Stumbling on the Sand

by Jenna Rae

  “Sorry.” There was another long pause. “I’m a bit ragged right now.”

  “Why? What happened?”

  “A kid was murdered. I can’t see any way I’ll find his killer. They beat him to death, just smashed his whole face, and dumped him in an alley. He was half starved, living on the streets, I think. He deserved better. He was a nice kid, you know? And I already—he just deserved better.”

  “You care about people, Del.” Lola’s voice was soft. “That’s what makes you good at your job, isn’t it? But the way you talk about him, he was special. Why?”

  Del laughed brokenly. “You always ask the question I don’t want to think about.”

  * * *

  “‘Mission Women Terrified, Police Stymied’ is what they’re saying.”

  Standing as if in an early morning prayer circle, the officers listened to their boss rant. Del resisted the urge to glance at her partner, whose comically attentive look was a good distraction from this stupid meeting about a peeper. What she wanted was to hear about Mikey Ocampo’s autopsy. A quick peek at the clock behind Captain Bradley told her it had only been a little more than twenty-four hours since she and Phan had been called to Shotwell Street, but she had a feeling Mikey’s case was, despite their efforts, already cold. And now this.

  After again reading the headline aloud, Captain Bradley glared at the cobbled together special investigative unit for a long minute. He had arranged extra patrols and a series of programs on self-defense. He’d set up a hotline, had warning flyers posted around the area, and saturated the social media sites. He was hosting weekly community forum meetings and making sure they were covered by the media. He’d put a series of female officers in front of television cameras to plead for help with the investigation. Bradley had requested updates on the local sex offenders. He’d pulled every available investigator from every nonessential task.

  Finally the captain waved them off as if in disgust. As the officers wandered back to their desks, Del exchanged glances with Phan. Within seconds, Mission Station was again filled with the usual babble of voices and ringing phones and fingers pounding on keyboards. Though she couldn’t see it from her seat on the second floor of the station, Del knew that, only feet away, Valencia Street bubbled with a more melodious mix of sound and movement.

  “Bradley’s doing everything possible,” Phan said. He shook back his long hair, and Del suppressed a smile. Phan wore perfectly ironed oxfords with perfectly ironed trousers and gleaming loafers. He was clean-shaven. His desk was perfectly organized. He was controlled, disciplined and appropriate. His one indulgence was his hair. Long, slightly wavy, and thick, his mane was always beautifully cut and his one source of vanity. When he was tense, Phan would touch his hair or shake it back or toss it like he was a restless pony.

  “True. But everyone’s still freaked.”

  “Well, you know how it is.”

  “Peepers aren’t dangerous,” Del started, meeting Phan’s eyes. They finished the sentence together. “Until they’re dangerous.”

  In the fifteen months that she and Phan had been partners, Del had come to appreciate the easy connection between them. She’d had a lot of partners over her twenty years in law enforcement. Some had been mentors, a few had been nightmares, but most had been men she’d had to work hard to build rapport with. Almost from the beginning, she and Tom Phan had been able to bypass the power struggles and misunderstandings that can get in the way of successful teamwork.

  She wasn’t sure what it was about Phan that made him so easy to deal with. He was a little senior to her in both age and experience, but he was a true partner. He was smart, so that helped. And he was confident enough not to need her to stroke his ego. He didn’t seem to find her threatening or off-putting or inferior. She smiled at Phan and saw his easy grin spread across his wide face. Then he frowned over her shoulder, and Del turned to see why.

  “Come on!” This came from Milner, an inspector recently passed over for promotion for the fourth time. “A couple of sluts got nervous, somebody took a peek at their tits? Big deal, close the fuckin’ blinds, you don’t wanna get looked at. No common goddamn sense!”

  “Milner,” Bradley barked from somewhere behind Del. “My office, pronto.”

  “Jesus jumped-up Christ. Here we go again. ‘Make nice-nice with the bitches’—I’ve heard this speech a hundred fuckin’ times.”

  No one responded.

  “Milner’s an ass,” Phan put in quietly as the partners watched Milner strut across the station.

