by Jess Walter
They started back toward the remote stretch of riverbank again, where patrol officers, firefighters, senior volunteers, a troop of Explorers, and some Eagle Scouts with scanners were all trudging through the deep brush, searching for the body in the river. Dupree thought it was a waste of time to search for floaters below the falls. Kevin Hatch’s body would show up eventually at one of the dams farther downstream or snag somewhere on a branch or a rock. Of course, if it didn’t, the body could theoretically float all the way to the Columbia and—if it somehow made it through a dozen or so dams—all the way to the Pacific. Dupree thought it would be all right sometimes to let bodies float, an experiment to see how far they might go.
After he’d slipped through Caroline’s hands, Kevin Hatch—Burn—slid over the spillway, was bashed against the face of the dam, pulled under the water, then spit out into the last rapids, the water in his body joining the surge around it, flowing over and between rocks, then spilling out in the cool, calm water downstream, beyond the streets of downtown to a floodplain of old houses, vacant fields, and thick brush, where the river resumed its more gradual drift to the north and the west.
Since Burn had been pushed, his death was classified as a homicide, and assigned to Dupree and Spivey, who hacked through weeds and bushes and came into a clearing around an eddy where transients had recently camped, unmistakable because of the campfire, the cigarette butts, and the orderly piles of shit on the fringes of the campsite.
“The thing about a floater is that if you don’t find ’em right away, they can get right disgusting,” Dupree said. He turned to make sure Spivey wasn’t taking notes. It was one of the more irritating things about this kid. Dupree could be telling him which bathroom at Denny’s had the best toilet paper and Spivey would be making those tiny marks in one of his notebooks, like he had no memory of his own and could only process information he wrote down.
“Worst thing about a floater that’s been in the water a few days is the smell. That and the bloat. You don’t wanna see that bloat. Trust me. Takes away any respect you might have for the human body.”
Spivey hummed the same response to every one of Dupree’s bits of dispensed wisdom. “Mmm-hmm,” he said.
Dupree rubbed his thin hairline and looked downstream. Then he turned to Spivey. “Why don’t I look upstream. You check the Pacific Ocean.”
Spivey nodded and began walking west.
“That was a joke,” he said, but Spivey was already gone. He couldn’t figure out why the lieutenant was so high on this kid. When Spivey was out of sight, Dupree pulled out his cell phone and hit Caroline’s cell number. It rang four times before her voice mail came on.
When he heard the beep Dupree began talking quickly, nervously. “Hey, just wanted to see if you were all right.” He looked over his shoulder at the calm river. “By the way, the kid you”—he paused—“tried to save, you know, I talked to him six months ago on an assault. He was a shit.” He rolled his eyes at himself. That wouldn’t make her feel better. “I just wanted to tell you…you know…it’s amazing what you did…I mean…” He bit his lip. He was no good at this sort of thing, at making people feel better. Especially her. Too many feelings too close to the surface.
“Any idea what kind of bait a guy uses to catch a drowned drug dealer? You know, maybe a Cool Ranch Dorito? A ’78 Monte Carlo?” He had the sense that this message was going on too long. “All right. I just wanted to see if you could tell me anything else about the guy who pushed him. Looks like it’s my case. So call me later. When you get a chance.”
He tried her home number, got no answer, then turned the phone off and stared at it for a moment. Caroline had given her story to patrol officers and then had gone home, according to the patrol sergeant on duty. He could imagine how upset she was. He didn’t like her taking things so hard. A person had to find a way to disconnect, to find a buffer between himself and the world. How many times had he told her that?
Dupree walked for several hundred yards, through more transient camps and teenage hideaways. It occurred to him that people only came to this part of the river to get drunk, get high, or have sex with someone they weren’t supposed to have sex with. It was as if everything shameful about Spokane seeped down the valley, over the falls, and into this riverbed.
Someone screamed and Dupree spun around.
