“That’s your church?” I said, coming back to the living room.
“I go when I can,” she said.
I handed her the glass. “Lemme ask you about something else: those people from the experiment.”
Her face pinched. “What about them.”
“You said they wanted to help.”
“That’s what they said. They came to the high school, passing out flyers. Julian was all excited, begging me, ‘Can I please, Mama.’ I said, ‘What these people going to do to you?’ I didn’t want them giving him electric shocks or nothing.”
“What did they do?”
“He told me he got to play video games,” she said. “He says he goes and does this experiment and also they gonna help him with his homework. You know, tutoring. He needed the help. The school already made him repeat the year. So, okay, I said.”
“He played video games, and they gave him help with school? Anything else?”
“That’s what they said they were gonna do. But I didn’t see none of that. Later I heard that the man, he said there was two groups, one got the tutoring and the other didn’t get nothing. I say that’s some bullshit.” She paused. “They fed him, though.”
“Fed him.”
“He said the man got him a burger. He liked that.”
Rennert passing out McDonald’s bags: life at Tolman Hall had improved since the days of free Oreos. “Nice of him.”
She stared at me incredulously. “You think a hamburger makes up for what they did?”
I was quick to agree that it did not.
“It was them made him crazy,” she said. “He was normal before that.”
She seemed to believe it, too. A game had driven her son to violence. Because that was easier than the alternative, that a terrible crime had spilled forth from some poisonous well within his being.
Either way, she wasn’t denying he’d done it.
I said, “After he got out, did he ever talk about the people from the study?”
“Like what?”
“Was he mad at them? Talk about wanting to get revenge?”
“Julian didn’t get mad,” she said. “He got scared.”
“Scared of what.”
“Himself,” she said. “People look, they see that big body of his and think the wrong things. I never seen a boy so scared his own shadow. I get scared, too, thinking about him out there, on his own. I just pray God keeps him safe. Nothing more I can do.”
“Is that where you think he is? On the street?”
She shook her head, dejectedly. “I don’t know.”
She yawned twice. “I’m tired, Mr. Edison. You made me tired.”
I stood. “I’m leaving you another card. Maybe you’ll like it better than the first.”
The barest smile. Another yawn.
“Ms. Triplett, if you remember anything, think of something else that might make it easier for me to find Julian and help him, please give me a call.”
“Coroner,” she said. “You sure he ain’t dead?”
“Definitely not,” I said. “We do other things, too.”
She said, “Hmm.” Reached for the remote control.
CHAPTER 20
Dwight Baptist Church was on my route home, a brick cube dressed up by a small steeple and an iron cross.
I rang the doorbell and spoke to an elderly lady in a smart navy suit who bid me please wait outside. The Reverend D. Geoffrey Willamette’s name presided atop the letterboard. Tacked below the schedule of services was a poster for an upcoming event called Get Woke, Stay Woke: Empowering Our Youth! There would be free food, a DJ, a dance contest, a winter coat drive, a poetry slam.
There’d be a moment of silence to honor two young men, victims of gun violence. I recognized their names.
The woman returned to show me to the pastor’s office.
Rail-thin, bald, in his sixties, Willamette greeted me with an open face, an open hand, a broad pleasant baritone that offered me a seat and a cup of water.
I accepted both and watched for a shift in demeanor as I explained who I was and why I was there. Employing the soft fib I’d told Edwina Triplett: main gig with dead people, but additional duties.
“How is Sister Edwina?” he asked. “I haven’t seen her here in too long.”
“She said she comes when she can.”
Willamette chuckled. “I suppose she does. Which makes it my responsibility to seek after her.”
“She could stand a checkup at the doctor.”
“That’s good to know. I’ll arrange for it. I try to keep tabs on people, but things escape me. I used to be better at storing it all up here.” Tapping his temple. “Nowadays, unless it’s in front of my eyes…It pains me to think how much suffering might’ve been avoided, if I were a more diligent man.”
“I wouldn’t blame yourself, Reverend.”
He smiled. “Got to blame somebody. Might as well be me. As far as Julian is concerned, I haven’t laid eyes on him for a long, long time. That pains me. The boy needs a certain degree of support to function.”
“What kind of support?”
“The kind that only a community can provide.”
“His mom said you got him a job here.”
He nodded. “I’m not ashamed to admit that my motives were strictly charitable.”
“Why would you be ashamed to admit that?”
“Because in the end, charity is patronizing,” he said. “I gave him that job to keep him out of trouble. I never suspected he would be any good at it.”
“But he was.”
“More than good,” Willamette said. “He had a talent.”
“For?”
“Fixing things.”
The first kind words anyone had had to say about Julian Triplett.
Willamette tented his fingers. “Let’s agree, Deputy, at the outset, that he did a grievous wrong. Nevertheless he lives, he is a man, and he is free to make choices. So the question becomes: What will make a better world for him and everyone else? Tormenting him? Turning him into an outcast? These are the very forces that pushed him toward darkness. Whom do we serve, by serving the past? It’s my belief that every man retains within him the light of God, just as each one of us who professes virtue bears the taint of sin. Julian revealed to me his godly spirit. For me that’s reason enough to say: Praise be.”
