Alan Russell - Burning Man

It appeared some thought had been given as to where to abandon the baby. The cardboard box had been left in a protected spot above street level. During the day there was a steady stream of pedestrians that passed by the spot. Whoever had abandoned the baby had wanted it to be found. I continued to hunch down, thinking my cop thoughts. The area was fairly well lit at night, but it would have been easy to stay in the shadows and anonymously drop off a baby. It was unlikely that anyone would have trekked down the stairway from above; I had walked the steps a few times and knew the incline was both steep and long. No, someone would have pulled up to the curb and quickly dropped off the baby and box behind the railing.

I stared up at the empty tracks of Angels Flight. When it was in operation, one railway car went up while the other came down. The cars were named after famous biblical mountains, the one Sinai and the other Olivet. In Catholic school I had been told that Mount Sinai was where God spoke to Moses and where he waited to receive the Ten Commandments. Mount Olivet’s history was no less storied-it was where Jesus retreated on the night he was betrayed, and where he said his farewell to the Apostles. I tilted my head back and scanned Bunker Hill. As far as I knew, no miracles had ever happened there.

Rising, I drew nearer to the cardboard box. Because of the incline, the box was tilted at an angle. I looked inside, and if I hadn’t known better I would have thought some girl had abandoned her doll. The body was impossibly small. She was facedown in the box and draped in a blanket. Her face was planted deep into a small pillow.

The baby had olive-colored skin, but I couldn’t really determine her race. The skin pigment of newborns often changes dramatically over the course of a few days. There were no visible signs of any trauma, but the blanket swaddled most of the body.

I swore under my breath, unable to hide my anger at the senseless death. In 2001, California passed the Safely Surrendered Baby Law, which allows a mother to anonymously surrender her newborn within three days of birth at any emergency hospital and most fire stations. The law was designed to prevent unsafe newborn abandonment. Nowadays, mothers no longer need fear arrest or prosecution for giving up their babies. Mothers that have somehow managed to keep their pregnancy secret for nine months can keep their secret forever and not be punished. It is a good and needed law, but another expectant mother had apparently not heard about it.

The uniformed officer posted just beyond the crime scene tape took my obvious anger as an invitation to comment. “You ask me, people should have to get a license to have children.”

My grunt of acknowledgment was interpreted as encouragement to speak further. “I got a newborn of my own,” he said. “As soon as I saw the kid, I knew the mother was felony stupid and didn’t know jack about babies.”

The officer knew a lot more about newborns than I did and my eyes dropped south to his tag. “What told you that, Officer Alvarez?” I asked.

“The damn box wasn’t level, and the baby was just left facedown in it,” he said. “That’s an invitation for disaster. My wife would kill me if I put our newborn to sleep on her stomach. And the pediatrician must have told us a dozen times that you never wrap a newborn in a blanket, and you especially don’t put a pillow in the crib.”

His comments made me look harder at the angle of the box, and at what was left inside it. You don’t usually think of a pillow and blanket as being instruments of death.

“The mother must have been worried about the baby getting cold,” I said.

Alvarez did his imitation of Dr. Spock: “That’s what sleepers are for.” Then he added with cop disdain, “Of course the mother’s probably a wasted teenage tweaker who didn’t even know she was pregnant.”

He knew his newborns but not his profiling. From working the last dumped baby, I’d learned that women who abandon their newborns don’t fall into any neat category: they can be any race, creed, or color. College students are as likely to offend as high school dropouts.

“You were the first on the scene?” I asked.

Alvarez nodded. “After determining the baby was dead, I cleared the area and made sure nothing was disturbed.”

“You want to name her?” I asked.

The officer rubbed his hands on his thighs, leaning one way and then the other, clearly uncomfortable with my question. “It doesn’t seem right, naming the dead.”

“No, it doesn’t, but the baby’s going to need a name before she’s buried.”

“I’ll pass, if you don’t mind.”

“No problem,” I said and then thanked the officer before returning my attention to the baby in the box.

My adoptive parents were churchgoers with an abiding faith in God. One of my father’s favorite quotations was from the Sermon on the Mount, and he would often repeat Christ’s words to me: “Not a sparrow falls to the ground without His care.” I looked at the fallen sparrow; by naming the baby I would provide her with an identity. The memory of my last trip to a unique and troubling graveyard made me remember roses.

Rose, I decided, and my victim had a name.

I checked with the crime scene unit, making sure it was okay for me to do a close-up study of Rose. The blue blanket surrounding her was a polyester blend. A woman’s white cotton T-shirt, size medium, swam over the baby. As I lifted the shirt, I was surprised to see that Rose was wearing knit pink bootees. Rose wasn’t wearing a diaper, and her pink-streaked body made it appear as if she had been hurriedly washed before being clothed and deposited in the box.

There was some food residue on the blanket, crumbs of some sort. Forensics was probably already on it, but I’d double-check to make sure they bagged it. I removed the pillow, rested Rose on it and then made sure there was nothing else in the box.

The coroner’s office would decide how Rose had died, but I was betting they would rule her death as an accidental homicide. Dumped babies aren’t usually clothed or blanketed, and this was the first time I’d ever heard of an abandoned baby wearing pink bootees. My gaze lingered on her tiny feet. Someone should have been playing with the little toes and spouting nonsensical words about a piggy going to market.

“The mother hedged her bet.”

I turned around and saw Della Tomkins, a veteran of the Forensic Field Unit. We had met at several crime scenes. On those other occasions, Della had been bright and cheery, but this time she couldn’t even force a smile.

“We found a pair of blue bootees on the steps,” Della said. “Mom must not have known the sex of the baby she was going to be abandoning.”

I had heard that Della and her life partner, Abby, had been going to fertility clinics for the past year in the hopes of Abby’s conceiving. They were doing all that they could to have a baby.

“Find anything else?” I asked.

“A few steps away from the box we found some crumpled cellophane wrapping with the remains of some partially eaten bread. We think the crumbs in the box match the bread. At first I thought it was banana bread, but judging from its aroma I’m now leaning toward pumpkin bread.”

Halloween had come and gone a few months back. I thought of pumpkin bread as a seasonal offering, but maybe it was a popular item in the trendy bakeries or bistros that I never patronized.

Della stood next to me and the two of us contemplated the newborn. “I’m identifying her as Rose in the book,” I said, referring to the casebook.

“I thought Lisbet named the newborns.”

“She encourages the detectives to come up with a name. It’s her way of getting us emotionally involved.”