“Serials never kill the right people,” she said. “I’d let them run wild if they did.”
The yellow pad was shaking in his hand, the chicken scratches on the page indecipherable. Natasha noticed before he could turn it facedown. She gently released the woman’s neck and touched his hands, cupping them in hers, steadying them.
“You need a rest,” she said, but he could see other questions in her eyes. She held his hands a moment, the latex cool and plastic-feeling. But her touch allowed him to breathe and he got his hands under control.
“Which house would be a good one?” she said, almost a rhetorical question.
“Not this one,” he said.
She let go of his hands and got back down on the floor to take pictures.
“No,” she agreed. “Not this one.”
And then she was talking to the woman again, whispers he could barely make out. He thought he loved Natasha then—or at least he felt something urgent like love. It wasn’t the first time he’d felt it, but the way the feeling hit him frightened him; it was pure need, utterly exposed.
“Why do you do that?” he said.
“Excuse me,” he heard her whisper to the body.
“Why do you talk to them?”
Natasha set the camera down and offered him the kind of patient smile reserved for the ignorant.
“A little kindness to take with them,” she said.
9
“IT’S SATURDAY,” BEN’S MOTHER SAID through the phone receiver. It was 7:46 A.M.
“Not today, Mom.” He sat up, found the NoDoz on the bedside table. He’d left the scene at 1:45, finished the paperwork nearing 3:00, checked the windows and doors at Rachel’s, and then sat in the barn until 4:30, putting away three beers while listening to the scanner. It was hard to sleep when you knew someone was out there, someone who would strike again. “We’ll go tomorrow.”
“It’s Saturday the twenty-fifth,” she said. “It’s circled on the calendar.”
There was no use arguing. If they didn’t go, she’d be agitated all day, even after she’d forgotten what she was agitated about. He took a shower, grabbed his case notes from the barn office, and drove the truck out to pick her up. By 8:45 they were parked in the lot beside Pacific Crest Cemetery in Orange, which was neither near the ocean nor situated on a crest but crammed between a strip mall dotted with taquerias and a cement wall that separated the cemetery from the rush of the Santa Ana Freeway.
“Yes,” his mother said, nodding. “I remember this place.”
Margaret was working at the seatbelt, her fingers searching around for the button. He softly took her hand and pressed the release and the belt came loose. “Oh,” she said, as though searching for words. “Oh.” And then her hand was pressed against her nose and she was crying.
“It’s all right, Mom. It gets stuck sometimes.”
When she calmed, he walked her by the elbow to the wrought-iron gate but stopped there and let her go on alone.
“The disrespect,” she muttered as she shuffled down the palm-lined path. He’d driven her out here the last Saturday of every month for the last six years, ever since Will Voorhees, Ben’s stepfather, had died of colon cancer. He wouldn’t join her at graveside, though, never had. “You better visit mine,” she said.
Ben got a coffee at a taqueria across the street and then settled himself in the cab of the truck. She might be there ten minutes or two hours, he never knew, and there was no use rushing her; she’d thrown a fit once, bombarding him with insults while other mourners laid flowers at gravestones. So he sipped the coffee and watched her stand sloped-shouldered beneath the swaying palm trees, conversing with a stone.
There was no plot of land for Ben to visit, no spot of grass he could speak to. Ben’s father had wanted to be cremated, his ashes sprinkled into the Pacific. He and his mother had walked the cheap plastic urn out to Abalone Point at Crystal Cove, just eight months before she met Voorhees, and poured the ashes in with the rockweed and gooseneck barnacles. But Ben wanted a monument, felt his father more deserving than Will Voorhees of something permanent.
Ben had never liked his stepfather, from the moment he met the man at New Life Mission Church’s spring picnic—and these visits always got Ben chewing on things that were long over. The Rancho had kicked Ben and his mother out of their house—no more employee of the Rancho Santa Elena Corporation, no more house. His mother found a one-bedroom apartment surrounded by a sweltering cement parking lot, and from the living room window they could watch backhoes dredge Moro Creek—a prime watering spot for cattle—to build a fifty-yard-wide “greenbelt.”
On the ranch, Margaret had always been up before Ben and his father, frying eggs and beans and wrapping orange wedges in napkins for the ride into the hills. On the ranch, she could rope a calf at full canter or reach inside a cow to deliver a breech calf. But she had no degree, not even a high school diploma, no skills that would serve this new California. She had been raised in Orange by a domineering man who worked in a glass-bottle factory, a man who taught his daughters to be quiet, to look pretty, to marry up in the world. A cowboy made little money; a cowboy had a tiny Social Security pension that barely covered the rent and left just enough to purchase butter and salt and thirty-nine-cent spaghetti from the new Lucky, with its piped-in music and bleached checkered floors.
So five months after being evicted from the ranch, five months of rejected job applications, five months of buttered pasta, Margaret took her pretty self to New Life Mission Church. Dresses she hadn’t worn in years fit her again. She grew two inches in high heels. Her hair curled around her made-up face like the tendrils of a vine. On Sundays she and Ben walked the quarter mile to the church. Inside, skylights cast desert light across the wooden pews, light that lit up the curve of Margaret’s calf at the crossed knee, light across the triangle of skin that fell into her blouse. They prayed and they sang and the minister spoke about sins of the flesh, sins of the mind, sins of the heart, sins of the appetite. You sneezed, it was a sin.
At the spring picnic, Ben and this girl Elizabeta had run off while the adults played a game of volleyball. Ben dreamed about Elizabeta—her coiled black hair, the question mark of her back, her accented English, which made his full name sound like something exotic. In the courtyard after church, they’d sip lemonade together and tell stupid stories about kids at school, but mostly they just sweltered in the heat of each other’s gaze. They found a spot to be alone behind the plastic geodesic-dome gym on the edge of the duck pond. There Elizabeta agreed to show him her new bra. It was embroidered with tiny flowers, and through the blooming center of one he thought he could see the darker skin of Elizabeta’s nipple. Fair is fair, so he unzipped his pants and showed her his penis—just a quick look, because she’d never seen one before and her older sister, back from college, had told her they were gross.