Tony was an adjunct communications professor at Long Beach State who had written a couple of screenplays, one of them optioned-but-never-produced by Jerry Bruckheimer. She’d met Tony at a Memorial Day barbecue thrown by Mendenhall and his wife, June. It was a narcissistic evening, she could see that now—the writer fascinated with the medical minutiae of the medical examiner. (He’d probably already written her—or a medical examiner like her—into another failed screenplay.) But she brought him home that night and he jokingly kissed each part of her body, asking her to whisper the medical terms: “orbital,” “external auditory meatus,” “labium superioris.” And then her shirt was on the floor—“manubrial notch,” “costa,” “areola,” “umbilicus.” Not to mention the metacarpals, the malleoli, the pelvis, and the others for which words became unnecessary. It was fun, still was, when her body felt the need and he was available and willing.
But she grabbed the phone and dialed Ben’s number instead.
Tony was twenty-seven, almost a decade her junior, about as deep as the Santa Ana River in summer, and for all the places he touched—admittedly with an admirable flair—he was unable to reach her (she smiled to herself) “myocardium.” A shame, really. He was easy, uncomplicated, but that was another kind of loneliness—the body satisfied but the heart left hungry.
She got Ben’s voicemail. “I’m buying if you’re thirsty,” she said. “Call me.”
There was some leftover Chinese in the refrigerator and two Coors. She popped a can, warmed up the moo shu, and turned on the television. The news, an Angels game, a sitcom about some perfect family and their perfect problems. She flipped the channels again and found a Disney movie, Snow White. She had seen the movie as a kid, her father driving her and her mother up to Grauman’s Chinese in Hollywood to sit in one of the balconies and gape at the huge screen. She turned down the lights now in her one-bedroom apartment and watched Snow White asleep in her glass coffin, her face like cold milk, beautiful in her false death. The dwarves keeping vigil, the birds perched heavily on bare branches. Snow White in her glass coffin, kissed and rising from the dead.
The phone rang. It wasn’t Ben.
—
BEN WAS TOSSING in bed at 1:03 A.M. He never slept well when he was on a case, and the winds made it impossible—the freight-train roar outside the window, the electricity tingeing the air, the way the rushing air put your whole body on edge.
After he paid a visit to Emma’s boyfriend earlier, he drove across the city line into Tustin and ordered take-out tacos—lengua, al pastor, carnitas—from Taqueria Sanchez. He had been eating them alone in the barn, drawing penciled lines between crime scenes, checking mileage between them, when the phone rang.
It was Daniela Marsh, from the Rancho Santa Elena World News, a newspaper that didn’t cover world news and rarely ventured beyond Conquistador Road. He had gone to school with Dani. Even at sixteen, she was in everyone’s business, spreading any shred of gossip she could unearth. She had caused more than a few breakups then and alerted the principal to the part-time night janitor who was banging a JV cheerleader in the riding-lawnmower shed behind the practice fields. She’d written a couple of articles about Ben, too, in the high school paper, back when he was the star swimmer. She had called Ben three times earlier in the day at the station for comment about the boy in the field. He would only confirm or deny her questions. Yes, it’s a dead body. Yes, the body was shot. No, there’s nothing, yet, to suggest that it was murder.
“I’m at deadline for the morning paper,” she said. “Anything from the autopsy? Murder? Suicide?”
“How’d you get my number? It’s unlisted.”
“I’m a reporter, Detective,” she said. “Come on, Ben, we went to school together.”
“You wanna talk?” he said. “You call me at the station.”
He slammed the phone down and it immediately rang again and he let it go. She’d keep hunting around, he knew, until she got something to print, but he wasn’t going to give her anything; she’d have to work for it.
Now he couldn’t stop his mind from running—an endless loop of evidence and crime shots. He got out of bed at 1:06 and slogged through the windy darkness back to the barn. He left the lights off, only flipping on the scanner and the desk lamp. He pulled the Mexican kid’s file from the desk drawer, found the slip of paper he’d taken off the body, and read it. Q: How would she feel if she knew? it read, in an elegant cursive. A: You know exactly how s— The paper hastily ripped.
The scanner squawked: 926. Tow truck needed.
Ben had learned over time that the best investigators were not the savant kids straight out of university armed with criminal-justice degrees and math theorems to connect the dots. They weren’t the tough-guy cops with marksmanship skills and judo training. They weren’t the forensics geeks, either, with all their scientific magic tricks. The best investigators knew that most things were simple, that usually there were straight lines to connect suspects to crimes. If a young woman was killed in an apartment, it was a boyfriend or an estranged lover. If a teenager got shot in the street, it was the rival gang. If a man was popped in a car, in a house in the hills, at some dramatic deserted location, it was probably drugs. If a convenience store was robbed, the perp lived around the corner.
If a mysterious note was found on a dead body, it probably led to the killer—or at least someone responsible for the death.
459-A: bank alarm, Security Pacific, Barranca.
But figuring out who did what to whom was the easy stuff. What was a bitch to sort out was why. And what was a bitch and a half was proving it beyond a reasonable doubt.
The rafters shuddered, and next door Annie Oakley huffed air through her snout.
“It’s all right, girl,” he said. “It’s just the wind.”
He fanned through the pictures of the boy, his glazed eyes staring at the cloudless Southern California sky, his left index finger still hooked in the .45. Ben looked at the slip of paper again.
Who is “she”? he wrote on his legal pad. Girlfriend? Mother? He ran his fingers over the letters, imagining he could feel the scar of the ink against the paper.
He underlined girlfriend, but then he heard Hernandez’s voice in his head. You’ve got nothing, Detective. She could be the Virgin Mary for all you know. He erased the line and tossed the pencil on the desk.
“187,” an out-of-breath voice scratched from the scanner. The cop’s voice was tight, pumped with adrenaline. “19745 Buttonwood Street.”
Ben turned up the dial.
“Received,” the dispatcher said. “Be advised, possible 187 at 19745 Buttonwood Street. No word on suspect.”
“DB still warm,” the voice said now, his words quick, his voice pitching higher. Ben knew the feeling—your heart thumping in your ears, the fog at the corners of your vision, your whole body pinpricked with heat. Didn’t matter how many times you came on scene, especially a fresh one, you felt it: death and fear, married to each other. “Need backup. Need a perimeter.”
“One Adam 9 en route.”
The speaker clicked on, nothing but static and quickened breaths for a moment, then clicked off. Another unit called in as responding. The speaker clicked again, and yelling could be heard in background. “Family member on scene,” the uniform said. “Suspect fled. No visual.”