It came from farther upstream, just below the dam and the last part of the falls. At first he thought someone had found Kevin Hatch’s body, but the scream was harrowing, and he didn’t figure the kid’s body to be in a state to inspire that kind of scream. Not yet.
He loped along the riverbed, reaching back for his handgun, and came into a clearing where a young Explorer stood, pointing at something pressed up against the riverbank, partly covered with branches. There was no mistaking what it was, but Dupree had trouble seeing the whole, focusing instead on a single point, a dull white shining, not like a coin or a beer can, but something flat, barely reflecting the light at all.
Bone.
Dupree stepped past the young volunteer, who couldn’t put her arm down, and began pulling the branches away. The bone was part of a forearm, the forearm part of a decomposing human body. The smell was strong, but fading.
He felt a rising in his chest and pulled more branches away, then brushed off a thin layer of dirt. At the shoulder, darkened, leathery skin hung in place, shrink-wrapped around the bone, the flesh drying away. There was some skin attached still lower too, at the breast. He keyed his mike, but nothing came out of his mouth, and he knew he should stop, shouldn’t disrupt any more evidence, but he couldn’t stop, just kept pulling branches away, filled with the irrational fear that he might know who this was.
More branches came away, revealing a small head, already shrinking in on itself, features wearing away, patches of wiry hair. Female, her lips pulled tight over her teeth, as if she had eaten something sour, her eyes darkly socketed, drawn in on themselves. Dupree felt his mouth go dry. The things men do to women. He pulled the branches away, further disrupting the crime scene because even though he knew it wasn’t possible, he had to know this wasn’t his daughter or his niece or his wife. Or Caroline.
That night, another detective would tell him the body was that of a hooker and methamphetamine user named Rebecca Bennett, whom no one could recall having seen alive since April 1, four weeks earlier. No report had been filed, because it was assumed she’d gone back to Seattle or perhaps down to L.A., or perhaps had gotten married, or maybe had been abducted by aliens, or, more likely, no one cared enough to notice she’d gone missing. A disappearing hooker was not much of a magic trick, as it turned out. Her file could’ve had a hundred different names on it, the details were so basic: victim of a sexual abuse at eleven, drug charge at thirteen, runaway at fourteen, theft at fifteen, foster care, runaway again, another drug charge, another theft. When she was killed—strangled and then shot in the head—Rebecca Bennett was twenty-two.
As he crouched in front of her, Dupree couldn’t stop thinking of her as one of the women he cared for, especially Caroline. “I’m sorry,” he whispered, staring into the face of the decomposing young girl. It took far more strength than it probably should have for him not to reach up and brush the hair from the dead girl’s eyes. Instead he pulled a few more branches away until the girl’s other arm emerged, bones with patches of dried skin, and then a hand, still clutched around the thing that had drawn his eye: two folded, twenty-dollar bills.
4
Caroline had gone back to the office, turned off her phone, and looked through a book of mug shots for the man in khaki pants. When she had looked through pages of mugs of forty-ish white men, she sat staring out a window. Time passed without any gauge. She took a shower in the locker room, letting the water pool in her long, narrow fingers, then changed into dry clothes. When she came out into the SIU offices, Sergeant Lane was standing at her cubicle, holding a picture of her niece that he quickly put back on her desk.
“They find the kid’s
body?” Caroline asked.
“No. Not yet.” He sat down, overweight and blanched, still wearing the suit from the sting. After a moment, she sat across from him. “Dupree just called, though. They found a body, a young woman, probably been there a couple weeks.”
“Jesus. What a day.”
“You taking tomorrow off?” he asked.
“I wasn’t planning to. Aren’t we doing the house on Sixth?”
“Caroline,” he began, and already she flinched. He never used her first name, always called her “Mabry.” “I want you to see someone in professional services.”
