The Low Desert

by Tod Goldberg

  All that to say I never trusted them. I’d known the family only casually, but well enough to discern they were hiding something. James sported a diploma from Harvard and Missy looked like the type of woman best suited for clambakes at Pebble Beach. They were not small-town people—they drove a gold Lexus and a convertible Jaguar—and Granite City is a small town. I never had cause to investigate the Kleins, never even pulled them over for speeding, but I aimed to at some point just so that I could look James in the eye when I had the upper hand, when my authority might cause his veneer to smudge. That chance didn’t come.

  I picked up a photo from the gravesite and there was James Klein’s face staring up at me. Miller was right: the bodies had been well preserved. The skin on James’s face was tight and tugged at the bones. His eyes had vanished but I could still picture the way they narrowed whenever he saw me.

  His body was faceup, arms flung to either side. He was draped on top of his wife, hands chopped from his arms, wearing his now-drab gray lab coat. Shards of bone jutted from underneath his sleeves, and I thought that whoever had done this to him had taken great pains to make him suffer.

  For a long time I stared at James Klein and wondered what it would be like to know that you were about to die. Andy and Tyler, the twins, must have understood all too well that their time on earth was ending before it had a chance to begin. They were only twelve.

  I stood up, stretched my arms above my head, and paced in the kitchen while I tried to gather my thoughts. After the family disappeared, I’d searched their home with Deputy Nixon and Deputy Person. We hadn’t found any forced entry or signs of a struggle, but we did find bundles of cash hidden in nearly every crevice of the house. All told, there was close to half a million dollars stashed in shoeboxes, suitcases, and file cabinets. The money was tested for trace residues of cocaine, heroin, and marijuana but came up empty. The serial numbers didn’t come up from any recent stings in the region. There’s no law against keeping a mountain of cash in your home.

  For almost three months, we searched for the Klein family. In time, though, winter dropped in full force and even James Klein’s own mother and father returned to their hometown. I told them not to worry, that we would find their son and his wife and their twin grandsons, but I knew that they were dead. I knew because there was $500,000 sitting in my office unclaimed, not even by the Kleins’ next of kin, and no man alive would leave that kind of money on purpose. And so, as the months drifted away and my thoughts of the Klein family withered and died in my mind, I figured that one day when I was retired someone would find them somewhere.

  “Dammit,” I said, sitting back down at the kitchen table. My eyes fixed on a pair of pale blue Nikes, unattached to legs, pointing out from the bottom of the grave. I wanted to sit there and just cry for those boys but I knew it wouldn’t do any of us any good.

  I GOT TO the medical examiner’s office late that next morning, figuring I didn’t need to see her slicing and dicing. Turned out I was right on time. The ME, a young kid named Lizzie DiGiangreco, had been working in Granite City for just over a year. Her father, Dr. Louis DiGiangreco, had been ME in Granite City for a lifetime and had practically trained Lizzie from birth. She went to medical school back east and then moved home after her father died at sixty-four from heart failure. I was one of Louis’s pallbearers, and I remember watching Lizzie stiffen at the site of her father in his open casket. I knew that her profession had not been a pleasant choice for her, but that she was duty bound.

  Lizzie greeted me with a handshake just outside the door to her lab.

  “Glad you could make it, Sheriff,” Lizzie said, only half sarcastically.

  “Miller said you were a little queasy up on Yeach,” I said. “I can get someone else to do this, if you want.”

  Lizzie made a clicking sound in her throat, a tendency of her father’s when he’d been about to get very angry, and then exhaled deeply. “I don’t like to see kids like that,” she said. “Maybe Miller is used to it, but I’m not.”

  “Understandable,” I said, and then followed her into the lab.

  The four bodies were covered with black plastic blankets and lined up across the length of the room. Lizzie’s assistant—what they call a diener—a man who went by his last name, Hawkins, was busy gathering up the tools they would need. I’d watched a lot of autopsies in my thirty-five years as sheriff in Granite City, but it never got any easier. Hawkins had been Lizzie’s father’s assistant too, so he knew what I’d need to make it through the next few hours.

