Warning Signs

by Stephen White

  She said, "You were right, there's a body in here, Colin. A lot of blood. Call for an ambulance, okay?"

  She counted to three and told herself she was fine. But she didn't feel fine. She felt as though she should sit down to keep from passing out, but she didn't want to disturb what she already knew was a crime scene. Sequentially, she looked everywhere in the room that didn't have a bloody body. She even looked at the ceiling. For her, the act was like looking at the horizon when she was seasick. Finally, the wave of nausea eased and her neurons resumed firing and she carefully checked the room to make triple-sure she and her partner and the guy on the floor didn't have any company.

  She dropped to her knees, stooped over the body, and lowered her head to listen for breath sounds. She heard nothing. To feel for a pulse, she needed to put down either her light or her gun. For a moment she weighed her choice, finally deciding to place the torch on the carpet, and, as she'd been taught, she rested three fingers on the underside of the radial bone of the man's right wrist. She was thinking the body was that of a man. The socks were men's socks. She was pretty sure of that. An exposed inch of calf was moderately hairy.

  It was a man.

  She felt no pulse. She thought, maybe, the body was cooler than it should have been, but only a little, and certainly not cold. She spent a moment trying to remember the speed at which a body gives up its warmth after death-a degree an hour, was that it?-and wondered if it was possible that this man was the same person who had started the dryer upstairs. He couldn't have cooled down that fast, could he? Maybe her own fingers were hot and that's why the body felt cool. That was certainly possible.

  Variables, variables.

  Bruce Collamore had said he heard the "somebody's-killing-me" scream at 9:51. She looked at her watch. It was 10:17. No, if this were the screamer, he wouldn't have cooled down, yet.

  Hot fingers. Had to be her hot fingers.

  Still on her knees, she lifted her Mag-Lite again and simultaneously turned her body to address her partner. The beam of the light danced carelessly off the ceiling and the walls. She said, "This guy's dead, and there's a lot of blood. Call for detectives and have the backup team tape off a perimeter out there. Make it a big perimeter. Tell the tall guy with the dog that he's not going anywhere for a while. We have to do the rest of the house. Get some people in here to help out. Tell them to come in the back door and walk straight to the front of the house, then turn left to the living room. And remind them not to touch anything. We have a crime scene and I don't want to be the one to mess it up."

  She said a silent prayer and aimed her lamp directly at the body on the floor, trying to discern the details of the man's face through the severe damage and the copious blood.

  For a second or two she thought she knew the man and tried to jar an association loose from her memory. It didn't work. VanHorn then decided that she didn't really know him. Again, she repeated her silent prayer and wondered what in heaven God had been thinking at 9:51 that evening.

  She decided that He must have been seriously distracted.

  CHAPTER 2

  T he first pair of detectives arrived about twenty minutes before midnight to find a well-delineated perimeter and a crime scene that was barely contaminated. Sam Purdy, the senior detective, was ecstatic. But he kept his joy to himself.

  "Who was first officer?" he asked of the patrol cop who was manning the clipboard and controlling access to the scene.

  "VanHorn and Carpino."

  "RP?" Purdy was asking who had called in the crime-who was the reporting party.

  "Still here."

  "Wits?"

  "Got one, guy named Bruce Collamore. He's the RP, too. That's him sitting in the backseat of my squad. Has a dog with him. Heard a scream a shade before ten. I talked to him a little bit-he's an interesting guy, teaches high school now, math I think. But he played a little pro football when he was younger, if you can believe it."

  Purdy grunted. "That's it? That's all you know?"

  The officer shrugged. "The Bengals. He was in camp for a few days with the Bengals."

  "I should care where he played football?"

  "Hey, it's early, Detective. We didn't want to mess with him before you guys got here. Played tight end, if you really want to know. Isn't built like a tight end now, though; he's tall enough, but he's too skinny, more like a Randy Moss type. He's crammed into the back of the squad like an anchovy in a can."

  Purdy said, "I might give a shit about any of this if he played for the Vikings, but I certainly don't care about some guy who didn't last a week with the damn Bengals, that's for sure. Whose house is this?"

