Civil Twilight Read online

  Her clothes. Such a tiny box. I had to swallow hard before saying, “Me, too.” I reached for it, but he waved me off. Carefully, he unfolded the linen tatters that had once been that stylish blue outfit. I swallowed harder. There was barely a square inch of color left, amidst the tire marks, the dirt, the oil stains, the blood, and other soil marks. There wasn’t enough material left even to guess whether it came from slacks or a blouse.

  “Is it hers?”

  “What I can see of the color looks right. It’s not like anything for sale right now in the stores. Did you find running shoes?”

  “Four—one pair and two singles. Stuff gets dropped on the freeway,” he explained, then looked away as he realized what he’d said. “It’ll take a while for the guys to put the pieces together. I was hoping you wouldn’t have to look at her remains—”

  “Was there a button? Same color as the material? The slacks had buttons at the cuffs, for decoration. Inch across. Luminescent, mother of pearl kind of thing.”

  He opened a smaller box.

  “There, in the corner! That sliver! That could be a piece of the button.” He scooped it out with a ladle, laid it against the fabric, and eyed me questioningly.

  “I can hardly swear it’s the button, but if there was a piece of her button that size, that’s what it would look like. What’s the rest of the stuff? That thing there looks like a link from a bracelet or necklace or watch, but she wasn’t wearing jewelry and her watch had a leather or cloth band, not metal. And the tooth’s definitely not hers. Hers were white, probably capped, definitely whitened.”

  “That’s a lot to have taken in if, as you say, you were only with her for an hour, just met her.”

  Because I was trying to figure what she and Gary were up to. “One of my roommates in New York was a hygienist. What pictures have turned up?”

  “Of the tooth?”

  “Of her death. A woman drops to her death on Route 80, in front of dozens of drivers and passengers, all talking on their cell phones. There’ve got to be pictures. Every news station, local and national must’ve gotten offers, right? And you got those photos from the stations, right? Maybe they’ll help me identify her.”

  Had he been John he would have puffed out and muttered: cops take, civilians give. But Korematsu only hesitated a moment before nodding, taking the box with the button and heading out the door. This trusting business wasn’t coming any easier to him than to me.

  I sat on the edge of the table and turned toward the wall a couple feet away. The pictures were going to be awful and I needed to clear my mind so I could see them without the overlay of the case. I wanted to look for some angle of her body in the air, arms up or down, something to give me an idea of her reaction.

  The door creaked. I turned to see Korematsu holding out a sheaf of papers. “I don’t know why there aren’t a dozen crashes an hour! A body drops in less than a second and ten people have pictures. It’s insane. Not good pictures, not useful ones. But just to move the phone in that time . . . !” He shook his head. A wave of hair dropped over his forehead and he pushed it back. “These are the pick of the lot, which’ll tell you how bad the others were.”

  “It was night. Dark up there. I’m amazed—”

  “Exactly. This one is the best, but, well, steel yourself.”

  “I am. Thanks, though.” I meant for the thought.

  The two pictures were long shots of a blue bundle on the roadway with a truck skidding to its left at the edge of the frame. I couldn’t make out any detail and didn’t want to, but I forced myself to study the blurry images. In the last shot she was falling, inches above the roadway; she looked as if she was reaching down for it. One arm was out over her head, the other flung to the side. Her legs were spread and one was bent and forward. The shot was from the rear and blurry as if it had been focused on the license plate ahead, with her falling into the frame. “If you blow this up, you should be able to see the button here on her pant leg.”

  “Anything else?”

  “No.”

  “You’ve done falls, right? You were talking about it at the scene, or at least so the scene sup kept saying. About how she wouldn’t have fallen onto the freeway if she’d just stepped off the edge of the slab. What I’m going to ask now is a long shot.”

  “Shoot.”

  “Can you tell whether she had any warning?”

  “You mean, did she have a split second to see the danger and react instinctively?”

