Carcass Trade

by Noreen Ayres

“Sweetheart, you will never be neuter.”

  “I know someone who will if he doesn’t be quiet. Looks are an accident of nature. They’re not earned, and I don’t take credit.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t want to spoil your fantasy,” he said. He smiled and left me, taking slow, careful steps, the steps of a man who’d learned all things have their natural rhythms, whose favorite expression was “It takes the time it takes,” said about almost anything, from paperwork to investigations to the winding and unwinding of love.

  I needed to measure actual distances, so I headed over to a boulder where I would tuck the end of the tape and walk up the slope, then come back down and measure from the boulder to the table ledge, then measure the ledge’s height and width. All the while, I was thinking of what I would see in the car, how badly burned the person was, how terrible the act of burning alive must be. And I hoped dearly that we would learn that the fire was merely an attempt to hide an already completed crime, or better yet, that it was an accident after all; for someone had surely once loved the someone in the car. Someone had heard him or her laugh, and watched whoever it was ride trikes and discover things, and someone had sacrificed to keep whoever it was in clothes and in schools and to give the child what we’ve come to expect is the right to reasonable living. When a life is deliberately taken away, it’s a theft from dozens of people. And theft, to my mind, each time it happens and no matter to what degree, is a little killing, a murder of time and thought and caring.

  I finished the measures and stood for a moment looking at the narrow passageway between the car’s tires and the backstop. My height at five five plus the height of the door with the car on its side would not allow me a perspective if I approached that way. I passed to the left where an aluminum ladder still lay, probably from off the fire truck, along the thirty-inch-high ledge. Lifting the ladder, I propped it against the car frame, setting the legs firmly in the mix of soil and leaves. I wasn’t too worried about getting ash on me because I had on an old green twill jacket and pants; they’d survive.

  Les Fedders came toward me. He saw me at the ladder and turned his palm up. “Ladies first.”

  “Oh, you go right ahead.”

  “Nuh-uh. I like to see women climb ladders.”

  “Les, does your wife make you sleep on the porch?”

  He laughed, and with his hands in his pockets, looked down and made sure leaves weren’t lapping over his gleaming brown shoes. He said, “You go on and do your thing, Smokey.”

  Joe told me a long time ago, “They pay you to think.” They pay you to think, not feel. And so a certain practiced dispassion overtook me while I climbed. The abundant smell of carbon, purged fuel, melted rubber, and incinerated flesh overtook my nostrils. I stilled myself at the thought of what lay inside the blackened salvage. What mute thing would send its plea for recognition: I was, therefore I am?

  I would look inside the ruin that yet released its heat to the morning air, and I would listen for what the blackened being within would tell me of its life and death. And afterward, at the morgue, I would explore the heart of the Greek word autoptos meaning “I see for myself.” I would see for myself. I would listen and learn. And if there had been a helper in the victim’s hard release from this world, I would be alert to it, and come to know that too.

  2

  When I peered into the chute, the shock of what I saw almost threw me off the ladder.

  At first I thought it was a dog, CC Rider’s size. Against the driver’s side lay a thing that looked like a burned duffel bag. The legs were gone to the knees and the arms so consumed they were not in the usual pugilistic posture of severely burned persons when ligaments and tendons shrivel, pulling the fists up as though the victim in final frenzy could box the flames away. Where the head should have been, a stump of leaden vertebrae remained.

  I lifted my eyes while steadying myself with a keener grip on the window frame. Above me, two ragged ravens swept through the sky and came to rest in the branches of a Monterey pine a few dozen yards away.

  Believing the shape of the head would form itself once my eyes got used to the shades of blackness, I looked inside again, but nothing there resembled a skull. On the chest wall were two burned lumps that said the victim was a woman.

  Joe and a coroner’s investigator with an explosion of coppery hair backlit by the sun were approaching as I got down. Les moved aside for them.

  I said, “The head’s gone. Maybe it rolled under. I can’t see that well. We’re going to need lamps.”

