A Measure of Darkness Read online

  “The body is that of a normally developed, well-nourished white or Asian female, possibly of mixed race, measuring sixty-one inches in length and weighing ninety-nine pounds, with an estimated age ranging between eighteen and thirty years.”

  The surface of Jane Doe’s body spoke to an unquiet life, with more downs than ups. The needle marks I’d previously noted on the exposed portion of her wrist continued along both arms. Park had called her well nourished, but that was a relative term; ribs and hip bones poked out. Fine white lines laced the tops of her thighs. Self-harm scars.

  The soft spot I’d felt in her rib cage corresponded to a bruise, yellow-green and heart-shaped. Her scalp was bruised, too. Numerous smaller cuts and abrasions marked her chin, knuckles, the insides of her wrists.

  The centerpiece was the throat, with its lurid palette of violets and reds. Swollen tissue above and below the level of compression gave the neck a slight hourglass shape.

  Strangling someone with your hands requires determination. You have to maintain an iron grip for several minutes, all while they claw and punch and buck and kick. During the dissection of the neck, Park ticked off the structures destroyed, wholly or in part: larynx, thyroid cartilage, cricoid cartilage, hyoid bone.

  Determination, and fury.

  Nwodo sighed.

  I glanced at her. Not impatience she was expressing. Just soul weariness, at the monstrous things people do to each other.

  Park incised a Y into the abdomen.

  Two broken ribs.

  Dani Botero reached for gardening shears to open the sternum.

  A crunching sound came through the intercom.

  I lowered the volume and pulled over a couple of chairs.

  Nwodo said, “How was your Christmas?”

  “Not bad,” I said. “Yours? Do anything fun?”

  “My father roasted a pig in the backyard,” she said. “He does it every year.”

  “Sounds like a party.”

  “Oh, it is.”

  “My girlfriend and I cooked for our families. My brother brought his fiancée.”

  “That’s nice.”

  “Would’ve been,” I said, “if he’d told me she was coming. Or that he had a fiancée.”

  Nwodo smiled.

  The heart. The lungs. Everything Park observed supported manual strangulation as the cause of death. The blunt impact that had broken the ribs and caused the bruise could have come from being struck, from being pushed into a railing, from a fall.

  There were few other conclusions, and nothing probative to Jane Doe’s identity. As the autopsy dragged on, Nwodo began to slump, first forward, then back, her leg jiggling with excess energy, her hands clenched together as if to contain her growing disappointment.

  She was hoping for a revelation. We both were.

  Dani Botero took tissue and tox samples.

  Maybe something helpful there.

  We’d know one way or another in a few weeks.

  After two and a half hours, they began to sew the chest cavity back up.

  Nwodo said she was leaving. I walked her out to the lobby.

  “I’ve been thinking about your offer,” she said. “Share and share alike? There’s a vigil this weekend. Remembering the victims.”

  “I heard about that.”

  “They’re expecting a crowd,” she said. “It might be interesting to see who shows up.”

  “Might help to have a second pair of eyes.”

  “Wouldn’t hurt,” she said. She sounded relaxed. She’d expected the offer.

  We shook hands.

  “Six thirty,” she said. “Text me when you get there.”

  “Will do. I’ll be coming straight from work.”

  She clucked her tongue. “Change first.”

  CHAPTER 12

  4:58 p.m.

  I was in the locker room, ready to step into the shower, when the door opened and Zaragoza stuck his head in.

  “Dani needs to talk to you.”

  “Tell her I’ll be out in a few.”

  “Clay,” Dani yelled. “You gotta come see this.”

  I yanked the curtain around my naked lower half. “What the hell, dude.”

  “I’m not looking.”

  “Can you please get out?”

  “Hurry up.”

  I dried off, pulled on clothes, and went out to the intake bay. Dani Botero had a camera around her neck and was hopping from foot to foot, grinning. “Come on.”

  I followed her into the morgue, to the area where they’d autopsied Jane Doe, now scrubbed clean. “What am I looking at?”

  Like a game-show hostess, Dani swept her hands toward the rolling steel table. The ruined clothes, folded and sealed inside an evidence bag. Old blue running shoes.

  Beside them, two rubber-banded stacks of credit cards.

  Dani said, “She kept them in her shoes. Under the insoles. I went to bag them and the inside of the left one was kinda sticking up.”

  She curtsied. “Ta-da.”

  I looked at her. “You.”

  She tilted her head.

  “Are awesome.”

  She smiled and handed me a box of gloves.

  Each stack measured about a quarter of an inch thick, seven or eight cards’ worth. It couldn’t have been comfortable, walking around with that underfoot.

  Living on the street. Sleeping arrangements uncertain.

  Associating with people she feared might cause her harm.

  She wasn’t wrong, there. Someone had harmed her.

  But not for her money.

  Or he didn’t know where she kept it.

  Or he ran out of time.

  I picked up the first stack. The topmost card was a Visa.

  “Catherine Myers,” I read.

  It was like stepping through a doorway.

  It was like I could see, or breathe, for the first time in days.

