Susan Smith - Out at Night

Deputy Coroner Jeff Salzer met her at the front desk and led her through a work space of laminated counters and computer stations. His hair was starting to thin. He carried himself like a retired military man, shoulders back, as if tensing for a bullet that hadn’t been fired yet.

Air-conditioning blasted. A chunky deputy in rolled-up sleeves glanced up from her notepad as they went by in silence.

Salzer closed the door and motioned for her to sit. Through the window, her car already looked glossy with heat, as if the chrome were melting. She took the seat across from his desk.

“Special Agent Descanso said to give you whatever you need on this one.”

His desk was swept clean except for his computer. It was on, the screen blank.

“I thought the body would have gone to the Indio morgue; that’s closest to Palm Springs.”

“Would have, but the air-conditioning in Indio blew out in this heat. We’ve gotten all of them for a week now. They come in refrigerated trucks. Full house. Let me get the file.”

Salzer pushed away from his desk and his pecs bunched under his shirt. He riffled through a file drawer. Grace tried not to visualize what full house looked like in a morgue.

He pulled out a thick file and handed it to her. “You can use the conference room. You can’t make copies, but you can take whatever notes you’d like.”

She nodded and followed him into the corridor. She caught the faint whiff of formaldehyde. Her stomach churned and she tasted acid.

“Palm Springs is a real dog’s breakfast right now with that ag convention. Where’s your hotel?”

“Right off Palm Canyon.”

“You’re going to get a dose of it then. They start at the Convention Center and spill out onto the main drag.”

“I heard a second field was torched. Anybody else killed?”

A deputy rolled a rack of files down the hall and squeezed past them. Salzer shook his head and resumed walking.

“No, but a couple of delegates were hospitalized for smoke inhalation. It’s going to get nastier. Protest organizers took out a march permit for eight thousand people. They’ve blown right through that number. We expect ten times that amount. The last time the U.S. hosted this conference was in Sacramento. Major protests. That came on the heels of riots in Seattle during the World Trade Organization, which led to looting and the declaration of martial law. You know how many rioters showed up for that one?”

Grace shook her head.

“Close to a hundred thousand, Grace. We have two hundred cops, security guards, and a handful of National Guardsmen piled in, from as far away as L.A. The FBI’s running the show. Not bad, but it’s not good, either. Makes everybody nervous. Plus, we got people drinking, raising hell, so we’ve had a rash of unrelated accidents, car crashes, partygoers using loaded weapons. A mess here. We’ve got three autopsies backed up. I can rustle up coffee, water, maybe some soda.”

“Water’s good.”

He nodded and closed the door. She took a seat at the long table in the quiet room. Empty bulletin boards with tacks adorned the walls. A detailed map of the Coachella Valley hung over a coffeemaker. The coffee smelled burned.

She opened the file. Stapled to the cover page was Bartholomew’s DMV photo. A heavyset man in his sixties stared back, with beetling eyebrows and shrewd blue eyes, looking into the camera with a mixture of intelligence and amusement, as if he was party to some small secret.

He was wearing a blue oxford button-down shirt, open at the neck, and a tweed jacket. His silvery hair was long, parted in the middle, his face a series of pouches: fleshy jowls, pink balloons of cheeks, and smaller, bluish bulges under his eyes. He looked impatient and tired, a combination Grace remembered from the day he’d burst into the lecture hall in Indio, not far from where she was sitting right now.

That day he was yelling, waving a sign and pointing a camera like a weapon:

DOWN WITH RACIAL PROFILING. POLICE PIGS ARE WHITE SUPREMACISTS .

He’d been cuffed and hustled out, and as they’d closed the door and she’d resumed her lecture, she’d heard him screaming, “Sow it, you’ll reap it!”

From Martin Luther King’s 1967 speech, taken from the Bible. Grace was just Catholic enough to have felt immediately guilty.

She’d never seen him again. Palm Springs police had taken her statement, but they hadn’t needed her to testify: He’d pled guilty and spent three days in jail for disturbing the peace. A month ago. And now he was dead.

She turned back to the file and studied the crime scene photos. Bartholomew had been reduced to looking like a charred piece of meat, the arrow still embedded in his chest.

She’d seen plenty of crime scene photos. She could get through these.

She looked up as the door opened and Salzer came in with a bottle of water.

“Thanks.”

He nodded and sat. Grace turned the page and read the report.

“Tracking?” She twisted the top and took a gulp of water.

Salzer nodded. “The way they think it went down, Bartholomew was driving, and he was either surprised by the perp there, or they rode out together. My guess? The UNSUB was in the car, directing him. Bartholomew parked badly and left his door open when he got out. By the time he entered the field, he was in a major hurry to escape whoever was after him. The police found a scrap of his tweed jacket on the barbwire, where he tore it. He stumbled, at some point, and when he got up, his stride was uneven, shorter. He’d injured himself, apparently, when he fell.”

She took another drink. “How about footprints, did they get anything they can use?”

Salzer shrugged. “It’s not in the coroner’s file if they did. The official cause of death was massive blood loss due to a direct arrow hit to the heart, and thermal injuries.”

“Thermal injuries?” She took a long swallow of water and wiped her lip.

“Yeah, Grace, he was still alive when his body was set on fire.” He got up. “Ready to take a look?”

The short answer to that would be no, she thought.

A wave of nausea washed over her and she felt her skin grow clammy. Salzer stared at her sharply.

“You okay?”

“I think it’s the heat.”

“It’s cooler in there.”

She nodded and followed him in. The autopsy viewing suite was a windowless room, filled with two empty tables, stainless steel sinks, metal filing cabinets equipped with scales for weighing and measuring the cost of death.

The body lay under a thick white plastic sheet on a metal table that was raised on the edges to catch fluids. Salzer hesitated briefly, as if to issue a warning, but Grace knew no warning from him could soften the images she was about to see. There had been fire in Guatemala. And death.

She nodded and Salzer slipped the sheet free. The odor of burned flesh permeated the room. “I’ll be right back.”

She went into the hall and leaned against the wall. Gradually the walls stopped moving. She went back inside and closed the door behind her.

He offered a box of gloves and she took a set and put them on, as if stepping into the hall was the most natural thing in the world. Maybe in that room it was.

The body lay on its back, claws pointed toward the ceiling, blackened arms frozen over its head as if trying to protect the face from the accelerant that was about to be dumped onto its dying body, but the face was curiously intact. The hair had been burned off, along with the eyebrows and ears, but in the shape of the brow and the slope of what was left of the nose, the face was still recognizably human.

Especially in the shape of the mouth, open in a frozen scream. The scalp had been cut open in a coronal incision from ear to ear and closed with white stitches. White thick stitches also closed the Y chest incision. The torso was severely charred, the tissue blackened and peeled back in some places to expose red flesh and bone underneath. The chest cavity was collapsed and sunken around a blackened hole.