  “It’s not gone,” Joe said. “It’s just not in one piece.” He put his hands to his head like ear mufflers and said, “You’ve got a prison of bone here. High enough temperatures, it explodes.” Expanding gases, he explained, would send bony shrapnel jetting into the leaves and lumpy eucalyptus buttons we’d have to search through on the canyon floor. “Our job just got a little harder, is all.”

  Les moved to the ladder, went up, looked a long while, then climbed down. “Get it out. We’ll see what’s what.”

  Doug came along with the CCD and set it down by Joe. He handed over the car keys, and Joe took them, bounced them twice, and gave them back. “You’ll need the sifter, too,” he said. “You’re a good man, Charlie Brown,” Joe said, as Doug gamely headed back up the hill to Joe’s car.

  Joe told Les, “I need to get to the underside of the car, but I’ll wait till the body is cleared. I guess you know it’s registered to a woman in Beverly Hills.”

  Les nodded. “We’ll give her a call. If she’s callable.” His gaze went to the wreck.

  The polished silver pin in Joe’s lapel with the numbers 4–190 on it glinted in the sun. A lot of cops have pins and belt buckles designed with 187 on them, the penal code section for homicide, but Joe’s meant he was for 190, the section that allows a judge to impose the death sentence for murder in the first degree.

  Joe went back up the hill as I stood waiting for Doug to bring back the screened flat we use for sifting. The coroner’s investigator, dressed in street clothes and wearing flat shoes, climbed up the ladder and looked in. She came back down wordlessly, then glanced at us and said, “Whew. Get your pictures. I’ll call Transport.” I didn’t know her name and she didn’t offer it. As she turned to go up the slope, she folded her arms tightly around her waist. Sometimes it’s too early in the morning.

  When Doug came back to give me the sifter, he got up on the car and began taking shots as I laid line in a grid for our search of the surrounding area. In a while the transport team arrived in a plain-wrap station wagon, two young men in blue jumpsuits with “Coroner” in gold letters on the back. They came down the hill with a collapsible gurney and a body bag. I told them to walk a single line along the ledge and when they were in the car itself to keep an eye out for anything foreign and try not to disturb its position. Then I went back up to my car, removed my jacket, took out a pair of coveralls and stepped into them, also bringing along the Polaroid I keep as a standby. I couldn’t see that Les Fedders was doing anything but bullshitting with the woman fire fighter.

  Doug’s autowinder was still going as I began brushing aside debris in a corner grid with just my gloved fingers. In the next fifteen minutes I found and dropped into a paper bag what I thought were fragments of temporal, occipital, nasal, and maxillary bone, this after snapping shots of the surface of the gridded area. I also found a tooth.

  Pretty soon I heard Doug’s camera buzzing again off my left shoulder and saw him photographing something by the trunk of an oak. Next thing I know, he was standing near me, saying, “Guess what I found.” His camera was capped and sitting on his bag near his sneakered foot, and he held both hands behind him. When I looked up, his white shirt hurt my eyes. Holding out a piece of gray bone in the shape of a croquet hoop, he said the jaw had been resting on a pot-sized rock against a tree.

  “The mandible,” I said.

  “The magic mandible,” he said.

  “Minus teeth.”

  “It’s got a
few.”

  “Find the upper, then we’ll celebrate.”

  “I can do that.”

  “Hotshot. Here,” I said, and gave him a bag. “Mark it right.”

  I heard him drop the bone in the bag. I wasn’t looking when he said, “Guess again.”

  “What?”

  I looked up and found him standing in the same stupid way, with the same stupid, satisfied smile. He brought around to the front the maxilla, the upper jaw, had it hiding somewhere. “God, Doug.”

  “I’m great, ain’t I?”

  “You are.”

  “Hear that?” he said, looking around for witnesses. “She said it.”

  Doug pointed to a canyon sycamore. “Found it in that wedge of roots.” He turned it admiringly. The front teeth were intact, but only two others remained on each side. Finally, he admitted a raven found it. He saw the bird poking its thick black crunchers into the leaves and snatching its head around like a shoplifter on the lookout.

