The Euthanist (36 page)

At long last I came across something notable in the path. A small cluster of rocks. One stone the size of a bread loaf rested on top of two others in the world’s chintziest pyramid. I had to remind myself this wasn’t a treasure hunt, and I felt ghoulish for my momentary elation.

With some effort I rolled off the top rock.

Out of the crack sprinted a spider big as a kumquat.

I gulped. It was a nasty one, hairless but red with a lobster-like shell and fangs that might have been its ninth and tenth legs. I stepped back, but my heart didn’t race. I didn’t stomp on it either. After a deep breath, I simply watched it run. It scrambled past me, disoriented from having its roof ripped off, and I let it go. The woman next to me yelped when she saw it.

We kept on. Leland, Tesmer, and Royce spotted the next set of carvings, until we reached a huddled grouping of trees surrounded by a field of ferns. They circled like a crown and rose until the white sunlight blotted out their tops. We passed through narrow crawl spaces between the trunks into a clearing maybe fifteen feet across. Those who couldn’t fit into the clearing peered in from between the trees. Dried needles had mounded up over time, and my boots bounced on the soft heap of needles as if it were a mattress.

“There.” Leland pointed to a trunk coated in moss. I didn’t see it at first, but Leland had spotted hard angles—almost a Z—carved into the bark. Tesmer tore down the moss that obscured the rest of the incision, wiping off the sod with her sleeves, and then ferreting her finger into the groove to scoop out the residue. The carving was a house, the height of my forearm. Like Walter’s drawing, it was a crude box at the base, then a simple pitched roof and a chimney the size of a cigar butt. This was home.

One of the dogs barked, and then others barked. Their owners let them off leash, and they sniffed around the grounds, pinning themselves to several spots within this ring of trees. Two of them yelped at a patch of ground close to the house carving. Leland unzipped Tesmer’s bag for more tools. He pulled out a shovelhead, then from Royce’s bag he retrieved several lengths of dowel that he screwed together until the various segments formed a full-size, five-foot shovel. By then his sweat turned the back of his shirt see-through. He started digging while the dogs howled around him, and most of the crowd looked on in horror and fascination, some of them clinging to the trunks around the perimeter. I caught a fleeting glimpse of Veda Moon back there with Cindy. He looked terrified, his chin receding into his neck, possibly on the verge of crying. If I thought I had any chance of comforting him, I would have gone to him. Cindy held him from behind, weeping into the back of his shirt.

Leland and Royce cleared away the top layer with clumped bundles of needles in their arms. I dropped to my knees and helped them push aside the topsoil. Leland snagged his finger on something sharp and nursed it in his mouth, but it didn’t stop him from digging. He dug gloves out of his backpack and gave a pair to each of us. They were nitrile, thicker than latex, thinner than mittens.

Leland feverishly tore up the earth with his hands. I felt his eagerness—he had waited so long for this—and I tried to keep up with him. The moist soil diffused into the air like ground coffee beans. Tesmer stood with the shovel, waiting for the surface layers to be cleaned off before she sunk the spade into the dirt. Our circle of spectators watched, quite literally forming a funeral gathering. At least one woman mopped her eyes with a shirt-sleeve. I wondered whose mother she was.

Once the loose debris was cleared, a subtly humped mound of solid earth remained. The dogs barked at the air as we stirred up trace scents of aged compost. Tesmer started in with the shovel, and I scooped what I could with a trowel from Royce’s backpack. I’m sure there was a more methodical way to excavate this plot, but no one much cared. None of us cared about procedure, not even the federal agent. No reason to, really. The criminals had already been caught.

Slowly, we amassed termite hills of clumped clay as we burrowed two feet down.

Tesmer alerted, “Look, look…” She’d found something, and then we all saw it: a sharp nub in the soil. Not a root, not a rock. Leland cast a look back at the rest of the search team. He seemed unsure of whether everyone should be watching this, but it was too late now. Some of the crowd stepped closer. Some averted their eyes and looked up at the branches above the clearing. Crouched by the pit, I could no longer see Veda or Cindy.

