A Measure of Darkness

by Jonathan Kellerman

  “They started him over at the bottom,” she said. “Nine-year vet, pulling graveyard patrol. Reset his pension, too.”

  “Damn.”

  “Mm-hm.”

  “Why’d he do it, then?”

  “He got sick of the bullshit,” she said.

  “And you’re not?”

  “Sure I am,” she said. “Who isn’t? What’s my alternative? Abandon it to the wolves? It’s my city. I grew up there.”

  “That’s fair.”

  “Well, no,” she said, “the one thing it most definitely is not is fair. Since when’s that matter?”

  “Never.”

  “Nope. I chose it.”

  I told her she had more in common with Camille Buntley than she realized.

  Her response was to make grabby motions; a sucking sound through her teeth.

  Barnacle.

  “Careful,” I said, wagging my spoon at the harbor. “That shit’ll sink a boat.”

  “My boat,” she said.

  I said, “Your boat.”

  CHAPTER 20

  Thursday, January 10

  6:35 a.m.

  I could see the relief spread through Sergeant Turnbow’s face when I told her we’d identified Jane Doe.

  “And to think,” she said, “he did it on crutches.”

  I took a wonky bow. No sooner had I straightened up, though, than she was reaching for her mouse.

  “What about your other decedent? ‘Gomez,’ ” she read. “Where are you on NOK?”

  “Couple decent leads.”

  She nodded gravely, continuing to click and blink and click.

  “Sarge? You good?”

  “Yeah. Yeah yeah.” She paused. “They buried Benjamin Felton yesterday.”

  “Right.” I’d never known her to get emotional, even when it came to the death of a child. “I think I knew that.”

  “You heard what happened.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Some guy showed up with a camera crew,” she said.

  She mashed down on the mouse to close the window. “You believe that? They’re carrying the coffin—you know what a kid’s coffin is like, it’s like a toy, like a, a, a joke—and this son of a bitch is chasing after the mother, trying to get her to make a statement.”

  “Schumacher,” I said.

  “What?”

  “That’s his name. Oswald Schumacher. He’s the guy got grazed in the leg.”

  “What’s that got to do with anything?”

  “He’s making a documentary,” I said.

  “About her?”

  “About the whole thing.”

  She squinted at me, baffled. “What?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Why is that a good idea?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know what to tell you.”

  She swung back to her screen. She looked fit to burst. “Just—find me Gomez, please.”

  I limped to my desk.

  * * *

  —

  JASMINE GOMEZ’S YEARBOOK page supplied the names of nine classmates, one of whom, I determined, had gone on to play midfield for the UC Irvine women’s soccer team. Rosters going back to 2001 listed the players’ graduating high schools. By extension, Kevin Gomez had graduated from Hamilton High School, in West Los Angeles, class of 2013.

  I called up, reaching a frazzled-sounding vice principal. That she didn’t remember Kevin was to be expected: enrollment stood at over three thousand.

  “I’m trying to contact her parents,” I said.

  “Her?”

  “His,” I said. “Sorry. It could be he had an older brother who went there, too. I’m unclear on the first name.”

  “Gomez, you said?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Uh-huh. Well, I can try to look,” she said, “but—”

  Background clatter ballooned into a loud argument, two cracked male voices trumpeting for dominance, the vice principal shouting Knock it off. The receiver banged against a hard surface and the line went dead.

  I tried her again, without success.

  My next move was to contact LAPD. If I asked nicely enough, they might send an officer by the school. I ran a gauntlet of voicemail, then spoke to four people, each of whom passed me along, until I ended up back at voicemail.

  I hung up.

  Scrolling through my contacts, I found a number with a 310 area code.

  Alex Delaware said, “Hello?”

  We’d spoken twice, met once, but his voice was distinctive: alert and at the same time mellow.

  “Dr. Delaware, hi. This is Deputy Clay Edison from Alameda County Coroner’s, up north. Don’t know if you remember me.”

  “I do,” he said. “Nice to hear from you. Actually, I’ve been meaning to get in touch. I read about what you did with the Julian Triplett case and wanted to congratulate you.”

  No reason for him, in L.A., to be following our local news, unless he’d made a point of keeping an eye out.

  He said, “I couldn’t say so then—not my place—but I always felt he’d gotten a raw deal. Well done.”

  “Appreciate it. Your help meant a lot.”

  “Sure,” he said. “What’s up?”

  “You have friends at LAPD, right?”

  “A few.”

  I explained my need for boots on the ground.

  “Basically,” he said, “you’re trying to cut through red tape.”

  “Basically.”

  “Man after my own heart,” he said. “Let me see what I can do.”

  * * *

  —

  THAT AFTERNOON I got a call from a patrol officer named Eric Monchen, out of West L.A. Division. He wanted me to understand that his lieutenant, a man named Sturgis, had instructed him to call. Clearly put-upon. But yeah, he’d swing by the high school and see what he could find.

  I thanked him and called Delaware to do the same.

  “Glad it worked out,” he said.

  “You must have some powerful friends,” I said. “I’ve never seen cops move so fast.”

