Shutter(18)
I took one more look over the overpass, the morning light turning dark, the wind rising up to my face. I still felt Erma at my back, as well as an urgency that raged hot.
“Help me!” I heard Erma’s screams getting louder and louder as I watched her fighting the giant. “Help me.” Her voice was in my ear. “Help me, now.”
It was my ringing cell phone that broke me from my meditation. “Rita here.”
“We’re having a busy morning. Are you on call?” Samuels rustled papers in the background. “Dammit, I can’t find the schedule.”
“I don’t know. What day is it?” My watch read 6:49 A.M. The sun was finally warming up the city. Erma still had my stomach in a ball and my mind at a tilt. I was disoriented and hyperaware all at once.
“Someone filled the old Imperial Motel with holes. First reports in call it a drive-by. I think the lady is still alive, so it’s not a fatality yet. But from what I understand, she’s not doing well. Detective Garcia is heading it.”
Garcia again. After thirty years on the force, the man had absolutely no emotion or empathy. He was on just about all the fatality calls that I was on, and we didn’t get along right from the beginning. His way of breaking the ice with me had been to tell me his one Navajo joke.
“So, these two East Coast hookers decided to move out to California. They’re driving through New Mexico and stop at a little trading post.” Garcia was already chuckling. “There were two Indian women sitting out on the front porch—the four women started to talk, you know, like women do. One Indian woman says, ‘Well, I’m a Navajo and she is an Arapaho.’ The one hooker said, ‘No shit. Well, I’m a New York ho and she a Chicago ho.’” He had roared with laughter. When I didn’t laugh, he muttered under his breath, “Women.”
Once, when I was only a few months on the job, I watched Garcia take some money off a guy they had in custody. Police had found the body of a woman who had been raped and bludgeoned in her apartment. She had been decomposing there for at least two days while her killer sat in the living room and watched the television. When the police arrived after the woman’s mother filed a missing person report, the killer was sitting there, eating a bowl of cereal next to her body.
They emptied his pockets: a pack of cigarettes, a lighter, a knife, and a wad of money an inch thick. I snapped photos in the apartment, but I kept an eye on Garcia. After they bagged the woman and put her in the OMI van, Garcia stuffed the money and knife into his pockets. The smokes he shook until one slender stick came out of the pack. He used the guy’s lighter too. Then he got in the car. I’ll never forget that.
7:21 A.M., IMPERIAL MOTEL—FIRST AND CENTRAL AVENUE: DRIVE-BY SHOOTING.
I walked to the perimeter, happy to see that there were no bodies lying beneath white sheets. Garcia lumbered toward me, his industrial strength cologne cutting through the cold air. The last time I’d seen him was on the overpass above Erma’s dismembered body, his round, pocked face shining with sweat. Now he looked blue from the early morning light, choking for air above the straining button of his collar.
“So, where’s the boss? He didn’t tell me he was sending you.”
“Sorry to disappoint,” I replied. “You know he has better things to do than to spend his morning with you.” An enema would have been better than spending any morning with this man.
He threw me a bright blue set of rubber gloves. “So, are you waiting for an invitation or what?”
“What happened here?” I said, ignoring him.
A young officer spoke up. “From what we can tell, it looks like it might be some gang activity. We have no leads, but shots were fired from a vehicle moving west to east, and we don’t think our victim was the target. The vic is in her early twenties. She’s probably going to make it, but she sure was a bleeder.”
The photos began outside. We counted and photographed over three hundred pieces of evidence in two hours—including the 130 brass shells that were scattered between the thick yellow lines in the hotel parking lot, where a trail ran over thirteen feet long before stopping abruptly, leaving a black skid mark. It must have sounded like a war zone, but that was what this town was becoming. I photographed a scene like this every month or so. Usually, it was a kid involved in a gang thing or a drug thing, sometimes just an unlucky soul in the wrong place at the wrong time. None of it ever ended well. There was always a car wash somewhere in the city raising money for a young man or woman’s funeral. That, and the plotting of revenge in someone’s basement.
The fact that she was a bleeder was an understatement. I could taste the blood in my mouth the second I came into the room. There were already scene investigators counting projectiles, property, dropping evidence markers. I took out my camera and my adhesive tape and began to take pictures. So far, I counted over fifty evidence markers, and I could see more as I moved further into the scene.
First, the establishing shot—the overview—then the corners. The flashes illuminated the seven pools of blood on the floors, now hardened shells of glistening black. Along the walls, I could see the young woman’s path from the floor to the nightstand, a ten-inch streak of blood that I marked with an evidence ruler; her bloody fingerprints moving up toward the phone; the bloody nine and one of her call. A pair of wings emerged from the wall behind the bed, the imprint of her bloody shoulder blades. As I flashed image 88, I realized the victim must have sat here for a while, spilling the life from her body. The blood on the bed measured a circumference of ten inches, moving three to four inches down into the side of the mattress. From this viewpoint, I could see her glancing out the shattered window to what must have been her view of the approaching police and ambulance. Images 97 through 102 were her perspective, the blue light of morning silhouetting the officers passing in the shattered glass. It was a miracle she was alive.