Shadow Man

by Alan Drew

  Ben and Emma reached the top of the hill now, the fledgling city of Rancho Santa Elena spreading beneath them in a patchwork of unfinished grids. Even when Ben was a kid, the basin had been mostly empty—a dusty street with a single Esso gas station, the crisscrossing runways of the Marine air base, a brand-new housing tract out by the new university, a few outlying buildings for ranchers and strawberry pickers. Now Rancho Santa Elena spread in an irregular geometry from the ocean to the base of the eastern hills of the Santa Ana Mountains, where newly paved roads cut swaths through orange groves. The center of town, the part of the master plan that was finished, looked vaguely Spanish—peaks of red-tiled rooftops organized in neat rows, man-made lakes with imported ducks, greenbelts cutting pathways for joggers and bicyclists. It was like watching a virus consume the soft tissue of land, spreading to join Los Angeles to the north.

  A sudden screech, and an F-4 fighter jet roared above Emma’s head. Tin Man leapt backward, and Gus startled and bucked, losing his purchase on the rocky trail.

  “Heels in,” he called out to Emma, as one of her hands lost grip on the reins.

  Ben dug his boot heels into Tin Man’s flanks and the horse steadied, but Gus stumbled down the hill and Emma flipped backward, thumping solidly on her back in the dirt. Ben was off Tin Man, rushing to her, and by the time he was there she was already sitting up, cursing the plane and its pilot.

  “Asshole,” she said, slapping dust from her jeans.

  “You all right?” Ben said, his hand on her back.

  “No.” She slapped the ground, her brown eyes lit with fury. “I want to kill that guy.”

  “Anything broken?”

  “No,” she said, standing now. “Where’s Gus?”

  “Don’t worry about the horse.” She had fallen before, of course, but his panic never changed about it. “Just sit. Make sure your ribs are in the right place.”

  He touched the side of her back, pressed a little. She elbowed his hands away.

  “I’m fine, Dad.”

  She went to Gus, who was shaking in a clump of cactus, a few thorns stabbing his flank. She hugged the horse’s chest as Ben yanked the thorns out, points of blood bubbling out of the skin. The jet swerved around the eastern hills, dropped its landing gear, and glided to the tarmac.

  “Asshole,” Ben said.

  “Yeah,” Emma said, smiling. “Took the words right out of my mouth.”

  —

  IT WAS NEARLY dark when they got back to the house, the western sky a propane blue. Emma walked the horses past his unmarked police cruiser and into the barn, and Ben retrieved a Ziploc bag of ice from the house and tried to hold it to Emma’s back.

  “Thanks, Dad,” she said, hoisting the saddle off Gus, “but I’m fine.”

  He let her be and they worked their tacks alone, the rushing sound of the 405 Freeway in the distance.

  Ben’s house was in the flats on the edge of the city, down a dirt road that ended at a cattle fence that closed off Laguna Canyon and the coastal hills, a patch of wilderness, and the last of the old ranch. The place was a low-slung adobe, set in a carved-out square of orange grove—his father’s house, a cowboy’s joint, the house Ben had lived in until he was eleven. Emma had dubbed it “Casa de la Wade” three years before and the name stuck; they’d even fashioned a sign out of acetylene-torched wood and nailed it above the front door. When he and Rachel had moved back here from L.A. four years ago, they spent the first year in a rented apartment near the new university. He would drive out every once in a while to look in on the old place—the windows boarded up, the barn roof sagging. He had asked around at the corporate offices of the new “Rancho,” out by John Wayne Airport. Some of the suits remembered his dad from back when it was a working ranch, not a corporation with valuable real estate to sell, and out of respect to his father’s memory they let him have it for a moderately inflated price. The house and its acre of land hadn’t then been part of the town’s master plan; it was in the flight path of the military jets, and the Marines had wanted at least a quarter-mile perimeter of open land surrounding the runways in case an F-4 bit it on approach. The feds, though, had recently decided to close the base, and suddenly the Rancho Santa Elena Corporation zeroed in on the surrounding land. Letters from the Rancho’s lawyers had already offered him 10 percent over market value for the place. He had written back and simply said, Not interested, though he knew they wouldn’t give up so easily. The Rancho had already declared eminent domain to bulldoze artist cottages in Laguna Canyon. It had its sights set on the old cowboy camp at Bommer Canyon, too, just up the hill from Ben’s place.

