Origin

by Diana Abu-Jaber

  “Do you ever think about not being a detective anymore?” I ask, thinking of Sylvie. The wind blows strips of hair over my eyes; I toss my head, but the hair blows back.

  He watches me a moment, then pushes the pieces of hair off my face. “All the time,” he says. “But there’s nothing better.” He leans over and kisses my neck, then pulls back, as if I were the one who’d just kissed him. “Sorry,” he mumbles.

  We duck under the police tape and approach the north wall of the house. They’ve secured a side door for entry and we pull on coveralls they keep in a pile at the door. A young officer stationed at the door is startled to see early investigators—he doesn’t appear to quite believe that we’re meant to be there even after we’ve shown him ID and he’s logged our names. I can feel his gaze trailing after us as we enter the house, pulling on masks and gloves. I resist glancing back at him and focus instead on the corridor in front of us. The light from the officer’s lamp barely touches the hallway before dissolving away; the rooms beyond look like underwater caves, full of glistening night. The house is overfurnished—there’s a stuffed bench, framed mirror, hooks and shelves, coat rack, glass wall sconces, and wrought-iron base lamp, just within the first ten feet of the side entrance. I can see the shapes of dressers and couches haunting the other rooms. Keller reaches for the light switch, but I ask him to wait. I hold my flashlight trained at the ground, to check the terrain. Then I switch it off.

  This baby, Miranda Abernathy, died in the early morning. The medical examiner has not yet pinpointed the exact time, but we know it happened before her mother woke to a “too-deep” stillness at five a.m., as is stated in the officer’s report. I try to imagine myself awakened by silence, the chill tang of the floor under my foot as I walked the corridor, looking for my baby.

  Keller drifts behind me, the beam of his flashlight skirting my feet. He’s checking out my examination style, but it doesn’t bother me. In fact, it feels companionable to know this man is just a few feet away, the warmth of his kiss lingering beneath my ear.

  At the door to the nursery, I motion to Keller to wait. I close my eyes for a moment, waiting for my night vision to sharpen up. The crib’s still in the room; numbered cards are propped beside the foot of the crib and inside the crib’s railing on a rumpled blanket. There are shelves built into the wall and heaped with soft toys—button-eyed dolls, a blue rabbit, a fuzzy white bear—all of them look a bit archaic, like toys from a previous generation. This is not a pristine death scene—someone tidied up. The crib itself has a sleek, alien look to it: the bars and legs are made of some sort of steel and the sides are partially glass so the baby is visible from any angle. It looks like something from Mars: here the baby floated trapped in sleep. Something ghostly stirs over the bed, and I step back. Then I realize it’s a mobile—wooden clowns with ethereal faces, cantilevered on wires, set to drift over the baby’s head.

  Miranda—her image comes back to me from the case photo—not three weeks old. For a moment, I seem to see her there, her eyes an opaque blue, her face and hands still ruddy from birth. This baby slept—I see it clearly, gazing down into the blankets—on her back, hands perched just above the blanket, curled over the top of it. Her tiny face turned to the side, a pale rose, fallen on the blankets. Her feet curved and round.

  Keller stands close to me: “Lena, you all right? What is it?”

  I say, “Watch your eyes,” and flick on the light switch beside the crib.

  “Did you see something?” he fiddles with the surgical mask.

  “It—this bed. It’s so strange.”

  He circles it. “It is weird. It’s a hospital crib, isn’t it? Like in the ICU.”

  “Why would they keep their baby in a hospital bed? Was she sick?”

  Keller pages through the folder. “According to the officer’s report the Abernathys were . . . very concerned parents. Looks like they took child care to, like, sacrament-level. Both parents were in their late forties . . . didn’t think they could have kids. Whammo, the miracle of modern science.”

  “Her first pregnancy?”

  Keller nods at the report, “She was forty-eight. She wasn’t going to let anything happen to this baby.”

  I nudge the mask strap tighter behind my head. “Does it say anything about the father?”

  Keller nods absently, reading, then lifts one shoulder, lets it drop, “He picked out the nursery stuff, crib, toys, bought a baby monitor camera.”

