Shutter(5)

I stood up in my cubicle with 45 percent of the job downloaded. “Right here.”

“I hear you guys had quite a mess last night. I thought you all would be there for a few more hours.”

Samuels breathed heavily as he moved toward me, his forehead glistening with sweat even in the frigid morning air. Spearmint gum, Windex, and pipe tobacco. The man’s smell reminded me of the parking arcade in the Old Town Hotel, where the bums slept in the elevator’s glass enclosure. Last time I was there, one of the bums was dead, his eyes still looking toward the opening and closing elevator doors as tourists walked past him all night, some tossing pennies into his empty coffee cup. No one knew he was dead until security poked him with a stick. He was as stiff as the concrete he rested on, sitting up with knees bent. I thought of him as Samuels approached, his smell following. I breathed through my mouth.

“I just got here. I thought I would download before I went home. I need to get some sleep.”

“You’re on call for the next two days. You know that, right?”

“I’m already working on my days off. Can’t anyone else take pictures? There are ten people in this office who can.”

“You can always go work at the bakery. I hear they’re hiring.” Samuels closed his office door. I dug my nails into my chair.

I knew the drill. Car accidents, petty crimes, property crimes took place every day, every night. Samuels sent out one of the scene investigators to snap a few photos, take a few measurements, help put things in bags. But I was there in case there was something that couldn’t be messed up, where protocol had to be followed, where not one detail could be overlooked. In the five years since I had been with the Crime Scene Unit, I had developed a reputation as an asset, seeing things through my lens that analysts sometimes missed. Samuels knew I wanted the overtime, that I couldn’t say no. The man depended on me like the oxygen, sugar, and tobacco that coursed through his muddled veins.

Samuels’s white beard was a drugstore Santa’s, his stark, white hair stained putrid hues of yellow and brown from years of smoking out of the same mahogany Calabash pipe—a naked woman entwined in a web of vines and flowers. His fat fingers displayed a huge maze of blackened veins where the brown resin of his pipe had dug deep into the smallest crevice. His desk, however, was miraculously clean and organized: well-filed documents filled yellow correspondence folders alphabetically and by topic. His photography was the finest example of forensic images— never out of focus, always to specifications.

He reminded me often about his credentials, his licenses, his degrees, and his years of experience. He never ceased pointing out my inadequacies, accusing me of lacking a true eye, or of soft focus on one of the sharpest photos I had ever taken. I didn’t know whether it was his ego or his lectures that got under my skin, but I knew I was irritated, mostly by the fact that when I took that image home and blew it up hundreds of times its size, I finally saw my soft focus. Samuels had seen it through his thick, acetate glasses, stained ochre by his pudgy finger pushing on the bridge of the frame. He was the best and was willing to hire me with no experience. And I was doing what I loved—taking pictures. What more could I ask?

My training had gone quickly. Two years before I moved to the crime lab, Samuels took me to my first job—“A sensitive issue,” he’d explained. His clients had brought a case against a youth home where their son had been living for two days. On day two, he’d had “an accident” and ended up in the morgue.

“The police department sent two blind officers to this investigation.” Samuels scoffed.

The youth house had been closed since the incident, but the building had been sold and renovations were set to take place. The defendants were relying on the police photos of the incident, about six wide shots of the bedroom. Before the scene was destroyed, the boy’s parents wanted photos that could prove his death had been no accident but the result of a severe beating, something the facility denied.

Samuels had instructed me to hide a camera in my coat and to follow along. I knew only the basics and the protocol from books and classes. He made small talk with the security guard until he paused and stared at me, eyes bulging. I knew that had to be my cue. I interrupted their conversation.

“Excuse me,” I said, “but do you have a restroom I could use?”

“Upstairs, left.”

I could hear their conversation continue as I stepped quickly up the stairs and into the hallway. The crime scene was immediately to my right. I ducked quietly under the yellow tape and began to shoot. There were three separate groupings of blood splatter that were about eighteen inches in diameter and seven or eight large, fist-sized holes in the porcelain-white walls. The rug was dotted with several pools of blood, the biggest seven inches in diameter. I laid a crinkled dollar bill on the floor for a size reference. It was something I had seen in a movie. I snapped away for a good two minutes, then stopped by the bathroom on my way out to flush the toilet for authenticity. They were still talking when I came down. We said our goodbyes and walked out the door.

Samuels hired me full-time the next day. I worked for his office for two years before we both moved to the crime lab.

SAMUELS HAD WORKED on these kinds of cases for over thirty years as a private investigator and as an evidence specialist—they were his bread and butter.

In the years before the Albuquerque Crime Lab hired Samuels, the whole police department had faced millions in lawsuit settlements and federal investigations. They were in desperate need of turning over a new leaf. When Samuels was offered the chief investigator job, he jumped at the opportunity to build on his retirement and closed his business. He was here to make sure the crime lab cleaned up its act. In the past five years, Samuels had kept it on an upward climb, even if the same could not be said for the police department as a whole.