  It took a year of evenings and weekends, one hammered broken finger, and a nail through the arch of his right foot to get the place in shape, though mostly it remained a cowboy flophouse, stinking of leather and coffee grounds, and he liked it that way.

  Ben forked hay into the barn stalls now, while Emma cotton-balled Betadine onto the cactus cuts on Gus’s flanks.

  “You ready for softball?” he asked.

  “I’m not going to play this year.”

  “You love softball.” She had an arm; she could whip it around in a blur and pop the ball into the catcher’s mitt.

  “You love softball,” she said.

  “Why not?”

  “You look at those girls in high school and they’re all, I don’t know, manly.”

  “Manly?” he said. His tomboy little girl had a sudden need to be “pretty.” She’d started spending hours in the bathroom, rimming her eyes with eyeliner, thickening her lips with lipstick. “There’s nothing wrong with those girls.”

  “I just don’t wanna play anymore, all right?”

  “I gotta talk with your mother about that,” he said, glancing at her. Her face was tanned, her dark hair sun streaked. “And, by the way, you’re perfect, if you ask me.”

  “Yeah, well, you’re my dad, so it counts like forty-five percent.”

  Emma finished with the Betadine and closed Gus up in his stall. They had a big dinner planned—carne asada tacos, fresh avocado from the farmers’ market, corn tortillas he’d picked up that morning from the tortilleria in Costa Mesa. Back to the Future had just come out on VHS, and he’d already slipped the cassette into the VCR.

  The Motorola rang in the cruiser. He stepped over to the car and leaned through the open window to grab the receiver. “Yeah, it’s Wade.”

  “Been trying to get you on the horn.” It was Stephanie Martin, the evening dispatch.

  “It’s my night off.”

  “Hope you enjoyed it,” she said. “Got a call from a Jonas Rafferty down in Mission Viejo. They got a DB down there that’s still warm. He’s asking for you.”

  A dead body. It had been a long time since he’d been on a murder scene.

  “Gotta get you to your mother,” Ben said to Emma.

  “What about Fiesta Night?”

  “Friday,” he said, latching up the barn door. “We’ll do it Friday. I’m sorry.”

  “You need a nine-to-five, Dad,” Emma said.

  Seven minutes later, he parked the cruiser in front of his ex-wife’s new condominium in the center of town. Rachel opened the door a crack to let Emma in, but Ben still saw the man sitting on the couch, legs crossed at the knees, a glass of white wine resting in his palm as though cupping a breast.

  “A professor?” Ben said, looking over Rachel’s shoulder as Emma waved a hello to the man and walked to the kitchen. “Drives a Datsun four-banger?”

  She smiled, the dimple in her left cheek killing him a little.

  “C’mon, Ben,” she said quietly. “You think I’m going to give you that?” She had used the shampoo he liked, cherry blossom or something like that, and for a moment in his mind her wet hair lay across her pillow next to him in the bed they used to share. “You’ve got a crime to solve, remember?”

  “It’s a DB,” Ben said. “Barring a miracle, it’s not going anywhere.”

  “Here?” she said. “In Santa Elena?�
�

  “No,” he said. “Mission Viejo.”

  “Thank God,” she said. “Is Emma’s homework done?”

  He shook his head and Rachel sighed. “Out riding again?”

  “She fell,” Ben said.

  “Jesus, Ben.”

  “One of those F-4s snuck up on us,” he said. “Spooked Gus.”

  “She all right?”

  “She says so,” he said. “But check on her anyway.”

  “If she’ll let me.”

  Apple in hand, Emma snuck behind Rachel and started up the steps to the second floor of the condo.

