Crime Scene

by Jonathan Kellerman

  “Really?”

  She nodded curtly. “Every time.”

  “I do, too.”

  Another nod from her, different: approval.

  Trapped in a seam of ranch homes, sandwiched between an elementary school and a middle school, Homer Court was the last and smallest spur off crooked Chapman Way, lawns left to wither and two-car garages. Unfolding myself from the Explorer, I felt the sun twist in close, a microscope focusing down on us.

  My gaze lingered on the portable basketball hoop perched at the curb—sandbags crushing the base, backboard craning into the street.

  “I know, right?” Shupfer said. “Put it in the driveway, for God’s sake.”

  She meant for safety. Thinking about her own kids, dribbling in circles on the asphalt, hollering “car” and scurrying out of the way.

  I nodded, although that wasn’t what I’d been thinking, at all.

  I was marveling at how far away the rim looked.

  —

  THERE ARE SEVERAL reasons to feel nervous before a notification. People do shoot the messenger, and not just figuratively. A day like that one, brutally hot, tempts you to leave your vest behind. I never do. Better sweaty and alive.

  That’s rare, of course. Best-case scenario, I’m about to ruin someone’s day, week, year, life. If that notion doesn’t make you squirm, you lack the requisite sense of empathy and you shouldn’t be doing this job.

  A nasty paradox. Only a true psychopath could do notifications and not suffer any consequences. But who wants a psychopath informing them that their father is dead?

  Part of me always hopes the person won’t be home. In the middle of the day, in the middle of suburbs populated by dual-income families…

  Maybe we’d get lucky. The driveway was empty.

  We knocked.

  Silence.

  Shupfer tried again, louder.

  We went to the side of the house. I leaned over the gate, called toward the backyard.

  No answer.

  A neighbor confirmed that Melissa Girard lived next door. He ogled the Explorer and put on a concerned face and wanted to know why we were there.

  “It’s a courtesy call,” Shupfer said. “Nothing to worry about.”

  We returned to Melissa Girard’s house. Shupfer took out her card, wrote a brief note on the back, and made to tuck it into the doorframe.

  Behind us, a blue RAV4 pulled up.

  Shupfer returned the card to her pocket.

  The driver got out. She was gaunt and fair-skinned, peering at us through raccoon eyes as we came up the front walk toward her. I noticed a rear-facing car seat in back.

  Shupfer said, “Mrs. Girard.”

  The woman nodded.

  “I’m Deputy Shupfer from the Alameda County Coroner’s Bureau.” Talking clearly, not rushing, not dragging. Bearing truth, which is a kind of gift. “I’m afraid I have some bad news. Your father passed away.”

  For a moment, Melissa Girard did not react. Then she opened the back door and reached for the car seat.

  She unlatched it and hauled it out, her spine bent at a painful angle. Supermarket bags filled the footwells. No way was she going to be able to manage. I jogged over to help.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  The neighbor was watching us from his front window. Shupfer shot him a look and he vanished.

  We went into the house, into the kitchen.

  Melissa Girard said, “On the counter is fine, thanks.”

  I made space for the bags amid a litter of unwashed baby bottles.

  “Is there someone you can call to be with you?” Shupfer asked.

  “Why would I do that?”

  “It can help not to be alone,” I said.

  Melissa Girard gestured to the car seat. “I’m not.” She started to laugh. “I never am.”

  Still laughing, she began unpacking the groceries.

  The baby was a boy, about three months old, asleep with his head slumped on his chest. His shirt said I ♥ MY BIG BROTHER.

  Behind the fridge door, Melissa Girard said, “Was there something else you needed?”

  Shupfer nodded me from the room. I went outside to wait.

  —

  SITTING IN THE Explorer, I found myself thinking about Tatiana Rennert-Delavigne. She was my most recent point of reference, and I couldn’t help but feel the contrast between her response to her father’s death and that of Melissa Girard.

  I wondered if she was okay.