  "Neighbor says it's a family named Peters, but the neighbor didn't hear anything that came down."

  Purdy turned to his partner. "You get that? What else do we have, Luce?"

  Lucy Tanner looked at her notepad. She knew he was asking her if the detective's log was current. In these circumstances, it was her job to make sure it was. She said, "We were called by dispatch via pager at ten twenty-six, arrive at the scene on Jay Street at eleven thirty-five. Six patrol officers present, all have checked in with the control officer. Medical personnel have come and gone. Photographers present and waiting for clearance to go inside. Ditto CSIs. Weather? Clear skies, temp near fifty. One wit at the scene, already isolated. Search warrant has been requested from Judge Silverman. We're waiting on it."

  "You get snaps? I want a good set of snaps. Who knows what time the photographers will get to go in."

  Lucy held up a disposable camera with a built-in flash. "This side of the house is covered."

  "Let's go to the back, then."

  Kerry VanHorn walked across the front yard of the house, approaching the two detectives. She was squinting. "Detective? I'm Officer VanHorn. I was first officer on the scene, along with Officer Carpino."

  "Sam Purdy. This is Lucy Tanner. Where's Carpino?" Purdy thought he recognized VanHorn from a recent altercation he'd investigated between a bicyclist and a pedestrian on Canyon Boulevard. He wasn't sure he'd ever heard of Carpino, didn't think he'd been with VanHorn that day.

  VanHorn nodded a greeting to Lucy before she answered. "We entered the home through an open rear door. He's standing watch there."

  "Who's been inside?"

  "Just Carpino and me initially. After we found the deceased on the main level, two other officers accompanied us on a search of the rest of the premises. Upon further search, we found a disabled person sleeping upstairs in the master bedroom. When we couldn't arouse her enough to take a statement, we called an ambulance. Two paramedics entered the house and removed her. At my request, one of them walked through the section of the house where I found the deceased to confirm that he was, well, deceased. The ambulance left about twenty-five minutes ago. The disabled woman is now at Community Hospital. You may want to dispatch someone to get her statement, Detective. She was not particularly coherent when I tried to talk with her."

  "That's it? Got any names?"

  "Yes, sir. That's it. And no, sir. The woman was, like I said, incoherent. I think she said her name was Susan, or Suzanne. I had trouble understanding her. She was not able to give a last name. Neighbor a couple of doors down across the street says the family is the Peters. Only wit is the RP, guy named Bruce Collamore. He's waiting in one of the squads. Heard a scream a few minutes before ten. I don't think he's going to be much more help; he's already told us all he knows."

  "Yeah, I've already heard all about Collamore. Got cut by the Bengals during training camp, if you can believe that."

  "What?" VanHorn asked.

  Purdy ignored her question while he went through a mental checklist and reached satisfaction that things were under control. Then he realized he'd missed something. "Coroner here yet?"

  "Haven't seen anyone," she said.

  Purdy made a note to have Lucy ascertain that Scott Truscott, the coroner's assistant, had been called. He said, "Good job here, VanHorn. You and Carpino managed this scene like you
do it every weekend."

  P urdy and Lucy followed VanHorn down the path to the backyard. Lucy snapped some photographs of the rear of the house before VanHorn introduced the detectives to Carpino. No one shook hands; Purdy and Lucy were busy pulling latex onto their fingers.

  "The yard was like this? Nothing's been touched?"

  Whiskers answered, "Just like you see it. No one's been back here but us since we arrived. Only things we touched outside were the doorknobs. We did that before we realized what we had."

  T he search warrant arrived around twelve-thirty.

  The crime scene investigators and the police photographers preceded the two detectives into the house. After about fifteen minutes, the CSIs reported to Purdy that they'd finished clearing and vacuuming the path to the living room and that he could enter.

  Everyone pulled coverings onto their shoes. At Purdy's request, VanHorn led the way inside and pointed out the direction she had walked to get to the living room before she discovered the body. On this return visit she went no farther than the foot of the stairs, using the beam of her flashlight to direct the detectives the rest of the way to the deceased. "He's there, behind that couch."

