by Tyler Dilts
As one of the techs opened his latent fingerprint kit, I wondered how many people came through this room every day. One hundred? One hundred fifty? The tech sighed at the futility of the task before him. I slipped along the wall and out of the room to join Marty and Jen.
“Have any blinding flashes of insight in there?” Jen asked.
“No,” I said. “That was just the photographers.”
All the cops in the hallway turned their heads in unison as Lieutenant Ruiz rounded the corner and headed toward us. He was tall and lean, with slick black hair and a leathery, sandblasted face. His eyes held a degree of hardness that I’d rarely seen and that I associated more with jail-wise cons and career button men. A lot of cops try to cultivate that look, but few succeed as well as Ruiz had. According to rumor, which he would neither confirm nor deny, he’d grown up on the South Texas border and started his law enforcement career in his hometown department. He worked his way through college and moved to the West Coast when the Texas Rangers informed him that they’d reached their quota for Mexican Americans. Ruiz had ridden a squad car for a decade in the East LA barrios, been among the first of the CRASH anti-gang officers, and received half a dozen commendations. Still, he had to come to Long Beach to make lieutenant and run his own homicide squad.
Dave Zepeda followed close behind Ruiz as we formed a loose circle a few yards away from the uniforms.
“Hey, Boss. Welcome to the party,” Marty said.
“Looks like we got our hands full here, folks.” Ruiz had tried hard to lose the accent, but a bit of Texas twang still lingered in his voice. “Run it down for me,” he said.
“Six o’clock, six fifteen,” Dave began. Every trace of the geniality he’d shown to Carl only minutes before had vanished. “Janitor’s starting to make his rounds of the classrooms.” He checked his notepad as he spoke. “He comes to this one here, sees the pretty teacher parked behind her desk, grading papers. Nothing unusual about that, he says. Hard worker, that one. He gives her a heigh-ho and goes on about his business. An hour or so later, working his way back toward the front, he finds her. Doesn’t touch anything, except to check she’s dead. Runs right to the office there and calls nine-one-one.”
“Call came in at seven forty-eight,” Marty said. The lieutenant looked at him as he continued.
“She’s standing, maybe moving toward the door. She sees the doer, doesn’t look like she starts panicking. Maybe she knows him, maybe she’s fronting him. He meets her halfway to the door and starts hacking. With something big, too.” Marty inhaled deeply through his nose and continued. “Maybe a machete, something like that, or a cleaver. Big and heavy anyway, and except for the crotch, he chops at her, doesn’t stab.”
“Danny? Jen?” Ruiz looked at each of us.
We nodded in agreement.
“Any thoughts on the suspect?”
“Definite wack job,” Marty said. “It’s ugly. Thrill kill. Trophy hunter.”
“Trophy?” The lieutenant’s face darkened.
“The left hand,” Jen said. “It’s missing.”
“Fuck.” In the five years I’d worked with Ruiz, this was only the third time I’d heard him use that word.
Stan approached with another uniform and a civilian who wore sweatpants, Velcro-fastened running shoes, and an ice blue Members Only jacket over a green-plaid sport shirt. The long hair on the right side of his head had been awkwardly brushed over the top, leaving lines of pink scalp visible between the strands of brown.
“Excuse me, Lieutenant,” Stan said. “This is the vice-principal.”
“Mr. Everett?” Ruiz asked, shifting into civilian-contact mode, his voice concerned, his slight smile overtaken by sadness.
“Yes,” the man said. He seemed to be trying hard to focus his attention on us rather than giving in to his own morbid curiosity by looking over his shoulder.
“We’ll need to see her personnel file. Emergency contact, that sort of thing.” Ruiz held the man’s gaze, trying to keep him focused.
“Yes, of course. We’ll just need to go back to the office.”
“You go ahead.” Ruiz nodded to Stan. “We’ll be right behind you.”
Stan took the man by his elbow. He turned him around so that Everett would be closer to the door as they walked down the hall. “How long have you worked here?” Stan asked.
