Crime scene / Jonathan Kellerman and Jesse Kellerman.
A former star athlete turned coroner's investigator is drawn into a brutal, complicated murder.
Record details
- ISBN: 9780525492504
- ISBN: 052549250X
- ISBN: 9780525492528
- ISBN: 0525492526
- Physical Description: 8 audio discs (9 1/2 hrs.) : CD audio, digital ; 4 3/4 in.
- Publisher: New York : Random House Audio, [2017]
- Copyright: ©2017
Content descriptions
General Note: | Series numeration from Fantastic Fiction. Unabridged. Compact discs. |
Participant or Performer Note: | Read by Dennis Boutsikaris. |
Search for related items by subject
Subject: | Coroners > Fiction. Murder > Investigation > Fiction. |
Genre: | Suspense fiction. Mystery fiction. Audiobooks. |
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Crime Scene
A Novel
By Jonathan Kellerman, Jesse Kellerman, Dennis Boutsikaris
Penguin Random House Audio Publishing Group
Copyright © 2017 Jonathan Kellerman
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-525-49250-4All rights reserved.
Â
 CHAPTER 1
Donât make assumptions.
Every now and then, I remind myself of that.
Every now and then, the universe does the reminding for me.
When I meet new people, theyâre usually dead.
A young white male lies on his back in the parking lot of a Berkeley frat house. According to the license in his wallet, his name is Seth Lindley Powell. He is four months past his eighteenth birthday. The license gives a San Jose address. Itâs a fair bet his parents are at that address, right now, asleep. Nobody has notified them yet. I havenât had a chance.
Seth Powell has clean gray eyes and soft brown hair. His palms are open to the three a.m. sky. He wears a misshapen brown polo shirt over khakis. One shoelace drifts loose. Except for a few shallow abrasions on his left cheek, his face is smooth and content, with a bluish tinge. His skull, rib cage, neck, arms, and legs are intact. Thereâs little visible blood.
Down at the end of the driveway, beyond the yellow tape, aÂ
Â
throng of students snap photos of Seth. And selfies. Some of them hug and weep, others just look on, curious.
Crushed red Solo cups pile high on the sidewalks. A banner strung from the eaves declares the theme: saturday night fever. Boys slur their statements to uniformed officers. Girls in platforms fidget with the buttons of loud polyester shirts fished from the five-buck bins on Telegraph Avenue. Nobody knows what happened but everyone has a story. From a third-floor window come the lazy flickers of a disco ball nobody has thought to still.
Standing over Seth Powellâs body, I make an assumption: I wonder how Iâm going to explain to his parents that their son has died of alcohol poisoning during his first week of school.
Iâm wrong.
The following afternoon, a technician comes into the squad room, calls me away from my computer and down to the morgue so I can see firsthand a body cavity sloshing with busted organs; lower vertebrae punched out of alignment; a pelvis smashed to gravel, consistent with a four-story fall, the small of the back taking the full brunt of impact.
Thereâs a reason we do autopsies.
Toxicology confirms what Sethâs friends insisted on, what I hesitated to believe: he wasnât a drinker. He was That Guy, caught up in righteous notions of purity. He wrote songs, they said. He took arty black-and-white photos with a camera that used actual film. Rush Week depressed him. Someone heard he went up to the roof to look at the stars.
How depressed?
At some point you need to make a decision. Boxes need checking. It says a lot about our desire for simplicity that there are an infinite number of ways to die but only five manners of death.
Homicide.
Suicide.
Natural.Â
Â
Â
Accidental.
Undetermined.
My job begins with the dead but continues with the living. The living have telephones with redial. They have regret and insomnia and chest pain and bouts of uncontrollable weeping. They ask: Why.
Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, why isnât a real question. Itâs an expression of loss. Even if I had the answer, Iâm not sure anyone could stomach it.
I do the next best thing. The old switcheroo.
They ask for why. I give them how.
Knowing that itâs impossible to live without assumptions, I try to choose mine carefully. I think about the loose shoelace. I rule Seth Powellâs death an accident.
Five years on, I still think about him whenever I get a callout to Berkeley.
I donât get called out to Berkeley often. Alameda County covers eight hundred square miles, of which Berkeley is a speck, and, compared with its neighbors, basically untouched by serious crime, unless you object to homeless people or fussy vegan reinventions of diner classics, which I donât. Who doesnât enjoy a good tofu Reuben?
