To the world, the boy she had once called Speedy Gonzales was now a “savage killer.” Warren, her friend, who had once called Marissa munchkin and called her a Care Bear. She’d already gone to the police station and given a statement about the friends she’d known and loved. “Thank you very much for coming in, Tara,” the detective had told her. “It showed a lot of courage for you to come in here and talk to us. I hope there’re more people like you rather than the people who were cowardly enough to be involved in this thing.”
Still, she felt neither brave nor honorable. She’d been there. Under the bridge. She would see the moment again and again when she was trying to listen to her teacher discuss the chart of elements. Under the bridge. She would see the moment as a flurry of such frightening and troubling savagery. It was the most horrible thing she’d ever seen. “Especially when friends whom you’ve known forever are kicking, pulling hair, punching, smashing heads against railings.”
And now those friends whom she’d known forever were locked away and their desks were empty and their names were not read or mentioned by teachers, as if they too had gone missing into some eternal place of absence.
In the hallways, Tara noticed Syreeta walking like a phantom with her hair lank and shadows under her eyes. “Syreeta used to always be high class, but after what happened, she just wore track pants and sneakers and she was just so sad.” Syreeta and Tara had gone together to the place below the old schoolhouse, and they’d placed two single roses on the sand for Reena. Then the reporters had come rushing down to ask them if they knew the girl who died, and they’d both run away together, chased by the unknown adults.
“After the arrests, The Five of us just stuck together. We talked about it all the time. We were just there for each other. ‘Do you want to go for a coffee?’ People didn’t know what to do with themselves. Our whole big group split up; the whole dynamic changed. No one wanted to go out anymore. Other people couldn’t understand what was going on. We talked about it all the time on the phone. For us, that was all we could think about. Before I went to bed, that’s all I could think of. When I woke up, that’s all I could think of.”
All that Tara could think of was this:
“The fact of seeing something so horrific.
“The fact that your closest friends could be capable of what they did.
“The fact that someone had lost their life for no reason at all.”
• • •
A Shoreline student named Jodene Rogers walked over the bridge to her mother’s home after school, and instead of doing her homework or calling her boyfriend, she asked for a drive to the police station.
Sergeant Poulton met with the girl. She was dressed in flared denims and a Calvin Klein hooded sweatshirt. Her eyes were a pale violet-brown, and some strands of her hair were tawny while others were almost gold.
“I have a few questions,” Jodene said. “The only thing I’m really worried about in giving this statement is the confidentiality. I don’t want anybody to know that I’ve been in here and given this information. It’s because of personal safety. There’s certain people, who are not involved, but if they knew I was ratting on Kelly, they wouldn’t like it and I’d have to deal with them. That’s the one thing I’m worried about.”
“Well, that could be a problem. If necessary, you would go to court to say what you’d seen or heard. I mean, it may be absolutely crucial to the case against Kelly.”
Worry shadowed Jodene’s eyes and the pale violet seemed to turn to a steady and dark brown.
“Its tough,” Sergeant Poulton said. “We understand these are hard decisions you and all your friends have to make right now. We’re in a position where we’re dealing with a murder investigation of a fourteen-year-old girl who’s been killed and it’s our responsibility to get to the bottom of it. For your own peace of mind, telling us what happened might be better for you. Basically, Jodene, if everybody gave information to us about Kelly and then didn’t show up in court, well then Kelly would get out of jail tomorrow and she’d stay out.”
“Well, can’t you use my recording? Can’t you play that in court?”
“That’s the way our justice system works. People have to stand up and give their evidence, and be subject to cross-examination. That’s the fair way of doing it.”
“See, the thing is,” Jodene said, biting her already bitten nails, “I want to tell you this. I know it’s the right thing to do, and I pray to God that I do not have to go up on that stand. I’m not the only person who knows this exact story. I know others know it, but they don’t want to tell you guys because they don’t want to go on the stand.”
“Well, as you say, it is the right thing to do.”
Jodene sighed.
“Okay, well, I was talking to Kelly outside the school last Thursday. We were having a smoke on a break from our peer counseling class. She mentioned to me that the cops had been phoning her friends, and I asked her why. She told me her and her friends invited Reena out and told her they were just going to go out and party with her and have fun, but all along they planned to beat her up. And that’s what they did. They just beat her up and everybody was in on it, and then they left her. They went away, and somehow she managed to walk over the bridge, and Kelly wanted to go after her. She wanted to have a talk with her to make sure she wouldn’t rat, and Warren went with her, and Kelly said she began kicking her. She pushed her on the ground, began kicking her in the head, took a stick, and messed with her face somehow. She said she snapped or broke one of her arms, and she hit her with some sort of object, in the head. I guess Reena got up, and they knocked her over, and she fell in the water. She was bobbing in the water, and Kelly said she held her head under the water for a good two or three minutes, and she told me she lifted her foot up, like, ‘Whoops,’ you know, and then, I guess they left. She never once mentioned that Warren did anything. It was all her, she said.”
“What did she mean by ‘whoops’?”