“Did he ever express remorse for what he’d done?”
“He didn’t often voice his thoughts.”
“So that’s a no.”
“He has a unique mind. Whether he repented in his heart, I can’t say. But he never gave us any problems.”
“Did you encourage him to repent?”
“I encouraged him to concentrate on building a worthy future.”
“By fixing things,” I said.
Willamette rubbed the top of his desk. “Before I was called here, I had a prison ministry. Seven years. I looked into the faces of hundreds of men, some of whom had committed unspeakable acts. Comparable to Julian’s. Worse, if you can imagine.”
“I can.”
“We must not be afraid to call evil deeds by their true name. By the same token, we must not be so vested in our own righteousness, so afraid of appearing weak to ourselves, that we deny goodness when it rises from the ashes. Many of those men were little more than frightened boys themselves.”
“That’s what Edwina said about Julian.”
“It doesn’t excuse him, of course. What I hoped for was to get him on the right path, so that he could exceed the sum total of his history.”
I said, “What sort of things did he fix?”
“Whatever we needed. Drywall. Gutters. He installed those bookshelves.” He chinned at me. “He made that chair you’re sitting on.”
I tensed, feeling the imaginary pressure of Triplett’s hands on my back, my legs. Willamette didn’t seem to notice, and I forced myself to relax.
“I don’t want to give you the impression that I took him on as my personal carpenter,” Willamette said. “
He was always paid fairly for his work. But the good it did went beyond that. It nourished him to create.”
I glanced at the bookshelves: straight and true, with tidy corners, the wood polished to a satin luster. “Where’d he learn to make furniture?”
“He picked up the basics while he was incarcerated. When I saw that he had a gift, I arranged for him to take private lessons with a gentleman I know, a friend of mine who’s a superior craftsman. Are you familiar with the Urban Foundry?”
I was: an industrial arts school in Oakland’s warehouse district, not far from the old Coroner’s building.
“My friend gave Julian permission to use their woodshop in the off hours, so he could go in and work on projects of his own.”
While I admired the reverend’s capacity to see decency in everyone, I did question the logic of granting a convicted murderer—who’d stabbed a woman to death—unsupervised access to a room full of sharp tools.
“May I please ask your friend’s name?”
Willamette looked me in the eye. “I’m sharing this information with you on the understanding that your goal is to help Julian.”
“You said it yourself, Reverend. It’s better if he’s not out there in the wind.”
A beat.
“Ellis Fletcher,” he said. “He’s retired now but I believe he comes in every now and again to teach.”
“Thank you.”
Before leaving I stepped back to have a look at the chair. Mahogany, delicate spindles at the back, sinuous legs, carved claw feet. Far more sophisticated than the shelves.
“Amazing, isn’t it,” Willamette said.
I nodded. The finish on the seat had rubbed off over the years, leaving a blond center surrounded by a dark, reddish corona that reminded me of dried blood.
“Julian had big hands,” Willamette said, touching one of the spindles. “Huge. Like those foam fingers they wave at sporting events. You’d never think a man with hands like that could produce such delicacy. It speaks to an underlying gentleness.”
I said, “Thanks for your time, Reverend.”
—
THAT EVENING I took a walk down Grand Avenue, got myself a bento box and a kombucha to go. I sat on my couch and started to put my feet up on the coffee table.
My phone rang with an unfamiliar number.
I set my food aside, wiped my hands on my pants. “Hello?”
A deep voice said, “This is Ken Bascombe. I heard you were looking for me.”
“Oh. Yeah. Hi. Thanks for getting back to me. Did Nate Schickman fill you in?”
“He said something to do with the Zhao murder. You’re with the Coroner?”
“That’s right. Clay Edison.”
“Tell you upfront, Clay, I’m glad that shit’s over and done with.”
“Bad one,” I said.
“The worst,” he said.
I told him about Linstad’s death; about Rennert’s.
“Rennert has a daughter who’s local,” I said.
“Okay,” he said. “And?”
“Triplett’s out there, walking around. I can imagine he’s carrying some ill will.”
“You think he’s coming for her?”
“Just covering my bases,” I said.
“Uh-huh. Well, I mean, the guy’s a fucking psycho, so…You’re saying Rennert had a heart attack, though.”
“No question.”
“First I heard about Linstad kicking it, either. He fell down the stairs?”
“It was ruled an accident.”
“Accident’s an accident,” he said. “Unless you guys changed your policy since I left. When’re we talking about, anyway?”
“Linstad was in oh-five.”
“I was gone by then.”
I asked how long he’d been with Berkeley PD.
“Eighty-one to ninety-seven.”
“You know when Triplett got out?”
“He was scheduled for release in oh-two. Everyone was pissed. We wanted him tried as an adult. I mean, shit. We’re talking premeditation, lying in wait, some serious fucking animal brutality. Adult doesn’t apply in that situation, when does it? You know how it goes around here. Get some idiot judge, find the soft spot, press on it, boom, Triplett’s a victim.”
“Of what?”