Five years after Seth Powellâs death, near to the day, at eleven fifty-two a.m. on a Saturday in September, Zaragoza was hanging over my cubicle wall, probing the flesh behind the lower left corner of his jaw in search of the latest development that would widow his wife and orphan his kids.
He said, âYo Clay, touch this.â
I did not look up from my work. âTouch what.â
âMy neck.â
âIâm not touching your neck.â
âYou can feel it if you push hard.âÂ
Â
âI believe you.â
âCome on, dude. I need a second opinion.â
âMy opinion is that last week you asked me to touch your stomach.â
âI checked WebMD,â he said. âItâs cancer of the pharynx. Maybe salivary glands, but thatâs kind of rare.â
âYouâre kind of rare,â I said. My desk phone was ringing.
I pressed the speakerphone. âCoronerâs Bureau. Deputy Edison.â
âHey there, this is Officer Schickman in Berkeley.â Friendly voice. âHow are you?â
I said, âWhatâs up, man?â
âIâm out on a DBF here. More than likely itâs natural but heâs at the bottom of the stairs so I figure you might want to have a look.â
âSure thing,â I said. âHang on a sec, Iâm all outta my little forms.â
Zaragoza absently handed me a blank worksheet, continued prodding his neck. âI should get an MRI,â he said.
On the speaker, Schickman said, âSorry?â
âNever mind,â I said, picking up the receiver. âMy buddy hereâs got cancer.â
âShit,â Schickman said. âSorry to hear it.â
âItâs all right, he gets it every week. Go ahead. Decedentâs last name?â
âRennert.â
âSpell it?â
He did. âFirst name Walter. Spelled like you think.â
I asked questions, he answered, I wrote. Walter Rennert was a seventy-five-year-old divorced white male residing at 2640 Bonaventure Avenue. At approximately nine forty a.m., his daughter had arrived at the house for their weekly brunch date. She let herself in with her key and found her father lying in the foyer,Â
Â
Â
unresponsive. She called 911 and attempted, unsuccessfully, to resuscitate him. Berkeley Fire had pronounced him dead at ten seventeen.
âSheâs next of kin?â
âBelieve so. Tatiana Rennert-Delavigne.â He spelled it without being asked.
âIs there a primary doctor?â
âUh . . . Clark. Gerald Clark. I havenât been able to reach him. Office is closed till Monday.â
âAny medical conditions you know about?â
âHypertension, per the daughter. He took meds.â
âAnd you said heâs at the bottom of the stairs?â
âNearish. I mean, heâs lying there.â
âMeaning . . .â
âMeaning, thatâs his location. It doesnât look to me like he slipped.â
âUh-huh,â I said. âWell, weâll have a look.â
âOkay. Listen, Iâm not sure I should be mentioning this at all, but his daughterâs pretty insistent he was murdered.â
âShe said that?â
âWhat she told dispatch. âYou have to come, my fatherâs been murdered.â Something like that. She told patrol the same thing when they got here. They called me.â
So far I liked Schickman. All indications were that he had his shit together. I attributed the hesitation in his voice to uncertainty over how to interact with the daughter, rather than any concern that she might be correct.
âYou know how it is,â he said. âPeople get upset, say things.â
âSure. Can I get your badge number real quick?â
âSchickman. S-C-H-I-C-K-M-A-N. Sixty-two.â
Berkeley. While I get that itâs not for everybody, you have to admit thereâs a certain boutique charm in a PD small enough to have two-digit badge numbers.Â
Â
I gave him my data and said weâd be there soon.
âCheers.â
I rang off, got up, stretched. On the other side of the cubicle wall, Zaragoza had opened up Google Images and was scrolling through a ghastly catalog of tumors.
âYou coming?â I asked.
He shuddered and closed the browser.Â
Â
CHAPTER 2
I think about the dead, wherever I go. Itâs inevitable. In eight hundred square miles, thereâs pretty much no place untainted in my memory by death.
A bend in the freeway and I reflexively slow to avoid the invisible lump of a woman who leapt from the overpass, causing the nine-car pileup and five-hour traffic jam that would become her legacy.
The motel in Union City where a tax lawyerâs celebration of his impending divorce ended in a speedball overdose.
Certain blocks in Oakland: take your pick.
Itâs not that Iâm haunted. More like I never quite manage to feel alone.
The work clings to us in different ways. Thatâs how it is for me. Zaragoza, he gets hantavirus, or flesh-eating bacteria, or whatever.
