She took a drag of the cigarette as he read on. Musculoskeletal system. Urogenital system. When they left the Reno Room that night, she was determined not to go home alone. He strolled her the six blocks back to her place, the fireworks exploding above Disneyland, a police helicopter slashing a spotlight across Westminster streets, and when they got to the front door, she said, “I want you to come up.”
Five minutes later, her jeans and shirt were off, and his fingers were on the lip of her panties when she touched him through his jeans. She could feel him alive there, and she wanted him inside her. She worked the button loose. Now, now, now, she thought, and then he pushed her hand away. Cute, she thought, feigning hard to get, but she wasn’t in the mood for cute, for his ironic deflections. His fingers were hooked in her panties, and she raised her hips to help him slip them off. She touched him again, trying to get his zipper to peel apart, and he recoiled.
“I can’t do this,” he said. Then he was up from the bed, his back to her, his shirt already pulled over his shoulders. It happened so fast it took her a moment to register what was going on.
“You can,” she said. “You can do whatever you want.” She regretted that now, that willingness to give all of her body away.
“I can’t,” he said, his voice strangled in his mouth. “I’m sorry. It’s not you.”
“Oh, Jesus,” she said. “Be more creative than that, at least.”
“It’s really not,” he said. He touched her bare knee, though it seemed to pain him. “I can’t explain.” And then he was gone.
She took a shower after he left, sure it was the smell of her skin, all that death, all those opened corpses. She exfoliated, used a nail file to carve dirt from beneath her fingernails, washed her hair, and washed it again, and still when she got in bed she could feel the taint on her skin—the death, the rejection, the embarrassment of letting herself be so exposed. She almost called Tony, to satisfy her body, but her heart made its demands and she tossed in bed alone.
“He’d been drinking?” Ben said now.
“There was alcohol in his system. Difficult to say how much when he pulled the trigger.”
“He’d had some drinks, though? Not just the beginnings of decomposition?”
A gust of wind blew the birds-of-paradise, the necks tangling around one another. Natasha leaned forward and unwrapped the stems carefully, setting them loose and swaying.
“Seems so.” She lit another cigarette with the tip of the first and blew the smoke into the heat lamp.
“He must have been drinking with someone.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Some drink alone.”
He glanced at her but went back to the file.
“Why’d you stay through the autopsy the other day?” Natasha asked. “I know you can’t stand those things. Don’t even like to see me afterward.”
A woman leashed to a Labrador retriever sat at the table next to them. She tied the dog to the table leg and went inside the coffeehouse.
“Didn’t want to leave the kid alone.”
“That’s not it,” she said, glancing at his tapping fingers. “You know something, don’t you?”
He closed the report and went quiet. Together they watched the woman stride out of the coffeehouse. She unwrapped a chocolate muffin and set it on a paper plate in front of the dog. The Lab licked the sugar off the top and then huffed it down in one bite. Natasha rolled her eyes at him.
“No,” he said finally, but he was a terrible liar. Ben Wade was a window, when he wanted to be a wall. You could see through him, but into what? An open window that led into a dark room.
“I was just thinking about Emma,” he said. “How I wouldn’t want her to be alone, if it was her. It’s irrational, I know.”
She wanted to hate him, but there was an honesty in his lies. Most men would have swallowed their disgust in the face of an easy lay and gone through with it. She’d met enough of those guys, my God. The prettiest spin she could put on it was that he knew it meant something to her, he knew it was unfair to her if he wasn’t sure. Maybe that was being too generous, but she wasn’t prepared to hate him yet for the things he was unwilling to give.
“Excuse me?” the woman with the dog said to Natasha. “Can you smoke that somewhere else? The wind is blowing it right across my table.”
Natasha spun around. The woman was windshield-wiping a skinny hand in front of her nose. She was one of those pretty Santa Elena women, plastic pretty and easy to hate.
“It’s not your table, honey,” Natasha said. “This is not your shopping center, this is not your courtyard, and this is not your outside air. And you’re poisoning that poor dog feeding it chocolate. Theobromine. Destroys their organs.”
The woman muttered something under her breath, gathered her stuff, and huffed away with the dog in tow.
“God,” Natasha said. “I hate these people and their registered mutts.”
“No match on fingerprint records, dental?” Ben said.
“Nada.” She stubbed out the cigarette and lit another. “Some poor mother in Chiapas or Oaxaca thinks he’s sending her money this month.”
“I think the mother’s here,” he said.
She sat up. “You do know something.”
“I saw a woman the other day in the camp,” Ben said. “She was upset. She wouldn’t talk to me. No one would talk about the boy at all.”
“They never talk to anyone. You know that.”
“There’s an older man, a picker, protecting her.” He wrote something across the top of the report. “I think he’s the one who called it in.”
“The serial’s tipping, I know,” she said. “But I’ve been on three scenes now, and nothing about this one adds up that way.”
“A body hasn’t turned up in a dozen years in this town, and one just appears while this serial is running around? It’s all a coincidence?”
“This kid was outside,” she said, counting it off with her fingers. “Shot in the head, no marks on his neck, no crazy saying carved anywhere near the body.”
“So why doesn’t a mother claim her son?”
“She’s afraid of getting sent back,” she said.
“It’s something else,” he said. “A mother wouldn’t leave her son in a morgue.”
“It’s not her son anymore, and—”
“No.” He looked at her. “It’s always, forever, your son.”
She sat back in her chair, silenced by his glare. She couldn’t stand that, the way parents threw their sentiment in your face, the way they thought they understood more about the human heart because they brought children into this world.
“I meant,” she said, taking a deep breath, “that maybe there’s something else she needs to protect. Maybe she’s got no other choice.”
“Maybe,” he said. “Let me have a pull.”
She handed him the cigarette and he took a long drag on it. He left the filter wet, like all novices, and when she took her own drag she let her tongue press against that wetness.
“Oh, chlorine,” she said. “Chlorine in his hair follicles, some pool water in his lungs.”
“Saw that,” he said.
“He’s a swimmer.”
“Seems plausible.”
Seems obvious, she thought. Swimming was a big deal in Santa Elena. “Teenager, illegal,” she said. “Doubt he had access to a community pool. Maybe on the high school team.”
Ben nodded. “You seem pretty comfortable doing my job.”
“You get the shiny badge and the hot wheels.”
“Dime-store tin and a Chevy.”