by Alan Drew
For weeks her body had throbbed—the inner part of her thighs (the gracilis); her hip joints (the acetabula), even the back of her knees (the popliteal fossa) ached. And it hurt where the boy had pushed into her, burned like alcohol dabbed on a cut—though there was no blood, no obvious lacerations or bruises. It was a ghost pain, the body offering no physical evidence of its cause. She had never been so aware of her body, never so conscious of the foundation of the pelvis, the way its crescent arc fastened her frame into balance. She read every textbook at least twice and even read the recommended texts and the texts cited in those recommended texts. The body broken down to its forensic parts, their functions and the myriad ways those functions ceased to function, and she came to understand that she was imagining the pain. Her body didn’t have a story to tell. That’s what took her three months to figure out. The pain was in her mind, in the realization that her body could be so quickly stolen away from her. Once she understood that she had let him take her mind, too, once she identified the cause of the pain as something irrational, the pain went away and she got her body back.
She’d thought about this last night after Ben stormed out of the bar. “Don’t touch me,” he had said. In her experience, that wasn’t something a man said to a woman. She thought about the night five weeks ago when they almost slept together. He had said it wasn’t her, and it was clear to her now that he had meant it.
She covered Lucero’s body now and slid him back into the cooler. The boy’s body wasn’t going to tell her anything she didn’t already know. The evidence she thought she was looking for could be washed away; the evidence she thought she needed was rotting in the dead tissue of the hippocampus, in the memory that couldn’t be accessed now. If family didn’t claim him soon, the county would incinerate the body and bury him in El Toro Cemetery, whatever story the boy could have told lost forever.
Midmorning, she cleaned up and told Mendenhall she had a dentist appointment. It was bullshit, of course, and Mendenhall knew it was bullshit—she hated dentists, hated their fingers and instruments rooting around in her mouth—but she never took days off and the paperwork was finished and no new bodies had been ambulanced in overnight, so he let her go, muttering some crude joke about gingivitis.
She idled through the midday traffic on the 5 Freeway and was at Santa Elena High School by 12:30. There were three black-and-whites on site, one at each entrance and another parked in the handicapped spot near the front steps of the school. They had almost caught the serial last night, and the city had the jittery energy of a place under siege. Three patrol officers stood at the top of the steps, one resting his hand on the butt of his revolver, as though the killer was about to ambush the students in broad daylight.
She wanted to talk to Coach Wakeland. When she had decided at 2:00 A.M. that she was going to look into this on her own, that’s what she wanted. She’d written down a series of questions at her kitchen table, but when she woke early this morning she was sure that was the wrong way to go. If Ben wouldn’t question Wakeland, then the darkness of the thing she needed to expose would never be willingly dragged into the light. This was not science anymore, this was not forensics, the body could not be cut open and measured into quantifiable truths. She needed to come at this the way firefighters fought a brush fire: set a backfire and push it onto itself.
She hadn’t seen Helen Galloway in nearly fourteen years, but the woman, at least twenty pounds heavier, psoriasis reddening the root edge of her gray hair, recognized her immediately.
“Sweetheart,” she said, struggling up from her chair and embracing Natasha. “Oh, sweetheart, it’s so good to see you.”
Helen was one of those rare people who had love for everyone. From this little office, a plague of benevolence infected the school—Tootsie Rolls even when you were late, gentle reminders that you were not the kind of kid who forged notes for absences, bear hugs and tissues when a boyfriend dumped you—and Helen became the unofficial counselor/den mother to the two hundred or so students who walked through the doors of the school.
“I’m sorry about your son,” Natasha said. She meant to call, to send a card, but she had—she was ashamed to admit it—let work get in the way of common decency. Teenagers, needy as they were, soaked up Helen’s unsolicited love and took it with them after commencement, and Natasha had done the same.
