by Daniel Pyne
“Guy at that number works in the California Attorney General’s Office,” Poole said. “Liaison to Justice. He’s going to get the Feds off your back.”
Mahrez took the note. Slotted it between his fingers.
“Sorry it took so long, I . . . well, city to run. You know.”
“What’ll it cost me?”
Poole smiled like a friend. “One autographed Tom Curren tri-fin Red Beauty.”
Mahrez didn’t reply. The dark weighed on them. The ocean thrummed. Poole sat down.
“You hear about Blanco?”
Mahrez said, “I did, yes.” He shifted the note from one hand to the other, to brace himself with a different arm. “And about Vic.”
Poole played dumb.
“I knew he was down there, somewhere,” Mahrez said. “You helped him disappear.”
“Vic?” Trying to sound convincing.
“I just didn’t—”
“I didn’t help anyone, I—”
“—I just didn’t know where.”
“No, no, man, you’re wrong. Vic died back in—”
“He’s dead, all right. Yeah. Was it you?”
Poole was all off-balance, suddenly sorry that he’d come. “What? God, no. Jesus. No.” He stared through the darkness at Mahrez, trying to read him, unable to stop the tumble of his thoughts out loud: “I thought maybe it was you.” He laughed, hollow, as if it made saying it okay.
Mahrez offered no reaction. “Good. Stay clean, Dicky.”
But Poole was spooked now. “The leak didn’t come from my office, Stix. I would never do that to you.”
That thrum of surf.
Mahrez nodded vaguely; he was done talking, Poole knew.
Another moment passed—was it a minute? Ten? Poole lost track—but at length he stood, brushed his slacks with blind hands and felt windblown grit swirl up in his face, then backed away, slowly distancing himself from his friend. He trudged reverse-course up the beach through the unhelpful soft sand and tufted salt grasses, troubled but, in the way of all politicians, able to gradually convince himself that everything was cool, crisis averted; he had the wind with him, up the long, steep wooden switchback staircase, back to his waiting car.
And Mahrez?
Stix crumpled Poole’s note.
Dropped it.
The north wind caught it, took it, tumbled it on down the beach.
Into the inviolable gathering of shadow.
PORTUGUESE BEND
JUNE 2016
1
IT MATTERED TO HIM that his cameras still made the old reflex noise. Flash and click. The romance of negatives and red-light darkrooms was gone, image itself had become fungible, but even in this digital world, the mechanical and the illuminative were forever bound.
What he saw through his viewfinder: the body of an adult male murder victim, facedown, legs split, arms thrown out, splayed awkwardly on polished travertine tile.
Steady. Light. Speed. Focus.
Flashclick.
Blood pooling, black.
Flashclick.
What he saw through his viewfinder: the usual horror show. Close-ups, medium, wide, details, disconnected, all but stripped of their meaning: hands, fingernails, feet, head, entry and exit wounds.
A rictus grin on the dead man, as if the joke was not on him.
One unseeing eye, canted sideways, peering into the void.
Loose-limbed, oddly graceful, the forensic photographer was freelance, a contract employee assigned to Long Beach Police Department’s Forensic Science Division, and he circled the victim, stepping carefully around the working crime scene technicians, circling tasteful furniture and taking his pictures with his brand-spanking-new retro-body Nikon Df and trying to avoid upending the quickly accruing evidence markers sprouting on the hardwood floor. Late twenties, restless, hair unruly, he had dark blue eyes his first girlfriend complained “saw too much,” and this had marked him and confused him because, to be completely candid about it, Finn Miller was always worried that he never saw enough.
Especially here, on scene, on task.
Late light through the big western windows washed liquid saffron through the minimalist Long Beach condominium; a desperate bleed of dying sun over the crazy quilt of rooftops that rambled to the sea.
In the living room shadows the police had in handcuffs, slumped against the wall, a small, stoic, square-shouldered woman who looked to be in her early twenties, wearing saggy desert camos, a blood-smudged Camp Pendleton T-shirt, and faded pink Converse high-tops. The cops believed she’d killed her husband with the service sidearm a crime technician was presently tagging and bagging as evidence. But of course nobody was saying that, they’d only just read her her rights.
