Notes on an Execution(32)

It was pure luck. It was chance, or maybe it was fate. As Saffy entered the police station, tentative and self-conscious, the person she found was Emilia Moretti.

Moretti was a brand of woman Saffy hadn’t previously known you could be. She surveilled the scene with sharp hawk eyes, glossy and firm, rigid, brilliant. Back then, Moretti had been in her early thirties, and her wedding ring glinted in the bright overheads, casting laser beams. She looked like the kind of woman who drank a single glass of tasteful white wine with dinner and used expensive skin creams that made the lines on her face look like streams cutting through soft soil. Approaching, Saffy felt shriveled and unkempt. Used up.

“Excuse me,” Saffy had croaked. “I want to help.”

Moretti had seen the bags under Saffy’s eyes, the flaking skin beneath her nose, the crop top she’d cut with a blunt pair of kiddie scissors. And still, she had listened to Saffy’s stories about Lila. When Saffy finished talking, Moretti handed her a business card. Call me if you hear anything. Saffy didn’t hear anything, but she called Moretti the next morning anyway and volunteered for the citizen search effort.

And that was how Saffy found it: police work. She loved the brisk, efficient instructions, the lack of sentimentality, the stern tenderness of Moretti’s gaze as they combed the grassy foothills.

There were so many ways her life could have turned. She could have lived one long basement party. She could have died alongside Travis in his overdose three years ago. She could very well have cleaned up some other way. Saffy did not like to question the forces that drove her to Moretti, to her GED, to community college and then to Candidate Processing Weekend with the New York State Police. When Saffy questioned these forces, she only became more aware of how precarious they really were.

*

By the time Saffy came home to the blinking light on her answering machine, it was nearly midnight. The day had passed in a frenzy, the evidence logged, the scene photographed meticulously. Tomorrow, the news would go public.

Saffy dropped her keys and gun on the counter, her apartment morose and frigid in shadow. She changed into an old NYSP sweatshirt, washed her face, pulled her shellacked ponytail from its rubber band. The few women in Basic School had recommended cutting it short, but Saffy could not bear to lose this release, her mass of hair tumbling free. An exhale, this unsheathing.

“Hey, it’s me,” Kristen sang through Saffy’s dusty answering machine. “You still on for Saturday? Jake’s gonna be at a conference, and I rented You’ve Got Mail.”

That hipbone.

Kristen would want to know about Lila. They had been a trio, all those years ago at Miss Gemma’s—Saffy, Kristen, and Lila. They had braided friendship bracelets, climbed trees, and made up games; they had whispered secrets from top bunk to bottom. But Saffy could not fathom returning Kristen’s call, saying the words. She stood frozen at the counter as the robot droned: No new messages. Her apartment smelled musty, like old carpet and dirty dishes. The studio was nicer than any place she’d ever rented, a unit in a refurbished old Victorian a few blocks from the Saranac River, a good deal from Kristen’s boyfriend, the heir to his family’s real estate business. You have to take better care of yourself, Kristen was always saying—the sunflowers Saffy had bought last week drooped in their vase, the water browned to a fuzzy swamp. Saffy heated a can of soup on the stove and fell asleep while it was cooling, collapsed in the blue light of the television.

*

The medical examiner kept a dingy office in the basement of the local hospital. When Saffy arrived, fifteen minutes early, Moretti was already waiting by the elevator. Her jaw was tight, clenching the spearmint gum she always chewed, her hair blown glossy—beneath the dim glare, Saffy could see the bags puffing beneath her tired eyes.

“Singh,” Moretti said, a sly grin breaking across her face. “It’s official. Lieutenant took you off the Saranac robbery. You’re working this case with me now.”

That familiar glow, swelling warm from Saffy’s chest. The sparkling halo of being chosen—being trusted—by Moretti.

“Lieutenant put Kensington on it too, but Kensington runs late.” Moretti looked at her watch, pressed the elevator button. “We’ll start without him.”

Kensington was a slick, cocky detective with unnaturally white teeth. He was a mediocre cop for the most part, but he could charm even the coldest suspects in an interrogation, pooling confessions regularly at his feet. And the lieutenant made no secret of his reasoning: they could not work a team of only women. Bad for optics.

As the coroner ushered them into the morgue, Saffy tried not to inhale; the smell engulfed her anyway, a chilly rush of formaldehyde. The bones had been laid out on plastic tarps across three separate tables, like an excavation from an archaeological dig—ancient artifacts, uncovered from some forgotten era. The coroner had logged each fragment, marked them with little white flags.

“We’re still waiting on dental records,” the coroner said, running a hand through his froth of white hair. “But decomposition looks right. Between eight and nine years. These are your girls.”

“Cause of death?” Moretti asked.

“Hard to say. Two of the spinal cords show some damage, but with this level of erosion, I can’t make any definitive conclusions.”

“Strangulation?” Saffy asked.

“Probably,” the coroner said. “No trauma to the skulls or any of the other bones. One of the girls had a fracture in her arm, but it healed premortem.”