âLymphoma,â he said, thumbing his phone. âFuck, I didnât even consider that.â
âI still get your Xbox, right?â
âYeah, fine.â
âLymphoma it is, then.â
Propped on the dash, my own phone instructed me to exit theÂ
Â
13 and continue onto Tunnel Road, skirting blind driveways drowned in redwood shadow. A hard yellow at the entrance to the Claremont Hotel had me stomping the brake, causing the gurneys in back to rattle around unhappily.
Pairs of wide-set brick columns marked the southern edge of the neighborhood, stern iron gates left open in a gesture of generosity. The homes beyond were tall and bright and stately, weathered brick and wood shingling, thoughtful drought-tolerant landscaping. A sign encouraged me to drive like my grandkids lived there. I saw a Volvo with a roof-mount bike rack, bumper sagging under several electionsâ worth of stickers. I saw a Tesla and a seven-seater SUV shouldering together in the same driveway, a winking attempt to acknowledge and then ignore the distinction between living well and living good.
âYou know it around here?â Zaragoza asked.
He meant from my student days. I shook my head. Back then I hardly left the safety of the gym, let alone ventured off campus. Iâd never come in a professional capacity, either.
Bonaventure Avenue meandered east for three hundred yards, narrowing to a single lane that terminated in a cul-de-sac plugged up by residentsâ vehicles, two Berkeley PD cruisers, and a full hook-and-ladder. Backing the truck out was going to be a pain in the ass.
Three houses clumped on the south side of the street, along the gentler downhill slope. To the north, a towering Spanish was set high atop a knob of bedrock, accessible via a long, steep driveway lined with crushed stone. At the crest I could make out the boxy silhouette of an ambulance, flashers on.
I eased the van up the driveway, which widened to a fissured asphalt parking area forty feet square and hemmed in by conifers. Aside from the ambulance, there was a third cruiser and a silver Prius, leaving me inches to slot the van parallel to the entrance portico. The secluded neighborhood and the layout of the prop
Â
erty meant we had the scene pretty much to ourselves. Good: no one enjoys crowd control.
We got out of the van. Zaragoza began taking flicks of the exterior.
In the far corner of the parking area stood a stick-straight, slender woman in her twenties, the sole civilian among a dozen emergency responders. She wore black yoga pants and a lightweight gray sweatshirt, one shoulder fallen to reveal a teal tank top beneath. Down her neck lay a bundle of lacquered black hair; her throat was concave, her posture so impressive that she appeared to dwarf the female patrol officer standing with her, though they were about the same height. A patchwork handbag slouched against her calf. She had a hand up against the sharp, slanting light, obscuring her eyes, so that I saw only cheeks, smooth and contoured nicely and slightly smoky. Beveled lips pursed and relaxed, as if sampling the flavor of the air.
She turned and stared at me.
Maybe because Iâd been staring at her.
Or I didnât matter at all, and she was looking past me, at the vanâthe gold lettering, the finality. Ambulance arrives: you hope. Cops arrive: you keep hoping. When the coroner shows up, you lose all rational room for denial. Though that doesnât stop some folks.
No. Not the van. Definitely looking at me.
A wiry redheaded guy in a black BPD polo shirt cut between us.
âNate Schickman,â he said. âThanks for coming.â
I said, âThanks for leaving the driveway open.â
We didnât shake. Too casual, with kin looking on. Thereâs no class, no textbook, on how to act in the presence of the bereaved. You learn the same way you learn anything worthwhile: by observing, employing common sense, and screwing up.
You donât crack jokes, obviously, but neither do you go over
Â
Â
board with grim sympathy. Thatâs false and it reeks. You donât say Iâm sorry for your loss or Iâm sorry to inform you or any version of Iâm sorry. Itâs not your place to be sorry. To claim sorrow on someone elseâs behalf is presumptuous and, occasionally, dangerous. Iâve had to notify families whose sons have been killed by the police. Do I tell them Iâm sorry? They donât care that Iâm not the cop who pulled the trigger or that I belong to an entirely different department; that Iâm the one charged with caring for their childâs physical remains. When itâs your kid, a uniform is a uniform, a badge is a badge.
Remember where we are, too. Nobody in the Bay Area likes cops.
âThatâs the daughter,â I said.
Schickman nodded.
