T. Parker: Red Light

“Did you touch any of the light switches?”

“Yes. I forgot that. Forgot to tell you that.”

“This outdoor light, was it on when you got here?”

“Bug light, affirmative.”

“Was the door ajar when the neighbor first came down?”

“That was his statement.”

“See if he’ll let us set up shop in his place. If he says no, do it anyway.”

“Yes.”

“Start an Order of Entry Log, fill it in and fasten it to this wall somehow. Nobody gets in but the coroners and Zamorra. Nobody.”

“Yes, Sergeant.”

The paramedics were leaning against the walkway railing but stood up straight when Merci turned to them. They were young and handsome and looked to Merci like TV actors.

“We went in, examined her and came back out,” one offered. “We didn’t defib or try CPR. She was cold, blood already draining down, extremities in early rigor. I turned on the lights just inside the door there, then turned them off. Looks like gunshot.”

Merci looked at her watch: 11:40, Tuesday, December 11. She gloved up, then toed open the door with her boot.

Muted light shone from inside. Merci saw a kitchen, a small TV screen flickering, a dining-room table with flowers, a sliding glass door beyond the table. But what drew her attention lay just inside the arc of the door she now held open with one elbow: a young woman in a black dress, arms thrown casually back like someone deep in sleep, her face peaceful and unmarked and inclined slightly toward the sliding glass door behind her. Her chest and stomach were still wet with blood, which looked black in the weak light. The blackness had progressed onto the pale carpet on both sides of her.

Merci knelt down and placed two of her right fingers on the woman’s jugular vein. She believed that she owed hope to the dead, even if the dead were beyond it.

She pulled a little flashlight from her pocket and found the hole in the dress, below the left breast but close to center, straight over the heart. She looked for another but found none. The neighbor said nothing about hearing a gunshot. Merci retraced her steps to the front door and pushed it closed with her boot. The paramedics who looked like actors watched her, a fade-out.

She stood between the body and the dining room. No signs of forced entry or struggle, so far. She noted that the table had been set for two. A pair of seductive high heels stood near the couch, facing her, like a ghost was standing in them, watching. The apartment was still, the slider closed against the cool December night. Good for scent. She closed her eyes. Salt air. Baked fowl. Coffee. Goddamn rubber gloves, of course. A whiff of burned gunpowder? Leather. Maybe a trace of perfume, or the flowers on the table — gardenia, rose, lavender? And, of course, the obscenity of spilled blood — intimate, meaty, shameful.

She listened to the waves. To the traffic. To the little kitchen TV turned low: an evangelist bleating for money. To the clunk of someone on the old walkway. To her heart, fast and heavy in her chest. Merci felt most alive when working for the dead. She’d always loved an underdog.

In the bedroom she found a purse with a wallet. There was a thick pinch of hundreds in the wallet, some twenties, several credit cards and a driver’s license. Aubrey Whittaker. Nineteen.

The woman was a girl and the girl was only a little over half her own age. The year Aubrey Whittaker was born, Merci was a junior in high school. The year Aubrey Whittaker was murdered, Merci was an Orange County Sheriff Department sergeant, Homicide Detail, age 36. A single mother. A once proud woman recovering from a broken heart, and from what police psychologists like to call critical incident stress. She’d painted up her exterior, but inside she was still a wreck.

Aubrey’s slaughtered youth made Merci sad and angry, but many things about her career made her feel that way. She looked out the bedroom window toward Coast Highway. The building next door already had its Christmas lights up, a neat outline of tiny white bulbs blinking at random. On the big dresser across from the bed Merci found a jewelry box filled with expensive-looking rings and necklaces. Under the lamp there was a greeting card propped up, this one with a soft-focus photograph of a tree on a hillside. She bent and read it without touching it.

In the muted blue sky were the words: In God’s World... The quip was completed inside: There’s a special place for Friendship. It was signed: Sincerely, Your D.C.

She could hear the footsteps on the walkway, louder now. She listened as they came toward the door and stopped. Voices.

She went to the door and looked through the peephole. She saw Paul Zamorra in the elliptical foreground, and the two Coroner’s Autopsy Team techs behind him. When she opened the door her partner met her with his joyless black eyes, then stepped inside. The techs followed him.

They all looked at Aubrey Whittaker. Zamorra walked to her side, knelt down and looked at her some more. He brought gloves from the pocket of his sport coat, worked them on. “Get to it, guys,” he said. “We’ve got about twenty minutes before the hordes thunder in.”

The hordes thundered in: three more patrol units bearing six deputies; the paramedic supervisors; the Coroner’s Investigation Team; the rest of the Coroner’s Autopsy Team; the county pathologist; the crime-scene scientists; the crime-scene technicians; the criminalists; the assistant district attorney and two of his investigators, all trudging down the wooden walkway to Aubrey Whittaker’s place under the drone of two Sheriff Department choppers that circled overhead and beamed unhopeful shafts of light into the city below.

The police reporters came next.

And, as always, concerned citizens multiplied as the minutes wore on, drawn from the darkness by the flashing lights of the prowl cars.

Close neighbors compared notes on the apparently deceased girl who came and went from 23 Wave Street at late hours: very attractive, well dressed, very tall, quiet. There was firm disagreement on what color, style or length of hair she had.

Outsiders gathered what they could, speculated. Most everyone was bundled up in something, arms around themselves or each other, blowing on their hands, puffs of breath coming out when they spoke. Surfers in hooded Mexican ponchos leaned against their little trucks drinking tall beers, slurring their vowels.

Merci Rayborn at first admitted only five people into number 23. Two were the best crime-scene people she’d ever worked with — Criminalist Lynda Coiner and Crime-Scene Investigator Evan O’Brien. They were standing near the door when she finally opened it, knowing she’d need them first.

Then, the assistant DA and his man. The People. They were the ones she’d bring her case to, the ones for whom she was really gathering evidence. It didn’t hurt that they were smart, quiet and knew the drill. Last, the coroner’s investigator, mainly for the body temp, which would help them with rime of death, and the body cavities, which can leak evidentiary fluids into the transport bags, complicating the job of the lab pathologists.

And everyone else, thought Merci, can stay the hell out for half an hour. Let my people work.

While they worked, Merci and Zamorra toured the apartment. It was an upscale interior in a downscale building: good carpet, leather furniture, recessed lighting aimed to dramatize good prints of Kahlo and O’Keeffe, Hockney and Basquiat. Over the expansive black leather sofa in the living room hung a painting she’d never seen before. It was ghostly but vibrant at the same time, a little too crime-lab for an ocean-view room, in her opinion. It was a Rembrandt of someone raising somebody else from the dead.