by Gregg Olsen
Carter cuts the evidence tape, and we go to work examining Luke Tomlinson’s 2014 Subaru Forester. I mention the color and Carter informs me that it isn’t just any red.
“It’s Venetian red,” he says.
Classy, I think.
We don gloves and get to work. The stench of what took place in the vehicle has not abated. Or if it has, my olfactory senses must be acute. Carter doesn’t mention it.
We go about the business of identifying and documenting everything we can find in Luke’s car. After we cover every inch, techs will do it again with the help of a vacuum. Being thorough is necessary. A recent case was tossed because the child was asthmatic, and the mother had loaded her car with lavender plants from a garden store before going into a bar for a couple of beers. The defense argued that the child’s medical condition was a factor in the toddler’s death.
After we’re done, a mechanic will check the engine to see if everything is in working order.
“The last thing we need is for some court-appointed lawyer to hand us our asses because the AC was pouring carbon monoxide from the exhaust,” Carter says.
“Right,” I say as I focus on logging everything I find. Each item is numbered and secured in a bundle marked with the case number.
Two travel mugs.
French fries cut in the way that tells me they’re from McDonald’s.
A small Cookie Monster plush toy.
A box of baby wipes.
A child’s picture book about ladybugs.
All of it is mundane. All of it makes up a three-dimensional still life of parenthood.
“How’s it going there?” I call over to Carter, who has opened the hatch and is examining its contents.
“Skateboard and beach blanket,” he says.
“I wonder who the skateboard belongs to, mom or dad,” I say.
“I’d say Luke,” Carter says.
I don’t tell him that’s sexist.
And then I find them under the front seat on the driver’s side.
“Lookie here,” I say, holding up a cache of Trojans in a gold-and-black box.
“Magnums.” Carter pops his head up and rolls his eyes. “Impressive.”
He’s being sarcastic, of course.
“Who drives around with a box of these?” I ask, putting them in a plastic evidence bag.
“Someone having sex in his car,” Carter says.
Carter can be so literal. That’s one of his good qualities. There’s never any guessing with him. “I get that,” I say. “But, honestly, what do you think? Is this guy some kind of player or what?”
Carter takes a swallow from his Dutch Bros. and sets down the empty cup.
“For around here,” he says, repeating a now-familiar refrain, “I guess he’s what passes for a player.”
I want to remind him that I’m from around here. And reminding me about how low the bar is gets on my nerves. But I don’t.
The car seat is next.
It’s a Graco. Appears to be brand-new. I can see where body fluids stained the blue-and-red fabric. I can imagine Ally trying to get out of that seat in the way that a person is held captive by a monster. The very straps that the manufacturer put there to ensure that she was safe paralyzed her. She was too young to figure out how to extricate herself. I wonder if she was awake. I hope she wasn’t. I hope that there were no last terrifying moments when she called for her mommy and daddy to help her. My hope is that in the heat she just passed out, slipped away.
Carter helps me to remove the car seat and put it in a black garbage bag. It’s going to the lab. Just to be sure.
I continue to photograph the car from every angle. It’s unremarkable in the way that most newer cars are. The sole exception is the Nirvana sticker in the back window. I take a photo of that.
“He’s too young for Nirvana,” Carter says, over my shoulder. “He probably was under ten when Cobain died.”
CHAPTER FOUR
Tuesday, August 15
The seesaw lands where we hoped it would. Luke Tomlinson sits in an interview room at the Aberdeen Police Department, where late afternoon coffee has turned, as it always does, to burnt mud. It smells terrible, but I suck the scent in through my nose, hoping the odor will take away the stench of the car we just examined.
It doesn’t.
I let myself inside and take a seat next to my partner. We face Ally’s father from the opposite side of the table, the doorway to his back. The ventilation is poor in the space, and all I can smell is Luke’s body odor mixed with some minty chewing gum that he moves from one side of his mouth to the other. He’s sweaty, and his glasses ride down the bridge of his nose. Every minute, or even less, he pushes the bridge between the lenses upward with his index finger.
