by Alan Drew
“School’s out early,” he announced to her students.
Natasha was in Mission Viejo in thirty-five minutes, smoking cigarettes on the way to kill the stench of the examination room. The smell: It didn’t bother her in the lab, but out in the world it did, when she felt it was tangled in her hair, trapped in the fibers of her clothes. That was the problem with being an ME: balancing the examination room and the outside world. Everything was clear in the medical examiner’s office but not out here, not at all.
She ducked under the yellow tape in front of the house, stepped through the foyer into the kitchen, and came around the corner of the island to take in the scene.
“I thought this kind of thing didn’t happen down here,” she said to Ben, who was down on his haunches, taking notes on a yellow legal pad.
“It didn’t,” Ben said. “Until it did.”
She set her kit down on the floor and knelt across from Ben. One of the deceased woman’s blue eyes stared at her. She understood why Mendenhall didn’t like the field. The examination room was impersonal, but kneeling next to a body on the floor of her own kitchen was a different thing. The woman had been alive just minutes before; the color was still in her cheeks. Alive was alive, dead was dead. Where the two met was the difficult part. In your mercy, she thought, turn the darkness of death into the dawn of new life. She hadn’t been to Mass in years, but being on scene always brought out the Catholic schoolgirl in her.
“Strangled,” Ben said.
“I see that.” She opened the kit and slipped on gloves. Petechiae. A necklace of bruises around the throat. “You been out riding?”
“How’d you know?”
“You smell like horse.”
Fractured hyoid bone. The larynx caved in.
“You need anything, sweetheart?”
Natasha turned to find a detective standing over her, his badge dangling from his leather belt, his face full of condescension. “Yeah, honey,” she said. Crime scenes were generally a boys’ club, full of testosterone-driven machismo. “I need you and all these other idiots out of my crime scene.”
Ben looked at the floor and smiled. The detective, without another word, cleared the kitchen. Cops. These entitled little boys.
“How’s Emma?” Natasha asked. She had shared an In-N-Out burger with Ben and Emma a week ago—his invitation—but he hadn’t called her since. A little over par for the course for him.
“She’s a teenager.” He shrugged.
“Ah, you’re not her knight in shining armor anymore.”
Ben flashed her an ironic look and then got back to business. “Seems like it’s manual,” Ben said, pointing to the woman’s neck. “No ligature.”
“Is that so?” Natasha said. “Go do your job, Ben, and let me do mine.”
“Right,” he said, slapping his thighs before standing up.
“One more thing,” Natasha said. “What’s her name?”
“Hold on. I got it written down.”
Ben flipped pages on the legal pad while Natasha got down on her elbows, Dictaphone in hand, and examined the woman’s neck. She would have passed out quickly, but the killer would have had to stare into her face for two to three minutes—a quiet face, a nice one—crushing the trachea, snuffing her out with his hands before the brain shut down.
“Emily,” Ben said finally. “Emily Thomas.”
“All right, Emily,” Natasha said quietly, so only Emily could hear. Cardinal sin, she’d tell her students. Don’t personalize the body. But on scene was different; on scene there was disturbed energy in the air. “Show me what he did to you.”
—
IN THE THIRTY-FIVE minutes they had waited for Natasha, Ben had studied the sliced-open door screen: a clean cut, with a scalpel-like instrument, probably an X-Acto knife. The chrome appliances shone in the kitchen track lighting, none of them smudged—at least to the naked eye—by an intruder’s fingertips. Ben had stuck his nose down near the dead woman’s neck, to see if he could smell it. There it was, the petroleum-and-baby-powder scent: The killer had worn latex gloves. Ben had sent a uniform out to interview the neighbors, too, asking them if they saw anything unusual—a car parked on the street, a man climbing a fence or slipping behind the shrubbery. Nothing.
Natasha was on her knees photographing the body, a bright flash and then everything back into focus. A junior detective finally fingerprinted the stove, and Ben turned off the fan so he could hear himself think.
