Knife Music

by David Carnoy

  Pastorini didn’t notice any of that right away, though. When he first saw her, there was something about how close her feet were to the floor that made him think they weren’t too late, that maybe they could bring her back. So, he dove into the shower stall and lifted her up and tried to unhook the belt from the showerhead. But at five-foot-seven he had trouble lifting her high enough. That’s when the bigger of the two uniforms had to step in and help.

  They gave her CPR on the floor of her room. They tried to resuscitate her for almost ten minutes, even though Pastorini knew the moment he put his mouth to hers that it was hopeless. Her body was still warm, but he thought she must have been dead for at least fifteen minutes and probably longer. Both of the parents were screaming. No, God. No, no, no. And then, when it was clear that nothing could be done for her, everybody and everything just stopped for a moment. Pastorini, on his knees, looked across the room at Bill Kroiter, who’d pulled his wife’s head to his chest, impossibly trying to shield her from the unfathomable. To say anything was pointless.

  After he gave them a moment with her, he had the uniforms take them downstairs. Then he himself lifted the girl onto her bed and covered her with a sheet he found in a linen closet down the hall. He was sorry he moved the body, he told Madden. But he just couldn’t bear to see her lying on the floor like that. And since he’d already moved her once, it didn’t seem to matter that he put her up on the bed.

  “Can’t blame him,” Greg Lyons, an investigator from the San Mateo County Coroner’s Office, now says. “I probably would have done the same thing, given the circumstances.”

  Lyons is standing by the side of the bed, stretching latex gloves over his hands. Not far behind him, Vincent Lee, one of the county crime-scene photographers, is in the bathroom doing his job, and the bursts of light from his flash and the sound of it recharging between shots leak into the bedroom at regular intervals.

  “He’s pretty shaken,” says Madden, already gloved. “Been sipping an empty can of Diet Coke for ten minutes.”

  “Better that than a full bottle of Jack.”

  “True.”

  With his blond hair pulled back in a ponytail, neatly trimmed goatee, and round, designer glasses, you’d guess Lyons was an artist long before you’d say coroner’s investigator. He unclips his penlight from his shirt pocket and goes to work examining the body. The girl’s face is ashen, her lips a faint blue. Her eyes are closed but her mouth is slightly open, just enough to appear disturbing. Lyons, a former paramedic, starts with the neck, where the classic V-shaped line of a ligature runs across the front just above the larynx. While the natural light streaming into the room isn’t intense, Madden can make out the mark just fine. Still, Lyons plays the flashlight over the line to bring out its detail, then touches her chin and lifts it up, pushing her lips closed. The moment he lets go her mouth springs back to its original position and the gap returns.

  “Rigor’s already setting in,” he comments. “How long you been here?”

  “Twenty, twenty-five minutes—tops.”

  “Where’s Burns?” Lyons asks.

  Burns is his partner. He’s in Lake Tahoe for the weekend.

  “Skiing at Squaw,” Madden says.

  “I didn’t know he skied. The guy can’t stand the cold.”

  “His girlfriend’s into it. But he only goes in the spring, when it’s fifty and slushy.”

  Lyons nods, then lifts the girl’s left eyelid and shines the light at the eye for a few seconds, then does the same on the right. He shows Madden what they both suspect will be there: the whites of the eyes are blotched with tiny red dots—pinpoint hemorrhages, or petechiae, that are the physical evidence of ligature strangulation. He looks at her cheeks and inside her nose for more, takes a look inside her mouth and ears, then pulls the sheet back and examines the rest of her body—or the parts he can without removing her clothes.

  Making a circle with the flashlight, Lyons highlights a discoloration on her right arm—a small bruise in the bicep area.

  “Someone could have grabbed her hard there,” he says. “Looks pretty fresh.” He moves the flashlight down to her wrists.

  “No signs of self-mutilation. And her hands look OK.”

  Madden nods. “I’ll bag ‘em when you’re through.”

