He liked the cop. His niceness made him stupid, and his stupidity made him blind to the thing in front of him.
Then he had driven down Laguna Canyon and stood on the side of the road with the Mexicans and Hondurans and El Salvadorans, begging rich white men for daywork. He didn’t need much, just enough money for gas and the boxes of latex gloves, just enough for donuts or a drive-through hamburger. He wasn’t Mexican, but he was olive-skinned and small, like the half-starved illegals. And no one asked questions, no one wanted to know, especially the rich white men who were afraid of the fines for hiring illegals. A few hours’ work, a palm full of cash, goodbye. Move on to the next corner in another town.
This morning he jumped into a Chevy pickup bed with a Nicaraguan and they huddled in the back together, clutching their chests as the truck hurtled down the freeway. The truck took the Magnolia exit, swung right, and drove into a gated community with a little fountain of reclaimed water and streets lined with palm trees. The man pushed the silver buttons and the gate slid open and the truck drove through, and he watched the gate lock behind them, a little castle wall to keep the world out. The houses had columns and cathedral windows and a greenbelt that snaked between the yards—kids dangling from monkey bars, a woman touching her toes before a jog. At the house, the rich man handed them shovels and he and the Nicaraguan dug a kidney-shaped hole in the ground, where they would pour cement for a pool. It was a hot day, and the earth was dry and pebbly until it gave way to hard-packed mud, tangled palm roots, knots of worms.
At noon a woman opened the sliding glass door to the kitchen and brought them glasses of ice water and orange slices. He smiled at her and they talked. Yes, they wanted the pool dug before her husband was back from New York. Yes, thank you for working so hard. Later, he stood at the sliding glass door and waited as she rose from the couch, setting aside a magazine. She unhooked the lock on the door—a little click like a small bone breaking. Yes, she said, of course, and he walked down her cool hallway to find the bathroom with the white towels and the seashells in a glass bowl. He kept his eyes on the sink, watched the water swirl into the drain; still he caught glances of himself in the mirror—his dark hair slicked with sweat, his thin jaw, his foreshortened nose, his straight mouth like a slit across his face, his soft teeth the color of butter. If he looked up, he’d see his eleven-year-old self, the one he saw for the first time at the doctor’s office, the boy self with saucer eyes and sores on his face. He hated his eleven-year-old self, the way it sat like a bird with a hood over its head, the way its heart exploded like grenades and burst flashes in its brain. But it followed him everywhere—he couldn’t get rid of it.
When he was finished, he asked for another glass of water and he stood in the doorway of her kitchen, complimenting her house, thanking her for the work; her little fingers drummed on the countertop, nervous to get him back outside. He liked her for that—it turned her beautiful, her body rigid in her own kitchen, the forced smile an unlocked door to her fear. He drank the glass to the bottom and thanked her again, and when he stepped outside he heard the latch click again in the sliding glass door. The wind blew palm fronds and electricity raised the hair on his neck and the buzz in his fingertips electrified the shovel and he dug and dug, deeper into the earth.
Now he was driving past the airport, the planes descending to the tarmac like giant insects. He took the Magnolia off-ramp, swinging around the cement berm, and merged into the stream of suburban traffic. At a stoplight, he turned to look at a man in his idling car, the dashboard light greening his face. He stared at the man until the man felt him and glanced across the lane, and when he met the man’s eyes he kept staring until the stoplight turned green, and then the man was gone. But his eyes went with the man, crouched in the backseat of his car, riding with the man down the boulevard, staying with him until he was deadbolted inside his house.
He turned the car in to the driveway and idled at the gate. He punched in the five numbers on the silver box—he had watched the rich man earlier today, memorized the 6, 6, 9, 3, 6—and the gate that made them feel safe rattled open and he drove inside.
5
THE DECEASED WOMAN, EMILY, HAD no family. No children, a dead mother and father buried together in Forest Hills, a divorced husband living in Phoenix. The husband hadn’t seen her in four years, he said when Natasha called him, but he was driving out to collect her body, to bury her in the empty plot to the right of her mother.
Mendenhall was done for the day, off to dinner and a movie with his wife at South Coast Plaza, and Natasha was left to prep Emily’s body before the ex-husband’s arrival. She had already incinerated the organs. Mendenhall avoided the incinerator, too. Maybe he didn’t like the smell; maybe there was something too final about the architecture of the body being reduced to ash that he couldn’t stomach before sitting down to steak and red wine. Maybe he just didn’t care. Emily had had a heavy heart; her liver, too—a drinker.
After the incinerator, she sewed up Emily’s body, trying to line up the imperfections of skin, reanimating a hollowed shell. When she was finished, she cleaned up and filled out paperwork until the husband arrived. Emily hadn’t been sexually assaulted. Definitely not the serial’s MO. She had a small tumor in her left lung, which would have become a problem soon. Otherwise, she had been mostly healthy.
The ex seemed like a nice man, tired from the drive, genuinely upset about his duty.
“She was strangled?” he said, his voice weak.
“Yes,” she said gently.
She had pulled the sheet back for him to see Emily’s pale face. She made sure to stop at the neck, made sure not to show him the baseball stitch running down the length of her torso.
“I feel guilty,” he said. “Maybe if I hadn’t left her.”
She replaced the sheet.
“Death makes everyone feel guilty,” she said, touching his elbow to guide him toward the papers he’d have to sign.
After the men from the funeral home wheeled the body out to the hearse, Natasha made copies of the two reports—one on Emily and one for the unidentified Mexican boy. She filed the originals away, placed the copies in two separate folders, one marked Detective Rafferty (Mission Viejo) and the other Detective Wade (Santa Elena), and left to meet her friend Allison for a drink.
When Natasha got to Las Brisas, Allison was already into her second margarita. She was at the patio bar, sitting poised at a tall table overlooking the cliffs and the surf below, a forty-something man in khaki pants and a guayabera leaning into her, shadowing her from the late-evening sun.
“Tash!” Allison said when she saw her. “Ronald, this is my friend Natasha.”