“Victim is Charlie Ko, twenty-six-year-old male Korean-American. Some kind of salesman,” a big buzz-cut plainclothes cop whose LBPD lanyard said MEXICO was briefing the lead detective who’d found the gun. The name LENNOX graced the detective’s ID; he looked much better than the mug shot on it, imposing, pushing forty, hero’s jaw, and built like a tailback.
Finn had shadowed him down the hallway a few minutes earlier, past a children’s room with twin beds, neatly made, fluffy pastel throw rugs, drawings tacked helter-skelter on the walls, lots of stuffed animals. The little girls who lived here were loved.
In the master bedroom, Finn’s photographs would confirm the detective’s later written report that there was no sign of a struggle here, that half of the California king was unmade in such a way as to suggest only one person had slept in it, not two. Lennox had stood in the doorway and scanned the room and had noticed a smudge on the bottom drawer of the bureau against the far wall, a perfect blood-red thumbprint made by a small hand. And that was where he’d found, in the drawer, the military-issue Beretta 9mm that had been, it appeared, hastily and unsuccessfully tucked under a sweatshirt that Lennox, without acknowledging Finn was even there, had lifted so that Finn’s camera could verify the hiding place.
In other words, good detective work.
“Appears to have been shot twice in the chest at close range.” Mexico read from his notepad, stolidly, like a third grader. “His wife”—he gestured behind them—“Willa Ko, Marine Corps, active duty, she’s a gunnery sergeant, says she came home and found the body around quarter to five.”
Flashclick.
Bloody handprints: small, some smeared. Same size handprint as on the shirt of the deceased.
Lennox looked over and studied the suspect with professional indifference.
“Front entrance surveillance camera is nonfunctioning.”
“Mm-hmm.”
The sergeant finished, closed his book. Lennox nodded, and started toward his suspect, forcing Finn Miller to step aside as the detective crossed his path. Mexico then remembered one other thing he’d neglected to mention: “Neighbors heard gunshots, saw nothing.”
Lennox nodded imperceptibly, leaned against the wall, and let himself squat down next to Willa. His shoe leather creaked. “You need anything?”
A clipped soldier’s voice. “No, sir.”
For a moment, they both watched the forensics crew work. Then the soldier’s gaze dropped back to the floor and Lennox absently looked directly up into Finn Miller’s lens as he took a picture of them. No recognition, even though Finn had worked at least a couple dozen recent crime scenes where Lennox had been the lead. This didn’t surprise Finn, or bother him. His job was to be invisible in the slur of investigation and procedure a detective has to put behind himself once the case file is sent to the DA.
“Can you think of anybody who’d want to do this to your husband, Willa?”
“No, sir.” The girl soldier flexed her wrists against the twisty-cuffs. Numb, she blinked away tears and confusion, trying to hold it together. Finn raised his camera. Light silvered the trace trail of m
oisture on her cheeks.
“And you understand your rights, as they’ve been read to you?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Is there a lawyer you want to call?”
“Sir, I don’t know any lawyers.”
Lennox pretended to be sympathetic to this. “You know, I get it, I do . . .” Lennox made his play, soft, strategic. Finn had seen him do this before. His eyes shifted. He looked like he was thinking maybe he could wrap this up right here: “. . . Come home from your, what, second, third deployment? Discover the husband’s hooked up with another gal . . . ?”
Flashclick.
Lennox looked up again, irritated, but Finn had already turned back to archiving the minutiae of a murder. Bloody shoe prints with a Converse tread. A bullet hole that had ripped open the drywall.
“Boom,” Lennox said, gesturing. “BOOM.”
Willa said nothing. She rocked, and tucked her chin, and her hair fell over her face.
“You do what you’ve been trained to do.” Lennox shrugged. “Sure. It’s war. You’ve got the gun. And he started it.” He looked at her, sidelong. “You do what you’ve been trained to do.”
