge of the highway replaced by the tangled and gnarled branches of waterfront mangroves. The road curved sharply, and she knew she would be able to see the wide expanse of Biscayne Bay when she emerged.
She thought at first that it was moonlight glistening on the bay waters.
It was not.
She stopped the car suddenly, and stared out at the scene before her. She became aware first of the mechanical noise of powerful generators. Their steady rhythmic thumping powered three banks of high-intensity lights. The floodlights delineated a stage cut from the darkness at the edge of the park’s parking lot, peopled with dozens of uniformed police officers and detectives, moving gingerly through the unnatural brightness. A row of police cruisers, an ambulance, white and green crime-scene search wagons were lined up on the fringe of the stage, their blue and red emergency lights throwing sudden strobes of color onto the people working within the parameters of the floodlights.
She took a deep breath and headed toward the light.
She parked her car on the rim of activity and started to walk to the center, where she spotted a group of men gathered. They were staring down at something that was obscured from her vision. She knew what it was, but this was an appreciation of experience, not of emotion. The entire area had been encircled with a three-inch-wide strip of yellow tape. Every ten feet or so a small white sign had been hung from the tape: police crime scene do not enter. She lifted the barrier and slipped underneath. The motion caught the eye of a uniformed officer, who swiftly moved to intersect her path, holding out his hands.
“Hey,” he said. “Ma’am, you can’t go in there.”
She stared at him and he stopped. His hands dropped.
Exaggerating her movement by pacing it slowly, she opened her purse and produced her gold shield. He glanced quickly at it, then backed off rapidly, muttering an apology. But her arrival had been noted by the men in the center of the scene, and one of them quickly broke from the crowd and moved to block her.
“Merce, for Christ’s sake. Didn’t Wills tell you not to come down here?”
“Yes,” she replied.
“There’s nothing here for you.”
“How the hell would you know?”
“Merce, I’m sorry. This must be . . .”
She interrupted him furiously.
“Must be what? Hard? Sad? Difficult? Tragic? What do you think it must be!”
“Calm down. Look, you know what’s going on here, can you just hang on for a couple of minutes? Here, let me get you a cup of coffee.” He tried to take her by the elbow and lead her away. She shrugged off his grip swiftly.
“Don’t try to steer me away, goddammit!”
“Just a couple of minutes, then I’ll give you a complete briefing . . .”
“I don’t want a goddamn briefing. I want to see for myself.”
“Merce . . .” The detective spread his arms wide, still blocking her vision. “Give me a break.”
She took a deep breath and closed her eyes. She spoke in a clipped, deliberate fashion.
“Peter. Lieutenant Burns. Two things. One, that is my niece lying there. Two, I am a professional policewoman. I want to see for myself. Myself!”
The lieutenant stopped. He looked at her.
“All right. It will only be a few minutes now before the medical examiner completes his initial inspection. When they put her on a stretcher, you can come over. You can perform the official identification then if you want.”
“Not a few minutes. Not on a stretcher. I want to see what happened to her.”
“Merce. For Christ’s sake . . .”
“I want to see.”
“Why? It will just make it harder.”
“How the hell would you know? How the hell could it make anything harder?”
A sudden flash of light burst behind the lieutenant. He turned and Detective Barren saw a police photographer moving in and out of position. “Now,” she said. “I want to see now.”
“All right,” said the lieutenant, stepping aside. “It’s your nightmare.”
She marched past him quickly.
Then she stopped.
She took a deep breath.
She closed her eyes once, picturing her niece’s smile.
She took another deep breath and carefully approached the body. She thought: Remember everything! Fix it in your mind. She forced her eyes to scan the ground around the shape she could not yet look at. Sandy dirt and leaves. Nothing that would produce a solid shoeprint. With a practiced eye, she estimated the distance between the parking lot and the location of the shape—she couldn’t, in her mind, speak body. Twenty yards. A good dumping distance. She tried to think analytically: There was a problem. It was always easier if the—again her thoughts were staggered and mentally she hesitated—victim were discovered in the location where the homicide took place. Invariably there would be some physical evidence. She continued to scan the ground, hearing the lieutenant’s voice behind her: “Merce, we searched the area very carefully, you don’t have to . . .” But she ignored him, knelt, and felt the consistency of the dirt. She thought: If some of this stuck to the shoes, we could make a match. Without turning to see if he was still there, she spoke out loud, “Take earth samples from the entire area.” After a momentary pause, she heard a grunt of assent. She continued, thinking, strength, strength, until she was next to the shape. All right, she said to herself. Look at Susan. Memorize what happened to her this night. Look at her. Look at every part of her. Don’t miss anything.
