Anything You Say Can and Will Be Used Against You (16 page)

I shook myself away from the memory as I drove past the vet school and turned left onto River Road. There were goats in many of the wide yards, a few cows and horses. The lots became larger, the houses smaller, and the grass higher until I reached a small paved road that turned away from the river. I drove slowly, looking for the address Davy had given me.

A woman in her midsixties dressed in a faded denim skirt, purple LSU T-shirt, and white high-top tennis shoes stood at the end of one of the driveways. I stopped the unit so my open passenger window was even with her.

I leaned partway across the seat and nodded hello. “Mrs. Whitehead?”

“Doris. It's Jeannette next door,” she said, her arms folded tightly against her chest. The woman's gray hair was chopped short, and her forearms were thick and corded with old muscle and fat. I looked in the direction she'd tilted her head toward, but I couldn't see a house for all the trees and underbrush.

“I'm Officer Jeffries. What seems to be the problem?”

“Haven't seen her in several days. I always see her leave for work; she passes right by my house, comes home this way too. She works 'cross the river at one of them refineries, regular like. But her car's in the yard.”

“You've been over there?”

“Went up to the porch and knocked. Couldn't see nothing. She's always been meanin' to give me a key but never got round to it.” She shook her head once. “I'm not a worrier, understand? But this is strange. Haven't seen her since the ruckus couple days back. Not like
her, not at all.” The woman's voice was firm yet soft. Her southern gravel reflected a long-time cigarette smoker and the skin around her nose a bit of indulgence in hard liquor.

“What ruckus is that?” I asked.

“It wasn't much. He's always hollering at her, regular like. Nothing strange 'bout that. 'Cept I haven't seen her.”

“She lives with somebody?”

The woman nodded. “Her husband, Vince. Truck driver. Must be doing a route, his rig isn't there; but this isn't like Jeannette not to be passing by. She's a nice woman.”

I took it from her intonation that Vince was not a nice man.

“Well, I'll go take a look, ma'am. You'll be here awhile?”

“Yup, I'm retired. Taught fifth-grade math.”

I started to put the car in gear, then remembered Davy's comment. “You mentioned something funny about a door over there?”

For the first time the woman's eyes shifted away from me, and she rubbed the palm of her hand hard against her right ear.

“Flies,” she said.

“Flies?”

“There's flies all over the back screen door and some of them windows.” She spoke so softly I had to lean toward her. “Jeannette keeps a clean house.”

I nodded slowly. “Okay.”

“You'll come back and let me know?” She put a hand on my car. “Whatever?”

“Yes, ma'am. Whatever.”

“Her last name's Durham,” the woman said. “Jeannette Durham.”

 

Jeannette's house was a small, sagging clapboard, with faded blue paint, sitting in a stand of magnolia and oak trees. I parked a good thirty yards back from the house on the shell driveway and put myself 10-7, on the scene, with HQ dispatch. I unsnapped my holster and kept my hand on the butt of my gun as I walked slowly, my footsteps crunching louder than I liked, the portable radio on my hip crackling faintly with transmissions. I stopped once to briefly touch the trunk of her car—closed
and locked—scanned the interior—clean—and then touched the hood—cool.

There's always something faintly eerie about approaching a house this way with so many unknowns. Especially during daylight when everything appears normal, or at least what we perceive as normal, as safe. You get a hundred calls about someone missing or something not right, and the person almost always shows up, the mystery is no mystery at all. It tends to breed cynicism, a lackadaisical approach to the myriad calls you answer day after day. And then there's that exception. Someone says something like “flies,” and your heart lurches.

The woman was right. There were an inordinate number of flies clinging to the screens on the windows at the rear of the house and side door. But even without the presence of flies I would have known something was wrong. After a while you can read the stillness, taste the texture of the air. Every sense processes a dozen different impressions that the brain computes and analyzes into one single pronouncement: something is wrong. It's what most cops live for, whether we like to admit it or not, that feeling of something gone wrong.

I hesitated only a moment, considering whether to call for backup. This seemed pretty straightforward: something was dead inside.