“I don’t know why I have to go over this again,” Luke says. “I told the officers what happened. I need to be with my wife right now. She needs me.”
“You can see her as soon as we are done here.”
“Oh, man,” he says. “I’ve got to be with her. She’ll need me.”
“We’ll make that happen. After we talk,” Carter says.
Luke kneads his hands together and rocks in his chair. He looks at both of us across the table. His eyes are hooded, either from weariness or by heredity. Hard to say.
“It was a fucking accident,” he says, emotion charging his words. “I forgot. I’m such an idiot! I forgot that Ally was in the car.”
“Right,” Carter tells the father of the dead girl. “Let’s start at the beginning.”
Luke continues to rock back and forth as he recounts the morning. Mia gets up early for a ten-hour shift at the hospital. On the days that she works, he says he’s charged with dressing, feeding, and getting their one-year-old to the Little Pal’s Day Care on Spruce, a few miles from their apartment building. He drops in some biographical detail too. He and Mia have been married for three years. She’s studying for a nursing degree on the weekends and in the evenings. He’s working his way into management at WinCo.
“I’m the assistant manager’s assistant,” he says, with some obvious pride that feels at odds in the milieu of a police interview room.
He goes on. The morning was typical, “just like every other day.” He changed Ally’s diaper, dressed her, ran a washcloth over her face, and packed her up in the car.
He stops to weigh the facial expressions of his audience.
Only then does he begin to sob. It’s rapid. Staccato. It’s a teakettle that’s whistled to the boiling point. And then it stops.
“Ally’s my girl. We have a good time. She’s only one,” he says, “but she’s still a little buddy to me.”
They leave the house at some time before nine.
“We stopped at McDonald’s and I gave her some pancakes to eat. She’s a good eater. Like me. She’s been on solid food since she turned ten months. I prefer that. I mean, those bottles all the time were a hassle. Mia made me wash them by hand. God, we have a dishwasher. But no. She said they needed to be boiled.”
Luke continues with his story. Every now and then, however, he takes a detour. He lets us know that he’s a very involved father. Loves being a dad. Never wanted anything more than being a father. He admits that a little boy might have been preferable in the beginning.
“But now I see things differently. I’m her daddy,” Luke says, between sobs. “That’s an awesome position to be in.”
I can’t help but notice that he continues to refer to Ally in the present tense, as though she were still alive. I wonder if he is in denial. Even though he knows Ally died in his car, it is possible that a defense mechanism is at work. He just can’t allow himself to speak of her in the past tense.
After McDonald’s, he drove to work—not to Little Pal’s Day Care.
“Here’s the thing,” he says, halting his story once more. “I just . . . I just don’t know. I have no idea how I forgot her. She fell asleep, I guess. She was quiet. The radio was on. I was thinking about what I had to get do
ne at the office. We were going to reconfigure a section of the store, and it was my job to manage a portion of that project. You know, start to finish. I have a big role in it.”
He’s hung up on showing how important he is.
“You just forgot her,” Carter says, as though he couldn’t care less about how important Luke was. What was important was Ally.
Luke looks up at the ceiling. “Yeah. I can’t explain it better than I already have. I just forgot she was in the backseat. I got all the way to WinCo. I parked. I got out. I locked the doors and went inside. I just forgot. I know it sounds lame, but that’s what happened. If I could do things differently, I would.”
“You parked in back, isn’t that right?” I ask.
He locks his eyes on mine. He knows what I’m getting at.
“Yeah,” he says, almost dismissively. “With the festival this weekend, everyone was supposed to park away from the prime parking spots. You know, to leave room for customers. ‘Customer first’ is our motto.”
I’d seen the ads on TV.
“Was the back lot suggested by management?” I ask.
He gives a quick nod. “I think so. I can’t exactly remember. I work back there sometimes when suppliers bring in merch. Customers never park there.”