  “It’s good for them to run a little, every now and again.”

  “You don’t happen to know anyone down at the Coroner’s, do you?”

  “Not well enough to produce similar results.”

  “Worth a shot. There’s one other thing I wanted to ask. By any chance have you heard of a place called the Watermark School?”

  He said, “It’s up by you.”

  “That’s right. In Marin. You know it.”

  “A little,” he said.

  “Have you been there?”

  “Never. I remember reading about it in a graduate seminar. Case study for the free school movement. Fad of the moment. Nowadays it’s Tiger Moms. I didn’t realize Watermark was still around.”

  “I was just there on a notification,” I said. “Interesting place.”

  “How so?”

  I described some of what I’d seen: the Town Hall meeting, the kids running wild. “My decedent, her mother’s the principal.”

  “That’s too bad.” He paused. “Is there something specific you wanted to know?”

  I was thinking about the girl in the nightgown, crouched in the mud.

  I couldn’t get her out of my head.

  I said, “I’m not sure.”

  When he spoke next I heard mischief. “Just good, old-fashioned curiosity.”

  “It’s a bad habit.”

  “I wouldn’t know about that.” He laughed. “Take care, Clay.”

  * * *

  —

  I FIGURED PATROL Officer Monchen had been shining me on, but lo and beho
ld he called the next day. A trifle friendlier, now that my request had proven not a complete fool’s errand.

  Kevin F. Gomez, same DOB as our vic, class of 2013.

  Parents Philip and Valentina; brother Dylan, class of 2011.

  Phone number and an address on South Halm Avenue.

  Monchen didn’t volunteer to go over there in person. I didn’t ask. Not his wheelhouse. Instead I called the Los Angeles County Department of Medical Examiner–Coroner to request they make notification to Valentina and Philip Gomez.

  Hung up, pleased with myself. My week to move the needle.

  Saturday, January 12

  1:41 p.m.

  Or not.

  The caller identified herself as Sue Carney, L.A. Coroner investigator. In a rapid patter, she told me that she and her partner had paid a courtesy visit to the Gomez family.

  “The father answers the door,” she said. “I’m like, ‘Mr. Philip Gomez?’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘I’m afraid I have some bad news,’ et cetera. The whole time he’s staring at me like I’m crazy. He goes, ‘I don’t have a daughter.’ ”

  I could see where this was headed. “Shit.”

  “I’m checking the address, see if we went to the wrong place. Mendes, she calls back to the office, like, ‘Do we have the wrong Gomez?’ Cause this is pretty embarrassing for us.”

  “I bet. Listen—”

  “She calls, they tell her, ‘No, that’s the address he gave us.’ He, being you.”

  Carney read the number on South Halm. “That’s what they told me. Is that right?”

  “It—yeah, but—”

  “Good to know we didn’t screw up,” she said, “cause meanwhile the father, he’s telling us no such person. So now I’m thinking he’s having some sort of denial reaction. Happens, right? ‘Why do you keep telling me that, I don’t have a daughter, I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ Mendes, nice and calm, asks is your wife home. Hopefully we talk to her and she can help him, you know, ease into it. For some reason that pisses him off even worse. He’s going apeshit. ‘Why won’t you leave me alone, blah blah blah, get your ass out of here.’ This is not a small dude, okay? This dude is big. Two thirty, two forty. I’m five-one, okay? Mendes—you see her, she’s a stick. Neither of us is carrying. I keep a Taser in the car. Six years I’ve been doing this I’ve never had to use it. And here’s this guy foaming at the mouth like he’s gonna step to us. All of a sudden he runs back into the house. I don’t know if he’s going to get a knife, a bat, a shotgun, whatever. Me and Mendes, we’re like, what do we do? We start backing up to our vehicle, and the dude comes tearing out the door with—I don’t think I, did I mention he’s naked?”

  “You did not,” I said.

  “He’s in his underwear. Technically not naked but I saw plenty.”

  I said, “Can I interrupt you for one second? What did they tell you about the decedent?”

  “What do you mean, what did they tell me?”

  “Were you aware that the decedent was born male?”

  Beat.

  “The fuck,” she said.

  “They didn’t tell you.”

  “No.”

  I pinched the bridge of my nose. “I’m sorry about this.”

  “The. Fuck. You think it might be, I dunno, important, maybe, to mention that?”

  “I did mention it,” I said. “I told whoever took the call.”

  “Nobody told me shit.”

  “I told them. I swear.”

  Sue Carney said, “Whatever. That don’t help, cause I got this maniac in his tighty-whiteys screaming his head off. He shoves a picture at me. It’s a picture of a young guy. ‘That’s my son. I have a son. He’s not dead.’ And I’m like, ‘Sir, I am very sorry, but I am going to have to clarify this situation with my department.’ ”

  “What did he look like?” I asked.

  “What? Like a red walrus with ass crack. I told you.”

  “The son,” I said. “In the picture. Can you describe him?”

  “No, I can’t, because I wasn’t paying attention.” A beat. “He was in a uniform.”

  “Marine uniform?”