Blinds were drawn over all the windows except in the front, and the two doors were locked. But screens are ridiculously easy to pry off with a pocketknife, and people are generally lax about locking their windows, especially this far out of town. I got lucky on the third one off the front porch.

As I eased the window sash up, I smelled what the flies already knew: dead flesh. It is a distinct smell, thick and lush with the ecstasy of rot. It settles on your skin like a fine sheen of sweat and requires discipline to hold your imagination in check.

I stood there for a minute, listening. Nothing. Technically, I knew, I should announce myself. Not for my well-being, but for the protection of any civilians who might be inside—that was the official department reasoning. The department didn't want to get sued if you entered the wrong house, arrested the wrong person, shot some
one you shouldn't have. You might get hurt, but God help you if a civilian did.

Some rules, however, are stupid.

Placing both my hands on the windowsill, I scrambled through the open window, very ungracefully but quietly, and sprawled on the wooden floor, gun in hand, and listened again. Past the wheeze of my own breath, past the slight buzz of flies, past the subtle sighs of a house in a morning breeze—searching for a rustle, a scrape, a sense that there was someone else here besides me and whatever lay dead in this house.

I rose slowly, wishing simultaneously that I had the silent grace of a tracker, that the search was already completed, that I had a scanner to detect signs of life-forms, that I'd called for backup, that I was eating breakfast with Gwen.

It's just like on TV, except you move slower and you don't say a word. You hug walls, use a sweeping two-handed grip on the gun, keep your knees bent, and move heel to toe. You toe-push doors open gently and pray that if something moves you have time to say, “POLICE, FREEZE,” and make the right decision to shoot or not.

I worked my way back through the house toward the smell, doing my best not to contaminate the scene, noted the dirty dishes on the kitchen counter, the blood in the sink and bathtub, the reddish-brown smears on the hall walls, and the broken glass on the floor, until I came to the rear bedroom, saw her, checked the walk-in closet, and came back to the bed, looked down, and studied the remains of Jeannette, a nice woman who kept a clean house.

 

The most valuable aspect of SOP—standard operating procedure—is that while one part of your brain is reacting to and absorbing the scene or crisis, the other part of your brain is flipping through the index file of appropriate actions, accessing the correct ones, and activating the body until the rest of you can catch up. The longer you're on the job, the less time it takes to catch up and the more likely you'll react correctly.

I had the portable radio up to my mouth even as I began scanning
the room, this time for evidence, for a sense of what went wrong here.

“2D-76 Headquarters.”

“2D-76.”

“Got a Signal 65 here. One female. Get me detectives, crime scene, coroner, DA, supervisor.”

“That's a 10-4, 2D-76. EMS as well, 10-4?”

“10-4.”

I sighed. It was asinine to send out an ambulance on bodies that were clearly dead and had been for some time. But in their infinite wisdom, some higher-ups had decided that a uniform cop couldn't determine for sure whether life had ceased, even with the obvious signs of rigor mortis and no pulse. So the med techs would come and say, “Nope, no pulse.” And the detectives would come and say, “Yep, she's a goner.” The assistant DA would arrive and say, “Looks dead to me.” The crime scene guys would come and say, “Oh yeah, we got a ripe one here.” One of the assistant coroners would arrive and say, “Yes, she's dead.” And we'd all stand around and watch the final indignities: the photographs, the fingerprints, the prodding and probing and scrapping and bagging—and some of us, the autopsy.

The house would swell with mostly men, and they would stare at her; there would be jokes and raunchy comments, and later bootlegged copies of the crime scene photos would be passed around in coffee shops and parking lots. The official photographs would be included in the packet of photos shown to academy classes to prepare them for their first dead body, a one-dimensional illustration without smell and taste and adrenaline kick of what one human being can do to another.

And Jeannette, whoever she'd been before, would gently disappear, the texture of a whole life vanished into a series of cut-and-dried reports, and she'd be referred to, for years to come by people she never knew, as “that woman who had the tennis racquet jammed up her vagina.”