“Been in the district nearly thirty years.”
“You must have some fascinating stories to tell.”
Everett, surprised, looked at Stan and nodded just as they passed the classroom door.
As soon as the two men rounded the corner, Ruiz was all business again.
“Marty, I want you back in the room. Make sure the techs don’t miss anything and get squared with the ME as soon as he shows.” He turned to Dave. “Organize a canvas. Find somebody who saw something.” Dave nodded. “You two,” he said, facing Jen and me, “you’re with Everett and me in the office.” He turned and strode down the hall.
“I just love it when he gets all butch like that,” I said.
Marty piped in too. “I wanna be just like him when I grow up.”
Jen shook her head and started after the lieutenant.
“Hey,” I said, “wait up.”
Ruiz, Jen, and I stood as Everett dug through a file cabinet drawer. “Here it is,” he said, placing a manila file folder on his desk. “I just can’t believe this, it’s so…so…” His voice trailed off, and he looked down at his hands. The venetian blinds behind his desk were open, and I looked out at the street.
“Boss,” I said. When Ruiz looked at me, I inclined my head toward the window. Outside, a blue Ford Econoline van with an encircled yellow 7 emblazoned on its side had parked across from the school. The satellite antenna mounted on its roof unfolded and telescoped toward the sky.
“Wonderful,” the lieutenant said, eyeing the news van. “You two got this?”
“Sure,” Jen said. “Mr. Everett,” she said as Ruiz left the room, “can we ask you a few questions?”
“Of course.” He clasped his hands nervously on the desk as we sat in the two chairs across from him.
“What can you tell us about her?”
“Elizabeth? She’s a fine teacher. A fine teacher. The students really love her.” He was still talking about her in the present tense. I wondered how long that would last.
“She was very good at her job, then?” Jen asked.
“Oh yes.” He looked down at his desk calendar. The tense shift hadn’t eluded him. Maybe he’d been an English teacher too. “One of our best.”
“How about the other faculty, the staff? How did they feel about her?” He looked up at Jen. I reached across the desk and slid the personnel file toward me.
“Well,” he said, “no real problems there.”
“No?” Jen asked, trying to open him up.
“No.” Everett began to rub his hands together. The motion was slight, but Jen caught it too. We both looked at him silently.
“Well,” he said after a moment, “there was a bit of friction with some of the other teachers. Nothing serious.”
“What kind of friction?” Jen asked innocently, her brown eyes sparkling.
He looked back at her, a slight smile playing across his lips. “Well, competition, you might say,” he said as he inched forward.
“Really?” Jen leaned into the desk, her eyes widening and locking onto his.
“Oh yes.”
I might as well have left the room at that point. She’d set the hook and was beginning to reel him in.
“You see, Elizabeth—Beth, her friends called her—she was very committed. Very driven. She’d put in hours and hours, after school, weekends, seemed like she never stopped.”
“And that was a problem?”
“Well, for some of the faculty,” he said, catching himself, “just some, mind you. That’s not always looked so kindly upon.”
“Really?” Jen asked, feigning surprise. “Why?”
“You se
e, not all of the teachers are that dedicated.” His comfort level was rising, and as he imparted his hard-won wisdom, he began to exhibit more confidence. “Some of them actually believe Beth’s work ethic reflects poorly on them.”
“In what way?” Jen smiled, feigning a fascination with his perceptiveness.
“They view it as a challenge to their own dedication and commitment. If she’s working so hard and getting such good results, well then, darn it, why aren’t they?” He slid his palm across his scalp, smoothing his comb-over.
Jen continued questioning him, asking about specific people who might be holding grudges, anyone who might have harbored ill will—each of the old homicide interview standards—all the while maintaining her doe-eyed innocent shtick. While she was reading him like a book, I flipped open the folder and started reading it like a file.
Elizabeth Anne Williams. Born February 12, 1979. Received her BA in English literature from UC San Diego in 1991 and her MA and teaching credentials from Cal State Long Beach two and a half years later. Began teaching at Warren High in 1995 after a brief stint at a high school in LA.
