A Measure of Darkness Read online

I could tell he felt guilty. We’d run late, and as a result, he’d blown a chance to be present for them, to offer them solace in the form of information, a lifeline of red tape to grab hold of amid the upheaval.

  We drove to the bureau, intaked Jalen Coombs, handed him off to Sully. Zaragoza sat at his desk to track down the Coombs family, and I sat at mine to search for Jane Doe.

  * * *

  —

  IF YOU LIVE in the great state of California and you’re a licensed accountant, your fingerprints are on record. The same goes if you’re a registered nurse, a veterinarian, or a psychologist. A termite inspector. A geologist. Clergy. If you coach Little League or sell real estate, you’ve had to submit your prints.

  If you train guide dogs for the blind, and you die unexpectedly, and nobody can say who you are—I, or someone like me, will look up your fingerprints.

  If you’ve been incarcerated, your fingerprints are on record.

  Applicants for a California driver’s license must give a thumbprint.

  Jane Doe was not any of these people.

  Things get trickier once you cross state lines. No comprehensive clearinghouse for fingerprint data exists. Some states take prints for a license. Others use a different biometric marker. A few don’t bother at all. The military sits in its own hermetic box. The FBI’s Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System holds a hundred million sets of prints acquired over decades from criminals, civil servants, firearms owners, terrorists. That’s a lot of fingers, but it’s not everyone, not even close.

  As an American, leery of Big Brother, I’m glad.

  As a coroner, it annoys me to no end.

  Another wrinkle: not every person who dies in the great state of California lives in the great state of California, or, for that matter, in the United States of America. A healthy chunk of our great state’s gross domestic product derives from tourism, and while plenty of those tourists arrive from Nevada, Arizona, or domestic points farther afield, an enormous number step off planes from China, Japan, Brazil, Denmark, India, Lithuania, Djibouti, or anyplace in the wide world where people still dream. Which is to say, everywhere.

  And which is to say nothing about the substantial number of Californians who cross the border, but not as tourists; who live here, but not quite as residents; who do their utmost not to end up in the system, and for whom getting in touch with the authorities sits down near the bottom of the to-do list, sandwiched between gouge out own eyes and munch turds.

  She could be anyone.

  I’d submitted Jasmine Gomez’s prints as well, hoping I might get back a record with her birth name. No local hit there, either.

  I replied to CIB, asking them to expand the search radius for both sets of prints.

  I wrote to forensic IT, asking when I could expect the data from Jasmine’s phone.

  The homeowner of the Victorian was named Rhiannon Cooke. According to her Facebook page, the theme of the party was Winter Solstice: Howl at the Moon!! Wear costumes that reflect your Inner Creature. Ten bucks at the door. DJ Fooye spinning. Cash bar.

  Browsing the list of RSVPs, I couldn’t distinguish between genuine attendees and those who had promised but failed to show. Nor did the list account for anyone who’d dropped by spontaneously. Over seven hundred people had reacted to the post, many of them after the fact: friends airing their grief in public; internet strangers compelled to share their two cents.

  How many of these folks could I realistically track down on my own?

  What were the odds they knew Jane Doe?

  To test the waters, I picked a handful of distinctive-sounding names and looked up their home phone numbers. I reached two live people. I asked if they had a female friend who’d gone to the party and was still unaccounted for. I got one no and one maybe that became a no when I described Jane Doe’s clothing.

  I then had to spend ten minutes politely deflecting their questions.

  For all I knew, it was Jane Doe’s date who had killed her. If by some fluke I stumbled across him, he’d never talk to me.

  I googled the video the detectives had mentioned.

  They’d led me to expect a single hit. Instead I got hundreds, hosted on a variety of platforms: YouTube, Instagram, Vimeo, WorldStarHipHop. Confounding the search results were clips ripped from local TV news, as well as a slew of videos of unrelated shootings. The sheer number implied a depressing appetite for cheap thrills.

  Oakland provided plenty of fodder.

  Street-corner shootings. Midday shootings. Front-yard shootings. Drive-bys.

  I plugged in my headphones.

  Most of the footage from the night in question showed the party itself, prior to the shooting. The atmosphere was raucous. The DJ was a bearded white guy in a tux; projection screens ran berserk with trippy animations. Young people mugged for the camera, spilling drinks, howling on cue. They looked happy. They looked ignorant.

  I hit PAUSE, scanned the faces.

  No Jane Doe.

  I clicked a link for “DEADLY Oakland party 12/21.”

  Close-up of a human shape writhing in flames.

  A spike of adrenaline, before I remembered the effigy with the purple nose.

  The camera zoomed out, panned along a ring of partygoers holding hands around the fire pit, singing and jumping and landing out of sync.

  I let the video run to the end.

  The promised deadliness never materialized.

  No Jane Doe.

  I clicked the next link, and the next, and the next.

  No Jane Doe.

  Jasmine Gomez, on the other hand, made several guest appearances. Her popularity, I reckoned, had to do with the costume. Aside from the robes and the mechanical wings, she had on a goofy plastic halo, attached to a headband. Missing, by the time I got to her. But of course there would be one.