She smiled at the department’s euphemism for its psychiatrist—professional services. She knew who went to see the dour woman in professional services: drunks just before they were put on disability leave; drug users just before they were fired; wife beaters, attitude problems, and burnouts, the guys who beat the shit out of people at routine traffic stops. “Sarge, I don’t need this.” Caroline lifted a hand to rub her jaw, but became self-conscious and dropped it back in her lap.
“After the day you had, Caroline…”
“I fucked up a bust. I know that.”
“It isn’t about that.”
Reflexively, she turned steady and cool, cleared her head of the fog, allowed her anger to dissipate, and stared at him through calm eyes.
“You work sixty-hour weeks,” he was saying. “I get my ass chewed for carrying your comp time and sick days over from the year before…at this rate, you’ll be able to retire at forty.”
“No one asked you to carry my comp days over.”
“That’s not the point.” He took a breath and covered his mouth, looking to come from a different direction. “It’s my responsibility to watch out for anything that might have an effect on the way my detectives do their jobs.”
Caroline just stared at him.
“If you were getting divorced, I would be concerned. I might suggest you talk to a counselor. If you had been involved in a shooting, if you had some personal crisis…” He gestured with an open hand, as if he’d made his case already.
Caroline started at the words “personal crisis.” She thought about her mother. “But those things aren’t happening to me,” she said quietly, not exactly convincingly.
“No,” he said. “No. But we both know what happens if you don’t deal with the stress of this job. It can’t be easy being the only woman in SIU. And I understand your mother is ill. I just thought it might help to have someone to confide in.”
Caroline stood and paced away from her desk. “So is this an order? Do I need my guild rep in here?”
“No.” He stood and took a step back, smaller than he’d been. “No, there’s no need for that.” He smiled. “I’m not the enemy, Caroline.”
He backed out of her cubicle and retreated to his office. Caroline ran her eyes along the metal-lined cubicles of the SIU office. Thankfully, there were no other detectives in the room. At least he had the sense to wait until the room was empty. She shook as she packed her briefcase, then started for the door.
Outside, she stood in front of the cop shop for a few minutes, breathing the cool April air and watching the light traffic in front of the courthouse. A patrolman bringing in a drunk driver gave her a little wave and she nodded back. She watched the patrol car pull into the cul-de-sac in front of the jail and then she walked to her own car and climbed in, but didn’t start it right away.
She didn’t want to go home yet, to sit there all by herself waiting for Joel to get off work, wondering which granola-fed college students were throwing themselves at him tonight. She didn’t want to go to the bar where he worked either; he would think something was wrong.
And maybe something was wrong. Caroline thought about what Sergeant Lane had said. The kid in the river was horrible, the stuff of nightmares. There was a time, when she first started on the force, when Caroline would’ve needed a couple of days off to sort through what had happened. Like the shooting.
After the shooting, she’d cried on Dupree’s shoulder like a scared kid—and even that wasn’t enough. She took a week off and probably could’ve used two. She’d had trouble sleeping and had a case of the shakes that came and went for months, as if the reverberations from her nine-millimeter had followed her home. The next two months were consumed by shooting reviews, and in every question Caroline heard the accusation that a male officer wouldn’t have needed “deadly force” to subdue a drunk man. She had to answer questions about whether she was the victim of abuse herself (she wasn’t), or had witnessed abuse as a child (she hadn’t). The man had been arrested twice before for beating his wife and had a couple of other minor felony charges on his record. That night he’d come home drunk, found that dinner had been put away, and had gone after his wife with a dull bread knife. Caroline was the first officer on the scene and found the man standing over his wife, beating and stabbing her on the kitchen floor. She yelled at the man through the back door and he turned on her, screaming and moving toward her. Twice she told him to stop, but he stalked out the door, Caroline backing down the steps, into the yard. Finally he lunged at her, and she fired when he was twenty feet away, within what police called the “kill zone,” that space in which a police officer’s life was in danger, though maybe not from a drunk with a dull bread knife. Alone at night, Caroline sat up staring at the walls, trying to remember if she’d made a conscious effort to shoot the man. In the end, it was Dupree’s insistence that she had done the right thing that kept her from quitting. The other officers said all the right things and were overtly supportive, but she could feel their doubt. The best attribute a police officer had was the knack for defusing potential trouble. She had made a situation worse, possibly even panicked, and shot a drunk man who was too far away to really do her any harm. No cop would ever say as much, but she knew what they were thinking.