“He was a good boy,” Helen said, letting go of Natasha to perch back on her swivel chair. “I don’t even know why we’re over there. Why we send our boys.” She glanced at her son’s photo. “Sometimes it feels to me like I raised him only so rich old men in Washington could get him killed, like I’m a part of some sick farm system.”
“I can’t imagine,” Natasha said.
“But you’re not here to see me,” Helen said, straightening. “You’re here about the boy, Lucero.”
“I am.”
“I’ve been thinking about him a lot,” Helen said. “Since Ben was here.” Helen leaned back in her chair. “You’re a medical examiner, right?” she said. “Seems a bit out of your job description to be here talking to me.”
“My job’s to find out what killed the boy,” she said. “Ben’s is to catch the person who did it.”
“Sounds like he did it to himself,” Helen said, “according to Benjamin.”
“According to my boss, too.”
Helen scrutinized her. Her willingness to give out love could sometimes make Helen seem stupid, but she wasn’t. She’d always been good at reading people—that was true when Natasha was a student here, and it was true now. It was as though she was finding all your secrets and adding them up one by one.
“Helen,” Natasha said, “I’m not a cop; I have no authority with this and you don’t have to talk to me.” Helen watched her closely. “I’m here for personal reasons….” Natasha hesitated. “Between you and me, I think whatever happened to Lucero is connected to Ben.”
“You always had something for Ben, didn’t you?” Helen said. “Even way back then.”
Natasha could feel her face go hot.
“Don’t worry, sweetheart,” Helen said, patting Natasha’s knee and flashing a conspiratorial smile. “You weren’t the only one. He was a gorgeous boy.”
Helen turned and reached toward a shelf of yearbooks. She grabbed one marked 1973 and opened it up to a page with a yellow Post-it.
“I’ve been here for twenty-seven years,” Helen said, nodding her head slowly. “Sometimes it seems like forever, but since I’ve been thinking about Lucero it feels very short—like no time at all, really.”
“Memory is a strange thing,” Natasha said. She’d been working as deputy medical examiner for six years now. Her first cadaver felt like a century ago, but his face was still with her, clear as his meltwater-blue eyes.
“You know, Lucero was one of Wakeland’s boys.”
Natasha nodded. “He was a swimmer.”
“It’s more than that,” Helen said. “Coach Wakeland’s always taking the swimming team out for pizza or having them over to his house for barbecues, that kind of thing, but Lucero was the boy he’d chosen to mentor. You’d sometimes see them driving around together in Wakeland’s Corvette.”
“Anyone question why a teacher was driving around with a student?”
“Well, it was so out in the open,” Helen said. “If there was something to hide, you’d think they’d hide it.”
“Did you question it?”
“I’m the attendance lady.”
“And he’s the big-time swim coach,” Natasha said.
“The city’s using the swimming program in its brochures to get families to move in.”
Natasha nodded.
“Most of the time everything feels disconnected,” Helen said, “especially over so many years, but then when you start thinking about it, really thinking about it, you can find threads of things, you know?”
“A pattern.”
“Kind of.” She turned the pages of the book and pointed to a boy, Ryan Bell. “He w
ent to Stanford. If you remember, he was the butterfly leg of the Olympic relay team in ’76. His grades were terrible, missed a ton of classes, especially senior year. So how does he get into Stanford, full scholarship?”
“Wakeland’s got connections.”
“If you were on the swim team,” she said, “you wanted to be one of Wakeland’s boys. You got special privileges—excuses from classes, rides in fancy cars, scholarships to the best schools.”
She grabbed another yearbook from the shelf: 1979. She turned to a page marked by another Post-it.
“Tucker Preston,” she said. “I hadn’t thought about him in a long time, until Ben came in here the other day.” She rubbed her finger across the boy’s forehead. “He dropped out of school his junior year. After swallowing a bottle of aspirin. Parents sold their house and moved.”
“One of Wakeland’s?”
She nodded. “State record in the backstroke.”
“Any rumors?”