  I open my kit, squat over it a moment, thinking. “Is there a tape or something? Is there a recording of what happened when the baby died?”

  Keller ruffles through the notes again. “Parents say the camera quit working—it was supposed to be on an automatic timer to record the baby’s sleep every night, but it cut out after the first couple of recordings.” He turns a page. “They were planning to trade it for a different model. Didn’t get the chance.”

  I crouch low and eye the steel bars closely. The crib emanates a burnt odor: a familiar stroke of revulsion. I take a gulp of air—for a moment I think I may have to leave. Keller stands close enough that I could brush his shoes with my fingertips.

  I breathe through my mouth; I’ll get these prints if they exist. No one’s dusted in here yet. Frank, it appears, has been saving this for me.

  I feather the tip of my brush into a tin of dark green powder, good for showing up against metal. I start twirling the brush at one end of the topmost railing, working my way toward the other. A series of smudges, marks, and ridge detail starts to appear under the dust deposit. There are several partial prints—the heel of a palm, the side of a finger—but midway on the railing, perfectly preserved, three simultaneous prints emerge in bas relief—the index, middle, and ring—just like the other set Frank had shown me. They stand out, eerily complete—just as if someone had deliberately planted them—a private message: To whomever collects the prints. I stare at them—I know they’ll match the other prints, a taunt—from someone bold enough to flaunt their identity.

  THE SKY IS TURNING to a faded gray by the time I’m about finished lifting prints. The attending officer has drifted by the room a few times to watch—I feel his gaze on the back of my neck. Keller murmurs something. I don’t even turn around, intent on finishing before any of the other investigators show up.

  I apply the low-tack tape to each print, then carefully peel the intricate latent prints from the crib. I work in silence, mounting each piece of tape to an acetate sheet, affixed to a backing card. Each of these cards is placed in a separate evidence bag. The rising light in the room makes me anxious. Wisps of sound travel through the room—a breath, the sigh deep in the floorboards of an old house.

  We check out the master bedroom next. The room is furnished in modern minimalist pieces—a broad, low platform bed, wooden ceiling fan, and teak dressers. I notice a jumble of wires and electronic equipment on top of a tall bureau in the corner.

  “Looks like the broken monitor,” Keller says.

  Sifting through the pile, I find the camera. I try the eject button and it whirs and shudders like something’s stuck. Keller digs a straight edge out of my kit and slides the tip under the cassette door. It pops open, presenting us with a tape.

  “Let’s just check it,” I say.

  We bring the bagged cards to the officer, who is sitting on the bench in the entryway reading the Post-Standard and sipping a tall, black coffee in a Styrofoam cup—steam still curling up from its lip—an open bakery bag next to him.

  He takes the bags grudgingly, still scrutinizing us. “These have to go to Frank Viso at the Crime Lab for analysis,” I say, not very confident of the guy’s competence. I fumble with the straps to my mask and peel it off.

  The cop shrugs. “You can run them over there,” he says.

  “For God’s sakes.” I struggle with the zip to my coveralls. “They have to be logged correctly.�
� I yank at the zipper.

  “Wait.” I feel Keller’s hand at my nape. He tugs the zipper up once, sharply, then unzips to my waist. “Take it easy,” he says.

  The young cop looks at me out of the corners of his eyes. “Do you think it’s terrorists?”

  “What?”

  “Killing American babies. Don’t you think it’s those religious freaks?”

  “Great theory, man,” Keller says. “I think you might be on to something there.”

  I step out of the suit. “Is there a way we can watch this here?” I hold up the tape.

  Now the guy hops off his stool. “Hell, yeah.”

  THE THREE OF US stand in the dark living room, watching as the image drifts in and out of static, the tape tucked into a player connected to the TV. At first there’s just a mess of blipping screens—a date and time stamp comes up twice—December 11, 8:03 p.m., December 12, 8:05 p.m. There are periods of white static intercut with images of a baby sleeping, a pair of hands—tiny and neat, an immense engagement ring—easing the baby onto her back. No sign of a blanket or any toys in the crib. Then the screen goes blank. The officer twists his neck from side to side, cracking the vertebrae. We stare at the screen a moment. “Well, okay, then,” the officer says and wanders back to his post.