âHowâs she holding up?â
âSee for yourself.â
Tatiana Rennert-Delavigne didnât appear hysterical. She had stopped watching me and turned away, wrapping her free arm around herself like a sash, self-soothing. She was nodding or shaking her head in response to questions posed by the patrol officer. That she was not crying or screaming did not, to my mind, make her any more or less credible. Nor did it make her suspicious. Grief finds a broad spectrum of expression.
I told Schickman Iâd be back in a second and headed over to join the conversation.
The patrol officer angled out to admit me. Her name tag said hocking.
âPardon me,â I said. âMs. Rennert-Delavigne?â
She nodded.
âIâm Deputy Edison from the county Coronerâs Bureau. My partner over there is Deputy Zaragoza. Iâm sure you have a lot of questions. Before we get started, I wanted to let you know exactly what our role is and what weâre going to be doing here.âÂ
Â
She said, âOkay.â
âItâs our responsibility to secure your fatherâs body. Weâll go inside the house and assess the situation. If thereâs need for an autopsy, weâll transport him so that can get done as quickly as possible. Iâll let you know if thatâs going to happen so itâs not a surprise to you.â
âThank you,â she said.
âMeanwhile, do you have anyone you can call, who can come be with you?â I noticed, in the moment before she cast them down, that her eyes were green. âSometimes it can help not to be alone.â
I was waiting for her to say my husband or my boyfriend or my sister.
She said nothing.
âMaybe a friend,â I said, âor a clergyperson.â
She said, âHow do you decide if an autopsy is necessary?â
âIf we have any reason at all to believe that your fatherâs death wasnât from natural causesâan accident, for exampleâthen weâll do one.â
âWhat are the reasons youâd believe that?â
âWe examine the physical environment and the body,â I said. âThe slightest question, weâll err on the side of caution and bring him in.â
âDo you do the autopsy?â
âNo maâam. The pathologist, a medical doctor. I work for the Sheriff.â
âMm,â she said. I couldnât tell if she was relieved or disappointed.
Windless sun beat down. Small animals chittered in the cedar branches.
âHe didnât slip,â she said. âHe was pushed.â
She shifted, just perceptibly, to address Hocking. âThatâs what Iâm trying to tell you.â
Credit Officer Hocking for a good poker face.Â
Â
âIâm definitely going to want to talk to you about that,â I said. âRight now, Iâm going to ask if we can pause for a bit, and me and my partner can go inside and conduct our assessment?â
I was careful not to use the word investigation. More accurate, in a way, but I didnât want to suggest that Iâd opened the door to the possibility of a homicide. I hadnât opened any doors, period.
Tatiana Rennert-Delavigne hugged herself tighter and kept silent.
I said, âI promise that we will treat your father with the utmost respect.â
âIâll wait here,â she said.Â
 CHAPTER 1
Donât make assumptions.
Every now and then, I remind myself of that.
Every now and then, the universe does the reminding for me.
When I meet new people, theyâre usually dead.
A young white male lies on his back in the parking lot of a Berkeley frat house. According to the license in his wallet, his name is Seth Lindley Powell. He is four months past his eighteenth birthday. The license gives a San Jose address. Itâs a fair bet his parents are at that address, right now, asleep. Nobody has notified them yet. I havenât had a chance.
Seth Powell has clean gray eyes and soft brown hair. His palms are open to the three a.m. sky. He wears a misshapen brown polo shirt over khakis. One shoelace drifts loose. Except for a few shallow abrasions on his left cheek, his face is smooth and content, with a bluish tinge. His skull, rib cage, neck, arms, and legs are intact. Thereâs little visible blood.
Down at the end of the driveway, beyond the yellow tape, aÂ
Â
throng of students snap photos of Seth. And selfies. Some of them hug and weep, others just look on, curious.
Crushed red Solo cups pile high on the sidewalks. A banner strung from the eaves declares the theme: saturday night fever. Boys slur their statements to uniformed officers. Girls in platforms fidget with the buttons of loud polyester shirts fished from the five-buck bins on Telegraph Avenue. Nobody knows what happened but everyone has a story. From a third-floor window come the lazy flickers of a disco ball nobody has thought to still.
Standing over Seth Powellâs body, I make an assumption: I wonder how Iâm going to explain to his parents that their son has died of alcohol poisoning during his first week of school.
Iâm wrong.
The following afternoon, a technician comes into the squad room, calls me away from my computer and down to the morgue so I can see firsthand a body cavity sloshing with busted organs; lower vertebrae punched out of alignment; a pelvis smashed to gravel, consistent with a four-story fall, the small of the back taking the full brunt of impact.
