The Fifth Rule of Ten

by Gay Hendricks

  “Jesus Christ,” Sully gasped behind us. Mack added a painful moan.

  “You two stay put,” Bill barked. “We’ll let you know if they find anything.”

  Bill and I skidded into the gully. We leaped across the dry streambed and scrambled up the second incline. We’d gone maybe a mile, but it felt like 10. My right shoe slipped, sending a cascade of tiny pebbles behind me.

  “Over here!” Fran’s call was urgent, and my heart rate picked up speed. I dug in, Bill huffing and puffing behind me.

  We crested the second rise. The jagged ravine below was choked with brush and a few stunted trees. A hot haze lay over everything, as if the earth was exhaling exhaust. Fran’s back was to us. She was looking past her dog at whatever the shepherd had found.

  Shirley sat rooted in place, a statue. She stared fixedly at a tight trio of blooming creosote bushes.

  Fran looked up at us. The pain in her face required no translation.

  Without a word, Bill pulled out the two crime-scene kits, and we pulled on paper gowns, gloves, and booties. A sickly-sweet smell wafted our way, and we added face shields. As we picked our way down, the smell grew stronger. I swallowed back bile.

  Whatever was down there was past fresh, and in an early state of decomp.

  When we reached Fran, Shirley was curled at her feet, munching happily on a rawhide cruller. Their work was done. Ours was just beginning.

  We moved to the body, stepping with care in our paper booties. Later, the crime scene investigators would take the same path.

  Tiny yellow blooms decorated the creosote bushes, bold if bittersweet reminders of new growth, given what lay beneath them. Bill indicated the location with a stack of small stones. I guess his kits didn’t include evidence markers.

  I crouched carefully, noting what I could, careful not to touch or disturb anything. This close, the smell was rank, an attack to the soul and like no other scent on the planet. I pressed the mask tighter against my nose and mouth.

  The body was almost naked, though a strip of cotton had been twisted around the groin area, like a loincloth. The legs were shoulder-width apart. Right elbow bent, fingers reaching upward. Left arm aimed down.

  Ragged holes where there should have been eyes.

  Bill had pulled out his camera and was shooting from different angles: Click, whirr. Click, whirr. Click, whirr.

  Focus, Ten.

  Adult male. Partially decomposed from heat, and the avid pecking of beaks.

  Darkish skin, could be a side effect of death, or from overexposure. Black hair.

  Black hair.

  Not Collie.

  The relief was short-lived. For I recognized him now, even without eyes. Or rather, I recognized his ring. The wide gold band cut into the swollen middle finger, but the amber cat’s-eye glowed. Not Collie, but rather the remains of Collie’s elated companion, his beaming cohort in the image posted on his Facebook page.

  “It’s not him, Bill. Not my missing person,” I said. “But I know him. Not by name, but he and Colin hung out together in England. I recognize the ring.”

  “Poor kid,” Bill said. He scanned the narrow gorge and cliffs, natural barriers to access. “What a nightmare. Getting forensics down here is going to be hell. We’ll need a chopper to airlift the remains.”

  “I figured.”

  “Oh, well. At least it won’t be hard to secure. This isn’t exactly a destination point.” Banter at times like this tended to blunt the horror.

  Bill held up his cell phone, waving it left to right. “No signal, of course.” He walked a few yards up the slope, testing the air for a digital source.

  Fran had put Shirley back on the leash and was keeping her distance. Her face was grim.

  “You okay?”

  “I’m used to bones,” she said. “Our finds aren’t usually this fresh. And that smell. I never get used to it. Brutal.”

  I stayed put. I wasn’t being paid to look away, and a thorough investigation included taking precise inventory of the damage.

  Maybe this time the act of objectifying mortal wounds would lessen their nightmarish impact.

  Bill returned. We scanned the body in silence.

  “There’s something almost ritualistic about this,” I said.

  Bill grunted, which meant maybe, maybe not.

  Click, whir. Click, whir.

  Both arms had been sliced open. The incisions were clean, vertical, and quite deep. No hesitation marks that I could see. The dusty ground beneath the body had hardened into a dark bed of spilled, desiccated blood. Blood spatter clotted the dirt in and around the branches of creosote.