“Broken hyoid bone,” Natasha said into her Dictaphone. Then whispering, not into the Dictaphone but almost as if she were sharing secrets with the woman. He’d seen her do it before—when a boy drowned in a backyard pool, when a woman was hit by an Amtrak train. He almost asked her about it one night when they were out having drinks but decided against it. Another camera flash, everything overexposed, then all the colors and shapes in the right place again. “Dead sixty to ninety minutes.”
“What’s with her?” Rafferty said.
“Natasha?” Ben said, smiling. “She’s not the ‘sweetheart’ type.”
“What a bitch.”
Ben bristled a bit. “Jonas, how about calling her ‘Dr. Betencourt’?”
Rafferty had gridded the house. Officers were searching each section for evidence. It was still horrifically hot inside, humid with pasta steam, stinking of death and onions. In the time since he’d last been on a murder scene, whatever immunity Ben had built up to it had been lost. Homicide was not like riding a bike. He watched Natasha, stretched across the kitchen floor, side by side with the DB—flash—then stepped outside for some fresh air.
The street was a circus. Reporters pushing against the yellow tape, kids on BMX bikes gawking at the scene, a neighbor crying. He saw, between two houses, a couple walking a golden retriever on a path beyond the backyard, beneath a burned-out streetlight.
“Jesus Christ,” he mumbled. “Suburban cops.” He climbed the front lawn and walked back into the house and found Rafferty bent over an investigator dusting the screen door for prints.
“Raff,” Ben said. “We need a perimeter back here.”
Rafferty called out to a couple of uniforms and Ben squeezed through the torn opening of the screen door, following a line of matted grass with a flashlight to a cactus garden at the edge of the backyard. There he saw the prints—Vans skateboard shoes; he could tell by the hexagonal pattern outlined in the pale soil. Eights or nines, he guessed. A uniform was rolling out tape that cut off the backyard from the greenbelt.
“Go inside,” Ben told the cop, “and tell Rafferty to get someone out here to take pictures of these.”
Then Ben was up on the greenbelt sidewalk, standing beneath the blown-out bulb and the eucalyptus bowing in the wind. Every hundred feet down the path stood a brightly lit streetlamp, except here, except right here. The house to the left had a six-foot privacy fence and a locked gate. The house on the right had a line of juniper trees, maybe ten feet tall, cutting the backyard off from this one. It wasn’t difficult to see why the killer chose this house. There were no clear lines of sight from the neighbors’; the only place where you could see inside was right here. He stood in the dark and watched a house full of men combing the first floor. He could see Natasha on her knees now, snapping more photos of the body, the warm light framed by the windows like an invitation.
—
NATASHA ACCOMPANIED THE body up to the county ME’s office in Orange nearing midnight. Ben left the scene to Rafferty and was back at the station in Santa Elena by 12:52 A.M. The night-shift cops were hauling in the drunks, lawyers, and businessmen, one VP for Security Pacific Bank threatening to sue. He typed up his report and left it on Lieutenant Hernandez’s desk. It was Rafferty’s case, Mission Viejo being out of his jurisdiction, but Ben made it official anyway. He liked to dot his i’s and cross his t’s. Every deadbeat he’d known, every crooked cop, had cut corners, used loopholes, exploited vulnerability. Follow the rules, he liked to tell Emma; it’ll make you a good person.
He left the station at 1:42 and drove the mile over to Rachel’s condominium, idling the cruiser in the complex parking lot. The rush of the freeway echoed hollow, as though the sound carried all the way from Los Angeles and beyond. If the killer had driven the Santa Ana down to Mission Viejo earlier tonight, he’d passed the off-ramp that led straight to this condo. Ben could tell the kitchen window was wide open. He knew, too, that Rachel liked to leave the sliding glass door to the backyard open, the ocean breeze cooling the rooms. That’s why they’d moved back here. It was safe; you could leave your doors unlocked. Hell, you could leave them flung wide open.
A blue light flashed from Rachel’s window, and he knew she had fallen asleep with the television on. A wave of satisfaction washed over him; the professor hadn’t stayed over. If things hadn’t fallen apart between them, he would sneak into the room right now to find her clasping two pillows to her chest. He’d click off the screen and slip into bed with her in the beautiful silence of the early morning, everything he gave a damn about breathing the same air he did.
