Crime Scene

Chapter 7

On Friday, a hearse from Mountain View Cemetery arrived to take away the body of Walter J. Rennert.

I felt relieved. The family had chosen a nice place; hopefully that meant they’d resolved to move forward and not raise a stink. I chided myself for assuming the worst of Tatiana, for regarding her not as a person, but as a variable in my caseload.

I thought about her eyes.

Wished her well and made my own resolution to forget about her.

Thursday next, I received a notification request from Del Norte County. A man up in Crescent City had shot himself in the chest, leaving behind an adult daughter in our neck of the woods. We make visits on behalf of other counties, just as they do for us; it’s more humane than cold-calling the next of kin, especially with suicides or when they’re estranged. Both were true here. I copied down the daughter’s address, and Shupfer and I climbed into the Explorer and headed east for Pleasanton.

While I get along with all of my colleagues, there are moments when I’m grateful for one more than the others. On that day, I felt no great need to talk. The morning rush had died off, leaving us to ride most of the way in silence — a situation really only possible with Shoops. Outside, tract homes bobbed on wave after wave of dry yellow grass. My legs kept cramping up, forcing me to shift around, angling for room. She, on the other hand, had racked her seat all the way forward to reach the pedals, the steering wheel lodged in her belly.

Here’s Shoops: soft and square and rounded off, as tall as five-two gets, with hair that starts each day slapped down to her scalp but finishes in a frizzy brown halo. She could be the star of a Sesame Street sketch teaching kids about disappointment.

Say you were an inmate at the jail, back when she was a guard. You might fool yourself into believing, as a certain idiot in a certain legendary story once did, that you could call her an obscene name. Or that you could suggest an obscene activity she enjoyed in her off hours. You might get cocky enough to grab a part of her body.

Those are mistakes you’d only make once.

Technically, Shoops has been around longer than the rest of our team. She joined the Bureau during the changeover, when the county stopped hiring civilian coroners and replaced them with peace officers. An extended family leave reset her status, so I have seniority on her. When December rolls around and we have to bid for shifts, she’s low lady on the totem pole. Better believe I don’t gloat. Nobody does.

The GPS guided us off the freeway, through a welter of extended-stay hotels and chain stores, along the divided main drag. Thirty minutes inland hardly seemed enough for the terrain to have morphed so dramatically. Topography flatter; vegetation bleached. The architecture belonged to everywhere and nowhere. That’s not a knock on Pleasanton, which is as its name implies. More a statement about where we’d left from.

Shupfer said, “I still get nervous.”

I glanced at her.

“Before a notification,” she said.

“Really?”

She nodded curtly. “Every time.”

“I do, too.”

Another nod from her, different: approval.

Trapped in a seam of ranch homes, sandwiched between an elementary school and a middle school, Homer Court was the last and smallest spur off crooked Chapman Way, lawns left to wither and two-car garages. Unfolding myself from the Explorer, I felt the sun twist in close, a microscope focusing down on us.

My gaze lingered on the portable basketball hoop perched at the curb — sandbags crushing the base, backboard craning into the street.

“I know, right?” Shupfer said. “Put it in the driveway, for God’s sake.”

She meant for safety. Thinking about her own kids, dribbling in circles on the asphalt, hollering “car” and scurrying out of the way.

I nodded, although that wasn’t what I’d been thinking, at all.

I was marveling at how far away the rim looked.

There are several reasons to feel nervous before a notification. People do shoot the messenger, and not just figuratively. A day like that one, brutally hot, tempts you to leave your vest behind. I never do. Better sweaty and alive.

That’s rare, of course. Best-case scenario, I’m about to ruin someone’s day, week, year, life. If that notion doesn’t make you squirm, you lack the requisite sense of empathy and you shouldn’t be doing this job.

A nasty paradox. Only a true psychopath could do notifications and not suffer any consequences. But who wants a psychopath informing them that their father is dead?

Part of me always hopes the person won’t be home. In the middle of the day, in the middle of suburbs populated by dual-income families...

Maybe we’d get lucky. The driveway was empty.

We knocked.

Silence.

Shupfer tried again, louder.

We went to the side of the house. I leaned over the gate, called toward the backyard.

No answer.

A neighbor confirmed that Melissa Girard lived next door. He ogled the Explorer and put on a concerned face and wanted to know why we were there.

“It’s a courtesy call,” Shupfer said. “Nothing to worry about.”

We returned to Melissa Girard’s house. Shupfer took out her card, wrote a brief note on the back, and made to tuck it into the doorframe.

Behind us, a blue RAV4 pulled up.

