It had been a week since Lucero’s body was found in the field, a week of the boy lying here on this stainless-steel table. The boy was seventeen, had pool water in his lungs, chlorine in his hair follicles. Ben himself had said that Lucero was a swimmer. But Ben hadn’t interviewed Coach Lewis Wakeland. She’d done her job, but Ben hadn’t, not this time. Wakeland should have been at the top of his interview list. She couldn’t get over that, had thought about it all last night and was still turning it over in her head this morning. Ben always followed protocol, always filled out the right paperwork, always tied up every loose end, and it pissed him off when other cops didn’t do the same.
Twelve years ago, nearly two weeks after the boy took her up to Signal Hill for the “submarine races,” she had gotten up the courage to go to the Long Beach Police. It was a rape. She had been raped. The first thing they asked her, two uniforms hovering over her in an interrogation room, was: “What were you wearing?” The second: “Had you been drinking?” They took her name and number, but she knew as soon as she left the station that they weren’t going to do a damn thing about it.
After the police, Natasha spent three days in her dorm-room bed; Kris, her roommate, brought her soups from the cafeteria, thinking Natasha was sick. The police wouldn’t do their job, the police wouldn’t protect her; it had been terrifying, that realization. It was like a crack opened up in the fa?ade of the civil world, and she had glimpsed the chaos behind it. She had grown up in Santa Elena, and she had na?vely believed the world to be as safe as its organized streets. On the fourth day, she finally got herself out of bed and immersed herself in her studies. She spent whole days in darkly lit alcoves in the School of Medicine, in a corner behind the biology stacks in the Darling Library—and snuck into bed after Kris was asleep or stayed away completely, resting her head on the open pages of her quantitative-chemical-analysis textbook.
For weeks her body had throbbed—the inner part of her thighs (the gracilis); her hip joints (the acetabula), even the back of her knees (the popliteal fossa) ached. And it hurt where the boy had pushed into her, burned like alcohol dabbed on a cut—though there was no blood, no obvious lacerations or bruises. It was a ghost pain, the body offering no physical evidence of its cause. She had never been so aware of her body, never so conscious of the foundation of the pelvis, the way its crescent arc fastened her frame into balance. She read every textbook at least twice and even read the recommended texts and the texts cited in those recommended texts. The body broken down to its forensic parts, their functions and the myriad ways those functions ceased to function, and she came to understand that she was imagining the pain. Her body didn’t have a story to tell. That’s what took her three months to figure out. The pain was in her mind, in the realization that her body could be so quickly stolen away from her. Once she understood that she had let him take her mind, too, once she identified the cause of the pain as something irrational, the pain went away and she got her body back.
She’d thought about this last night after Ben stormed out of the bar. “Don’t touch me,” he had said. In her experience, that wasn’t something a man said to a woman. She thought about the night five weeks ago when they almost slept together. He had said it wasn’t her, and it was clear to her now that he had meant it.
She covered Lucero’s body now and slid him back into the cooler. The boy’s body wasn’t going to tell her anything she didn’t already know. The evidence she thought she was looking for could be washed away; the evidence she thought she needed was rotting in the dead tissue of the hippocampus, in the memory that couldn’t be accessed now. If family didn’t claim him soon, the county would incinerate the body and bury him in El Toro Cemetery, whatever story the boy could have told lost forever.
Midmorning, she cleaned up and told Mendenhall she had a dentist appointment. It was bullshit, of course, and Mendenhall knew it was bullshit—she hated dentists, hated their fingers and instruments rooting around in her mouth—but she never took days off and the paperwork was finished and no new bodies had been ambulanced in overnight, so he let her go, muttering some crude joke about gingivitis.
She idled through the midday traffic on the 5 Freeway and was at Santa Elena High School by 12:30. There were three black-and-whites on site, one at each entrance and another parked in the handicapped spot near the front steps of the school. They had almost caught the serial last night, and the city had the jittery energy of a place under siege. Three patrol officers stood at the top of the steps, one resting his hand on the butt of his revolver, as though the killer was about to ambush the students in broad daylight.
She wanted to talk to Coach Wakeland. When she had decided at 2:00 A.M. that she was going to look into this on her own, that’s what she wanted. She’d written down a series of questions at her kitchen table, but when she woke early this morning she was sure that was the wrong way to go. If Ben wouldn’t question Wakeland, then the darkness of the thing she needed to expose would never be willingly dragged into the light. This was not science anymore, this was not forensics, the body could not be cut open and measured into quantifiable truths. She needed to come at this the way firefighters fought a brush fire: set a backfire and push it onto itself.
She hadn’t seen Helen Galloway in nearly fourteen years, but the woman, at least twenty pounds heavier, psoriasis reddening the root edge of her gray hair, recognized her immediately.
“Sweetheart,” she said, struggling up from her chair and embracing Natasha. “Oh, sweetheart, it’s so good to see you.”
Helen was one of those rare people who had love for everyone. From this little office, a plague of benevolence infected the school—Tootsie Rolls even when you were late, gentle reminders that you were not the kind of kid who forged notes for absences, bear hugs and tissues when a boyfriend dumped you—and Helen became the unofficial counselor/den mother to the two hundred or so students who walked through the doors of the school.
“I’m sorry about your son,” Natasha said. She meant to call, to send a card, but she had—she was ashamed to admit it—let work get in the way of common decency. Teenagers, needy as they were, soaked up Helen’s unsolicited love and took it with them after commencement, and Natasha had done the same.
“He was a good boy,” Helen said, letting go of Natasha to perch back on her swivel chair. “I don’t even know why we’re over there. Why we send our boys.” She glanced at her son’s photo. “Sometimes it feels to me like I raised him only so rich old men in Washington could get him killed, like I’m a part of some sick farm system.”
“I can’t imagine,” Natasha said.
“But you’re not here to see me,” Helen said, straightening. “You’re here about the boy, Lucero.”
“I am.”
“I’ve been thinking about him a lot,” Helen said. “Since Ben was here.” Helen leaned back in her chair. “You’re a medical examiner, right?” she said. “Seems a bit out of your job description to be here talking to me.”
“My job’s to find out what killed the boy,” she said. “Ben’s is to catch the person who did it.”
“Sounds like he did it to himself,” Helen said, “according to Benjamin.”