The move here was supposed to save their marriage. The last straw, the thing that finally made them pack up their Marina del Rey apartment and drive the thirty-eight miles south in a rented U-Haul, was the shooting. Emma had been nine then, and Ben had been popped in the left arm six months before in East Hollywood by a twelve-year-old gangbanger who had been forced into a blood-in initiation ritual by his older brother, a heavy in the La Mirada Locos. Shoot the 5-0 and you’re in; don’t shoot the cop and you’re out and we won’t protect you. That was the kind of choice kids in the worst L.A. neighborhoods had to make. Ben didn’t even see the kid; heard the shot and then felt the burn in his arm, just like that, the bullet streaking through his unmarked Ford’s open window. There was a shitload of blood, slicked over the armrest and splattered across the steering wheel. He called it in but didn’t wait around to bleed to death; he gunned the car to St. Vincent and walked himself in, his head like helium by the time the nurses got the gurney.
Later, at the court hearing, the kid had apologized, dressed in a suit too big for his underfed body, a sewing-needle tattoo etching the side of his neck. Not even shaving yet, his voice still singing soprano, and already owned by the street. He was sent to juvie and then released to the custody of his grandparents, and two weeks later the kid ended up facedown in a vacant lot, shot in the back of the head by his cousin, a smog-stunted palm tree waving above him. And that was it for Ben; what the hell were you supposed to do with that? He investigated the murders, sure—the drive-bys, the drug deals gone bad—but he tried to work with the kids, too, tried to show them a way out. He had naïvely thought he could bring some order to their lives. But once it went Cain and Abel over gang allegiance, what could you do? That was something permanent, something rotten in the culture.
At the time, he didn’t tell Rachel it was a kid who shot him. What was he going to say? A prepubescent child nearly sent him toes up? Jesus, it rattled him enough, not to mention how it would scramble her. The hole in his arm was all she needed to know. They had to get themselves out of L.A. Rachel was too unhappy, too confused. She couldn’t take it anymore—the constant worry, her exhausting teaching position at the underfunded high school in North Hollywood. At first the job felt like an admirable mission to a third-world country, but it quickly grew into an exhausting exercise in futility. L.A. had worn them out—Rachel trying to save the kids with education and Ben trying to save them with the law, and their marriage going down the toilet. Not to mention Emma’s own educational future. L.A. public? No way. They had a child to raise and Rachel wasn’t going to do it alone, and he was damn well not going to make her. Rachel wanted to go home, back to Santa Elena, where they both grew up, back to where things didn’t seem to be spinning out of control.
The Santa Elena assistant police lieutenant, Ramon Hernandez, had been fishing partners with Ben’s late father, and the police department was expanding. Ben got an interview, and the job offer came two weeks later. Rachel found a good job at the high school in El Toro, the next town over, and all the dimly lit stars aligned. Now here they were, nearly five years gone, in the gorgeous other side of L.A., and everything had finally gone to hell.
Sometimes he thought if he had stayed on the force in L.A., they would still be together. During the day, he and Rachel would be bound by their fear, and in the evening they’d share the relief that someone hadn’t popped a hollow-tipped bullet into his chest. It was too good in Santa Elena, too easy to get bored, to be sucked into the vortex of complacency. You started to believe you deserved more than you had, deserved what your neighbor had—and they always had more—and once you started thinking like that there was an anxiousness that set in on you, a rotting dissatisfaction. Maybe that’s what happened to them after they moved here. When you had it bad, you were glad for the good, any good. When you had it good, you wanted it better.
Emma’s window was dark, glowing only with a string of white Christmas lights she kept hung from the ceiling year-round. He got out of the car and walked the sprinkler-dampened grass to the back of the condo. As he suspected, the sliding glass door was pulled open, just the screen separating outside from in. He tugged on the plastic handle, but the lock was engaged. He found the penknife in his coat pocket, jimmied the lock free, and slid the door open. Click locks were nothing; door locks could be picked with a paper clip. Only deadbolts were worth a damn. He stood there for a moment in the dark, waiting to hear Rachel moving upstairs. Silence. It was too easy to get in; thirty seconds and the killer could be standing in the family room. He closed the screen and the sliding glass door, engaging both locks. He walked the edge of the room, jumping around the creaky spots on the floor—he’d visited enough to know such things—and slid closed and locked the window in the kitchen. A pad of paper was sitting near the phone and he wrote Rachel a note.
