This mess before I had been employed by the City of Wometzia for a full day.
Simpson seems the well-meaning type, but doesn’t quite have the competence to be all that helpful. I’m somehow certain that at some point in his life, he started a load of dishes for someone as a courtesy but used dish soap instead of detergent, leaving them with a kitchen full of suds rather than a clean sink and sparkling glassware.
The file swims back into view, images of Simpson’s dumpy mug retreating once more to the barren nether areas of my mind where they belong.
My trip to Albuquerque burns ever hotter on my to-do list, but for now, I must see the family.
Or such was the plan, but then Husk confirms that Officer Simpson went to break the news this morning, ignoring the protests of Officer Kent and common sense.
Detectives are typically the ones to break the news; at least in cases in which foul play is suspected. This offers the detectives an opportunity to gauge the reactions of the family (particularly the father and brothers), which is important because over half of murders are committed by someone the victim knew, and nearly ninety percent are committed by males.
Beyond that, timing can be a bitch with family questioning. By this time, the Koster residence is, no doubt, fit to be sponsored by Kleenex, and thus in no state for questioning.
Presented with this information, Albuquerque rises to the top priority on my list as the Koster Family Questioning takes a reluctant back seat.
I text Todd as I gather my things, letting him know that I’ll need the car.
He responds when I’m a minute from home on foot: “I figured. I filled her up after you left.” God I love him.
“God I love you.”
He replies: “Yeah, you do.” With a winking emoji. Then: “Love you, too.”
I get into the house as a pleasant eastward breeze picks up. It’s still strange to me how quiet the wind is here; no grass or leaves rustling with it, whispering of coming rain. No such rain is in the forecasts of these winds, at least not this morning or afternoon. The western sky carries only a couple of clouds, white and wispy.
The familiar wall of cold welcomes me, and I shut the door behind me quickly, lest the desert rob our home of its precious cool.
“Keys and lunch are on the counter,” Todd calls, the half-muffled voice of a face semi-buried in pillow.
“Thanks! I’ll see ya tonight!”
Six
The drive to Albuquerque is smooth, almost charmed, even. The traffic lights on the road to the interstate, few though they are, are all green as I pass, and no cars obstruct my side of the two-lane road. Before pulling out of the driveway, I had situated my lunch in the cup holders in such a way that allows me to eat while minimizing the time that my eyes leave the road. Todd must have stopped at Franco’s for gas, one of the town’s two stations, which is part Mexican restaurant with a formidable menu for those with formidable stomachs.
Ten out of ten times (a number we may have hit, actually), it’s worth it. My stomach is quite strong indeed. Todd is a marvelous cook, but in the undying heat, the idea of bustling about in a hot kitchen is borderline nauseating, so as an alternative, we patronize the local taqueria, dining on delicious dishes and taking advantage of free refills on their house drink, a very citric drink with just the right amount of sugar. Todd says that there’s too little, but he’s wrong.
The cemetery, as I anticipated, is crawling with press, wanting the Exclusive Story on the Hollow Man (the name I thought of during the drive), but none being permitted past the notorious yellow tape. Eager photographers bend and stretch to try to snap a photo from the best angle, but the officers who set the tape did so strategically, and I can’t imagine these reporters getting anything good from outside of it.
I flash my badge as I approach, and pause to allow the uniforms holding the line a good, long look at me and my badge. One of them is a redhead, hair cut nearly to his scalp. He’s stocky in the Midwest ‘corn-fed’ tradition and has quite the case of Resting Bitch Face.
The other is small but looks eager to piss someone off, like someone wished a Chihuahua into human form and slapped a badge on it. He has short, black curls that surely tickle his ears.
To my surprise, it’s Bitch Face who speaks. “Who’re you?” His voice is deep and bold, matching his stature, but I sense that it’s at least partly forced.
“Detective Thorn,” I say. “I’m here from Wometzia.” I hold eye contact with him, his eyes cold and gray, until he looks away. I passed the test.
