Authors: Noreen Ayres
I noted an approximate distance from roadside to rubble at about sixty feet. My rendition of a jumbo sedan with its wheels to the cliff face looked like a Crackerjack box with loop handles, but a sketch doesn't have to be a piece of art. Above me, while I sketched, I heard the whir of Doug's autowinder. I glanced up and saw CC Rider observing this new occurrence from a higher perch on the incline. Let's put our thoughts together, CC. What do you think? I pondered how the driver missed the curve and tunneled into a bowl of darkness to connect with the unforgiving clay-and-sandstone backstop. Maybe he was fleeing, in his stolen car, from someone. Maybe he'd been blinded by opposing headlights, or his tires had skied on a skin of water from the night's hard dose of rain. Perhaps he was a night-shift worker who took a final snooze in the car he borrowed from a friend, waking for a last few precious seconds as his body shifted in the capsizing car.
Whatever the cause, I wanted Joe Sanders to get there soon. After twenty-three years of service, he's an expert in arson, explosives, drugs, blood, trace evidence, toolmarks, or whatever, and the rest of us dummies call on him when we get in a bind. He used to be the supervisor of CSI, Crime Scene Investigation, but that was three years and a heart attack ago, and now he assists the lab director and is available for teaching classes at the academy. On the way to the scene I learned he was finishing up a seven o'clock class at the training academy, so I left a message for him to drop by if he could.
I was getting out my steel tape measure when Doug came back and stood braced above me on the slope. He said all the fire crew had done was check for embers; otherwise, they had not disturbed the scene.
“Did you get some skids?”
“Nope. A diet Pepsi can. Good shot of that.”
“Wonderful.”
“I bagged it. Want it for evidence?” He withdrew a brown paper sack from his camera bag, a pleased look on his face. “My lunch sack.”
“Why not?” I took it and put it next to my kit.
“If nothing's on it, give it back. I'll recycle for the five cents.”
“Things are tough all over, Doug.”
“Do you know now long it's been since I had a raise?”
“Yeah, I know. You're so poor you're eating jam sandwiches: two pieces of bread jammed together.”
“I
am
poor,” he said. “My roof leaks so bad my whole bed's a wet spot.”
Joe's gray sedan pulled up and parked ahead of my car and behind the deputies' cruiser and the fire pumper. He got out, crossed the road, and stood with his legs apart and his hands in his suit pockets, then came down the hill toward Doug and me sideways, experienced with fallen eucalyptus spears that act like a million minisleds on slopes. With the steady look that sufficed for hello, he said, “Did you call for aerial?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“It's just a stolen car.”
“With a body. There could be another one somewhere, or an injured person. You goofed.”
My hackles were up, him talking to me like that. He may be an expert, but he's forgotten that these aren't the good old days when Orange County was rolling in citrus money and aw-shucksing itself in the presence of certain gol-dumed Republican actors, one of whom went and got a whole airport named after him. John Wayne is still one of Joe's favorites. Over the holidays, he watched seven of his movies.
But I didn't say anything because I figured he was giving me a small dig for a reason. We'd been a passionate pair for a while until I asked for a reprieve, not because dating someone you work with is a bad idea to my mind, despite the popular notion. What better petri dish than a work environment to learn someone's values, temperament, and reputation? But I admit to a restlessness I sometimes have to defend, and a memory of a husband lost to sudden death. His memory slips through me like a shadow in a stream, there, not there, solid, broken, like life itself, and a certain wariness takes over. You're either ready for commitment or you're not, and I'll take the blame.
“Who all's been down?” Joe asked. He glanced back up to the road where the one fire fighter, a small man with little hair, sat on the backstep of the truck, pulling on a stick of red licorice with his teeth. Now I noticed a female fire fighter at the side writing in a report book.
“We haven't yet,” Doug said. “Everyone else has.”
“I haven't seen Homicide yet,” I said. “If it's just a stolen, maybe nobody's coming out. Maybe Dispatch didn'tâ”
Joe looked at the car a moment, then said, “Somebody arsoned it. These canyons are used all the time for body dumps.”
Doug asked, “What if the car just flew off the road and burst into flames?”