Thereâs a reason we do autopsies.
Toxicology confirms what Sethâs friends insisted on, what I hesitated to believe: he wasnât a drinker. He was That Guy, caught up in righteous notions of purity. He wrote songs, they said. He took arty black-and-white photos with a camera that used actual film. Rush Week depressed him. Someone heard he went up to the roof to look at the stars.
How depressed?
At some point you need to make a decision. Boxes need checking. It says a lot about our desire for simplicity that there are an infinite number of ways to die but only five manners of death.
Homicide.
Suicide.
Natural.Â
Â
Â
Accidental.
Undetermined.
My job begins with the dead but continues with the living. The living have telephones with redial. They have regret and insomnia and chest pain and bouts of uncontrollable weeping. They ask: Why.
Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, why isnât a real question. Itâs an expression of loss. Even if I had the answer, Iâm not sure anyone could stomach it.
I do the next best thing. The old switcheroo.
They ask for why. I give them how.
Knowing that itâs impossible to live without assumptions, I try to choose mine carefully. I think about the loose shoelace. I rule Seth Powellâs death an accident.
Five years on, I still think about him whenever I get a callout to Berkeley.
I donât get called out to Berkeley often. Alameda County covers eight hundred square miles, of which Berkeley is a speck, and, compared with its neighbors, basically untouched by serious crime, unless you object to homeless people or fussy vegan reinventions of diner classics, which I donât. Who doesnât enjoy a good tofu Reuben?
Five years after Seth Powellâs death, near to the day, at eleven fifty-two a.m. on a Saturday in September, Zaragoza was hanging over my cubicle wall, probing the flesh behind the lower left corner of his jaw in search of the latest development that would widow his wife and orphan his kids.
He said, âYo Clay, touch this.â
I did not look up from my work. âTouch what.â
âMy neck.â
âIâm not touching your neck.â
âYou can feel it if you push hard.âÂ
Â
âI believe you.â
âCome on, dude. I need a second opinion.â
âMy opinion is that last week you asked me to touch your stomach.â
âI checked WebMD,â he said. âItâs cancer of the pharynx. Maybe salivary glands, but thatâs kind of rare.â
âYouâre kind of rare,â I said. My desk phone was ringing.
I pressed the speakerphone. âCoronerâs Bureau. Deputy Edison.â
âHey there, this is Officer Schickman in Berkeley.â Friendly voice. âHow are you?â
I said, âWhatâs up, man?â
âIâm out on a DBF here. More than likely itâs natural but heâs at the bottom of the stairs so I figure you might want to have a look.â
âSure thing,â I said. âHang on a sec, Iâm all outta my little forms.â
Zaragoza absently handed me a blank worksheet, continued prodding his neck. âI should get an MRI,â he said.
On the speaker, Schickman said, âSorry?â
âNever mind,â I said, picking up the receiver. âMy buddy hereâs got cancer.â
âShit,â Schickman said. âSorry to hear it.â
âItâs all right, he gets it every week. Go ahead. Decedentâs last name?â
âRennert.â
âSpell it?â
He did. âFirst name Walter. Spelled like you think.â
I asked questions, he answered, I wrote. Walter Rennert was a seventy-five-year-old divorced white male residing at 2640 Bonaventure Avenue. At approximately nine forty a.m., his daughter had arrived at the house for their weekly brunch date. She let herself in with her key and found her father lying in the foyer,Â
Â
Â
unresponsive. She called 911 and attempted, unsuccessfully, to resuscitate him. Berkeley Fire had pronounced him dead at ten seventeen.
âSheâs next of kin?â
âBelieve so. Tatiana Rennert-Delavigne.â He spelled it without being asked.
âIs there a primary doctor?â
âUh . . . Clark. Gerald Clark. I havenât been able to reach him. Office is closed till Monday.â
âAny medical conditions you know about?â
âHypertension, per the daughter. He took meds.â
âAnd you said heâs at the bottom of the stairs?â
âNearish. I mean, heâs lying there.â
âMeaning . . .â
âMeaning, thatâs his location. It doesnât look to me like he slipped.â
âUh-huh,â I said. âWell, weâll have a look.â
âOkay. Listen, Iâm not sure I should be mentioning this at all, but his daughterâs pretty insistent he was murdered.â
âShe said that?â
âWhat she told dispatch. âYou have to come, my fatherâs been murdered.â Something like that. She told patrol the same thing when they got here. They called me.â
So far I liked Schickman. All indications were that he had his shit together. I attributed the hesitation in his voice to uncertainty over how to interact with the daughter, rather than any concern that she might be correct.
