Джонатан Келлерман: Crime Scene

“The phone,” she said. “That means you’re still working on the case.”

Shit.

“The autopsy was completed last week,” I said. “There are a few loose ends.”

“Like what?”

Aiming for maximum vagueness, I said, “It’s a process.”

“But you did do the autopsy.”

“The procedure itself was completed. The full protocol’s not finished. I’m ready for those codes if you have them.”

“I — right. I gave you birthdays, I think. What do you have?”

I read back the list.

She gave me another set of four numbers. “That’s their anniversary.”

For a broken marriage? “What about your father’s own parents’ birthdays?”

“I can’t remember them off the top of my head. I can find out and call you back.”

“Or email me. My info is on the card I gave you.”

“When do you think I can have it back? The phone. I’d like to get the photos off it.”

“We like to hang on to it until the case is officially closed out.”

“Do you have a sense of when that’ll be?”

For a clear-cut natural death? A month. Two at most.

“Tell you what,” I said. “If I can find a way into the phone, I’ll download the photos and get them to you. Does that work?”

“That’s perfect. Thank you so much.”

“Of course,” I said.

“It’s not an emergency,” she said. “I want to have them, is all.”

“I understand,” I said.

Silence.

She said, “I’ll get you those other birthdays.”

The anniversary code failed, as did the two additional codes she sent me the next day. With three attempts left, I’d had my fill of living dangerously. I went upstairs to Forensics.

The IT guy took one glance. “You’re lucky it’s a 4S. The newer ones are a pain in the ass. What do you need?”

“Everything. Calls, texts, browser history, pictures, video.”

I returned to the office following my days off to find an email waiting for me.

“It’s not super organized,” the IT guy said, handing me the phone and a thumb drive. “But it’s all there.”

It was indeed. Rennert had opted for the sixty-four-gigabyte model, the most memory available at that time. Half of what you could get now, but still plenty of room for crap to accumulate over five-some-odd years, any shreds of useful information squirreled away in folders and subfolders and sub-subfolders, minus the typical user-friendly interface. It was like getting vomited on by the Matrix.

With enough hunting, I found the contact list.

“Shoops,” I said. “Come look at this.”

She rolled her chair over. I’d highlighted a folder labeled LOUIS VANNEN, opened a text file containing Vannen’s email address, along with numbers for home and mobile.

“So,” she said, “he lied.”

“Yeah.”

“So?” she said.

“So he lied. ”

She glanced at me sidelong. “You said this case was a done deal.”

“It is.”

“Then why do you care?”

“Because it’s weird,” I said.

“Lots of things are weird. Zaragoza is weird.”

“Heard that.”

“Life is weird,” Shupfer said. “Death is weird.”

Moffett said, “Deep thoughts, by Shoops.”

“Why would Vannen lie to me?” I said.

Shupfer shrugged. “Maybe he’s scared cause he wrote the scrip for recreational use.”

“People take Risperdal for fun?”

“People take anything for fun,” Moffett said.

“True dat,” Daniella Botero said. “I had a friend in high school who used to get high on nutmeg.”

“I didn’t know you could do that,” Moffett said.

“Totally. You have to eat, like, a pound, though.”

I said to Shupfer, “You’re getting someone to write you bogus scrips, you’re not gonna ask for Oxycontin?”

She shrugged again. “Rennert was a shrink, he knew his own personal chemistry.”

“Nutmeg,” Moffett said.

“I don’t like it,” I said.

Shupfer smiled, all lips, no eyes. “So don’t like it, princess.”

She rolled back to her desk.

I returned to my data dump. Rennert didn’t have a lot of photos, which felt consistent with the guy I was getting to know: solitary. I burned what there was to a fresh thumb drive, put it in an envelope addressed to Tatiana, and tossed it in my to-do tray.

Someone came around, taking orders for a coffee run.

“Pumpkin spice latte,” Moffett said. “Hella nutmeg.”

At five thirty I got my stuff together. Instead of dropping the envelope in the outgoing mail bin, I kept walking, toward the door, down the stairs, across the lobby linoleum, ripe with disinfectant. I waved to Astrid behind the reception booth glass and pushed out into the mild evening.

Tucked in a peaceful nook, below a regional park, our headquarters is a smooth new concrete stack surrounded by California live oaks and a deep gully frothing with ivy, like a disused moat. I crossed the gangway to the parking lot, the handrail slick against my palm. Autumn in the pipeline.

I stared down the prospect of the next few hours. Hit the gym. Stop at Chipotle. Go home and watch History Channel on demand. The big question was who I’d be spending my evening with. Would it be Jesus? Or Hitler?

Throwing my bag in the backseat of my car, I drove to Berkeley.

Tatiana Rennert-Delavigne lived on Grant Street, near the Gourmet Ghetto, fifteen minutes across town from her father’s place. Her digs were more modest: the top floor of an orange, seventies-era duplex, a bit of an eyesore on an otherwise quaint block. The silver Prius shared the driveway with a two-tone Subaru wagon.

Drop off the thumb drive.

Leave without ringing the doorbell.

Go home and watch my stories.

I unbuckled my seatbelt and stripped off my uniform shirt. From my gym bag I took a can of Febreze, hoping to cover the skin of stench picked up on a ninety-second visit to the cold storage locker.

Decomp. The smell of wrong, Zaragoza calls it — a persistent sensory stain, chewing up your sinuses, shellacking the inside of your face, hounding you for hours. One good whiff will destroy your operating illusions about the world.

I doused myself with freshener.

The car filled with fumes.

I rolled the window down, choking and waving.

Once the air cleared, I smelled fractionally better.

Didn’t matter. I wasn’t going to see her, I was a delivery boy.

I doused myself a second time.

I took an old Cal sweatshirt from the gym bag and pulled it over my T-shirt.

The man in the mirror: disheveled, bleary, and moderately foul.

What a stud.

The exterior stairs to Tatiana’s apartment were made of concrete, silent as I climbed to the second-floor landing. A small hinge-top mailbox hung from the siding. The lid squeaked as I raised it and dropped the envelope inside.

I started back down to the street.

Behind me, above me, a door opened.

“Hello?”

I turned.

She stood barefoot on the landing, wearing leggings and a purple scoop-neck shirt, hair up in a bun.

“Hi,” I said. “Didn’t mean to disturb you. I brought those pictures you asked for.”

She blinked at me. “You didn’t have to do that.”

“It’s no problem,” I said. “I was nearby.”

Of course I was. I’d taken a five-mile detour to get there.

“Anyway,” I said, pointing to the mailbox, “all yours.”

She fished out the envelope, peered inside. “I guess they worked.”

“Sorry?”

“The codes I gave you,” she said. “Which one was it?”

“None, actually,” I said. “We have our ways.”

I’d meant it as a joke but she nodded distractedly, still gazing at the drive. “Kind of amazing it all fits on there.”