Trail of Echoes

by Rachel Howzell Hall

  8

  Happy endings. That myth stayed with me as I fought my way through “LA in the Rain” traffic. Accidents—cars against cars, cars against bikes, cars wrapped around light poles—peppered every third mile, and so it took an hour to reach Syeeda’s Miracle Mile neighborhood. Since the divorce, I had squatted here, walking distance from the Farmers’ Market, the Grove outdoor mall, and CBS Studios. I finally pulled into the driveway next to Lena’s Range Rover and climbed out of my SUV. Rain fell like liquid silk on my face.

  Lena snored in the armchair as Syeeda, on the couch, played Mass Effect on the Xbox. Crust from brie-filled sourdough bread sat beside wineglasses stained from Cabernet Sauvignon.

  “Looks like you and your herd of goats just crawled from beneath a bridge,” Syeeda said, pausing the game. “Either you and Sam hit it in the backseat of the Porsche, or…”

  I clomped over to the love seat and collapsed into the deep cushions. “I feel like sunshine.” I reached for the wine bottle, then took a long pull. I plucked Midnight Rendezvous, my latest bad romance, from between two sofa cushions. On the book’s cover, a woman with long blond tresses rode a dark-haired centaur wielding his giant … wand.

  “I can’t believe you like that shit,” Syeeda said.

  I found a page, then read, “Daemon sought to quench their loving lusts on that eve, nay that dark, dark night. It was clear that she was just a virgin, a perfect goddess to carry his centaur seed.” I whooped and kicked my feet in the air. “Centaur seed! C’mon, that’s awesome.”

  Lena groaned, then turned over in the chair. “Must you cackle so loudly as I lay here, passed out?” Mascara and eyeliner ringed her eyes, but the diamonds in her ears gleamed as bright as Venus.

  “So, what did I miss?” I asked, shoving the book back between the cushions.

  Syeeda turned her attention back to the game. “Fitz or Jake? Huck be crazy. Melly be schemin’. And Olivia wore this bad-ass coat I want to buy, like, yesterday. And…” She paused the game again, and this time, she placed the controller on the cushion beside her.

  “Uh oh,” I said. “Gimme a minute.” In one last pull, I finished the wine. “Tell me.”

  “Who gave him my address?” Syeeda asked, eyebrow cocked.

  I frowned. “He showed up here?”

  “Yep,” Lena said. “He didn’t believe us when we told him you weren’t here.”

  My face burned. “I’m sorry, Sy. Maybe Mom gave him … or Greg … Shit.”

  Syeeda stared at me, then said, “You need to figure this Victor Starr thing out.”

  I sighed, then stood. “I will. As that great philosopher Dan Quayle once said, ‘The future will be a better tomorrow.’ Tonight, though, I need to take a long, hot shower. Fall into bed and close my eyes for three hours. And then wake up and see a man about a dead body.”

  Thursday, March 20

  9

  A pile of sixty missing children reports sat on the wobbly desk near Brooks’s file cabinets located in the bowels of the Los Angeles County Coroner’s office. At almost seven in the morning, I plopped into the raggedy chair and plucked a report from the pile.

  Quida Chisholm, born February 7, 2003 … I, the mother, returned from work on March 16 to find Quida missing … eighth grade home school … Quida was the same race as my Jane Doe. Probably around the same age, too. But Quida was shorter, had darker hair, and was about fifteen pounds heavier.

  Quida’s report went into the no pile.

  The next five reports involved three boys and two Hispanic girls.

  No, five times.

  A yes pile did not exist yet, but there were six reports in maybe.

  I stood from the workstation and stretched until every bone in my body clicked. The asteroid-colored rash on my chest still burned, but a soft LAPD T-shirt and hydrocortisone cream had contained the blaze. I grabbed the reports and lumbered down the hallway to the autopsy suites. Someone had microwaved oatmeal for breakfast—the scent of warm brown sugar wafted along the corridors, only to be lost in the clinical stink of formaldehyde and death. The blisters on my feet still made me wince, but the Nikes’ memory foam treated them better than yesterday’s fancy boots. Little acts of kindness.