And she raised her eyes to the shape.
“Susan,” she said out loud, but softly.
&nb
sp; She was aware of the other people moving about her, but only in a peripheral sense. That they had faces, that they were people she knew, colleagues, friends, she was aware, but only in the most subliminal fashion. Later, she would try to remember who was there, at the scene, and be unable.
“Susan,” she said again.
“Is that your niece, Susan Lewis?” It was the lieutenant’s voice.
“Yes.”
She hesitated.
“It was.”
She felt suddenly overcome by heat, as if one of the spotlights had singled her out, covering her with a solid beam of intense brightness. She gulped a great breath of air, then another, fighting a dizzying sensation. She remembered the moment years earlier when she’d realized that she was shot, that the warmth she felt was the lifeblood flowing from her, and she fought with the same intensity to prevent her eyes from rolling back, as if giving into the blackness of unconsciousness would be as fatal now as it would have been then.
“Merce?”
She heard a voice.
“Are you all right?”
She was rooted.
“Somebody get fire-rescue!”
Then she managed to shake her head.
“No,” she said. “I’m going to be okay.”
What a silly thing to say, she thought.
“You sure? You want to sit down?”
She did not know who she was talking to. She shook her head again.
“I’m okay.”
Someone was holding her arm. She snatched it loose.
“Check her fingernails,” she said. “She would have fought hard. We may have a scratched-up suspect.”
She saw the medical examiner bend over the body, gingerly lift each hand, and, using a small scalpel, gently scrape the contents under each nail into small plastic evidence bags. “Not much there,” he said.
“She would have fought like a tiger,” Detective Barren insisted.
“Perhaps he didn’t give her a chance. There’s severe trauma to the back of the head. Blunt instrument. She was probably unconscious when he did this.” The doctor motioned at the pantyhose that were wrapped tightly around Susan’s throat. Detective Barren stared for a moment at the bluish cast to the skin.
“Check the knot,” she said.
“I already looked,” said the doctor. “Simple square knot. Page one of the Boy Scout Handbook.”
Detective Barren stared at the pantyhose. She desperately wanted to loosen it, to put her niece at rest, as if by making her look as if she were only sleeping it would be true. She remembered a moment when she was growing up. She had been very young, no more than five or six, and the family dog had been hit by a car and killed. “Why is Lady dead?” she’d asked her father. “Because her bones were broken,” he replied. “But when I broke my wrist the doctor put a cast on it and now it is better,” she had said. “Let’s put a cast on Lady.” “But she lost all her blood, too,” said her father. “Well,” the child in her memory said with insistence grown of despair, “let’s put the blood back in.” “Oh, my poor little child,” said her father, “I wish we could. I wish it were so simple.” And he’d wrapped big arms around her as she sobbed through the longest of childhood nighttimes.
She stared at Susan’s body and longed for those arms again.
“How about the wrists?” she asked. “Any signs of restraints?”
“No,” said the doctor. “That tells us something.”
“Yeah,” said a voice from the side. Detective Barren didn’t turn to see who was speaking. “It tells us this creep conked her before he had his fun. She probably never knew what hit her.”
Detective Barren’s eyes scanned down from the neck.
“Is that a bite mark on the shoulder?”
“Probably,” said the medical examiner. “Got to check microscopically.”
She fixed her eyes for an instant on her niece’s torn blouse. Susan’s breasts were exposed, and she wanted to cover them. “Swab the neck for saliva,” she said.
“Did it,” said the doctor. “Genital swabs, too. I’ll do it again when we get to the morgue.”
Detective Barren’s eyes slid down the body, inch by inch. One leg was flung over the other, almost coyly, as if even in death her niece was modest.
“Was there any sign of laceration to the genitals?”
“Not visible out here.”
Detective Barren paused, trying to take it all in.
“Merce,” said the doctor gently, “it’s pretty much like the other four. Mode of death. Positioning of the body. Dumping ground.”
Detective Barren looked up sharply.
“Others? Other four?”
“Didn’t Lieutenant Burns tell you? They think it’s this guy the papers are calling the Campus Killer. I thought they’d told you . . .”