  The thighs and shins had been both stabbed and sliced and in some places stripped of skin.

  In addition, here and there the flesh looked puckered, as if beaks were involved.

  The face was bloated and the neck arched, mouth open, lips pulled back in a grimace. A trickle of something like dried foam crusted the corners. Traces of the same fluid left small dark stains under each nostril. The stomach area, too, was distended.

  These were all common events in untended corpses—we may die, but the millions of microorganisms and enzymes in our internal organs don’t. They start to self-digest, creating fluids and gases that have to go somewhere. It’s a form of life after death, a transformation of matter, but one that we have succeeded in sanitizing and embalming right out of our culture and consciousness.

  So he’d been here at least a few days. No visible maggots, though. Which meant less than a week.

  His eyes—I hoped that was the work of ravens or some other raptor, after his spirit-self abandoned ship.

  So much for objectivity. My chest ached. Every inhalation was a struggle. I swallowed hard, but all I could taste was this young man’s pain.

  I offered the only antidote I could: May your passage through the bardo be protected. May your journey be filled with ease. May you find peace. May you be free.

  “Ten. Over here,” Bill said. He had moved several yards away.

  He was photographing a plant with gray-green velvety leaves. A limp trumpet of a flower, creamy white streaked with violet, wilted in the afternoon sun. A handful of walnut-size, spiny capsules lay at the base of the plant. Most had split open, revealing crowded colonies of flat seeds the size of peppercorns.

  “What is this?”

  “Datura,” Bill said. “Angel’s trumpet.”

  “Or Devil’s snare. Take your pick,” Fran said, coming up behind us. “The seeds are loaded with tropane alkaloids. Plus a little scopolamine. They’ll make you high as fuck, if they don’t kill you first.”

  “Exactly. Which is why I find this interesting.” Bill’s gloved finger pointed to an empty husk, both sides scooped of seeds. He again marked the area with a stack of three small stones. They dotted the crime scene now like forensic stupas.

  “You’re not going to bag it?” I asked.

  “I’ll leave the packaging to the pros. Clearer chain of evidence. The courts like it better that way.”

  “You’re thinking he might have been poisoned,” Fran said.

  “Maybe.”

  “Here’s another possibility,” I said. “We have a version of this plant in India. Also called datura. It’s been around forever, it’s even mentioned in ayurveda, a Hindu system of healing over five thousand years old.”

  “Here we go,” Bill said.

  “No. I want to hear this,” Fran said.

  “Thank you. Some ayurvedic healers say it’s a poison, others, an aphrodisiac. But I can almost guarantee you there are Indian gurus who still use datura as a way to honor Shiva and achieve higher states of enlightenment.”

  “So the fuck what?” Dehydration was making Bill grumpy.

  “So maybe he swallowed the seeds on purpose.”

  “Or maybe there’s a hallucinating coyote out there who thinks he’s a camel,” Bill said. “I’m not ruling anything out at this point. I’ll have the lab test for it. They’ll need to do a full tox screening a
nyway.”

  “Better mark this area, too. There may have been a struggle.” I pointed to a spot near the body where blood loss and multiple footprints had churned and stained the earth.

  Bill photographed the chaos.

  “I’m seeing lots of prints,” he said from behind the camera.

  “Bare feet,” Fran added. “And bleeding like a mofo.”

  “Like a death dance,” I said.

  I turned back to the body. Whatever the cause, or purpose, his passing had not been gentle.

  A raven landed next to the corpse.

  “Get! Get away!” I shouted. Careful to avoid the bloody carpet of soil, I stepped toward the bird, waving my arms. Something metallic glinted from deep within the creosote’s gnarled roots.

  “Bill.”

  I could just make out a knife of some sort. I crouched.

  The knife had an ornate eight-sided handle and a curved iron blade that finished in a hook, like a deadly curl. The flat part of the blade was encrusted with blood. The knife lay on a folded garment of gray cotton.

  A robe.

  A pair of hiking boots was neatly placed to one side.

  “Bill!”

  My ex-partner knows me very well. He ran.