  “I don’t know,” she said angrily. “I’m sorry, all right? I wasn’t taking notes. He won’t let us leave. He’s blocking our car, whaling on the hood. ‘Who do you think you are, come here, tell me that, run off, you come back here, chickenshit motherfuckers, get the fuck out of here.’ Mendes and me are like, make up your frickin mind. ‘I want to speak to your supervisor.’ Mendes goes, ‘Absolutely, sir.’ She gave him the number and we got out of there quick.”

  “That’s where you left it? He’s gonna call you?”

  Carney had a sailor’s bawdy laugh.

  “Hell no,” she said. “That’s what you think? Hell no. She didn’t give him our number. She gave him yours.”

  CHAPTER 21

  I braced myself for a call from a pissed-off Philip Gomez.

  It never came, and the next several weeks slid by in relative peace and quiet.

  The orthopedist prodded my leg and declared it to be healing nicely.

  A van from a Marin mortuary arrived to pick up Winnie Ozawa’s body.

  The jail emailed me the results of Meredith Klaar’s drug panel. It was clean.

  The Sunday after Martin Luther King, Jr., Day, five weeks and one day since the events on Almond Street, the transcriptionist returned Winnie Ozawa’s autopsy protocol.

  Cause of death was confirmed as asphyxia due to manual strangulation.

  Her blood work showed traces of methamphetamine and alcohol.

  Two DNA profiles had been recovered from the scrapings beneath her nails.

  The first profile belonged to Winnie herself.

  The second profile was that of an unknown male.

  I picked up my phone to call Nwodo. Stopped myself. She didn’t need me to tell her about the results. She would’ve gotten them.

  Five weeks and one day. In some ways it felt like far more time had passed; in some ways, far less. A few tasks remained. Starting with contacting the defrauded women. The Watermark name made it easier to keep them on the line. Now Karla-with-a-K Abruzzo was grateful. Jessica Chen, too. As for those who chose to continue to hang up on me, let them reap the consequences the next time they applied for a car loan.

  I ran Winnie Ozawa’s Social Security number, looking for a residence, a marriage license, a driver’s license, arrests.

  Nothing.

  I wondered if Nwodo’d had any better luck.

  Maybe she’d managed to locate Winnie’s friends.

  I picked up the phone.

  My boat.

  I put it down. My dialing hand felt awful twitchy, though.

  It didn’t help that I had fewer distractions than usual. People kept dying, but I was still on light duty, forbidden from going out on removals. What fell to me instead were notifications.

  Shoops and I paid a visit to a woman out on Alameda whose sister had overdosed on opioids. The woman beamed triumphantly. She said, “I told you so.”

  Bagoyo and I paid a visit to a man in Hayward. His mother had been found in her apartment, dead of a heart attack. We omitted that the apartment was overrun with rabbits, gerbils, and other living things, uncaged. Left without food, the animals had devoured the contents of the pantry before starting in on one another and their host. EMTs broke down the door on a charnel house. The body was positioned upright in bed, missing six fingers, nine toes, and both eyes. She had been dead for a week. Per downstairs neighbors, the stench wasn’t noticeably worse than usual.

  Zaragoza and I paid a visit to a couple in Berkeley. They lived in a quaint Brown Shingle. He was a computer programmer. She was a microbiologist. The previous spring, their twenty-four-year-old son had left for a solo
camping trip in Arches National Park. He hadn’t been heard from since. His vehicle, a green 1989 Volvo station wagon, was discovered at a remote trailhead, and a search mounted without success. Now a group of hikers had spotted his skeletonized remains, a mile off the trail. He was piled up on the far side of a rock formation. A nearby backpack contained tabs of LSD. The presumption was that he’d gotten high, climbed up, and fallen, shattering his left femur. The pathologist’s report put the probable cause of death as dehydration, rather than trauma from the impact. Identification had been made from dental records.

  His mother showed us to his childhood bedroom, still with its hip-hop posters and outer-space duvet. She and her husband had been talking about redecorating. Update it; make it suitable for guests. They hadn’t gotten around to it yet, she said, softly stroking the rings of Saturn; not yet, but perhaps the time had come.

  The degree to which all this depressed the shit out of me caught me off-guard. Notification was a duty I performed on a weekly basis, but I’d never felt the weight of it quite so hard as I did then.

  Amy said, “You’re a physical creature.”

  It was Monday night, and I had my leg up on the couch, watching the Warriors dismantle the Celtics. The coffee table had been moved within arm’s reach, a slice of Zachary’s deep-dish congealing on a plate. The gel pack on my knee had warmed to room temperature.

  I said, “I don’t feel very physical.”

  “You’re not, right now.” She was sitting at the card table that served as her work nook, answering emails. “That’s my point.”

  She took the gel pack to the kitchen.

  “You sit still for too long,” she called, “you start to brood.”

  She returned with a pack fresh out of the freezer, plus three ibuprofen and water.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  She went back to her laptop. “I’m the same way.”

  “Think about our poor kids.”

  “I’d rather not, yet.”

  On screen, Draymond Green was getting T’d up.

  Between swallows, I said, “You do want to have kids, though.”