Chapter Twenty-Four
Present
There was an incessant buzzing on Church’s nightstand.
At first, he was so deep in his REM sleep he didn’t hear it, so when he finally stirred to consciousness and grappled in the dark for his phone on his bedside table, it had already stopped.
When the buzzing started up again, not two seconds later, Church rubbed his eyes and answered it without looking at the screen.
“Hello?”
“Detective Church,” the voice said. It was male, stilted and icy, and Church’s mind struggled to place it, still half caught in the stupor of sleep. “I trust you’ve read this morning’s paper?”
Church glanced over groggily at the alarm clock on his nightstand. Who on God’s green earth would be calling him this early? It was only 6:15 a.m., and he had had a late night. He’d been in the office until nearly 11:00 p.m., reviewing case files.
“You talked so much about the integrity of this case, Detective,” the voice went on.
“The last time we spoke, you went on and on about how you couldn’t share any details with us so as to protect the sanctity of the investigation, did you not?
So imagine my surprise when I opened my paper this morning to see all the things you could not tell us printed there in black and white for all to read. ”
“Senator Towers?” Church said, his mind finally catching up with him. He coughed to clear his throat. “I’m sorry—I’m not sure what you’re talking about.”
“The paper,” the senator said, the irritation evident in his voice. “The San Luis Obispo Herald. They printed it this morning.”
Church sat hurriedly up in bed. He put his phone on speaker so he could see his screen and thumbed opened a browser. He quickly googled San Luis Obispo Herald Saoirse Towers.
The headline struck him like a cold slap to the face: New Lead in Saoirse Towers Case: Was the Second Unidentified Body Staff?
He kept reading:
Police have reason to believe the unidentified remains discovered on the Towers family property last month may be those of a staff member hired to work the party at which Saoirse, and this unidentified victim, were presumably killed.
A probable cause affidavit filed on Wednesday reveals the victim was male, between twenty-five and thirty-five years old, and approximately 6 feet tall.
The affidavit was filed with a search warrant requesting access to the Towers family tax returns from 1982, in an effort to track down the staff members who were hired to work the event.
This would not be the first time a staff member attending to the Towers family has ended up dead. Readers may recall, in 1978, that a young woman working at a hotel where Theo and Ransom Towers were staying drowned while sailing on their yacht.
Church stopped reading.
“Shit,” Church muttered under his breath. “Senator, I can promise you I didn’t know anything about this,” Church said.
“This came from your department, did it not?” Ransom asked.
“Yes, it did, but—”
“I’ve been cooperative, haven’t I?” Ransom cut in.
“Any questions you asked, I answered. I opened the door to my home. I instructed my staff to be open with you as well. When you told me you couldn’t tell me anything about the investigation or the body found in my own backyard, I let it go.
I acquiesced. And this is what I get in return?
Details I wasn’t allowed to know, splashed across the front page of the paper?
Private truths about my family, out there for the whole world to read about?
It’s a transgression of my privacy, of my family’s privacy, and our trust.”
Church was silent for a moment. “You’re right,” he said. “You’re absolutely right. This shouldn’t have happened, and I can give you my word nothing like this will ever happen again.”
“Your word means very little to me now,” Ransom said. “Detective, you will find me less than cooperative going forward. I’m afraid both my understanding and my patience have run out.”
And with that, the senator unceremoniously hung up.
There was a bar called Pour House on State Street in Santa Barbara, not far from BFS, where Church and Nisha met up occasionally for drinks to talk about the cases they were working on together.
They’d throw darts, knock around a few balls on the pool table, sip their pints at the bar.
And case talk would inevitably lead to talking about other things.
Conversation with Nisha felt as easy as breathing—never forced.
Tonight, they didn’t make it to the dartboard or the pool table; they just sat at the end of the bar with their pint glasses of beer and talked.
“I don’t understand,” Nisha said, taking a sip of her beer. “How did that reporter get all that information about the second body anyway?”
“From the search warrant that Leland filed for the Towerses’ tax returns,” Church said. “You have to file a probable cause affidavit, basically explaining to the judge why we need access to the documents we’re requesting.”
“And the public has access to those?” Nisha asked.