  “Forgetting something?” Ben called through the cracked door. “Where’s my kiss?”

  “Geez, Dad,” Emma said, pushing her way between her mother and the door. She leaned forward and deigned to present him her cheek, and Ben took advantage of the wide-open door to once-over the professor sitting on the couch. “Hey,” Ben said, nodding once.

  “How are you this evening?” the man said, not even bothering to uncross his legs.

  Pompous ass. “Got any outstanding parking tickets?” Ben said in a serious voice.

  The man shifted his weight on the couch.

  “Ben,” Rachel said, pushing him back from the door.

  “A joke,” Ben said, holding up his hands. “Just a little police humor.”

  “Go do your job, Ben,” Rachel said, and then she closed the door.

  A body was growing cold seven miles away, but he walked to the carport anyway, trying his hunch on the vehicles, looking for a University of California faculty parking tag, a MEAT IS MURDER bumper sticker, anything that would give the man away as an elitist wimp. And on the fifteen-minute drive down to Mission Viejo, riding the shoulder past a red sea of taillights, all he could think about was that man’s soft hands on his ex-wife’s skin in the bedroom next to where their daughter slept.

  —

  THE HOUSE WAS on Mar Vista, off Alicia Parkway, .46 miles from the 5 Freeway, according to his odometer. The street was already a carnival, with neighbors straining the yellow tape and half of the Mission Viejo police force parked on the road, cruiser lights spinning blue and red circles. When Ben pulled up, Rafferty was standing on the porch, giving directions to a uniform. It was 7:47; Ben wrote it down on a yellow legal pad sitting on the passenger seat. Rafferty saw Ben’s cruiser and waved him in.

  Rafferty had been a vice detective in L.A., and he took the job in Mission Viejo for the same reasons Ben had taken the job in Santa Elena—safe neighborhoods, great schools for his two kids, little smog, good benefits and retirement plan, and an easier caseload, which allowed him to put his feet up at night with a beer and watch his sons swim in the backyard pool. Mission Viejo was another in a chain of master-planned communities in southern Orange County that set out to create an idyll that never existed—lakes where there had been rock, grass where there had been dust, shade where there had been sunlight. It survived on being the opposite of L.A.—clean, organized, boring. In L.A., people were used to crime scenes, used to the fact that there were bad people and they did bad things. Here, the neighbors crowding the crime-scene tape already carried the look of communal shock.

  “Got a DB on the kitchen floor,” Rafferty said, his voice pitched high with adrenaline. He placed his hand on Ben’s shoulder; his palm was hot. “I’m glad you’re here.”

  Since moving south, he and Rafferty had worked a couple of cases together—an illegal-immigrant smuggling operation with tentacles in both Mission Viejo and Santa Elena, a medical-insurance fraud case.

  “Homicide’s not vice, is it?” Ben said.

  “At least no drugged-out chick is screaming at me,” Rafferty said without any humor.

  Ben could feel his blood pressure rise when they walked into the house. It was brutally hot, the heat of the day still trapped by the walls of the house. The foyer was lined with pictures of children or grandchildren, their smiling faces pinned behind glass. The living room was tidy—the carpet recently vacuumed, magazines stacked on a coffee table. Glass figurines—panda bears, cows, miniature unicorns, a seagull with wings outstretched—sparkled in a lighted cabinet against the far wall. A cheap oil painting of a wave catching the light of sunset, probably purchased at a convention-center art sale, hung askew. It wasn’t until he saw what was in the kitchen that he understood what had knocked it off-kilter.

  Scuff marks blackened the yellow wall, the sole of one of her shoes ripped apart at the toe. She had kicked and kicked the common wall that separated the living room from the kitchen and nearly knocked the picture off the hook. The woman’s legs were pale in the kitchen light, her dress pushed above her knees. Her torso and face were hidden behind the kitchen island. On top of that island was a cutting board, a tomato sliced into thirds, and a knife slicked with pulp and seed. A fan motor rattled above the oven. A pot of pasta sat on the stove top, the smell of starch thickening the heat in the room. The screen to the sliding back door had been peeled open.