The soldier was completely shut down, blank, emotionless until the commotion at the front door. An older man, sixties, ruddy-faced and life-worn, with two little girls that the cop monitoring access to the crime scene was unable to keep back.
“We’re family,” the old man was saying. “That’s my daughter.”
“Sir, I need you to take the kids and stand—”
“Willa?”
Chaos. The girls slipped through. Ran first to the motionless body of—
“—Daddy?”
“Carly, no—Carly—Jade—”
Flashclick.
Finn Miller often experienced time as series of still-life vignettes captured, accumulated, camera rising and falling from his eye. Light. Speed. Frame. Focus. Brace. Shoot.
Often he wondered, did it make his days extended or compressed?
Flashclick.
Little girls stopped short by the lifeless crumple of their father veered away and found and mobbed their mother before anyone could intercept them. Raw emotions. Flummoxed cops. Lennox motioned for them to wait. Finn stood silent witness, behind his lens, to a life unraveling and a case coming together, which, in his experience, was always pretty much the same thing.
Forensic flags all over.
The guarded look that passed between the suspect and her father.
The sidearm.
The shiny black pools of blood.
And a bagged, burritoed body carried out.
Gunny Willa Ko, eyes clouded and sunken back, hands bound helpless behind her as they took her to be booked.
And her thousand-yard stare.
—
JOAQUIN SAID TO HIM, “Life is beautiful, huh?” He meant it to be ironic.
Finn replied, without irony, “I just take the pictures.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. You can say that, but don’t pretend there isn’t a cumulative cost.” The packet for the condo crime scene consisted of a hard copy folder of photos from the Long Beach murder shoot, which Finn had gone back to his studio to print—a few dozen trial-ready, well-lit, utilitarian, and successfully artless forensic eight-by-tens with a secure digital watermark, in the corner of each, unique to every forensic photographer’s camera. The accompanying memory card from the Nikon Df was labeled with date, time, and location; it got separately tagged and logged by rumpled, rail-thin Joaquin, a faux-hawked crime lab clerk who also happened to be Finn’s best friend. “That’s why I stay in the lab,” he added. Joaquin had social anxiety, to which he refused to admit; it kept him from fieldwork, except in those rare situations where the lab got stretched thin.
“The worst of this one was the alleged killer,” Finn admitted. “This girl who, she’s a soldier, but”—he took a moment’s reflective hesitation and shook his head—“she just sat there, dude. Wrung out. No expression. While everything she’d loved swirled away in front of her.”
Joaquin looked at him curiously. “What did you want her to do?”
Finn couldn’t put it in words, then wasn’t even sure why he had said anything about it to Joaquin, and wondered if the slow gathering of crime after crime, instead of numbing him, was rubbing him raw. “Never mind.”
Joaquin said, again, “This is why I stay in the lab. But. If I could make a small suggestion? It probably didn’t swirl, Finn. From the Celtic, meaning life itself.”
“What?”
“It probably fell short of, you know, totality. Swirling-wise.”
“Okay, stop.”
“Unless you’re drawing some cheap correlation to the onset of June gloom, which I fully support.” Overworked, short-staffed, and underfunded—in other words, typical—the Long Beach crime lab was bare bones; anything too complicated got sent to the big boys in Los Angeles on a favored-nations basis, which seven out of ten times meant interminable delays and repeated phone calls ignored. Joaquin touch-typed codes onto an evidence database spreadsheet on the old Dell computer, booking Finn’s photos into the case file, as he elaborated, as if it explained everything, “I’m talking about the endless repetition of what we on the Left Coast laughingly call weather, between April and September, morning marine layer; that gruel of gray pressing down, gloomy, day after day, cock-teasing us with the promise it will burn off in the afternoon, but, no, and suddenly it’s August, and you wake up and scratch your ass and wonder, fuck, what just happened?