  I moved aside. Bill studied the weapon and robe for some time before turning back to me. His expression was unreadable.

  “So, the knife’s a sacred weapon, sacred to the Tibetan Buddhist tradition.” I swallowed. “My tradition, as it turns out.”

  Bill nodded as he stacked three more stones.

  “Ceremonial,” I said again. “For use in rituals, to . . . to root out ignorance, greed, and aggression. Symbolic use.”

  “What rituals?”

  “I’m not sure. Yet.”

  Bill’s mouth tightened, but he gave a short nod.

  Shirley barked, her canine nose far more attuned than ours to any alteration in the status quo. Where we smelled a single note, she smelled a symphony. Now Sully and Mack staggered into view, gleaming gods of sweat. A black-and-white helicopter chopped its way across the sun-streaked sky.

  Shirley and her handler had tracked down their fallen, lifeless prey. Bill and I had established enough grounds for suspicion concerning the cause. Now the experts in deciphering acts of mortal violence would converge, pulled as one to this particular place at this particular time by the negative forces of an unlawful death.

  CHAPTER 33

  Julie wouldn’t even meet my eyes. I slipped into the empty chair next to her. A waiter scurried up.

  “Pho Tai? Noodle with beef?” Julie and Lobsang raised their hands, and two steaming bowls landed. The fragrance hit like a punch.

  “Noodle with beef and meatball?” Yeshe and Sonam made room.

  “Pho ga? Noodle with chicken, very good!” TJ took the bowl. Everyone but Wangdue and me had food.

  “Don’t worry,” Julie said, her voice curt. “I ordered for you.” Uh-oh.

  A second waiter arrived.

  “Pho chay. No meat. Only veggie. No meat.”

  “Here.” Once again, I was the lone outlier.

  Well, not quite. Wangdue’s place setting was still empty. “What about you, Lama Wangdue?”

  “Saka Dawa,” he said. “I fasting.”

  Right. Rigorously observant lamas spent the entire month eating only one meal a day, in the midmorning.

  Platters of crunchy bean sprouts, sprigs of fresh Thai basil and cilantro, and slices of lime followed.

  Julie’s anger lay like a wall between us. I busied myself with condiments, adding this and that. Every table sported a round white tray with plastic squeeze bottles of soy, hot, and hoisin sauces. I reached for the plastic bottle of thick, sweet- and-sour hoisin.

  “Don’t,” Julie said.

  I froze, bottle poised.

  “Hoisin ruins a good Pho broth. It’s like putting ketchup on steak tartare.”

  I put the bottle back.

  I couldn’t get a signal at the site, and getting sprung from the crime scene had taken much longer than I’d expected. But honestly, getting to a sand mandala ceremony was the last thing on my mind once I’d caught sight of the ravens circling the caves.

  By the time I’d checked in with Julie it was dusk.

  “I wanted to come,” I said to Julie. “One thing just led to another.”

  “It’s not that you didn’t come. It’s that you didn’t call. For hours. It’s not like you. The new you, I should say.” She gestured, her eyes hurt. “Ten, I thought we made an agreement about this.”

  An ancient resistance welled up, the notion that anyone who claims to love me really just wants to control me. Thankfully, I recognized it for what it was, an old idea. My issue, not Julie’s, and based on a stifled, powerless past. But this was the present, and I did have a choice.

  I chose to allow the resistance to rise, and then dissolve.

  “You’re right. I wasn’t thinking. I’m sorry. I’ll be more mindful next time.”

  It was Julie’s turn. She could either ratchet the argument up or down. As I waited, the tension drained from her body.

  “Thanks,” was all she said, but it was enough. She picked up a flat ceramic spoon and scooped hot broth into her mouth. “Oh. My. God.” She waved her spoon at Lobsang. “Did you taste this, Lobsang? This can’t be legal.”

  Pho Café was tucked in the corner of a strip mall off Sunset in Silver Lake; impossible to find, but extremely popular with Vietnamese locals and foodies like Julie with discerning taste buds.

  The décor was minimalist, featuring plain white walls, laminated pine tables for two, and an exposed kitchen where the magic happened. A big-bellied Buddha beamed from the far corner of the counter, seemingly delighted by the vases of fresh sunflowers surrounding him. No sign out front, no reservations, yet it overflowed with diners most of the time.