“And when you parked there, you just forgot about Ally?” Carter says.
Luke’s face tightens. “I told you that already,” he says. “You need to hear it again for some reason?”
Defiance creeps into the room just then.
“We do,” Carter says.
Luke shrugs like he’s being inconvenienced now. “Yes. Ally slipped my mind. In my mind I thought she was at day care the whole time. Honestly, I really did. It was only after I left for the movies that I noticed she was in the car.”
I’m surprised.
“In the middle of the day?” I ask. “The movies?”
“Yeah,” Luke says. “I like horror shows and Mia hates them. I told her that I was going to see The Conjuring 2 and then head home.”
Luke stops and I push a little. “So then what? What happened next, Luke? After you left WinCo for the movies?”
Just like that, his pudgy hands are back on the surface of the table. He glances up once more. I find myself looking upward to see what he’s staring at. Of course, other than a fluorescent tube light fixture, there’s nothing there. Not even a crack in the ceiling. He’s thinking. Maybe imagining? Maybe recalling? Hard to know. Then I see it. I watch a growing bead of perspiration on his upper lip. It nearly drips. He sees what I’m looking at and does a rapid-fire wipe on the sleeve of his sodden white dress shirt. As he does so, I detect the presence of that hideous scent that had permeated the car.
The odor of his dead daughter.
I know now that the sweat pouring from his chubby frame is the result of nervousness. Good, I think. It has nothing to do with the nearly one-hundred-degree heat outside. The Aberdeen Police Department’s air-conditioning system works just fine. Some days, actually, a little too fine. In fact, hooked on the back of my desk is one of my mother’s old sweaters. I wear it most of the summer when I work in the office. It keeps me warm, which is ironic in that Mom was anything but warm. When she left us, she stuck a note on the fridge:
Casserole. 350 for twenty mins. I’ll call you from Cali.
That was it. Ten words.
No “Love, Mom.” No “Goodbye.” Just baking instructions for a casserole that my father and I would be too upset to eat. Not Stacy. She gobbled some up and went to watch TV in her room.
“You left WinCo and you drove across the bridge, heading toward the theaters,” I say. “Is that what happened? Is that what you’re telling us?”
“Yeah,” Luke says. “I started driving. I was going to send a text to Mia to remind her about the movie. I know you guys don’t want us texting, but that’s what I was about to do, when for some reason I looked up and saw the top of Ally’s head in the rearview mirror.”
He stops cold. Carter and I stay mute. We want him to fill the space between us with what happened.
Luke puts his fingertips on his damp forehead and rubs away the wetness.
“I fucking freaked out,” he says. “I pulled over as soon as I could. The whole time I was calling out to Ally. I was telling her that everything would be okay and that I was really sorry.”
Luke stops. It’s as if he thinks that’s the end of the story. We wait a beat. Finally, Carter steps in to move things along.
“You remembered just then that you’d forgotten to drop her off that morning?” he asks.
“I don’t know if I even thought of that,” Luke says.
Again silence.
“What was your first thought?” I ask.
Luke shakes a little. “It was weird,” he says, no longer rubbing his forehead. “It was like seeing a ghost or something. There she was. In the car seat.”
“A ghost?” I ask. “So you knew she was dead?”
Luke snaps a little. “No,” he says, right away. “Like a shock. Like out of a horror movie, I guess. I just never thought she was there. I never thought about not dropping her off. I just put it out of my mind. I tried to turn around a little as I drove, but I couldn’t see her face even if I’d wanted to, because, you know, they make you face the kid backward.”
I think back to a time when my sister let me take baby Emma for the afternoon. God knows what she was doing and whom she was doing it with. She gave me a diaper bag and some premade bottles of formula. She’d only breastfed Emma for a month.
“My uterus has shrunk, and that’s all breastfeeding is good for,” she told me one time. “I’m not about to have my tits look like water wings. Gross.”
