“Tire tracks,” Tim said. “If the guy’s that disorganized, something’ll break.”
“Yeah,” Bear said. “Yeah, it will.”
He slowed and pulled into a parking lot, easing past the squat sign reading VENTURA COUNTY MORGUE. He parked in a handicap spot up front, threw his marshal’s placard on the dash. They sat in silence. Tim pressed his hands together, flat-palmed, and crushed them between his knees.
Bear reached across to the glove box and tugged out a pint of Wild Turkey. He took two gulps, sending air gurgling up through the bottle, then offered it to Tim. Tim took a half mouthful, feeling it wash smoky and burning down his throat before losing itself in the morass of his stomach. He screwed on the lid, then untwisted it and took another pull. He set it down on the dash, kicked open his door a little harder than necessary, and faced Bear across the uninterrupted stretch of the vinyl front seat.
Now-just now-grief was beginning to set in. Bear’s eyelids were puffy and red-rimmed, and it occurred to Tim that he may have pulled over on his way to their house, sat in his rig, and cried a bit.
For a moment Tim thought he might come apart altogether, start screaming and never stop. He thought of the task before him-what awaited him behind the double glass doors-and wrestled a piece of strength from a place he didn’t know he had inside him. His stomach roiled audibly, and he fought his lips still.
“You ready?” Bear asked.
“No.”
Tim got out and Bear followed.
The fluorescent lighting was otherworldly harsh, shining off the polished floor tile and the stainless-steel cadaver drawers set into the walls. A broken lump lay inert beneath a hospital-blue sheet on the center embalming table, awaiting them.
The coroner, a short man with a horseshoe of hair and a stereotype-reinforcing pair of round spectacles, fussed nervously with the mask that dangled around his neck. Tim swayed on his feet, his eyes on the blue sheet. The draped form was distressingly small and unnaturally proportioned. The smell reached him quickly, something rank and earthy beneath the sharp tang of metal and disinfectant. The whiskey leapt and jumped in his stomach, as if trying to get out.
The coroner rubbed his hands like a solicitous and slightly apprehensive waiter. “Timothy Rackley, father of Virginia Rackley?”
“That’s right.”
“If you’d like, ah, you could go into the adjoining room and I could roll the table over before the window so you could, ah, ID her.”
“I’d like to be alone with the body.”
“Well, there’s still, ah, forensic considerations, so I can’t really-”
Tim flipped open his wallet and let his five-point marshal’s star dangle. The coroner nodded weightily and left the room. Mourning, like most things, gets more deference with a little authority behind it.
Tim turned to Bear. “Okay, pal.”
Bear studied Tim a few moments, eyes darting back and forth across his face. He must have trusted something he saw, because he backed up and exited, easing the door closed discreetly so the latch bolt made only the slightest click.
Tim studied the form on the embalming table before drawing near. He wasn’t sure which end of the sheet to peel back; he was accustomed to body bags. He didn’t want to turn aside the wrong edge and see more than he absolutely had to. In his line of work he’d learned that some memories were impossible to purge.
He ventured that the coroner would have left Ginny with her head facing the door, and he pressed gently on the edge of the lump, discerning the bump of her nose, the sockets of her eyes. He wasn’t sure if they’d cleaned up her face, nor was he sure he would prefer that, or whether he’d rather see it as it was left so he could feel closer to the horror she’d lived in her final moments.
He flipped back the sheet. His breath left him in a gut-punch gasp, but he didn’t bend over, didn’t flinch, didn’t turn away. Anguish raged inside him, sharp-edged and bent on destruction; he watched her bloodless, broken face until it died down.
With a trembling hand he removed a pen from his pocket and used it to pull a wisp of Ginny’s hair-the same straight blond as Dray’s-from the corner of her mouth. This one thing he wanted to set straight, despite all the damage and violation stamped on her face. Even if he’d wanted to, he wouldn’t have touched her. She was evidence now.
He found a single ray of thankfulness, that Dray wouldn’t have to carry the memory of this sight with her.
He pulled the sheet tenderly back over Ginny’s face and walked out. Bear sprang up from the row of cheap, puke-green waiting chairs, and the coroner scurried over, sipping from a paper cone filled with water from the cooler.
Tim started to speak but had to stop. When he found his voice, he said, “That’s her.”
2
THEY headed back to Dray in silence, the bottle sliding empty on the dash. Tim wiped his mouth, then wiped it again. “She was supposed to be just around the corner at Tess’s. You know, the redhead-pigtails? Two blocks away from school, right on Ginny’s way home. Dray told her to go there after school, so we’d have a chance, you know, her other friends, the presents. To surprise her.”.
A sob swelled in his throat, and he swallowed it, swallowed it hard.
“Tess goes to private school. We have an arrangement, us and her mom. The kids can stop by for play dates unannounced. There was no one expecting Ginny, no one to miss her. This is Moorpark, Bear.” His voice cracked. “It’s Moorpark. You’re not supposed to know your kid’s not okay when she’s four hundred yards away.” Tim faded off into a space between agonizing thoughts, a momentary respite from the distinct pain of having failed-as a father, as a deputy U.S. marshal, as a man-to protect his sole child’s existence.
Bear drove on and didn’t talk, and Tim appreciated him greatly for it.
Bear’s cell phone rang. He picked it up and spoke into it, a string of words and numbers that Tim barely registered. Bear flipped the unit shut and pulled to the curb. Tim didn’t notice for several minutes that they were stopped, that Bear was studying him. When he looked over, Bear’s eyes were startlingly severe.
Tim spoke through the sluggishness of his exhaustion. “What?”
“That was Fowler. They caught him.”
Tim felt a rush of emotions, dark and hateful and intertwined. “Where?”
“Off Grimes Canyon. About a half mile from here.”
“We’re going.”
“Ain’t gonna be nothing to see but yellow tape and aftermath. We don’t want to contaminate the arrest, fuck up the crime scene. I thought I’d take you to Dray-”
“We’re going.”
Bear picked up the empty bottle, jiggled it, then set it back on the dash. “I know.”
•They pulled down the long, isolated drive, gravel popping beneath the tires, winding their way into the heart of the small canyon. A converted stand-alone garage to a house that had long since burned down sat dark and slanted along a crescent of eucalyptus. The smudged side windows diffused a single spot of yellow interior light. Rain and wear had lifted the plywood from the walls, and the swing-down door was rotting in fat patches. To the side a rusting white pickup rose from the weeds, fresh mud caked in the tire treads and thrown up around the wheel wells.
A police vehicle sat diagonally across the overgrown concrete foundation of the extinct house, lights blinking. Like the other cars in the fleet, it was labeled MOORPARK POLICE, though all two-man crews were, like Dray, sheriff’s deputies contracted from Ventura County. Parked beside it was an unmarked, lights flashing from the sun visor. Without the accompanying scream of the sirens, the strobe action was disorienting.
Fowler met them at the truck, his mouth pursed over a lipful of tobacco. He was breathing hard, his eyes sharp and gleaming, his face flushed with excitement. He unsnapped his holster, then snapped it again. The detectives were not in sight. No yellow tape, no perimeter, no crime-lab guys working up forensics.