Diaz had to know that hoping for fingerprints after more than six months- in a vehicle that had been in use all that time- was an investigator’s version of a Hail Mary pass. But he’d been damned thorough. That faint purple-white haze on the glass never came off.
Sarah, don’t whine. Not even to yourself.
And then I looked down, and saw something that wiped petty concerns about the condition of my car from my mind. A square of carpet had been cut out of the floor.
They’d found blood. To inspect the carpeting was one thing, but to remove some for further testing meant they’d found something they were fairly sure was blood.
While I drove home, I engaged in a mostly pointless exercise, trying to estimate how long it might take the BCA to do the lab work. More often than not, the testing process took weeks. Then again, it was possible that Diaz had some stroke with the BCA, and they’d expedite these tests. I couldn’t count on having all that long.
Even though I would have preferred to go straight home, I stopped by the Hennessys’ instead. I arrived to find Liam apparently digging under the willow tree, leaning into his work with a spade. Yet his clothes, a white shirt and gray pants, were clearly what he’d worn to school, not consistent with gardening. There was a sealed plastic trash bag near his feet.
I walked across the grass to Liam’s side. It was warm enough out that I felt the five-degree drop in temperature as the shadow of the willow tree fell across my face, then my body. “What is that?” I asked him. There was something in the trash bag; it was rounded but shapeless, as though it held an unbaked loaf of bread. Color wasn’t discernible through the pellucid green plastic.
Liam stopped working, raised a shoulder diffidently as if trying to decide how to phrase something. “It used to be Snowball,” he said finally.
“Oh, hell,” I said. “What happened?” Now that I knew what I was looking at, I could see that the color the bag masked was red: a murky, greenish red, like blood in a parking-lot oil puddle.
“Something got to her,” Liam said. “We don’t know what. She was ripped up pretty badly.”
“Where did you find her?”
Liam pointed. “Down at the end of the driveway, off to the side.” He leaned into the spade handle again and forced more upturned black soil out of the hole he was making. “I said I’d bury her. I didn’t want Marlinchen looking at it anymore. I thought she was going to be sick this morning.”
I felt a small sting of guilt; it was me who’d glibly told Marlinchen that Snowball would be home safe in the morning.
“It bothers me, too,” Liam said. “I can’t think of any animal around here that would do this.”
He was looking at me as if for comment, and I realized that he was calling on me as an expert in violent death, even that of pets.
“There are some natural predators around here,” I said, thinking. “Coyote, fox, black bear.”
Liam was skeptical. “I never see anything like that. We don’t even see the tracks.”
“Generally, animals like that stay away from humans,” I said. “But as rural areas get more built up, they do come into human settlements to look for food. People have spotted them around here.”
“I suppose,” Liam said.
20
My next trip to the gym was more successful. I didn’t run into Diaz, or my unwanted supporter, Jason Stone, either. I bought groceries after and, on the way home, was stopped at a traffic light when something caught my attention. A lone figure was climbing up a concrete staircase that led to a pedestrian-and-bike overpass over the freeway. Except he wasn’t really climbing.
Popular culture writes off drinking to excess as a rite of passage among the young, but there’s something painful to watch about someone who has drunk himself into complete incapacitation. The boy- he looked underage in his hoodie, loose jeans, and running shoes- was literally crawling up the stairs toward the bridge on his hands and knees. At the halfway landing, he stopped and lay down to rest. Or he’d passed out.
A horn sounded behind me. The light had turned green, and I was holding everybody up. I pulled away, into the intersection.
The last I saw of the young man was that, as if galvanized by the sound of the horn, he had started crawling again.
A rectangular pattern, across the interstate and back along a side road, brought me to the corresponding staircase on the other side of the pedestrian walkway. I didn’t go up to intercept the kid. He’d be safe crossing the highway; the overpass was bounded on each side by a high chain-link fence. Even if he rose to his feet and walked, there was no way he could topple over into traffic.
In time he appeared at the top of the stairs, staggering, but nonetheless on his legs. He looked down at the steps as though they were an obstacle course, then wisely decided to descend on hands and knees, just like he’d gone up. I got out of the car and climbed up the stairs to meet him.
His body, viewed from above, was even more slender up close, and his hair looked a little too blond to be true. When he looked up from my running shoes to my face, that suspicion was confirmed: his features were clearly Asian. Hmong possibly, or Vietnamese.
I saw something else, too. He wasn’t just under 21; he was clearly under 18.
“Are you all right?” I said. “Can you hear me?”
His eyes focused in on my face. “Oh no,” he said in a tone of resigned dread. “Oh no. Police.”
How do they always know? I thought. I was wearing nothing remotely officiaclass="underline" mid-calf-length leggings, a T-shirt, and a hooded jacket.
“Can you stand up?” I asked.
“I don’ want to go to juvie,” he said in the same tone. There was no accent in his voice, marking him clearly as second-generation American.
“I’m not arresting you,” I said.
“I hate it at juvie,” he moaned.
“One, I doubt you’ve ever been,” I said, hooking a hand around his upper arm and pulling. “Two, you’re not under arrest. Stand up.”
“No, no, no,” he said, refusing to yield to my pressure. He wasn’t heavy, but I couldn’t get him up without his cooperation.
“Kid,” I told him, “you’ve got something in your sleeve that might someday be a bicep. There’s got to be enough muscle in your quadriceps to get you on your feet.”
“I don’ want to go to juvie,” he said, still droning lifelessly.
“Up,” I said.
When we got to my car, I put him in the backseat. He was only five-eight or so, and thin, but it’d still be safer there in case he got squirrelly on the ride to wherever we were going. Sometimes drunks who couldn’t even get coordinated enough to walk properly suddenly recovered enough to become violent. I fastened the seat belt around him.
As I got behind the wheel, he said once again, “I don’t want to go in, I don’t want to go to juvie,” and fell bonelessly sideways to lie down, head to hipbone, on the backseat.
“Kid,” I said, “how many police officers have you seen that patrol while wearing workout clothes and driving an old car that smells like superglue fumes?”
His lips dropped slightly apart. Too many concepts at once; I’d blown his mind.
“Let me ask you something easier,” I said. “What’s your name?”
“Special K.”
Of course. “No, your government name,” I said.
“Kelvin,” he said.
“Okay, Kelvin, where do you live?”
The address he slurred was becoming very familiar. I started the car, pulled away from the curb.
“It smells funny in here,” he said, ending with a slushy word that could have been Officer.