by Alan Drew
“Five fifty-seven.” His voice shook; his face was bleached white. He couldn’t have been more than twenty-five.
“First DB?” Ben said.
The cop—Chang was his name—nodded. “I threw up,” he said, as though at a confessional.
“No shame in that.” Ben stood and rested his hand on Chang’s shoulder. Ben’s first DB was a drive-by, a nineteen-year-old shotgunned on his low-rider bicycle. He was alive when Ben arrived on scene, twisted in the spokes of his bike. Ben held his hand while he bled out into the gutter. “I’d like to say it gets easier,” Ben said, “but I hope it doesn’t. If it does, means you’ve seen too much of it.”
“He’s a teenager.”
“Yep,” Ben said. Two of the old-timers had taken him for drinks that night and let him cry it out. A sort of rite of passage: one first DB and one public-crying jag. “Should I get someone else?”
“No, sir. I’m okay.”
Ben flipped the notebook page in Chang’s shaking hand and glanced at his watch.
“Six twenty-one,” he said, pointing to a line on the paper. “Detective Wade on scene.”
The officer wrote it down.
“You don’t have to look at him,” Ben said. “Just write what I tell you. When the ME gets here, you do the same with her.”
“Right.”
Chang turned his back to the body, staring out toward the mountains in the east, his hand pinching down the blowing pages.
Ben noted the revolver clenched in the boy’s hand, an old Colt .45, the handle dented, the chamber popped open. Shot close range, no doubt, near the back of the skull; he could see the burn marks at point of entry. Thank God for the wind; it kept the flies away but not the ants, not the beetles. Natasha would need to collect them to help determine time of death. It was early—no bloating tissue, no decomposition. Natasha would know, but he guessed four to five hours. Suspect could be three hundred miles away by now, out of state, in Mexico even, sipping Coronas in Ensenada.
“You touch anything?” Ben said to Chang. Ben watched the lights of black-and-whites on the edge of the field, responding to the scene. Just lights, no sirens. No need to wake anybody up.
“No, sir.”
He walked through the scene with Chang, his adrenaline cooling off with the business of the investigation. Chang had gotten the call from dispatch at 5:53. Dispatch said it sounded like a Hispanic male who made the call.
“Name?”
“No,” Chang said. “Anonymous tip.”
Generally speaking, serials took a break after a killing, their anger, desire, whatever it was, briefly satiated. It was barely ten hours since the woman’s body had turned up in Mission Viejo. Was it possible he hit twice in one night?
“Anybody here when you arrived?”
“Some Hispanic workers on the edge of the field.” He pointed toward the camp. “But they took off when they saw me.”
“You stayed with the body?”
“Yeah.”
“Good,” Ben said. “You done good.”
Ben circled the body, widening the arc as he stepped over clumps of strawberries. Footsteps running left to right and crossed over one another. Knee impressions in the dirt. A bucket tipped over with strawberries spilling out. Coyote or dog prints. A Dulces Vero candy wrapper crushed into the dirt.
Natasha arrived on scene ten minutes later, carrying the tackle-box forensics kit in her left hand and a cigarette in her right.
“Never thought I’d be so lucky,” she said, “to see you this early in the morning.”
“Play the lottery today.”
“I’ll meet you over at 7-Eleven as soon as we’re done here.”
Natasha was short, with a wiry gymnast body that looked good slipped into jeans and a T-shirt. She had a difficult time stepping over the strawberry bushes, and Chang offered her a hand, which she took with the cigarette clasped in her teeth. “Ah, a gentleman,” she said. “You’re a dying breed.
“Shit,” she said when she saw the body. She dropped the kit in the dirt and knelt near the boy’s vacant face, the bone structure misshapen, its architecture knocked off-kilter by the gunshot. “A kid?” She took a drag of the cigarette, closing her left eye to keep the smoke out of it.
“Yeah,” Ben said. He began to share his observations with her, but she cut him off. “I know,” he said, holding up his palm. “I’ll go do my job.”