Shupfer returned the card to her pocket.

The driver got out. She was gaunt and fair-skinned, peering at us through raccoon eyes as we came up the front walk toward her. I noticed a rear-facing car seat in back.

Shupfer said, “Mrs. Girard.”

The woman nodded.

“I’m Deputy Shupfer from the Alameda County Coroner’s Bureau.” Talking clearly, not rushing, not dragging. Bearing truth, which is a kind of gift. “I’m afraid I have some bad news. Your father passed away.”

For a moment, Melissa Girard did not react. Then she opened the back door and reached for the car seat.

She unlatched it and hauled it out, her spine bent at a painful angle. Supermarket bags filled the footwells. No way was she going to be able to manage. I jogged over to help.

“Thank you,” she said.

The neighbor was watching us from his front window. Shupfer shot him a look and he vanished.

We went into the house, into the kitchen.

Melissa Girard said, “On the counter is fine, thanks.”

I made space for the bags amid a litter of unwashed baby bottles.

“Is there someone you can call to be with you?” Shupfer asked.

“Why would I do that?”

“It can help not to be alone,” I said.

Melissa Girard gestured to the car seat. “I’m not.” She started to laugh. “I never am.”

Still laughing, she began unpacking the groceries.

The baby was a boy, about three months old, asleep with his head slumped on his chest. His shirt said I ♥ MY BIG BROTHER.

Behind the fridge door, Melissa Girard said, “Was there something else you needed?”

Shupfer nodded me from the room. I went outside to wait.

Sitting in the Explorer, I found myself thinking about Tatiana Rennert-Delavigne. She was my most recent point of reference, and I couldn’t help but feel the contrast between her response to her father’s death and that of Melissa Girard.

I wondered if she was okay.

I couldn’t come up with an excuse to call her. Remembering that Dr. Louis Vannen had never called me back, I did the next best thing. The old switcheroo.

“Doctor’s office.”

I repeated my spiel. As before, the receptionist would not tell me whether Walter Rennert had been a patient of the practice. She would deliver the message to Doctor, et cetera.

“Right,” I said. “I called last week. Is Dr. Vannen around now?”

“He left for lunch a few minutes ago.”

“Can you look on his calendar and see when he’ll be free?”

“He’s booked solid. All I can do is tell him.”

“Thanks, then. Have a good day.”

“You too.”

Shupfer emerged. I leaned across to open the driver’s-side door for her.

“Everything all right?” I asked.

She shook her head, put the key in the ignition.

“Should we wait for someone to show up?” I asked.

Shupfer glanced at the house and thought it over. “I’m going to say no.”

I said, “You mind if we take a little detour?”

Twenty minutes later we rolled up to the medical building where Louis Vannen practiced. Shupfer cruised the lot along a row of reserved parking spaces. Three belonged to Contra Costa Urological Associates, the middle slot unoccupied.

She found a nearby spot and parked nose-out.

Shortly before one, a silver BMW coupe arrived to claim the reserved space. The brake lights shut off, and I stepped from the Explorer.

“Dr. Vannen?” I asked.

He paused, halfway out of his car. He was mid-sixties, sinewy and tan, sleeves rolled up on woolly forearms. He looked at me, at the Explorer, at Shoops, back at me. He stood up, erect and pigeon-chested. “Can I help you?”

“Hope so,” I said, coming forward. “I’ve been trying to get in touch with you for the last week. I called your office a couple of times and they said they’d give you the message, but I was in the neighborhood, so I thought I’d drop by.”

He made a forbearing sound, half chuckle, half cough: This guy. “It’s not the best time. I have patients waiting.”

“It’s about a patient, actually. Walter Rennert?”

A beat. Vannen bent into the BMW to retrieve his phone from the cup holder. When he came back out his expression had cleared.

“Sorry,” he said, closing the car door. “I don’t have a patient by that name.”

“You prescribed him some medication,” I said. “Risperdal.”

He shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

“Your name’s on the bottle.”

“Then there’s been a mistake. Check with the pharmacy.”

“Will do. Sorry for the interruption.”

“Not at all. But I really do have to go.”

“Sure. Thanks.”

He strode off toward the building.

“Dr. Vannen?”

He turned around, annoyed.

“You forgot to lock your car.”

He stared at me, fished out his keys, jabbed the button. The BMW bleeped.

I got in beside Shoops. “That was weird, no?”

She started the Explorer. “Mm.”

“What’s ‘mm.’ ”

“What nothing,” she said, shifting into gear. “Mm. That’s all.”

“Drive, please.”

“Mm.”