“There was a meeting with the superintendent. Lawyers were involved. Some kind of confidentiality agreement.”
“Hush money,” Natasha said. “Anyone say why?”
“Everyone had a reason,” Helen said, “but it depended on how you wanted to see things. Some people thought it couldn’t be such a big deal if the family was so willing to shut up about it. Others thought the opposite.”
“What about you?”
“I think anything that has to be shut up about is a bad thing,” she said. “But police, lawyers, the superintendent, made the decision they made. People tend to think that counts for something.”
“Maybe the people in charge don’t deserve to be in charge.”
“I might agree with that.”
Helen grabbed another yearbook, from 1970. Ben. There he was, his beautiful seventeen-year-old face creased with a guarded smile.
“The world is full of open secrets,” Helen said. “Kids like Lucero are being raised in cardboard boxes; the military tells children it’ll give them a future.”
She handed Natasha the yearbook, and she stared at Ben’s picture. He was beautiful then, but there was something in his eyes, something you could still see today if you looked at him closely: something lost about them. Natasha remembered him from high school—six foot two, his swimmer’s shoulders twice as wide as hers, his sinewy muscles that were literally carved by water. She’d see him around, sometimes with Wakeland—in the man’s Mustang multiple times, now that she thought about it. She was a child, a little girl, and Ben had looked like a man and she believed him to have a man’s authority in the world. More than a few times in high school she had fantasized about him using that authority on her.
“Why’d no one say anything?” Natasha asked.
“That’s what I’ve been wondering about,” Helen said. She was quiet for a moment. “I don’t know exactly, but I guess I can only speak for myself.” She went quiet again, thinking. “Years ago, something like that was an embarrassing secret, something you didn’t want to look at, something you didn’t want to point out. It was so embarrassing you wanted to believe it wasn’t true.” The phone rang, but Helen let it go. “It’s like being fat,” she said when the ringing stopped. “Everyone can see it, but they don’t come up to you and point it out to you. They talk to your forehead instead of looking in your eyes, anything to avoid the embarrassing fact of your size.” She picked up a pencil and chewed on the eraser. “The boys didn’t complain, as far as I know—except for Tucker, maybe—and after a while Wakeland and a boy in his car was just another part of Santa Elena—like the illegals in the fields, the coyotes in the backyard, the bulldozers knocking down people’s homes to make new ones. Besides, it was hard to see how a boy like Ben—so big and strong—could be forced to do something like that if he didn’t want to.”
Natasha had to admit it was. If she’d been big enough, strong enough—if she had been six foot two, two hundred pounds, like Ben had been—she would have fought the boy off. She stared at Ben’s face and wondered who he really was. She went into the sciences to find clarity and had found the opposite. She’d begun to realize in the last few years that most things were difficult to understand—from love, to murder, to the very muscle and tissue that held the body together. We gave them names, but identification was simply the illusion of understanding.
“And then Wakeland got married,” Helen said, “and everyone sighed in relief.”
“Where’d Tucker and his family move to?”
“Dana Point, I think.”
Natasha closed the yearbook, sealing Ben’s seventeen-year-old face inside, and handed it back to Helen.
“I don’t know about these other boys,” Helen said. “I’m not sure how to think of it, but Lucero was gay—or at least he had a boyfriend.”
“Gay has nothing to do with it,” Natasha said, shaking her head. “This, what Wakeland does, is something else.”
“I don’t know,” Helen said. “But I don’t understand it, I really don’t. You should have to take an oath to become a teacher—the Hippocratic oath or something.”
“An oath is just words,” Natasha said. “They don’t mean much.”
—
“HE’S USING THE hills,” Ben said at the Tuesday-morning investigations meeting. “That’s where we’re not looking.”