  I ducked into the dimly lit antechamber. On the other side of the double doors, Brooks was scrubbing his hands in the stainless steel sink. Two of the exam tables hosted bodies covered in white sheets, with one of those patients so obese that parts of it slopped off the table. Brooks’s assistant, Big Reuben, a giant in cornrows, was removing a soup ladle from one of the cabinet drawers. No rush. Just another day at LACCO.

  This early in the morning, I thought that I would’ve been sleeping off too many glasses of red wine. Waking up next to Sam Seward in his bed. My hand drifting down his happy trail to claim his early-morning gift to me. Thought I’d be foggy-headed, deliciously sore, bursting with a story to tell Lena and Syeeda. Giggling, gasping, and shrieking. Being a Girl.

  I was foggy-headed—no restful sleep.

  And I was sore, though not deliciously, from tromping in mud, falling in mud, and bending over to examine mud.

  I certainly had a story to tell—but not the one I wanted to share over Moscow mules and jalapeño poppers.

  My cell phone vibrated in my bag.

  A text from Sam.

  Had a great time. Had hoped to still be talking about GOT. But death happens. What if we had dinner @ home tonight?

  My fingers hovered over the phone’s keyboard as stainless steel appliances of death clinked around me and called me to work. I typed my response: I cram to understand you, Sam.

  A few seconds passed before he texted back. What’s confusing?

  You still hanging around.

  I’m like a cat. Feed me once …

  Shame on you, I typed.

  Feed me twice …

  Magic?

  U not skeered, is you?

  I chuckled. Hell yeah, I’m skeered.

  A pause, then: Don’t be.

  The saw’s high-pitched whir pulled me out of Sweet Valley High and back into the autopsy antechamber. Sober now, I tapped SETTINGS on my phone and assigned the “Star Wars Theme Music” ringtone to Sam’s number. Then, I saw that two voice-mail messages had been left as I’d arrived at the coroner’s office. The first message had been my ex, Greg. Something-something … condo selling … real estate … something.

  I deleted the message, then listened to the message from my mother.

  Georgia Starr’s voice, bourbon and pecans, drifted through the speaker. “You’re still avoiding him. And so he keeps calling me to make you talk to him. I remind him that although he left you when you were eight, you continued to grow, and today you are an adult.”

  “What the hell, Mom?” I muttered.

  Why hadn’t she blocked Victor Starr’s calls? Why did she keep talking to him? I’d told her a zillion times: you don’t have to pick up the phone.

  “So I don’t know what to say,” she continued. “And honestly, I don’t even know why I’m calling you. Because I understand. This is your relationship, not mine. But whatever you do, do it. And soon. Please. I love you, okay? Call me later.”

  Your relationship.

  A “relationship” meant that the involvement was two-way, mutual, existing.

  I had a relationship with Greg. Antagonistic. Nostalgic.

  I had a relationship with Sam. Fledgling. Tentative. Exciting.

  What I had with Victor Starr was neither tentative nor antagonistic. Since our so-called reunion in December, he kept trying to see me. I had not returned his phone calls. And when he returned to knock on the front door of the condo, I hadn’t answered. In the last twenty-four hours, he had invaded the station and Syeeda’s front porch.

  All because he wanted to talk to me.

  So? We all wanted something.

  And he didn’t deserve to get what he wanted. At least not from me.

  He had written me three letters and had mailed them to the station. Sorry
… please … let me explain … I’m guessing here since I never opened those letters and chose instead to shove them into the mail room’s shred bin. No more stupid Jedi mind tricks with Victor Starr. I wanted no apology. I wanted no explanation. I wanted nothing from him—except to be left alone. And up until last December, he had been very good at doing that, leaving me alone.

  A Jedi, he was.

  10

  God bless the dead. Not all of them are mourned.

  Almost five thousand unclaimed bodies were listed on the Los Angeles County Coroner’s books. More than 750 would be cremated and their remains stored in small black boxes. They would remain at the county’s crematorium for two years, waiting for family members to step forward and claim them. Alas, not enough families did.

  “Ready?” Brooks asked me.

