City of Sand

by Robert Kroese

  Benjamin found a number for Chris Sandford in a phone book in a booth outside the restaurant, and gave it a call with his cell phone. To his surprise, a man answered after only two rings.

  “Hello?” said the voice.

  “Chris Sandford?”

  “Yeah. Are you a reporter?”

  “No, I—”

  “A cop?”

  “My name is Benjamin Stone. I’m Jessica’s father.”

  “Oh,” said the voice. “What do you want?”

  “I’m trying to find my daughter. I was hoping to ask you a few questions.”

  “I don’t know where Jessica is. She broke up with me three weeks ago.”

  “I know. You might still have some information that will be useful in finding her.”

  “I already told the police everything.”

  “I’m sure you did. I’m making sure the police didn’t miss anything. Are you home right now?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Would it be okay for me to come over for a few minutes?”

  “I guess.”

  Benjamin got the address and drove to Sandford’s apartment, a run-down building on the west side of town. After several knocks, a young blond man came to the door. He was lean and tall; Benjamin supposed he was good looking in a lanky sort of way. Was that what had attracted Jessica to him? It certainly wasn’t his personality. Lentz had described Jessica’s boyfriend as a “sad sack,” and Benjamin would be hard-pressed to think of a better description.

  Sandford invited Benjamin into his dimly lit and unkempt apartment, and they sat on lumpy furniture in Sandford’s small living room. Over the next hour, Benjamin questioned Sandford regarding everything he knew about Jessica, but learned very little. It was clear that Sandford still believed himself to be in love with Jessica, but it was a sort of love that made Benjamin think of the way a damp dishcloth sticks to a countertop. It was a vague, desperate kind of love that was more about Sandford’s own inadequacy than anything to do specifically with Jessica. Benjamin still couldn’t understand what Jessica had ever seen in Chris Sandford, but he certainly respected her decision to dump him.

  According to Sandford, Jessica had broken up with him two weeks before she disappeared, and he hadn’t seen her since she’d left him blubbering in a booth at Chevy’s. Contrary to what Cameron Payne told him, Sandford seemed to believe that their breakup had something to do with her relationship with Payne.

  “He used to call her late at night,” Sandford told him. “She’d sneak off to talk to him.”

  “About what?” asked Benjamin.

  “I don’t know. She wouldn’t tell me.”

  “How often did this happen?”

  “Maybe a few times a week.”

  “You think they were romantically involved?”

  “I don’t know. She said they weren’t, but why else would he call her at eleven o’clock at night? She was a web designer. That’s not the kind of job where you get late night calls from your boss.”

  “I understand that you met Cameron Payne at a party. Did he make advances toward Jessica?”

  “Not that I saw.”

  “Did she seem interested in him?”

  “Everybody’s interested in Cameron Payne.”

  “I mean romantically.”

  Sandford shrugged.

  “Did either of them ever do anything to make you think they were romantically involved?”

  “Besides the phone calls?”

  “Yes.”

  “I guess not.”

  “Was the tone of the calls intimate?”

  “Intimate?”

  “Romantic. Did it seem like she was giddy to hear from him?”

  “I wouldn’t say giddy.”

  “What would you say?”

  “I don’t know. Secretive. Like they were planning something.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Benjamin tried for another ten minutes, but that was the extent of the useful information provided by Chris Sandford. Either he was extremely proficient at hiding information, or he was simply too self-absorbed and depressed to see much outside of his own lonely existence. Benjamin could see why Detective Lentz didn’t think Sandford was a promising suspect.

  Benjamin thanked Sandford for his help and left. Walking out of the apartment building, he was for once relieved to find himself assaulted by the California sunshine. Chris Sandford’s apartment was like a shrine to hopelessness, and some of it clung to Benjamin even after he left. He imagined it boiling away in the relentless glare.

