“See those calluses on the fingers of his right hand?” Natasha said.
Ben bent down and saw the reddened skin. “Right-handed,” he said. Out here picking strawberries. Two, maybe three years older than Emma, his whole life ahead of him, though what kind of life was it? Living in this camp. Bent at the waist all day in the sun, picking fruit. Why not take your own life, if this was what life is? There was a certain bravery in it, a clear-eyed pragmatism about the options before him.
“Yes.”
“But the .45 was in his left,” Ben said.
“You do pay attention, Detective Wade.” She pointed to the back of the boy’s head. “A suicide, you shoot yourself at the temple or through the soft palate, not back here.”
“Anything to link it to Rafferty’s DB?”
“Be patient,” she said. “I’m just getting started.”
Ben hoped it was murder. People did bad shit; you nailed them to the wall for it. A suicide just left things wide-open, forever unanswered.
“Been a busy twenty-four hours,” he said.
“Santa Ana winds,” Natasha said, her camera pointed at the back of the boy’s head.
When the Santa Anas blasted into the basin, it was a bad time to be a cop—or a good time, depending on your way of seeing things. There wasn’t any scientific evidence for this, but every cop knew something went haywire in people when the winds hit; there was a charge in the air, literally, the air full of spark. Electricity zapped between blankets, little lightning strikes popped off skin-to-skin contact. When he was in L.A. and the winds were up, the captain packed the night shift with uniformed officers. Husbands beat wives, Crips slaughtered Bloods, drunks bashed other drunks over spilled beer, crazies let out of institutions for lack of funding heard voices telling them to attack blondes in apartments down the hall: spores of violence floating on the wind. Ben could feel this edge in himself, too, an extra pulse in the body, a humming in the teeth.
“No one’s talking at the camp,” he said.
“Illegal?” Natasha said.
“I suspect so.”
“Good produce deals at Safeway, though.”
“Yep,” Ben said. “My guess, we’re not going to get an ID.”
“Just another Juan Nadie,” she said.
Juan Nadies facedown in the desert. Juan Nadies drowned in rivers. Juan Nadies shot on street corners. Dying of old age in falling-down neighborhoods.
“You check the pockets yet?” Ben said.
“No.”
“May I?” he said, trying to sound as gentlemanly as possible.
“Be my guest, Detective Wade.” She smirked. “But don’t you dare disturb his position.”
Lying down in the row, Ben slipped his hand into one of the boy’s front pockets—feeling the arch of his hip bone, the muscles of his leg, the unnerving intimacy of death—and fingered three pennies and a candy wrapper. He dropped the items in a plastic evidence bag and slipped his hand into the next pocket. Down at the bottom, tangled with lint and bits of thread, he found a paper clip and an erasable pen and slipped those into the evidence bag, too.
Natasha shuffled down the row of strawberries, snapping photos of shoe prints. Ben moved to the back pockets, getting down in the dirt to edge his hand in without disturbing the twist in the boy’s torso. The ground stank of pesticide and loam, and he thought he smelled something else, too—chlorine? In the right pocket, he found a slip of paper. It was ripped and folded into a small square. Still lying on the ground, he unfolded the paper. Something jumped in him and he lay there for a moment looking at the handwriting, his heart beating double time. He glanced over his shoulder. Natasha was still down the row, her back to him, snapping pictures. Quickly, he folded the note up, stuffed it into his jeans pocket, and stood.
“Anything?” Natasha called out.
“A pen and paper clip.” He zipped closed the evidence bag.
“A studious one, then.”
—
NATASHA WAS WRAPPING things up, the body bagged, and Ben sat in the cruiser trying to write notes on the legal pad through his shaking hands. On scene @ 6:21, he wrote. Teenage boy. Mexican. He knew he should slip the piece of paper back into the evidence bag, but it was too late; the bags were closed up in the forensics kit in the back of Natasha’s van. He took a few deep breaths, counting out a slowing rhythm, and steadied his hands on the steering wheel. He’d have to get it back with the other evidence later. It was 8:07.
He dialed Rachel’s number on the Motorola.
“What are you doing sneaking into my apartment?” she said.
“I knew you’d be pissed off.”
“Of course I’m pissed off,” Rachel said. “You know the law, Ben. You get to come inside my house when I invite you inside.”
“The scene rattled me last night,” he said. “I just needed to know the bottom floor was locked. I was worried. For Emma—and for you.”
She let out a frustrated sigh, but he could feel her soften.
“Ben,” she said. “We’re trying to get out the door. We have to get to school.”
“Em all right?”
“A bit sore,” she said.
“She can breathe okay?” he said. “Turn her neck all right?”
“She’s a little stiff,” Rachel said, “but nothing bad.”
The coroner assistants were trying to wheel a gurney up the row of strawberries. The wheels got stuck in the dirt, and the assistants tried rattling them loose.
“I mean, the way she fell yesterday,” he said. “It scared the h—”
“I know,” she said. “I know. You want to talk to her?”
“No,” he said, hesitating. Not now, not when he was rattled. “Tell her ‘I love you’ for me.”
Silence.
“You don’t sound good, Ben.” There was almost a question in her voice, a note of worry.
“Bad morning.”
The assistants gave up on the gurney and finally lifted the boy’s bagged body and started laboring it across the field. The bag sagged in the middle and scraped the leaves of the plants.
“Hungover?” she said.
“No,” he said. Jesus, Rachel, he wanted to say. People do change. “Not that kind of bad. Not for a long time.”
The assistants hoisted the boy’s body into the back of the wagon and closed the door. It would be cold in the back, antiseptic and cold.
“Listen, Ben. We’ve got to go.” He pictured her at the door, dressed for school, her hand on the door handle, her bag of papers dangling from her shoulder. Off to do the clean work of teaching.
“Yeah,” he said. “I know.” She didn’t even mention the coffee he had made. “Didn’t mean to hold you up.”
He held the Motorola for a minute, listening to the drone of the empty line, and watched the ambulance silently speed away. Phone call. Anonymous tip. Hispanic. There weren’t any phones in the camp, unless someone had run an illegal line. The ambulance passed a shopping center and a lit-up Texaco station on the edge of the field, a phone booth standing on the corner.
“Natasha,” he said when she was back at her van. “Don’t pack up yet.”