  "All the lights were off? Just like this?" Purdy asked as he carefully crossed the length of the room and lowered himself to a crouch a few feet from the body. The detective's feet were in a little clearing in the center of the pottery debris.

  "Yes. We touched nothing in this room. I did feel the victim's wrist for a pulse and I tripped over some of the broken pottery when I got back up. The EMT was careful, too, when he confirmed the death. I watched him. That's it. Nothing else was touched down here. Upstairs was different. We tried to watch what we were doing, but moving that lady to the hospital spilled some milk. Couldn't be avoided. I've started making a list of everything I think was disturbed up there."

  "Good. Finish the list and get it to me. We'll take it from here."

  "Oh, I almost forgot, the dryer was on. Upstairs? There's a washer and dryer. When I first came in the house, the dryer was on. It finished its cycle just before I found the body. Made a loud buzzing sound."

  Purdy took a moment to catch her eyes and smiled at her. "Scared the shit out of you, I bet, didn't it?"

  She laughed. "Yeah. Scared the shit out of me." VanHorn didn't generally condone profane language. But the phrase seemed to fit the circumstances.

  "That was when?"

  "Ten twenty-five, ten-thirty, give or take a couple of minutes."

  "Got that, Luce?"

  Lucy raised her pen from her notebook but didn't look up. "Yeah, Sam. I got it."

  "You can go, Officer. Good work."

  Purdy stood up straight, took a flashlight from Lucy's hand, and swept the room with the beam, pausing a few times. While he perused the space, he took note of the temperature in the house, inhaled the aroma of the room, and digested how the shadows played with the darkness. He knew Lucy would be doing the same drill. In a few minutes, they'd compare impressions. When he finally stepped forward, he approached the corpse cautiously, noting the position of the lamp on the floor, treading carefully around the pieces of ceramic.

  Lucy hung back; she was at least six feet behind him. Purdy could hear her breathing through her mouth.

  "You okay, Luce?" he said.

  She said, "Sure." But Purdy didn't quite believe her.

  "You need a minute? Or are you ready?"

  "I'm right behind you, Sam. I'm fine."

  Maybe a stranger would have failed to recognize the catch in her voice. But Purdy heard it. "If you're going to puke, puke outside, okay?"

  He expected her to curse at him in reply. Instead, she said, "I told you I'm fine, Sam."

  Purdy once again lowered himself to a crouch, this time right beside the body. For a few seconds he focused on the injuries and on the blood, not on the dead person. A gestalt thing-figure, not ground. The head and face wounds that had been inflicted were severe. At least two deep crushing blows. Probably more. Blood pooled around the man's head like a lake on a dark night. The blood loss was copious. With the flashlight beam he traced a fan-shaped splatter that extended up the nearest wall all the way to the crown molding. The conclusion was obvious: The victim had been standing when he was hit and had lived long enough to bleed like a broken dike.

  "Is he dead, Sam?" Lucy asked the question as though she didn't quite believe it was true.

  Purdy didn't bother feeling for a pulse. He knew dead. "He's really dead, Luce. Bashed in the face and head with something heavy and hard. My money's on the lamp or this broken pottery."

  She didn't reply.

  Purdy asked, "Can you see outside? Has the coroner's van arrived?"

  "I don't see it out there."

  He thought she sounded funny.

  Sam Purdy was a big man. He lowered one knee to the carpet so he could lean over and examine the undamaged part of the man's face. It took him maybe two seconds of focus to identify the victim.

  "Holy shit. You know who this is, Luce?"

  She swallowed. Her voice was hollow. "I can't see him from here. Just some blood. All I see is the blood."

  Purdy said, "Whose house is this, anyway? Do you know whose house this is? Lucy?"

  CHAPTER 3

  I t should have been my first clue.

  For the first time since Grace's birth I put her to bed all by myself. Shortly after nine o'clock on Friday night Lauren had pulled the satiated baby from her breast and handed her up to me, smiling wanly. She asked if I'd give our daughter a bath. I was delighted to comply.