  I removed the rubber band. In a perfect world, Catherine Myers’s driver’s license would be in there.

  I dealt the cards out in a row.

  Three more Visas. Three Mastercards. An Amex.

  I picked up a second Visa. “Hold on.” Not Catherine Myers. “Beth Green.”

  The next card in the deck, a Mastercard: “Frances Ann Flatt.”

  Dani Botero said, “Oh snap.”

  * * *

  —

  SIXTEEN CARDS.

  Sixteen names.

  No license.

  I called Amy.

  “Hi,” she said. “I’m just about to order dinner. Is Thai okay?”

  “I’m going to be late,” I said.

  I called Delilah Nwodo. She didn’t answer, so I texted her, and emailed as well. The subject heading was your investment pays off.

  I hunched in my chair, staring at the screen.

  Column of numbers.

  Column of names.

  Off the top of my head, I could think of several ways to obtain a credit card for fraudulent purposes.

  You could remove it from another’s possession by force. I had a hard time picturing ninety-nine-pound Jane Doe as a mugger.

  Pickpocket, then. Straight out of Dickens.

  Easier and safer was to clone it. Maybe she worked as a server at a restaurant. Did you enjoy your meal? Lemme run that for you. Be right back.

  You could open an account in someone else’s real name. Purchase a trove of account data from a black-market vendor. Pull random names off the internet.

  You could open an account in a fake name.

  Surely there were other new and exciting methods. No species on earth outdoes humans for innovation, especially when it comes to stealing other p
eople’s shit.

  A column of numbers; a column of names.

  If the names did in fact refer to real, flesh-and-blood individuals, I faced the same hurdle that I had with Jasmine/Kevin Gomez: the Big World Problem.

  You want to believe there can exist but one Frances Ann Flatt or Dara Kenilworth or Karla-with-a-K Abruzzo. But it’s a big world. Statistics will kick your ass, every time.

  Without a second data point, a name is close to meaningless.

  Still, some names are rarer than others. I skipped Beth Green and Catherine Myers and Jessica Chen and googled Frances Ann Flatt.

  And got a hit.

  Assuming I had the correct person—the gods owed me that much—she lived in Seattle, was fifty-one years old, and worked as a statistician for the University of Washington.

  Her LinkedIn profile showed a woman most assuredly not the dead one in our freezer.

  Accurint delivered a home phone number.

  No answer.

  I left a message.

  Emboldened by my early success, I tried Leah Horvuth next.

  Two hits: forty-nine-year-old English professor in Raleigh, North Carolina. Thirty-four-year-old veterinarian in Connecticut.

  And so on.

  It’s a Big World.

  I picked up the phone.

  7:37 p.m.

  My optimism was fast evaporating.

  In addition to Big World issues, I was running into a much more banal hurdle: nobody would talk to me.

  I’d made two dozen calls, to points flung throughout the continental U.S., managing to reach four people, all of whom had hung up on me within thirty seconds.

  Makes sense. Stranger calls you up. At night. Blocked number. Claiming to be law enforcement, some department you’ve never heard of.

  Yes, hi, ma’am. May I speak with you about an issue regarding your credit cards?

  Click.

  Sergeant Brad Moffett sauntered by, pausing to chuck me on the shoulder. “No authorization for OT. Go home.”

  I told him what Dani had discovered, showed him the list, shared my frustration.

  He said, “Go home.”

  I wasn’t going to solve it, in one evening, at my desk. But I felt wired.

  He added, “Take that as an order.”

  “You’re really power-tripping,” I said.

  “Believe it.”

  “Ten more minutes,” I said. “Two more calls.”

  “Whichever comes first.”

  I started to reach for the receiver, but paused.

  I was going about this backward.

  Concentrating on the names, when it was the card numbers that mattered.

  Contact the credit card companies and request account data.

  Address. Phone. Social Security number.

  In all likelihood the information would turn out to be bogus. Worth a try, though, especially given my inability to persuade people I wasn’t running a scam myself.

  Plus it provided a welcome excuse to stop for the day. Business hours were over.

  I stood up, my stomach rumbling at the thought of reheated Thai. Poor Amy. I still hadn’t had a chance to shower.

  Friday, December 28

  11:45 a.m.

  Modern police work often requires obtaining information from cellphone carriers, financial service providers, social media. How helpful they are depends on the prevailing legal mood, which in turn depends on how scared we are as a nation—that is, how recently we’ve had a terror attack. Privacy versus security. At minimum they want a warrant.

  Again: as an American, I’m glad.

  As an investigator?

  Sixteen credit cards, with sixteen names, issued by sixteen different companies?

  It was like I’d handed my morning to Kafka: Do your worst.

  I finished my call with Capital One.

  Once the appropriate paperwork had been filed, reviewed, and processed, I could expect a response within eight to twelve weeks.

  My ear throbbed from the pressure of the receiver. I’d started out on speaker, but after several hours on hold, the doodly-doodly-doo music had begun to drive my co-workers insane. Sully hurled crumpled Post-its at me. Maggie Garcia threatened to file a harassment complaint.