  “There’s a tub of Vicks behind you in that cabinet, Sheriff,” Hawkins said. “These folks ain’t gonna smell so fresh.”

  Lizzie glared at Hawkins, but she knew he didn’t mean any harm. Hawkins could probably perform an autopsy just as well as she could, and Lord knows he never went to medical school.

  Hawkins pulled back the first blanket and there was James Klein’s naked, handless body.

  “Where’d you put the hands, Hawkins?” Lizzie asked.

  “I got ’em in the jar by the back sink,” he said. “You want them now?”

  “No,” she said. “But make sure not to cross them up with Mrs. Klein’s.”

  “She thinks I don’t know how to do my job,” Hawkins said to me, not unhappily. I’d gone to high school with Hawkins’s older brother, Ralph. They were one of the few African American families in town for many years, which had been a hard life, I’m sure. Ralph ended up working for the sheriff’s department when I was gone to California, but a few months after I got back, he put a gun in his mouth while sitting in the front seat of his cruiser. No note. No warning. One day he was Deputy Ralph Hawkins, the next day he was diner gossip. Hawkins was a few years younger than his brother but was already working in the examiner’s office. Lizzie’s father told me Hawkins even embalmed his brother, getting him right for his funeral. As right as he could. “Tell her I’ve never made a mistake, Sheriff, will you?”

  “Never heard of an instance,” I said, but Lizzie was already onto the business at hand.

  She sliced James Klein with a Y incision, starting from his shoulder, across his chest, around his navel, and down through the pelvis using a scalpel. The room filled with a smell like raw lamb.

  For the next two hours, Lizzie spoke quietly and clinically into a tape recorder, noting the condition of James Klein’s vital organs as she examined and weighed them. I had to leave the room only twice: when Hawkins sifted through the intestines and when Lizzie and Hawkins peeled back James Klein’s scalp and removed his brain.

  After they’d removed all of James Klein’s vital organs, his corpse sat opened on the examining table: his trunk resembled the hull of a ship under construction. Both Lizzie and Hawkins were covered in blood and tissue.

  “Well,” Hawkins said to me, “he’s dead all right.”

  “Why don’t you get a cup of coffee, Hawkins,” Lizzie said. “The sheriff and I need to go over a few things before we sew up.”

  Hawkins stripped off his gloves and hung up his apron. Washed his hands. “You know,” he said, “I used to bowl with Mr. Klein. He was terrible. Couldn’t score a hundred, not once. Gutter balls were his specialty.” He dried his hands and wiped off his face with a paper towel. “But every week, he’d be out there, giving it a shot. Boys were terrible, too.” He shook his head. “Never did meet his wife, until today. You want something, Doc? It’s on me.”

  “No, thanks,” she said, and when he was gone, she started back up. “Off the record, because I’ll need to look at the tox screens and some of the neuro X-rays, but I’d say the cause of death for Mr. Klein was suffocation plus blood loss from his hands being chopped off.”

  “Suffocation?”

  “Look here,” Lizzie said, pointing at James Klein’s lungs. “He had severe hemorrhaging, probably caused by inhaling so much dirt, and there’s bruising along the back of his neck. See that?”

  There was a dark purple bruise along the base of James Klein’s neck, but what was od
d was the shape of the bruise. It was a pattern of small squares.

  “What do you make of those marks?”

  “Probably the bottom of a work boot or hiking boot,” Lizzie said. “Like someone was standing on his neck, pushing his face into the dirt, while they cut off his hands.”

  “Using his head for leverage,” I said, not as a question, and not really to Lizzie, but to myself. Said it because I had to hear myself say it.

  Lizzie nodded and I saw that she was looking over my shoulder at the bodies of the two boys. “Yeah,” she said finally, her gaze averted back to James Klein, “that’s probably what happened.”

  “All right,” I said. “How long will it take you to finish the rest?”

  Lizzie exhaled so that her bangs fluttered in the air for a moment. “About two hours for each of them.”

  “Okay,” I said. “The families are flying in this afternoon. Can you get me something preliminary on paper tonight?”