  He returned to the library to continue his research on XKredits, but found little of interest. Most of the articles seemed more interested in Cameron Payne as a person than in XKredits itself, and those that covered the company did little more than rehash Payne’s marketing spiel. The most recent issue of a magazine called Red Herring had an article headlined “Can Cameron Payne change the future of money?”, but offered little in the way of a definitive answer. It described Payne’s plans as “ambitious” and even “audacious,” and noted that there were two possibilities for XKredits.com: either it would succeed on a massive scale or it would collapse under the weight of its ambitions. There was no chance of a moderate success, according to the author. If XKredits didn’t become a sort of de facto standard for micropayments on the web, it was going to fold. And its investors would either become very wealthy or lose everything.

  The initial public offering was set for this Tuesday, less than a week away. That would mean a huge influx of cash for Cameron Payne’s operation. Would it be enough for XKredits to achieve market dominance? In the words of the Red Herring writer, it was “anybody’s guess.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Benjamin muttered. The standards for tech journalism were evidently somewhat lower than for detective work. Benjamin could only imagine the shit storm that would have ensued if he’d ever used the phrase “it’s anybody’s guess” to answer a reporter’s question about a murder investigation. On the other hand, wasn’t that essentially what Detective Lentz had told him? No suspects, no leads.

  What happened to my daughter, Detective Lentz?

  Well, Mr. Stone, it’s anybody’s guess.

  Benjamin’s stomach growled and he looked at his watch. It was nearly six pm.

  He got up and drove the Buick to a place called Andalé Burrito. Sitting alone in a booth eating a chicken burrito and sipping a Diet Coke, he found himself wondering how things had gone so wrong with Jessica. The two of them had always butted heads, and things had only gotten worse after Katherine died. Or maybe their relationship had deteriorated even before that; Benjamin couldn’t pinpoint the moment he lost her. He hadn’t had much time or energy to give Jessica during Katherine’s seemingly endless chemo treatments, and then there had been the gray haze of her hospice stay, during which Benjamin wore a plastic smile and drank himself to sleep at night. He had gotten the drinking under control eventually—about six weeks after the funeral—but by then Jessica had left for college. He’d tried to reconnect with her, give her some guidance, but it came across as an attempt to control her. He didn’t think that art classes were a good investment. Evidently he was wrong. It had been her facility with graphic design that had landed Jessica her first real job, at Glazier Semiconductor, and got her in on the ground floor of XKredits.com. And if XKredits.com took off the way Cameron Payne expected, she’d do very well indeed. He’d read that XKredits.com, like most Silicon Valley startups, enticed employees with generous stock options—options that would suddenly become very valuable once the company went public.

  Benjamin finished his burrito and drove back to the Sandman Inn. He tried calling Valerie Rocha again, but still there was no answer. He left another message.

  Benjamin sat on the bed and rubbed his temples with his fingertips. He’d taken several more ibuprofen, but his head still hurt and he felt extraordinarily tired. Not wanting to wake up at four am, he managed to keep his eyes open long enough to watch the first
half of Chinatown on cable. The Chinese gardener was explaining to Jake Gittes why maintaining the lawn around the pond in Mulwray’s backyard was so much work. “Salt water,” the gardener was saying. “Bad for the glass.”

  Chapter Three

  Benjamin awoke with a start, the dream still fresh in his mind. He had been in his father’s apricot orchard, running toward home. It was spring, because the trees were in bloom. Apricot trees weren’t much to look at for most of the year, but for a few weeks in spring they were glorious.

  There may have been more to the dream, but that’s all that stuck with him: the light filtering through the apricot blossoms, now peeking from behind the dingy motel curtains. The chirping of birds transmuted into the ringing of a cell phone. The clock on the nightstand said 10:19. How could that be? How long had he slept? Twelve hours? It seemed impossible.

  Benjamin reached groggily for the cell phone and flipped open the face plate. “Hello,” he rasped.

  “Mr. Stone?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Mr. Stone, this is Detective Lentz.” A pause. “From the Sunnyview Police. We met yesterday?”

  “Yes. Yes, of course. Hello, Detective.”

  “Mr. Stone, we found her. We found Jessica.”

  Benjamin’s heart sank. He’d been on the other side of this sort of call too many times to have any illusions about what came next.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Stone. She’s dead.”

