At the Scene of the Crime

by Dana Stabenow

Pamela went through the images frame by frame, looking for clear faces. Her computer didn’t have the face recognition software that one of the computers at the lab had, but she had installed a home version of image sharpening software. She used it to clean out the fuzz and to lighten the darkness, trying to find more than a chin or the corner of an ear.

  Finally she got a small face just behind the flag, a serious white face with a frown—of disapproval? She couldn’t tell—and a bit of an elongated chin. Enough to see the wisp of a beard, a boy’s beard, more a wish of a beard than the real thing, and a tattooed hand coming up to catch the flag as the person almost blocking the camera yanked the pole out of the holder.

  She blew up the image, softened it, fixed it, and then felt tears prick her eyes.

  They don’t usually come to places like Halleysburg.

  No. They grew up here. And worked at the grocery store down the street to pay for their football uniforms at the underfunded high school. They collected coins in a can on Sunday afternoons for Boosters, and they smiled when they saw her and respectfully called her Mrs. Kinney and asked, with a little too much interest, how her granddaughters were doing.

  “Jeremy Stallings,” she whispered. “What the hell were you thinking?”

  And she hoped she knew.

  Neil wouldn’t let her sit in while he questioned Jeremy Stallings. He was appalled she’d even asked. “That sort of thing belongs on TV and you know it.”

  But she also knew he probably wouldn’t do much more than slap the boy on the wrist, so what would be the harm? She hadn’t made that argument, though.

  Instead, she waited on the bench chair outside the sheriff ’s office conference room, which doubled as an interview room on days like this, and watched the parade of parents and lawyers as they trooped past.

  No one acknowledged her. No one so much as looked at her. Not Reg Stallings, whose brother had sold her the house, or his wife June, who had taken over the PTA just before Travis got out of high school. No one mentioned the friendly exchanges at the high school football games or the hellos at the diner behind the movie theater. It was easier to forget all that and pretend they weren’t neighbors than it was to acknowledge what was going on inside that room.

  Then, finally, Jeremy came out. He was wearing his baggy pants with a Halo T-shirt hanging nearly to his knees. He wore that same frown he’d had as he took the flag off from Becky’s front door.

  He glanced at Pamela, then looked away, a blush working its way up the spider tattoo on his neck into his crew cut.

  His parents and the lawyers led him away, as Neil reminded all of them to be in court the following morning.

  Neil waited until they went through the front doors before coming over to Pamela.

  She stood, her knees creaky from sitting so long. “He confess?”

  Neil nodded. “And gave me the names of his buddies.”

  Pamela bit her lower lip. “Funny,” she said, “he didn’t strike me as the type to be a war protestor.”

  Neil rubbed his hands on his pristine shirt. “Is that what you thought?”

  “Of course,” Pamela said. “Every house he hit, we’re all military families.”

  “Who happened to be flying flags, even at night.” There was a bit of judgment in Neil’s voice.

  She knew what he was thinking. People who knew how to handle flags took them down at dusk. But she couldn’t bear to touch hers. She hadn’t asked Becky why hers remained up, but she would wager the reason was similar.

  And it probably was for every other family Jeremy and his friends had targeted.

  “That’s the important factor?” she asked. “Night?”

  “And beer,” Neil said. “They lost a football game, went out and drank, and that fueled their anger. So they decided to act out.”

  “By burning flags?” Her voice rose.

  “A few weeks before, they knocked down mailboxes. I’m going to hate to charge them. There won’t be much left of the football team.”

  “That’s all right,” Pamela said bitterly. “Petty property crimes shouldn’t take them off the roster long.”

  “It’s going to be more than that,” Neil said. “They’re showing a destructive pattern. This one isn’t going to be fun.”

  “For any of us,” Pamela said.

  Her hands were shaking as she left. She had wanted the crime to mean something. The flag had meant something to her. It should have meant something to them too.

  God, Mom, for an old hippie, you’re such a prude. Jenny’s voice, so close that Pamela actually looked around, expecting to see her daughter’s face.