  I was jealous. But now ID would be that much easier, especially if I found more teeth. From dentition—the kind, number, and arrangement of teeth—an odontologist can read the patient’s history like a kindergarten book, and the morgue people delight in keeping the rate of their unidentifieds way down.

  The transport team brought the body out. They had used a sheet to extract the corpse, threading it under the remains in the tight interior. Then they tied the ends to make the bundle easier to lift up through the car door. The whole thing, sheet and all, would be put into the body bag, to make sure no evidence was lost.

  The corner’s investigator wore latex gloves as she stepped around, bent, and untied the flaps, throwing the sheet open. When she rose from bending over the body and blocking our view, we all stood silently looking at the thing that seemed no more than a charred humanoid wick, the limbs seared away and the head gone, the two charcoal knobs glued to the chest.

  “It was a woman,” one of the men said.

  The investigator flipped the sheet back over the corpse and said, “There’s not much to examine here,” and began pulling off the gloves. “We’ll get it to a safe environment.”

  I needed shots of the car interior after the body was removed. Since I had coveralls and Doug didn’t, I’d have to go into the car myself. I asked Doug to stand by in case I needed anything, took some shots from above, then lowered myself in. It was like standing in a dead fireplace. I cast a light around the whole interior, then reached over the frame of the front seat for something that lay like an ashy helmet in the curl of the backseat springs, and pincered it, bringing it forward. It looked like one half of the parietal. Lightly, I ran a finger over the piece of skull. The borders were smooth, flames having eaten away the serrations by which it would fit like a jigsaw piece with the other half.

  “Find any money under the seat, it’s mine,” Doug called.

  “Very funny.”

  I did retrieve a few coins, and dug off the door a melted blob of blue plastic with one comb-tooth protruding, and spied a metal barrel I thought at first was the front seat track until it moved with a touch of my glove. Lifting the object, I unstuck a small handgun buried like a corn dog in a crust of sheepskin-padded leather. The two halves of the cover came away, the side with the sinuous zipper falling down my thigh.

  There was more scorch on the bottom side than the top, and I imagined liquid accelerant running underneath before the fire erupted. The plastic on the grip had melted the magazine shut, but I needed to check to see if there was a cartridge in the chamber because the whole thing would be in a volatile state. I could read the letters BOA between the head and tail outline of a snake on the slide. With the muzzle pointed down, and holding firm on the corrugated metal finger grips, I cracked open the slide, then let it go home when I saw no cartridge.

  “Doug, toss me a firearm box,” I called. “This victim didn’t know that if you’re going to pack a gun under a seat, you don’t tuck it into bed like a baby. She never had a chance.”

  “Women and guns,” Doug said. “It’s the in thing. I’m afraid to go out on a date anymore.”

  “You should be,” I said. “Where’s my box?”

  I sat on the southern rise of the canyon and watched the transport wagon pull away with its pitiful cargo. In the splayed eucalyptus branches above me, a burly raven clucked. Joe was down by his car, putting away his equipment. Les was back talking to the woman fire fighter, whose truck, I’d learned, was out of Station No. 4, on the corner of Olinda Drive and Olinda Place in the tiny village of Olinda not a mile south, where the house numbers still run to three digits, so I guess that’s why the pumper crew had time to sit around during our whole investigation. Doug had already gone.

  A second raven flew above me and sat by the first in the leafy veil. The common raven, called common for a reason. The heavy boldness of their size pleases me, their iron shape taking big bites out of the sky. Once I saw a pair of ravens fighting their own reflections in a bank window, making guttural noises in their hackle-covered throats. The lower window was shaded black, drawing their own images sharply in the reflected sidewalk light. The two flapped and hopped and spit at themselves the whole time I was at the ATM, miniature gangsters in each other’s faces.

  To the bird on the lower branch, I said, “Hello, big guy,” because if you put your face up and talk to a raven, he will talk back, maybe not the first time you come across him, but by the second. Big Guy gave a metallic tok-tok-tok, then a prolonged grauk, as he tipped his head my way.

