“It didn’t,” Ben said. “Until it did.”
She set her kit down on the floor and knelt across from Ben. One of the deceased woman’s blue eyes stared at her. She understood why Mendenhall didn’t like the field. The examination room was impersonal, but kneeling next to a body on the floor of her own kitchen was a different thing. The woman had been alive just minutes before; the color was still in her cheeks. Alive was alive, dead was dead. Where the two met was the difficult part. In your mercy, she thought, turn the darkness of death into the dawn of new life. She hadn’t been to Mass in years, but being on scene always brought out the Catholic schoolgirl in her.
“Strangled,” Ben said.
“I see that.” She opened the kit and slipped on gloves. Petechiae. A necklace of bruises around the throat. “You been out riding?”
“How’d you know?”
“You smell like horse.”
Fractured hyoid bone. The larynx caved in.
“You need anything, sweetheart?”
Natasha turned to find a detective standing over her, his badge dangling from his leather belt, his face full of condescension. “Yeah, honey,” she said. Crime scenes were generally a boys’ club, full of testosterone-driven machismo. “I need you and all these other idiots out of my crime scene.”
Ben looked at the floor and smiled. The detective, without another word, cleared the kitchen. Cops. These entitled little boys.
“How’s Emma?” Natasha asked. She had shared an In-N-Out burger with Ben and Emma a week ago—his invitation—but he hadn’t called her since. A little over par for the course for him.
“She’s a teenager.” He shrugged.
“Ah, you’re not her knight in shining armor anymore.”
Ben flashed her an ironic look and then got back to business. “Seems like it’s manual,” Ben said, pointing to the woman’s neck. “No ligature.”
“Is that so?” Natasha said. “Go do your job, Ben, and let me do mine.”
“Right,” he said, slapping his thighs before standing up.
“One more thing,” Natasha said. “What’s her name?”
“Hold on. I got it written down.”
Ben flipped pages on the legal pad while Natasha got down on her elbows, Dictaphone in hand, and examined the woman’s neck. She would have passed out quickly, but the killer would have had to stare into her face for two to three minutes—a quiet face, a nice one—crushing the trachea, snuffing her out with his hands before the brain shut down.
“Emily,” Ben said finally. “Emily Thomas.”
“All right, Emily,” Natasha said quietly, so only Emily could hear. Cardinal sin, she’d tell her students. Don’t personalize the body. But on scene was different; on scene there was disturbed energy in the air. “Show me what he did to you.”
—
IN THE THIRTY-FIVE minutes they had waited for Natasha, Ben had studied the sliced-open door screen: a clean cut, with a scalpel-like instrument, probably an X-Acto knife. The chrome appliances shone in the kitchen track lighting, none of them smudged—at least to the naked eye—by an intruder’s fingertips. Ben had stuck his nose down near the dead woman’s neck, to see if he could smell it. There it was, the petroleum-and-baby-powder scent: The killer had worn latex gloves. Ben had sent a uniform out to interview the neighbors, too, asking them if they saw anything unusual—a car parked on the street, a man climbing a fence or slipping behind the shrubbery. Nothing.
Natasha was on her knees photographing the body, a bright flash and then everything back into focus. A junior detective finally fingerprinted the stove, and Ben turned off the fan so he could hear himself think.
“Broken hyoid bone,” Natasha said into her Dictaphone. Then whispering, not into the Dictaphone but almost as if she were sharing secrets with the woman. He’d seen her do it before—when a boy drowned in a backyard pool, when a woman was hit by an Amtrak train. He almost asked her about it one night when they were out having drinks but decided against it. Another camera flash, everything overexposed, then all the colors and shapes in the right place again. “Dead sixty to ninety minutes.”
“What’s with her?” Rafferty said.
“Natasha?” Ben said, smiling. “She’s not the ‘sweetheart’ type.”
“What a bitch.”
Ben bristled a bit. “Jonas, how about calling her ‘Dr. Betencourt’?”
Rafferty had gridded the house. Officers were searching each section for evidence. It was still horrifically hot inside, humid with pasta steam, stinking of death and onions. In the time since he’d last been on a murder scene, whatever immunity Ben had built up to it had been lost. Homicide was not like riding a bike. He watched Natasha, stretched across the kitchen floor, side by side with the DB—flash—then stepped outside for some fresh air.
The street was a circus. Reporters pushing against the yellow tape, kids on BMX bikes gawking at the scene, a neighbor crying. He saw, between two houses, a couple walking a golden retriever on a path beyond the backyard, beneath a burned-out streetlight.
“Jesus Christ,” he mumbled. “Suburban cops.” He climbed the front lawn and walked back into the house and found Rafferty bent over an investigator dusting the screen door for prints.
“Raff,” Ben said. “We need a perimeter back here.”
Rafferty called out to a couple of uniforms and Ben squeezed through the torn opening of the screen door, following a line of matted grass with a flashlight to a cactus garden at the edge of the backyard. There he saw the prints—Vans skateboard shoes; he could tell by the hexagonal pattern outlined in the pale soil. Eights or nines, he guessed. A uniform was rolling out tape that cut off the backyard from the greenbelt.
“Go inside,” Ben told the cop, “and tell Rafferty to get someone out here to take pictures of these.”
Then Ben was up on the greenbelt sidewalk, standing beneath the blown-out bulb and the eucalyptus bowing in the wind. Every hundred feet down the path stood a brightly lit streetlamp, except here, except right here. The house to the left had a six-foot privacy fence and a locked gate. The house on the right had a line of juniper trees, maybe ten feet tall, cutting the backyard off from this one. It wasn’t difficult to see why the killer chose this house. There were no clear lines of sight from the neighbors’; the only place where you could see inside was right here. He stood in the dark and watched a house full of men combing the first floor. He could see Natasha on her knees now, snapping more photos of the body, the warm light framed by the windows like an invitation.