  “I’ll try,” Lizzie said, and then both of us were silent for a minute. “I didn’t know Hawkins bowled,” she said.

  “He’s a good man,” I said. “You should get to know him.”

  “I’ve tried not to,” Lizzie said, “in case I decide to leave. If there’s some distance between me and everyone else, maybe it will make it an easier decision.”

  “Leaving doesn’t stop this from being your home, Lizzie.”

  “I barely recognize this place anymore,” she said.

  “I miss your dad,” I said, because at that moment I really did. We’d been good friends for many years, and when he died I knew that the old school in Granite City was getting close to recess time. “He was a complicated person. I don’t know if he was much of a father.”

  “He did what he could.”

  “Well, I’m sure proud of the way you’ve stuck around here, and I know he would be, too. But if you go, you go.”

  Before Lizzie could reply, Hawkins walked in with two cups of coffee. When I left, they were dumping James Klein’s internal organs back into his body in no particular order.

  JUST AFTER NOON, a helicopter containing James Klein’s mother and father, plus Missy Klein’s mother, a Mrs. Pellet, landed on the football field at Granite City High School. Lyle and I were there waiting for it.

  “I’m real sorry about this,” I said to Mrs. Klein when I shook her hand.

  “You said you’d find him,” she said.

  Before I could answer Mrs. Klein, before I could tell her that we’d found him just as I knew we would, her husband placed a hand on her shoulder and directed her away from me.

  “This is a hard time for her,” he said, and then he too was gone, squiring his wife into the back of a rented Aerostar we’d brought for them. Mr. Klein wore a houndstooth sport coat that hung off his shoulders like a dead vine and a pair of expensive sunglasses. I knew behind those tinted glasses were the eyes of a man without hope. I’d seen that look on the face of every man who’d lost a son.

  Lyle helped Missy’s mother off the helicopter and I could tell that, like Mr. Klein, she was face-to-face with the dead end of life. She was older than I’d remembered her from the months she’d spent in town, but I guess waiting for bad news would do that to you.

  We drove the three of them to the Best Western on Central, none of us speaking until we arrived there. The lobby was filled with a dozen gingerbread houses, each sponsored by different businesses in town: The Pizza Cookery. B. Barker & Sons, Accountants. The Paulson Mortuary and Home of Peace & Tranquility. Even Shake’s Bar had a house, which tilted ever so slightly to the left. Somewhere, Burl Ives was singing “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” over tinny speakers.

  “When do we get to see them?” Mr. Klein asked. We were waiting for the elevator to take the Kleins and Mrs. Pellet up to their rooms.

  “Tomorrow, I’d guess,” I said. “Or after the holiday.”

  “We’ll want to bury them in Connecticut,” Mr. Klein said, and Mrs. Pellet nodded in agreement. “Tomorrow is the last day of Hanukkah. I’d like to spend it with my son.”

  “The medical examiner still needs to finish getting some information though.”

  “For what?” Mr. Klein said. He reached over and pressed the elevator button twice, even though it was already lit. “So that we can be told my son suffered? I don’t need to know any more to understand that he’s gone. That all of them are gone.”

  “It’s an investigation into an unnatural death,” I said. We’d told both families that their loved ones had been found, though not the condition of their bodies. Foul play, we’d told them, was suspected. “There are procedures that must be followed. I’m sorry if you have to stay here one minute longer than you want to, but this is my job, and I’m planning on doing it.”

  “Sheriff Drew,” Mr. Klein said, “do you have any children?”

  “I don’t.”

  “I know my son was a criminal,” Mr. Klein said. “My wife and I have reconciled that much. He was a drug addict and probably a pretty good one, if you want to know. He was also a gifted liar. I am sure he made enemies in many parts of the world or else why would he come to a place like this?” Mr. Klein swallowed, and it seemed then that he’d come to some fine point in his mind, as if he’d figured out a troubling problem that had always been just within reach. “So, you see, Sheriff, I don’t need to know who did what. I don’t need that kind of element in my life. I’d prefer to think that my son was the decent person he pretended to be.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” I said.