The migrant camp was on the eastern edge of the field, two dozen low-slung plywood shacks squeezed between the strawberry field and an orange grove. He’d been here once before, when he was investigating the theft of a professional racing bike snatched from an open garage. A landscaping team had recently mowed a couple of lawns in the neighborhood; the owner of the bike thought a “beaner” had taken it, and this was the obvious place to look. Ben knew immediately that nobody from this camp had taken the bike. There was no place to ride out here, and any Mexican trying to sell it risked deportation. Turned out to be a neighbor, a white kid living two doors down. Generally speaking, the illegals were among the most law-abiding citizens, in Ben’s experience. If we were all threatened with deportation, Ben sometimes thought, this would be the most straitlaced country on the planet.
There were two rows of tenements—card houses, basically, the walls leaning against one another. All the doors were closed. A couple of pieces of cardboard lay in the street, ripped loose by the wind. A rooster picked at discarded sunflower-seed shells. He could smell the burn of beans and coffee, and the fecal stench of an open toilet. Immigration harassed the camp every few months, sending a few people back over the border. A cynical game, really, since the owners of the fields didn’t want their people deported, but local immigration needed to look as if they were doing their job. So, a compromise: Haul a few away, get it in the newspapers to appease a certain type of voter, and then let more come in to replace the ones sent home. Ben had been asked to assist in a raid when he first started with the department four years ago. He helped drag a few out of camp and pack them into vans, but he felt like an A-grade asshole doing it.
Someone was crying, faint sobs audible in the silences between wind gusts. He stopped in the middle of the street, trying to get a direction on it, but the freight-train howl of wind confused the sounds. He knocked at the first house, the mildewed wooden door tied shut with yellow packing twine. A dark hand reached through the space between door and wall, the fingertips raw with fruit-picking scabs, and unwound the twine. A tiny woman stood in the half dark, holding a sleeping baby in her arms.
“Buenos días,” he said.
The woman’s eyes were deep brown, almost black, her face wide and flat like a plate. Mayan, he thought. Not Mestizo. Behind her, a boy lay asleep on a cot.
“I would like to speak to you,” Ben said in his awkward Spanish, “about the body in the field.”
“No entiendo.”
He tried again, taking care with his accent, articulating every syllable like a child.
“Please,” she said. “Speak more slowly. Habla más despacio.”
The baby woke and cried, and she pulled up her shirt to feed him. Ben pointed beyond the walls of the house, toward the field.
“Muerto,” he said, as simply as possible. “En el campo. Sabes?”
“No,” she said, shaking her head. “No.”
He knocked on three more doors and got the same answer. “No,” they said. “We know nothing.” But no one asked what happened, no one looked shocked to hear the news. He tried to get names, tried to get any kind of statement, but people just shook their heads and closed cardboard doors in his face.
At the second-to-last house, a man, in his forties maybe, stood stooped in the doorway. Beyond him, a woman sat on a stool in the corner of a makeshift kitchen. Mottled patches of morning light splattered through holes in the wall, making it difficult to see, but he thought her face had the ashen pallor of someone who had been crying. Another woman, a younger one, knelt at the woman’s feet and clasped her hand, lightly
running her fingers over the knuckles.
“Do you know anything about the body in the field?”
“No,” the stooped man said. He glanced at the ground when he said it. “Sorry, no.”
“Does she?” Ben said, nodding toward the woman in the back.
“No.”
Two little girls sat quietly on a blanket in the corner of the room.
“I’m not immigration,” Ben said.
One of the girls flashed her eyes at him when she heard the word, then she looked away.
“I know.”
“I could get them, though,” Ben said. “I could call them from my cruiser.”
The man lifted his chin, his eyes narrowing. “Please,” he said, his voice sharp with anger. “The devil wind was up. No one got any sleep.”
Ben gave the man his card. “Call me, please. A boy is dead.”
“Murdered?” the man asked.
“I don’t know yet. You got reason to believe he was murdered?”
“No.” The man took the card and slipped it into the chest pocket of his shirt. “Please go now.”
