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A SWELL LIFTED Ben ten feet into the air, the water sucking at his torso, dragging his body up the face of the wave. He was bodysurfing at the Wedge down in Newport Beach, a south swell pumping hard. For a moment there was no horizon, the water cutting into the sky, the land pitching sideways. The swell crested, the wind blowing spray off the lip. He turned in to the wave and it shot him toward the beach. His palm carved the glass in front of him, his body rocketing across the face. Then suddenly the wave jacked up against the jetty. He was airborne briefly, before his torso spun back into the water. He cut his hand into the face of the wave and shot the pipe, and just before it closed him off, a second before the slam and grind of the ocean floor, he flipped out the backside into the ebb of the receding churn.
Three hours earlier, he’d followed the body to the medical examiner’s office. He usually stayed away from autopsies. When he was a recruit, his class had been required to attend autopsies to learn what kind of evidence was important to a case, so they didn’t destroy forensic particulars on scene. The day he witnessed, the body was a young woman. He’d kept his stomach through external examination and even through the Y cut from shoulder blades to pubic bone, but when the examiner laid the blade of the electric saw against her ribs, he couldn’t take it. He barely made it to the toilets. Ever since, he avoided it: the smell of the rooms, the dun-colored stains on the floors, the whole stainless-steel cool of the place. But he couldn’t leave this boy; he felt some kind of responsibility toward him.
So he smeared Vicks above his top lip and stood in the corner while Natasha and Dr. Mendenhall removed the body from the bag. He watched as they swabbed the boy’s mouth and cut his nails and placed the clippings in a plastic bag. He watched as they combed his hair around the wound, untangling strands from the comb to keep for testing. He imagined the boy standing in front of a mirror, combing his own hair in the minutes before school, slicking it back into a thick black streak.
Now, in the ocean, three swells were stacked up ahead of him. Out of breath, he freestyled against the tide, pulling himself through rope kelp and sea froth. He dove beneath a breaking wave. The churn rolled over him, a muted rumble on the surface of the water, until he burst out into oxygen, filling his burning lungs with it as another wave crested above him. He turned and caught the wave, carving the swell, feeling its tug and pull, but riding the beautiful clean glass just in front of the break.
He had stayed through the Y cut, though his stomach roiled and he had to hold the Vicks to his nose. Mendenhall unceremoniously carved through the body, intoning medical terms into the microphone. Natasha, though, held the boy’s arm as if comforting him. Ben watched her hands—her fingertips pressed lightly to the boy’s skin, as though afraid to bruise him—as the doctor worked on the ribs. That kept him calm, her soft touch on the body. He watched her hands, too, when she assisted Mendenhall with the first of the boy’s organs, but that was all he could take; he stood in the corner of the examination room, his hands in his pockets, staring at the graying grout that held the tile together.
“We can call you when we’re finished,” Natasha said.
“No. I’ll stay.”
He stared at the wall and listened to Mendenhall call out numbers, medical minutiae, and thought of the boy’s mother sitting in a small, dark room while her son lay here on a stainless-steel table. He would stay until it was done; he would.
The wave closed out and broke all at once, grinding him into the sand, dragging him head over feet across the ocean floor. His body was the ocean’s for a few moments, and he let himself be raked across the pebbles and broken shells, his rag-doll limbs useless against the churn. Then he was up into the air, his lungs expanding with oxygen, the sun glancing off the water.
He dove beneath the kelp bed, into the dark below. He swam the bubbling silence, his shoulders aching as he tugged himself against the tide. The weight of the water pressured his ears, but his body felt weightless now, and for nearly a minute he forgot about everything except the rush of water slipping down his limbs.
When the medical examiner finished, Natasha placed her palm on his back.
“Waiting for this?” she said, the disinfected bullet in her hand.
He didn’t know what he was waiting for, but, yeah, he guessed that was it. Evidence. His job. “Yeah,” he said, taking it in his hand. She gave him a plastic bag and he slipped the slug inside.
“You okay?” she said.
“Yep,” he said. “Just fine.”
He had run the revolver and the bullet over to ballistics and spent an hour at his desk, typing up the death investigation form on one of the new Macintosh computers. Case number: 12-00443-UI. Decedent name: _____-_____-__. Decedent DOB: _____-_____-. Decedent address: _____-_____-_____-_____-. Location of body: Strawberry field, Junipero and Serrano Canyon Roads. Cause of death: Homicide. He got three more lines down the form before he realized which box he’d marked. He returned to the cause-of-death line and let his hand hover over the erase key, the green cursor flashing at him. It didn’t look like the work of a serial killer, but maybe he was wrong, maybe he was missing something. He stared at the X in the box for at least a minute, his finger hovering midair, before Lieutenant Hernandez leaned over his desk, the air around him spiced with aftershave.
“What’s the deal with this?” he said. “Bad fucking timing to have a body turn up.”
Ben gave him the lowdown while Hernandez bent over the monitor, reading glasses on the tip of his nose, and scanned the screen.
“Mayor’s got investors in today,” Hernandez said. “They want to build a ‘campus’ with upscale houses for employees. Some computer-software crap. Want the city to have a ‘family feel.’?”
“And we all know nothing bad happens in families,” Ben said.
“Homicide?” Hernandez said. “Unless you got something not listed here, you’re getting ahead of yourself, Wade.”
“Things don’t line up for self-inflicted,” Ben said.
“They line up for murder?” Hernandez said, standing up now. He wasn’t a tall man, but he had the broad shoulders of a wrestler. A couple of years back, Ben had seen him pin a six-foot-five perp freaking on PCP against a bus-stop bench, until Ben and two other officers could handcuff him to the bolted-down legs.
“Not yet,” Ben said.
“When they do, you can check that box.”