  Now covered in a smock and a face mask, I stood across from the medical examiner. Jane Doe lay between us. “I’m ready.” A small lie: what regular person could properly prepare herself for bone cracking and blood scooping? I wasn’t a regular person—this was my way of life—and yet that “about to faint” feeling stayed with me.

  I should’ve been accustomed to the scalpel’s glint and the saw’s whir, Brooks’s muffled breathing, and Big Reuben’s dead-eyed gaze. I should’ve especially been accustomed to the ordered chaos of a dead body. Most times, I cracked jokes (a monster and a zombie walk into a mortuary) and pried into county drama (who was caught where doing what to dead Mrs. Feingold?). Not this morning, though.

  “Detective Norton,” Brooks said.

  I jerked out of my fugue—both Brooks and Big Reuben were staring at me. “I was just…”

  Brooks’s eyes softened as he gazed at the girl. “It would be a wonderful thing if we could ID her today. Don’t want to see her unclaimed.” He sighed, then said, “Here we go.”

  He then pressed a foot pedal and the overhead microphone clicked. “Thursday, March twenty, seven fifteen A.M.” He stared at the scale’s blinking numbers. “She’s … 45.3 kilograms.”

  One hundred pounds.

  “And 154.9 centimeters.”

  Five feet, one inch.

  Her face, legs, and abdomen had swollen with gasses. Her skin was mottled and black in some places, green and blistery in others.

  Brooks peered into the girl’s eyes. “Pupils are fully dilated. Eyes are hazel or green.” He stepped on the pedal to turn off the mic. “Really, Lou: there should be a lot of bug activity right now. Blowflies and houseflies in every opening of her body and…” He sniffed, cocked his head, then sniffed again.

  I chuckled. “You smell something?”

  “Funny. Not sure.” He clicked on the mic. “No bruising around the neck…”

  A weird-colored fluid—black, emerald, crimson, peach—sluiced down the side canals of the exam table.

  I swayed a bit, then squeezed shut my eyes. Once the wooziness passed, I glanced at the digital clock above the entryway. Almost seven thirty.

  “Birthmark,” Brooks said, “on her right hip, two and a half centimeters. And bruises on her hips and thighs.” He counted five bruises on her left calf alone, then measured each. He clicked on the penlight clamped to his face mask, then bent closer to peer at something. “Two injection marks on her left thigh.”

  My eyes roamed her body, stopping at the weird coloring. Differing lividity. Why had he moved her so much?

  Brooks walked to the other side of the table. “One injection mark on her right thigh.” He pressed the pedal, then grunted.

  “Maybe she was diabetic,” I offered.

  He grunted again, then pressed the pedal, directing his attention to the girl’s discolored feet. “Significant bruising on the top and bottom of the patient’s left foot. The discoloration suggests a Lisfranc injury and occurred while the patient was alive. X-ray will confirm.”

  The girl’s right hand was curled into a fist.

  “Now examining the patient’s closed right hand.” He pried open her fingers.

  She held a dull white object the size of a Jelly Belly and flecked with brown grit.

  Brooks squinted at whatever it was. “The patient is holding a tooth in her right hand.”

  Before I could ask a follow-up question—whose tooth, her tooth, which tooth, why a tooth?—I blurted, “What color were her eyes?”

  Brooks clicked off the mic and snapped, “What?”

  “Her eyes.”

  “I’m looking at her feet right now, Detective.”

  “What color?”

  “Green or hazel.”

  “Wait. Birthmark. I read that—”

  “Are you gonna let me—?”

  I stepped over to the counter and grabbed the maybe pile of missing persons reports. Holding my breath, I flipped through each document. Not her … Not her … Her!

  The color photo was one of those glamour shots taken at the mall. This girl had green eyes, a wide nose, and cashew-colored skin. She wore lots of fuchsia eye shadow and coats of purple lipstick. If you wiped away the paint that had tramped her up to look twenty-seven years old, she’d be the girl now lying on Brooks’s table.

  “Thirteen-year-old Chanita Lords,” I said. “Missing since Friday, March fourteen.”

  Brooks sighed, and his shoulders slumped with relief.

  “At least now she has a name,” I said, my gaze still on the photograph.

  “Five days have passed since Friday,” Brooks said, nodding. “He kept her alive for at least two of those days.” He looked down at Chanita Lords. “At least that’s what her body’s telling me.”

