by Alan Drew
“Ben,” Rafferty called from the family room. “Think I got something.”
Rafferty was holding back the curtain to a small window that overlooked the backyard.
“Jesus,” Ben said. “How’d we miss it?”
“Looks like kindergarten writing,” Rafferty said.
It was small, jaggedly etched into the wood of the windowpane. The letters were malformed, turned backward, the words misspelled and nearly indecipherable. It looked like the kind of writing a child would leave on his bedroom wall.
“What the hell is wrong with this guy?” Rafferty said.
Ben got down on his knees and rubbed his thumb across the rough edges. A backward S. Inverted N’s.
“I mean, who writes like that?”
A lowercase g with the tail turned the wrong way. An upside-down A.
“Get the camera,” Ben said.
Rafferty grabbed the Polaroid from the kitchen counter, and Ben snapped two pictures—one he slipped into an evidence bag, and the other he slid into his coat pocket.
A backward lowercase h, an upside-down A, an inverted N, a b. No, a backward lowercase d. “Hand,” Ben said, rubbing his fingers against the jagged wooden edges.
The first word was indecipherable, though there was a squiggle that could be an S, an M that could be a W, if you turned it right side up. “Swear you’re gonna…” Ben said out loud as he read it. An F, a lowercase i, and a backward L. “Feel,” he said. “You’re gonna feel my hand.”
“Holy shit,” Rafferty said.
“Swear you’re gonna feel my hand,” Ben said again, standing up now.
“Yeah,” Rafferty said. “I guess so.”
—
WHAT NATASHA COULDN’T get out of her head from the Westminster scene, even three hours later at the morgue, was the woman’s husband. She knew what she was going to get with the body—the bruises around the neck, the sclerotic eyes, the livor mortis—but she hadn’t anticipated the husband, the way he lost it. Detectives had been with him, locked inside an upstairs bedroom, but his wails still echoed in the house. Bent over the woman—Karena Avery was her name—snapping shots of bloodied skin caught in the crescent beneath her fingernails, Natasha had thought, You’re a lucky woman, to be mourned like that. If there was a half-world after death, a purgatorial membrane between this world and whatever was beyond it, where the dead could stand witness, this is what you wished to see: your loss tearing a hole out of someone.
Stop, she thought then. She actually stepped outside for a smoke, leaving Karena’s body alone, while she tried to exhale the thought away. Natasha was shocked by her selfishness. Yet it was there, like a ticker-tape sign announcing her true self: She wanted to mean that much to another person. She wanted her death to hurt someone.
She left the morgue at dawn, a yolk-yellow crack in the eastern sky above the San Gabriels. She drove home through the empty morning streets, poured herself a finger of Dewar’s, and stood in the shower until the water went cold. Before getting in bed, she called Allison, who was awake and rested-sounding, getting the kids ready for school, and told her to close and lock all the doors to the house.
“You’re frightening me,” Allison had said.
“He’s looking for easy targets,” Natasha said. “So don’t be one.”
Natasha slept until 10:17, when the garbage truck in the alley slammed loose the trash from the apartment cans. And in the silence of the retreating truck, there he was again, trapped in her mind, the husband and his guttural wails.
“Get a cup?” Natasha said into the phone, when Ben picked up.
“I’m on duty,” he said.
“I’m sunbathing at Newport Beach,” she said. “You martyr. It’s a business coffee.”
She met him at a table outside the Blowhole Café on Thursday morning, a half mile from the station, near the 5 Freeway. He stood when she got there, pulling out her chair.
“You look tired,” he said.
“You look wrecked.”
“Occupational hazard.” He sat down and she placed the files on the table next to two cups of coffee.
“You on scene last night?” he said, picking up the file on the Mexican boy.
“Till three,” she said, nodding.