  I eyed the photo again. “A high fall in a gag—stunt—is a whole different thing. You run the tape in your mind, second by second. You know where the catcher bag is and how much time you have to flip or turn and then stretch out so you land on the maximum body surface to spread the force of impact. The whole time you’re in the air you’re aiming toward your landing. You’re controlling every part of your body.”

  “But this . . . Look, there’s no coordination between her arms, or her legs, no attempt to cover her head, or land on her feet, not that that would have made any difference. Her legs aren’t together, which she might have done automatically if she’d been a diver. There’s nothing about this that suggests any plan or preparation.”

  He held out a hand for the picture.

  “Not that that means anything. Even if she had planned it, she’d probably never’ve done anything like that. Not many people have. And even those of us . . . Hell, I wouldn’t look any better about to die. Still . . .”

  “What?”

  “If you’re asking my professional opinion as someone who’s studied falls, I’d say she never saw it coming.”

  “A couple tons of metal speeding at her?”

  “If I was standing there and you drove toward me, I’d assume you’d turn or stop. It’d never cross my mind—”

  “Because I’m a police officer.”

  Damn! “Because”—I hesitated to say it out loud, as if I’d be betraying John—“I trust you.”

  He started to raise his gaze to meet mine and ended up giving me too curt a nod. “That’d take a lot of trust.”

  “More trust than sense.”

  “What’d John think?”

  So that was it! Trust be damned. This was what he’d been assigned to do: use me to peek into John’s mind, into observations and opinions John would never share with him. With every bit of acting skill, I forced my face not to tense up, kept my voice calm. “‘Relying on trust is the sign of a lazy interviewer.’”

  Korematsu’s mouth quivered but I couldn’t tell if he was restraining a laugh or simply failing to hide his discomfort. “One of your brother’s Academy classics. So what did he say about Karen Johnson?”

  “He didn’t have any basis to judge. I don’t know if he even saw her, really. When I got to Coit Tower with her I said I was going to talk to my brother a minute, and she went off to look at the view. Maybe he noticed her, maybe not.” I could have mentioned her checking messages, but I was too disgusted with him.

  “Cops notice.”

  “But when she swiped the car I knew it was her, from her hair and the blue. But he was looking at the car, not the driver.”

  “He left the keys in the car?”

  Damn! This was exactly what I did not want to get into, which would only dig John in deeper. It was all I could do to control my voice. “You see a woman you know, who’s not in running clothes, panting. You—especially if you’re John—suspect the worst. Mugging? Heart attack? You jump out to check. I’m his baby sister. Of course he’s not going to stop and go through standard procedure while I collapse on the macadam.”

  “All that time to turn the ignition key.”

  “I happened to be fine, but it could have been otherwise.” Weak. Getting weaker. I gave up. “I don’t know. It was a mistake.”

  “A pretty basic mistake.”

  “Do you need me to identify her body or not? Otherwise, I’m out of here.”

  He hesitated again. “Wait in the hall.”

  I was glad to be ushered out i
nto the world of fast forward. I sat on a wooden bench, felt the slats under my butt. There was a newspaper next to me. I opened it, but couldn’t focus to read. So I sat behind it, thinking not of Karen Johnson but of the cart koan: when all the parts are removed, what will it be? Maybe I was thinking of her.

  A cell phone was ringing. “I gotta take this. Catch you up in a min,” a male voice called.

  The quick tap of high heels resounded on the flooring.

  “Broder,” a man was saying.

  Another cell phone rang.

  “. . . his fine little piece on the side on Guerrero.” Same guy. Muffled laugh. I didn’t dare look.

  “. . . oh yeah! Livid, you can just imagine. No, no, not even about his wife. More power to him; my wife’d . . .”

  Another newspaper crackling open.

  I leaned back, ear to the edge of my own paper.

  “. . . and the smuggling thing.”

  A hand landed on my shoulder. I dropped the paper.

  Korematsu stared down, his expression tense. I couldn’t tell how much of the phone call he’d overheard, but if Broder’s affairs were gossip in the hallway, Korematsu already knew. Broder’s mistress smuggling! The acting chief of detective’s mistress, whose house was guarded by patrol cars! No wonder Broder was taking charge of this case, desperate to get it closed before the bombshell burst.