Leland’s glove stroked away the dirt. The nub became a tine. Its color faded from deep chocolate to birch bark. Daintily it protruded. When enough soil had been cleared away the nub became a knuckle. The knuckle became a hand. Onlookers moaned behind us. Leland’s head dropped between his shoulders. At first I assumed it was sadness, but his lips rippled in a silent prayer. When the prayer was over, Leland cleared away more of the soil, fiercely vigilant. Breathing through a clenched jaw, he siphoned loud inhales through his nostrils. Royce, Tesmer, and I worked at the same pace. Our first knuckle was a distal phalanx—the tip of a middle finger. It sat closer to the surface because the body had been buried face down, and the fingers curled. Based on the angle of the hand, we shifted where we dug and cleared away sections that revealed a torso and legs. I felt on the verge of a catastrophic sob, and yet I didn’t feel sadness.

As we unearthed a pelvis, a new feeling came:
gloom
, the dread of something unexpected, and the feeling that nothing good would relieve the hopelessness. Those bones were from a girl. Every cubic inch of dirt we cleared away made that more of a glaring reality. The dress, the hair, and the hips—even on a girl not fully developed, there were differences.

Her remains issued the tang of rotten strawberries. Royce’s arm covered his nostrils. Given what I’ve smelled on the job, I’d expected something stronger, but she’d been there for at least twelve years. Anything that would have given off those strong meaty odors had already nourished the ground.

The families around us reacted with wet, sickly sobs. Someone called to God. One man, maybe convinced this was his daughter, buckled to his knees and bit his fingers as he cried. His wife rubbed his shoulders. I couldn’t see Cindy or Veda.

Carefully we revealed the full figure. Three feet down in the hole, we uncovered a small skeleton with bird bones. Rags clung to the bone, and most of the fabric had been eaten. The remaining patches faded to an overcast version of baby blue. A pink plastic watch loosely coiled around one wrist. No shoes.

Leland motioned to her legs. He meant to speak to Tesmer, but we all heard. “The right leg’s been severed below the knee.” I thought this might be Julie Diehl, but then remembered Julie had been buried below the shed. A new dread struck me as I realized that what happened to Cindy Coates might have happened to others.

Leland gently rolled the skull to one side. His gloved finger glided along the teeth and stopped at one that was slightly off kilter. “She’s the right age. Most of her baby teeth are out, but there are still a few left. Some of the permanent teeth are still pushing their way in.”

I needed air. I stepped back from our fresh grave and withdrew past the rest of our search team, out through the circle of trees. The families were so consumed in their own grief that they didn’t acknowledge me as I passed.

As I walked through the ferns, I saw Cindy and Veda against the thickest redwood trunk in the cathedral. No one paid attention to them, and in turn, Cindy and Veda ignored the rest of us. Cindy stroked her boyfriend’s forehead. Veda Moon lay stiff with his legs splayed on the ground. He looked somewhere between when he’s wet his pants and what I imagined would be a seizure. His body quivered as if freezing to death.

I climbed back inside the circle of trees and whispered in Leland’s ear, passing a message along about his son. He discretely stood back from the bones and circled the crowd to reach Veda, motioning to Tesmer to join us. Once the agent stepped away, the rest of the crowd stepped cautiously forward, taking a better look at the skeleton, wondering if she was theirs.

Tesmer and Leland helped his son to his feet. Veda looked confused, like he wasn’t sure how he got here. His father whispered in his ear. I stayed far enough away so I couldn’t hear. Veda seemed too consumed with his own emotions to listen, but he nodded when his father finished, faking understanding of whatever consolation Leland gave him. I retreated back to the crowd to give them privacy, but couldn’t help watching them. They gave each other a quick, violent hug, only lasting a moment before Veda pushed his father away. The two Moon men stared at each other. Leland tried to touch him again, but his son shrank from his father’s hand. Tesmer did the same, with the same result. Veda turned from them and walked back from where we came, toward the slope and the red rope. Cindy followed him, simpering apologetically to the Moons. She caught up to Veda and tried to touch him, but he shrugged off her hand as well. He seemed unreachable. I couldn’t articulate why I was so worried, but I sensed that however our discovery made me feel, it hit Veda Moon in a place no one could reach.

