Under the Bridge (29 page)

Warrens teacher corrected his misspelling of “drive-buy” and had circled “glock,” adding her own question mark.

Bruce Brown wrote in his report. “I seized the fairy tale; a sort of gangsta/rap type story about somebody being shot using characters such as Goofy, Mickey, and Bugs Bunny.”

Bruce Brown and John Bond found themselves at the Tillicum Mall perfume counter. The two men, both wearing leather jackets, might have been mistaken for husbands buying a gift for their wife. They surveyed: Opium, White Diamonds, Happy, Eternity.

“Can I help you?” the salesclerk said hopefully.

Sergeant Bond flashed his badge.

“Is this about those girls from Shoreline?”

He nodded and produced some shards of glass from a plastic bag in his pocket.

The small shards of glass had been retrieved from the concrete of the parking lot behind the Comfort Inn.

“Do you know what kind of bottle these might have been from? What brand?”

She looked down at the shards, observing the blue letters. The small line of an L. The faint curve of the S.

“Oh sure,” she said, proudly. “That's one of our best-sellers. I have it right in the Ralph Lauren section. That's Polo Sport.”

T
WO DETECTIVES
from the Ident team stood at the scene of the crime. Both men were examining the bark of a tree with a magnifying glass. The white schoolhouse remained incongruously surrounded by yellow crime scene tape. How pristine the empty and antique schoolhouse remained, the boards still white and clean. The homes on the other side of the Gorge too remained elegant and envied locales with their view of the shimmering Gorge. How strange it seemed that no one in any of those homes had witnessed the murder in their midst under the light of the full moon.

The bridge now was covered completely in bouquets of flowers. The place of passage had become an ad hoc shrine. Those who had never known Reena now gathered on the bridge and held each other and cried and cried. Her photo was propped up amid the flowers. Lines from a Robert Frost poem, placed at the site by Reena's family, were on a piece of white paper, above the words, “Reena, forever in our hearts.” The true memorial would have to wait until after the autopsy results were
complete. Photographers aimed their cameras down toward the flowers, then traipsed under the bridge to capture some images of the dark place of attack.

The two detectives were inspecting the bark of the tree as, according to their notes: “Sgt. Bruce Brown informed us Glowatski said the victim's head had been smashed into the trees.”

The sky was gray and yet soft with the plumes of mist and mountains the color of smoke.

The men tried to be furtive, for the media and public were not yet to know the specific details of the last moments of a girls life. The secrecy, as it is wont to do, only created more curiosity. Sergeant Archer saw no sign of red on the gray and wet ancient bark. Surely the rain had washed all the blood away. Sergeant Archer found the day's assignment particularly frustrating.

“Everywhere I turned,” he would later testify, “there were cameras in my face.”

The cameras bothered Tara as well. She would later recall how on her walk to and from school, “There were 500 reporters trying to talk to you. They didn't look at us and see that we were so young. They don't think about how they make people feel. We couldn't concentrate in school. Only our teachers didn't judge us; they were the only adults that understood that we weren't bad people.”

To the world, the boy she had once called Speedy Gonzales was now a “savage killer.” Warren, her friend, who had once called Marissa munchkin and called her a Care Bear. She'd already gone to the police station and given a statement about the friends she'd known and loved. “Thank you very much for coming in, Tara,” the detective had told her. “It showed a lot of courage for you to come in here and talk to us. I hope there're more people like you rather than the people who were cowardly enough to be involved in this thing.”

Still, she felt neither brave nor honorable. She'd been there. Under the bridge. She would see the moment again and again when she was trying to listen to her teacher discuss the chart of elements. Under the bridge. She would see the moment as a flurry of such frightening and troubling savagery. It was the most horrible thing she'd ever seen. “Especially when friends whom you've known forever are kicking, pulling hair, punching, smashing heads against railings.”

And now those friends whom she'd known forever were locked away and their desks were empty and their names were not read or mentioned by teachers, as if they too had gone missing into some eternal place of absence.

In the hallways, Tara noticed Syreeta walking like a phantom with her hair lank and shadows under her eyes. “Syreeta used to always be high class, but after what happened, she just wore track pants and sneakers and she was just so sad.” Syreeta and Tara had gone together to the place below the old schoolhouse, and they'd placed two single roses on the sand for Reena. Then the reporters had come rushing down to ask them if they knew the girl who died, and they'd both run away together, chased by the unknown adults.

“After the arrests, The Five of us just stuck together. We talked about it all the time. We were just there for each other. ‘Do you want to go for a coffee?' People didn't know what to do with themselves. Our whole big group split up; the whole dynamic changed. No one wanted to go out anymore. Other people couldn't understand what was going on. We talked about it all the time on the phone. For us, that was all we could think about. Before I went to bed, that's all I could think of. When I woke up, that's all I could think of.”

All that Tara could think of was this:

“The fact of seeing something so horrific.

“The fact that your closest friends could be capable of what they did.

“The fact that someone had lost their life
for no reason at all.”

•   •   •

A Shoreline student named Jodene Rogers walked over the bridge to her mother's home after school, and instead of doing her homework or calling her boyfriend, she asked for a drive to the police station.

Sergeant Poulton met with the girl. She was dressed in flared denims and a Calvin Klein hooded sweatshirt. Her eyes were a pale violet-brown, and some strands of her hair were tawny while others were almost gold.