Her address caught my eye. She lived on Newport, a few blocks from the beach, not more than a mile and a half from me. Was that why she looked familiar? Maybe I’d seen her in the 7-Eleven. Or in Blockbuster. Or Ralph’s. Maybe.
I thumbed through the rest of the pages. I found what I was looking for on the back of the last page of her Long Beach Unified District application: “In case of emergency please notify: Rachel Williams.” Listed were her address, phone number, and relationship. The way things were playing out, odds were that shortly Jen and I would be telling Rachel that her sister had been found dead.
“Thank you so much,” Jen said, reaching across the desk to shake Everett’s hand.
“It was my pleasure, Detective.” He held onto her hand and stared into her eyes. “If there’s anything else I can do, please don’t hesitate—”
“Oh, don’t worry,” I said, closing the file and tucking it under my arm, “we won’t.”
When we were outside his door Jen whispered, “Looks like I’ve got a date for the prom.”
While Jen went to find Ruiz, I walked back down the hall to the crime scene. The medical examiner had arrived. A gurney, on top of which was a neatly folded black vinyl body bag, had been parked outside the classroom door. Inside, the ME, a squat black man whom I’d never met, was checking the body for rigor and lividity. Marty stood next to him, his arms folded across his chest.
“Anything interesting?” Marty asked.
“Nope,” the ME said.
I looked down at the teacher’s face again and tried to place her in my memory. I tried to imagine her walking through my neighborhood, renting a video, or checking bananas for ripeness. Nothing clicked.
Feeling an uncharacteristic pang in my gut, I looked into her dead green eyes. The last thing you want to do while standing over a victim’s body is to imagine them alive. It may sound cold, but they need to be objectified, viewed as a thing, simply a piece of meat, nothing more than an object to be studied for evidence: a strand of hair, a cotton fiber, a fleck of skin under the nail, a latent print on the smoothness of the watchband, a drop of semen soaked into the panties. Once you begin to imagine glowing green eyes and chestnut hair flowing in the wind, your objectivity and detachment turn to shit and you start missing the little things—and it’s the little things that make the story.
“Danny?” Marty asked.
“Yeah?”
“What is it?”
“Nothing. Just thinking.”
“We’re about ready to bag her,” he said, eyeing me curiously.
I found Jen just inside the school’s main entrance. Two more news vans were setting up across the street. A few feet away, Ruiz was consulting with a captain from Public Affairs who’d soon be forced to make an official statement.
“What’s up?” I asked her.
“He wants us to make the notification, feel out the sister. If she doesn’t turn us on to anything, we check out the vic’s place.”
“Work up the victimology?”
“Yeah.”
Most homicides, if they are solved at all, are solved in the first forty-eight hours after the crime. Ruiz was putting his money on Marty and Dave, hoping they would turn up some hard physical evidence or a reliable witness. If they came up dry, the best shot at finding our doer would be combing through Beth’s life, turning her past inside out, hoping, probably in vain, that we would be able to find someone with a motive, someone who wanted her dead. Someone unhinged and twisted enough to do what had been done to her.
I found myself hoping that Dave and Marty would come through. I knew, even then, that this case was different.
TWO
We drove west on Seventh Street in Jen’s Explorer, listening to the radio for news of the murder. Fortunately, a man in West LA had taken an assault rifle into the office that afternoon and killed three people before turning the .308 on himself. With any luck, that story would lead and take some of the media attention off Beth’s murder. So far, there had been no mention of dead teachers, but we’d already seen the first news van, so it wouldn’t be long before others picked up the scent.
Jen took out her cell phone and speed-dialed a number. “Tom,” she said, “it’s Jen. It’s a little after nine on Friday night. I’m not going to be able to make class tomorrow. Just keep them going on what we worked on last week, okay? Especially the ukemi—none of the newbies can roll for shit. And let me know if Rudy shows up. I’m really starting to worry about him. Just give me a call on my cell, all right?” She hung up and slipped the phone back into her bag.