 

After I replaced the two screens I'd popped off the locked windows, I
sat on the porch steps and smoked a cigarette. I hadn't been particularly interested in staying with Jeannette. There was too much residual terror in the back bedroom for my taste. I'd seen a lot of dead bodies in my day, women in particular: beaten, strangled, raped, shot, stabbed, some even tortured. But the level and intensity of violence here, the sheer horror of what had been done to her body, eclipsed anything I'd ever seen before. And I'd learned early on that hanging out alone with a dead body could play tricks with your mind, that the essence of the dead person could come to life and swirl around in unsettling ways.

The first time that happened was nine months after I'd joined the force. We were dispatched to a shots-fired call in the projects off Nicholson. I arrived with two other uniforms so quickly we could still taste the acrid bite of gunpowder. A white male lay crumpled on his side, almost in a fetal position, gun resting in his hand as though it was an orange he'd just selected for lunch. One officer went back outside to call for an ambulance and detectives, the other followed him, and I'm there, alone in the kitchen, standing over the body and studying his face, wondering how he could look so peaceful with half his head missing, when I swore he shifted, that something of what he'd been started to rise up off the ground and speak. I clattered back out the side door, down the steps, and stood in the yard taking deep gulps of air. The other uniforms laughed at me, but I wasn't about to correct their notion that the body had made me sick.

Fact: The dead don't come to life again. Fact: Dead bodies don't stand up and speak. But the mind doesn't always like facts; it can have a sneaky desire at times to veer off into mystery and supposition. And that's where discipline comes in. The best I could do for Jeannette at this point was keep the scene clean and turn it over to the Homicide detectives when they arrived.

Before I'd finished my cigarette, a tan Ford Fairmont with a low front tire whipped in the drive with a blast of loose shells. Barker was driving, and Cowan was riding shotgun.

“Sarah Jeffries! What bundle of joy have you brought us today?” Cowan was a perpetually cynical and happy man, a weird mix that
grated on my nerves sometimes, but mostly I appreciated how many cases he closed and how he didn't treat me like some dumb uniform.

“Torture, bondage, rape with a tennis racquet,” I said, carefully stubbing out my cigarette and slipping it into a back pocket. “Not too pretty.”

Barker winced and stretched his shoulders.

“Never is,” Cowan said. “Keeps it interesting, though.” His small frame vibrated with enthusiasm as he moved to the trunk to collect camera, plastic booties, gloves, and evidence bags.

“Anyone we like for this?” Barker wore a light green shortsleeve shirt that didn't improve his complexion. He had a voracious appetite—I'd watched in wonder one night when he downed three “cook's specials” at Steak 'n' Egg in less than a half hour—but he always looked pale and underfed. Unlike most of the detectives who'd gone to wearing belt holsters, Barker still wore a shoulder holster, his gun tucked up under one armpit, handcuffs under the other.

“There's an absent husband the neighbor lady doesn't think much of.”

“Yeah, well, my neighbors don't think much of me, but I'm not about to go sticking a tennis racquet up my wife's box,” said Cowan.

“You're divorced,” I said.

“Exactly.” Cowan grinned, took off his jacket, and tossed it on the backseat of the unit.

“What about this window?” Barker said, eyeing the screen I'd propped up against the house earlier, as he slipped on the plastic booties that ensured an untainted crime scene. Cowan stood in front of the house and started taking pictures.

“I popped the screen to get in. House was locked up tight otherwise. No signs of forced entry. Your evidence trail starts inside. I didn't touch a thing except the window and a few doorknobs.”

“Not even the body?”

“It's kind of obvious she's dead,” I said, giving him a look.

“Ungloved?”

“Yep.”

Barker nodded, frowning. “Car?”

“Neighbor lady says it's the victim's.”

“You got gloves?”

“In my unit.”

“Check it if you get the chance. 'Preciate if you keep the outside scene secure until CSD gets here.” Barker stuffed several paper and plastic envelopes in his back pockets and took out a penlight, small notebook, and pencil as he joined Cowan on the porch.