After calling in the scene last night, after cordoning it off and bagging the paper clips to send off to forensics, after taking pictures of the scrawled words, after fending off reporters pushed back beyond the NO TRESPASSING sign, Ben had stayed up late in the barn, looking at the map, trying to piece together a symbol that would reveal something. He drew lines between scenes, erased them, and drew lines again. He tried to make pentagrams out of the points, letters that created a message, shapes that would reveal the killer’s next move. It wasn’t until sunrise, moted light slipping through the slats in the wall, that he saw it. The dark spaces of open territory—the hills of the coast joined to the Santa Ana Mountain foothills in the east by a tendon of undeveloped groves. He had remembered, suddenly, like pieces fitting into place, the man sleeping in his car a week ago. He had been small, Ben remembered, a teenager or early twenties. His eyes were rimmed bruise-blue, as though he hadn’t slept in a long time. His girlfriend had kicked him out, the young man had said, and Ben had bought it, given the guy his fresh coffee even, but he didn’t look like the kind of guy who had a girlfriend. He looked like the kind of guy who stood on corners and watched people, the kind of guy who called in bomb threats to schools, the kind of guy who was invisible until he exploded into visibility. Ben remembered the ride with Emma the other day, the man coming out of the Bommer Canyon camp and walking down to the golf course. He had been small, too, lean and wiry, his limbs awkward, as though parts of him were unhinged. Surrounding the horseshoe of open space, the developed basin was a grid of steel and lights, but that horseshoe was a dark zone, a shadow cast by city light, lined with foot trails and dotted with rotting cowboy camps.
“The hills are off the grid,” Ben said now. “Old cowboy cabins in Bommer and Loma Canyons. Another up near the Sinks in Santiago Canyon.”
“Just deer and coyote up there,” Carolina said.
All of them had been on scene until after 2:00 A.M., and probably none of them had slept. Hernandez called them in at 8:30 this morning, after Westminster found a print on a water glass at their crime scene. Marco, working the night shift, cross-referenced the prints with the numbers and letters Ben had gotten off the plate, and they had their man: Ricardo Martinez, twenty-three years old. By 8:00 A.M. there was an inter-department BOLO for all of the Southern California basin; they’d sent out the killer’s mug shot to the press, uniformed officers were canvassing neighborhoods—but the hills were it, the hills were ground zero.
“The Santa Ana Freeway,” Marco said, running a finger up the map that covered the east wall, “and the 405 both run the edge of the hills. Six on-ramps. In and out, disappear.”
“He was down in Chino,” Lieute
nant Hernandez said, passing out the folders. CIM. California Institute for Men.
“Something’s off in his face,” Carolina said.
“It’s him,” Ben said, looking at the mug shot. The killer’s face seemed misaligned, not obviously so, but enough to throw off the eyes. “It’s the guy I found sleeping in the Toyota last week.”
“He spent time in Reception Center East for assaulting a prostitute.”
Reception Center East was for inmates with mental-health problems. Ben had been there a few times, back when he was in L.A., questioning low-level drug pushers who worked the system to get time off for emotional instability. The place was unsecured; inmates started pickup games in the courtyard. Therapists were on hand to hold inmates’ hands and help them talk out their problems. A place for coddling, if you asked him, though he had seen the genuine article there, too: Men breaking down like little girls, recalling traumatic events from childhood. Men smearing feces in “quiet room” pens, their eyes dense and occluded, the brain closed off to the present world.
“According to the prostitute’s formal statement,” Hernandez said, “he started choking her during sex.”
“Erotic strangulation?” Carolina asked.
“No,” Hernandez said. “Not according to her. Choked her until she passed out. She woke up and he was gone; the money in her purse was gone, too.” Ben looked at the pictures of the woman’s throat, the finger bruises, the scratches on her chin where her nails had dug into her skin. “Turned himself in,” Hernandez said, “but then wouldn’t admit to anything.”
“He scared himself,” Ben said. “But found it exciting, too. That’s probably when he got hooked.”
“Any priors?” Marco asked.
“No,” Hernandez said, “but he’s got a long case history.”