When Leland passed by again, I said, “You don’t have to be here. You can go with him.”

“Who else is going to do this?” He sounded so taxed. “Veda will get over it. Maybe not today, but eventually.” When I tried to touch him for comfort, he warned, “My son—my business.”

We waited for the local police. At that point Leland had to call it in. Leland also called the FBI, who would arrive later. The forensic team stretched yellow tape around tree trunks. Photographers with long lenses snapped every angle, and the pit was marked with a small yellow sandwich board with the number 1. I wish I’d been able to leave with Veda and Cindy, but the rest of us stayed behind so officers could interview and then dismiss us.

They asked everyone, “How did you know to look here?”

“Leland,” we all said. “He talked to Walter Gretsch.” The police would only speculate about what must have come up in those conversations.

The crowd petered out after they were dismissed. It was a quiet exodus. No one came back to Berkeley. I wished I’d been able to drive myself home. The same way that attending to every client reminded me of my own mortality, I felt closer to death now. I wanted to be alone. But my new rental car was parked at the Moon house, so I rode with Tesmer and Leland, knees cramped in the backseat.

Veda had left hours before we were able to drive back. Once the police came, we were overwhelmed by the flurry of activity and interviews. Now that we were headed back to Berkeley, I thought about the youngest Moon again. When he left, he seemed changed. The gravity of that girl’s remains seemed to eat at him worse than the phantom stench of Walter Gretsch. Without a hint of his usual defiance, I thought I’d detected a resignation in his face.

In the rearview, Leland locked on the oncoming road with a distressed squint. He said, “You made this happen.” For a second I thought this was an accusation, but then I realized he was thanking me. Even Tesmer looked over her shoulder and smiled.

I smiled halfheartedly. “I hope it was worth it.”

“You seem distant. What are you thinking about?”

I answered honestly. “Veda.”

Tesmer had been messing with her phone the whole ride, and she checked it again. She said to her husband, “He hadn’t texted.”

“Does he usually?” I asked.

She seemed annoyed. “He does when I ask him to.” She tried to call her son, but the phone rang all the way to voicemail. She placed a hand over her heart and breathed deeply. It seemed all of us tensed at once.

Leland bit a knuckle. “Call Cindy.”

Cindy picked up when Tesmer called and confirmed that she’d dropped off Veda in Berkeley.

“Where are you?”

“My home,” she said through the speaker.

Leland accelerated.

When we reached Berkeley, he rolled fast into their driveway and skidded into park. Both doors flung open as the Moons spilled out of the car. Leland and Tesmer ran to their door. I was afraid to get out of the car.

Through the walls of the house, and through the glass of the car, the unmistakable scream of Leland Moon jolted me.

Chapter 17

I burst through their front door to find the living room vacant and the house still. I listened for a moment, but nothing made a sound. I lightly stepped through the hallway toward the bedrooms. A frayed black Persian runner softened my footsteps. All the doors were closed, which kept the sun out of the corridor.

The first door opened to the salmon bathroom I’d used that morning. The toilet bowl still showed streaks from a hasty towel wipe. Stray drops of water fell from the showerhead.

Emmanuel barked somewhere in the backyard, but I couldn’t hear people inside or outside.

I continued down the hall and tried the next doorknob, which sat loose in the bore hole with some of the gloss rubbed from the brass finish. I twisted slowly but the spring still whined. Inside I found a shallow closet with towels.

The next rattling knob revealed the master bedroom, where Leland and Tesmer slept. Not a trace of them. The windows looked out onto the backyard, and I saw Emmanuel trot in wide circles on the lawn, occasionally barking up at squirrels in the trees. Amid a predominantly white room, purple bed sheets stretched tight as a hotel mattress. A shallow trough indented the right side of the bed from where someone would have lain. The room connected to a private bathroom, which wafted a warm, damp musk. The mirror through the open door reflected an empty bathtub and deep blue tiles.