Crime Scene

Chapter 21

Back at the office, I worked as hard as I could, but my head was elsewhere. Moffett and I took a callout for the 42nd Street overpass in Fruitvale — John Doe, indeterminate age, indeterminate race, in a state of advanced decomposition. Autopsy would have the final word, but a cursory inspection showed no signs of violence.

He had simply died, rotting in place because there was no one around to witness it, let alone help.

As Moffett and I crab-walked around the body, hacking, waving our hands to bat away the rising chimney of stink, I could not escape the thought that this could be Julian Triplett. Or someone who knew him. Or the person he could, would, become. Eventually. Inevitably.

If you’d asked me several months ago how I felt about such a case, I would’ve answered: Sad but not surprised. Now I listened to the traffic thundering along 880, thousands upon thousands of people pushing on overhead, oblivious to what lay below them. Moffett tried to adjust the corpse’s arm, and a patch of skin sloughed free like the peel off a boiled peach. Behind his mask his features contorted in disgust, and I found myself filled with despair, and frustration, and anger.

We’d take this remnant of humanity, weigh him, stick him in the freezer. Tell someone he had passed, if someone could be found who cared.

So what?

In six-plus years on the job, I’d never questioned my purpose. I took the bad with the good because what I did was, foremost, necessary. That perfect fit, that sense of sealing airtight a crack in society, gave me deep satisfaction.

A setup man.

Now I felt pushed up against the limits of my mandate, and I had a sudden and awful premonition. Saw myself slide toward a darker state, where the work wasn’t necessary, let alone fulfilling; just a temporary relief from uncertainty.

The question marks awaiting all of us.

“Earth to dude.”

I snapped to. “Sorry.”

Moffett shook his head. “One, two, three, up.”

We rose.

On my next day off, I drove over to Cal.

What I’d told Tatiana was true: I did come by every so often, to use the gym. But it had been years since I’d stepped foot in the psych building.

Sneakers chirping on linoleum.

Bulletin board soliciting human subjects.

One elevator out of service. Did it ever get fixed?

That things hadn’t changed one bit was less charming than terrifying: long before I’d arrived on campus, the structure had been condemned as seismically unstable.

I made my way up to the fourth floor. The halls were hushed and ill lit. I found the door and knocked.

A boyish voice said, “Come in.”

Spellman-Rohatyn Professor of Psychology and Social Issues Paul J. Sandek taught in the department’s social-personality track. He hadn’t changed much, either. A few extra veins of white in his beard, a modest pouching around the eyes.

I’d never seen him in anything other than argyle sweaters, or maybe a sweater vest in late spring. The fluttering array of Far Side cartoons still blanketed the wall above his computer. At one point I’d known them all by heart. Cover up a caption and I could recite it.

“Clay.” He hugged me warmly. “It’s good to see you.”

“You too.”

He beamed up at me, inspecting me at arm’s length. In his day, you could be five-ten and play Division I point guard. Granted, in the Ivy League. But still.

He clapped my shoulders. “So good. Sit. You want some coffee?”

“Please.”

He pivoted to a side table set with a pod espresso machine and a stack of demitasses.

“That’s new,” I said.

“Birthday present from Amy.” He pressed a button, and the machine gurgled to life. “I use it way too much. Bad for the heart but I can’t stop.”

“How is Amy?”

“Wonderful, thanks. Finishing up her PhD.”

I remembered Sandek’s daughter as a pale, gangly high schooler, sneaking looks at me over the dinner table while her mother heaped me more mashed potatoes. “Send her my congratulations.”

“Will do. Now comes the hard part: finding a job.”

“I’m sure she’ll be fine.”

“Oh, she will. That’s just me being parental. She’s done some outstanding research, and to my amazement, having Yale on your diploma continues to mean something. It’s a jungle out there, though.” He smiled and handed me my cup. “Like I need to tell you that.”

Prior to getting hurt, I’d never paid attention to academics. No one on the team did. We got “help” with our papers, prep for tests. To say nothing of those who preferred not to take their own tests. It happens everywhere. I had no reason to care. I was going pro.