“I have a few questions,” Jodene said. “The only thing I'm really worried about in giving this statement is the confidentiality. I don't want anybody to know that I've been in here and given this information. It's because of personal safety. There's certain people, who are not involved, but if they knew I was ratting on Kelly, they wouldn't like it and I'd have to deal with them. That's the one thing I'm worried about.”

“Well, that could be a problem. If necessary, you would go to court to say what you'd seen or heard. I mean, it may be absolutely crucial to the case against Kelly.”

Worry shadowed Jodene's eyes and the pale violet seemed to turn to a steady and dark brown.

“Its tough,” Sergeant Poulton said. “We understand these are hard decisions you and all your friends have to make right now. We're in a position where we're dealing with a murder investigation of a fourteen-year-old girl who's been killed and it's our responsibility to get to the bottom of it. For your own peace of mind, telling us what happened might be better for you. Basically, Jodene, if everybody gave information to us about Kelly and then didn't show up in court, well then Kelly would get out of jail tomorrow and she'd stay out.”

“Well, can't you use my recording? Can't you play that in court?”

“That's the way our justice system works. People have to stand up and give their evidence, and be subject to cross-examination. That's the fair way of doing it.”

“See, the thing is,” Jodene said, biting her already bitten nails, “I
want
to tell you this. I know it's the right thing to do, and I pray to God that I do not have to go up on that stand. I'm not the only person who knows this exact story. I know others know it, but they don't want to tell you guys because they don't want to go on the stand.”

“Well, as you say, it is the right thing to do.”

Jodene sighed.

“Okay, well, I was talking to Kelly outside the school last Thursday. We were having a smoke on a break from our peer counseling class. She mentioned to me that the cops had been phoning her friends, and I asked her why. She told me her and her friends invited Reena out and told her they were just going to go out and party with her and have fun, but all along they planned to beat her up. And that's what they did. They just beat her up and everybody was in on it, and then they left her. They went away, and somehow she managed to walk over the bridge, and Kelly wanted to go after her. She wanted to have a talk with her to make sure she wouldn't rat, and Warren went with her, and Kelly said she began kicking her. She pushed her on the ground, began kicking her in the head, took a stick, and messed with her face somehow. She said she snapped or broke one of her arms, and she hit her with some sort of object, in the head. I guess Reena got up, and they knocked her over,
and she fell in the water. She was bobbing in the water, and Kelly said she held her head under the water for a good two or three minutes, and she told me she lifted her foot up, like, ‘Whoops,' you know, and then, I guess they left. She never once mentioned that Warren did anything. It was all her, she said.”

“What did she mean by ‘whoops'?”

“She had her foot on the girl's head, and she made it as if it was a joke, like whoops' type of thing. I don't know. I didn't take Kelly seriously. I know she told other people this, because we sat on the phone the other night. We just talk about it all the time now, and nobody really knows. A couple of my friends think that her arms may have been broken, but we don't know for sure.”

“Did you have any conversation with Warren?”

“I saw him every day at school during that week, but he really kept it quiet. If someone came up to him, he was just like, ‘Get the hell out of my face, get away from me,' type of thing. People were asking him what was wrong with him. Something was wrong with him.”

“Have you known him to be involved in other fights?”

“No. I know he's in that little Crip thing at school. I've never heard of him fighting before.”

“You said she told you Josephine and Dusty were involved in the fight. Do you know them? Could you describe them?”

“Josephine's real tiny. Other than that, I don't have a clue. Dusty, she's quite big with wavy black hair. Other than that, I don't know her.”

Before she left, Jodene was asked by the detectives if there was anything she'd like to add.

“I don't know. The main reason I came down here is because I thought about what Kelly told me, and I replayed it in my mind, and I guess I came down here because I do not believe Warren did that. I'm sorry. I can't even picture him doing that. He's a nice guy. I mean, I can picture him standing there, like this is my mental picture: I picture him standing there, just going, ‘Oh, you're crazy,' you know, and it's not clicking what she's doing. I just can't picture him killing her and leaving her in the Gorge to die. Kelly, I don't know. Kelly's messed up in her head. I always thought she was really weird. She's the kind of person who destructs things, gets herself in trouble. She's been in trouble so much at school she should have been expelled from Shoreline by now. She's either ripping
things off the walls or punching people in the face. I can't see either of them doing this, but it shocks me about Warren most of all.”

•   •   •

Dimitri no longer walked over the bridge because his father had taken him out of Shoreline. His father drove him to the police station, avoiding the bridge, but it did not matter because for years, and perhaps forever, Dimitri would see Reena on the bridge and replay it in his mind and think if he'd only followed her, if he'd only grabbed Warren a second time, if he'd only…. A rash of pimples now marked his once-clear skin, and he'd pretty much given up on trying to play basketball. He could barely talk to Marissa now because she too was a part of the memory. He knew no one at his new school, and he walked through the hallways, an outcast where he once, as he told the
GQ
reporter, “pretty much ran Shoreline.” He was over six feet tall, but he felt as if he must be still growing because every one of his limbs ached and he'd curl up with his knees banging into his chin just trying to still the anxiety.

There was this too: he knew more than he'd told the cops. He knew more about Warren's activities on that terrible evening. As his father's car drew closer to the station, he thought of the Decision, as Sergeant Poulton had referred to it—“the Decision you all have to make.” The Decision, however, could get him in deeper, cause his complete exile from the youth of View Royal. So many guys know shit, he thought, why must
I
be the one to tell what happened?