“That swirl. Where because everything gets sucked into the vortex? There’s a name for it, I forget—low clouds sluicing out over the ocean and back, cycling round and round, and, the mistake is, when something comes around like that and repeats we begin to think there must be some connection with the last one, but it’s just today’s fog, no relation to yesterday’s, or last week’s, or last year’s, we’re just stuck in a meteorological GIF file, endlessly cycling, all four seasons in one day sometimes. And it wears on us. The illusion of continuity, of connections, of history, where what we really have is a random series of stolen moments, family, friends, distant relations, epigenetic links, and acts of violence, love, and madness strung together to make what we experience as life.”
“Thank you, Mr. Happy Sunshine,” Finn said, annoyed. “No, that’s not what I mean at all.”
As it was shift change, and Joaquin was punching out, their discussion spilled across the street and into the Palace of Justice, a cop bar famous harborwide for its inedible food and spotty service by surly waitstaff. Joaquin supped on bar mix he’d gathered from several shallow dishes, between gulps of the watery happy hour IPA Finn was half convinced was craft-brewed spillage sold on some shadowy dive bar beverage black market.
“Things are different under a microscope,” Joaquin said, having reached that point in every evening where he would float a new justification for his aversion to doing fieldwork.
“Yeah, they are,” Finn allowed, looking out, distracted, into the crowded bar. Arguing with Joaquin was fruitless, but Finn felt obligated to give some pushback. “There’s no people under a microscope, for one thing.”
“I love people. Are you kidding? I’m a people person. But. Things out there are weird and stupid and devoid of feeling, and there is no God. I mean, explain to this soldier girl who comes home from two tours of duty chasing neckbeards around the Peshawar—from that”—half of his thought garbled in a mouthful of nuts—“to this, and doesn’t . . . are you listening to me?”
“No.” Finn was staring, like he was poleaxed, over Joaquin’s shoulder, drawn by an argument on the far end of the noisy bar. Joaquin twisted around to look and saw the homicide detective named Lennox trading angry words with a leggy dye-job redhead in a little slinky black dress and strap-heel pumps that weren’t really meant to walk in.
“Ah,” Joaqui
n said.
“Who’s that?” Finn asked.
“With Lennox? Beats me. Girlfriend? Or fiancée. And don’t we hope she’s a ballbuster.”
Finn cracked a slight smile, but found he couldn’t take his eyes off the girl. “How can you be sure they’re engaged?”
“Well, I guess we could pretend that fat rock he just gave her is a friendship ring. White people still wear them, I think.”
Sure enough, there was a little box on the bar, and something glittering madly inside. “Since when does Detective Lennox go long with anything but his ambition?”
Joaquin laughed. “Zing.”
Something the woman said got Lennox all in a twist. Their voices raised, audible but unintelligible in the raucous bar. He barked back at her, sore, his features crimped and ugly, as if a mask had been pulled away and his true soul bared; he threw a twenty at his beer and stalked out, leaving the redhead fighting tears.
“Trouble in paradise,” Joaquin said, turning away, the show was over. “A betrothal no more than two brews old.”
“Could it be a trick of the light and the distance?” Finn asked, serious. “The way she seems.”
“The what?” Joaquin glanced at her again. She was really crying, now. “Seems?”
“Somebody should go talk to her.” The way he said it surprised even Finn.
Joaquin turned back to him. “No, they shouldn’t.”
But Finn was already up out of his chair and halfway across the floor.
She was hunched on the last stool at the far end of the bar. Her bare legs, crossed and angled, seemed impossibly long, Finn thought, maybe because she wasn’t that tall, and her eyes were green, or hazel, or brown. As he came closer, he got self-conscious, abruptly aware that what had simply been a reaction to seeing one more woman in tears now seemed, on approach, more in the neighborhood of a creepy skeeze-bar come-on by a total stranger, and the voice in his head kept murmuring: What the fuck am I doing? But he stepped up, didn’t sit, and asked softly, “You all right?”
She looked sidelong at him, head on one hand, eyes red. She frowned. “No. Yes. I don’t know.”