  I should’ve inferred that on my own. What else had I missed?

  I watched her strike a pose, draw down the chain at her side.

  The effect was dramatic: fully spread, the wings measured a good five feet, tip to tip. The audience cheered, and Jasmine took a bow.

  You made that? Yourself? Rad. Hey, check this out. Do it again.

  She was happy to oblige.

  Eventually I came to a video two minutes and seventeen seconds long, uploaded by a YouTube user named yeoldejeff22 and titled “Okaland shoot out.” The errant letter, along with the flood of noise, had caused it to sink down in the search results.

  I clicked.

  It opened without prelude, the fight already in progress. The perspective put the cameraman on the lawn of the Victorian, twenty or thirty feet back from the street, filming through the crowd.

  The Sharks and the Jets, Von Ruden had called them; and indeed, the action had a flat, theatrical quality to it. Insults bounced back and forth like a discordant round. Houses in the background possessed the depth of a painted scrim.

  At around the forty-five-second mark, the cameraman moved up to get a better vantage, and the leads came into focus.

  The Sharks were three young men. Two—Isaiah Branch and Jalen Coombs—were black. The third Shark was Asian. He was out front, puffing his chest. Cross talk muddled his words, though the subtext was clear enough. Angry young male.

  The Jets were harder to define. If you counted everyone massed on the opposite side, it seemed like a pretty unfair fight. But two stood out. Rhiannon Cooke I recognized from her Facebook page. She wore a silver lamé jumpsuit, her hair dyed purple and pink and shellacked into a helmet. Beside her was a lean, shaggy guy with thick glasses and a red knit beanie, feinting and bobbing like a buoy.

  What’s your fuckin problem.

  The camera moved shakily over the crowd.

  Taut, disgruntled, restless, jeering.

  Asshole.

  Get the fuck out of he
re, asshole.

  Fuck off.

  The mob, starting to flex like a single unit, to chant.

  Fuck off fuck off fuck off.

  A bottle came flying, shattered on the sidewalk.

  The camera rolled back to center stage, where the Asian guy and the guy in the beanie were up in each other’s faces, shouting. Jalen Coombs was restraining the Asian guy. Isaiah Branch, in turn, was tugging on Coombs: Let’s go.

  At the 1:47 mark, several things happened in quick succession.

  The Asian guy surged forward.

  His shirt rode up, revealing the butt of a gun.

  The man in the beanie recoiled, grabbing at the small of his back.

  A shot rang out.

  Pandemonium.

  An eruption of screams crackled my eardrums; I lunged to lower the volume. The camera jerked as its operator attempted to flee, filling the screen with a nauseating barrage of pixels and blobs and streaks. Fuck oh fuck. He couldn’t get anywhere, he was trapped, colliding with other bodies, elbows thrown, shoving. Fuck oh God oh my God fuck. Seven dense seconds of this and then, at 1:54, the real shooting began: a series of quick, overlapping claps.

  I had to lower the volume again.

  It’s worse, somehow, when it’s happening off screen.

  At 2:06 the cameraman got free and broke up the middle of the street, arms pumping, the world dark scribbles.

  I could hear metallic smacks: car doors. I could hear tires.

  Three more shots.

  The camera fell, scraped along the sidewalk, landed facing up.

  Sky. Cloud. Stars.

  One shot.

  A giant hand came down to retrieve the camera.

  I caught a glimpse of him as he leaned over.

  He was white, with a beard.

  Two more shots.

  The clip broke off.

  I rewound to the beginning and slowed playback to a quarter speed, examining the gallery of faces that surfaced and submerged in the patchy streetlight.

  I thought I saw Grant Hellerstein, the male GSW.

  No Jane Doe.

  It was difficult to say who’d opened fire. The camera was moving nonstop, hungry for drama. In yeoldejeff22, we had ourselves a regular auteur.

  I saw Isaiah Branch pulling at his friend’s sleeve.

  I saw the Asian guy rise up, enraged.

  The guy in the beanie, galvanized.

  No Jane Doe.

  It made sense. We’d found her in the backyard, not the street.

  Four possibilities, then.

  She’d been killed and stuck in the shed at some point prior to the party.

  She’d been killed and stuck in the shed at some point during the party.

  She’d died simultaneous with the shooting.

  Possibility four, the most chilling: she’d died after the shooting, in the intervening seven-plus hours before Grelling found her, while the neighborhood was crawling with cops.

  “Shit is messed up.” Zaragoza was staring over my shoulder at the screen.

  I took off my headphones. “I’m not so sure Isaiah Branch was lying. He’s not holding a gun, far as I can see. Neither is Coombs.”

  He smiled quizzically. What business was it of mine?

  Turnbow’s voice in my ear, chiding. Stay focused.

  “D’you read the comments?” Zaragoza asked.

  “Do I want to?”

  “Depends,” he said. “Have you already met your recommended daily allowance for human awfulness?”

  He went off to get coffee.

  Against my better judgment, I scrolled down.

  In thirty-six hours, the video had garnered fifty-eight thousand views, and almost as many opinions.

  The problem, see, was a culture that glorified violence.