âYou know how it is,â he said. âPeople get upset, say things.â
âSure. Can I get your badge number real quick?â
âSchickman. S-C-H-I-C-K-M-A-N. Sixty-two.â
Berkeley. While I get that itâs not for everybody, you have to admit thereâs a certain boutique charm in a PD small enough to have two-digit badge numbers.Â
Â
I gave him my data and said weâd be there soon.
âCheers.â
I rang off, got up, stretched. On the other side of the cubicle wall, Zaragoza had opened up Google Images and was scrolling through a ghastly catalog of tumors.
âYou coming?â I asked.
He shuddered and closed the browser.Â
Â
CHAPTER 2
I think about the dead, wherever I go. Itâs inevitable. In eight hundred square miles, thereâs pretty much no place untainted in my memory by death.
A bend in the freeway and I reflexively slow to avoid the invisible lump of a woman who leapt from the overpass, causing the nine-car pileup and five-hour traffic jam that would become her legacy.
The motel in Union City where a tax lawyerâs celebration of his impending divorce ended in a speedball overdose.
Certain blocks in Oakland: take your pick.
Itâs not that Iâm haunted. More like I never quite manage to feel alone.
The work clings to us in different ways. Thatâs how it is for me. Zaragoza, he gets hantavirus, or flesh-eating bacteria, or whatever.
âLymphoma,â he said, thumbing his phone. âFuck, I didnât even consider that.â
âI still get your Xbox, right?â
âYeah, fine.â
âLymphoma it is, then.â
Propped on the dash, my own phone instructed me to exit theÂ
Â
13 and continue onto Tunnel Road, skirting blind driveways drowned in redwood shadow. A hard yellow at the entrance to the Claremont Hotel had me stomping the brake, causing the gurneys in back to rattle around unhappily.
Pairs of wide-set brick columns marked the southern edge of the neighborhood, stern iron gates left open in a gesture of generosity. The homes beyond were tall and bright and stately, weathered brick and wood shingling, thoughtful drought-tolerant landscaping. A sign encouraged me to drive like my grandkids lived there. I saw a Volvo with a roof-mount bike rack, bumper sagging under several electionsâ worth of stickers. I saw a Tesla and a seven-seater SUV shouldering together in the same driveway, a winking attempt to acknowledge and then ignore the distinction between living well and living good.
âYou know it around here?â Zaragoza asked.
He meant from my student days. I shook my head. Back then I hardly left the safety of the gym, let alone ventured off campus. Iâd never come in a professional capacity, either.
Bonaventure Avenue meandered east for three hundred yards, narrowing to a single lane that terminated in a cul-de-sac plugged up by residentsâ vehicles, two Berkeley PD cruisers, and a full hook-and-ladder. Backing the truck out was going to be a pain in the ass.
Three houses clumped on the south side of the street, along the gentler downhill slope. To the north, a towering Spanish was set high atop a knob of bedrock, accessible via a long, steep driveway lined with crushed stone. At the crest I could make out the boxy silhouette of an ambulance, flashers on.
I eased the van up the driveway, which widened to a fissured asphalt parking area forty feet square and hemmed in by conifers. Aside from the ambulance, there was a third cruiser and a silver Prius, leaving me inches to slot the van parallel to the entrance portico. The secluded neighborhood and the layout of the prop
Â
erty meant we had the scene pretty much to ourselves. Good: no one enjoys crowd control.
We got out of the van. Zaragoza began taking flicks of the exterior.
In the far corner of the parking area stood a stick-straight, slender woman in her twenties, the sole civilian among a dozen emergency responders. She wore black yoga pants and a lightweight gray sweatshirt, one shoulder fallen to reveal a teal tank top beneath. Down her neck lay a bundle of lacquered black hair; her throat was concave, her posture so impressive that she appeared to dwarf the female patrol officer standing with her, though they were about the same height. A patchwork handbag slouched against her calf. She had a hand up against the sharp, slanting light, obscuring her eyes, so that I saw only cheeks, smooth and contoured nicely and slightly smoky. Beveled lips pursed and relaxed, as if sampling the flavor of the air.
She turned and stared at me.
Maybe because Iâd been staring at her.