Ben glanced at the woman in the corner; his eyes had adjusted to the darkness and he could see her black eyes watching him as the man quietly closed the door in his face. She was the boy’s mother, Ben was sure of it.
—
“ANYTHING TO GIVE us an ID?” Ben asked when he got back to the body.
Natasha ignored him as she snapped pictures of the boy’s hands, his fingers curled stiff. “How old are you?” she whispered to the boy. “Sixteen? Seventeen? Seventeen’s a tough year for a boy.
“Mexican,” she said to Ben finally, her eye pressed to the viewfinder.
“I knew forensics was a precise science.”
“You’re in my light,” she said.
Ben moved, and the crisp sun shone brightly on the boy. He had been trying to grow a mustache, but the skin along his jawline was wax-paper smooth. “Sixteen, seventeen,” Natasha repeated. Just six thousand or so days. A waste. Some poor mother out there remembered the day he was born, this boy slicked with life, crying the pain of first air filling his lungs.
“Make yourself useful,” she said to Ben, “and gather up some of these beetles.”
Ben grabbed a plastic vial and a pair of tweezers from her tackle box and started pinching the bugs into the vial.
“High school age,” she said, keeping the camera close to her face.
Ben could see the lights of the high school football stadium towering above the rooftops of the El Paraiso housing complex. He dropped another beetle into the vial, then one more, before placing the cap back on, carrying them to the tackle box, and filing them inside.
“He was a good-looking kid,” Natasha said.
Ben stopped and looked at the boy’s face. The symmetry of it had been knocked out of line, but, yeah, if you could push everything back into place he was handsome—had been handsome.
“Could be self-inflicted,” Natasha said. “Burn marks at point of entry, no signs of struggle.”
Ben looked out over the field, the red fruit dotting the rows, the swirling lights of the police cars cutting the field off from the orange groves and the hills beyond. On the western edge of the field, nearest the closest housing tract, stood a small crowd—reporters, curious morning joggers, a television van topped with a satellite dish. Beyond the crowd stood the brand-new homes, their red-tiled roofs staggered in the sun. Through the wrought-iron gate to the backyard of the nearest home, Ben watched a woman dive into a swimming pool, her body arcing above the blue water like a falling arrow.
“Something’s off about it, though,” she said.
He knew enough not to ask; she’d tell him when she was ready. He watched the body while he waited—the limbs still and stiffening, the bottoms of his bare arms purpled with settling blood. Natasha maneuvered around the body and took pictures of his shoes, the soles thick with mud. Sixteen, seventeen: born in 1969 or ’70. The wind blew his hair, and his T-shirt fluttered at the waist, exposing the boy’s stomach—the muscles still rippled there, a little hair poking up to his belly button.
“See those calluses on the fingers of his right hand?” Natasha said.
Ben bent down and saw the reddened skin. “Right-handed,” he said. Out here picking strawberries. Two, maybe three years older than Emma, his whole life ahead of him, though what kind of life was it? Living in this camp. Bent at the waist all day in the sun, picking fruit. Why not take your own life, if this was what life is? There was a certain bravery in it, a clear-eyed pragmatism about the options before him.
“Yes.”
“But the .45 was in his left,” Ben said.
“You do pay attention, Detective Wade.” She pointed to the back of the boy’s head. “A suicide, you shoot yourself at the temple or through the soft palate, not back here.”
“Anything to link it to Rafferty’s DB?”
“Be patient,” she said. “I’m just getting started.”
Ben hoped it was murder. People did bad shit; you nailed them to the wall for it. A suicide just left things wide-open, forever unanswered.
“Been a busy twenty-four hours,” he said.
“Santa Ana winds,” Natasha said, her camera pointed at the back of the boy’s head.