  They put paper bags on victims’ hands to preserve any trace evidence. Usually, but not always, if there was some sort of struggle, you could tell from the victim’s hands. If you were lucky, you’d find them clutching a hair or two. But the girl’s hands look clean; her nails appear to be in pretty good shape, though her nail polish, an opalescent color, is chipping in places. Later, in the crime lab, the coroner will scrape the underside of her nails for debris, then clip them and package each hand’s nails separately.

  Madden watches Lyons turn the girl on her side and take a cursory look at the back of her neck and arms, paying extra attention to the area where the bruise is. The skin is discolored almost all the way around the arm, though not quite. That’s the only thing that gives the appearance of a struggle—that, and the heel of her right foot, which is also bruised.

  “She might have kicked it back against the shower wall,” Lyons says, fishing a rectal thermometer out of his bag to take the body temperature and make a rough estimate of time of death. However, before he lowers the girl’s light blue, terry-cloth-style sweatpants, Madden says, “How ’bout we make sure there isn’t any trace evidence first? We’ve got the time of death pretty much nailed down anyway.”

  Lyons nods. “You got some reason to suspect foul play?”

  “Just being cautious, Greg. There are some extenuating circumstances.”

  Without elaborating, Madden turns away and looks out the window, which faces the front of the house. Outside, another squad car has pulled up and a few curious neighbors are loitering on the sidewalk in front of the residence. But Pastorini’s efforts to limit the spectacle—for the sake of both the family and their investigation—seem to be paying off. He’s told officers to stay off their radios and he used his cell phone to call in a minimum number of personnel. If this was a homicide, he might call in all four general crimes detectives and even the department’s two narcotics-enforcement detectives, who are primarily assigned to drug- and gang-related cases but are also trained to assist in homicide investigations. The narcotics sergeant might show up, and even the division commander. However, in a situation like this, where they’re looking to avoid any media attention, the fewer people traipsing around the premises the better. It also doesn’t hurt that Vintage Oaks is gated and can be easily sealed off.

  “Anybody interesting out there?” Lyons asks, making some notations in his notebook.

  Madden glances at his watch. “Not really. Ambulance won’t be here for another fifteen,” he says, and just then Vincent Lee comes out of the bathroom. He’s a tiny man, no more than five-foot-three, who has a crew-cut and a diamond stud in his left ear. He went to the same high school as Madden, Woodside—or Weedside, as locals sometimes call it, deferring to the nickname that stuck from the peak pot years of the 1970s. But Lee, who’s in his early thirties, had graduated twenty-five years after Madden.

  “I’m done in the bathroom, Hank,” he says. “You ready for me in here?”

  Madden nods. “We’ve got a couple of bruises. And since the body was moved, let’s get some shots with the belt next to the ligature marks on her neck. I want to make sure everything matches up. Oh, and give me a couple of Polaroids of the bruises. Close-ups, OK?”

  “If you don’t mind, I’m going to take a few shots as well,” Lyons says.

  With digital SLR cameras becoming affordable, it had become easier—and a lot cheaper—to document crime scenes. Everybody these days seemed to have a decent camera. Even Madden had one out in the car, a Canon, that he kept around for back-up.

  After Lee shoots the body, Madden tells him to shoot the rest of the room, starting with the desk, where the poem, along with the girl’s cell phone, is resting to th
e left of the computer’s keyboard. To describe the room as that of your typical suburban teen girl wouldn’t be a stretch, but on certain levels it feels more mature than that. Perhaps Madden’s getting that vibe because on one wall there’s a giant French movie poster with an almost life-size image of the actress Renée Zellweger in black boots and a mini-skirt. It’s a poster for the movie Bridget Jones’s Diary, which translates into French as Le Journal de Bridget Jones. Running down the left side of the print is a bulleted list of seven of Bridget’s do’s and don’ts from her diary, with the last item reading “J’arrête de faire des listes,” or “I will stop making lists,” as Vincent Lee, who did four years of French at Woodside High, informs him.

  Yes, there are some girlish items—a small collection of dolls and stuffed animals on a shelf, a giant stuffed Sulley from Monsters, Inc. in a corner, a couple of homemade collages with pictures of friends, a flowery bedspread, and a violet Chinchilla beanbag that goes well with the aqua- and purple-colored Sulley. But overall, the room is pretty neat and relatively uncluttered. Her books are stacked three rows high on a bookshelf along with a row of DVDs that appear to be in alphabetical order. Her desk, too, only has a few things on it: a flat-panel Apple iMac, printer, iPod, portable DVD player, small stack of CDs, and some framed photos.