  Creosote resins released by rain the night before scented the air. I concentrated, trying to imagine who the person in the car could be. A woman, coming down the hill in the early A.M. But coming down to what? Three kids waiting at home, the father ready for his day shift? And she, the mother, returning from nine hours of tending bedpans, the only job she could get in these hard times? Or maybe a woman who’d run away from her husband, receiving a call, tears on both sides; then the grateful agreement, yes, I’ll come home.

  Or something darker? The pistol would say so. It looked to me like a .25, not a power gun, a gun an amateur might select for defense. And how did it add up that we had a stolen car from Beverly Hills, a city populated by movie stars, Arab sheikhs, and rich plastic surgeons, yet the car was old, its carapace lying sixty miles south, in northern Orange County?

  Orange County is in its adolescence, its face and figure changing. Eight hundred square miles and forty-odd cities surround a shrinking island of peaceful bean and strawberry fields. Stark white finance centers and design-free hotels loom next to freeways. In the last decade, builders bolstered by a flood of Pacific Islanders, Filipinos, Guamanians, Koreans, Vietnamese, and Hispanics hiked housing prices to sucker levels, then fled to Colorado when the market dropped. Yet while red-tile cloned homes invade forsaken farmland, cul-de-sac drug dealers and arts center supporters eat at the same pizza bars. Most of us go to work, to fairs and games and stores and movies without event. The golden weather, the knowledge that the endless, rhythmic ocean lies mere miles away, makes us complacent. Cows still graze on hillsides. The air is mostly clear, and there are places where horses lope on fragrant bark trails, and protected pockets where wildlife can be seen. Yet beneath this docile surface, the bottom currents churn.

  When Joe’s shadow came shooting over the white morning glory vine, the sun an hour past its apex, I was talking to my ravens again.

  He said, “Keep that up and somebody’ll pin you down and pull a tox on you,” meaning I must be on some behavior-altering drug and should have a toxicology test for drug use. He sat on his heels, handing me a can of soda.

  “You want to be the one to do it?”

  “Can I? What’s this lonesome business you tell me? You’re the one wanted some time off.”

  I said, “It doesn’t mean I don’t miss you.” I stood up and walked to the edge of the hill, avoiding the morning glories. He followed. I looked at the soft skin by his eyes with a yearning. Both of us had said the L word, then
qualified it in special ways, casually, over salad or while philosophizing about life, using those sidelong glances to see how the other person took it. Twice he’d mentioned the difference in our ages. I told him it was not a problem.

  He said, “Do you care what people in the office think? Office affairs are never a secret, not really.”

  “People think what they think. If we weren’t seeing each other, they’d think we were. Who knows what they think? Who cares? Besides, you can’t call it an affair if it’s two single people, can you? A friendship. A very friendly friendship. What are we talking about this for? That’s not the issue, and you know it.”

  “What is the issue?”

  “If I knew that, I guess I wouldn’t be asking for a time-out,” I said. “What’d you find with your sniffer?”

  “It dinged when it should. They used an accelerant. We’ll find out which one when I can get to my rate sheets.” The CCD pumps vapors over a coil, measuring heat resistance. Joe would match the resulting numbers with retention rates to identify the particular fuel.

  “This is the way I figure it,” he said, pointing across the canyon. “The car didn’t go off the road in this direction, where we’re sitting. I walked up there on the bank. There’s chunks out of the edge there. I think the car was pushed over. Not rolled. It goes down, wheels in, wheels out, wheels in, bang.” He broke a dried grass stem into bits and chewed on the last length while he looked into the far landscape. “The door panel’s caved in on the up side.”

  “So?”

  “Like it was rammed over.”

  “You read a lot into a scene.”

  “It makes up for a dull life.”

  We headed down the hill toward the road, the ravens uttering rude sounds as they took a couple of hops and flew to another tree along our path. Their pebble eyes stayed on us in case they got lucky and we both keeled over from poison oak rash or something. Out of the scrub a gray mockingbird swooped near us, spreading its black-and-white tail fan and squawking about our infringement of territory. “Mockers have more guts than sense,” I said.