A Measure of Darkness

by Jonathan Kellerman

  “Shitshow,” she said.

  Couldn’t argue with that.

  “Lindsey went back in her own car,” she said.

  “I’m going to need to do the same.”

  She went around to open the rear doors. Inside, on the right gurney, a small bulge, sheeted and buckled: the dead child. The victim was roughly the same age as her son. If the removal had bothered her, she gave no sign of it.

  We hauled out the free gurney and wheeled it toward the tape. The uniform on duty made as if to turn us away. One way in, one way out. Shoops cut him a look and he immediately shrank back.

  Inside the pop-up, she got down to inspect the body.

  I said I hadn’t performed a full exam. “Right now I just want to get her out of here.”

  Shoops nodded.

  We placed Jasmine Gomez atop a clean set of sheets.

  She felt like nothing, like the body of a bird, hollow bones and down.

  We wrapped her, knotted handles. Having enough room to work required that we widen the pop-up, exposing a gap of several feet. Thinning crowds had freed up sight lines, and Amy’s text had made me leery of the camera crews. We had to keep shifting the panels to ensure that nobody had a direct view of us or what they really wanted to see.

  In preparation for the lift, we crouched and took a three-count. Always a precarious moment for me and my bum knee; more so when I’m paired with Shupfer, because of the eleven-inch height difference between us. When we stood, I almost toppled backward, so faint was the resistance.

  We laid the body on the gurney, buckled it in, wheeled it to the van.

  I loaded Jasmine in beside the boy. Shupfer retrieved the pop-up.

  “Drive safe,” she said, climbing behind the wheel.

  It was six thirty-two in the morning.

  * * *

  —

  AS THE LAST coroner on scene, I went to check in with Acosta.

  “I’m taking off,” I said.

  “You got it, brother. Merry Christmas.”

  “You too.”

  The bulk of the players along Almond Street had cleared out, leaving behind a skeleton crew. The ambulances were gone. The detectives were gone. Few onlookers remained, all but the hardest of hardcore tragedy addicts having had their fill.

  Now that we’d removed Jasmine Gomez’s body, the uniforms were opening up 11th; redrawing the cordon to contain the frontage of the party house; taping off the perimeter of 1124. Dew misted windowpanes and windshields and mirrors, the eastern sky crinkling with an ambivalent dawn.

  On my final pass through the intersection, I detoured to hunt around for the missing flip-flop. I knew I ought to get back to the bureau—I owed it to my teammates—but it was driving me batty that I couldn’t find it.

  Preserving Jasmine Gomez’s property: that fell to me, didn’t it?

  Say the car had struck her from behind. What trajectory would the flip-flop follow? What about a side impact? Say she was running; she was standing still. What did a flip-flop weigh? An ounce? It had to be close by.

  I checked the bushes and the gutter.

  I got down to peer beneath parked cars.

  I paced the south side of 11th, craning over low, spiked iron fences.

  Nothing.

  My radio, still open to the common channel, began stuttering.

  Uh, this is Grelling 889.

  The baby-faced rookie.

  Requesting immediate assistance.

  Acosta’s voice came on. Copy 889. What’s your twenty?

  I’m here, uh…There’s a—I think it’s, uh.

  Grelling. Where the fuck are you?

  I’m—uh. On the property.

  Which property?

  The house. The big house. In the yard, all the way at the back. Sir?

  He was hyperventilating, the poor bastard.

  Sir, there’s another body here.

  Stay put Acosta said. I’m coming.

  I started walking, too.

  CHAPTER 5

  Acosta and I reached the lawn at the same time.

  He said, “I thought you left.”

  “So did I.”

  The entrance to the backyard was through a chain-link fence. Strategically placed bamboo created a visual barrier from the street. When I pulled open the gate, I didn’t know what I was stepping into.

  The property was an unholy morass of furniture, “art,” and overgrowth.

  Acosta radioed Grelling to describe his location as precisely as possible.

  Toward the back.

  “Which back?” Acosta said. “West? North?”

  Silence.

  “Grelling.”

  Um…west. West. Sir.

  We climbed over detritus, Acosta muttering to himself. “I told that motherfucker.”

  “Who.”

  “Von Ruden. I told him we needed to grid and search the entire yard.”

  “He didn’t?”

  “He said the street’s the primary scene. Jackass.”

  Adding to the disarray was an infill of party trash: discarded cups, cigarette butts, tissue paper streamers, condom wrappers. My brain winced as I imagined cataloging it all. Acosta was right, but I could also understand Detective Von Ruden’s thought process. To spend your night picking up a hundred thousand pieces of lint—when you had witnesses fleeing in droves, bodies cooling in the gutter, a dead child in a basement—promised a lousy return on investment.

  Acosta stumbled over a cement turtle. “Man, fuck this.”

  A low electrical hum grew louder as we went forward. Acosta parted a bead curtain that had been nailed to a horizontal ficus branch, and we came to an area with a fire pit. Tiki torches flickered; lawn chairs lay ass-up in the weeds. Velvet ropes guided those in need toward the house, where a side entrance was marked BATHROOM. There was a table kitted out with DJ equipment, wires running to the source of the hum: a speaker, left on.