Jen earned her first black belt in tae kwon do before she learned how to drive. Since then, she’d studied half a dozen other martial arts before finally committing herself to aikido. Last spring I joined her parents and brother to watch her take the test for her third-degree black belt. Our eyes widened as we watched her randori. Five men, most twice her weight, attacked her simultaneously, and in a spinning and twisting whirlwind of motion, she sent each of them flying in a different direction. They rolled back onto their feet and repeated their attacks over and over again, but not one of them landed a single blow.
When Jen first made detective and could count on having a reasonable number of weekends off, she began teaching Saturday afternoon martial arts workshops in a city program for at-risk youths. After seeing her belt test, I was intrigued enough to visit the first session of one of her classes, for a particularly tough crew of juvenile repeat offenders. As Jen walked to the front of the gym, she was met with snickers, snide comments, sexual innuendoes, and shaking heads. She held up a hundred-dollar bill in one hand and a police baton in the other. She told the class that the first person who could hit her with the nightstick got the bill. After she repeatedly assured them that there was no trick and that the offer was legit, one cocky teen volunteered to give it a try. She handed him the weapon. He attacked her with force, but she effortlessly slipped to the side and, in one continuous spinning motion, disarmed him and pinned him to the floor. Four more brave souls tried the attack, and they all wound up face down on the mat, unable to move. She broke the hundred when she bought me lunch after class.
“Still teaching kung fu to the miscreants, huh?” I asked.
She said the same thing she always did when I asked that question. “It’s not kung fu, and they’re not miscreants.”
“Who’s Rudy?”
“Rudy Nguyen. Just one of the kids. Getting ready for his brown belt test.” She was quiet a moment and then went on. “His brother was a small-time banger, ran with one of the Little Saigon crews. Helped take care of the family. He got popped a few months ago as an accessory to that drive-by in Westminster. The one that killed the ten-year-old girl? He stood up, so he’s doing five to seven. The family’s struggling to keep on. Father’s long gone, so it’s just the mom, Rudy, and two little sisters. The mom does laundry at one of the downtown hote
ls.”
What she didn’t say, of course, was how worried she was that Rudy would follow in his brother’s footsteps. Single mothers working for poverty-level wages don’t make it far without help. It wouldn’t be the first time we’d seen a kid take a wrong turn while trying to take care of his own. The cops, the politicians, and the media don’t like to admit it, but it’s not always about the bling.
I opened a red and white tin of mints. “When you can snatch the Altoid from my hand,” I said, in my best Master Po imitation, “it will be time for you to go.”
Her right hand snapped away from the wheel, and as quickly as I could, I closed my hand on the mint. I didn’t realize that she wasn’t going for it until I felt her knuckles strike my biceps “Ouch,” I yelped.
“Pussy.”
Jen turned left onto Pine Avenue. The Friday night crowd was lining the street full of trendy restaurants and nightspots. Thanks to the city’s massive urban renewal effort, people who wouldn’t have been caught dead downtown after dark only a few years ago now flocked there every weekend.
She turned left again on Broadway and parked in a red zone near the Blue Cafe, a club that featured live blues seven nights a week. The crowd was just starting to thicken on the patio outside as people lined up for the bigger names who played later in the evening. She took the laminated LBPD placard from the slot on the sun visor and dropped it onto the dash so we wouldn’t be towed by an overzealous parking enforcement officer.
“You ready for this?” she asked.
“No.”
“Well, that makes two of us.”
We walked along the pedestrian-only concourse that joined Broadway and Third. Passing the cafe patio, which was enveloped in a cloud of tobacco smoke, we heard the pulsating rhythms that seeped out into the still night air. I followed Jen around the corner and into the alley behind the old brick building, which housed the club and several other establishments. Halfway along the alley, we came to a glass door set back into the brick wall. Through the doors we saw a flight of dimly lit stairs, which led up to the apartments above. I reached out and pulled on the door handle. It didn’t open.