Wendy Hornsby - The Color of Light

“Some things you don’t forget.”

He hesitated, thinking through what he knew and what he remembered before he shook his head. “After all this time, you can’t possibly be sure.”

“But I am.” I leaned toward him. “The police came to school that day at lunch time. We all thought we were in trouble for fighting, but they were there to take Beto home to his dad before he heard about his mom from someone else.”

“Even so, thirty years is a long time.”

“There’s something else.”

I walked over to my dad’s desk, took an envelope out of the top drawer and carried it across the room to him. He pulled out the single Polaroid photo inside, saw what it was, and blanched: In the faded photo, Beto’s mother lies at the base of a granite outcropping at Indian Rock Park a few blocks from our homes, half-naked, long dark hair in a loose spill across her face. She looks more like a doll that has been dragged through mud and cast away by a willful child than like the quiet, reserved woman we had known in life.

“Jesus Christ, Maggie.” He turned the photo face down on the table beside him. “Where the hell did you get this?”

“I was clearing out Dad’s desk- you know Mom has given up the house. I found it locked in a strongbox with the film I just showed you.”

“If you’re thinking your dad took the picture, he didn’t. It’s one of a series taken at the murder scene by the original crime scene investigators,” he said. “The rest of them are in the evidence box locked up in my office. The question is, how did your father get hold of this one?”

As an answer to his question, I took the yellowed envelope the photo had been in and pointed to the embossed return address, BENJAMIN G. NUSSBAUM, M.D., my father’s closest friend.

“Doc Nussbaum,” he said, nodding as he carefully placed the photo back inside the envelope. “He used to give the department a hand from time to time, sit in on autopsies when there was a gunshot wound involved so he could testify in court as our department expert. He was a M.A.S.H. surgeon during the Korean War so he knew a hell of a lot more about gunshot wounds than any of us ever could; we don’t get a lot of experience with murder in Berkeley. He must have bagged the picture and given it to your dad. The question is, why?”

“That is the question, isn’t it?” I said.

He aimed his chin toward the dark television screen. “Did your dad shoot that film?”

“As far as I know, he did.”

“There’s no record in the evidence log that he ever showed a film to the police.”

“I’m sure that he didn’t,” I said. “Your people would have kept it.”

“If you’re right about what day that was, then you kids were just about the last people to see Mrs. B alive.”

“That’s why I thought you should see the film.”

“Uh-huh.” He sounded skeptical.

“Kevin, was Mrs. Bartolini raped?”

“Looks that way.”

“Did they do a rape kit?”

“Sure, but it’s long gone.”

“You had the coroner do a search for it?”

“Hey, Maggie?” Voice low, words drawn out, sounding like my dad when he was about to deliver a scolding. “I know you play at being an investigator when you put together your TV shows. But just for a minute, why don’t we pretend that I’m a real cop and I know what I’m doing?”

“I don’t doubt your ability, Kevin,” I said. “But this is new information to me. I’m shocked by it. Whenever I think about Mrs. B in death, I see her as she was in her coffin, looking as serene as a Christmas angel. Not like this.” I tapped the back of the envelope. “This was brutal, angry. Help me out, here. What happened to her?”

He took in a deep breath and let it out slowly as if he felt put upon. “You saw; it was ugly. She was battered, maybe raped, shot in the chest, and dumped in a public place. That suggests that the perp meant to humiliate her or her family, or to upset the peace of the community.”

“He succeeded in all the above,” I said. “Who was he?”

“That’s the question, isn’t it? There was blood found on her teeth and lips that suggests she might have taken a chunk out of her attacker. A sample was collected.”

“Is that lost, too?”

“Lost? No. Gone, yes,” he said. “Thirty-something years ago, blood type was about all they could get from blood or semen. We didn’t have DNA labs and cold case units back then. There wasn’t enough of either found on her for typing, so the samples were disposed of during routine house cleaning when the coroner moved to a new facility. Okay?”

“Okay.” I gave his knuckle a flick as I smiled up at him. “Just to be clear, I get paid fairly well to play at investigating.”

“I didn’t mean that as a shot.”

“Sure you did.”

He threw back his head and laughed. “God, I’ve missed you, Maggie.”

He started to rise from his chair and I thought he was ready to leave. But he glanced at the dark television and a new thought seemed to occur to him.

“Why was your dad out there filming you that morning, anyway?” He looked over his shoulder at me. “Did you tell him there was going to be a rumble?”

“Hardly. Would you have told your parents that you were heading off for a showdown with a pack of middle-school bullies?”

“They’d have locked me inside the house,” he said. “But your dad was there, he saw what was happening. Why didn’t he try to stop it?”

“He taught me to fight my own battles,” I said. “If things had gotten out of hand, he would have done something. But they didn’t, did they?”

“Did you know he was there?”

“No.”

“So, why was he?”

“Does it matter?”

“I can’t know that until you tell me what you know. Everything you know.”

I sighed, sat back down in my chair and rubbed my eyes. For a while-not long enough-I was married to a homicide detective. No one could ever successfully tell my Mike that there was something he just did not need to know. I had no reason to believe that my old friend Kevin, now Detective Halloran, was any less relentless than Mike had been. I also trusted that Kevin, like Mike, would be discreet about what he learned.

Kevin still watched me, waiting.

“It’s a long story, Kevin.”

He glanced at his watch. “I have time.”

“Lordy.” I did not want to go into all the sordid details, and sordid they were. I said, “The short version is, the woman who raised me, Mom, was not my birth mother.”

“Everyone knows that now,” he said. “It was all over the news last winter when your birth mother died. I DVR’d the interview you did on TV so I could watch it a couple of times. I record all your TV shows, Maggie. We all do.”

“The woman used to lurk around me.”

“Your bio-mom?”

“Isabelle,” I said.

“Isabelle,” he repeated. “Your dad withheld information from the police to protect Isabelle?”

“More likely he was trying to protect me and Mom from whatever Isabelle might do.”

“And Doc Nussbaum helped him?”

I nodded. “He understood the stakes.”

“So, you were adopted?”

“No,” I said. “You know the story by now. Dad had an affair with a graduate student when he was in France working on a project. And, voilà , me.”

“The student was Isabelle?”

“Yes.”

“And your mom, meaning your father’s wife, raised you?”

“What can I say? She’s a saint.”

Kevin tsk’ d. “Your dad is the last person I would ever suspect of fooling around. The way he used to watch me, jeez, like he thought I was up to something.”

“You were up to something,” I said. “You were trying to get into his daughter’s pants.”