  Acosta went over and unplugged it.

  I saw his face pinch with alarm. Followed his gaze to the fire pit.

  A charred human form.

  I said, “Oh shit,” and stepped toward it.

  Stopped when I saw that it had eyes the size of hams and a foot-long purple nose.

  Some kind of effigy.

  Acosta cupped his mouth. “Grelling.”

  Muffled: “Back here, sir.”

  The northwest corner of the house dovetailed with the rear chain-link, forming a triangular space roughly ten yards deep. It was what I call a nowhere space—a few forgotten square feet, filled with afterthoughts. You see them everywhere, the standpipes and the transformer boxes, the cement aprons and the drainage ditches. Or rather, you don’t see them. You want what’s beautiful in the world. You edit out what isn’t.

  This particular nowhere served as overflow for the homeowner’s least prized possessions. Cobwebbed bicycles. Some wooden pallets, some milk crates. Trash cans, one two three in a tidy row, backs to the siding. Wheel them out for pickup, convenient street access through the gate at the far end.

  My first thought was to wonder if the flip-flop could have touched down here. It didn’t seem physically possible. I started running the calculations regardless, picturing the distance to the corner. That ought to clue you to my state of mind—how much fatigue had clouded me. Only when Grelling spoke again did I notice him.

  Sort of a nowhere guy, Officer Grelling.

  He was standing inside the triangle, gazing as though hypnotized at a plywood shed with a slanted plastic roof. Against its side leaned gardening implements: hoe, shovel, rake. The hasp was closed, but the double doors bulged out an inch or two past parallel. On the ground nearby, a flowerpot lay tipped over.

  Officer Grelling said, “I saw it and I thought
…”

  Acosta looked at him. “Yeah?”

  “I thought I should call.”

  “Good thought,” Acosta said.

  Someone had placed a large, heavy object in the shed. This person had shut the doors and set the hasp, but the doors wouldn’t keep closed. Maybe the hinges were loose, or the plywood had warped in the rain. They wanted to open, those doors. To prevent that, this person had placed the flowerpot in front of them, hoping it would act as a doorstop.

  This person hadn’t been thinking.

  This person had been in a rush.

  This person’s plan had misfired, because the large heavy object inside the shed had shifted, either right away or eventually, of its own volition or due to the natural processes of tissue change. And when the large heavy object shifted, it pushed against the doors, hard enough to knock over the flowerpot, before the hasp caught.

  The large, heavy object had once lived and breathed.

  At the threshold, like a pale gibbous moon, jutted a thumb.

  7:33 a.m.

  Acosta went to his car to call it in. I phoned my office.

  “Coroner’s Bureau, Zaragoza.”

  “It’s Clay,” I said.

  “Hey. Where are you?”

  “I haven’t left yet. Is the sergeant there? I need to talk to her.”

  “Yeah, hang on.”

  I plugged my ear against a mad babble of birdsong. The sun had risen, acid thorns of light piercing the surrounding clutter. I stood close to the shed, keeping an eye on Officer Grelling, pallid and sheened and fixated on the thumb.

  I wondered how many dead bodies he had seen.

  He swayed on his feet, and I snapped my fingers at him, motioning at him to back up. If he was going to keel over, I didn’t want him to hit his head on the shed. He could hurt himself. He could disturb the scene.

  Sergeant Paula Turnbow came on the line. “Clay? What’s happening over there? Why aren’t you back?”

  “We caught another.”

  “You’re shittin me,” she said.

  “Wish I was. But, Sarge? This looks different to me.”

  “Different how.”

  The shed doors were barely ajar, angles and shadows prohibiting a clear look. Without knowing the actual disposition of the body, without assessing its condition, I could only describe what I saw and hope she understood.

  “Okay…” she said. When she thinks, her voice drops a notch and loses its usual animation. “What do you need?”

  “A camera, a van, and a secondary.”

  “How long you think you can hold out?” she asked. “We’re getting crushed.”

  “The detective hasn’t even arrived yet.”

  “Call me when you’re ready.”

  “Will do.”

  I hung up. Grelling had turned to peer into the foliage. Nothing to see, but easier than staring at the thumb.

  I said, “How’d you end up back here?”

  “Huh? I was—there was a goat.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You know. Like.” He made horns with his fingers.

  “I know what a goat is,” I said.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Sorry.”

  He explained that he’d just gotten through restringing the crime scene tape around the front of the property when he spotted an individual tearing up a flower bed.

  “By individual,” I said, “you mean ‘goat.’ ”

  “I was like, ‘Yo, get out of there.’ ”

  “Did you consider maybe they’re his flowers?”

  “I—no.”

  “All right, you caution this goat. It fails to heed.”

  “Yeah. I go over there, to make it stop, and it runs inside the yard.”

  “At which point you engaged in a foot pursuit.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Or hoof pursuit, if we’re gonna be accurate. So, where’s the fugitive now?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I couldn’t find it before I saw…”

  He didn’t finish.