  “Anyone touch that door?” Ben said to Rafferty.

  “No,” he said. “First on scene said it was like that when he got here.”

  She had been at the cutting board, he guessed, her back to the door. Between the fan and the boiling water, and the carpet on the floor to soften the intruder’s footsteps, she wouldn’t have heard anyone sneaking up behind her.

  “Get someone to print that,” Ben said, pointing to the stove.

  There was another smell, too. When he came around the corner of the island, he saw the puddle glistening beneath her dress, the orange flowers deepening red where it was soaked with her urine. He could tell she had been strangled before he saw the bruises on her neck and the fingernail crescents cutting blood out of her skin, before he saw the scratches crisscrossing her chin, before he discovered the petechiae around her eyes like little pinhole blisters.

  “Medical examiner on the way?” Ben asked.

  “Don’t have one.” Rafferty shook his head. “It’s me.”

  “The perks of living in paradise, huh?”

  “I can do it,” he said. “I just don’t want to fuck it up. That’s why I called you. I mean, this is the guy, right?”

  “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Ben said.

  In recent months, there had been a series of killings in L.A. and northern Orange County, mostly manual strangulations. No one yet had said there was a serial on the loose, but cops had started to whisper exactly that to one another. The last body, six days ago, had turned up in Seal Beach, thirty-five miles away.

  Ben knelt down next to the body. One eye was open, the sclera red with broken blood vessels.

  “She fought,” Ben said. “Hard.”

  The woman was in her late forties, at least. Barefoot, a reddening burn on her left thigh—from splashed pasta water, he guessed. Jesus. Ben could understand the shootings in L.A. It was business, a twisted ethic among the gangs, a harsh world with harsh laws, and the kids bought into it. But not even a Crip or Blood, not even a Loco, would strangle the life out of someone. It was too much work, too personal, too brutal. You had to be out of your head angry to do such a thing, psychotic angry, or else you had to enjoy it, had to find pleasure in the power of your hands.

  “Who found her?”

  “Anonymous tip,” Rafferty said.

  “The killer?”

  “That’s my guess,” Rafferty said. “Doesn’t seem to have much faith in us.”

  “Look what I’ve done,” Ben muttered, looking at the bruises on the woman’s neck.

  “What?” Rafferty said.

  “This guy wants an audience.”

  “Sick dick.”

  “Get a call in to the Orange County ME,” Ben said. “We need some science down here.”

  2

  NATASHA BETENCOURT WAS IN THE middle of teaching a class on weighing organs. Liver, 1,560 grams. Lungs, 621 grams. And the heart: 315. That always surprised the UC students, the lightness of the heart. When the call came in, she was placing a kidney (
276 grams) on the scale. Some of the students had tissue paper stuffed up their nostrils—a bad idea, she told them, since you tasted the stink then; tamp down one sense and another compensates. Vicks was the way to go, but everyone dealt with the smell the way they dealt with it. She’d already lost two students to the toilets. The first one with the Y cut and the second when she unraveled the lungs. Those were the sentimental ones. She had a soft spot for those students; they still attached a person to a body, still sympathized with the cadaver. An admirable sentiment, but misplaced and ultimately ineffective in this line of work. “The soul flew away a long time ago,” she liked to say in the examination room. “Just tissue and bone here.”

  “Detective Wade on the line,” Mendenhall said, his head poking through the half-open examination room door. “Needs you down in Mission Viejo.”

  “You wanna take over?”

  Mendenhall, the lieutenant medical examiner, never taught classes. He felt it was beneath him to walk the UC students around, much less show them how to use a Stryker saw, so it was left to Natasha, his deputy. Charging her to teach the classes was Mendenhall’s way of reminding her that a woman didn’t belong in the medical examiner’s office, though he was more than happy to let her do most of the work. Worse than his disdain for teaching, though, was Mendenhall’s distaste for fieldwork. Too messy. He was all clinical, liked to keep his shoes clean.