She took a sip of the coffee he’d fixed, black, cut with hot water—tea, really, just as she liked it. She didn’t know when they’d crossed this line into banal intimacy, but it had been crossed. It was a strange comfort, an illicit one in a way, tinged with guilt. (She knew Rachel; they’d all gone to school together, though Natasha was two years behind them and had been an anonymous geek with her nose always in a book.) Natasha had enjoyed this little attention when he was married, too, and she returned it: He liked his coffee sugared up, quarter full of half-and-half. The first time she’d made it for him—five years ago when he kept visiting her office, pressing her for forensic evidence on a gang-war shooting that had spilled over into Orange County from L.A.—she’d called him “sweetie.” He’d quietly laughed then and said, “Yeah, don’t tell anyone. They’ll make me a meter maid.” There was a generosity in Ben, the ability to laugh at himself, though she hadn’t seen that spirit in him in a long time.
“Why haven’t you called?” she said. God, she hated the way she sounded, like some needy, fragile woman, like her friend Allison. Why haven’t you called me? We had such a nice night together. She wasn’t going to ask it; she’d told herself she wouldn’t bring it up. It was a simple question, though, and she wanted a simple answer. They’d had dinner. Sure, it was just In-N-Out Burger, but Emma was there, too. In her stupid groaning-woman mind, she thought that meant something.
“I thought this was a business cup-a-Joe?”
“It is,” she said, sitting back in her chair, “of course.”
“I’ve been busy,” he said vaguely.
“I’ve been sipping champagne and nibbling caviar.”
“I hate caviar,” he said, a wry smile on his face.
Levity, deflection, ironic triviality, all Ben’s specialty. He was an expert at it, the friendly banter that kept you at arm’s length.
“Russian,” she said. “It has to be Russian.”
“Damn Communists.”
He turned the file page. “What’ve we got?” he said, all business now.
“The bullet ripped through the frontal lobe, clipped the basal ganglia, and shredded the parietal lobe.” She lit a cigarette and blew the smoke above her head. “You know how to read.”
It was a cool morning, the wind pumping in high desert air, and they sat beneath a heat lamp near a planter blooming with bird-of-paradise. The wind swung the flowers’ heavy heads back and forth. A half block away was an on-ramp to the freeway, and a steady stream of cars raced up the pavement to join the rush toward Los Angeles. From here, the freeway was a pleasant white noise, the rush of a river, the cascading of a waterfall.
She watched him read, his elbows on the table, his lips moving slightly as his eyes ran across the pages. The boy’s height, 6'3". Weight, 185. The liver weighed 2,551 grams. Heart, 346 grams, slightly above average.
She and Ben had met a few more times after the gang case, even after the case was closed and Ben had gotten his man, Ben asking her about evidence on open cases, picking her brain about shooting angles, time-of-death indicators, stuff like that, as though he wanted an education. Then they didn’t see each other for three years, until they were both on scene for a backyard pool drowning, after he and Rachel had moved back to Santa Elena. But it wasn’t until after his separation from Rachel that they started meeting for drinks; she made sure of that. They talked open cases, tossed around evidence on cold cases, played out hypotheticals on suspects’ motives. Sometimes the conversations turned serious. What is hate? What makes a criminal? Was it something physical, something she could pinpoint in the brain, in the size of the heart? He wanted to know if fear showed in the body, like physical scars in the tissue. It was chaste stuff, mostly, and she had almost resigned herself to her p
latonic role, when one drunken night five weeks ago he’d pushed the line.
“What is sex?” he had asked.
They had been clumsily dancing at the Reno Room, an old haunt of his from his Long Beach days, Ben plunking down quarters for old R&B tunes. The question caught her off guard, and she couldn’t tell at first if he was serious or flirting.
“The body’s reaction to physical stimuli,” she said, the two of them swaying to Marvin Gaye.
“What is sexual attraction?” he countered.
“The body’s reaction to an irrational feeling.”
He smiled. “No,” he said, his hand on the curve of her back. “No, it’s more than that.”
Then he bent down and kissed her, once, and the song ended and they stood there in the middle of the room, the sounds of the bar coming back to them.
