“To my reading, the Mexican looks like a suicide, not this serial,” Hernandez said, sitting down at his leather desk chair. “Depressed strawberry picker.”
“Right-handed but gun in left?” Ben said. “Shot in the back of the head? That doesn’t spell suicide to me.”
Hernandez looked at him closely. Ben knew he wanted this neat and clean, wrapped up, filed away. Hernandez was good at the politics of the job, knew how to deliver the right message, giving the mayor and the town what they wanted: an illusion, not reality. That’s why he got paid the big bucks. Ben was pretty sure the lieutenant had his eye on higher office—the first Hispanic mayor of Santa Elena, maybe.
“A kid, right? Teenager?”
“Yep.”
“You haven’t been to the high school yet?” Hernandez said. “Unless I missed something.”
“He’s most likely illegal,” Ben said, a pitch of defensiveness coloring his voice.
“Doesn’t keep them out of the schools.”
“No, I guess not.”
“I would’ve thought you’d already checked there,” Hernandez said, crossing his arms over his chest. “I’m not used to telling you how to do your job, Ben.”
—
THE HIGH SCHOOL could wait. Ben grabbed the Polaroid camera from his filing cabinet, then called Rafferty off an affidavit for a ring of car-stereo thieves and met him at the Mission Viejo scene that afternoon.
Police tape still ribboned the house. A memorial of flowers and half-burned candles littered the driveway gutter. The house had been shut up for two days, all the curtains drawn, the air still thick with the dank fetor of death. Investigation chalk hieroglyphed the kitchen linoleum, and a salted stain ringed the corner of the floor like a dried-up lake.
“Jesus, Raff,” Ben said. “Get a crew to clean that up, huh?”
“Got orders not to touch it,” he said. “Still an open investigation.”
“Natasha’s got what she needs from that.”
“Would love to shut it down,” Rafferty said. “I’ve got recitals and baseball games to get to. Didn’t move down here for this kind of shit.”
How he kept his marriage together after Delia found out about his screwing around was beyond Ben. Rachel wouldn’t have stood for that crap. Put up with a lot else, but she wouldn’t have any of that.
“Etched into the wall?”
“With a paper clip,” Ben said. “Or an X-Acto knife. Something like that.”
They searched the walls in the kitchen—grease stains, calendar pinned to a corkboard. They pulled back the curtains on the pantry windows to check the lime-green painted plaster, combed over the cabinets and wooden dining table.
They split up, Rafferty taking the family room and Ben searching the living room. He ran his palms over the green recliner, unfolded the quilt spread neatly over the headrest. He ran his fingers over the brick of the fireplace, checked the backs of the framed photos on the mantel, checked the silver face of the Pioneer hi-fi sitting on a shelf beneath the television. “You’re going, you’re going…” he whispered to himself. “Swear you’re going to what?” He got down on his knees and brushed dust from the baseboards and swiped a hand underneath a couch, pulling out an old Sunset magazine and a green jelly bean.
“Ben,” Rafferty called from the family room. “Think I got something.”
Rafferty was holding back the curtain to a small window that overlooked the backyard.
“Jesus,” Ben said. “How’d we miss it?”
“Looks like kindergarten writing,” Rafferty said.
It was small, jaggedly etched into the wood of the windowpane. The letters were malformed, turned backward, the words misspelled and nearly indecipherable. It looked like the kind of writing a child would leave on his bedroom wall.
“What the hell is wrong with this guy?” Rafferty said.
Ben got down on his knees and rubbed his thumb across the rough edges. A backward S. Inverted N’s.
“I mean, who writes like that?”
A lowercase g with the tail turned the wrong way. An upside-down A.
“Get the camera,” Ben said.
Rafferty grabbed the Polaroid from the kitchen counter, and Ben snapped two pictures—one he slipped into an evidence bag, and the other he slid into his coat pocket.
A backward lowercase h, an upside-down A, an inverted N, a b. No, a backward lowercase d. “Hand,” Ben said, rubbing his fingers against the jagged wooden edges.
The first word was indecipherable, though there was a squiggle that could be an S, an M that could be a W, if you turned it right side up. “Swear you’re gonna…” Ben said out loud as he read it. An F, a lowercase i, and a backward L. “Feel,” he said. “You’re gonna feel my hand.”
“Holy shit,” Rafferty said.
“Swear you’re gonna feel my hand,” Ben said again, standing up now.
“Yeah,” Rafferty said. “I guess so.”
—
WHAT NATASHA COULDN’T get out of her head from the Westminster scene, even three hours later at the morgue, was the woman’s husband. She knew what she was going to get with the body—the bruises around the neck, the sclerotic eyes, the livor mortis—but she hadn’t anticipated the husband, the way he lost it. Detectives had been with him, locked inside an upstairs bedroom, but his wails still echoed in the house. Bent over the woman—Karena Avery was her name—snapping shots of bloodied skin caught in the crescent beneath her fingernails, Natasha had thought, You’re a lucky woman, to be mourned like that. If there was a half-world after death, a purgatorial membrane between this world and whatever was beyond it, where the dead could stand witness, this is what you wished to see: your loss tearing a hole out of someone.
Stop, she thought then. She actually stepped outside for a smoke, leaving Karena’s body alone, while she tried to exhale the thought away. Natasha was shocked by her selfishness. Yet it was there, like a ticker-tape sign announcing her true self: She wanted to mean that much to another person. She wanted her death to hurt someone.
She left the morgue at dawn, a yolk-yellow crack in the eastern sky above the San Gabriels. She drove home through the empty morning streets, poured herself a finger of Dewar’s, and stood in the shower until the water went cold. Before getting in bed, she called Allison, who was awake and rested-sounding, getting the kids ready for school, and told her to close and lock all the doors to the house.
“You’re frightening me,” Allison had said.
“He’s looking for easy targets,” Natasha said. “So don’t be one.”
Natasha slept until 10:17, when the garbage truck in the alley slammed loose the trash from the apartment cans. And in the silence of the retreating truck, there he was again, trapped in her mind, the husband and his guttural wails.
“Get a cup?” Natasha said into the phone, when Ben picked up.
“I’m on duty,” he said.
“I’m sunbathing at Newport Beach,” she said. “You martyr. It’s a business coffee.”
She met him at a table outside the Blowhole Café on Thursday morning, a half mile from the station, near the 5 Freeway. He stood when she got there, pulling out her chair.
“You look tired,” he said.
“You look wrecked.”