  Grace and I moved swiftly over the familiar territory that led from bath, to diaper, to fresh sleeper, to my favorite part-bedtime stories in the big upholstered rocker in the nursery. I had no illusions that my little girl even knew what a book was, but I could find no reasonable argument for postponing her introduction to the wonders of the written word, and I could find a million reasons for not waiting. Each night we read a few books. Each night both of us loved it.

  Lauren never jumped into the ritual that particular night, even when the usually irresistible trill of Grace's laughter echoed down the hall between the two bedrooms. I enjoyed the independence of it all and assumed that Lauren's request that I put the baby to bed was her way of giving me a vote of confidence. I also knew I'd have to get used to it; the following Monday Lauren was returning to work after half a year of maternity leave.

  Once I'd kissed our daughter for the last time and placed her on her back in her crib, I stepped down the hall to the bedroom to find Lauren curled away from the door, asleep. A few minutes later I touched my lips to her inky hair before I crawled into bed beside her.

  I t wasn't long after Grace's birth six months earlier that we'd developed a family ritual that consisted of a Saturday morning breakfast out followed by errands and grocery shopping. The morning after my first solo bedtime flight with Grace, Lauren drove us into town on our way to breakfast. We were planning to eat at Marie's, followed by some grocery shopping at Ideal, bagels from Moe's, bread from Breadworks, and wine from the Boulder Wine Merchant.

  All without moving our car. Almost like in a real city.

  As we crawled up Balsam past the mini-roundabouts toward Broadway, Lauren cursed at an elderly man in an impeccably preserved old turquoise Chevy Bel Air who signaled a left turn and then smoothly pulled right into the driveway of a modest brick ranch that had held its value a lot better than his car.

  At the sound of Lauren's profanity, I leaned into the backseat and told Grace to cover her ears.

  Lauren didn't laugh.

  It should have been my second clue.

  T he reason I was missing so many clues was, I think, that I was out of practice. From the moment Lauren had become pregnant fifteen months before, she'd enjoyed a sabbatical from her long struggle living with relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis. Her neurologist had told her that the pregnancy might indeed provide a respite from her chronic symptoms and a brief protection against fresh exace
rbations of her illness. It turned out that he'd been right on both counts.

  What were the usual signs that something was brewing with Lauren's health? Withdrawal and distraction. She'd sense some sign of change in her functioning-pain, weakness, numbness, vertigo, something-and she'd pull away from me. She'd also display signs of irritability.

  But my radar was rusty and I was out of practice. For fifteen months I'd floated along on the gentle sea of denial, buoyed by blind hope that our daughter's birth would be her mother's ticket to prolonged good health.

  T he selection of breads at the bakery didn't include the multigrain that Lauren coveted. Her disappointment at the news was much too keen. The table at Marie's was uneven and Lauren leaned over to fidget with sugar packets until the wobble disappeared. The waitress brought Lauren coffee, not the tea she'd ordered. Lauren tried to sigh away her uncharacteristic annoyance at the mistake. She failed. When she looked over at me and said, "I'm not up for this, Alan. Can we skip breakfast this morning?" I finally realized that something was wrong.

  I lowered my coffee mug back to the tabletop and said, "You're not feeling well, are you?"

  For a prolonged moment every sound in the crowded coffee shop was muted. No motion blurred anything in my periphery. I followed Lauren's gaze as she looked at Grace, who was asleep in her infant carrier. Tears formed in Lauren's lower lashes.

  "What is it?" I asked, even though I already knew.

  She didn't answer right away.

  "Are you symptomatic?" I said. With Lauren, I didn't need to be any more specific. I didn't need to reference a specific illness. We both knew I was inquiring about her MS.

  She nodded, flicked a poignant glance at Grace. At the same moment, she said, "I don't want to be sick anymore, Alan. I don't."

  I covered her wrist with my hand-her hand was balled into a fist-and waited almost a full minute for her to continue. When finally she did, she said, "We can talk about this later, okay? I think I'd really like to go home. But we need to stop at the drugstore first. You know?"