“Society. The Man. The fast-food conspiracy. Listen, I’m not gonna sit here, tell you the kid wasn’t holding a shitty hand. He’s got an IQ of about eighty. He can barely read. I have to walk him through the Miranda sheet one word at a time. Lousy deal, no question. Dad’s AWOL, mom’s fucked up outta her head on dope twenty-four seven.”
“She seemed okay to me.”
A slight pause. “You talked to her?”
“I went over to see if she’d clue me where he’s hiding out.”
“Ah-huh. Lemme guess, she didn’t know.”
“No. She looked clean, though.”
“Good for her. Maybe she did a twelve-step.” His laugh was harsh.
“What did she use?”
“Crack. The PD uses that to sob-story. Has people coming in and saying Triplett’s a nice kid, wouldn’t hurt a fly. I get, it’s the job, but enough is enough. He’s hearing voices telling him to hurt people. He needs to be off the street.”
I said, “Voices.”
“Oh yeah.”
“His mom didn’t mention anything about that. Neither did his old pastor.”
“Pastor,” he said. “You all over this motherfucker…Yeah, voices. Talk to him for two minutes—you don’t have to be a fuckin psychologist to understand he ain’t right. What do those guys do anyway, complicate simplicity. When we wanted to adult Triplett, the court ordered an eval. The shrink says he can’t hack it at juvie, needs to be hospitalized. Okay, off he goes to the hospital. They put him on meds. Bingo! All better. Now he’s not crazy anymore. Now he’s a nice boy. Back to juvie. In juvie, he doesn’t get his meds. So now he’s crazy again. Back to the hospital. It was like that for eight, ten months. You get the picture.”
“I read your interviews,” I said. “Thorough. Sometimes it’s hard to tell if he’s acting strange cause he’s nervous, or a kid, or whatever.”
“Nervous? He was crazy,” Bascombe said. “Half the stuff he said’s not in there, it gets impossible to follow the thread of the conversation. He’d go on about all sorts of shit.”
“Like what?”
“Specifically? Christ, I don’t…Okay. This I remember. He said the girl disappeared. Like, he stabs her, and—poof.”
“Yeah, I read that.”
“I mean, come on. Listen—what is it, Ed?”
“Edison.”
“Edison. You ever work homicide?”
“No.”
“Patrol?”
“Some. Before the Coroner I was mostly at the jail.”
“Jail, huh,” he said drily. “Well, trust me. Whatever Triplett said, it was nothing special. We’re talking about Berkeley, okay? I spent half my career talking to people who believe aliens ate their dog. It’s noise. You learn to cut through it. But the eval made an impression on His Honor. Then you get the so-called expert witness banging on the table about this fucking experiment, he’s vulnerable, he’s triggered, blah blah.”
“Video games.”
“Right. Some shoot-em-up dealie they showed the kids. I think my son had it on Nintendo. I guess I should count myself lucky he didn’t kill nobody.” He laughed. “There you go. You know what you need to know. Remind me your name again.”
I said, “Edison.”
“Edison. Okay. Well, Edison, don’t work too hard,” he said. “Trust me on that.”
CHAPTER 21
Back at the office, I worked as hard as I could, but my head was elsewhere. Moffett and I took a callout for the 42nd Street overpass in Fruitvale—John Doe, indeterminate age, indeterminate race, in a state of advanced decomposition. Autopsy would have the final word, but a cursory inspection showed no signs of violence.
He had simply died, rotting in place be
cause there was no one around to witness it, let alone help.
As Moffett and I crab-walked around the body, hacking, waving our hands to bat away the rising chimney of stink, I could not escape the thought that this could be Julian Triplett. Or someone who knew him. Or the person he could, would, become. Eventually. Inevitably.
If you’d asked me several months ago how I felt about such a case, I would’ve answered: Sad but not surprised. Now I listened to the traffic thundering along 880, thousands upon thousands of people pushing on overhead, oblivious to what lay below them. Moffett tried to adjust the corpse’s arm, and a patch of skin sloughed free like the peel off a boiled peach. Behind his mask his features contorted in disgust, and I found myself filled with despair, and frustration, and anger.
We’d take this remnant of humanity, weigh him, stick him in the freezer. Tell someone he had passed, if someone could be found who cared.
So what?
In six-plus years on the job, I’d never questioned my purpose. I took the bad with the good because what I did was, foremost, necessary. That perfect fit, that sense of sealing airtight a crack in society, gave me deep satisfaction.
A setup man.
Now I felt pushed up against the limits of my mandate, and I had a sudden and awful premonition. Saw myself slide toward a darker state, where the work wasn’t necessary, let alone fulfilling; just a temporary relief from uncertainty.
The question marks awaiting all of us.
“Earth to dude.”
I snapped to. “Sorry.”
Moffett shook his head. “One, two, three, up.”
We rose.
—
ON MY NEXT day off, I drove over to Cal.
What I’d told Tatiana was true: I did come by every so often, to use the gym. But it had been years since I’d stepped foot in the psych building.
Sneakers chirping on linoleum.
Bulletin board soliciting human subjects.
One elevator out of service. Did it ever get fixed?
That things hadn’t changed one bit was less charming than terrifying: long before I’d arrived on campus, the structure had been condemned as seismically unstable.
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