You’re going to be pissed off, he wrote, but ask me about it later.
He checked the coffeemaker. The timer wasn’t set, no coffee in the filter. Ben had always taken care of the coffee, a full pot at 5:30 A.M. every day. He found the tin in the cupboard and scooped a few spoonfuls into the filter. He set the timer, pressed start, and left the note propped up against a clean coffee mug.
He snuck through the hallway into the foyer and stood gazing up at the weak light emanating from Emma’s cracked bedroom door. He wanted to go up there, wanted to kiss his daughter, wanted to crawl into bed with Rachel. He wanted to rewind the last five years of their lives together, pinpoint the places he’d screwed up, and fix them all. But of all the useless thoughts in the world, this was the most useless. All you could do was say you were sorry and hope they believed it.
He opened the front door by millimeters, turned the door-handle lock—man, they needed a deadbolt—and stepped out into the night, pulling the door closed behind him and checking it twice to make sure the lock was engaged.
—
AFTER THE AMBULANCE delivered the body to the medical examiner’s office, Natasha was alone in the examination room. The body lay on a stainless-steel gurney, covered to the toes by a blue sheet. She found a tag, wrote down the woman’s name—Emily—and tied it to the big toe on her right foot. The toenails were painted with chipping teal enamel.
She liked it like this, the silence, particularly after being on scene. On scene, the body seemed demeaned to her, all those people milling around, standing over it, the chaos of an investigation. Here, the bleached-white tile of the examination room felt appropriately serious to the disrespectful task of opening up a body. Here, her job was clear: Determine the cause of death. Not: Who caused the death? Not: Why did they kill? Just: What? Straightforward, objective. It was like a puzzle with clear rules, like the ones her father, an immunologist, used to play with her as a child. “If this cell kills this bacteria,” he would say, “why does it not kill this one?”
An autopsy couldn’t be performed until next of kin were notified, a job that got left to the detectives. But s
he would wash the body tonight, dignify it by making it clean. She wheeled the gurney over to the floor drain near the sink, soaked a cloth, pulled back the sheet, and pressed the cloth between Emily’s toes. She swabbed the arch of her right foot and then her left. She then moved up the woman’s calves, washing away the indignity of having lost her bowels, the blood starting to pool purple in the fat of her thighs.
Natasha couldn’t help it; it always disturbed her, the bodies of women killed violently. Men who had been shot or stabbed, men who had OD’d, men’s bodies in general, didn’t bother her; for the most part they were killed by some stupid business they’d gotten themselves into. But not the women. Women, most often, were killed by the men who got themselves into stupid business. She tried to remind herself that death was death, equal in its permanence, but the moments before death were not equal in their terror, and Natasha couldn’t convince herself not to be bothered by this.
She moved up Emily’s torso, washing away the sweat of the day, then wiped clean the more-intimate places, tossing one cloth out and starting again with a fresh one.
She remembered the night on Signal Hill; it sometimes came to her when she was here alone with a female body. “Let’s go watch the submarine races,” the boy had said, leaning into her in the doorway. She had been at a frat party. A stupid nineteen-year-old girl. She wasn’t a little sister, but her roommate at the time, Kris, had been. It was a cheap night out—a backyard keg, jugs of wine, boys, most of them clean-cut and drunk. She had known this boy, the one with the plastic cup of beer dangling from his fingers, the one with the blue eyes and the easy smile. He had been in her psych class and she had watched him from afar, flirted with him over coffee in the university courtyard. Submarine races? The joke was so obscure she couldn’t register its meaning. She was a little drunk herself and enjoying the loose feeling of her muscles, her sudden lack of anxiety, the boy’s blue eyes on her. “Sure,” she’d said, laughing.