  “Yeah,” Benjamin said. Part of him had known it all along.

  “Mr. Stone?”

  “Yeah, I heard you,” said Benjamin. “Where is she?”

  “Mr. Stone, it would be better if you wait for us to—”

  “God damn it, Lentz. Where is she?”

  A pause. “You know where Fourth Street dead ends at Sand Hill Creek?”

  “I know the place.”

  “Meet me at the cul-de-sac in twenty minutes.”

  Benjamin grunted assent and put down the phone. He got out of bed, used the bathroom, brushed his teeth, got dressed. Just keep moving, he told himself. One foot in front of the other. Autopilot. You can go to pieces later.

  The cul-de-sac was lined with police cars and emergency vehicles. Benjamin parked the Buick several houses down and made his way toward the hubbub. This part of Fourth Street had been a dirt road cutting between two orchards when Benjamin was a kid, but now it was a paved street lined with houses. It was clearly a low-income part of town; the houses were small and close together, with stucco walls and aluminum-framed windows. Several residents stood in their driveways watching the scene in the cul-de-sac unfold; they watched Benjamin suspiciously as he passed, speaking to each other in Spanish.

  As Benjamin approached the cul-de-sac, he noticed Detective Lentz leaning against a champagne-colored Ford Taurus, sipping out of a Styrofoam coffee cup and nodding his head as a uniformed officer spoke to him. As Benjamin approached, Lentz dismissed the man and turned to face Benjamin.

  “Mr. Stone,” said Lentz, holding out his hand. “I’m so sorry.” It was a practiced delivery, one that mimicked actual human sympathy almost perfectly. He admired Lentz’s professionalism while simultaneously wanting to tell him to go fuck himself.

  “Where is she?” Benjamin’s voice was stilted, almost robotic.

  “Are you okay, Stone?” asked Lentz.

  Benjamin glared at him.

  “Look, I get it,” said Lentz. “She’s your daughter. Obviously you’re not okay. What I’m asking is, are we going to have a problem? Can you hold it together? Because if you make a scene, it’s my ass, got it?”

  “I’m fine,” said Benjamin coldly. “Where is she?”

  Lentz shook his head. “Some kids found her body in the creek,” he said, jerking his thumb over his shoulder. “Back that way.” A pathway behind one of the stucco houses had been cordoned off with police tape wrapped around mailboxes and ash trees.

  Benjamin moved as if to walk the direction Lentz had pointed, but Lentz put his hand firmly on Benjamin’s shoulder.

  “Where the hell do you think you’re going?” Lentz asked.

  “To see my daughter,” said Benjamin.

  “The hell you are,” said Lentz. “You’re going to wait right here for the uniforms to carry her up here on a stretcher. Then, if you can hold yourself together, I may let you have a look at her, as a professional courtesy.”

  Benjamin stared at Lentz open-mouthed, hardly believing what he was hearing. “Listen to me, you son of a bitch—” he started.

  “No, you listen to me,” Lentz snapped, jabbing his finger at Benjamin. Lentz was smaller and leaner than Benjamin, but he had youth—not to mention about two dozen local police officers, several of whom were watching with interest as the confrontation unfolded—on his side. “I saw the look you gave me when I told you how sorry was about Jessica. That was the ‘fuck you and your professional condolences’ look. Well, if you don’t want to be the grieving father here, then I’m not going to treat you that way. Grieving fathers get to identify their daughters’ bodies at the morgue. Is that what you want?”

  Benjamin shook his head, still somewhat taken aback by the change that had come over Lentz.

  “Okay, then you’re here as a professional courtesy. Got it? And that means that you wait here for the uniforms with the stretcher to arrive. I’m not going to have you trampling all over my crime scene.”

  Benjamin nodded. “All right,” he said, swallowing his anger. Lentz was right: he couldn’t have it both ways. He was either a grieving father or he was a cop from out of town expressing a professional interest. Either way, there was no way Lentz was letting him near the actual crime scene, but as a fellow cop Benjamin wouldn’t have to watch from a distance as Jessica was loaded into an ambulance to be transported to the morgue.