  No. The problem was gentrification and a shortage of affordable housing, when you started kicking people out of a neighborhood that had been theirs for decades.

  Could we not forget that these are REAL people, they’re my FRIENDS, please don’t hijack this to push your own agenda?

  Who was kicking anyone out?

  What else could you call it when you let greedy developers come in, and rents doubled and tripled overnight?

  It’s called the free market.

  THESE ARE MY FRIENDS.

  It was an Italian neighborhood originally.

  Actually it was German.

  Are you a fucking idiot, no one has the “right” to live anywhere.

  It was African American and had been since World War II.

  Did you know anything, anything at all, about history?

  The problem was you’d never read a book other than Harry Potter.

  Could everyone PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE try to remember that we were talking about a dead child, this is a TRAGEDY, we get nowhere playing THE BLAME GAME.

  Your the idiot.

  Animals with no value for human life.

  Not sure what you mean by “animals” other than oh yes you’re straight up nazi.

  The problem was guns.

  The problem was millenial entitlement.

  The problem was cultural appropriation.

  *you’re

  Can you PLEASE PLEASE DON’T WRITE IN ALL CAPS CAUSE IT’S ANNOYING AF?

  Ever heard of the Second Amendment, shitbag?

  The problem was cis white male privilege.

  The problem was that neither side is listening to the other.

  The problem was that not each side is worth listening to.

  The problem was you.

  You, motherfucker.

  You.

  2:41 p.m.

  The address on Jasmine Gomez’s license belonged to an LGBTQ+ community center, a converted Craftsman home on Telegraph Avenue, half a mile south of the Berkeley campus. Rainbow-colored letters screwed to the eave spelled out THE HARBOR; a sign in the front window declared it to be a SAFE SPACE. A young man with a pencil mustache answered my knock and admitted me to a musty, paneled foyer.

  I asked for the person in charge.

  He invited me to have a seat and went to the reception desk in the parlor.

  While he called, I wandered into the adjoining room, shabby but comfortable, with a magazine rack and mismatched chairs that exuded a faint smell of sweat. The bulletin board advertised meetings and support groups. Some were aimed at the general public: grief, Al-Anon. Others felt more niche. Married and/or once-married bisexual men 35 to 50. Middle Eastern queer femmes. Partners of the non-conforming.

  “Can I help you.”

  A woman in her late twenties was coming down the stairs. She had ruddy skin and auburn hair in a pixie cut. She introduced herself as Greer Unger, one of the co-directors. I gave her my card and asked if we could speak in private, and she brought me up to her office on the second floor, at the end of a long hallway lined with a bald runner. Beside a potted fern, a white noise machine burbled, masking the conversations taking place behind closed doors.

  She gave me a chair and went to her desk. Slogan posters and Native American art scaled the walls.

  I said, “I’m going to ask you to keep what I’m about to tell you confidential. It’s part of an ongoing investigation, and not public yet. Can you make me that assurance, please?”

  “Not until I’ve heard what it is.”

  “It’s about Jasmine Gomez,” I said.

  No reaction.

  “Do you know her?”

  “I can’t answer that.”

  I said, “Jasmine passed away over the weekend.”

  Greer Unger shut her eyes. “Oh God.” She opened them and met mine. “Was she killed?”

  Her assumption took me aback. “Is there a reason you’d think that?”
/>   “Yes. Because people like Jasmine get hurt. What happened?”

  “What I can tell you is that we’re looking into it. I’m sorry I can’t be more specific. Right now I’m trying to get in touch with her family. That’s the first step.”

  “I can’t help you there. I’ve never met them.”

  “Jasmine never mentioned their names?”

  “No.”

  “What about her own name?”

  Greer Unger screwed up her mouth. “Excuse me?”

  “Before she was Jasmine,” I said. “What did she go by?”

  “You’re asking me to deadname.”

  “What—I’m not sure what that means.”

  “Referring to someone by a name they’ve abandoned is a form of transphobia.”

  “You understand that that’s not my intention.”

  “Even so,” Greer said, “it can be a deeply traumatic experience for the individual.”

  “Jasmine is deceased,” I said.

  “That’s all well and good, but it’s not her I’m thinking of. Say I tell you and it gets out. People come here seeking support they can’t get elsewhere. For many of them, we’re a last resort. You’re asking me to violate Jasmine’s privacy, then turn around and tell them they’re safe.”

  “It won’t get out. You have my word.”

  She shook her head. “Sorry.”

  “I’m not—judging, or—”

  “That’s kind of you,” she said. “Not to judge.”

  Silence.

  I said, “What I want is to take care of Jasmine, and to make sure she gets a proper burial. To do that, it’s imperative that I speak to her family.”

  “I told you, I don’t know them.”

  “Maybe we can narrow it down, some. Did she come from the Bay Area, originally?”

  Greer shook her head. No or No comment.

  “On her license she listed this as her home address. Was she living here?”

  “We don’t provide residential facilities.”

  “Was she out on the street?” I asked.

  “From time to time.”

  “What about when not?”

  She had broken eye contact. “I’m sorry, but I’m going to need to consult with my colleagues before we continue this conversation.”