At the Scene of the Crime

by Dana Stabenow

  Pamela had clung to that flag like she’d seen so many other military mothers do, and she suspected she had looked as lost as they had. Then, when she stood, that pain ran through her, dropping her back to the chair.

  Her sons took her arms, and when she mentioned the pain, they dragged her to the emergency room. She had been late for her own daughter’s wake, her chest sticky with adhesive from the cardiac machines and her hair smelling faintly of disinfectant.

  And the feeling came back now, as she stared at the massacre before her. The flag, Jenny’s flag, had been ripped from the front door and burned in her driveway.

  Pamela made herself breathe. Then she rubbed that spot above her left breast, felt the pain spread throughout her body, burning her eyes and forming a lump in the back of her throat. But she held the tears back. She wouldn’t give whoever had done this awful thing the satisfaction.

  Finally she reached inside her purse for her cell, called Neil—she had trouble thinking of him as the sheriff after all the years she’d known him—and then she protected the scene until he arrived.

  It only took him five minutes. Halleysburg was still a small town, no matter how many Portlanders sprawled into the community, willing to make the one and a half hour each-way daily commute to the city’s edge. Pamela had told the dispatch to make sure that Neil parked across the street so that any wind from his vehicle wouldn’t move the leaves.

  And she had asked for a second scene-of-the-crime kit because she didn’t want to go inside and get hers. She didn’t want to risk losing the crime scene with a moment of inattention.

  Neil pulled onto the street. His car was an unwieldy Olds with a soupedup engine and a reinforced frame. It could take a lot of punishment, and often did. As a result, the paint covering the car’s sides was fresh and clean, while the hood, roof, and trunk looked like they were covered in dirt.

  The sheriff was the same. Neil Karlyn was in his late fifties, balding, with a face that had seen too much sun. But his uniform was always new, always pristine, and never wrinkled. He’d been that way since college, a precise man with precise opinions about a difficult world.

  He got out of the Olds and did not reach around back for a scene-of-the-crime kit. Annoyance threaded through her.

  “Where’s my kit?” she asked.

  “Pam,” he said gently, “it’s a low-level property crime. It’ll never go to trial and you know it.”

  “It’s arson with malicious intent,” she snapped. “That’s a felony.”

  He sighed and studied her for a moment. He clearly recognized her tone. She’d used it often enough on him when they were students at the University of Oregon and when they were lovers on different sides of the political fence, constantly on the verge of splitting up.

  When they finally did, it had taken years for them to settle into a friendship. But settle they did. They hardly even fought any more.

  He went back to the car, opened the back door and removed the kit she’d requested. She crossed her arms, waiting as he walked toward her. He stopped at the edge of the curb, holding the kit tight against his leg.

  “Even if you somehow get the DA to agree that this is a cockamamie felony, you know that processing the scene yourself taints the evidence.”

  “Why do you care so much?” she asked, hearing an edge in her voice that usually wasn’t there. The challenge, unspoken: It’s my daughter’s flag. It’s like murdering her all over again.

  To his credit, Neil didn’t try to soothe her with a platitude.

  “It’s the eighth flag this morning,” he said. “It’s not personal, Pam.”

  Her chin jutted out. “It is to me.”

  Neil looked down, his cheek moving. He was clenching his jaw, trying not to speak.

  He didn’t have to.

  Somewhere in her pile of college paraphernalia was a badly framed newspaper clipping that had once been the front page of the Portland Oregonian. She’d framed the clipping so that a photo dominated, a photo of a much-younger Pamela with long hair and a tie-dye T-shirt, front and center in a group of students, holding an American flag by a stick, watching as it burned.

  God, she could still remember how that felt, to hold a flag up so that the wind caught it. How fabric had its own acrid odor, and how frightened she’d been at the desecration, even though she’d been the one to set the flag on fire.

  She had been protesting the Vietnam War. It was that photo and the resulting brouhaha it caused, both on campus and in the State of Oregon itself, that had led to the final breakup with Neil.

  He couldn’t believe what she had done. Sometimes she couldn’t either. But she felt her country was worth fighting for. So had he. He joined up not too many months later.

  To his credit, Neil didn’t say anything about her own flag burning as he handed her the kit. Instead he watched as she took photographs of the scene, scooped up the charred bits of fabric, and made a sketch of the footprint she found in the leaves.

  She found another print in the yard, and that one she made a cast of. Then she dusted her front door for prints, trying not to cry as she did so.

  “A flag is a flag is a flag,” she used to say.

  Until it draped over her daughter’s coffin.

  Until it became all she had left.

  “I called the local VFW, Mom,” her son Stephen said over dinner that night. Stephen was her oldest and had been her support for thirty years, since the day his father walked out, never to return. “They’re bringing another flag.”

  She stirred the mashed potatoes into the creamed corn on her plate. The meal had come from KFC. Her sons had brought a bucket with her favorite sides and told her not to argue with them about the fast food meal. She wasn’t arguing, but she didn’t have much of an appetite.

  They sat in the dining room, at the table that had once held four of them. Pamela had slid the fake rose centerpiece in front of Jenny’s place, so she wouldn’t have to think about her daughter.