Even after surgery, I entertained fantasies of a comeback. My first question upon waking in the recovery room was when I could start rehab. Junior year was a slog of stretching, ice, heat, water therapy, resistance bands, balance drills, speed drills, weights. By summertime, I’d been cleared to play. But I was different. I knew. Coach knew.

My first scrimmage back I was sluggish, wooden, ineffective. And — this was the dagger — timid where I once would have been bold. We had a sophomore, a transfer from San Diego State; he ran circles around me. Afterward Coach asked if I didn’t think he showed real promise.

He offered me a spot on the roster, regardless, more as a reward for previous performance than for anything I could contribute going forward.

I turned him down. Soon enough, the same people who had chanted my name were labeling me vain or selfish. Was I too good to come off the bench? Mentor my own replacement? I had obligations, they said, to set an example of leadership, of self-sacrifice and team spirit and loyalty.

Maybe they were right. I only know that my desire to play was gone, utterly, and that any physical pain was dwarfed by the agony of perceiving the chasm between before and after. It was the pain of a phantom limb. Reviewing myself on tape was unbearable, like watching a bird shot down, midflight.

That fall, I almost quit school. My transcript was in shambles. I had no declared major. I might as well have chosen classes by tossing darts at the course catalog. If not for Sandek — a fanatical team booster, but more important a profoundly kind and empathic human being — I doubt I would’ve graduated.

Now, waiting for the machine to finish sputtering his own cup of espresso, he wheeled his chair around from behind the desk. “Theresa sends her love, too.”

“Same to her,” I said before breaking into laughter.

“What,” he said.

I pointed to his kneeling chair. “I forgot you have one of those.”

He laughed. “It’s since been replaced by a newer model.”

“How’s the back?” I asked.

“For shit. How’s the knee?”

“Holding up.”

He took his coffee and knelt. “I look like a supplicant, right? Salùd.”

We drank.

“So,” he said, wiping froth from his mustache. “Pretty mysterious email you sent.”

“I wanted to speak to you in person,” I said. “You were around in ninety-three, right? What can you tell me about Walter Rennert?”

He paused, the cup near his mouth. “There’s a name I haven’t heard in a while.”

“Were you aware he passed away?”

“I wasn’t, no. Shame.”

“How well did you know him?”

“Not very well at all. He was in the developmental track, I think, and I’d only come on board a year or two before. And then of course he got caught up in that sorry situation, so he wasn’t doing a whole lot of fraternizing. I’d call us acquaintances.”

“It’s his study that I’m trying to learn about, actually,” I said.

“Whatever for?”

“It may bear on a case of mine.”

“A current case.”

“Do you recall anything about the research? Or know who would?”

“Not offhand. I’d be surprised if you could get anyone to talk about it. The entire episode remains somewhat of a bugaboo around these parts. Same for Walter. I’m sure that’s why nobody’s mentioned his death. What happened to him?”

“Heart trouble.”

“Ah. Nothing sinister, then.”

“Not really.”

“I take it you’re not going to tell me what’s going on.”

I smiled. “Do you remember anything about the victim, Donna Zhao?”

“Never met her. She was an undergrad, yes? There was also a grad student involved, I think. Walter’s TA?”

“Nicholas Linstad.”

“That’s the one. Big blond fellow.”

“Him you remember.”

“Only because I didn’t much care for him. It’s strange, given how little interaction we had. But there you have it.”

“What about him didn’t you like?”

Sandek scratched his beard. “I suppose I found him... superficial? He sounded like what an Ikea chair would sound like if it could talk. He ended up leaving the program.”

“When was that?”

“Right around the time Walter did. Not a happy parting for either of them. Extremely messy.”

“How so?”

Sandek finished his coffee. “The department did what it always does when something goes wrong — and this was way beyond wrong. They established a review committee. If memory serves, the report put the blame partly on Linstad.”

“What for?”