  I can hear the machine’s still running, and when Keller leans toward the tape player to shut it off I stop him. I wait, gazing at the empty space. I’ve learned to expect nothing, to let the evidence come to me. Several minutes pass this way, watching nothing. Distracted, Keller strolls to the doorway. And then there’s another burst of static, then a sharper black and white image of the baby sleeping. Keller returns quickly. “The camera kicked back in?” Something at the side of the screen moves forward in stop-time jerks—a pair of hands. They’re long, big-knuckled—difficult to see clearly on the grainy video. They tuck a blanket in around the baby’s mouth and nose.

  “One of the parents?” Keller asks.

  As the hands reach forward, something swings into, then back out of, the frame. “What was that?” I ask Keller. “Can we back this thing up?”

  He rewinds the tape and we watch it swing again and again, until finally he manages to freeze the image just as the item is stopped in midair: a tooth on a string.

  CHAPTER 27

  KELLER DRIVES ALONG THE EDGE OF THE UNIVERSITY DISTRICT, then pulls over, parking at a curb on the side of Onondaga Hill, overlooking downtown Syracuse. The roads are ground up and chalky with salt and the plowed embankments are crusted over, three feet high on either side of the street. The snowy wind is stronger here at the edge of the hill and it shoves the car around, whistling over some gap in the window. From here, the city looks square-shouldered and industrial, not too far from what it must have looked like when the Erie Canal cut through the center of town, crammed with barges. Now Syracuse seems to be sleeping under a frozen layer, in isolation from the sun. I try to picture someone out there, perhaps pacing inside one of the ornately decorated buildings, thinking about killing. I imagine how, in so much darkness—the skin eternally contracted—a person might start to believe that they will never be warm again. How such a kind of despair or stupor might lead a person to do the most terrible sorts of things, separate them from their reason, even the reason of emotions.

  There’s no sound, aside from the wind, and that’s subsiding now. The sharply curved road is deserted and if circumstances were different this spot might seem like a lover’s lane. Keller’s stuck very close to me over the past several days—driving me everywhere, patrolling the door to my room like an arresting officer.

  He scrubs his hands over his face and into his hair, a rough, exasperated motion. When he looks back up at me, his face is blotchy. “Lena, where did this thing come from?” He’s holding a small white envelope: inside is the tooth on a string.

  I sink back against the seat and door.

  He puts his hand up like making a notation on a blackboard. “Right. Okay. First of all, I have no idea how you feel about me. That’s fine,” he says, his voice casual. “I mean—for me, what happened between us, the other night—it meant everything.” He turns to his window, toward the flurries spinning over the glass. “Hell with it. We don’t even have to talk about it if you don’t want to—I’m a guy. I know how to do that. But, Lena, I do want at least to have your friendship. I want . . .” He seems to be searching the air, trying to find words. “I want to be whatever it is that you’ll let me be. But if we’re going to do this investigation—hell, we’ve got to work together on this.”

  After we saw the baby video at the Abernathy house, I asked Keller to drive me back to the St. James. He waited in the car while I ran in and retrieved the artifact. And after we both examined it and confirmed it looked like the one in the video, I realized I didn’t want to talk to him about it—it required too much self-revelation.

  Now I shift in my seat, turn my face toward my own window, where the snow is thick and damp, sticking to the window like squashed blossoms.

  There’s a long, hard pause. “Nothing? You can’t tell me anything?”

  “It’s from my childhood.” My voice is thin.

  “Lena.” He takes a resituating breath, a self-calming pause. “Aside from the fingerprints, this . . . tooth is our first substantive piece of evidence—it links you in a very direct and immediate way to the investigation. Try to think—where did you get this thing? Can you think of anyone else who would have one?”

  I’m shaking my head. “No, I can’t remember, I can’t. I’ve just always had it. And I don’t know anyone who has one. Maybe it belongs to the baby’s mother? Or the nanny?”

