“She didn’t take out the trash last night, and I didn’t volunteer to do it for her, and now I’m glad. Thank God for that. We need to make everything as watertight as possible,” I explain. “What we don’t want is anything leaking, especially if you plan to transport evidence in your car.”
“Maybe there’s a better way.” He returns to his scene case and places rolls of evidence tape on the counter. He puts on a face mask and hands me one. “Maybe we should get HazMat in here.”
“If that was necessary, I wouldn’t still be around to help you.”
I cover the counter with plastic bags and don’t bother with the face mask. My nose is my friend, even if I don’t like what I’m smelling.
“I touched all of this when I was helping clean up and didn’t have the benefit of wearing gloves or knowing there was any reason for concern,” I continue. “I’m sure Colin has contacts at the CDC, and if not, I do. I suggest making a call and letting them decide exactly how they want to handle transport, for example, which will be subject to regulatory control, since what we’re talking about is the potential of pathogens or toxins present in body fluids and tissues collected at autopsy, and in foods and food containers, et cetera. But the first step for us is to package all this as rigorously as possible, triple-bag it, document everything. I don’t know if you or Colin have biohazard labels or infectious-substance labels or any other type of leakproof packaging. And we need to get all of this back to the lab and immediately refrigerate it.”
“We usually don’t deal with stuff like this, I’m happy to report. I don’t have any special biohazard boxes or containers.”
“We’ll do the best we can. Like this.” From the refrigerator, I retrieve the container of seaweed salad leftover from last night and make sure it’s sealed tightly shut. “It goes in one bag, which I’ll wrap around and tape into a tight little package, then that goes into a second bag, and I’ll do exactly the same thing, and finally a third bag, again the same thing,” I describe. “Probably would pass the four-foot-drop test, but I believe we won’t press our luck. I can take care of this or you can help or you can stand here and watch. Or, if you prefer, Colin can do it.”
“Who’s volunteering me for what?” Colin says, as he walks down the hallway.
“You got any ideas about how to get this stuff to the labs?” Chang asks him. “She says it should be refrigerated.”
“And what you’re saying is you don’t want potentially poisonous garbage inside your candy-ass air-conditioned SUV.”
“I prefer not.”
“I’ll throw it in the back of mine,” Colin says. “Open air and I just hose her off, decon her good, and Lord knows I’ve done it before. Just can’t use bleach on my fine upholstery.”
Chang carries his scene case to the desk near the stacks of expansion files with their different-colored gussets, and he begins to process the two laptops. He swabs keyboards and mouse pads, making sure he won’t wish he had done so long after the fact if there is reason to believe someone might have tried to get into Jaime’s computers.
“I’m going to take these in,” he says, “but I want to look first. Whatever isn’t password-protected.” He moves a gloved finger on the mouse pad. “Bingo,” he says. “If your delivery lady is real, we’re about to meet her. This baby’s got a DVR card. Looks like it goes with that camera out front and the one outside the apartment door.”
I shake open more black plastic trash bags, and Colin and I individually package the containers that I placed in the trash early this morning.
“And it’s got audio,” Chang lets us know. “A pretty fancy camera she’s got outside, we’ll start with that and see who shows up. Long-range, pans and tilts three hundred and sixty degrees. And thermal infrared, so it works in complete dark, fog, smoke, haze. What time did you say you got here last night?”
“Around nine.” I dig chopsticks out of the trash.
“We probably should package her whisky glass,” Colin decides. “And swab the bedside table, like you said. Let’s make sure we don’t forget.”
“The Scotch is in there”—I indicate which cabinet—“but I doubt that’s it, because the bottle was unopened when she first got into it. And here’s the wine bottle.” I lift it out of the garbage and set it on top of a plastic bag, and the memory of drinking pinot noir and talking on the couch tightens my stomach. It almost takes my breath away.
“Nothing like day-old seafood,” Colin makes a face.
“Shrimp bisque. Scallops.”
“Rather smell a floater. Lord, that’s bad.” He bags an empty container.
“Well, this is really strange,” Chang says from the desk where he’s seated. “What the hell happened to her head? Now, this I’ve never seen before. Well, shit. That really sucks.”
We take off our soiled gloves and walk over to see what he’s complaining about.
“Let me back up to when she’s first picked up by the camera.” Chang’s finger moves on the mouse pad.
The images are high-resolution and remarkably clear in shades of white and gray. The entrance of the brick building, the iron railing of the front step, the walkway and the trees. The sound of a car going by and a flash of headlights, then she’s there, a distant figure on the street. Chang pauses the recording.
“Okay. She’s off to the left, right out here in front.” He indicates the street below us in front of the building. “You can barely make her out with the bicycle.” He points at the upper-left area of the computer screen.
“There you are, pressing the intercom button, and here she comes in the distance. But she’s not on the bike. She’s walking it across the street,” Colin observes. “That’s a little unusual.”
“And no safety lights on,” I comment, as I look at what’s on the screen. “As if she doesn’t want anyone to see her.”
“I’m going to guess that’s the point,” Colin agrees.
“It gets better.” Chang touches the mouse pad, and the recording resumes. “Or worse, actually.”
The figure moves again in the distance on the dark street, and I can see the vague shape of her, but I can’t make out her face. A shadow in shades of gray moving the shape of a bicycle closer, and I catch a movement of her right hand lifting up and suddenly a hot spot. A shocking white glare. What looks like a ball of white fire has obliterated her head.
“Her helmet,” I suggest. “She switched on the safety lights on her helmet.”
“Why would you turn on helmet safety lights if you’re not riding?” Colin says. “Why would you wait until you’ve reached your destination?”
“You wouldn’t,” Chang answers. “She was doing something else.”
29
It is almost nine p.m. when Marino and I arrive at the hotel, the back of his van packed with bags of groceries and other necessities of life, including cases of water, a set of pots and pans and cooking utensils, a toaster oven, and a portable butane stove.
After he picked me up in front of Jaime’s building as Chang and Colin were clearing the scene, I had him take me on a series of errands. First we visited a Walmart for whatever items I deemed essential to set up camp, as I put it. Then it was a Fresh Market for basic food supplies, and after that a liquor store. Finally we stopped at the specialty market on Drayton Street that Jaime recommended last night for its selection of nonalcoholic beer, and I was reminded of what some might view as the coincidence of proximity on the one hand and the senselessness of it on the other.
While I understand the concept of fundamental randomness, the favored theory of physicists that the universe exists because of a Big Bang roll of the dice, and therefore we can expect a mindless messiness to rule our everyday lives, I don’t accept it. I honestly don’t believe it. Nature has its symmetries and laws, even if they are beyond the limits of our understanding, and there are no accidents, not really, only labels and definitions that we resort to for lack of any other way to make sense of certain events, especially god-awful ones.