  “Shame,” says Lee, who’s stopped taking pictures and is looking at one of the girl’s photo collages. “Attractive girl—and not a bad photographer.”

  Madden shoots him a look. He’s never comfortable talking about a victim’s looks, but especially when she’s lying dead in the room.

  “What?” Lee says defensively. “Am I wrong?” Then, turning to Lyons, who’s putting his camera away. “Greg? Am I?”

  “No,” Lyons says.

  He isn’t. The truth—or what Madden’s gut tells him is the truth—is that she’s a pretty girl but not a dangerous girl. Not a seductress. He’s seen a few of those in his time. Fourteen-, fifteen-, sixteen-year-old girls who’d sat there smiling back at him, knowing they held some power over boys but coveted men instead. They were adults in a children’s world—to a degree. Always to a degree. But Kristen Kroiter, judging from the pictures on the walls and on her desk, is—or rather, was—not one of these girls.

  “I tell ya, though,” Lyons says, coming up next to Madden, who’s standing at the desk, “she doesn’t seem like the type to off herself.”

  Madden picks up the cell phone now that it’s been photographed. “They don’t always,” he says as he toggles through the menu system until he hits on the call-history icon.

  “With the girls,” Lyons goes on, “it’s usually pills or wrists. They don’t hang themselves too often. Not their thing.”

  “I heard about one in the East Bay last year,” Lee says, in the middle of switching lenses. “A little older. Nineteen, I think.”

  “Well, maybe it’s getting more popular,” Lyons says. “She leave a note?”

  Madden is still staring at the phone’s screen. The girl appears to have made several calls that afternoon, though it looks to be seven calls to only two numbers, which could mean she didn’t get through every time. “Some sort of poem,” he says out of the side of his mouth, concentrating on correctly transcribing the numbers and the times they were called into his notebook. “‘Anthem for a Seventeen-Year-Old Girl’ is the title.”

  Lyons looks at the sheet of paper.

  “‘Anthems for a Seventeen-Year-Old Girl,’” he corrects him. “And it’s not a poem. It’s lyrics—to a song.”

  Madden stops writing and looks at him.

  “You know it?”

  “It’s from a few years ago. By a Canadian band. Broken Social Scene.”

  “They’re good,” Lee approves from across the room.

  “‘Now you’re all gone got your make-up on and you’re not coming back,” Lyons mutters, reading from the sheet. “‘Bleaching your teeth, smiling flash, talking trash, under your breath / Park that car, drop that phone, sleep on the floor, dream about me.’” He pauses briefly, then recites the handwritten words at the bottom: “‘I will not be a victim. I can’t. I’m sorry. Don’t hate me, but you should have listened. You all should have listened.’”

  “Mean anything to you?” Madden asks Lyons.

  The investigator shrugs. “The song? Just the general angst of being a teenager, I guess.”

  “How ’bout this?” Madden says, hitting the space bar on the computer, waking the screen up. He points to an icon of a CD on the display. Then he hits the eject button on the keyboard and the tray slides out from the front of the computer’s bulbous base. There’s a disc in the tray, a CD-R. On the disc, neatly handwritten in permanent black ink, in all caps, are the words, “KNIFE MUSIC II.”

  “Ring any bells for you?”

  Lyons stares at the disc, contemplating it. From directly behind them, Lee fires off a shot of the gold-colored Maxell CD-R. The burst of the flash appears to trigger one in Lyons’s head as well, for he says suddenly: “You know, this is probably way off, but that’s a term surgeons sometimes use to describe the music they play in the operating room.”

  “Surgeons?” Madden says, startled.

  “Yeah. Why? That mean something?”

  Madden looks at the numbers in his notebook. He puts the girl’s phone down on the desk and pulls his Motorola out of its belt holster and flips it open.