When the Santa Anas blasted into the basin, it was a bad time to be a cop—or a good time, depending on your way of seeing things. There wasn’t any scientific evidence for this, but every cop knew something went haywire in people when the winds hit; there was a charge in the air, literally, the air full of spark. Electricity zapped between blankets, little lightning strikes popped off skin-to-skin contact. When he was in L.A. and the winds were up, the captain packed the night shift with uniformed officers. Husbands beat wives, Crips slaughtered Bloods, drunks bashed other drunks over spilled beer, crazies let out of institutions for lack of funding heard voices telling them to attack blondes in apartments down the hall: spores of violence floating on the wind. Ben could feel this edge in himself, too, an extra pulse in the body, a humming in the teeth.
“No one’s talking at the camp,” he said.
“Illegal?” Natasha said.
“I suspect so.”
“Good produce deals at Safeway, though.”
“Yep,” Ben said. “My guess, we’re not going to get an ID.”
“Just another Juan Nadie,” she said.
Juan Nadies facedown in the desert. Juan Nadies drowned in rivers. Juan Nadies shot on street corners. Dying of old age in falling-down neighborhoods.
“You check the pockets yet?” Ben said.
“No.”
“May I?” he said, trying to sound as gentlemanly as possible.
“Be my guest, Detective Wade.” She smirked. “But don’t you dare disturb his position.”
Lying down in the row, Ben slipped his hand into one of the boy’s front pockets—feeling the arch of his hip bone, the muscles of his leg, the unnerving intimacy of death—and fingered three pennies and a candy wrapper. He dropped the items in a plastic evidence bag and slipped his hand into the next pocket. Down at the bottom, tangled with lint and bits of thread, he found a paper clip and an erasable pen and slipped those into the evidence bag, too.
Natasha shuffled down the row of strawberries, snapping photos of shoe prints. Ben moved to the back pockets, getting down in the dirt to edge his hand in without disturbing the twist in the boy’s torso. The ground stank of pesticide and loam, and he thought he smelled something else, too—chlorine? In the right pocket, he found a slip of paper. It was ripped and folded into a small square. Still lying on the ground, he unfolded the paper. Something jumped in him and he lay there for a moment looking at the handwriting, his heart beating double time. He glanced over his shoulder. Natasha was still down the row, her back to him, snapping pictures. Quickly, he folded the note up, stuffed it into his jeans pocket, and stood.
“Anything?” Natasha called out.
“A pen and paper clip.” He zipped
closed the evidence bag.
“A studious one, then.”
—
NATASHA WAS WRAPPING things up, the body bagged, and Ben sat in the cruiser trying to write notes on the legal pad through his shaking hands. On scene @ 6:21, he wrote. Teenage boy. Mexican. He knew he should slip the piece of paper back into the evidence bag, but it was too late; the bags were closed up in the forensics kit in the back of Natasha’s van. He took a few deep breaths, counting out a slowing rhythm, and steadied his hands on the steering wheel. He’d have to get it back with the other evidence later. It was 8:07.
He dialed Rachel’s number on the Motorola.
“What are you doing sneaking into my apartment?” she said.
“I knew you’d be pissed off.”
“Of course I’m pissed off,” Rachel said. “You know the law, Ben. You get to come inside my house when I invite you inside.”
“The scene rattled me last night,” he said. “I just needed to know the bottom floor was locked. I was worried. For Emma—and for you.”
She let out a frustrated sigh, but he could feel her soften.
“Ben,” she said. “We’re trying to get out the door. We have to get to school.”
“Em all right?”
“A bit sore,” she said.
“She can breathe okay?” he said. “Turn her neck all right?”
“She’s a little stiff,” Rachel said, “but nothing bad.”
The coroner assistants were trying to wheel a gurney up the row of strawberries. The wheels got stuck in the dirt, and the assistants tried rattling them loose.
“I mean, the way she fell yesterday,” he said. “It scared the h—”
“I know,” she said. “I know. You want to talk to her?”
“No,” he said, hesitating. Not now, not when he was rattled. “Tell her ‘I love you’ for me.”
Silence.
“You don’t sound good, Ben.” There was almost a question in her voice, a note of worry.
“Bad morning.”
The assistants gave up on the gurney and finally lifted the boy’s bagged body and started laboring it across the field. The bag sagged in the middle and scraped the leaves of the plants.