“What?” she said.
“They’re ashamed,” Ben said. “It’s that shameful.”
“Jesus Christ,” she said. “The body wants what the body wants.”
“No,” Ben said, his voice sounding as if something was unfastening inside him. “The body confuses things, works against you.”
“What’re we talking about, Ben?”
He pressed the heels of his hands to his eyes. For a moment she thought he was going to swing open the door and let her in. “Suicide,” he said. “We’re talking about suicide.”
A rack of balls cracked in the corner of the bar.
“This kid,” Natasha said. “This Lucero kid was a swimmer, right?”
Ben emptied the vodka glass, let a piece of ice roll around in his mouth.
“Yeah,” he said finally.
“Wakeland was one of the witnesses the other night.”
Ben gestured to the bartender for another vodka tonic.
“You know what I want to know?” she said.
“What do you want to know?” Ben said, not looking at her, his voice low and strangled-sounding.
“I want to know why you haven’t interviewed Wakeland.”
“What is it you always say?” Ben said, turning to her. “You do your job and I’ll do mine?”
“You’re not doing your job,” Natasha said. “Wakeland should have been at the top of your list. There’s something else you’re not telling me.”
He stood up and slapped a twenty on the bar top.
“Ben,” she said, placing her hand on his forearm.
“Don’t touch me,” he snapped.
“Okay,” she said, lifting her hand. He wouldn’t look at her, his eyes shifting in his head as if he couldn’t focus.
“I thought you wanted to see me,” he said. “I didn’t think this was going to be some sort of interrogation. I thought we’d forget about all this stuff together for a little while.”
“Ben.”
“See ya,” he said, and then he was out the front door, a shadow against the traffic headlights.
—
HE DIDN’T REALIZE how drunk he was until he was on the 405 Freeway, four lanes clogged with swerving taillights. He pulled the truck into the emergency lane and rested his head against the steering wheel. He tried to recall his argument with Natasha, but only snatches of phrases rose to the surface of his muddied consciousness. It’d be easier if that serial killer had shot him. That was there; he couldn’t get that out of his head.
He rode the emergency lane to the Seal Beach exit and slow-laned it to the Pacific Coast Highway, the streetlights blurring off the ocean, the crashing waves like phosphorescent explosions. The moon was almost full, its light casting the beach a grainy white. He found the pair of board shorts and his fins tucked behind his seat, fumbled them on in the dark parking lot, and dove into the ocean. The moonlight spread a greenish glow across the surface of the water, but three inches down it was inky black and silent. The swells flowing and ebbing, his body carried through ropes of bladder kelp and winged rib. The swells lifted him closer to the moon, before crashing him to the sand. He let himself be taken and dropped, lifted and thrown, until he got his head back and the horizon attached itself to the sky again and he noticed, for the first time, bonfires on the beach like burning eyes cast in a strip of bone.
By the time he got home, at 10:46, the wind had torn loose the barn doors, the broken latches slapping the clapboard siding. He turned on the scanner in the barn—a robbery at a gas station, a drive-by in Little Saigon—and nailed the latch back onto the door. A dead frat kid at Cal State Fullerton choking on vomit in his sleep, but nothing about the serial.
Inside, Ben slipped the cassette of the killer’s song into the boom box and listened to it three times while he transcribed the lyrics. There was power in the song—the sneer of the voice, the rawness of the guitar—and he sat there staring at the lyrics, his body pulsing. There’s nothing in my dreams, just some ugly memories. Something had happened to this guy, something in his past. The power of the song, Ben realized, was in its anger. Yeah you’re gonna feel my hand. This wasn’t about getting off. This guy was angry, raging furious.
“273.5,” the box squawked. “Fourteen thirty-eight East Almond Avenue, Orange.” Some asshole beating his wife.
A copy of the Rancho Santa Elena World News sat on his desk, a picture of April, the most recent victim, smiling on the front page. She was so innocent-looking, much younger in the picture, her blond hair curling around her neck. Maybe she was a bitch in real life, maybe she’d hurt people, had affairs; maybe she drank too much or cheated on her taxes. But in this photograph she’d be forever innocent; the serial had transformed her into an angel beyond rebuke. Maybe the horror of her death had earned her that.
Ben turned the page to Lucero’s face. His smile was crooked, but he was a handsome boy, too handsome to seem innocent. There was something guarded in his eyes, something dissembling in his look. Or maybe Ben was imagining it. He ripped the paper in half and set their pictures side by side. April and her sparkling eyes. April and her blond hair. April and the lacy collar around her neck, like some saintly churchgoer. And Lucero, his dark eyes that hid something, the wave of slicked black hair, as though oil dripped down the back of his neck. Both dead, but their deaths didn’t seem equal; one seemed purer than the other.
That’s what Santiago and Lucero’s mother knew. If he’d been killed by the serial, Lucero would be transfigured into innocence, just like April. Ben knew how people thought about these things. A girl could be held down, overpowered. If it was a girl, it was a violent act, a rape. But a boy’s body couldn’t be so easily pressed into submission. Even if Ben could prove that Wakeland did to the boy what Ben suspected he did, people would forever look at Lucero’s face and see a faggot who must have wanted it. Blowing his brains out just made it worse. A selfish act, people would say. How could he do that to his poor mother?
Ben unlocked the rifle cabinet and found the box hidden behind his father’s bolt-action. It was dust-covered and unlabeled, sealed with duct tape. It hadn’t been opened in a decade or more, yet he’d taken it with him to his apartment when he’d entered the police academy; he’d carried it with him to their place in Marina del Rey and stuffed it in the attic; he’d packed it up again, too, into the back of the U-Haul that brought them here.