Caroline started the car and began driving, figuring she’d know where to go once she got there. She started with the Longbotham Pub, where Joel worked. The bar covered the main floor of an old miners’ hotel in downtown Spokane, converted into the kind of young professionals’ pub that serves micros and Guinness black-and-tans to junior law partners and sweet martini derivations to fifth-year college students.
And cops. Younger cops found their way to the Longbotham, and that was how she’d met Joel. He was tending bar when she’d come in with some other detectives after a particularly adrenaline-filled drug raid eighteen months ago.
For her, the attraction had been simple, basic. He was twelve years younger, six feet three inches tall, with the round, muscular shoulders and flat stomach of a swimmer, short black hair, and green eyes with black borders. When she was insecure about his fidelity, which was more often lately, it was those eyes that scared her.
On their first date, they talked about leaving Spokane; she was waiting to hear from law school, he from an Alaskan fishing boat. That conversation had taken place on almost every date Caroline had in Spokane. Everyone was either in the process of leaving or apologizing for not leaving yet. Caroline found herself hoping it was the same in other mid-sized cities, that there were some places that could only be left, cities just barely boldfaced on road maps—Dayton, Des Moines, and Decatur; Springfield, Stockton, and any city with “Fort” in its name—places that spark none of that romantic quality that young people believe will keep them from growing old.
It wore on Caroline. Everyone dragged around heavy suitcases filled with excuses for staying in Spokane, and her own sounded no more convincing than any others she’d heard. “I was planning to leave, but I met this guy…” “I would’ve left months ago, but my mother is ill.” She was thirty-six. What was her excuse before she met Joel? Before her mother got sick? Before she shot the wife beater? Before Dupree?
She stood outside the Longbotham, which was fronted on the street by big picture windows. She watched from outside as Joel pulled the taps and served up beers to a couple of young men in baseball caps. She ran her eyes along the
bar until she found the girl who worried her: thin, blond, faded jeans cinched around a rubber-band waist. The girl leaned across the bar and yelled over the music into Joel’s ear as Caroline tried to imagine a drink that took that long to order.
From the street, Caroline watched the college girl shrug demurely. Joel began mixing her a margarita, never looking away from the girl, drawing her in, making her think stupid thoughts. Caroline thought about warning her: Get out of town while you still can. It’s not real, the thing you see in those eyes.
She stepped away from the window, looked up and down the street, and then started back for her car.
She drove through downtown and up the first crest of the South Hill, parked in the lot of Sacred Heart Hospital, and walked inside. She showed her badge to the security guard, who waved her inside. She took the elevator to the seventh floor oncology unit and chatted with the nurses for a few minutes. They seemed uncomfortable with her being there and had trouble making small talk.
“She was awake for about an hour tonight,” a nurse said. “She ate some pudding.”
They walked to the end of the hall, Caroline keeping her eyes straight ahead, avoiding eye contact with the patients in the other rooms. The door swung open silently, and even in the dark Caroline could see that her mother was in the same position as she had been the day before, on her left side, airing out the bedsores on her right. At 6 A.M., the nurses would turn her again. At 6 P.M., they would turn her again. And on and on, perfect in their symmetry. It struck her that the only thing her mother’s doctors treated with any certainty at all was bedsores.
Caroline bent over her mother’s face and kissed her dry cheek, rattling the plastic IV lines. The room hummed with the motorized morphine drip and the grinding oxygen machine and the whir behind every wall of the hospital. Caroline leaned over to read the setting on the morphine.
“You upped her dosage?”
“The doctor did, yes,” the nurse said. “Earlier today.”