“She had her foot on the girl’s head, and she made it as if it was a joke, like whoops’ type of thing. I don’t know. I didn’t take Kelly seriously. I know she told other people this, because we sat on the phone the other night. We just talk about it all the time now, and nobody really knows. A couple of my friends think that her arms may have been broken, but we don’t know for sure.”
“Did you have any conversation with Warren?”
“I saw him every day at school during that week, but he really kept it quiet. If someone came up to him, he was just like, ‘Get the hell out of my face, get away from me,’ type of thing. People were asking him what was wrong with him. Something was wrong with him.”
“Have you known him to be involved in other fights?”
“No. I know he’s in that little Crip thing at school. I’ve never heard of him fighting before.”
“You said she told you Josephine and Dusty were involved in the fight. Do you know them? Could you describe them?”
“Josephine’s real tiny. Other than that, I don’t have a clue. Dusty, she’s quite big with wavy black hair. Other than that, I don’t know her.”
Before she left, Jodene was asked by the detectives if there was anything she’d like to add.
“I don’t know. The main reason I came down here is because I thought about what Kelly told me, and I replayed it in my mind, and I guess I came down here because I do not believe Warren did that. I’m sorry. I can’t even picture him doing that. He’s a nice guy. I mean, I can picture him standing there, like this is my mental picture: I picture him standing there, just going, ‘Oh, you’re crazy,’ you know, and it’s not clicking what she’s doing. I just can’t picture him killing her and leaving her in the Gorge to die. Kelly, I don’t know. Kelly’s messed up in her head. I always thought she was really weird. She’s the kind of person who destructs things, gets herself in trouble. She’s been in trouble so much at school she should have been expelled from Shoreline by now. She’s either ripping things off the walls or punching pe
ople in the face. I can’t see either of them doing this, but it shocks me about Warren most of all.”
• • •
Dimitri no longer walked over the bridge because his father had taken him out of Shoreline. His father drove him to the police station, avoiding the bridge, but it did not matter because for years, and perhaps forever, Dimitri would see Reena on the bridge and replay it in his mind and think if he’d only followed her, if he’d only grabbed Warren a second time, if he’d only…. A rash of pimples now marked his once-clear skin, and he’d pretty much given up on trying to play basketball. He could barely talk to Marissa now because she too was a part of the memory. He knew no one at his new school, and he walked through the hallways, an outcast where he once, as he told the GQ reporter, “pretty much ran Shoreline.” He was over six feet tall, but he felt as if he must be still growing because every one of his limbs ached and he’d curl up with his knees banging into his chin just trying to still the anxiety.
There was this too: he knew more than he’d told the cops. He knew more about Warren’s activities on that terrible evening. As his father’s car drew closer to the station, he thought of the Decision, as Sergeant Poulton had referred to it—“the Decision you all have to make.” The Decision, however, could get him in deeper, cause his complete exile from the youth of View Royal. So many guys know shit, he thought, why must I be the one to tell what happened?
Then, as he recalls, “I just decided I’d keep some things out of my story. I wanted to help Warren. I just wanted to keep some things to myself. Before this all happened, me and Warren ended up getting really close and hanging out, and I didn’t want him getting in trouble, because he was my friend. I didn’t know what to do. I was up and down all that week after the arrests. I didn’t know if I was coming or going. I did not know what to do.”
Sergeant Bond could tell that Dimitri was being “selective.” He could tell from the boy’s uneasiness that he was holding back some knowledge about his best friend.
“Make sure you’re telling it straight, Dimitri,” he said. “To be blunt about it, I think only certain areas of your story have a ring of truth. I’ll cut to the chase here. You’ve washed a pair of pants worn by someone who’s murdered. You’re the first person Warren talks to after the murder. You’ve seen your buddy and Kelly pursue this girl across the Craigflower Bridge. Now I know you don’t question your friends about a little scuffle down by Mac’s, but I think this is a significant event. I’ve got some problems with your story, Dimitri. I’ve got major problems with it.”
Dimitri sighed. “If you’ve got a problem with my story, then I’m sorry.”
“I see you as being a bit uncomfortable with yourself.”
“If you don’t believe me, that’s your prerogative,” Dimitri said, with the certain sullenness and defiance common to all confused and pimply boys.
When Syreeta walked on the bridge, she saw Reena’s face in the photograph. When she arrived at school, she could not focus and was told by her teacher that it looked like she would likely receive a failing grade in math. Though this once would have been of great concern, she could now not deal with the rows of numbers in her textbook. She spent most of her time in Mrs. Smith’s office. “I practically lived there,” she would later recall.
We don’t think you deserve to have any guilt at all, the cops had said. We think you’re a nice person. You don’t need to feel guilty about this, the cops had said.
“But I do feel guilty,” she told Mrs. Smith. “Warren wanted to walk me home that night, and I said no. If I had just let him, a girl might still be alive. Or I could have just stayed with him. I don’t know why I left him. If I had stayed there that night, I can 100 percent guarantee you Warren wouldn’t have done anything.”
“Syreeta, you can’t blame yourself for this.”
There were geometry exams and the study of the human genome. Surely, she would fail every test and remain forever in the ninth grade, a girl with her lank hair and a blind eye.