  “Burnout.”

  “You don’t think he was always a jerk?”

  “Maybe.” Del gave a wry smile. “I know peepers can escalate, I just think we may have bigger fish to fry. Like Mikey.”

  “I know.” Phan pointed at his desk as if to remind Del of their sixteen hours of work the previous day and the dead ends they’d chased down in trying to solve Mikey Ocampo’s brutal murder.

  Del rubbed her thumb absently on the case file. “I owe him. I can’t let him down again.”

  “I get that. When we get the autopsy report we’ll focus on the kid, okay?” Phan tapped his desk as if to punctuate a change of subject. “Listen, how dangerous do you think our peeper could be? Does he have a record? Is he single, married? Can he hold down a job? Is he afraid of girls, too socially awkward to get a date? Or is it more complex?”

  “Why’re you asking me?”

  “You worked sex crimes a lot longer than I did. Bradley said, back when he was matchmaking, you had some kinda amazing arrest and conviction record, sex crimes superstar.”

  Del shook her head. “Bullshit.”

  Phan nodded. “Mason, throw something out there. It’s not like you to hold back.”

  “I don’t know enough to say much.” When Phan merely stared at her, Del shrugged in resignation. “You want my worthless, no-insight-included guess?”

  “Disclaimer noted.”

  “The guy is single, a planner. Has a low-level job with limited face-to-face. Smart. Arrogant. Disdainful of women, threatened by women. Possibly religious, it reinforces his gender fuckery. Innocuous, polite, not overtly creepy.”

  “That’s pretty detailed for an off-the-cuff guess.”

  “Probably bull. Broad strokes based on nothing.”

  “Right.” Phan made a face. “If he’s afraid of women, why not just look at porn?”

  Del sat back in her worn desk chair. “Maybe he does, but porn isn’t intrusive enough. Voyeurs are turned on by the fact that the victims can’t consent to their watching. The invasion of privacy, the violation, is the important thing. Forbidden fruit, you know, stolen candy is sweeter. He’s a naughty boy. The secrecy and violation are the turn-ons, maybe more than the actual women.”

  “I don’t know about that,” Phan countered. “Naked ladies are pretty enticing. And remember, we lowly men don’t have your evolved sensibilities.”

  Del gave the obligatory snort and motioned at him to continue.

  “Putting that aside,” Phan grimaced, “so our guy decides to walk around, look in a window here and there, maybe getting shot or arrested, over staying home, looking at porn? Doesn’t track.”

  “No, it doesn’t.” Del shrugged. “I can’t explain it.” She thought for a minute. “Hey, maybe there’s porn tailored to peepers. You know, simulated peeping.”

  “Why not? There’s every other kind.”

  They went to Anton Jones, a computer expert in the department. He interrupted their rundown of the case with a shake of his head. His wide eyes regarded them with wry good humor.

  “Right,” he said. “You know I actually work here, right? I’ve been collating data on this for days. The pattern isn’t distinctive enough to offer much in terms of narrowing the pool of suspects. But you already know that. So what’s your angle? What do you want from me?”

  Phan filled him in on their question, and Jones wrapped his thin arms around his long, narrow torso before answering. Del watched his face relax into a
wide, amused smile.

  “You want me to find out who’s looking at peeper porn?” Jones shook his head, still smiling. “Do you have any idea how much porn there is? How much of each type? How many possible versions of peeper porn there must be? And I can’t look at who’s downloading anything without a warrant, you know that. Yeah, sorry, guys, no can do.”

  Del made a face. “What about identifying individuals who download excessive porn?”

  Jones laughed so hard he reared back in his undersized chair and almost hit the back of his head on the colorful Dr. Who poster he’d recently hung in his tiny cubicle.

  “Come on! What’s an excessive amount of porn? Phan, you like to look at naked women, right? Shit, Mason, don’t you? I sure as hell do. And it’s legal. You want to know who’s looking at what? You need something real. Give me a name, an address and a warrant, I can tell you every keystroke in the guy’s history. But until then, there’s no way.”