  “Hey, Donna,” he says when he gets the weekend dispatcher on the phone. “Hank Madden. Can you do me a favor and run a couple phone numbers? I’m not in my car.”

  “Gimme a minute, Hank,” she says. “Let me get my computer back on. I was just restarting it.”

  When she’s ready, he reads the second number, the one the girl dialed four times. A short silence on the line, then her voice comes back.

  “Belongs to one Carrie Pinklow.”

  He reads her the first number, the one the girl dialed three times, the last time around three hours ago, at 1:36 p.m.

  “That one’s T. Cogan.”

  “Is that a Mr. Cogan?” he asks.

  Another silence, this one shorter.

  “Actually, that’s a doctor, Hank. Dr. T. Cogan.”

  7/ SEAVER GOES THE DISTANCE

  Summer, 1973

  COGAN WAS NINE WHEN HE FIRST VISITED A HOSPITAL. HIS MOTHER had something wrong with her brain. She kept forgetting things, and no one could tell her why, so they took her to the University of Chicago Medical Center to see someone called a specialist. He remembered walking into the hospital and seeing people in white coats and his father telling him these people were going to try to make his mother better. That was his first impression of doctors, and his introduction to medicine.

  His mother died in 1983, when he was nineteen. But she’d been institutionalized in a Jewish nursing home for the previous six years. She died at sixty. Initially, she was very forgetful. She couldn’t remember, for instance, where she’d left things around the house. Or his father would take her shopping downtown, and he’d say, Phyllis, meet me in front of such and such store at five o’clock. But when he’d show up at five o’clock, she wouldn’t be there. And he’d end up looking for her everywhere. When he finally found her he’d say, “What the heck’s going on?” And she’d say, “I don’t know. I don’t remember a thing.” There was obviously something wrong. And later there were personality changes. Today, people recognize these as symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease, but back then no one really knew what was wrong.

  His brother, who was almost eleven years older, grew up in a more traditional setting. His father would come home around six after a hard day at work in the bakery and his wife would meet him with a prepared dinner and would wait on him and her boy. She waited on everybody. She saw that as the role she had to play. And in that generation that was the role you had to play. There wasn’t a lot of outward affection, hugging and kissing and so forth. And there wasn’t a lot of Ward Cleaver, Hello, Dear, and all that. But there was at least some semblance of a family with dinner
on the table.

  By the time Cogan was nine it was all gone. They took his mother away for good when he was eleven. A few years earlier, his older brother had gone to ’Nam. He was in the Marines. It made for a strange adolescence. His father worked long hours then went out at night sometimes, leaving him home alone. It was at night, after he finished his homework, that he played ball. He would stand outside in the driveway, pitching old tennis balls into a wooden box filled with Styrofoam in the back of the garage. The hole in the box was the exact height and size of the strike zone. For hours, he’d throw balls into the box. Once, he threw fifty straight strikes.

  “Who’s pitching tonight, Teddy?” one of the neighbors, a widower named Sid Feinberg, would always ask when he took his dog out for his nightly walk.

  “Seaver,” he said.

  “I thought he pitched Sunday.”

  “We’re going for the pennant. I had to send him on one day’s rest.”

  “Is that wise?”

  “Well, it’s the top of the seventh and he’s pitching a two-hitter with thirteen strikeouts.”

  “Pull him,” Feinberg said. “Pull him before it’s too late.”

  “No way. He’s going the distance.”

  Tom Seaver was his favorite pitcher. And Seaver always went the distance.

  “We’ll see,” Feinberg called out as his dog dragged him away. “I’ll be back for the ninth.”

  His mother’s illness had made him a pitcher. Had it made him a doctor, too? He often wondered about that. All those visits to the hospital. All those men in white coats. Surely there’d been a transference.

  In the beginning of the tenth grade, he met a girl, Melissa McCumber, at a high school science competition that was held at Northwestern University. She was tall, gawky, a year older than Cogan, and went to Frances Parker, a small private school that Cogan’s friends said was for “rich bitches.” And although Melissa McCumber was rich—or at least her stockbroker father was—she was not a bitch. In fact, she was one of the few truly nice girls Cogan had met.