I think you’ll find yourself feeling a lot better, the cops had said.
I think you’ll find this is the worst week of your life.
She wanted to write Warren, just to see if he was okay, but the cops told her he could not receive her letters because she would be a witness against him. A witness against him. “You’re going to be subpoenaed,” they told her. “You’re going to have to go to court.”
“But what if I don’t want to? Can’t I say I don’t want to go to court?”
“This is murder,” they said, with great disgust, unable to comprehend the bond of a young girls first love.
Who could she talk to about her strange and sudden fate? She could read her horoscope or talk to her friends. She could drift through the pages of Seventeen. Could anyone know what to say to the girlfriend of an accused killer? Mrs. Smith thought she should go visit her grandparents, get out of town, just go somewhere without the whispers and the talk.
She talked to the police for a second time. They came and picked her up after school. She wasn’t sure why, since she’d told them, again and again, everything she knew about the conversation in the bedroom. They just kept asking her for more details, as if they suspected she was holding back something because “of your love for Warren.”
She’d heard so many stories in the hallways and smoke pit since the night of the arrests. She’d heard Kelly had told Tara and Jodene and Maya that she alone drowned Reena. That she put her foot on Reena’s head, holding it under the water, while she calmly smoked a cigarette.
“I thought maybe Kelly might have done it all by herself, and Warren might have wanted to look like he could do something like that, even though it’s an awful thing to do.”
On that Wednesday night, she slept, or thought she slept. She was afraid to sleep, and she left the radio on, as if the songs would soothe her or lull her to dream. She woke up and she was shaking and there was cold sweat all over her arms. She’d kept a bucket beside her bed because since this all happened, she’d seen the scene in her mind and awakened nauseous and trembling. What time is it? She looked at the red numbers on her clock and it was 11:00 and then it was 3:00 in the morning. She no longer saw Warren’s face in her mind, though sometimes she could hear the sound of his voice. It was Reena’s face she saw. “Every time I closed my eyes, I saw her face.”
Everyone at Shoreline was grounded now. Everyone at Shoreline had been told by their parents, “You are never going out again.”
Under the bridge, there might have been discovered some malevolent spirit. There were dark forces who could beat and attack your daughter, or who could turn your daughter into a brutal and careless thug. Stay away from the bridge, parents said, as if it was a place, an abyss, holding all the savagery.
The Mechanism of Death
DR. LAUREL GRAY is a scholarly looking woman, with cropped gray hair and gold-rimmed glasses. She might be taken for a librarian or an academic, as she drives to work dressed in tweed suits or cashmere sweater sets. Yet she has authored articles such as, “The Coronary Artery Luminal Narrowing in the Young with Sudden Unexpected Death.” As a young woman, she learned about signs of drowning by studying the lungs of drowned cats; she learned how to recognize stabbing by staring at puncture wounds in pig skin. Her hands often shake when she performs autopsies, for out of the morgue, she smokes cigarettes.
Like the Dive Unit, she often can’t see anything when she examines a body. The heart blurs; the organs are too decomposed. And often she observes shimmers—fleeting colors that are translucent, temporary—and these shimmers either blind her from the search or offer illumination from the dark.
On November 24, when she looked at the young body of an unknown girl, she saw a shimmer of gold and removed a single earring, for the piece of gold caught itself, became tangled in the girls black hair.
• • •
The burden was on Dr. Laurel Gray to provide proof more tangible than the stories being told in interrogation rooms. She was to find
the cause of death. Her report would, it was hoped, hold something more scientific than cartoon drawings and hip-hop fairy tales. Blood had been washed away by rain and washing machines. The truth was fading fast in the web of loves and lies and gossip, and it would only fade faster when the lawyers began to try to protect their clients from punishment. By looking at blood, bruises, the heart, Dr. Laurel Gray might be the only one now able to establish the truth about the death of Reena Virk.
*
In the morgue, Reena is now a girl without opinions or dreams. She is a Deceased Female. She is Case No. 97-2749-33.
“The morgue is very sterile,” Sergeant Poulton, in attendance, explains. “The body is on a metal table, and there’s a metal stand as a head support. Everybody’s gowned and gloved and in little slip-on boots so you’re not introducing new elements into the area. The pathologist does a narration as she’s doing the autopsy. I was taking notes and another officer was taking photographs.”
“Measured, the girl is 5′6. She is 182 pounds.” Dr. Laurel Gray said. In her external observation, she saw no needle marks, no signs of drug use or disease. “She’s a very healthy girl.”
“The body is intact, but the skin on her hands and feet is starting to slip away. I would estimate she spent a week in cold water.”
Dr. Gray took a number of swab samples, and then removed Reena’s bra and the camisole tangled up around her neck.
“It is certainly apparent that she received a very severe beating. The following observations regarding bruising are:
bruising and swelling under both eyes
very bruised cheeks
a large laceration on her lips
nose bruised; bloody discharge in her nostrils
red marks on tops of both shoulders (an odd symmetry to the bruising on shoulders, almost a circle)
bruising on collarbone
Under the Bridge Page 22