  Disappointed, the partners thanked Jones and left his little kingdom. As they walked away, Del heard Jones muttering something about “excessive porn” and chuckling. Back in the larger space they shared with the other Mission Station officers, Phan and Mason wrote a list of questions they needed to answer to identify the peeper.

  “You feeling hamstrung?”

  Del nodded. “He’s invisible. In such a big city, a guy like this disappears.”

  There were over a hundred registered sex offenders in the Mission District—not, unfortunately, an unusual number for a neighborhood of that size and density. Del and Phan and several other investigative pairs combed through the records with both care and urgency.

  “Hey,” Del called out to her partner later that afternoon. “I say we send out an email asking all the detectives in the area for the names of sex crime suspects not arrested or convicted within the last year.”

  “You’re shitting me!” Phan threw his hands in the air. “Do you have any idea how many pervs that is?”

  “What else can we do?”

  “Oh, I don’t know, maybe we could just count the grains of sand on the beach.”

  “You know I’m right,” Del said, arching an eyebrow.

  “Doesn’t mean I have to like it.” Phan mirrored her expression, and Del smiled.

  “What?” Phan frowned at her.

  “What, what?”

  “You’re smiling at me. I don’t like it.”

  Del rolled her eyes and ignored Phan to focus on sending out the request for updates.

  The responses came pouring in within minutes, and she was struck by how many officers were immediately able to name multiple suspected rapists who’d never been booked, much less imprisoned. Del and Phan created a spreadsheet that detailed the specifics on each suspect and asked Captain Bradley for a couple of warm bodies to input the data. He agreed, and within an hour they were watching the spreadsheet grow to cosmic proportions. Setting aside the pedophiles, they were able to cut the number in half, but it was clear there were a lot of sex offenders roaming around. Their pool of suspects was a flood.

  “Makes me sick,” Phan snapped. “These assholes get away scot-free.”

  “You know how rare it is for a rapist to spend a single night in jail?”

  “Too fucking rare.”

  “Got that right.” Eyeing her partner’s glower, Del decided not to follow up with the statistics. As the father of an adolescent daughter, Phan was increasingly wound up about crimes against women, and Del wasn’t interested in distracting him further. Her mild-mannered partner could respond to most things coolly, but woe to the bad guy who laid a single hand on sweet young Kaylee Phan.

  “I’d help you get rid of the body,” Del said impulsively, mostly joking.

  Phan’s ghastly smile told her he’d followed her line of thinking, and she wished she’d kept her mouth shut.

  Though they continued to look at hundreds of suspects, no one stood out. As dinnertime came and went, Del and Phan put aside their work on the peeper case and focused on Mikey Ocampo’s murder. After reviewing their notes and the list of possible interview subjects, they went over what little they knew.

  Phan flipped through the photos from the crime scene. “Okay, let’s lay out a timeline from the time you met him to now.”

  “He got five years in juvenile detention in Stockton and was released after four. Mom died, breast cancer, while he was still locked up. A year ago Mikey got released to a group home.”

  “Did he even get to say goodbye to his mom?”

  “I don’t know.” Del shook her head. “She didn’t have health care with any of her jobs, and it looks like either the cancer got too far before it was diagnosed or she couldn’t afford treatments or didn’t know how to get help. I didn’t hear about her death until later.”

  “Okay. So Mikey goes from juvie in Stockton into a group home here in the city,” Phan prompted. “After a few months of getting along fine—he’s going to school, passing his classes, no arrests, no fights, no disciplinary actions, no red flags—one day he just runs away. No dirty drug test? No pregnant girlfriend? No bullies in the group home? No pervy adults in his life?”

  “Nothing. So far. He was in the wind for months before his body was found.” Del exhaled loudly. “We have to reinterview everybody. The counselors, the social worker, the group home kids, teachers, students at the high school, neighbors. Somebody knows something.”

  “He’s never been to any of the shelters?”