  Suddenly I understood the danger to John. Broder’d be taking no prisoners in his rush to nab him. He’d use every bit of his power, influence, connections to pin Karen’s murder on him and get him no-bailed. And if John didn’t live to face trial, all the better.

  I was desperate to run for the door. Instead, I took a breath and followed Korematsu to the viewing room.

  14

  “YOU SURE YOU want to do this?”

  I nodded. Yet, despite my intentions I was not sure at all—and less sure with each step down the short hall into a small, cold room. Two gray metal chairs had been pushed against the gray wall. The door at the far end was wide and I understood the reason.

  Korematsu motioned me to sit.

  I didn’t move. Breathed. Remembered the reactions to the koan when Leo gave a talk on it. A cart maker built a magnificent cart with wheels of one hundred spokes. If you remove the wheels, the axle, the front and back pieces and even the cart bed, what will it be? “One big mess,” a woman said. “A pile of rubble,” a guy added.

  A pile of rubble?

  The door opened and the acrid smell of formaldehyde gushed in. Instinctively, I breathed through my mouth. A metal dolly rolled through the doorway. A cart. If its wheels were stolen and its bed tossed away, what would it be, I wondered. It was an instant before I realized I was just avoiding looking at the oil-skin-like sheet lying on top of something small and flat.

  “You’re sure?” Korematsu asked again.

  “Yes.” But I held my breath and reminded myself that whatever shape the bones and flesh under the cloth were, they were still as much Karen Johnson as they had been.

  He pulled the sheet clear of her face. Despite all my intentions I gasped. She looked like a Salvador Dalí Karen Johnson, like the cart when its wheels and axle and bed had been trampled, run over . . . as she had been. I kept my eyes on her, holding our connection. Her face, that face I had noted looked so good for a woman the age I took her to be, resembled one of those rubber Halloween masks flattened in its cellophane bag. But it wasn’t all flat, really, just the lower half, like someone had ripped off her jawbone the way you’d tear into the wings of fried chicken. Lucky there was enough lip to cover the exposed bone of her upper jaw because her teeth were gone. That must have been one of them in the box I looked through, swept up off the freeway like debris. A big mess. Her eyes were closed, the lids sunk into her skull and I couldn’t bring myself to consider whether her eyeballs had been knocked loose, were still in the sockets or not.

  My hands went clammy, my head throbbed. The stench of formaldehyde filled the air. I wanted to race out of the room. I wanted to keep staring at her eyelids that looked almost normal, at her hair that someone had smoothed down over her forehead. I wanted to pretend the cart was still a cart.

  I forced my gaze down. The sheet covered her torso as if she’d sat up in bed and pulled it up under her arms. But I could see her clothes had been cut off or maybe there wasn’t anything left of them except for a piece of blue linen jammed so deeply into the flesh of her arm that it mustn’t have been worth cutting out. Her blouse had been a shell—sleeveless—so that meant it had ripped open as vehicles hit her, flapped against her arm and been ground in. I pointed to it and Korematsu nodded. “Maybe there’s a thread caught inside John’s car,” I said.

  He nodded again, but I had the sense he’d swallowed a comment, probably about the police lab figuring that out without my guidance.

  “You haven’t done an autopsy. There’s no incision.”

  “Not yet. The M.E.’s backed up.”

  “Did they do toxicology? Drugs’d explain a lot.”

  He nodded. He was humoring me, answering questions he’d normally remind me were police business, not mine.

  I looked back at her face—half almost normal, half destroyed—and tried to find an answer to this. Common sense said there must have been a desperation in her that I missed. But, even now, even staring at her corpse, I couldn’t reconstruct that. Excitement, yes. Recklessness, even. She had been about to step off the hundred-foot pole and was ready to go, not preparing to be herded into a fall.

