While I waited for the light to cross MLK, skaters ground the rail at the base of Peace Wall Park, the noise raising the hair on my arms.
The lobby of the Safety Building was spruce and silent. Reception paged Nate Schickman, but it was Patrol Officer Hocking who came to escort me back to investigations.
“You,” she said, not unpleasantly.
“Me,” I said.
Schickman wasn’t at his desk, either. Someone said he was out back. I couldn’t blame him for needing to escape: the room he shared with five other cops was landlocked, windowless, a cave with fluorescent bulbs and whiteboards badly in need of a shave.
“Out back” meant the vehicle lot. Hocking walked me there, about-faced, and returned inside, unimpressed by the unfolding spectacle: Schickman, in gray sweats, grunting as he flipped a giant truck tire end-over-end, while another guy kept time on his phone and exhorted him to fucking hurry the fuck up. Just watching it re-tore my ACL.
“Ten,” the timekeeper yelled.
Schickman collapsed to his knees and rolled messily onto his back, forearm draped across his eyes, belly pumping in and out. “Fuck that,” he wheezed to no one in particular.
The timekeeper looked at me. “Help you?”
“I’ll wait till he’s alive,” I said.
Schickman sat up, groaning. “Shit. I forgot you were coming.”
He stretched out a hand, and his partner yanked him to his feet.
“Back in a minute,” Schickman said. “Stay warm.”
The other guy began jumping imaginary rope.
Schickman went slowly up the stairs, pounding his quads as he climbed. He asked if I was into CrossFit.
“I’m more into not being paralyzed,” I said.
He laughed. “Me, I’m nothing. My buddy there squats five fifty.”
“Well that seems unnecessary.”
“Till you’re crushed by a tractor.” He glanced at me. “Ever had anybody crushed by a tractor?”
“No, but I’m still young.”
“Ha.”
He climbed faster. My knee was feeling better and I kept up with him. Fate had done me a solid: no bodies for me at work, and I’d been religious with the ice and ibuprofen. Shupfer had returned on Saturday without explanation, nodding a truce as she sat down. When I asked how Danny was, she’d shrugged. “Shit never ends.” Adding: “He’s home.” Adding: “Thanks.” As close to optimism as she got.
Life had regained its normal rhythm, except for the nagging possibility of a prowler stalking Rennert’s house and/or his daughter.
I’d said nothing to Tatiana. I didn’t want to scare her before I knew there was something to be scared of.
Schickman, bless him, didn’t ask any more questions. Maybe he was a good guy, maybe he didn’t care. He brought me to a storage closet adjacent to the investigations room, reaching for the top shelf to take down a cardboard box hand-lettered in black marker.
He hauled the box over to the deserted conference room.
“Need anything,” he said, dropping it with a thump, “you know where to find me.”
“The hospital.”
He strained comically. “ ’Murica, baby.” Turning serious. “And it goes without saying, there’s something I need to know...”
“You got it. Thanks.”
Alone, I spread the contents of the box out on the table. The centerpiece of the Donna Zhao file was a vinyl five-inch binder, its contents tabbed in rainbow colors: yellow for the report, orange for written statements and warrants, so forth, ending with blue jail call transcripts and green A/V files. The scheme suggested an investigation starting off at a boil and cooling as it went.
As a kid I had a habit of reading a book’s last page first. I’m not sure where I picked it up. I think I tended to feel a story much too hard, the characters’ struggles becoming mine to an uncomfortable degree. Skipping ahead was my solution, a way to establish a critical space between them and me — enough to allow room for pleasure.
Once my brother saw me starting to do this with a book he’d recently finished. I can’t recall which. We’re fourteen months apart; our tastes often overlapped. Probably it was an athlete biography. We ate those up. Legends of Sports: Michael Jordan or whatever.
What I won’t forget is Luke’s reaction: he went berserk, ripping the book out of my hands and winging it over the rear fence into our neighbor’s yard; getting up in my face and screaming about cheating. I was confused. Cheating who? The author? Michael Jordan? Who cared? That’s my brother, though: righteous, sensitive, unfit to live in an unjust world. The way he saw it, he’d worked for that ending. I hadn’t.
What became of him, I suppose, was nauseatingly poetic, if not inevitable.
What became of us both.
After he’d stormed off, I went around the block and rang the bell to Mrs. Gilford’s house. She admitted me, watching with a perplexed smile as I went to her backyard and fished a flimsy paperback from the rosemary bush.
I was thinking about Luke distantly as I flipped ahead in search of an arrest report. I didn’t consider it cheating to start with information that bore on Tatiana’s safety.
Several hundred pages in, I found him.
His name was Triplett, Julian E.
On April 23, 1994, he was arrested and booked on one count of PC 187(a), murder.
At the time he resided at 955 Delaware St. #5, Berkeley, CA 94710.
He was a black male, with brown hair and brown eyes, born on July 9, 1978.
The next line made my blood lock up.
At fifteen years old, Julian Triplett stood six-four and weighed two hundred forty-seven pounds.
The man I’d chased was easily that size. Bigger, maybe. Twenty-plus years had elapsed — plenty of time for a growing boy, even a huge one, to grow more.
The arresting officer and lead investigator was named Ken Bascombe.
I paged back to his supplemental and began to read.
At four thirty-one on the morning of November 1, 1993, Bascombe was called to an apartment building on the 2500 block of Benvenue Avenue, just south of People’s Park. Upon arrival he found the street roped off at either end in anticipation of a mass of onlookers. Consulting with officers on the scene, he learned that the victim was Donna Zhao, a twenty-three-year-old Asian female, dead of apparent multiple stab wounds to the face, neck, and torso. She shared a third-floor two-bedroom unit with a pair of roommates, Li Hsieh and Wendy Tang. All three were undergraduates, enrolled at UC Berkeley.
It was the roommates who’d found her.
According to Wendy Tang’s statement, around nine thirty the previous evening, she and Li Hsieh had left the apartment together to go trick-or-treating. They’d tried to persuade Donna to accompany them, but she had declined, stating she was too tired and had too much work. Wendy Tang and Li Hsieh went out, spending the night hopping from one party to the next before coming home at approximately four in the morning.
Both women admitted to being intoxicated. For this reason, they did not at first realize that a crime had taken place, despite the disorder evident upon entering the apartment. Furniture was overturned, a lamp snapped in half. A trail of blood on the carpet led toward the adjacent kitchen, accessible through a pair of saloon doors, also bloodstained. Wendy Tang said, “We thought it was a joke.”
Entering the kitchen, they found Donna Zhao’s body heaped on the linoleum in a large pool of blood. Drawers had been pulled out. The toaster was in the sink. There were bloody handprints on the refrigerator door, as well as numerous streaks and smears, indicative of the victim fighting back. Spatter on the walls reached a height of eight feet, a few drops grazing the ceiling.