  “Nope. Not the churches either. No hospital visits. No connections.” Del ticked off the fruitless investigative inquiries. “No arrests since that one five years back. No known gang affiliations, in juvie or out of it. None of the street kids seem to know him, at least they won’t admit to knowing him. I don’t know if Mikey was gay or straight or bi or trans, religious, agnostic, a health nut, a musician, a nerd, anything. Now the forensic scraps.”

  “Scraps is right.” Phan pursed his lips. “Okay, the postmortem didn’t add much to the picture. No recent sexual assault or sexual activity. Scrambled face, you saw that. It looks like he was beaten with fists, kicked, and hit with what might have been a golf club. Evidence of earlier abuse, physical and sexual. Scarring, healed fractures, a couple of missing teeth. Positive for pot and ecstasy, but he wasn’t a junkie. Dehydrated, empty stomach, both of which could mean he was held at some point or just that he was hungry and thirsty because he was homeless. HIV negative. No hep, no gonorrhea, no ongoing disease or infection. Wrists show some abrasions from restraints, looks like they used rope. And that’s about it at this point. If we had anything—”

  “Right.” Del again looked over the photos of Mikey’s body and of Shotwell Street. She saw nothing new. “Killed somewhere else, like we thought.”

  “Yeah. Dead for six hours when we saw him. Some transfer of clothing fibers, plus maybe carpet from a trunk. Like the rope and the golf club, nothing distinctive, no identification of either unless we have a comparison. Nothing useful in terms of the location of the actual assault or which vehicle was used to move him. We need a suspect before the forensics are useful.”

  “Nobody knows him, nobody remembers him, but somebody tied him up and then beat him to death around midnight Monday night.” Del pushed back her hair. “Why?”

  “And was the destruction of his face to slow identification, or was it a personal thing?”

  Knowing Phan didn’t expect an answer, Del stared at the most recent photo of Mikey they had been able to find. It had come from a kid in the group home. In the photo, taken nine days before his disappearance, Mikey and five other kids stood behind a wide, scarred oak table. Someone must have done something silly right before the photo was snapped, because all of the kids were laughing. Del stared at Mikey’s open, gleeful expression, his short, neat haircut, his black T and long, ropy arms. He was at the back of the group and was mostly hidden by another kid, but he looked happy. He didn’t look like a kid who was about to run away and disappear from view. He didn’t look like a kid who
was only months away from being murdered. He looked like a regular teenager.

  Del searched the photo for clues—regarding his relationships with the other kids, his emotional state, his physical wellbeing, anything—but all she could glean was that he seemed in the picture to be happy and to be comfortable with the other kids. No one seemed to know anything meaningful about Mikey, and she was determined to figure out why. They spent a couple of hours going over what little they knew and dividing up the to-do list on Mikey’s case.

  “We’ll go over it all again as soon as we have anything else, I promise.”

  “Okay,” Del muttered, closing the file. “Back to the pervert.”

  “Oh goodie,” Phan said under his breath. They repeated many of the same steps they had just gone through with Mikey’s case: reading the files, taking notes, looking for patterns and differentiating features, and making to-do lists.

  “Who is this peeper?” Phan asked.

  “Apparently he’s nobody.” She pointed at the computer to indicate the burgeoning database of potential suspects. “He’s everybody.”

  “Could be more than one guy,” Phan offered.

  “Yeah. Or it could be the same guy in disguise. We have too many pervs, too many different descriptions, too many of everything but solid leads.”

  “Too many hours adding up to nothing.” Phan slapped a file down on the pile. “I’m taking Alana out tonight. Wanna join us?”

  “Thanks, but I’m gonna go home. I’ve been promising to make Lola dinner for months, and I owe her for Janet and Sterling.”

  “None of that was your fault.”

  Del shrugged. “I dated a crazy woman. At least some of that is on me.”

  Phan laughed and shook his head. “Mason, if dating crazy women is a crime, then I’m due for a couple of life sentences.”

  Del rolled her eyes and grinned. “Okay, it’s definitely time to get outta here. I’m actually starting to think your jokes are funny.”

  They’d almost made it out of the station when Bradley barked out their names.

  “Got another one, and I want you two over there.”