  But none of that was reflected in her body. Right now, I wasn’t going to find anything of any use to Karen Johnson or Korematsu. What I needed to do here was for myself. I reached down to touch her hand.

  “Omigod! Her hands! They’re shredded!”

  “That kind of accident . . . hard on appendages.”

  “You don’t mean she tried to break her fall?”

  He eyed me questioningly.

  “That’d mean,” I said, choosing my words with care, “she had some awareness of what was happening. A fall from that height takes less than two seconds—add another second for the horizontal momentum. There wouldn’t have been time to assess the situation mid-flight.”

  His lips pursed.

  “You’re thinking no one who’s gone off a building and about to hit the freeway is going to assess,” I explained. “What I mean is take in the situation enough to react. Putting out a hand to break your fall is the natural reaction. Stunt doubles have to train ourselves not to do that. You coach yourself, you practice, you do a run-through of the fall in your mind, you know the safest landing is on your back, arms and legs out. And still you can barely keep yourself from trying to land face down with your hands and knees breaking the fall.

  “But if you were drugged, or if a car you didn’t see hit you from behind, you wouldn’t have time to even take in what was happening or where you were. You wouldn’t be aware enough of the situation to have a reaction.”

  Korematsu was staring at the floor.

  “But that’s not how her hands got so mangled, is it?”

  “That may have been part of it.” He hesitated, as if asking again if I really wanted to know the next thing. “When the body lands, the force flings the arms and legs out. Drivers see the body, swerve, and if they miss the body, likely they run over the hands or feet. Probably that’s what happened with the drivers in the first vehicles. In the ones after that, people are essentially driving blind. They know there’s a problem, but they can’t see what. Maybe they saw the body fall, but they haven’t had mental time to process that it’s a body in front of them. Bad enough it’s any object falling out of the sky. It’s dark; ahead of them taillights are suddenly glowing. Brakes are squealing, metal crashing all around them. They can’t see anything. They’re just standing on the brakes and hoping. So whether they run over her—it’s a crap shoot. Chances of them braking and being rear-ended into her—” He shrugged. “We’re lucky to have fingers. That’s the truth. If we get prints, we’ll be rea
l lucky. It’s not like we’re going to be able to send them through the system in the condition they’ll be. We’re going to need leads to match them.” He took a step toward the door.

  “Give me a moment.” I turned back to Karen, this woman I may not have known at all. I touched a square of flesh on her mangled hand.

  I lifted my hand, but the chill of her skin stayed on my fingers as I walked out of the room and started down the hall. Korematsu must have signaled a lab assistant to wheel her body back to the freezer. He was only a minute in catching up with me, as if he wanted to warn me one last time.

  Before he could speak, I said, “The killer had to be in the car with her, right? You’re not assuming she met him up there on the parking slab . . .”

  “Another conclusion we would have reached. I’d be happy to question him if we knew who he was—if we knew who she was. So if you have other information—”

  “Look, I’ve been with her less time than I’ve been with you today. I couldn’t know any more.”

  “But your brother can.”

  “Fine. Go get him!” I snapped. This was like dealing with Dr. Korematsu and Mr. Hyde.

  “Where is he?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “I think you do.”

  “You think in error. If I knew where he was, I wouldn’t be here; I’d be there.” I pushed open the outside door and was relieved to feel the fresh air.

  Korematsu caught my arm. “I’ll say this to you again,” he said louder. “We are on the same side. John ought to be on that side. It’s not doing him any good to think he can deal with this off the books. Sure, he’s pissed about his car and the brass being furious and the rest of the guys laughing their heads off. I can understand why he doesn’t want to run the gauntlet here, why he’s set on figuring out what’s behind it—beyond his own stupidity. Why he wants to come back dragging a perp or waving a psychiatric record or digging up something more than just her name. But he’s only making things worse—a lot worse—not showing up here, not calling in, being the kind of irresponsible he’d ride a rookie out of the department for. What I’m saying is if he knows something about this case that he’s not reporting, he’ll get himself suspended and it’ll be what he deserves.”