  I couldn’t come up with an excuse to call her. Remembering that Dr. Louis Vannen had never called me back, I did the next best thing. The old switcheroo.

  “Doctor’s office.”

  I repeated my spiel. As before, the receptionist would not tell me whether Walter Rennert had been a patient of the practice. She would deliver the message to Doctor, et cetera.

  “Right,” I said. “I called last week. Is Dr. Vannen around now?”

  “He left for lunch a few minutes ago.”

  “Can you look on his calendar and see when he’ll be free?”

  “He’s booked solid. All I can do is tell him.”

  “Thanks, then. Have a good day.”

  “You too.”

  Shupfer emerged. I leaned across to open the driver’s-side door for her.

  “Everything all right?” I asked.

  She shook her head, put the key in the ignition.

  “Should we wait for someone to show up?” I asked.

  Shupfer glanced at the house and thought it over. “I’m going to say no.”

  I said, “You mind if we take a little detour?”

  —

  TWENTY MINUTES LATER we rolled up to the medical building where Louis Vannen practiced. Shupfer cruised the lot along a row of reserved parking spaces. Three belonged to Contra Costa Urological Associates, the middle slot unoccupied.

  She found a nearby spot and parked nose-out.

  Shortly before one, a silver BMW coupe arrived to claim the reserved space. The brake lights shut off, and I stepped from the Explorer.

  “Dr. Vannen?” I asked.

  He paused, halfway out of his car. He was mid-sixties, sinewy and tan, sleeves rolled up on woolly forearms. He looked at me, at the Explorer, at Shoops, back at me. He stood up, erect and pigeon-chested. “Can I help you?”

  “Hope so,” I said, coming forward. “I’ve been trying to get in touch with you for the last week. I called your office a couple of times and they said they’d give you the message, but I was in the neighborhood, so I thought I’d drop by.”

  He made a forbearing sound, half chuckle, half cough: This guy. “It’s not the best time. I have patients waiting.”

  “It’s about a patient, actually. Walter Rennert?”

  A beat. Vannen bent into the BMW to retrieve his phone from the cup holder. When he came back out his expression had cleared.

  “Sorry,” he said, closing the car door. “I don’t have a patient by that name.”

  “You prescribed him some medication,” I said. “Risperdal.”

  He shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

  “Your name’s on the bottle.”

  “Then there’s been a mistake. Check with the pharmacy.”

  “Will do. Sorry for the interruption.”

  “Not at all. But I really do have to go.”

  “Sure. Thanks.”

  He strode off toward the building.

  “Dr. Vannen?”

  He turned around, annoyed.

  “You forgot to lock your car.”

  He stared at me, fished out his keys, jabbed the button. The BMW bleeped.

  I got in beside Shoops. “That was weird, no?”

  She started the Explorer. “Mm.”

  “What’s ‘mm.’ ”

  “What nothing,” she said, shifting into gear. “Mm. That’s all.”

  “Drive, please.”

  “Mm.”

  CHAPTER 8

  People keep their whole lives on their phones.


  Having a person in your contact list doesn’t prove that you have a real relationship with them. My own list includes names—Ike the Plumber, Plaid Glasses Girl—that I can no longer match to a face.

  At some point, though, I had reason to care.

  As soon as Shupfer and I got back to the office, I went down to Evidence to retrieve Walter Rennert’s iPhone.

  At my desk, I dug through my notes for Tatiana’s suggested passcodes. She’d written down four strings of four numbers. Kids’ birthdays plus Rennert’s own.

  I held up the phone. “Anyone know how many tries I get before it locks me out?”

  “Five,” Moffett said.

  Sully corrected him: “It’s ten.”

  Another tech, Carmen Woolsey, suggested I take it upstairs to the crime lab.

  “I don’t want to sift through a data dump,” I said, googling iphone wrong passcode. Sully was right: after ten incorrect codes, the phone would not only lock but erase itself.

  None of Tatiana’s codes worked.

  If I still wanted an excuse to call her, I had it.

  “Hello?”

