Shutter(2)

“I understand, sir. Where did the thud come from?”

“From the front left side, then way back on the left tires. I could feel the back ones roll over something, so I stopped.”

“And then what did you do?”

“Jumped out of the cab.” The man hesitated and grabbed the bill of his blue hat, the kind with the plastic mesh on the back. “Then I saw pieces, and I called it in.”

Hundreds of cars had passed her, unknowingly carrying her flesh beyond the boundaries of the city. I was sure there would be pieces we would never find. It was only us now, five investigators, fifteen cops, and my camera, visible only by the turning, cherryred lights of patrol cars. There was no moon out tonight; the sky was the color of indigo ink. I moved on. I was about halfway there and my fingertips were numb.

Number forty-eight began with pieces of arms and fingers. Her thumb was alone, the fingernail bit down to the nail bed, flecked with red polish. On the yellow line of the highway, we found her little toe, polished the same color as her fingernails. It was over twenty feet from the rest of her feet and legs. Image 456.

The largest piece of the skull was her jawbone, two bottom teeth missing, gums still bloody. Number sixty-eight. Even after the few hours she had spent on the road, her skin was soft. A delicate covering of fine hair lined the condyle of her jaw, the joint where the bones meet beneath the ear. It sat on the road at a forty-five-degree angle. There wasn’t even a drop of blood on the skin. I pressed my finger to the shutter release and raised the viewfinder. My eye stung from the flash.

One of the scene investigators walked behind me with the medical examiner, Dr. Blaser, who carried a box of red biohazard bags under his arm. He reached out and touched my shoulder. I turned to see his awkward smile and his nod.

“Rita.”

I returned the nod. They kept walking.

“So how long do you think she’s been out there?” An officer scribbled on a report. Dr. Blaser stopped and looked at the sky.

“A couple of hours. When does the sun set again?”

My eavesdropping was interrupted by the shouts of officers chasing someone off the overpass. I watched as three onlookers ran into the shadows, followed by the beams of the officers’ flashlights. I’d need to get up on that overpass to photograph anything that looked out of the ordinary. Officers in paper suits fanned their flashlights through fence lines and over handrails. I watched one lay down a marker. My feet began to ache. I needed to focus. It had been fifty-two hours since I last slept.

Her nasal bones and suborbital ridge were crushed into a chalky white puzzle immersed in crimson. Marker seventy-seven. The insides of the skull began to appear in various fragments, broken at the skeletal sutures. The yellow markers stood at attention: eighty-eight, eighty-nine, ninety. I photographed one of the eyeballs, free from its bone and muscle, lying between a crushed beer can and the remnants of broken windshield glass. Number ninety-three. The pieces of teeth were five inches from a pile of ash and cigarette butts—what remained of a two-day snowstorm. Some travelers along this highway had passed this way over two weeks ago and dumped their ashtray onto the road. It had frozen there, strangely protected from the elements by the melt and freeze of ice. Number ninety-eight.

I walked onto the overpass, a two-lane bridge with walkways on the sides. The cement moved beneath my feet as police directed traffic through one lane of the bridge. A small section of the walkway was cordoned off with yellow tape; a lonely yellow marker reflected in the passing headlights. Two detectives waited impatiently for me to photograph a purse that sat on the curbside. The fat, ugly one was Detective Martin Garcia. The other was his completely silent new partner, Detective Vargas. His longtime partner, Detective Armenta, had a heart attack last month and had officially retired. The marker: M2—Miscellaneous.

“We need to see if we can find some ID in this bag, Rita,” Garcia said.

No one could touch anything until I took a picture of it. The two of them were antsy. Garcia’s hands were on his hips; his greasy skin bounced back the rosy orange light of the bridge lanterns.

“Can you?” He brought an imaginary camera up to his face and pressed the button.

“Where’s M1?”

“Over here. On the other side of the railing.” He pulled skyblue gloves over his fat, hairy hands.

I walked up to the railing, shining my flashlight down below. A pair of red stiletto heels hung from a steel beam that jutted from the overpass, the ankle straps caught on the jagged edge. Garcia peered over with me.

“Guess she didn’t like ’em, huh?”

Above the red stilettos, a technician covered the rails of the bridge in powdery black. A trail of smudges led to the black outline where they tried to lift prints. It was the last place our victim had touched the overpass. Two sets of finger groups, four fingers on each side, had gripped the metal in desperation. She had not wanted to jump. The two partial handprints showed a larger presence, someone with strong, thick hands and deep lines in their skin. The left print was smeared, but the right one was clear and showed that whoever had helped her to the edge had been wearing rubber gloves. Forensics pulled the tape anyway and transferred them to the evidence cards.

The flash lit up the bridge and filled the camera frame with the red shoes, size seven. I dangled myself over the railing, balancing with the weight of my boots. Flash. The viewfinder read 965 of 1,000 images.