  “I’m not a prude,” she whispered, and then realized she was reliving an old argument between them.

  Sure you are. Judgmental and dried up. I thought you protested so that people could do what they wanted.

  Pamela sat in the car, her creaky knees no longer holding her.

  No, I protested so that people wouldn’t have to die in another senseless war, she had said to her daughter on that May afternoon.

  What year was that?

  It had to be 1990, just before Jenny graduated from high school.

  I’m not going to die in a stupid war, Jenny had said with such conviction that Pamela almost believed her. We don’t do wars any more. I’m going to get an education. That way, you don’t have to struggle to pay for Travis. I know how hard it’s been with Steve.

  Jenny, taking care of things. Jenny, who wasn’t going to let her cash-strapped mother pay for her education. Jenny, being so sure of herself, so sure that the peace she’d known most of her life would continue.

  To Jenny, going into the military to get a free education hadn’t been a gamble at all.

  Things’ll change, honey, Pamela had said. They always do.

  And by then I’ll be out. I’ll be educated, and moving on with my life.

  Only Jenny hadn’t moved on. She’d liked the military. After the First Gulf War, she’d gone to officer training, one of the first women to do it.

  I’m a feminist, Mom, just like you, she’d said when she told Pamela.

  Pamela had smiled, keeping her response to herself. She hadn’t been that kind of feminist. She wouldn’t have stayed in the military. She wasn’t sure she believed in the military—not then.

  And now? She wasn’t sure what she believed. All she knew was that she had become a military mother, one who cried when a flag was burned.

  Not just a flag.

  Jenny’s flag.

  And that’s when Pamela knew.

  She wanted the crime to mean something, so she would make sure that it did.

  She brought her memories to court. Not just the scrapbooks she’d kept for Jenny, like she had for all three kids, but the pictures from her own past, including the badly framed front page of the Oregonian.

  Five burly boys had destroyed Jenny’s flag. They stood in a row, their lawyers beside them, and pled to misdemeanors. Their parents sat on the blond bench seats in the 1970s courtroom. A reporter from the local paper took notes in the back. The judge listened to the pleadings.

  Otherwise, the room was empty. No one cheered when the judge gave the boys six months of counseling. No one complained at the nine months of community service, and even though a few of them winced when the judge announced the huge fines that they (and not their parents) had to pay, no one said a word.

  Until Pamela asked if she could speak.

  The judge—primed by Neil—let her.

  Only she really didn’t speak. She showed them Jenny. From the baby pictures to the dress uniform. From the brave eleven-year-old walking her brother to school to the dust-covered woman who had smiled with some Iraqi children in Baghdad.

  Then Pamela showed them her Oregonian cover.

  “I thought you were protesting,” she said to the boys. “I thought you were trying to let someone know that you don’t approve of what your country is doing.”

  Her voice was shaking.

  “I thought you
were being patriotic.” She shook her head. “And instead you were just being stupid.”

  To their credit, they watched her. They listened. She couldn’t tell if they understood. If they knew how her heart ached—not that sharp pain she’d felt when she found the flag, but just an ache for everything she’d lost.

  Including the idealism of the girl in the picture. And the idealism of the girl she’d raised.

  When she finished, she sat down. And she didn’t move as the judge gaveled the session closed. She didn’t look up as some of the boys tried to apologize. And she didn’t watch as their parents hustled them out of court.

  Finally, Neil sat beside her. He picked up the framed Oregonian photograph in his big, scarred hands.

  “Do you regret it?” he asked.

  She touched the edge of the frame.

  “No,” she said.

  “Because it was a protest?”

  She shook her head. She couldn’t articulate it. The anger, the rage, the fear she had felt then. Which had been nothing like the fear she had felt every day her daughter had been overseas.

  The fear she felt now when she looked at Stephen’s daughters and wondered what they’d choose in this never-ending war.

  “If I hadn’t burned that flag,” she said, “I wouldn’t have had Jenny.”