  A few seconds later he saw several cops making their way up the path toward the cul-de-sac, and he instinctively knew what was coming. He forced himself to breathe normally, relaxing his shoulders and letting his eyes unfocus a little. It was the reflexive detachment he’d learned to invoke after witnessing a few dozen grisly murder scenes in Portland.

  The men with the stretcher followed shortly after. Lentz and Benjamin walked to the ambulance that sat with its doors open like a mobile sarcophagus waiting to swallow his daughter’s body. Lentz held up his hand and the two officers stopped a few feet from the ambulance. He glanced at Benjamin, and Benjamin gave him a slight nod. Lentz pulled back the plastic sheet covering the body.

  Her skin was pale and bluish, and her ordinarily lush brown hair was damp and plastered against her forehead and cheek. There was a deep, jagged cut on her forehead, but it wasn’t swollen or bloody, making Benjamin think it was post-mortem. Her neck seemed twisted at an unnatural angle. Benjamin would have liked to inspect her body more closely, but he knew he was pushing it as it was. Lentz pulled the sheet back over Jessica’s face and nodded to the officers, who loaded the stretcher into the ambulance. There was a brief exchange between the cops and the ambulance driver, after which the ambulance pulled away, followed by two police cars.

  “You got a preliminary cause of death?” asked Benjamin.

  “Neck’s broken,” said Lentz. “The M.E. will confirm.”

  “Foul play?”

  “You tell me.”

  “She was in the creek?”

  Lentz nodded. “Looks like she’s been there a few days.”

  “Strange place to dump a body. The creek is what, fifty yards from the house at the end of the cul-de-sac?”

  “Maybe they wanted it to look like a drowning.”

  “Unless that creek is a lot deeper than I remember,” said Benjamin, “you’d have to work pretty hard to drown in it. I’m surprised there’s even any water in it.”

  “Heavy snowfall in the Coastal Range this past winter,” said Lentz. “The creek is as deep as it’s been in fifty years. Can you think of any reason Jessica would be in this area?”

  Benjamin shot Lentz a quizzical glance. “You
’re asking me?”

  “Didn’t you used to live around here?”

  “Sure,” said Benjamin, a little surprised. “Sand Hill Creek was the southern boundary of my dad’s orchard. Our house was about a half mile that way.” He pointed in the direction of the police tape. “But so what?”

  Lentz shrugged. “Like you say, strange place to dump a body. I’m thinking it was a crime of opportunity.”

  Benjamin snorted. “What, Jessica was fishing in the creek when she ran into the wrong element?”

  “Either that or someone killed her and then transported her body to the creek, where it was certain to be found eventually. Take your pick.”

  Benjamin shook his head. Neither possibility made much sense. “Is this the only way to get to that part of the creek?” The real estate had changed a lot since Benjamin had last been here; he had no idea what lay behind those houses.

  “This is the closest road,” said Lentz. “But the housing development continues on the other side of the creek. There are any number of routes that the killer could have taken to the creek, but most of them involve sneaking through somebody’s backyard. Or slogging a ways through the creek bed.”

  “Difficult if you’re carrying a body.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Are you releasing anything to the media?” Benjamin asked. Jessica’s disappearance had made the national news, as disappearances of young, attractive white women often did.

  “We’re planning a press conference at three this afternoon. Gotta feed the beast.”

  “I’m surprised there are no cameras here now.”

  “We managed to keep the discovery quiet for now,” said Lentz. “But they’ll find out soon enough. We’ll try to get ahead of it with the press conference.”

  Benjamin nodded. He knew the drill. Try to stay a step ahead of the press, control the flow of information.

  “They’ll cover it on all the local stations,” said Lentz. “But I wouldn’t watch it if I were you. We’ll release all the basics, but you won’t learn anything. It’ll be the usual media circus.” He paused a moment and then added, “You’re lucky they don’t know you’re in town. It would add a whole new dimension to the story.”