As I recalled, the car seat did face backward. It would be hard to miss a child sitting across from you as you got into the driver’s side.
“Didn’t you see her when you opened the car door to get in?” I ask.
Luke shakes his head.
“You passed the passenger door to get to the driver’s door,” Carter adds, pushing a little more.
Yet Luke doesn’t flinch. Through his sweaty lenses, he looks right at my partner and answers.
“I know,” he says. “But, no, I didn’t see her.”
“When you got in, didn’t you smell anything?” I ask, referring to the grotesque stench of the one-year-old’s decomposing body.
“I didn’t finish my third Sausage McMuffin,” Luke says. “I thought maybe that the heat rotted it a little. But really it wasn’t that bad. I’ve smelled worse, you know.”
I don’t. I don’t know anybody who has.
CHAPTER FIVE
Tuesday, August 15
My eyes take her in. Moments like this feel a little invasive, but they are part of a detective’s job. We watch. We study. We dissect. Mia Tomlinson, twenty-two, arrives with a patrol officer within an hour after her husband is transported here. Her long auburn hair is up in a loose, messy bun. Freckles adorn pale features that have been ravaged by sudden and inconceivable grief. Her attire announces to the world who and what she’s all about. A Sylvester and Tweety Bird smock covers her postbaby frame. She’s a nurse’s aide in the pediatric ward. She looks the part.
“I want my baby,” she says, looking at me with red and puffy eyes.
“I’m so sorry, Mia,” I say, using her first name because she’s young and in a circumstance like this it just feels right.
“She might still be alive,” Mia says with false hope cradling her words. “Maybe she passed out?”
I shake my head. I hate this part of my job more than I can say.
“No,” I tell her. “She’s gone.”
“I’m practically a nurse,” the young mother says, a little edge of authority in her shattered voice. “I know what I’m talking about.”
Mia starts crying harder than anyone has ever cried. Ever. In the history of the world. Her body contorts. She shakes. She squeezes. She shudders. A second later Mia has found her way into my arms. Her
eye makeup smears my blouse. She repeats over and over that Ally, her precious baby, can’t be gone.
Words erupt one at a time from between her guttural sobs. “There. Has. To. Be. A. Mistake.”
“I’m so sorry,” I repeat as if saying it once more can emphasize my real understanding of the magnitude of her pain, the grief that I share with her. The grief is already beyond measure. “Ally’s gone.”
Silence. A shudder. More tears.
Finally, Mia pulls away, releasing a crablike grip from my wincing shoulders. I have never witnessed such anguish in my life. I have worked the cases of dead children before. I’ve seen extreme anguish in all kinds of circumstances related to my job in law enforcement. I have filed away the faces and pain into a catalog of reactions that I almost never revisit. This pain. This utterly stinging agony. It is something beyond anything I’ve ever seen.
“I want my daughter,” Mia says. “I have a right to see her. She’s my little girl. She’s mine. She’s everything to me.”
“We’ll take you to her,” I offer. I wait a beat. I wonder why she hasn’t asked about Luke or even why they’re at the police department.
Then she does.
“What’s happening?” she asks, fighting with everything she has for some semblance of composure. “Where’s Luke? Where’s my husband?”
She looks genuinely concerned.
“He’s out of booking by now,” I tell her. “We’ll need to take a statement from you.”
Mia pulls back from me. “Booking him? But why? This had to be an accident.”
“I’m sorry,” I repeat. “But there are some legal implications here.”
“What kind?” she asks. Tears continue to puddle in her eyes.
Only a jerk would say this, but I say it because it is my duty to do so. “It’s against the law to strike a police officer. It’s also against the law to leave your child in the car unattended.”
Her eyes flutter. She’s starting to cry again.
“Yes, I know,” she says. “Why was she in the car at WinCo? The officer told me that’s where it happened. Why wasn’t she at day care? Luke was supposed to drop her off at Little Pal’s. I start work early. He always takes her. What happened?”