  It wasn’t working.

  “Another flag isn’t the same, dumbass,” Travis said. At thirty, he was the youngest, unmarried, still finding himself, a phrase she had come to hate.

  The hell of it was, Travis was right. It wasn’t the same. That flag those people had burned, that flag had comforted her. She had clung to it on the worst afternoon of her life, her fingers holding it tight, even at the emergency room when the doctors wanted to pry it from her hands.

  It had taken almost a week for her to let it go. Stephen had come over, Stephen and his pretty wife Elaine and their teenage daughters, Mandy and Liv. They’d brought KFC then, too, and talked about everything but the war.

  Until it came time to take the flag away from Pamela.

  Stephen had talked to her like she was a five-year-old who wanted to take her blankie to kindergarten. In the end, she’d handed the flag over. He’d been the one to find the old flagpole, the one she’d taken down when she bought the house, and he’d been the one to place the pole in the hanger outside the front door.

  “The VFW says they replace flags all the time,” Stephen said to his brother.

  “Because some idiot burned one?” Travis asked.

  Pamela’s cheeks flushed.

  “Because people lose them. Or moths eat them. Or sometimes, they get stolen,” Stephen said.

  “But not burned,” Travis persisted.

  Pamela swallowed. Travis didn’t remember the newspaper photo, but Stephen probably did. It had hung over the console stereo she had gotten when her mother died, and it had been a teacher—Neil’s first grade teacher? Pamela couldn’t remember—who had seen it at a party and asked if she really wanted her children to see that before they could understand what it meant.

  “I don’t want another one,” Pamela said.

  “Mom,” Stephen said in his most reasonable voice.

  She shook her head. “It’s been a year. I need to move on.”

  “You don’t move on from that kind of loss,” Travis said, and she wondered how
he knew. He didn’t have children.

  Then she looked at him, a large broad-shouldered man with tears in his eyes, and remembered that Jenny had been the one who walked him to school, who bathed him at night, who usually tucked him in. Jenny had done all that because Stephen at thirteen was already working to help his mom make ends meet, and Pamela was working two jobs herself, as well as attending community college to get her degree in forensic science and criminology. A pseudoscience degree, one of her almost-boyfriends had said. But it wasn’t. She used science every day. She needed science like she needed air.

  Like she needed to find out who had destroyed her daughter’s flag.

  “You don’t move on,” Pamela said.

  Her boys watched her. Sometimes she could see the babies they had been in the lines of their mouths and the shape of their eyes. She still marveled at the way they had grown into men, large men who could carry her the way she used to carry them.

  “But,” she added, “you don’t have to dwell on it, every moment of every day.”

  And yet she was dwelling. She couldn’t stop. She never told her sons or anyone else, not even Neil, who had become a closer friend in the year since Jenny had died. Neil, a widower now, a man who understood death the way that Pamela did. Neil, whose grandson had enlisted after 9/11 and had somehow made it back.

  She was dwelling and there was only one way to stop. She had to use science to solve this. She couldn’t think about it emotionally. She had to think about it clinically.

  She had her evidence and she needed even more.

  The next morning, the local paper ran an article on the burnings, and listed the addresses in the police log section. So Pamela visited the other crime scenes with her kit and her camera, identifying herself as an employee of the state crime lab.

  Since CSI debuted on television, that identification opened doors for her. She didn’t have to tell the other victims that she had been a victim too.

  She took pictures of scorch marks on pavement and flag holders wrenched loose from their sockets. She removed flag bits from garbage cans, and studied footprints in the leaf-covered grass to see if they looked similar to the ones on her lawn.

  And late that afternoon, as she stepped back to photograph yet another twisted flag holder beside a front door, she saw the glint of a camera hiding in a cobwebby corner of the door frame. The house was a starter, maybe twelve hundred square feet total. She wouldn’t have expected a camera here.

  “Do you have a security system?” she asked the homeowner, a woman Travis’s age who looked like she hadn’t slept in weeks. Her name was Becky something. Pamela hadn’t really heard her last name in the introduction.

  “My husband put it up,” Becky said, her voice shaking a little. “I have no idea how it works.”

  “When will he be back?” Pamela asked.

  Becky shrugged. “When they cancel stop-loss, I guess.”

  Pamela felt her breath slide out of her body. “He’s in Iraq?”

  Becky nodded. “I put the flag up for him, you know? And I haven’t told him what happened to it. I’ve gotta find someone to fix the holder, and I have to get another flag.”

  Pamela looked at the house more closely. It needed paint. The bushes in front were overgrown. There were cobwebs all over the windows, and dry rot on the sills. Obviously the couple had purchased it expecting someone to work on it. Either the money wasn’t there, or the husband had planned to do the work himself.

  “I can fix the holder,” Pamela said. “If you have a few tools.”

  “My husband does,” Becky said.

  “I have a few things to finish, and then you can show me,” Pamela said.

  She dusted for prints, and then, for comparison, took Becky’s and some off the husband’s comb, which hadn’t been touched since he left. Then Pamela went into his workroom, which also hadn’t been touched, and took a hammer, some screws, and a screwdriver.