Joe shook his head. “Cars hardly ever explode. Except Corvettes. All that glue and resin. No, somebody wanted to hide something. I've got the sniffer in the trunk. I was using it in class.” He was referring to a device called a catalytic combustion detector, a CCD, used to see if anyone dumped gasoline, kerosene, or lighter fluid before the blaze erupted. “Get all the shots you can up the road, okay?” he said to Doug.
Doug started uphill immediately, and Joe waited a moment, then asked, his face softened, “How are you, kid?”
“Semi-lonesome,” I answered, and buffeted him with a shoulder as I passed by.
“I'm free tonight,” he said, catching up.
“Let me think about it.”
He nodded once, and after a time we both stopped and just stood there, looking ahead at the wreck behind the twisted yellow cordon tape swinging in the breeze.
Up on the road, Doug was talking to a detective named Les. The less I see of him the better I like it.
Joe said, “Your buddy's here.”
“I see that.”
Les was in a brown suit and an orange tie, a favorite combination he claimed went with his faded red hair. He and Doug moved off to the deputies' car.
Joe looked me over, and I couldn't tell if he was remembering something else he should have brought or he was about to give me another lesson. “You look pretty today,” he said.
“Thanks.”
“You do.”
“I don't want to hear it.”
“Why are you always so touchy on that?”
“On the job I'm neuter.”
“Sweetheart, you will never be neuter.”
“I know someone who will if he doesn't be quiet. Looks are an accident of nature. They're not earned, and I don't take credit.”
“Well, I wouldn't want to spoil your fantasy,” he said. He smiled and left me, taking slow, careful steps, the steps of a man who'd learned all things have their natural rhythms, whose favorite expression was “It takes the time it takes,” said about almost anything, from paperwork to investigations to the winding and unwinding of love.
I needed to measure actual distances, so I headed over to a boulder where I would tuck the end of the tape and walk up the slope, then come back down and measure from the boulder to the table ledge, then measure the ledge's height and width. All the while, I was thinking of what I would see in the car, how badly burned the person was, how terrible the act of burning alive must be. And I hoped dearly that we would learn that the fire was merely an attempt to hide an already completed crime, or better yet, that it was an accident after all; for someone had surely once loved the someone in the car. Someone had heard him or her laugh, and watched whoever it was ride trikes and discover things, and someone had sacrificed to keep whoever it was in clothes and in schools and to give the child what we've come to expect is the right to reasonable living. When a life is deliberately taken away, it's a theft from dozens of people. And theft, to my mind, each time it happens and no matter to what degree, is a little killing, a murder of time and thought and caring.
I finished the measures and stood for a moment looking at the narrow passageway between the car's tires and the backstop. My height at five five plus the height of the door with the car on its side would not allow me a perspective if I approached that way. I passed to the left where an aluminum ladder still lay, probably from off the fire truck, along the thirty-inch-high ledge. Lifting the ladder, I propped it against the car frame, setting the legs firmly in the mix of soil and leaves. I wasn't too worried about getting ash on me because I had on an old green twill jacket and pants; they'd survive.
Les Fedders came toward me. He saw me at the ladder and turned his palm up. “Ladies first.”
“Oh, you go right ahead.”
“Nuh-uh. I like to see women climb ladders.”
“Les, does your wife make you sleep on the porch?”
He laughed, and with his hands in his pockets, looked down and made sure leaves weren't lapping over his gleaming brown shoes. He said, “You go on and do your thing, Smokey.”
Joe told me a long time ago, “They pay you to think.” They pay you to think, not feel. And so a certain practiced dispassion overtook me while I climbed. The abundant smell of carbon, purged fuel, melted rubber, and incinerated flesh overtook my nostrils. I stilled myself at the thought of what lay inside the blackened salvage. What mute thing would send its plea for recognition: I
was
, therefore I am?
I would look inside the ruin that yet released its heat to the morning air, and I would listen for what the blackened being within would tell me of its life and death. And afterward, at the morgue, I would explore the heart of the Greek word
autoptos
meaning “I see for myself.” I would see for myself. I would listen and learn. And if there had been a helper in the victim's hard release from this world, I would be alert to it, and come to know that too.