  “Hi, Ms. Rennert-Delavigne. Deputy Edison from the Coroner’s Bureau.”

  She said, “Oh.”

  You could drive yourself nuts, trying to figure out the meaning of that “oh.”

  Oh it’s you. Oh great. Oh shit.

  I said, “I’ve got your father’s phone here and unfortunately none of the codes you suggested seem to be correct.”

  “…uh,” she said, “ah, hang…hang on.”

  I heard a chair scrape.

  “Is this a bad time?” I asked.

  “No. No, it’s fine, I…” She cleared her throat. “It’s fine. I meant to call you.”

  I tightened up. Let the yelling commence. “Okay.”

  “I wanted to thank you for your help,” she said. “With the…the funeral home.”

  “You’re welcome,” I said. “I don’t remember being too helpful on that count.”

  “Well—no. You were helpful in general, I guess. So thanks.”

  “Of course.” Possibly she hadn’t seen the death certificate and was still clinging to the idea of a homicide investigation. Or else I was right: she’d come to her senses, let it go.

  “The phone,” she said. “That means you’re still working on the case.”

  Shit.

  “The autopsy was completed last week,” I said. “There are a few loose ends.”

  “Like what?”

  Aiming for maximum vagueness, I said, “It’s a process.”

  “But you did do the autopsy.”

  “The procedure itself was completed. The full protocol’s not finished. I’m ready for those codes if you have them.”

  “I—right. I gave you birthdays, I think. What do you have?”

  I read back the list.

  She gave me another set of four numbers. “That’s their anniversary.”

  For a broken marriage? “What about your father’s own parents’ birthdays?”

  “I can’t remember them off the top of my head. I can find out and call you back.”

  “Or email me. My info is on the card I gave you.”

  “When do you think I can have it back? The phone. I’d like to get the photos off it.”

  “We like to hang on to it until the case is officially closed out.”

  “Do you have a sense of when that’ll be?”

  For a clear-cut natural death? A month. Two at most.

  “Tell you what,” I said. “If I can find a way into the phone, I’ll download the photos and get them to you. Does that work?”

  “That’s perfect. Thank you so much.”

  “Of course,” I said.

  “It’s not an emergency,” she said. “I want to have them, is all.”

  “I understand,” I said.

  Silence.

  She said, “I’ll get you those other birthdays.”

  —

  THE ANNIVERSARY CODE failed, as did the two additional codes she sent me the next day. With three attempts left, I’d had my fill of living dangerously. I went upstairs to Forensics.

  The IT guy took one glance. “You’re lucky it’s a 4S. The newer ones are a pain in the ass. What do you need?”

  “Everything. Calls, texts, browser history, pictures, video.”

  I returned to the office following my days off to find an email waiting for me.

  “It’s not super organized,” the IT guy said, handing me the phone and a thumb drive. “But it’s all there.”

  It was indeed. Rennert had opted for the sixty-four-gigabyte model, the most memory available at that time. Half of what you could get now, but still plenty of room for crap to accumulate over five-some-odd years, any shreds of useful information squirreled away in folders and subfolders and sub-subfolders, minus the typical user-friendly interface. It was like getting vomited on by the Matrix.

  With enough hunting, I found the contact list.

  “Shoops,” I said. “Come look at this.”

  She rolled her chair over. I’d highlighted a folder labeled LOUIS VANNEN, opened a text file containing Vannen’s email address, along with numbers for home and mobile.

  “So,” she said, “he lied.”

  “Yeah.”

  “So?” she said.

  “So he lied.”

  She glanced at me sidelong. “You said this case was a done deal.”

  “It is.”

  “Then why do you care?”

  “Because it’s weird,” I said.

  “Lots of things are weird. Zaragoza is weird.”

  “Heard that.”

  “Life is weird,” Shupfer said. “Death is weird.”

  Moffett said, “Deep thoughts, by Shoops.”

  “Why would Vannen lie to me?” I said.

  Shupfer shrugged. “Maybe he’s scared cause he wrote the scrip for recreational use.”