  It took only ten minutes to repair the flag holder. But in that time, she’d made a friend.

  “How’d you learn how to do that?” Becky asked.

  “Raised three kids alone,” Pamela said. “You realize there’s not much you can’t do if you just try.”

  Becky nodded.

  Pamela glanced at the camera. Untended since the husband left. It was probably in the same state of disrepair as the rest of the house.

  “Can I see the security system?” she asked.

  “It’s not really a system,” Becky said. “Just the cameras, and some motion sensors that’re supposed to alert us when someone’s on the property. But they clearly don’t work anymore.”

  “Let me see anyway,” Pamela said.

  Becky took her past the workroom, into a small closet filled with electronics. The closet was warm from the heat the panels gave off. Lights still blinked.

  Pamela stared at it all, then touched the rewind button on the digital recorder. On the television monitor, she watched an image of herself fixing the flag holder.

  “It looks like the camera’s still working,” she said. “Mind if I rewind farther?”

  “Go ahead.”

  Backwards, she watched darkness turn to day. Saw Neil inspect the hanger. Saw Becky crying, then the tears evaporate into a stare of disbelief before she backed off the porch and away from the scene.

  Back to the previous night. No porch light. Just images blurred in the darkness. Faces, not quite real, mostly turned away from the camera.

  “Got a recordable DVD?” Pamela asked.

  “Somewhere.” Becky vanished into the house. Pamela studied the system, hoping that she wouldn’t erase the information as she tried to record it.

  She rewound again. Studied the faces, the half-turned heads. She saw crew cuts and piercings and hoodies. Slouchy clothes worn by half the young people in Halleysburg.

  Nothing to identify them. Nothing to separate them from everyone else in their age group.

  Like her, her hair long, her jeans torn, as she stood front and center at the U of O, a burning flag before her.

  She made herself study the machine, and figured out how to save the images to the disk’s hard drive so that they wouldn’t be erased. Then she inspected the buttons near the machine’s DVD slot.

  “Here,” Becky said, thrusting a packet at her.

  DVD-Rs, unopened, dust-covered. Pamela used a fingernail to break the seal, then pulled one out and inserted it in the slot. She managed to record, but had no way to test. So she made a few more copies, feeling somewhat reassured that she could come back and try to download the images from the hard drive again.

  “Will this catch them?” Becky asked while she watched the process.

  “I don’t know,” Pamela said. “I hope so.”

  “It’s just, they got so close, you know.” Becky’s voice shook. “I didn’t know anyone could get that close.”

  It took Pamela a moment to understand what she meant. Becky meant that they had gotten close to the house. Close to her. The burning hadn’t just upset her, it had frightened her, and made her feel vulnerable.

  Odd. All it had done to Pamela was make her angry.

  “Just lock up at night,” Pamela said after a minute. “Locks deter ninety percent of all thieves.”

  “And the remaining ten percent?”

  They get in, Pamela almost said, but thought the better of it. “They don’t usually come to places like Halleysburg,” she said. “Why would they? We all know each other here.”

  Becky nodded, seemingly reassured. Or maybe she just wanted to abandon an uncomfortable topic.

  Pamela certainly did. She wanted to play with the images, see what she could find.

  She wanted a solid image of the culprits, one that she could bring to Neil.

  Maybe then he would stop complaining that this was a petty property crime. Maybe then he might understand how important this really was.

  But it was her own words that replayed in her head later that night as she sat in front of her computer.
>
  They don’t usually come to places like Halleysburg. We all know each other here.

  She had lied to make Becky feel better, but the words hadn’t felt like a lie. Thieves really didn’t come here. There was no need. There were richer pickings in Portland or Salem or the nearby bedroom communities.

  Besides, it was hard to commit a crime here without someone seeing you.

  Except under cover of darkness.

  Her home office was quiet. It overlooked the backyard, and she had never installed curtains on the window, preferring the view of the year-round flower garden she had planted. At the moment, her garden was full of browns and oranges, fall plants blooming despite the winter ahead. She had little lights beneath the plants, lights she usually kept off because they spiked her energy bill.

  But she had them on now. She would probably have them on for some time to come.

  Maybe Becky wasn’t the only one who felt vulnerable.

  Pamela put one of the DVDs in her computer, and opened the images. They played, much to her relief, so she copied the images to her hard drive and removed the DVD.

  Her computer at home wasn’t as good as her computer at work. But it would have to do.

  She didn’t want to do any work on this case at the state crime lab if she could help it. The lab was so understaffed and so overworked that it usually took four months to get something tested. When she last checked, more than six hundred cases were backlogged, some of them dating back more than nine months. Those cases were bigger than hers. The backlogs were semen samples from possible rapists and blood droplets from the scene of a multiple murder case.

  She couldn’t, in good conscience, bring something personal and private to the lab. She would work here as long as she could. Then if she couldn’t finish here, she might be able to convince herself that the time she took at the lab would go toward an arson case—a serious one, not a petty property crime, as Neil had called it.

  Petty property crime.

  Funny that they would be on opposite sides of this issue too.