  Because she might have married Neil. And even if they had made babies, none of those babies would have been Jenny or Stephen or Travis. There would have been other babies who would have grown into other people.

  Neil wasn’t insulted. They had known each other too long for insults. Instead, he put his hand over hers. It felt warm and good and familiar. She put her head on his shoulder.

  And they sat like that, until the court reconvened an hour later, for another crime, another upset family, and another broken heart.

  ARTICULATION OF MURDER

  BY MICHAEL A. BLACK

  I WATCHED THE NEWSCAST OF THE WILDFIRES winding down the mountain as I held the model in my hand. My fingers probed the impressions of the bite marks that I was sure were Fernando Montoya’s. He now had a minimal overbite, the fortunate byproduct of porcelain veneers, which I was certain hid the peg laterals that I knew would convict him. Or at least I hoped they would. The search warrant for the original plaster impression of his bite had yet to be issued.

  My lab assistant, Rachel Pruit, sidled up next to me and squinted at the television.

  “That where you’re going, Doctor?”

  Her unruly crop of red hair and freckled face made her look like a life-size Raggedy Ann doll. I’d hired her to do small jobs around the office, like pouring models and setting up articulations.

  “Friction, Arizona,” I said. “Second hottest place in the United States.”

  “Second hottest? What’s the first?”

  “Bullhead City. It’s a couple miles south.” I articulated the maxillary and mandibular models using the bite registration material.

  “Want me to mount that for you?”

  I shook my head. It would create too many openings on cross-examination for Montoya’s attorney to impugn my investigative techniques. I’d learned that the hard way many trials ago, and this was one trial I didn’t intend on losing. The victim, Sandra Tilly, had been a beautiful nineteen-year-old coed when she’d begun her walk from the college library a year ago. Now she was a statistic, a bright smiling face in a photograph on her parents’ mantel. A beacon of lost hopes and dreams of a shattered family. The killer had left his bite marks on her shoulder and breasts at some point during the brutal rape and murder, and although there was a mountain of inconclusive trace evidence, his distinctive bite pattern would let the truth shine through. Even the most skillful defense attorney wouldn’t be able to ease that indelible image from the jurors’ minds. All I had to do was find conclusive proof that it matched up to Montoya’s.

  I set the yellow die stone models between the metal tongues of the articulator and began mixing some plaster. I’d have to mount the maxillary model first, and then, once it had dried, mount the mandibular.

  “You sure you don’t want me to do that for you, doc?”

  “Very sure,” I said. Just then my hygienist, Roland Vanderberg, walked in and gave me an equally perplexed look.

  “Doctor Link,” he said, still staring at the rubber bowl in my hand, “there’s a phone call for you.”

  I’d just gotten the plaster mixed with the right amount of water so that I could slap it on the die stone-model and then affix it to the articulator. It wasn’t a good place to stop.

  “Just take a message,” I said, realizing that I’d let my receptionist go home a tad too early today. “I’m in the middle of something.”

  Vanderberg gave me one of his customary looks of smug superiority. As hygienists went, he was capable and talented, and he was applying to U of I Medical Center, my alma mater, for dental school. He was handsome and charming to the patients, but I had taken a dislike to him. Usually, when someone enters the field of dentistry, they are imbued with an urge to help people. Or at least, in my opinion, they should be. Vanderberg seemed motivated more by venality than altruism. His first words to me, after I’d hired him, was a disparaging remark about the Buick I drove. He’d asked why I didn’t drive a Porsche. When he found out I did forensic dentistry for the police, he seemed dumbfounded, asking if it was lucrative. He had a lot to learn.

  “It’s some guy who says he needs an emergency appointment,” Vanderberg continued. “Says you were recommended to him.”

  I tried to control my frown as I used the spatula to scoop enough of the soupy plaster on the yellow model.

  “I’m going out of town tomorrow, remember?” I said. “Dr. Major is taking all my calls for the next few days.”