He shook his head. “I never read it. It wasn’t made public. Everything I’m telling you is just scuttlebutt. Whatever the case may be, the buck stopped with Walter. It was his lab, so he ended up taking the brunt. I have no idea what became of Linstad after he left.”

“He’s dead, too,” I said.

“Holy Toledo. That is one cursed study.”

“I’d like to know more about it,” I said.

“Honestly, Clay, I’m not sure there’s anything to know. I don’t think they’d finished collecting data before everything fell apart.”

“The design had to be submitted to IRB for approval.”

“Yes.”

“So that might be on file somewhere.”

A slow nod. “It might.”

“The review committee’s report, too,” I said. “I’d like to get a copy of that.”

Sandek put his cup down. “You know, my boy, I’m not some crime-solving whiz like you. I’m not sure what you think I can do.”

“Try to get the reports?”

He slapped his thighs. “For you, I will.”

“Thanks.”

“Don’t thank me yet,” he said, swiveling to the coffee machine. As he racked in a fresh pod, he said, “You get a chance to play much these days?”

“Here and there.”

“I’m good for HORSE,” he said. “Just don’t ask me to run.”

“Is there money involved?”

“If you like.”

“I don’t,” I said.

“Scared, are we?”

“Compassionate. You’re on a teacher’s salary.”

He laughed. “Out of my office.”

The rain had let up, and I stood beyond the breezeway, filling my lungs with the scent of damp mulch. Tolman Hall was shaped like a squat H, two blocky legs and a low-slung bridge connecting them. Windows scaled its exterior, a move intended to soften the design’s brutalism. Over time, the frames had rusted from the inside out, leaking streaky brown pennants down the raw concrete, so that the building appeared to be weeping, or bleeding, from a thousand eyes.

It struck me that the entire Greek tragedy — all its significant locales, spread out over twenty-plus years — fell within a five-mile radius. The poles were Edwina Triplett’s apartment and Walter Rennert’s house, lying at opposite corners of the city, a distance befitting the class disparity. The other places that mattered were bunched closer together. From where I stood, Donna Zhao’s apartment was a fifteen-minute walk south. The spot where Nicholas Linstad had died was even closer — virtually across the street, up the hill on Le Conte.

Considering the circumstances of his departure from the university, I found it peculiar that he’d chosen to set up shop so close by.

I headed there to have a look.

Most of the block consisted of multi-unit dwellings catering to students. Halloween had recently come and gone, and the insides of some windows were still lined with paper jack-o’-lanterns and nylon cobwebs.

Twenty-four Halloweens since Donna Zhao died. The party never ended.

Nicholas Linstad’s former residence, a skinny brown duplex, was set back from the sidewalk, cowed by a larger building of more recent provenance.

I knocked first at the downstairs unit, where he had worked. Receiving no answer, I went down the driveway to the exterior staircase, climbed up slowly. Sure enough, I spotted a series of waist-high grooves in the shingling, scrubbed down by a decade of weather but visible nonetheless. I remembered the pathologist’s note that one of Linstad’s nails had torn partway off in the fall. He really didn’t want to die.

I reached the landing. The wobbly banister in Ming’s report had since been repaired, a large nailhead driven into the base of the post.

My knock again met silence. I stuffed my hands in my jacket pockets and turned, scanning for sight lines. Steep, wavy terrain put the surrounding homes at relatively different heights. None had a perfectly unobstructed view of the landing. I saw, mostly, power lines and trees. Nearest was a majestic redwood, wide and woolly, rooted in the rear yard of the adjacent multi-unit, on the other side of a rough picket fence.

“Can I help you?”

Below, a woman in a flowing turquoise dress and matching chunky necklace was walking a ten-speed up the driveway. Long white hair cascaded from beneath her helmet.

“Admiring the tree,” I said, clomping down the stairs. “Are you the upstairs tenant?”

“May I ask why you’re interested?”

I showed her my badge. “I’d like to take a look around inside, if you don’t mind.”

“I’m afraid I do,” she said. “I object to all manifestations of the fascist state.”

“It’s for an old case,” I said.

She smiled pleasantly and flipped me off. “Go fuck yourself.”