Emma’s window was dark, glowing only with a string of white Christmas lights she kept hung from the ceiling year-round. He got out of the car and walked the sprinkler-dampened grass to the back of the condo. As he suspected, the sliding glass door was pulled open, just the screen separating outside from in. He tugged on the plastic handle, but the lock was engaged. He found the penknife in his coat pocket, jimmied the lock free, and slid the door open. Click locks were nothing; door locks could be picked with a paper clip. Only deadbolts were worth a damn. He stood there for a moment in the dark, waiting to hear Rachel moving upstairs. Silence. It was too easy to get in; thirty seconds and the killer could be standing in the family room. He closed the screen and the sliding glass door, engaging both locks. He walked the edge of the room, jumping around the creaky spots on the floor—he’d visited enough to know such things—and slid closed and locked the window in the kitchen. A pad of paper was sitting near the phone and he wrote Rachel a note.
You’re going to be pissed off, he wrote, but ask me about it later.
He checked the coffeemaker. The timer wasn’t set, no coffee in the filter. Ben had always taken care of the coffee, a full pot at 5:30 A.M. every day. He found the tin in the cupboard and scooped a few spoonfuls into the filter. He set the timer, pressed start, and left the note propped up against a clean coffee mug.
He snuck through the hallway into the foyer and stood gazing up at the weak light emanating from Emma’s cracked bedroom door. He wanted to go up there, wanted to kiss his daughter, wanted to crawl into bed with Rachel. He wanted to rewind the last five years of their lives together, pinpoint the places he’d screwed up, and fix them all. But of all the useless thoughts in the world, this was the most useless. All you could do was say you were sorry and hope they believed it.
He opened the front door by millimeters, turned the door-handle lock—man, they needed a deadbolt—and stepped out into the night, pulling the door closed behind him and checking it twice to make sure the lock was engaged.
—
AFTER THE AMBULANCE delivered the body to the medical examiner’s office, Natasha was alone in the examination room. The body lay on a stainless-steel gurney, covered to the toes by a blue sheet. She found a tag, wrote down the woman’s name—Emily—and tied it to the big toe on her right foot. The toenails were painted with chipping teal enamel.
She liked it like this, the silence, particularly after being on scene. On scene, the body seemed demeaned to her, all those people milling around, standing over it, the chaos of an investigation. Here, the bleached-white tile of the examination room felt appropriately serious to the disrespectful task of opening up a body. Here, her job was clear: Determine the cause of death. Not: Who caused the death? Not: Why did they kill? Just: What? Straightforward, objective. It was like a puzzle with clear rules, like the ones her father, an immunologist, used to play with her as a child. “If this cell kills this bacteria,” he would say, “why does it not kill this one?”
An autopsy couldn’t be performed until next of kin were notified, a job that got left to the detectives. But she would wash the body tonight, dignify it by making it clean. She wheeled the gurney over to the floor drain near the sink, soaked a cloth, pulled back the sheet, and pressed the cloth between Emily’s toes. She swabbed the arch of her right foot and then her left. She then moved up the woman’s calves, washing away the indignity of having lost her bowels, the blood starting to pool purple in the fat of her thighs.
Natasha couldn’t help it; it always disturbed her, the bodies of women killed violently. Men who had been shot or stabbed, men who had OD’d, men’s bodies in general, didn’t bother her; for the most part they were killed by some stupid business they’d gotten themselves into. But not the women. Women, most often, were killed by the men who got themselves into stupid business. She tried to remind herself that death was death, equal in its permanence, but the moments before death were not equal in their terror, and Natasha couldn’t convince herself not to be bothered by this.
She moved up Emily’s torso, washing away the sweat of the day, then wiped clean the more-intimate places, tossing one cloth out and starting again with a fresh one.
She remembered the night on Signal Hill; it sometimes came to her when she was here alone with a female body. “Let’s go watch the submarine races,” the boy had said, leaning into her in the doorway. She had been at a frat party. A stupid nineteen-year-old girl. She wasn’t a little sister, but her roommate at the time, Kris, had been. It was a cheap night out—a backyard keg, jugs of wine, boys, most of them clean-cut and drunk. She had known this boy, the one with the plastic cup of beer dangling from his fingers, the one with the blue eyes and the easy smile. He had been in her psych class and she had watched him from afar, flirted with him over coffee in the university courtyard. Submarine races? The joke was so obscure she couldn’t register its meaning. She was a little drunk herself and enjoying the loose feeling of her muscles, her sudden lack of anxiety, the boy’s blue eyes on her. “Sure,” she’d said, laughing.
The boy—well, he was a sophomore in college, twenty—had parked the car, a nice car, a Camaro, on the edge of a ravine, the orange port lights of Long Beach spread beneath them like shattered glass, the mechanical hum of oil derricks pumping behind them. There was one other car parked on the edge of the hill, thirty yards away, and she remembered seeing the glowing point of a lit cigarette behind the darkened glass. And when the boy started pressing himself against her, she’d said no—at least, that’s what she remembered saying. And when he’d gotten his hands up her shirt, she had said no again, but he was drunk and moving quickly, and her back was pushed up against the door handle, and he was six foot four—something she’d admired about him, his lanky limbs, his butterflied back—and it was over quickly. Afterward he’d kissed her on the neck, tenderly, as though what had just happened held great meaning for him. And his passion, his belated tenderness, confused her.
Natasha washed around the woman’s breasts now, cleaning away dried sweat, and then moved to her neck, where the killer’s hands had clamped down, and dabbed the cloth on the crescent-shaped cuts surrounding her esophagus.
She didn’t think about that night often; it didn’t obsess her. It simply floated into her mind occasionally, when the deceased had been sexually assaulted, strangled. The submarine races. She had been drunk, and he had been speaking in code, a code she later discovered other girls spoke. She’d gone out on a date with him a week later, the boy using his fake ID to buy them a bottle of Blue Nun at a little Italian place strung with white Christmas lights. She’d even let him kiss her at her dorm room door. Let him place his fingers on the curve of her left breast, all of her insides cramping into knots. He called her again two days later, and she told him he was nice but that she wasn’t interested in dating someone right now. She could hear the disappointment in his voice, hear him saying, “But I thought—” and “What the hell, Natasha.” She hadn’t been a virgin, they’d both been drunk, he was mostly a nice boy, and she let it go, burying herself in her studies after that. Getting straight A’s the rest of the year, grades she’d never gotten before, grades that prompted her parents to take her out for a lobster dinner at Nieuport 17. “We’re so proud of you,” her father had said. “I knew you could do it.”