  At lunchtime I announced that I was stepping out and got a round of applause.

  * * *

  —

  TIME TO DEAL with facts at hand.

  Meredith Klaar lived in Emeryville, a small city sandwiched between Berkeley and Oakland, shaped like a price gun and adjacent to the Bay. For decades it had languished, as local industry faltered and collapsed, warehouses emptied out, and factories went quiet. Eventually the free market had its say. First came the cafés, followed by small-scale residential projects. The short hop to San Francisco made the location attractive to start-ups and their employees fleeing crushing rents. A city council friendly to developers didn’t hurt.

  Now the area boasted condos and an Ikea, corporate headquarters, an outdoor mall, and a perpetually crowded Target. Making Emeryville the very model of a high-density, mixed-use urban environment, available today, starting at seven hundred dollars a square foot.

  Exiting the freeway, I passed a homeless encampment big as a baseball diamond.

  The mid-rise Meredith Klaar called home had underground parking, a fitness center, a doorman who signed me in and buzzed me up. Her unit, a fourth-floor studio, faced away from the water. She answered my knock with the lights off and the blinds drawn, bracing her foot against the bottom of the door while she examined my ID.

  She said, “Come in.”

  She was in her early twenties, medium height and whittled, with a gamin face and flat brown hair tipped electric blue. Gray sweatpants made an incongruous pairing—as if she’d made a last-ditch attempt to infuse color into her life, only to change her mind and give up.

  Just a studio. Nice, though, for someone so young. Maybe family money. Maybe the first time her life hadn’t gone as expected.

  The interior smelled of old takeout. Everywhere lay evidence of a neat person who’d temporarily lost control. The bed was made, but the duvet was askew and throw pillows were scattered on the floor. Houseplants fainted. A kitchen bag, overflowing and yoked to a drawer pull, dangled helpless as a hanged man.

  I said, “May I turn on a light?”

  Nodding, she pulled herself cross-legged on the bed. I switched on an Ikea halogen and rolled an Ikea desk chair over.

  People under stress don’t always process well. I reiterated that I was from the Coroner, was there to gather facts, to gain a fuller picture of what had happened last Saturday night. I understood things had been pretty chaotic and that a week had gone by. Her memory might not be perfect. I asked her to do her best. I encouraged her to take her time.

  Meredith Klaar wrung spidery hands. “I killed her. That’s what happened. I don’t know what else there is to say. I don’t understand why I have to keep answering these same questions. What’s the point? Can we please just get it over with?”

  I said, “What is it you want to get over with?”

  “This,” she said. “Whatever you’re going to do to me. I’m not telling you I didn’t do it. I have never said that, not one time. I did it. Okay? I did it. Don’t you think this is kind of, I don’t know. Inefficient?”

  “I’m sure you’ve spoken to a lot of people, last couple days.”

  A crazed, high-pitched laugh spurted out of her.

  “I’ve never been so popular in my life,” she said.

  A second burst of laughter and then she sucked in air to smother herself, glancing at me in abject terror. “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “I don’t know why I said that,” she said. �
��I didn’t mean it. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s fine,” I said.

  “I’m sorry,” she said a third time, and she began to weep.

  With a lurch toward the nightstand she grabbed a tissue box, one of many strewn about. A clear plastic wastebasket brimmed with used tissues; empty boxes mobbed the table, the floor, lurked half hidden behind a guitar on a stand. On the kitchenette counter, reinforcements: two more six-packs of boxes, one of them started into, shrink wrap puckered like an open wound.

  Meredith Klaar yanked one, two, three tissues from the box in her hand. She blew her nose, mopped her eyes, clutched in her palm a sodden white fruit. She had peach-colored nails and a sprinkling of freckles across the bridge of her sunburnt nose. On the wall behind her was a calendar: Twelve Months of Yosemite.

  I said, “I’m not here to judge you.”

  Which is a thing we say. It’s one of our lies. Because I am there to judge you, if not precisely in terms of guilt or innocence. Even pity is a form of judgment, after all.

  She sat there and wept and I could feel the wretchedness coming off her like decay, and I thought of the others like her I have known, inadvertent killers, sleepwalking through life, mimicking normalcy, their souls bent double under an invisible burden.

  Meredith Klaar’s mouth opened, and her jaw slid forward, and she heaved with impatience, as though I had proven myself an awful disappointment: I refused to judge her when she wanted to be judged. Compared with the damnation she was levying against herself, mine would’ve been a welcome distraction.

  “I’m actually a good driver,” she said.

  I nodded.

  “I’ve never ever had a ticket. I’ve never gotten behind the wheel drunk. I’ve never had an accident. Before I got my job I was driving for Uber. My rating is something like four point nine. You understand? That’s—it doesn’t happen.”

  “I believe you.”

  “No,” she said, her agitation rising. “You need to understand. I hit her because I was trying to be careful. Okay? I was trying to look in ten directions at once. That’s what…I am not a reckless person. The opposite. You can ask anyone.”

  I said, “Who should I ask?”