“Shame I have to bother you, then,” Ken said. “Must be a blue moon. Got a body out in the strawberry fields. Serrano Canyon and Junipero.”
On a legal pad, he scribbled the time of notification, then called it in to Lieutenant Hernandez and Natasha. He ran his head under the kitchen faucet to jolt himself awake and grabbed an apple from the fridge. In the barn, he snatched the .40 caliber out of the locker, and he was on the road in three minutes.
There were three black-and-whites on scene—two parked on the south edge of the field, near an irrigation ditch, and another patrol car pulling a perimeter on the west. He radioed dispatch to get more units out to cover the corners, parked his car on the south side, near the two patrol cars, and surveyed the scene from a distance. The body lay a hundred to a hundred twenty yards away, on the western third of the field; he couldn’t see it from here, but he saw that a uniform was standing over it. On the eastern edge of the field stood tenement camps but no squad cars.
The uniform next to him nodded. “Detective.” He was leaning against his cruiser door, smoking.
“Officer,” Ben said. “Put that cigarette out. I need you over at that camp. No one in or out.”
The officer flicked the butt into the dirt and slid into the squad car, muttering something before driving the black-and-white down the dirt service road bordering the field.
Ben took latex gloves out of the trunk of his cruiser and scrambled into the irrigation ditch, hopping the trickle of water dripping into the metal drain. He held his breath as he made it across the field, counting the beats of his heart. Calm, man. Calm down.
It was a kid, just a kid, not much older than Emma. A boy. Ben leaned on his haunches to take it in. It was the worst when it was a kid. Something twisted up inside you with the waste of it.
“You first on scene?” he asked the beat cop standing a few feet away. The cop had a notebook in hand and flipped to the previous page to look at his notes.
“Five fifty-seven.” His voice shook; his face was bleached white. He couldn’t have been more than twenty-five.
“First DB?” Ben said.
The cop—Chang was his name—nodded. “I threw up,” he said, as though at a confessional.
“No shame in that.” Ben stood and rested his hand on Chang’s shoulder. Ben’s first DB was a drive-by, a nineteen-year-old shotgunned on his low-rider bicycle. He was alive when Ben arrived on scene, twisted in the spokes of his bike. Ben held his hand while he bled out into the gutter. “I’d like to say it gets easier,” Ben said, “but I hope it doesn’t. If it does, means you’ve seen too much of it.”
“He’s a teenager.”
“Yep,” Ben said. Two of the old-timers had taken him for drinks that night and let him cry it out. A sort of rite of passage: one first DB and one public-crying jag. “Should I get someone else?”
“No, sir. I’m okay.”
Ben flipped the notebook page in Chang’s shaking hand and glanced at his watch.
“Six twenty-one,” he said, pointing to a line on the paper. “Detective Wade on scene.”
The officer wrote it down.
“You don’t have to look at him,” Ben said. “Just write what I tell you. When the ME gets here, you do the same with her.”
“Right.”
Chang turned his back to the body, staring out toward the mountains in the east, his hand pinching down the blowing pages.
Ben noted the revolver clenched in the boy’s hand, an old Colt .45, the handle dented, the chamber popped open. Shot close range, no doubt, near the back of the skull; he could see the burn marks at point of entry. Thank God for the wind; it kept the flies away but not the ants, not the beetles. Natasha would need to collect them to help determine time of death. It was early—no bloating tissue, no decomposition. Natasha would know, but he guessed four to five hours. Suspect could be three hundred miles away by now, out of state, in Mexico even, sipping Coronas in Ensenada.
“You touch anything?” Ben said to Chang. Ben watched the lights of black-and-whites on the edge of the field, responding to the scene. Just lights, no sirens. No need to wake anybody up.
“No, sir.”
He walked through the scene with Chang, his adrenaline cooling off with the business of the investigation. Chang had gotten the call from dispatch at 5:53. Dispatch said it sounded like a Hispanic male who made the call.
“Name?”
“No,” Chang said. “Anonymous tip.”
Generally speaking, serials took a break after a killing, their anger, desire, whatever it was, briefly satiated. It was barely ten hours since the woman’s body had turned up in Mission Viejo. Was it possible he hit twice in one night?
“Anybody here when you arrived?”
“Some Hispanic workers on the edge of the field.” He pointed toward the camp. “But they took off when they saw me.”
“You stayed with the body?”
“Yeah.”
“Good,” Ben said. “You done good.”
Ben circled the body, widening the arc as he stepped over clumps of strawberries. Footsteps running left to right and crossed over one another. Knee impressions in the dirt. A bucket tipped over with strawberries spilling out. Coyote or dog prints. A Dulces Vero candy wrapper crushed into the dirt.
Natasha arrived on scene ten minutes later, carrying the tackle-box forensics kit in her left hand and a cigarette in her right.
“Never thought I’d be so lucky,” she said, “to see you this early in the morning.”
“Play the lottery today.”
“I’ll meet you over at 7-Eleven as soon as we’re done here.”
Natasha was short, with a wiry gymnast body that looked good slipped into jeans and a T-shirt. She had a difficult time stepping over the strawberry bushes, and Chang offered her a hand, which she took with the cigarette clasped in her teeth. “Ah, a gentleman,” she said. “You’re a dying breed.
“Shit,” she said when she saw the body. She dropped the kit in the dirt and knelt near the boy’s vacant face, the bone structure misshapen, its architecture knocked off-kilter by the gunshot. “A kid?” She took a drag of the cigarette, closing her left eye to keep the smoke out of it.
“Yeah,” Ben said. He began to share his observations with her, but she cut him off. “I know,” he said, holding up his palm. “I’ll go do my job.”