“At least no drugged-out chick is screaming at me,” Rafferty said without any humor.
Ben could feel his blood pressure rise when they walked into the house. It was brutally hot, the heat of the day still trapped by the walls of the house. The foyer was lined with pictures of children or grandchildren, their smiling faces pinned behind glass. The living room was tidy—the carpet recently vacuumed, magazines stacked on a coffee table. Glass figurines—panda bears, cows, miniature unicorns, a seagull with wings outstretched—sparkled in a lighted cabinet against the far wall. A cheap oil painting of a wave catching the light of sunset, probably purchased at a convention-center art sale, hung askew. It wasn’t until he saw what was in the kitchen that he understood what had knocked it off-kilter.
Scuff marks blackened the yellow wall, the sole of one of her shoes ripped apart at the toe. She had kicked and kicked the common wall that separated the living room from the kitchen and nearly knocked the picture off the hook. The woman’s legs were pale in the kitchen light, her dress pushed above her knees. Her torso and face were hidden behind the kitchen island. On top of that island was a cutting board, a tomato sliced into thirds, and a knife slicked with pulp and seed. A fan motor rattled above the oven. A pot of pasta sat on the stove top, the smell of starch thickening the heat in the room. The screen to the sliding back door had been peeled open.
“Anyone touch that door?” Ben said to Rafferty.
“No,” he said. “First on scene said it was like that when he got here.”
She had been at the cutting board, he guessed, her back to the door. Between the fan and the boiling water, and the carpet on the floor to soften the intruder’s footsteps, she wouldn’t have heard anyone sneaking up behind her.
“Get someone to print that,” Ben said, pointing to the stove.
There was another smell, too. When he came around the corner of the island, he saw the puddle glistening beneath her dress, the orange flowers deepening red where it was soaked with her urine. He could tell she had been strangled before he saw the bruises on her neck and the fingernail crescents cutting blood out of her skin, before he saw the scratches crisscrossing her chin, before he discovered the petechiae around her eyes like little pinhole blisters.
“Medical examiner on the way?” Ben asked.
“Don’t have one.” Rafferty shook his head. “It’s me.”
“The perks of living in paradise, huh?”
“I can do it,” he said. “I just don’t want to fuck it up. That’s why I called you. I mean, this is the guy, right?”
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Ben said.
In recent months, there had been a series of killings in L.A. and northern Orange County, mostly manual strangulations. No one yet had said there was a serial on the loose, but cops had started to whisper exactly that to one another. The last body, six days ago, had turned up in Seal Beach, thirty-five miles away.
Ben knelt down next to the body. One eye was open, the sclera red with broken blood vessels.
“She fought,” Ben said. “Hard.”
The woman was in her late forties, at least. Barefoot, a reddening burn on her left thigh—from splashed pasta water, he guessed. Jesus. Ben could understand the shootings in L.A. It was business, a twisted ethic among the gangs, a harsh world with harsh laws, and the kids bought into it. But not even a Crip or Blood, not even a Loco, would strangle the life out of someone. It was too much work, too personal, too brutal. You had to be out of your head angry to do such a thing, psychotic angry, or else you had to enjoy it, had to find pleasure in the power of your hands.
“Who found her?”
“Anonymous tip,” Rafferty said.
“The killer?”
“That’s my guess,” Rafferty said. “Doesn’t seem to have much faith in us.”
“Look what I’ve done,” Ben muttered, looking at the bruises on the woman’s neck.
“What?” Rafferty said.
“This guy wants an audience.”
“Sick dick.”
“Get a call in to the Orange County ME,” Ben said. “We need some science down here.”
2
NATASHA BETENCOURT WAS IN THE middle of teaching a class on weighing organs. Liver, 1,560 grams. Lungs, 621 grams. And the heart: 315. That always surprised the UC students, the lightness of the heart. When the call came in, she was placing a kidney (276 grams) on the scale. Some of the students had tissue paper stuffed up their nostrils—a bad idea, she told them, since you tasted the stink then; tamp down one sense and another compensates. Vicks was the way to go, but everyone dealt with the smell the way they dealt with it. She’d already lost two students to the toilets. The first one with the Y cut and the second when she unraveled the lungs. Those were the sentimental ones. She had a soft spot for those students; they still attached a person to a body, still sympathized with the cadaver. An admirable sentiment, but misplaced and ultimately ineffective in this line of work. “The soul flew away a long time ago,” she liked to say in the examination room. “Just tissue and bone here.”
“Detective Wade on the line,” Mendenhall said, his head poking through the half-open examination room door. “Needs you down in Mission Viejo.”
“You wanna take over?”
Mendenhall, the lieutenant medical examiner, never taught classes. He felt it was beneath him to walk the UC students around, much less show them how to use a Stryker saw, so it was left to Natasha, his deputy. Charging her to teach the classes was Mendenhall’s way of reminding her that a woman didn’t belong in the medical examiner’s office, though he was more than happy to let her do most of the work. Worse than his disdain for teaching, though, was Mendenhall’s distaste for fieldwork. Too messy. He was all clinical, liked to keep his shoes clean.
“School’s out early,” he announced to her students.
Natasha was in Mission Viejo in thirty-five minutes, smoking cigarettes on the way to kill the stench of the examination room. The smell: It didn’t bother her in the lab, but out in the world it did, when she felt it was tangled in her hair, trapped in the fibers of her clothes. That was the problem with being an ME: balancing the examination room and the outside world. Everything was clear in the medical examiner’s office but not out here, not at all.
She ducked under the yellow tape in front of the house, stepped through the foyer into the kitchen, and came around the corner of the island to take in the scene.
“I thought this kind of thing didn’t happen down here,” she said to Ben, who was down on his haunches, taking notes on a yellow legal pad.