Джонатан Келлерман - Crime Scene

The stock reply: You’re free to pick the items up from our facility, between eight thirty and five, Monday through Friday.

I said, “I can bring it by tonight. Six thirty work?”

“I’d planned to head over to his house to pick up the last of the boxes. I’m not sure how long I’ll be.”

“I can meet you there,” I said.

“Would you, please? That’d be easier.”

Her tone had softened nicely.

I couldn’t bring myself to ask what the hell I was doing. I knew what I was doing. I knew that if Tatiana had the face of a toad, the conversation would’ve already ended.

Never would’ve begun.

But Tatiana did not have the face of a toad.

“Of course,” I said. “See you then.”

I put down the receiver.

Shupfer had leaned around her monitor to stare at me.

“What’s up?” I said.

She shook her head, went back to her work.

“Shoops,” I said. “What you looking at me like that for?”

“I’m not looking at you.”

“You were.”

She met my eye. “We’re not a delivery service.”

“Beg pardon?” I said.

She resumed typing.

An open plan office makes it hard not to form opinions. I do it. But you don’t expect to hear them spoken aloud. Keep to yourself and go about your business. It’s phony, sure, but only as phony as civilization in general.

That Shupfer was right only pissed me off all the more.

“That’s a great tip, thanks,” I said. “Lemme write that down.”

She ignored me.

I shoved back from my desk and went to the coffee station.

Moffett came up beside me, poured his own cup, spoke low:

“Don’t get on her, man.”

“She’s the one getting on me,” I said, wringing a sugar packet.

“She’s having a bad time. You can’t take it personal.”

“What bad time?”

“Danny.”

The anger went out of me, displaced by guilt. “Shit. Is he okay?”

“I dunno,” he said. “I think they had to take him to the ER last night.”

“Shit. I didn’t know.”

“I don’t think I’m supposed to know, either. I heard her ask Vitti for tomorrow off. She and Scott need to take him to some specialist.”

I glanced across the squad room. Shupfer had her head down. “I feel like a dick.”

“Don’t sweat it,” he said. “I’m giving you the FYI.”

He poked around inside the communal pastry box, pressing down to collect cake crumbs on the pads of his fingers. “What’s the deal, though. You’re making deliveries?”

I stared at him.

“Chill, homey,” he said. He licked a sugary thumb. “I’m just asking.”

He grinned, slapped me on the butt, and sauntered back to his desk.

The ground-floor lights were on as I pulled up the driveway to Rennert’s house. Tatiana had left her Prius at an uncomfortable angle. It was her house now — one-third hers — and she could park any damn place she wanted to.

Walking to the door, I was struck by how much cooler and calmer the spot felt in comparison with the last time I’d been there. The seasons, turned over. The frenzy, long gone, leaving behind a stillness both easeful and lonesome, dry trees shuffling in the wind.

Before knocking, I smoothed down my uniform. It didn’t smell too bad. I could’ve changed, but it had seemed prudent not to. Keep me in line. Give me a façade of validity.

Distantly: “It’s open.”

I found her at the head of the dining room table, clutching handfuls of paper, staring defeatedly into yet another box. An empty juice glass sat on the sideboard alongside an open bottle of white wine.

She didn’t look up. “I’m trying to figure out how much of this I can toss.”

The table was vast, long enough to seat sixteen comfortably, though I doubted it had seen any recent action. Cobwebs entangled the carved chair-backs and laced the sconces. On one wall, a roiling seascape stretched nearly to the rafters.

“It’s like he didn’t know you’re allowed to throw things out,” she said. “Look at this.”

I stood beside her and she showed me a creased instruction manual for a robotic vacuum. The tendons in her forearms stood out like train tracks. “I don’t even think he owns one of these.”

She tossed the manual to the floor, facing me at last. “What’ve we got.”

I gave her the phone, still in its evidence bag.

“I can open it?” she asked.

“It’s yours,” I said.

She didn’t open it. She stood there, feeling the screen through the plastic, and I reached in my backpack for a second evidence bag, containing the pill bottles from the attic.

“I don’t need those,” she said.

“Right, but they were his, so I’m required to return them to you.”

I wondered if she’d notice the Risperdal. But she tossed the bag on the table with a clatter. “Anything else?”

The third and final bag contained the crystal whiskey glass her father had been holding when he died.

“I don’t want it,” she said.

I hesitated.

“I mean it. I don’t care what you’re required to do. Get it the fuck away from me. Those, too.”

I tucked both the pills and the tumbler in my backpack.

She stepped abruptly to the sideboard and lifted the wine bottle. “Do you want?”

“No, thanks. I should hit the road.”

Perhaps I’d made her self-conscious; she stopped at a quarter glass. She took a quick sip and set it aside, sanding her palms. “Before you go, do me a favor, while you’re here? In the basement. I could use a pair of hands.”

I followed her through the kitchen and into a service porch, down plank stairs lit by a bare forty-watt bulb.

“Watch your head,” she said.

I ducked a jutting two-by-four, stepping down into a long, fusty space that stank of rotting wood. Along one wall ran the wine racks Zaragoza had mentioned. The floor was raw concrete, showing concentric traces left by water pooling and evaporating, time and again. Tatiana continued to the far end of the room, where sat a pair of gigantic gravity furnaces, arms flying off every which way. Lodged between them, like an outmatched referee, was an X-braced steel shelving unit, walling off a group of three boxes pushed into the basement’s rear corner.

“That’s all that’s left,” she said.

“More instruction manuals.”

She smiled tiredly. “Yeah. And this guy’s completely stuck.” To prove her point she grabbed one of the shelving unit’s uprights, yanking it back and forth to no effect.

I gave it a tug: wedged in there pretty good. “We can try brute force, but I wouldn’t recommend it. You’ll scrape the ducts up, and you don’t want to do that.”

“Why?”

“They’re covered in asbestos.”

She recoiled.

“It’s fine,” I said. “It’s harmless as is. You just don’t want particles getting into the air. Did he kept tools somewhere? We could take it apart. That’d be the easiest way.”

“I think there’s some upstairs.”

“WD-40 would be great, too, if you have it.”

She disappeared, bringing back a screwdriver, a pair of pliers, and a blue-and-yellow spray can. “Ask and ye shall receive.”

Disassembling the shelves made for an acrobatic enterprise, me wrangling my long body into position to access the rusted rear bolts, while Tatiana hung on with the pliers for dear life. One particular bracket would not move for love or money.

“Forget it,” I said. “We’ll leave it and do that one instead.”

She rested on her haunches, shook out her wrists. “I need a break.”

I backed out on my hands and knees and sat cross-legged on the concrete.

“I can’t wait for this to be over,” she said. She was staring through the bars of the shelving unit at the trapped boxes. “But it’s sad, too. You know?”