When I peered into the chute, the shock of what I saw almost threw me off the ladder.
At first I thought it was a dog, CC Rider's size. Against the driver's side lay a thing that looked like a burned duffel bag. The legs were gone to the knees and the arms so consumed they were not in the usual pugilistic posture of severely burned persons when ligaments and tendons shrivel, pulling the fists up as though the victim in final frenzy could box the flames away. Where the head should have been, a stump of leaden vertebrae remained.
I lifted my eyes while steadying myself with a keener grip on the window frame. Above me, two ragged ravens swept through the sky and came to rest in the branches of a Monterey pine a few dozen yards away.
Believing the shape of the head would form itself once my eyes got used to the shades of blackness, I looked inside again, but nothing there resembled a skull. On the chest wall were two burned lumps that said the victim was a woman.
Joe and a coroner's investigator with an explosion of coppery hair backlit by the sun were approaching as I got down. Les moved aside for them.
I said, “The head's gone. Maybe it rolled under. I can't see that well. We're going to need lamps.”
“It's not gone,” Joe said. “It's just not in one piece.” He put his hands to his head like ear mufflers and said, “You've got a prison of bone here. High enough temperatures, it explodes.” Expanding gases, he explained, would send bony shrapnel jetting into the leaves and lumpy eucalyptus buttons we'd have to search through on the canyon floor. “Our job just got a little harder, is all.”
Les moved to the ladder, went up, looked a long while, then climbed down. “Get it out. We'll see what's what.”
Doug came along with the CCD and set it down by Joe. He handed over the car keys, and Joe took them, bounced them twice, and gave them back. “You'll need the sifter, too,” he said. “You're a good man, Charlie Brown,” Joe said, as Doug gamely headed back up the hill to Joe's car.
Joe told Les, “I need to get to the underside of the car, but I'll wait till the body is cleared. I guess you know it's registered to a woman in Beverly Hills.”
Les nodded. “We'll give her a call. If she's callable.” His gaze went to the wreck.
The polished silver pin in Joe's lapel with the numbers 4â190 on it glinted in the sun. A lot of cops have pins and belt buckles designed with 187 on them, the penal code section for homicide, but Joe's meant he was
for
190, the section that allows a judge to impose the death sentence for murder in the first degree.
Joe went back up the hill as I stood waiting for Doug to bring back the screened flat we use for sifting. The coroner's investigator, dressed in street clothes and wearing flat shoes, climbed up the ladder and looked in. She came back down wordlessly, then glanced at us and said, “Whew. Get your pictures. I'll call Transport.” I didn't know her name and she didn't offer it. As she turned to go up the slope, she folded her arms tightly around her waist. Sometimes it's too early in the morning.
When Doug came back to give me the sifter, he got up on the car and began taking shots as I laid line in a grid for our search of the surrounding area. In a while the transport team arrived in a plain-wrap station wagon, two young men in blue jumpsuits with “Coroner” in gold letters on the back. They came down the hill with a collapsible gurney and a body bag. I told them to walk a single line along the ledge and when they were in the car itself to keep an eye out for anything foreign and try not to disturb its position. Then I went back up to my car, removed my jacket, took out a pair of coveralls and stepped into them, also bringing along the Polaroid I keep as a standby. I couldn't see that Les Fedders was doing anything but bullshitting with the woman fire fighter.
Doug's autowinder was still going as I began brushing aside debris in a corner grid with just my gloved fingers. In the next fifteen minutes I found and dropped into a paper bag what I thought were fragments of temporal, occipital, nasal, and maxillary bone, this after snapping shots of the surface of the gridded area. I also found a tooth.
Pretty soon I heard Doug's camera buzzing again off my left shoulder and saw him photographing something by the trunk of an oak. Next thing I know, he was standing near me, saying, “Guess what I found.” His camera was capped and sitting on his bag near his sneakered foot, and he held both hands behind him. When I looked up, his white shirt hurt my eyes. Holding out a piece of gray bone in the shape of a croquet hoop, he said the jaw had been resting on a pot-sized rock against a tree.