For good reason, law enforcement is wary and uneasy with transplants, similar to how a body might reject an artificial organ and begin attacking it. I need my insertion into law enforcement here to be seamless, both in Wometzia and with surrounding departments. It’s a delicate balance between not allowing myself to be pushed around while simultaneously demonstrating that I’m a team player. To that end, I extend a hand for him to shake. A moment’s hesitation precedes his doing so. It’s a rough, man-to-man handshake that might shake the rest of my body, if I let it.
“I’m Officer Lund. This is Officer Tipp.”
I offer my hand to Tipp and he shakes it, an electric jolt of a shake redolent of those gag had zappers that were cool before I was born. He must be a greenhorn on his first murder scene. That or he just downed thirty-two ounces of black coffee.
“Nice to meetcha,” he says. His voice gives me the urge to blow my nose, even though it’s clear.
Officer Lund lifts the tape and I duck underneath it, aiming for the grouping of people flitting about in a concentric mess like ants first discovering a newly fallen cracker.
Kent and Simpson are already in there, along with a handful of cops from Albuquerque PD as well as New Mexico State Police. They notice me at the same time and turn toward me, inviting me via body language to come and look important with them. I opt instead to look around for a bit.
Totem Hill Cemetery sits in the south-central chunk of Albuquerque, snuggled up against the arid desert to the west. It’s less a graveyard and more a gravemound, a hill of dirt skewered by an army of white wooden crosses, a pin cushion of dry earth. Most graves are of this variety; modest, often adorned with a candle or a rosary. The paint is peeling from many of them, and some crosses have more wood exposed than not. Of the tombstones that are indeed stone, few look newer than fifty or sixty years old. Here and there, I see one tagged with faded, illegible graffiti. A statue of the Virgin Mary stands tall, and seems to have aged similarly to how a human of flesh might: eroded cheeks, sunken eyes, and withered frame. Many depictions of her carry a degree of sadness, but the look of this particular statue is one of hopeless exhaustion, a mother tired of sending her children off into a world that demands they suffer until they pass.
The headstones that have not been marked by graffiti have been marked by time, instead, stone crumbling, engravings far enough gone that they’re now all but gone. Thematically appropriate to New Mexico, cracks resembling lightning split stones here and there, some of them badly enough that a strong kick would erase them from their plots.
The one stone that has been touched neither by spray paint nor by the crumbling claws of time bears the name ‘Martin Pacheco.’ This is where Firenze’s clock ticked its last tick.
The dirt where the body had lain looks like it had been assaulted by a trowel-wielding army. Were we in a more accommodating climate, the upturned earth might be dark, ready to play host to daisies. As it is, the disturbed soil looks only that: disturbed.
The pleasant breeze from the west plays up again. My hair ruffles as the warm wind caresses me like a succubus tempting away the virtue of a broken man. Fortunately, I’m fresh out of virtue.
To the right, there’s another area of churned dirt, most likely the resting place of Firenze’s entrails for a short while. I walk to the place where the photo would have been taken last week, but it’s tricky, as the photo had been flipped. In silence, I stand at that spot until the combined pressure of Kent�
�s and Simpson’s gazes at last mounts the threshold of my tolerance and I join them at the new, slightly more relevant crime scene.
Sacrifice.
Anthony Koster lies before us. As far as I can tell, everything Husk said is accurate: The cadaver is identical to the photos of Firenze Pacheco. The tools glint in the light, the sun bearing down from overhead.
As before, the killer was generous with fingerprints. Even kneeling down and looking at the weapons (“Don’t you touch my fuckin’ crime scene,” says someone who must have some kind of authority), I can see the swirly, layered patterns of a fingerprint pressed into the crusted layer of blood on the handle of a tool that looks fit to remove organs without permission.
“Oi!” I call to the one who reprimanded me.
He walks over to me in long, lanky strides that make me think of the classic Sasquatch photograph. “What?” Clearly I’m disturbing his morning.
“How long ago were prints taken to the lab?”
He glances at a cheap-looking digital watch. “An hour and fifty-one minutes ago.”
