Джонатан Келлерман: Crime Scene

“Did he ever end up getting help?”

“He never would’ve admitted it to me.”

“This might sound a little out of left field here, but did you ever refer Dr. Rennert to a urologist?”

“Really, now, I’m sure that’s got nothing to do with anything whatsoever.”

I told him about the prescription from Louis Vannen.

“I don’t know the name,” Clark said. “He gave Walter Risperdal?”

“Seems that way.”

“Huh.” I heard the phone shift; a mouse click; his breathing slow as he read. “There’s nothing in his chart about it.”

“Would there be?”

“We keep track of current medications. Unless he failed to mention it to the nurse.”

“Can you think of a reason why he’d need it?”

“Well, some of these atypicals work for depression or bipolar. He wasn’t bipolar.” More clicking. “Dammit.”

“What’s the matter?”

“I had him on Lasix and Lopressor for his blood pressure. They both interact with Risperdal.”

“How serious of an interaction?”

“Moderate,” he said, the unease in his voice steepening. “Some cardiac effects.”

Presumably the pathologist had taken note of these interactions and written them off as immaterial to cause of death. I said, “Thanks for your help, Doctor.”

He hung up. The poor guy now had to wonder if he’d helped kill his patient.

He hadn’t. I felt reasonably confident of that. And nothing he’d told me had altered my opinion on Walter Rennert’s manner of death. To the contrary. I had a seventy-five-year-old man who had endured major life stress, drank to excess, and cherished a hard-charging brand of tennis. The real wonder was that he hadn’t dropped dead sooner.

I thought about how best to present these facts in a way that would make sense to Tatiana. I quickly gave up. I’d just have to wait for her to call me up and scream.

It might have ended there.

It should have. I’d called both doctors prior to learning the cause of death. Now that I knew it, I had no reason to chase them down. Had Clark not bothered to return my message, we likely never would have spoken. It might have ended there.

It didn’t.

Because I took an active step, small but crucial. At that very moment, it felt harmless. Meaningless.

I called the office of Louis Vannen, MD.

Looking back, I’m not sure why I did this. I could claim I was trying to marshal extra evidence for when Tatiana did start yelling at me. But I knew well enough that piling on facts rarely changes anyone’s mind.

Nor did I call out of morbid curiosity. At that point in my career, I didn’t have much of it left.

I explained to Vannen’s receptionist who I was and what I was after. Citing confidentiality, she could not confirm whether Walter Rennert had been a patient. She would convey my message to Doctor. Doctor would call me back as soon as he had a chance.

On Friday, a hearse from Mountain View Cemetery arrived to take away the body of Walter J. Rennert.

I felt relieved. The family had chosen a nice place; hopefully that meant they’d resolved to move forward and not raise a stink. I chided myself for assuming the worst of Tatiana, for regarding her not as a person, but as a variable in my caseload.

I thought about her eyes.

Wished her well and made my own resolution to forget about her.

Thursday next, I received a notification request from Del Norte County. A man up in Crescent City had shot himself in the chest, leaving behind an adult daughter in our neck of the woods. We make visits on behalf of other counties, just as they do for us; it’s more humane than cold-calling the next of kin, especially with suicides or when they’re estranged. Both were true here. I copied down the daughter’s address, and Shupfer and I climbed into the Explorer and headed east for Pleasanton.

While I get along with all of my colleagues, there are moments when I’m grateful for one more than the others. On that day, I felt no great need to talk. The morning rush had died off, leaving us to ride most of the way in silence — a situation really only possible with Shoops. Outside, tract homes bobbed on wave after wave of dry yellow grass. My legs kept cramping up, forcing me to shift around, angling for room. She, on the other hand, had racked her seat all the way forward to reach the pedals, the steering wheel lodged in her belly.

Here’s Shoops: soft and square and rounded off, as tall as five-two gets, with hair that starts each day slapped down to her scalp but finishes in a frizzy brown halo. She could be the star of a Sesame Street sketch teaching kids about disappointment.

Say you were an inmate at the jail, back when she was a guard. You might fool yourself into believing, as a certain idiot in a certain legendary story once did, that you could call her an obscene name. Or that you could suggest an obscene activity she enjoyed in her off hours. You might get cocky enough to grab a part of her body.

Those are mistakes you’d only make once.

Technically, Shoops has been around longer than the rest of our team. She joined the Bureau during the changeover, when the county stopped hiring civilian coroners and replaced them with peace officers. An extended family leave reset her status, so I have seniority on her. When December rolls around and we have to bid for shifts, she’s low lady on the totem pole. Better believe I don’t gloat. Nobody does.

The GPS guided us off the freeway, through a welter of extended-stay hotels and chain stores, along the divided main drag. Thirty minutes inland hardly seemed enough for the terrain to have morphed so dramatically. Topography flatter; vegetation bleached. The architecture belonged to everywhere and nowhere. That’s not a knock on Pleasanton, which is as its name implies. More a statement about where we’d left from.

Shupfer said, “I still get nervous.”

I glanced at her.

“Before a notification,” she said.

“Really?”

She nodded curtly. “Every time.”

“I do, too.”

Another nod from her, different: approval.

Trapped in a seam of ranch homes, sandwiched between an elementary school and a middle school, Homer Court was the last and smallest spur off crooked Chapman Way, lawns left to wither and two-car garages. Unfolding myself from the Explorer, I felt the sun twist in close, a microscope focusing down on us.

My gaze lingered on the portable basketball hoop perched at the curb — sandbags crushing the base, backboard craning into the street.

“I know, right?” Shupfer said. “Put it in the driveway, for God’s sake.”

She meant for safety. Thinking about her own kids, dribbling in circles on the asphalt, hollering “car” and scurrying out of the way.

I nodded, although that wasn’t what I’d been thinking, at all.

I was marveling at how far away the rim looked.

There are several reasons to feel nervous before a notification. People do shoot the messenger, and not just figuratively. A day like that one, brutally hot, tempts you to leave your vest behind. I never do. Better sweaty and alive.

That’s rare, of course. Best-case scenario, I’m about to ruin someone’s day, week, year, life. If that notion doesn’t make you squirm, you lack the requisite sense of empathy and you shouldn’t be doing this job.

A nasty paradox. Only a true psychopath could do notifications and not suffer any consequences. But who wants a psychopath informing them that their father is dead?

Part of me always hopes the person won’t be home. In the middle of the day, in the middle of suburbs populated by dual-income families...

Maybe we’d get lucky. The driveway was empty.

We knocked.

Silence.