“Occupational hazard.” He sat down and she placed the files on the table next to two cups of coffee.
“You on scene last night?” he said, picking up the file on the Mexican boy.
“Till three,” she said, nodding.
She took a sip of the coffee he’d fixed, black, cut with hot water—tea, really, just as she liked it. She didn’t know when they’d crossed this line into banal intimacy, but it had been crossed. It was a strange comfort, an illicit one in a way, tinged with guilt. (She knew Rachel; they’d all gone to school together, though Natasha was two years behind them and had been an anonymous geek with her nose always in a book.) Natasha had enjoyed this little attention when he was married, too, and she returned it: He liked his coffee sugared up, quarter full of half-and-half. The first time she’d made it for him—five years ago when he kept visiting her office, pressing her for forensic evidence on a gang-war shooting that had spilled over into Orange County from L.A.—she’d called him “sweetie.” He’d quietly laughed then and said, “Yeah, don’t tell anyone. They’ll make me a meter maid.” There was a generosity in Ben, the ability to laugh at himself, though she hadn’t seen that spirit in him in a long time.
“Why haven’t you called?” she said. God, she hated the way she sounded, like some needy, fragile woman, like her friend Allison. Why haven’t you called me? We had such a nice night together. She wasn’t going to ask it; she’d told herself she wouldn’t bring it up. It was a simple question, though, and she wanted a simple answer. They’d had dinner. Sure, it was just In-N-Out Burger, but Emma was there, too. In her stupid groaning-woman mind, she thought that meant something.
“I thought this was a business cup-a-Joe?”
“It is,” she said, sitting back in her chair, “of course.”
“I’ve been busy,” he said vaguely.
“I’ve been sipping champagne and nibbling caviar.”
“I hate caviar,” he said, a wry smile on his face.
Levity, deflection, ironic triviality, all Ben’s specialty. He was an expert at it, the friendly banter that kept you at arm’s length.
“Russian,” she said. “It has to be Russian.”
“Damn Communists.”
He turned the file page. “What’ve we got?” he said, all business now.
“The bullet ripped through the frontal lobe, clipped the basal ganglia, and shredded the parietal lobe.” She lit a cigarette and blew the smoke above her head. “You know how to read.”
It was a cool morning, the wind pumping in high desert air, and they sat beneath a heat lamp near a planter blooming with bird-of-paradise. The wind swung the flowers’ heavy heads back and forth. A half block away was an on-ramp to the freeway, and a steady stream of cars raced up the pavement to join the rush toward Los Angeles. From here, the freeway was a pleasant white noise, the rush of a river, the cascading of a waterfall.
She watched him read, his elbows on the table, his lips moving slightly as his eyes ran across the pages. The boy’s height, 6'3". Weight, 185. The liver weighed 2,551 grams. Heart, 346 grams, slightly above average.
She and Ben had met a few more times after the gang case, even after the case was closed and Ben had gotten his man, Ben asking her about evidence on open cases, picking her brain about shooting angles, time-of-death indicators, stuff like that, as though he wanted an education. Then they didn’t see each other for three years, until they were both on scene for a backyard pool drowning, after he and Rachel had moved back to Santa Elena. But it wasn’t until after his separation from Rachel that they started meeting for drinks; she made sure of that. They talked open cases, tossed around evidence on cold cases, played out hypotheticals on suspects’ motives. Sometimes the conversations turned serious. What is hate? What makes a criminal? Was it something physical, something she could pinpoint in the brain, in the size of the heart? He wanted to know if fear showed in the body, like physical scars in the tissue. It was chaste stuff, mostly, and she had almost resigned herself to her platonic role, when one drunken night five weeks ago he’d pushed the line.
“What is sex?” he had asked.
They had been clumsily dancing at the Reno Room, an old haunt of his from his Long Beach days, Ben plunking down quarters for old R&B tunes. The question caught her off guard, and she couldn’t tell at first if he was serious or flirting.
“The body’s reaction to physical stimuli,” she said, the two of them swaying to Marvin Gaye.
“What is sexual attraction?” he countered.
“The body’s reaction to an irrational feeling.”
He smiled. “No,” he said, his hand on the curve of her back. “No, it’s more than that.”
Then he bent down and kissed her, once, and the song ended and they stood there in the middle of the room, the sounds of the bar coming back to them.
“Any chance this was an execution?” Ben said now. “Any gang tats?”
“Would be a bad line in Vegas,” she said, shaking her head. “The boy’s prints are all over the gun; his thumb was bruised. He must have jammed it when the gun recoiled.”
A .45 caliber bullet. Meninges penetrated at right temple. Perforation of skull behind left ear. The description of the brain damage ran in her head. Intracranial hematoma. Ischemic cascade. She was beginning to hate medical terms: A half dozen years before, they felt comfortingly precise. Now they were beginning to feel deceptive, inaccurate in their scope of things.
“There was sperm?”
“Traces of semen in the underwear.”
“Any other signs of sexual activity?”
“No,” she said. “No tears, no bruising, no vaginal secretions.”
He was quiet for a moment, his index finger tapping the page in front of him, his lips tightening.
“Any signs,” he said, hesitating, “of unusual sexual activity?”
Cops, she thought, the fraternity of delicate sensibilities.
“No,” she said. “No signs of unusual sexual activity.”
“You checked?”
“Of course I checked. It’s not as unusual as some of us like to think.”
He took a sip of his coffee. Ben’s hand seemed to shake a bit. Maybe he was tired.
“A little in the underwear is not uncommon,” she said, “especially with teenage boys, if you know what I mean.”
He nodded and stared off at the cars in the parking lot.
“ID on the Colt?” she asked.
“Not yet. Slow as hell over there.”
“It’ll be faster,” she said, “when they get the computer database running. They say they’ll be able to analyze DNA.”
“Sounds like sci-fi bullshit to me.”