“No . . .” she said. “No one told me.”
She took a deep breath.
“But it makes perfectly good sense. It fits . . .” And her voice trailed off.
She heard the lieutenant’s voice next.
“Probably his first of the semester. I mean, nothing is certain, but the general pattern is the same. We’re going to assign the case to him so the task force can work it—I think that’s best, Merce?”
“Right.”
“Seen enough now? Will you come over here and let me tell you what we’ve got and what we haven’t got?”
She nodded. She closed her eyes and turned away from the body. She hoped that they would move Susan soon, as if by pulling her out of the underbrush and dirt that it would start to restore some humanity to her, lessen somehow the violation, diminish somehow the totality of her death.
She waited patiently next to the cars belonging to the crime-scene search specialists and the evidence technicians. They were all people she knew well, the night shift in the same office she worked. Individually, they all broke off from their duties within the yellow tape area and spoke to her, or touched her shoulder or grasped her hand, before going back to processing the scene. In a few moments Lieutenant Burns returned with two cups of coffee. She wrapped her hands around the Styrofoam cup he held out to her, suddenly chilled, though the tropical night was oppressively warm. He looked up at the sky, just starting to fade from dark, creeping gray light marking the edges of morning.
“Do you want to know?” he asked. “It might be better, all around, if you just . . .”
She interrupted quickly. “I want to know. Everything.”
“Well,” he started slowly. She knew he was trying to assess in his own mind whether sharing information with her would hinder the investigation. She knew he was wondering whether he was dealing with a policewoman or with a half-crazed relative. The trouble, she thought, was that he was dealing with both.
“Lieutenant,” she said, “I merely want to help. I have a good deal of expertise, as you know. I want to make myself available. But, if you think I’ll be in the way, I’ll back off . . .”
“No, no, no,” he replied quickly.
How simple, she thought. She knew that by offering to not ask questions she would get permission to ask every one.
“Look,” the lieutenant continued, “things are pretty sketchy so far. Apparently she and some friends went out to a bar on the campus. There were a lot of people around, a lot of different guys hanging about. She danced with a number of different guys, too. About ten p.m. she went outside to get some air. She went alone. Didn’t come back in. It wasn’t until a couple of hours later, just about midnight, that her friends got worried and called the campus cops.
“Just about the same time a couple of fruits down here in the park just getting it on in the bushes over there stumbled on the body . . .” He held up his hand. “No. They didn’t see or hear anything. Literally stumbled, too. One of t
he guys fell right over it . . .”
The body, she thought. It. She bit her lip.
“Girl disappears from campus. Body gets discovered in a park a couple of miles away. It wasn’t hard to put one and one together. And we’ve been here since. Her purse had your name in it. That’s why you were called. Your sister’s kid?”
Detective Barren nodded.
“You want to make that call?”
Oh, God, she thought.
“I will. When we clear here.”
“There’s a pay phone over there. I wouldn’t want to make them wait. And it’s likely to be a while before we finish . . .”
She became aware of the growing dawn light. The area was steadily losing its nighttime blackness, shapes taking form, becoming distinct as the darkness faded.
“All right,” she said.
She thought how utterly mundane and hopelessly banal the act of telephoning her sister and brother-in-law was. For a second she hoped that she did not have a quarter to put in the pay phone’s slot, then hoped that the telephone would be out of order. It was not. The operator answered with routine brightness, as if immune to the hour of the day. Detective Barren charged the call to her office. The operator asked her when someone would be there to confirm accepting the charges. Detective Barren told her someone was always there. Then she heard the electronic clicking of the number being dialed, and suddenly, before she was ready with the right words, the phone was ringing at her sister’s house. Think! Detective Barren thought. Find words! And she heard her sister’s voice, slightly groggy with sleep, on the other end of the line:
“Yes, hello . . .”
“Annie, it’s Merce.” She bit her lip.
“Merce! How are you? What’s . . .”
“Annie. Listen carefully: It’s Susan. There’s been a . . .” she fumbled. Accident? Incident? She just barreled on, oblivious, trying to keep her voice a professionally calm, even, flat tone. “Please sit down and ask Ben to get on the line . . .”
She heard her sister gasp and then call to her husband.
In a moment, he joined the line. “Merce, what is it?” His voice was steady. Ben was an accountant. She hoped he would be as solid as numbers. She took a deep breath.
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