Chapter
1
When Bear came to tell him that Ginny’s body had been found
raped and dismembered in a creek six miles from his house, that
her remains had required three biohazard bags to depart the
scene, that they were currently sprawled on a pathologist’s
slab awaiting further probing, Tim’s first reaction was
not what he would have expected of himself. He went ice cold.
There was no grief—grief, he’d learn, takes perspective,
recollection, time to unfurl. There was just the news slapping
him, dense and jarring like face pain. And, inexplicably, there
was embarrassment, though for whom or what, he was not sure.
The heel of his hand lowered, searching out the butt of his
Smith & Wesson, which of course he wasn’t wearing at home
at 6:37 in the evening.
To
his right Dray fell to her knees, one hand clutching the door
frame, fingers curling between the jamb and hinges as if
seeking pain. Beneath the razor edge of blond hair, sweat
sparkled on the band of her neck.
For
an instant everything was frozen. Rain-heavy February air. The
draft guttering the seven candles on the pink-and-white-frosted
birthday cake that Judy Hartley held poised for revelation in
the living room. Bear’s boots, distressingly carrying the
crime-scene mud, blotting the aggregate porch, the pebbles of
which Tim had meticulously smoothed on his hands and knees last
fall with a square trowel.
Bear
said, “Maybe you want to sit down.” His eyes held the same
guilt and attempted empathy Tim himself had used in countless
situations, and Tim hated him unjustly for it. The anger
dissolved quickly, leaving behind a dizzying emptiness.
The
small gathering in the living room, mirroring the dread
emanating from the hushed doorway conversation, gave off a
breath-held tension. One of the little girls resumed
recounting Harry Potter Quidditch rules and was hushed
violently. A mother leaned over and blew out the candles Dray
had lit in eager anticipation after the knock on the front door.
“I
thought you were her,” Dray said. “I just finished
frosting her . . .” Her voice wavered hard.
Hearing
her, Tim registered an aching remorse that he’d pressed Bear
so hard for details right here at the door. His only way to
grasp the information had been to try to contain it in questions
and facts, to muscle it into pieces small enough for him to
digest. Now that he’d taken it in, he had too much of it. But
he’d knocked on enough doors himself—as had Dray—to know
that it would have been only a matter of time until they’d
known it all anyway. Better to wade in fast and steady and brace
against the cold, because the chill wasn’t going to leave
their bones anytime soon, or maybe ever.
“Andrea,”
he said. His trembling hand felt the air, searching for her
shoulder and not finding it. He couldn’t move,
couldn’t so much as turn his head.
Dray
bent her head and started to weep. The sound was one Tim had
never heard. Inside, one of Ginny’s schoolmates matched her
crying—confused, instinctive mimicry.
Bear
crouched, both knees cracking, his form broad but huddled on the
porch, his nylon raid jacket sweeping low like a cape. The
yellow lettering, pale and faded, announced u.s. deputy
marshal in case someone cared. “Darlin’, hold on there,”
he said. “Hold on.”
His
immense hands encircled her biceps—no small feat—and drew
her in so her face pressed against his chest. Her hands clawed
the air, as if afraid to set down on something for fear of
what they might do.
He
raised his head sheepishly. “We’re gonna need you to...”
Tim
reached down, stroked his wife’s head. “I’ll go.”
The
three-foot tires of Bear’s chipped-silver Dodge Ram hiccupped
over seams on the roadway, shifting the broken-glass dread in
Tim’s gut.
Composed
of twelve square miles of houses and tree-lined streets about
fifty miles northwest of downtown L.A., Moorpark was
renowned for little more than the fact that it housed the
state’s largest concentration of law-enforcement residents. It
was a low-rent country club for the straight arrows, a
post-shift refuge from the streets of the off-kilter city they
probed and fought for most of their waking hours. Moorpark
radiated an artificial fifties-TV-show feel—no
tattoo parlors, no homeless people, no drive-bys. A Secret
Service agent, two FBI families, and a postal inspector lived on
Tim and Dray’s cul-de-sac. Burglary, in Moor-park, was a
zero-growth industry.
Bear
stared dead ahead at the yellow reflectors lining the
center of the road, each one materializing, then floating
downward in the darkness. He’d forgone his usual slouch,
driving attentively, seeming grateful for something to do.
Tim
sifted through the mound of remaining questions and tried to
find one to serve as a starting point. “Why did
you...why were you there? Not exactly a federal case.”
“Sheriff’s
department took prints from her hand....” From her hand. A
separate entity. Not from
her. Through his sickening horror, Tim wondered which of the
three
bags
had carried away her hand, her arm, her torso. One of Bear’s
knuckles was smudged with dried mud.
“.
. . the face was tough, I guess. Jesus, Rack, I’m sorry.”
Bear heaved a sigh that bounced off the dash and came back at
Tim in the passenger seat. “Anyways, Bill Fowler was in the
handling unit. He firmed the ID—” He stopped, catching
himself, then reworded. “He recognized Ginny. Put in a call to
me, since he knows how I am with you and Dray.”
“Why
didn’t he do the
advise next of kin? He was Dray’s first partner out of
the academy. He just ate barbecue at our house last month.”
Tim’s voice rose, grew accusatory. In its heightened pitch
he recognized his desperate need to lay blame.
“Some
people aren’t cut out for telling parents that—” Bear laid
off the rest of the sentence, evidently finding it as
displeasing as Tim did.
The
truck exited and hammered over bumps in the off-ramp, making
them bounce in their seats.
Tim
exhaled hard, trying to rid himself of the blackness that had
filled his body, cruelly and methodically, somewhere
between the porch and now. “I’m glad it was you that
came.” His voice sounded far away. It betrayed little of the
chaos he was fighting to control, to categorize.
“Leads?”
“Distinctive
tire imprints heading out of the creek’s slope. It was pretty
muddy. The deputies are on it. I didn’t really... that’s not
really where my head was at.” Bear’s stubble glimmered with
dried sweat. His kind, too-wide features looked hopelessly
weary.
Tim
flashed on him setting Ginny up on his shoulders at
Disneyland last June, hoisting her fifty-three pounds like
a bag of feathers. Bear was orphaned young, never married.
The
Rackleys were, for all intents and purposes, his surrogate
family.
Tim
had investigated warrants with Bear for three years on the
Escape Team out of the district office downtown, ever
since Tim’s eleven-year stint in the Army Rangers. They also
served together on the Arrest Response Team, the Marshals’
SWAT-like tactical strike force that kicked doors and hooked and
hauled as many of the twenty-five hundred federal
fugitives hidden in the sprawling L.A. metropolis as they
could get cuffs on.
Though
still fifteen years from the mandatory retirement age of
fifty-seven, Bear had recently begun referring to the date
grudgingly, as if it were imminent. To ensure he’d have some
conflict in his life after retirement, Bear had completed
night law school at the SouthWest Los Angeles Legal Training
Academy and, after failing the bar twice, had finally
wrung a pass out of it last July. He’d had Chance Andrews—a
judge he used to work court duty for regularly—swear him in at
Federal downtown, and he, Dray, and Tim had celebrated in the
lobby afterward, drinking Cook’s out of Dixie cups. Bear’s
license sat in the bottom drawer of his office file
cabinet, gathering dust, preventive medicine for future tedium.
He had nine years on Tim, currently apparent in the lines
etching his face. Tim, who’d gone enlisted at the age of
nineteen, had had the benefit of opposing stress with
youthfulness when learning to operate; he’d emerged from the
Rangers seasoned but not weathered.
“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.”
Chapter
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.”
h
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