  Normally I’m the one trying to maintain an appropriate atmosphere in the presence of a decedent. But it had been such a long, loopy night.

  I said, “Good on you, Grelling.”

  “Thanks.” He paused. “Can I ask you something?”

  “Sure.”

  “Do you, like, like what you do?”

  “Not every minute of every day,” I said. “It’s still a job. But most of the time, yeah. I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t.”

  “It’s not…I dunno.”

  “Weird?”

  “No, not that.”

  “Gross? Boring?”

  “Depressing,” he said.

  I said, “It can be.”

  He nodded. “I don’t think I could do it.”

  He was staring at the thumb again.

  “Well,” I said, “I couldn’t do your job.”

  Which was bullshit. I have done his job. But I thought he could use the bucking up.

  We waited in silence for another twenty-five minutes.

  Voices drew near, Acosta’s and that of a woman.

  I saw them approach in slices, between the stalks of a stand of giant sunflowers. She was medium height, with blue-black skin, elongated facial features, and hair knitted in patterned braids. She wore dove-gray slacks and silver flats, her detective’s badge on a neck chain, swaying in the folds of an emerald satin blouse.

  “Delilah Nwodo,” she said to me, putting out her hand.

  “Clay Edison.”

  She was assessing me in the twitchy way that people do when they’re trying to hide the fact that they recognize you. It still happens to me on occasion, mostly with people my age who went to Cal and saw me play ball. It goes like this:

  Step one: don’t stare.

  But two: don’t avoid eye contact, either.

  Repeat.

  Detective Nwodo said, “Let’s have a look.”

  CHAPTER 6

  She shone a penlight through the cracked doors.

  “And we’re sure it’s a real person,” she said.

  “As opposed to?”

  “A mannequin,” she said, straightening up. “I noticed some on my way in.”

  I’d never seen a mannequin with such a lifelike digit. But I wasn’t going to rule it out, not without a look at the rest of the body. The whole yard was filled with bizarro stuff, and anything felt possible.

  “Forensics?” she asked.

  “They’re scraping up a new team,” Acosta said. “Shit’s fucked today.”

  “It’d help to know if we need them in the first place,” she said and turned to me.

  “Is that okay with you?”

  Nice of her to ask. Plenty of detectives say My scene, my call.

  I said, “Long as we’re careful.”

  Nwodo and I each photographed the area around the shed. I prefer the Nikon, but a phone will do in a pinch. The earth was hard and gravelly, inhospitable to footprints or drag marks. Hundreds of pieces of potential evidence lay within a fifty-foot radius. It was going to be a technician’s nightmare.

  Once we’d finished, Grelling and Acosta each took a shed door. I knelt by the threshold, ready to catch the body if it tumbled out.

  Nwodo gently depressed the doors, using a pen to flip back the hasp.

  Grelling and Acosta let the tension out.

  The doors opened.

  The body didn’t move an inch.

  The shed stood on a poured-concrete pad, six feet wide and four feet deep. Hand tools hung on pegs affixed to the insides of the doors. It was a dumb place to try and hide a body. Heaped sacks of potting soil and organic fertilizer left open only an eigh
teen-inch strip of concrete, parallel to the threshold, in which to place the decedent.

  Not a mannequin.

  Size and proportions suggested a female. She lay oriented with the head to the right, twisted at the waist, a position that elevated the left hip and shoulder and forced the right arm behind her. It was the tip of the right thumb that Grelling had spotted. More sacks covered the legs, neck, head, and parts of the torso. One dirty blue running shoe stuck out.

  No visible blood.

  No insect activity.

  Manure masked any other smells.

  She hadn’t been there long.

  We took more pictures.

  A fine layer of soil dust covered the sacks. Nwodo fretted over whether to move them, scrutinizing their surfaces for hand- or fingerprints.

  Acosta said he’d try to get an ETA for the forensics team.

  While he stepped away to make the call, Nwodo quizzed me and Grelling on the evening’s events. We did our best, but the account that emerged was fragmentary.

  Acosta rejoined us. “They’re telling me fifteen minutes.”

  “So, forty-five,” Nwodo said.

  “Yuh.”

  “We’ll wait.” She took out her phone. “Anyone for Scrabble?”

  9:49 a.m.

  I stood at the curb, waving to the approaching van.

  Zaragoza pulled up and got out.

  “You look like crap,” he said, slinging the camera over his shoulder.

  “Good morning to you, too.”

  We grabbed sheets and began bushwhacking through the backyard. Zaragoza told me that the office was getting deluged with calls from people who had read about the shooting on the internet or seen the morning news.

  “They put our main line up on the screen,” he said.

  “Hell no.”

  “Hell yes. Turn it on and it’s like ‘Oakland Party Massacre.’ There we are, right at the bottom. Big numbers. ‘Call for information.’ ”

  “Why would they do that?”

  “Now all these people are terrified it’s their kid got killed. ‘I haven’t seen her in six months, she’s mad at me, but I know she goes to parties.’ What twenty-year-old doesn’t go to parties? Turnbow’s pissed.”