“No,” Church said. “I mean, not if you petition to have them sealed, which any detective worth his salt would have, in this case.”
“Ah,” Nisha said.
“It was a rookie mistake,” Church seethed. “And it’s fucked me. The senator won’t even return my calls now.”
What really got under Church’s skin was that Leland should never have been assigned to the case in the first place. He didn’t have the experience. Church had told Wallis that from the get-go. If Wallis had only listened to him then, they wouldn’t be in this mess now.
“I’m sorry,” Nisha said. “That’s awful. But—” She paused.
Church looked over at her. He cocked an eyebrow. “But?”
“Okay, just hear me out on this,” Nisha said, raising her hands defensively.
“I know Leland is super green, but I do think he’s trying.
He really wants to do well, and yeah, this time he fucked up, but it was an honest mistake, and he owned up to it.
And, from what you’re telling me, the sheriff and Sergeant Wallis really went at him hard for this.
So, maybe, you could cut him some slack. ”
Church exhaled. He recalled with particularly cutting clarity the other day in Sergeant Wallis’s office, as he had sat next to Leland while both the sheriff and the sarge basically chewed Leland a new asshole, and Leland just sat there, the tips of his ears red, looking chastened and embarrassed.
He reminded Church in that moment so much of a wounded golden retriever, and while Church hadn’t been able to bring himself to add to the barrage, he also had not come to his defense.
“I just think,” Nisha went on, “let he among us who’s never made an error when they’re tired and overworked throw the first stone. That’s it. That’s all. I’ll step down from my soapbox now.”
“Thank you,” Church said. He didn’t want to talk about it anymore, didn’t want to even think about it. “So what’s new with you? I trust you’ve had a better week than me?”
“Well,” Nisha said excitedly, “we’re trying 3D forensic facial reconstruction on our John Doe.”
“3D facial reconstruction?” Church asked.
“Yeah,” Nisha said. “You basically digitize the skull with a CT scanner, and then you map the face onto it, with the help of tissue markers. It’s painstaking. It takes forever. But it’s a good idea, and it’s worth a shot.”
“That sounds promising,” Church said.
“Leland suggested it, actually,” Nisha said. “It was something he read about. He’s been really focused ever since—well, you know. Head down. Serious.”
“I don’t really want to talk about Leland anymore,” Church said. He took a drink of his beer. “You know what I’ve been wondering, though?” Church asked after a moment, changing the subject.
“What’s that?” Nisha said.
“What made you want to spend all your time with dead people?”
Nisha laughed. “I’ll tell you, but you’ll probably think I’m morbid.”
“I already think you’re morbid.”
“Well, then, good. The pressure’s off, I guess,” she said. “I actually went to school to be a dentist originally.”
Church snorted, almost spitting out his beer.
“I know,” Nisha said, “it’s hard to picture.
Anyway, first year of dental school, you have to take anatomy with the med students.
You basically spend the semester dissecting a human body.
It was my first time seeing one. It’s quite a shock to the system, you know?
The smell of formaldehyde and methanol from the embalming fluid, the feel of your scalpel cutting through skin, which doesn’t feel or look like skin at all, really.
It’s tough and leathery, and the tissue and muscles are gray underneath. ”
She told him about the dissection of the body, how they kept the face and hands covered with a towel while they were working.
Her lab partners didn’t like to think about the body on the table as a man who had once lived.
They didn’t want to think of him as someone’s father or brother or son, though of course he had been at least one of those things. They tried hard not to know him.
But, to Nisha, that was impossible. The human body was so particular.
From the plaque in the arteries in the abdomen, she knew the man often ate red meat, and from the scars on the walls of his liver, she knew he enjoyed drinking.
On his left leg, she discovered a healed femur shaft fracture.
Nisha thought about that for months. What could this man have done to break the longest, strongest bone in his body?
All over the body, it was like that. She found indications of stories, subtle signs of who the man had been.
“My classmates wanted to think of this man as just a body, but that didn’t interest me at all,” Nisha said.
“I couldn’t separate the body from the man, from the stories that made him.
That was it for me. I changed my major the next semester.
What about you?” Nisha asked. “What made you want to become a detective?”