I check my phone. It’s five after ten. “So, eight-fourteen? Fifteen minutes to get back to the lab, an hour or so to get them scanned and edited, two hours to query the database, and maybe half an hour to narrow it down, then? So results may be ready by an hour and fifty-four minutes from now?”
My spiel caught him off-guard. He suppresses the impressed face that escapes and replaces it with one of annoyed contempt. “I suppose maybe sometime around then. But the whole process is unpredictable, so I wouldn’t count on it too much.”
I find his name on a laminate dangling around his neck. “Noted. Thanks, Matchie,” I say. In response, he covers his laminate with his lab coat and stalks away, muttering something about respect, studded with colorful profanity.
I rejoin Kent, but Simpson is off somewhere flirting with a forensic tech who’s way out of his league. A few feet from the body, the boy’s insides are piled in the purposeful way that I saw in the photos. In person, they sink to the depths of indignity, like a huge snake beaten into submission and turned inside out by its assailant.
I try but fail to avert my gaze from the boy’s face.
He looks like his sister. I feel my heart rate begin to rise and tears well up in my eyes. A lump in my throat forms then dissolves, and my other bodily reactions regulate themselves as well. At a distance that will probably upset Matchie, I kneel and inspect the body. He looks dead, of course, but worse than empty, like instead of his body becoming a non-sentient husk slated to wither over time, his spirit was shunted out of his body by a bigger, meaner spirit with the sole intent of desecration.
Simpson and Kent have their hands on their hips. For Kent, it looks as though she belongs, and is gauging the scene from all possible angles, as any good cop does. Simpson, on the other hand, looks lost, like he’s waiting for someone to tell him what to do. I wonder whether it would be worth telling him to get his shit together and pretend he knows what he’s doing.
It probably isn’t, I decide.
I walk up to Lund and Tipp, who are holding their vigil with a dignity much more born of Lund than of his goofy-looking counterpart.
“What did the locals say? No one saw anything?”
“Pretty much,” says Lund. Tipp starts to talk, but Lund allows him no room. “I mean, you saw the road leading here. Only a few houses, most of them old, battered things. Their inhabitants practically live in their TVs, Korean soap operas and shit like that.”
I nod. “Did we get to talk to someone from every household?”
“All but two. One of them is vacant, and its next-door neighbor is a recluse, and if I may say so, maybe a color or two short of a crayon box.”
“He wouldn’t talk to anyone?”
“Wouldn’t even open the door. His neighbors say he’s a bit of a conspiracy nut, the foil hat kind.”
“We got a name?”
“Melvin Towning. Although his neighbors refer to him, affectionately I’m sure, as ‘Crazy Town.’”
Right. Probably with as much affection as one scrapes grime off of dirty windows.
In my experience, my best tool for communicating with conspiracy theorists enough to earn their trust is a simple and effective, yet manipulative one: us vs. them. If I can establish a ‘Them’ and subsequently convince him that I’m not one of Them, I can move forward. I must be careful in my endeavor, though, lest my true intentions become suspected. A character along the lines of Mr. Melvin Towning is not only hesitant to trust, but also lightning fast to suspect and allege.
“Where does he live?”
“Just up the road you came by, second or third house on the left. The yard’s a mess, you can’t miss it.”
I thank Officers Lund and (with reluctance) Tipp, and walk along the dirt road, toward the west. With any luck, I’ll be finishing my tour of Crazy Town around when the results of the fingerprints are coming in.
A common misunderstanding about ‘running prints’ is that we can’t just peel something off the handle of a knife, shove it into a computer’s scanner, and watch as the monitor regurgitates pictures of the bad guy. No, indeed, in that regard (among others), Hollywood has glamorized detective work. In reality, most of what we are able to pull from crime scenes are partials. Often, this is enough to narrow it down, at best. After we submit the print, an editor then alters the image digitally to remove any debris, fibers, dirt, dust, etc. that may have hitched a ride to the lab. Once the image is scanned, edited and pretty, the computer will scan the print against all of the samples on file for the particular database being searched; sometimes, triple or even double-digits, but often in the millions, as with the FBI database. Because of these numbers, the inquiry can take a couple of hours. Then the display will produce prints most likely to match, and a technician with some six months of specialized training analyzes the results carefully to determine which, if any, is a true match. Being that we got a full, ten-digit set, the process takes longer; each print needs to be processed. But that also means that the results will yield more accuracy.