“Any chance this was an execution?” Ben said now. “Any gang tats?”
“Would be a bad line in Vegas,” she said, shaking her head. “The boy’s prints are all over the gun; his thumb was bruised. He must have jammed it when the gun recoiled.”
A .45 caliber bullet. Meninges penetrated at right temple. Perforation of skull behind left ear. The description of the brain damage ran in her head. Intracranial hematoma. Ischemic cascade. She was beginning to hate medical terms: A half dozen years before, they felt comfortingly precise. Now they were beginning to feel deceptive, inaccurate in their scope of things.
“There was sperm?”
“Traces of semen in the underwear.”
“Any other signs of sexual activity?”
“No,” she said. “No tears, no bruising, no vaginal secretions.”
He was quiet for a moment, his index finger tapping the page in front of him, his lips tightening.
“Any signs,” he said, hesitating, “of unusual sexual activity?”
Cops, she thought, the fraternity of delicate sensibilities.
“No,” she said. “No signs of unusual sexual activity.”
“You checked?”
“Of course I checked. It’s not as unusual as some of us like to think.”
He took a sip of his coffee. Ben’s hand seemed to shake a bit. Maybe he was tired.
“A little in the underwear is not uncommon,” she said, “especially with teenage boys, if you know what I mean.”
He nodded and stared off at the cars in the parking lot.
“ID on the Colt?” she asked.
“Not yet. Slow as hell over there.”
“It’ll be faster,” she said, “when they get the computer database running. They say they’ll be able to analyze DNA.”
“Sounds like sci-fi bullshit to me.”
She took a drag of the cigarette as he read on. Musculoskeletal system. Urogenital system. When they left the Reno Room that night, she was determined not to go home alone. He strolled her the six blocks back to her place, the fireworks exploding above Disneyland, a police helicopter slashing a spotlight across Westminster streets, and when they got to the front door, she said, “I want you to come up.”
Five minutes later, her jeans and shirt were off, and his fingers were on the lip of her panties when she touched him through his jeans. She could feel him alive there, and she wanted him inside her. She worked the button loose. Now, now, now, she thought, and then he pushed her hand away. Cute, she thought, feigning hard to get, but she wasn’t in the mood for cute, for his ironic deflections. His fingers were hooked in her panties, and she raised her hips to help him slip them off. She touched him again, trying to get his zipper to peel apart, and he recoiled.
“I can’t do this,” he said. Then he was up from the bed, his back to her, his shirt already pulled over his shoulders. It happened so fast it took her a moment to register what was going on.
“You can,” she said. “You can do whatever you want.” She regretted that now, that willingness to give all of her body away.
“I can’t,” he said, his voice strangled in his mouth. “I’m sorry. It’s not you.”
“Oh, Jesus,” she said. “Be more creative than that, at least.”
“It’s really not,” he said. He touched her bare knee, though it seemed to pain him. “I can’t explain.” And then he was gone.
She took a shower after he left, sure it was the smell of her skin, all that death, all those opened corpses. She exfoliated, used a nail file to carve dirt from beneath her fingernails, washed her hair, and washed it again, and still when she got in bed she could feel the taint on her skin—the death, the rejection, the embarrassment of letting herself be so exposed. She almost called Tony, to satisfy her body, but her heart made its demands and she tossed in bed alone.
“He’d been drinking?” Ben said now.
“There was alcohol in his system. Difficult to say how much when he pulled the trigger.”
“He’d had some drinks, though? Not just the beginnings of decomposition?”
A gust of wind blew the birds-of-paradise, the necks tangling around one another. Natasha leaned forward and unwrapped the stems carefully, setting them loose and swaying.
“Seems so.” She lit another cigarette with the tip of the first and blew the smoke into the heat lamp.
“He must have been drinking with someone.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Some drink alone.”
He glanced at her but went back to the file.
“Why’d you stay through the autopsy the other day?” Natasha asked. “I know you can’t stand those things. Don’t even like to see me afterward.”