  “Sheriff,” Mrs. Pellet said, her voice soft and tired, “I just want to bring my baby home. Whoever killed her, if anyone did, is gone. If you haven’t found who did this yet, you never will.”

  “SHE’S RIGHT, YOU know,” Lyle said as we walked back to the van. “They’re both right, sort of. We went through every lead we had on this case over a year ago, Morris.”

  “We’ve got bodies covered in forensic evidence sitting on Lizzie’s table,” I said.

  “You ran every fingerprint and strand of hair we found in that house,” Lyle said. “And the answer was nothing. Whatever Miller pulled off of Yeach, after all this time, you think any of it would even be admissible? You know how many people hunt on that mountain? Hike? Just dick around?”

  “But there’s all kinds of new technology, Lyle,” I said. “Every single day, something new comes online. We move too fast, we’re gonna be digging those bodies back up in a couple years. That what you want?”

  “Morris,” Lyle said, “nobody cares about these people but their parents. Listen to yourself.” Lyle reached into his pocket and pulled out a pack of Lucky Strikes and lit one. I’d known Lyle for half my life and he’d always been someone I could depend on. He wasn’t what you’d call book smart, but he knew things instinctively like no one I’d ever known, before or since. “Tell you what,” he said, smoke drifting out of his nose in smooth wisps of gray. “I get cable just like you. I see all those forensic shows on Discovery and I think they’re fantastic. I’m glad the cops in LA are solving crimes from the 1950s using space-shuttle technology. But you know what, Morris? This ain’t LA.”

  “If those were your kids,” I said, “wouldn’t you want the truth?”

  “My kids barely speak to me. I’d need to deal with that truth, first.”

  We got into the van but I didn’t start it right away. “You remember Milton Stairs?”

  “Of course. Killed the Claxson girl.”

  “That’s right,” I said. I pointed at the Best Western. “His father’s hardware store used to be right there. My daddy used to go in there two, three times a week, just to bullshit. You know he never stepped foot in the place again?”

  “Well,” Lyle said, “you nearly killed Milton when you arrested him, as I recall. Probably made things tense between him and old-man Stairs.”

  “I guess so,” I said. I started the van up. “You know Milton is still alive?”

  “No kidding?”

  “Up
for parole in two years.”

  “You gonna go speak?”

  “I already got my suit picked out,” I said. “He’s been in a wheelchair all this time. Eating through a tube in his stomach. And he’s been doing it in prison. Not just wandering around free.”

  “I hear you,” Lyle said. “I do. Now turn on the heater before they find us frozen, too.”

  “The twins didn’t deserve to end up like that,” I said. I started the engine, and, in a few seconds, hot air was blowing in my face, making my skin tingle. “Don’t they deserve justice?”

  “Everyone deserves justice, Morris,” Lyle said. “But also, people deserve grace.”

  He was right, of course, which made it all the more difficult to take.

  I WAS SITTING at the counter of Lolly’s Diner eating meatloaf and reading the autopsies of the Klein family when Miller Descent walked in and sat down next to me. It was near nine o’clock.

  “Lyle said you might be here,” Miller said.

  “Just reading about that family,” I said, holding up the autopsy report. “And trying to swallow some food. Can hardly do either.”

  “We’ve got Bonnie’s family staying with us for Christmas,” Miller said, “so I’ve been eating my mother-in-law’s food all week. You never had so much nutmeg in your life.” Miller chuckled and then paused. “I wanna ask you something, Sheriff,” he said cautiously, “and I don’t want to offend you in any way by asking it.”

  “That’s a tough order.” Lolly came by to refill my coffee cup, and Miller asked if he could have a slice of apple pie. “Well,” I said when Lolly left, “spit it out.”

  “Do you think maybe you should turn this case over to someone else?” Miller said.

  “That doesn’t sound like a question, Miller,” I said. “It sounds like a request.”

  “Assistant DA upstate saw some of the crime-scene pictures,” Miller said. “I probably shouldn’t have shown him a damn thing, but you know how favors work around up there, right, Sheriff?”