The migrant camp was on the eastern edge of the field, two dozen low-slung plywood shacks squeezed between the strawberry field and an orange grove. He’d been here once before, when he was investigating the theft of a professional racing bike snatched from an open garage. A landscaping team had recently mowed a couple of lawns in the neighborhood; the owner of the bike thought a “beaner” had taken it, and this was the obvious place to look. Ben knew immediately that nobody from this camp had taken the bike. There was no place to ride out here, and any Mexican trying to sell it risked deportation. Turned out to be a neighbor, a white kid living two doors down. Generally speaking, the illegals were among the most law-abiding citizens, in Ben’s experience. If we were all threatened with deportation, Ben sometimes thought, this would be the most straitlaced country on the planet.
There were two rows of tenements—card houses, basically, the walls leaning against one another. All the doors were closed. A couple of pieces of cardboard lay in the street, ripped loose by the wind. A rooster picked at discarded sunflower-seed shells. He could smell the burn of beans and coffee, and the fecal stench of an open toilet. Immigration harassed the camp every few months, sending a few people back over the border. A cynical game, really, since the owners of the fields didn’t want their people deported, but local immigration needed to look as if they were doing their job. So, a compromise: Haul a few away, get it in the newspapers to appease a certain type of voter, and then let more come in to replace the ones sent home. Ben had been asked to assist in a raid when he first started with the department four years ago. He helped drag a few out of camp and pack them into vans, but he felt like an A-grade asshole doing it.
Someone was crying, faint sobs audible in the silences between wind gusts. He stopped in the middle of the street, trying to get a direction on it, but the freight-train howl of wind confused the sounds. He knocked at the first house, the mildewed wooden door tied shut with yellow packing twine. A dark hand reached through the space between door and wall, the fingertips raw with fruit-picking scabs, and unwound the twine. A tiny woman stood in the half dark, holding a sleeping baby in her arms.
“Buenos días,” he said.
The woman’s eyes were deep brown, almost black, her face wide and flat like a plate. Mayan, he thought. Not Mestizo. Behind her, a boy lay asleep on a cot.
“I would like to speak to you,” Ben said in his awkward Spanish, “about the body in the field.”
“No entiendo.”
He tried again, taking care with his accent, articulating every syllable like a child.
“Please,” she said. “Speak more slowly. Habla más despacio.”
The baby woke and cried, and she pulled up her shirt to feed him. Ben pointed beyond the walls of the house, toward the field.
“Muerto,” he said, as simply as possible. “En el campo. Sabes?”
“No,” she said, shaking her head. “No.”
He knocked on three more doors and got the same answer. “No,” they said. “We know nothing.” But no one asked what happened, no one looked shocked to hear the news. He tried to get names, tried to get any kind of statement, but people just shook their heads and closed cardboard doors in his face.
At the second-to-last house, a man, in his forties maybe, stood stooped in the doorway. Beyond him, a woman sat on a stool in the corner of a makeshift kitchen. Mottled patches of morning light splattered through holes in the wall, making it difficult to see, but he thought her face had the ashen pallor of someone who had been crying. Another woman, a younger one, knelt at the woman’s feet and clasped her hand, lightly running her fingers over the knuckles.
“Do you know anything about the body in the field?”
“No,” the stooped man said. He glanced at the ground when he said it. “Sorry, no.”
“Does she?” Ben said, nodding toward the woman in the back.
“No.”
Two little girls sat quietly on a blanket in the corner of the room.
“I’m not immigration,” Ben said.
One of the girls flashed her eyes at him when she heard the word, then she looked away.
“I know.”
“I could get them, though,” Ben said. “I could call them from my cruiser.”
The man lifted his chin, his eyes narrowing. “Please,” he said, his voice sharp with anger. “The devil wind was up. No one got any sleep.”
Ben gave the man his card. “Call me, please. A boy is dead.”
“Murdered?” the man asked.
“I don’t know yet. You got reason to believe he was murdered?”
“No.” The man took the card and slipped it into the chest pocket of his shirt. “Please go now.”
Ben glanced at the woman in the corner; his eyes had adjusted to the darkness and he could see her black eyes watching him as the man quietly closed the door in his face. She was the boy’s mother, Ben was sure of it.
—
“ANYTHING TO GIVE us an ID?” Ben asked when he got back to the body.
Natasha ignored him as she snapped pictures of the boy’s hands, his fingers curled stiff. “How old are you?” she whispered to the boy. “Sixteen? Seventeen? Seventeen’s a tough year for a boy.
“Mexican,” she said to Ben finally, her eye pressed to the viewfinder.
“I knew forensics was a precise science.”
“You’re in my light,” she said.
Ben moved, and the crisp sun shone brightly on the boy. He had been trying to grow a mustache, but the skin along his jawline was wax-paper smooth. “Sixteen, seventeen,” Natasha repeated. Just six thousand or so days. A waste. Some poor mother out there remembered the day he was born, this boy slicked with life, crying the pain of first air filling his lungs.
“Make yourself useful,” she said to Ben, “and gather up some of these beetles.”
Ben grabbed a plastic vial and a pair of tweezers from her tackle box and started pinching the bugs into the vial.
“High school age,” she said, keeping the camera close to her face.
Ben could see the lights of the high school football stadium towering above the rooftops of the El Paraiso housing complex. He dropped another beetle into the vial, then one more, before placing the cap back on, carrying them to the tackle box, and filing them inside.
“He was a good-looking kid,” Natasha said.
Ben stopped and looked at the boy’s face. The symmetry of it had been knocked out of line, but, yeah, if you could push everything back into place he was handsome—had been handsome.
“Could be self-inflicted,” Natasha said. “Burn marks at point of entry, no signs of struggle.”
Ben looked out over the field, the red fruit dotting the rows, the swirling lights of the police cars cutting the field off from the orange groves and the hills beyond. On the western edge of the field, nearest the closest housing tract, stood a small crowd—reporters, curious morning joggers, a television van topped with a satellite dish. Beyond the crowd stood the brand-new homes, their red-tiled roofs staggered in the sun. Through the wrought-iron gate to the backyard of the nearest home, Ben watched a woman dive into a swimming pool, her body arcing above the blue water like a falling arrow.
“Something’s off about it, though,” she said.
He knew enough not to ask; she’d tell him when she was ready. He watched the body while he waited—the limbs still and stiffening, the bottoms of his bare arms purpled with settling blood. Natasha maneuvered around the body and took pictures of his shoes, the soles thick with mud. Sixteen, seventeen: born in 1969 or ’70. The wind blew his hair, and his T-shirt fluttered at the waist, exposing the boy’s stomach—the muscles still rippled there, a little hair poking up to his belly button.