A woman leashed to a Labrador retriever sat at the table next to them. She tied the dog to the table leg and went inside the coffeehouse.
“Didn’t want to leave the kid alone.”
“That’s not it,” she said, glancing at his tapping fingers. “You know something, don’t you?”
He closed the report and went quiet. Together they watched the woman stride out of the coffeehouse. She unwrapped a chocolate muffin and set it on a paper plate in front of the dog. The Lab licked the sugar off the top and then huffed it down in one bite. Natasha rolled her eyes at him.
“No,” he said finally, but he was a terrible liar. Ben Wade was a window, when he wanted to be a wall. You could see through him, but into what? An open window that led into a dark room.
“I was just thinking about Emma,” he said. “How I wouldn’t want her to be alone, if it was her. It’s irrational, I know.”
She wanted to hate him, but there was an honesty in his lies. Most men would have swallowed their disgust in the face of an easy lay and gone through with it. She’d met enough of those guys, my God. The prettiest spin she could put on it was that he knew it meant something to her, he knew it was unfair to her if he wasn’t sure. Maybe that was being too generous, but she wasn’t prepared to hate him yet for the things he was unwilling to give.
“Excuse me?” the woman with the dog said to Natasha. “Can you smoke that somewhere else? The wind is blowing it right across my table.”
Natasha spun around. The woman was windshield-wiping a skinny hand in front of her nose. She was one of those pretty Santa Elena women, plastic pretty and easy to hate.
“It’s not your table, honey,” Natasha said. “This is not your shopping center, this is not your courtyard, and this is not your outside air. And you’re poisoning that poor dog feeding it chocolate. Theobromine. Destroys their organs.”
The woman muttered something under her breath, gathered her stuff, and huffed away with the dog in tow.
“God,” Natasha said. “I hate these people and their registered mutts.”
“No match on fingerprint records, dental?” Ben said.
“Nada.” She stubbed out the cigarette and lit another. “Some poor mother in Chiapas or Oaxaca thinks he’s sending her money this month.”
“I think the mother’s here,” he said.
She sat up. “You do know something.”
“I saw a woman the other day in the camp,” Ben said. “She was upse
t. She wouldn’t talk to me. No one would talk about the boy at all.”
“They never talk to anyone. You know that.”
“There’s an older man, a picker, protecting her.” He wrote something across the top of the report. “I think he’s the one who called it in.”
“The serial’s tipping, I know,” she said. “But I’ve been on three scenes now, and nothing about this one adds up that way.”
“A body hasn’t turned up in a dozen years in this town, and one just appears while this serial is running around? It’s all a coincidence?”
“This kid was outside,” she said, counting it off with her fingers. “Shot in the head, no marks on his neck, no crazy saying carved anywhere near the body.”
“So why doesn’t a mother claim her son?”
“She’s afraid of getting sent back,” she said.
“It’s something else,” he said. “A mother wouldn’t leave her son in a morgue.”
“It’s not her son anymore, and—”
“No.” He looked at her. “It’s always, forever, your son.”
She sat back in her chair, silenced by his glare. She couldn’t stand that, the way parents threw their sentiment in your face, the way they thought they understood more about the human heart because they brought children into this world.
“I meant,” she said, taking a deep breath, “that maybe there’s something else she needs to protect. Maybe she’s got no other choice.”
“Maybe,” he said. “Let me have a pull.”
She handed him the cigarette and he took a long drag on it. He left the filter wet, like all novices, and when she took her own drag she let her tongue press against that wetness.
“Oh, chlorine,” she said. “Chlorine in his hair follicles, some pool water in his lungs.”
“Saw that,” he said.
“He’s a swimmer.”
“Seems plausible.”
Seems obvious, she thought. Swimming was a big deal in Santa Elena. “Teenager, illegal,” she said. “Doubt he had access to a community pool. Maybe on the high school team.”
Ben nodded. “You seem pretty comfortable doing my job.”
“You get the shiny badge and the hot wheels.”