  “People take Risperdal for fun?”

  “People take anything for fun,” Moffett said.

  “True dat,” Daniella Botero said. “I had a friend in high school who used to get high on nutmeg.”

  “I didn’t know you could do that,” Moffett said.

  “Totally. You have to eat, like, a pound, though.”

  I said to Shupfer, “You’re getting someone to write you bogus scrips, you’re not gonna ask for Oxycontin?”

  She shrugged again. “Rennert was a shrink, he knew his own personal chemistry.”

  “Nutmeg,” Moffett said.

  “I don’t like it,” I said.

  Shupfer smiled, all lips, no eyes. “So don’t like it, princess.”

  She rolled back to her desk.

  I returned to my data dump. Rennert didn’t have a lot of photos, which felt consistent with the guy I was getting to know: solitary. I burned what there was to a fresh thumb drive, put it in an envelope addressed to Tatiana, and tossed it in my to-do tray.

  Someone came around, taking orders for a coffee run.

  “Pumpkin spice latte,” Moffett said. “Hella nutmeg.”

  —

  AT FIVE THIRTY I got my stuff together. Instead of dropping the envelope in the outgoing mail bin, I kept walking, toward the door, down the stairs, across the lobby linoleum, ripe with disinfectant. I waved to Astrid behind the reception booth glass and pushed out into the mild evening.

  Tucked in a peaceful nook, below a regional park, our headquarters is a smooth new concrete stack surrounded by California live oaks and a deep gully frothing with ivy, like a disused moat. I crossed the gangway to the parking lot, the handrail slick against my palm. Autumn in the pipeline.

  I stared down the prospect of the next few hours. Hit the gym. Stop at Chipotle. Go home and watch History Channel on demand. The big question was who I’d be spending my evening with. Would it be Jesus? Or Hitler?

  Throwing my bag in the backseat of my car, I drove to Berkeley.

  CHAPTER 9

  Tatiana Rennert-Delavigne lived
on Grant Street, near the Gourmet Ghetto, fifteen minutes across town from her father’s place. Her digs were more modest: the top floor of an orange, seventies-era duplex, a bit of an eyesore on an otherwise quaint block. The silver Prius shared the driveway with a two-tone Subaru wagon.

  Drop off the thumb drive.

  Leave without ringing the doorbell.

  Go home and watch my stories.

  I unbuckled my seatbelt and stripped off my uniform shirt. From my gym bag I took a can of Febreze, hoping to cover the skin of stench picked up on a ninety-second visit to the cold storage locker.

  Decomp. The smell of wrong, Zaragoza calls it—a persistent sensory stain, chewing up your sinuses, shellacking the inside of your face, hounding you for hours. One good whiff will destroy your operating illusions about the world.

  I doused myself with freshener.

  The car filled with fumes.

  I rolled the window down, choking and waving.

  Once the air cleared, I smelled fractionally better.

  Didn’t matter. I wasn’t going to see her, I was a delivery boy.

  I doused myself a second time.

  I took an old Cal sweatshirt from the gym bag and pulled it over my T-shirt.

  The man in the mirror: disheveled, bleary, and moderately foul.

  What a stud.

  The exterior stairs to Tatiana’s apartment were made of concrete, silent as I climbed to the second-floor landing. A small hinge-top mailbox hung from the siding. The lid squeaked as I raised it and dropped the envelope inside.

  I started back down to the street.

  Behind me, above me, a door opened.

  “Hello?”

  I turned.

  She stood barefoot on the landing, wearing leggings and a purple scoop-neck shirt, hair up in a bun.

  “Hi,” I said. “Didn’t mean to disturb you. I brought those pictures you asked for.”

  She blinked at me. “You didn’t have to do that.”

  “It’s no problem,” I said. “I was nearby.”

  Of course I was. I’d taken a five-mile detour to get there.

  “Anyway,” I said, pointing to the mailbox, “all yours.”

  She fished out the envelope, peered inside. “I guess they worked.”

  “Sorry?”