Long Bright River(5)

—Jeez, says one—Saab is his last name, there on his name tag—to the other, to Jackson.

—She’ll be light, at least, says Jackson, which feels like a hit to my stomach. Then collectively they climb over the log, skirt the body, kneel down beside her.

Jackson reaches out to place his fingers on her. He tries a few times, obligingly, to find something, then stands up. He checks his watch.

—As of 11:21, Jane Doe pronounced, he says.

—Record that, I say to Lafferty. One nice thing about having a partner again: someone else to fill in the activity log. Lafferty’s been keeping his inside his jacket to preserve it from the rain, and he takes it out now, hovering over it, trying to keep it dry.

—Hang on a second, I say.

Eddie Lafferty looks at me and then the body.

I bend down between Jackson and Saab, looking carefully at the victim’s face, the open eyes cloudy now, nearly opaque, the jaws clenched painfully.

There, just beneath her eyebrows and sprinkled over the tops of her cheekbones, is a splattering of little pink dots. From far away they just made her look flushed; up close, they are distinct, like small freckles, or the marks of a pen on a page.

Saab and Jackson bend down too.

—Oh yeah, says Saab.

—What, says Lafferty.

I raise my radio to my mouth.

—Possible homicide, I say.

—Why, says Lafferty.

Jackson and Saab ignore him. They’re still bent down, studying the body.

I lower the radio. Turn to Lafferty. His training, his training.

—Petechiae, I say, pointing to the dots.

—Which are, says Lafferty.

—Burst blood vessels. One sign of strangulation.

The Crime Scene Unit, Homicide, and Sergeant Ahearn arrive not long after that.





THEN





The first time I found my sister dead, she was sixteen. It was the summer of 2002. Forty-eight hours earlier, on a Friday afternoon, she’d left school with her friends, telling me she’d be back by evening.

She wasn’t.

By Saturday, I was frightened, telephoning Kacey’s friends, asking them if they knew where she was. But nobody did, or no one would tell me, at least. I was seventeen then, very shy, already cast in the role I’ve played my entire life: the responsible one. A little old lady, said my grandmother, Gee. Too serious for her own good. Kacey’s friends no doubt thought of me as parental in some way, an authority figure, a person from whom to withhold information. Over and over again, they apologized dully and denied knowing anything.

Kacey, in those days, was boisterous and loud. When she was home, which she had been with less and less frequency, life was better, the house warmer and happier. Her unusual laugh—a silent, open-mouthed trembling, followed by a series of sharp, high, vocal inhalations, doubling her over as if they caused her pain—echoed off the walls. Without it, her absence was noticeable, the silence in the house ominous and strange. Her sounds were gone, and so was her smell, some terrible perfume that she and her friends had begun using—probably to mask what they were smoking—called Patchouli Musk.

It took a whole weekend for me to convince Gee to call the police. She was always reluctant to involve outsiders: afraid, I believe, that they would take a hard look at her parenting and deem it unfit in some way.

When, at last, she agreed to, she fumbled the number and had to call twice on her olive-green rotary phone. I had seen her neither so frightened nor so mad before. She was trembling with something when she hung up—anger or sorrow or shame. Her long ruddy face moved in unsettling and novel ways. She spoke softly to herself, indiscernible phrases that sounded something like a curse or a prayer.



* * *



—

It both was and was not surprising, Kacey’s disappearing like that. She’d always been social, and had recently fallen in with a ragtag group of friends who were benevolent but lazy, well liked but never taken seriously. She had a brief hippie phase in eighth grade, followed by several years of dressing like a punk, dying her hair with Manic Panic and getting a nose ring and an unfortunate tattoo of a lady spider in a web. She had boyfriends. I never did. She was popular, but generally used her popularity for good: in middle school she effectively adopted a sorrowful girl named Gina Brickhouse, a girl so badly teased for her weight, her hygiene, her poverty, the misfortune of her name, that she’d gone silent at age eleven. That’s when Kacey took an interest in her; and under Kacey’s protection, she blossomed. By the end of high school, Gina Brickhouse was named Most Unique, an award reserved for quirky but respected iconoclasts.

Lately, though, Kacey’s social life had taken a turn. She had regularly been getting into the kind of serious trouble that threatened to get her expelled. She was drinking a lot, even at school, and using various prescription drugs that, in those days, nobody knew to be scared of. This was the first part of her life that Kacey ever tried to keep hidden from me. Prior to that year, she had confided everything to me, often with an urgent and pleading note in her voice, as if she were seeking absolution. But her new attempts at secrecy were ineffective. I could sense it—of course I could sense it. I calculated a change in her demeanor, her physicality, her gaze. Kacey and I shared a room, and a bed, for the duration of our childhood. At one time we knew each other so well that we could predict the next thing the other would say before she said it. Our conversations were rapid and indecipherable to others, sentences begun and abandoned, lengthy negotiations conducted exclusively in glances and gestures. So when my sister began sleeping over at friends’ houses more and more, or coming home in the small hours of the morning, smelling of things I couldn’t, then, identify, it is safe to say that I was alarmed.