It’s a lengthy process, and the detectives who fail to respect that fact are the Ds most likely to lose the respect and patience of their forensics techs.
Melvin Towning’s house is indeed unkempt. In the desert, that doesn’t mean too much; there is no grass growing wildly out of control, and there are no unruly hedges in desperate need of a trim. Instead, there’s litter dotting his modest front yard, the type of trash easily picked up and tossed about by the wind: plastic grocery bags, greasy fast food packages, bits of cheap tarp. A pile of newspapers dating back to July thirteenth sits like kindling waiting to start a fire, individually wrapped in pink cellophane. One was naked, its sheath having found a home in the crease where his chain link fence meets the hard ground. In the backyard, visible from the front, a growing mound of tumbleweed presses against the corner of the property’s fencing, surely a fire hazard.
The house is in a state of disarray almost on par with the yard, save for the intrusions of foreign trash. No, it’s old and decrepit all on its own. The paint, formerly some engaging hue of deep blue, now is less so than that of the morning sky. Most of it has peeled away, leaving wooden panels exposed to weather and pest alike, evident in cracks, holes, and entire portions that have been eaten away, though by weather or by termite, I cannot discern.
As though to tell me exactly how unwelcome my solicitation is, a used condom sits at the top of the stairs. I wonder whether a malicious neighbor left it there or it found its way there some other way.
I knock on Towning’s door and wait. The wind settles, allowing me to hear the small goings-on around me, but the house seems to hold its own breath to match it. For a moment, I consider that maybe I mistook the vacant house for Crazy Town’s, but then the blinds catch my eye in their deep, swaying motion in a window to my right. And though their swinging slows, then stops, I’m certain I’m being watched, probably through the peephole in the rotting door.
“Mr. Towning, please open the door. You don’t have to let me inside. I just have a couple of questions.”
“I think I’m good, thanks!” calls a muffled voice from within. This surprises me; I anticipated that he would ignore me and pretend he isn’t home.
“Okay, well, I’ll just wait out here until you’re ready to chat. Some water sure would be nice, though.” I normally reserve this technique for women, but in this case, it may prove useful. In asking for an accommodation, I offer the witness a sense of power over the situation, a modicum of control. In allowing him to choose whether or not to let me in, and when he wants to come and talk, I’ve allowed him three, a number I would hardly consider granting a non-victim witness in most cases.
I’m not sure what possesses me here and now to be so lenient, in fact. A part of my mind plays host to an incessant confidence that Melvin will have some useful information. In some way, it’s because what I know of him reminds me of my old downstairs neighbor, before I moved in with Todd, in Riverdell. Her name is Jenny Lewis, and she had some neurotic quirks that, while unlike Towning in execution, may prove similar in nature. One such quirk was a to-the-minute journal of my (and others’) departures and arrivals. This was convenient for me, as I could stealth off and away without her noticing, leaving her to, in essence, write out an alibi for me, customized by me.
I sit down on the steps (with a not-insignificant amount of reluctance) as far as possible form the discarded rubber. I find it helpful to pretend that it’s a shed snake skin.
The desert sun, in its slow, purposeful manner, takes position overhead and begins its arcing descent toward Arizona, California, and the Pacific. The wind from before rises and falls with an uncanny regularity, like the barren flatlands of New Mexico are alive and breathing. I listen closely for movement within the house, but hear few: a bump here and there, and even then, hardly enough to attribute to Mr. Towning. The whispers playing across the dirt and dust are different from Riverdell. Less nuanced, and not buried under layers of shadow. The desert is just more naked.
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