  “Believe me, that’s the first thing we’re going to find out.” He stares at me. “Why’s it so hard to talk about this? What’s it mean to you?”

  The snow twirls through the sky and I feel a piercing sadness as Keller watches me. I’d like to stay inside this car beside him, not speaking, the day a smudge of light. Finally, I say to Keller, “I didn’t have a—completely normal childhood.”

  WE DRIVE TO the Lab, entering the tape and the prints into Evidence. Keller takes the tooth with him to do a little more research. When I ask him—a bit timidly—to be careful, and observe it has sentimental value, he asks, “How can it have sentimental value if you don’t remember where it came from?”

  I spend the day searching data banks for information on the prints we lifted at the Abernathy house, with no luck. Alyce and Sylvie both seem withdrawn, exhausted from the reversals of the week and the barrage of meetings following the reopening of the Cogan case. Margo barely looks at me—at any of us, for that matter—she has a long, whispering conversation on the phone instead of joining us for lunch. Her expression is sulky and defensive.

  Late in the afternoon, I leave the Lab and plan to walk to my apartment, but the number 17 rumbles up as I approach the corner—the bus to Keller’s neighborhood. I climb aboard.

  The bus takes about fifteen minutes to wend its way through the neighborhood, past houses and then banks, coffee shops, restaurants, then back to houses. Office workers are already crowding the bus stops, leaving work early to beat the next forecasted blizzard. Shopping bags bang around their legs and women shiver in down jackets and boots. The afternoon light has degraded quickly, from dimness to the barely visible moments before dark. Streetlights blink on up and down the streets, reminding me of fireflies, the way they used to crowd the backyard, bright and hot as sparks.

  AS I APPROACH Keller’s house from the bus stop, I notice two cars. Keller’s Camaro is in the driveway, sugared over with snow, and the front light is on, casting a pale yellow tent of illumination. A police cruiser is parked out front, parallel to the house. I feel a thud of dread as I see Charlie climb out of his car. He looks around, his features slowly gathering into the familiar old anger as he recognizes me. He throws the door shut.

  “W
hat are you doing here?” I ask, hurrying toward his car. “You should go home.”

  “I am. I am,” Charlie says, rounding his side of the car. “But a little birdie mentioned that you were spending time over here and I just thought I’d walk you to the front door, make sure you got inside okay.”

  “I don’t want you to walk me to the door.”

  He stops beside me. “Well, gosh, we’re not going to be married anymore, Lenny, remember that?” he asks loudly, his voice a red streak in the darkness. The smell of alcohol is strong and ripe. “Remember what you said at Frank’s house? So I guess it really doesn’t matter what you want and don’t want, now, does it? I guess we can pretty much do what we want from now on, because we’re free agents.”

  The front door opens and I can see Keller’s silhouette lean out. “Lena?”

  “Well, now, who the heck is that?” Charlie calls. He gives me a little wink and starts walking up the driveway. “Who have we here? Is it none other than Officer Friendly?”

  “Charlie.” I touch his sleeve. “Can you please just—”

  He gives a short, electric jerk. “Can I please just what? Lenny? Just what?”

  Keller walks out on the snowy front yard, just a few steps away. I think about taking his arm, then decide against it. “Hey, Charlie, how’s it going?” Keller asks.

  Charlie half lowers his head and looks up at Keller with a flat glitter in his eyes. “Hey, Officer Friendly, how you like my wife?”

  “Charlie!” I hiss, throat constricted.

  Keller strides up to Charlie and with a single explosive movement shoves him hard enough to throw him flat on the driveway. For a moment he’s still, the wind knocked out of him, and Keller starts to bend toward him, extending his hand. But Charlie rolls over, stumbles forward to his feet; he shakes his head clear, mouth crumpled as if he’s tasted something bitter. I can see a network of reddened capillaries in his eyes. He charges forward with a half-strangled sound and crashes into Keller, head down, right into his gut, and the two of them flip backward into the snow. They roll together, Charlie flailing. I can’t stand the pulse of the violence, Charlie’s wildness loose in the air, and I’m shrieking, “Stop it stop it stop it!”