Or I didnât matter at all, and she was looking past me, at the vanâthe gold lettering, the finality. Ambulance arrives: you hope. Cops arrive: you keep hoping. When the coroner shows up, you lose all rational room for denial. Though that doesnât stop some folks.
No. Not the van. Definitely looking at me.
A wiry redheaded guy in a black BPD polo shirt cut between us.
âNate Schickman,â he said. âThanks for coming.â
I said, âThanks for leaving the driveway open.â
We didnât shake. Too casual, with kin looking on. Thereâs no class, no textbook, on how to act in the presence of the bereaved. You learn the same way you learn anything worthwhile: by observing, employing common sense, and screwing up.
You donât crack jokes, obviously, but neither do you go over
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board with grim sympathy. Thatâs false and it reeks. You donât say Iâm sorry for your loss or Iâm sorry to inform you or any version of Iâm sorry. Itâs not your place to be sorry. To claim sorrow on someone elseâs behalf is presumptuous and, occasionally, dangerous. Iâve had to notify families whose sons have been killed by the police. Do I tell them Iâm sorry? They donât care that Iâm not the cop who pulled the trigger or that I belong to an entirely different department; that Iâm the one charged with caring for their childâs physical remains. When itâs your kid, a uniform is a uniform, a badge is a badge.
Remember where we are, too. Nobody in the Bay Area likes cops.
âThatâs the daughter,â I said.
Schickman nodded.
âHowâs she holding up?â
âSee for yourself.â
Tatiana Rennert-Delavigne didnât appear hysterical. She had stopped watching me and turned away, wrapping her free arm around herself like a sash, self-soothing. She was nodding or shaking her head in response to questions posed by the patrol officer. That she was not crying or screaming did not, to my mind, make her any more or less credible. Nor did it make her suspicious. Grief finds a broad spectrum of expression.
I told Schickman Iâd be back in a second and headed over to join the conversation.
The patrol officer angled out to admit me. Her name tag said hocking.
âPardon me,â I said. âMs. Rennert-Delavigne?â
She nodded.
âIâm Deputy Edison from the county Coronerâs Bureau. My partner over there is Deputy Zaragoza. Iâm sure you have a lot of questions. Before we get started, I wanted to let you know exactly what our role is and what weâre going to be doing here.âÂ
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She said, âOkay.â
âItâs our responsibility to secure your fatherâs body. Weâll go inside the house and assess the situation. If thereâs need for an autopsy, weâll transport him so that can get done as quickly as possible. Iâll let you know if thatâs going to happen so itâs not a surprise to you.â
âThank you,â she said.
âMeanwhile, do you have anyone you can call, who can come be with you?â I noticed, in the moment before she cast them down, that her eyes were green. âSometimes it can help not to be alone.â
I was waiting for her to say my husband or my boyfriend or my sister.
She said nothing.
âMaybe a friend,â I said, âor a clergyperson.â
She said, âHow do you decide if an autopsy is necessary?â
âIf we have any reason at all to believe that your fatherâs death wasnât from natural causesâan accident, for exampleâthen weâll do one.â
âWhat are the reasons youâd believe that?â
âWe examine the physical environment and the body,â I said. âThe slightest question, weâll err on the side of caution and bring him in.â
âDo you do the autopsy?â
âNo maâam. The pathologist, a medical doctor. I work for the Sheriff.â
âMm,â she said. I couldnât tell if she was relieved or disappointed.
Windless sun beat down. Small animals chittered in the cedar branches.
âHe didnât slip,â she said. âHe was pushed.â
She shifted, just perceptibly, to address Hocking. âThatâs what Iâm trying to tell you.â
Credit Officer Hocking for a good poker face.Â
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âIâm definitely going to want to talk to you about that,â I said. âRight now, Iâm going to ask if we can pause for a bit, and me and my partner can go inside and conduct our assessment?â
I was careful not to use the word investigation. More accurate, in a way, but I didnât want to suggest that Iâd opened the door to the possibility of a homicide. I hadnât opened any doors, period.
Tatiana Rennert-Delavigne hugged herself tighter and kept silent.
I said, âI promise that we will treat your father with the utmost respect.â
âIâll wait here,â she said.Â
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Crime Scene by Jonathan Kellerman, Jesse Kellerman, Dennis Boutsikaris. Copyright © 2017 Jonathan Kellerman. Excerpted by permission of Penguin Random House Audio Publishing Group.
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