  “Okay, doctor,” he said, his tone not masking his disapproval.

  I set the metal tong in place, then slathered on the plaster. It would take a few minutes to harden, and then be ready to trim down. When I was finished, I wanted to place it in a special locked cabinet that I used for my forensic investigations. Then I’d be ready to go home and pack for my early-morning trek to the airport. This was one trip I wasn’t looking forward to, even though weddings are supposed to be joyous affairs.

  “Excuse me, Doctor.” It was Vanderberg again. “You got a second phone call.”

  I’d just finished trimming the excess plaster off the model. “Another patient with an emergency?”

  “No, it’s that cop. He says it’s urgent.”

  I grinned, despite myself. “He always says it’s urgent. Send it into my office.” The call wouldn’t take more than five minutes, which would give enough time for the plaster to set before doing the mandibular. Eventually, I’d need the original model, without the veneers, to demonstrate the articulation of the peg laterals over a life-size photograph of the wound site to the jury, but we had to obtain a search warrant before I could get it from his dentist. It was either that or I’d have to drill off Montoya’s new veneers and get the impression, which wouldn’t be as exact a match as the original plaster model. That was probably what Detective Keldon wanted to talk to me about.

  I sat behind my desk and answered with my most professional sounding, “Dr. Link.”

  “Yeah, Jim, it’s Keldon. Just calling to check if we’re on for Monday’s performance.”

  Keldon had asked me to accompany him before the judge to describe exactly what was needed for our search warrant regarding the importance of getting the original model of Montoya’s bite. Once we had that, I could do a dog-and-pony show for a grand jury and he’d be indicted quicker than the blink of an eye. We figured the grand jury would allow Keldon to swoop in and arrest Montoya before he could sneak away to Mexico.

  “Shouldn’t be a problem,” I said. “I’m catching my flight to Arizona early tomorrow, got the rehearsal Friday night, the wedding Saturday, and the return trip Sunday. I’ll be back in plenty of time.”

  “Okay,” he said. I detected something in his voice. Apprehensi
on, maybe? “Doc, you’re sure about those things, aren’t you?”

  The question didn’t surprise me. Keldon had called me in as an accredited forensic dentist after the bite marks were discovered during the autopsy. I’d gone to the morgue and examined the body, something I don’t like to do unless I have to. She’d been stripped and dumped in a pond, which destroyed or tainted any DNA residuals in the bite marks, but the distinctive patterns gave me hope. When Keldon pulled Montoya in for questioning, because he’d sought “a dating relationship with the victim” and had been rebuffed, I sat in on the interview due to the bite marks. Montoya sat across from us, a perpetual smirk on his face, as his lawyer monitored our questions and translated his responses from Spanish. We both knew Montoya spoke English, but it was obvious he was enjoying the game. He figured he’d covered all the bases. It was when he got up to leave that his smile betrayed him. An almost perfect alignment of dentition, which I knew immediately had to be attributed to porcelain veneers. Later, Keldon and I sifted through the collection of Montoya’s previous arrest photos and found one where he’d been grimacing at the camera in defiance. I used a magnifier to examine the exposed array of teeth and confirmed what I already knew: he had a pair of peg laterals hidden beneath the new veneers.

  “Peg whats?” Keldon had asked.

  “Peg laterals,” I said, pointing the picture. “Underdeveloped incisors on the maxillary.”

  Keldon had looked at me like I was speaking Klingon. I imagined his expression wasn’t too much different on the other end of the phone today.

  “I won’t know for sure until I can get the original plaster impression of his bite from the dentist who did them,” I said, pausing to look at the careful re-creation of maxillary and mandibular impressions the purple Impregum displayed of the bite pattern I’d taken from the wounds on Sandra Tilly’s body. “But I’m as sure as I can be at the moment.” I heard him sigh. “I’m afraid you’ll just have to trust my gut instinct on this right now.”

  “It’s not that, Jim. I’m just a bit concerned, is all.”

  “Why’s that?”