  Our four small tables had been pushed together to make one and we sat elbow to elbow on curved chairs of bright orange vinyl. The other diners shot sideways glances at us, and a few took furtive pictures with their phones, as if the monks were rock stars.

  “How did you manage to get us in so quickly?” I asked. We’d skirted a group of restless hipsters milling outside in the dark.

  “I played the Buddhist monk card,” Julie said. She maneuvered a twisted knot of rice noodles into her mouth with the house chopsticks. “Turns out the owner’s a follower of Thich Nhat Hanh.”

  “Convenient.”

  “I had a feeling.”

  She nudged me. “Eat, love, before it gets cold.”

  I spooned up some broth and tasted both smoke and tang, a blend of mushrooms, herbs, and diced hot peppers. Julie was right. Hoisin would have wrecked the delicate balance between earth and fire. I plucked out a few cubes of tofu with my chopsticks. They were dense and firm, exactly the way I liked them, and the white rice flour noodles had been perfectly simmered, not too hard and not too soft.

  Julie had plucked three strips of steak from her bowl. She folded them in a paper napkin. A certain bulldog waiting in the van was going to be ecstatic.

  For a moment, I was miles away from the broken body in the park.

  But only for a moment.

  I set my chopsticks aside, my appetite gone.

  “You finished?” Lobsang asked.

  “Yes.”

  “I can try?”

  I passed over my bowl.

  “What’s wrong?” Julie said. “You barely ate.”

  I hadn’t wanted to burden her, but withheld truth creates its own unhealthy weight.

  “We found a body in Griffith Park. Not my client’s son, but someone Colin knew.” I paused. “It was bad, Jules.”

  Julie reached for my hand. “I can’t imagine how hard that must have been.” Her response was perfect, like perfect pho. She didn’t try to change how I was feeling, or make things better. She didn’t start a sentence with oh well, at least . . . She just held my hand. And the darkness lifted.

  Now I was sorry I’d given Lobs
ang my noodles.

  Wangdue touched my shoulder.

  “Tenzing. I hear you say you find body. I must ask. Dead?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Dead.”

  “In park?”

  “Yes.”

  Wangdue removed a string of carved sandalwood prayer beads coiled around his right wrist. He cupped the beads in both hands, as if weighing their worth.

  “I chant for him,” Wangdue said. He closed his eyes. His lips moved as he fed the beads from hand to hand. I knew what he was doing. He was keeping count of his mantras. The more you recited, the closer you were to achieving Buddha mind. He was probably as obsessed with his stats as Fran.

  I shifted in my seat.

  Self-righteous jerk.

  I caught myself and had to smile. Judgmental mind is right up there with comparing mind when it comes to obstructing one’s path to ease.

  Yeshe was directly across from me. He sent me his own smile, one of deep affection, as if he’d both observed and understood this entire sequence of responses.

  We had spent over a decade side by side in the prayer hall at Dorje Yidam, wrestling with the maddening parade of hindrances to tranquility.

  I rolled my eyes and his smile widened.

  “Show him your hat, Yeshe,” Julie said. Yeshe rummaged inside his cloth bag and pulled out a blue Dodger cap.

  “Martha brought them to Yeshe and Lobsang today,” Julie said. “Courtesy of your ex-partner.”

  “Leave it to Bill.” Bill was more enthusiastic than ever for the team, now that new ownership was firmly in place.

  Yeshe pulled the cap on. He flashed me a hand sign, middle fingers bent, pinkie, forefinger, and thumb up. He looked so pleased—I hated to burst his bubble, but common sense prevailed.

  “Yeshe, where did you learn that?”

  “Man on street today. He wearing blue cap like mine, and shirt with Dodger name on front. I smile at him. He make sign like this. Is for Dodgers, yes? Dodger mudra!”

  “Not exactly.”

  My early beat had included East Los Angeles, and I was well versed in the hand tags flashed by local gangs. Weirdly, Yeshe was right. They did resemble mudras. Unfortunately their purpose was to wreak havoc, not protect against it.