  “Let’s talk about the tooth,” I said.

  He opened Chanita’s mouth, then shone light into the darkness. “Probably hers—there’s an empty space where it would be. Can’t tell when it was removed, though. More tests needed.”

  “Why pull it out?” I asked. “Why let her keep it?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “Strange.”

  “Let’s do internal,” he said.

  “Before you do,” I said, “can you tell me what killed her?”

  He shook his head. “Not right now.”

  “And latent prints on her body?”

  “Once they send over a tech, we’ll look.”

  “Mind if I scoot, then?” I backed away from the table, not strong enough this morning to endure heart, kidneys, and guts in a scale. “I’d like to confirm with the family now that we know.”

  He waved me away. “I’ll try to get all the tests pushed through as quickly as I can.”

  Dressed now in a respectable light-gray pantsuit and loafers, I trudged back out to the parking lot bustling with cars beneath stormy gray skies. As I neared the Crown Vic, I noticed a small white object sitting on its roof.

  It had been carved out of marble. A woman—a goddess, maybe—held the head of a bearded man in one hand and a knife in the other.

  Hunh. A tchotchke you’d buy in a souvenir store near the Colosseum in Athens.

  I glanced around the parking lot: no one was looking in my direction. Not the trio of secretaries in panty hose and Easy Spirits and not the sheriff’s deputy hoisting a travel mug and a lunch cooler. I squinted at the figurine for a moment more, plucked it from the roof, and shoved it into my coat pocket.

  Not every day you found a goddess on the roof of your car.

  I slid behind the steering wheel. “Now, where am I going?” I peered at Chanita Lords’s missing person report again and found the girl’s address. “Crap.”

  6873 Hillcrest Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90008.

  Today would be a long, long day.

  11

  A little after nine o’clock, I parked in front of the wrought-iron security gate that “protected” Chanita Lords’s apartment complex from the terror lurking on the streets. The gate sat wide open—terror would have no problem gaining entry. Barefoot toddlers wearing soggy diapers and clutching baby bottles filled with red punch zigzagged from apartment to apartment, rambling close to stairways and trash chute
s.

  Next door, the two palm trees that had flanked the entrance to my childhood home still stood, but wind, fire, and disease had lopped off the top of the right palm, and BPS in red spray paint and bullet holes of varying calibers had nearly destroyed the trunk of the left tree.

  Dark clouds gathered in the sky above. Because, of course.

  “Home sweet hell,” I muttered, shouldering my bag.

  Back in 1960s Los Angeles, the community of apartment buildings located between Hillcrest Avenue and La Brea Avenue earned the nickname the Jungle because of the surrounding lush green: palm and banana trees and hillsides covered in wildflowers and wild mustard. Many apartment units were larger than some single-family homes, and the units’ swimming pools made having to use laundry rooms doable.

  “My dad’s old Ford Maverick used to wheeze up this hill,” I told Colin over the Motorola. “Boys in the yellow apartment building over there, the one with the couch on the lawn? They used to throw bottles at Tori and her friend Golden because they wouldn’t stop to talk. And we used to chase monarch butterflies in the park around the corner.” I sighed. “Once upon a time, the Jungle used to be cool.”

  “So what happened?” Colin asked as he tried to park his Cavalier a few feet from my old apartment building.

  “The Riots,” I said as my fingers brushed against the marble figurine in my coat pocket. “Burn, baby, burn. Terrorists in Dickies. PCP. Guns…”

  “And now look at you: the Man.”

  I frowned as he pulled the car in and pulled the car out again. “You park like a ninety-year-old. It’s gonna be lunchtime by the time you—”

  “It’s a weird space.”

  “Yeah, it’s one of those parallel spaces the size of a car.”

  Finally, Colin parked, then climbed out of the Cavalier. His gray wool suit looked a little baggy on him—sick-skinny. As he made his way to my car with his binder, he tightened his gray striped tie, then blew his nose into a tissue.

  “I missed you,” I said.

  “Whatever, Lou.”

  “No, seriously. I had to do all the reports and shit. I hate that stuff and you do it so well. So yes: I missed you.”