“I…can’t tell how she died. Not by looking at her. I don’t see anything wrong. She looks like she’s sleeping but she’s not, not underwater. She’s not breathing. I don’t want to touch her. I know I shouldn’t, and I haven’t.”
“Holy hell, you’re serious? Did you call the police?”
“I called you.”
“You need to call the police. Right now. You need to hang up and call them.”
I did.
Chapter Three
Michael
Can I change my pants?”
I was on the couch in my small living room.
From the corner of the room, Detective Garrett Dobbs looked up from his phone. His brow furrowed. “What?”
“When I sat on the edge of the bathtub, my pants and underwear got soaked. Can I change clothes, please?”
“No. Later. I want you to walk me through everything one more time. Start when you left your apartment this afternoon,” Dobbs said.
The detective looked like he was in his mid- to late thirties. His brown hair was cropped close on the sides, longer on top, slightly tousled. He wore a black sweatshirt, jeans, and black boots. His badge hung around his neck on a metal chain. He made no effort to conceal the gun attached to his belt. I didn’t know enough about guns to identify the make or model. It was black and seemed heavier than it probably was.
He looked familiar, but I couldn’t place him. Then it came to me. “You used to play football, right? For Syracuse? Running back, if I remember correctly.”
His eyes had been on his phone and they stayed there for another moment. When he looked up, his expression remained blank. “Are you from New York? Not many Orange fans out here in LA.”
“I went to Cornell.”
He nodded. “Big Red, huh?”
“Not really. I dropped out my junior year.”
“Last I checked, you don’t need the degree to be a fan.”
“You haven’t spoken to my parents. Without a degree, you’re not much of anything.”
“That’s harsh.”
“You were fast. Always figured you’d head to the pros.”
Another detective, I hadn’t been told his name, leaned in and grinned. “Dobbs here ran the forty in four point two-seven seconds, the same as Deion Sanders. Fastest guy to come out of Syracuse till he tore his Achilles. Then he was only as fast as the rest of us humans.”
Dobbs lowered his phone. “I tore it twice. Junior and senior year. When the NFL scouts came, they saw me as damaged goods. Stepped right on by like I was invisible. Past—”
“Past performance is not indicative of future results,” the other detective said. “He always says that. Reminds me of a financial commercial.”
Dobbs said, “I saw that phrase next to my name on one of the scout’s clipboards. It stuck, I suppose. You hear something like that about yourself, and it gets caught in your head. Coach let me finish out my senior year riding the bench so I wouldn’t lose my scholarship, but we all knew I was done with football.”
“Wilkins?”
This came from one of the CSI investigators near my bed.
The other detective, Wilkins, crossed the room.
Dobbs turned back to me. “You’ve got a good memory. I haven’t played since 2001. Christ, seventeen years now.”
“Some things do stick, I suppose.”
My eyes went to the CSI investigator. Through the open bedroom door, I watched him reach down with gloved hands and pick up a woman’s purse from the far side of my bed. He set it gently on top of my rumpled navy quilt. I hadn’t seen the purse when I came in. He reached back down and brought up a small black dress, panties, matching bra, and a pair of black pumps. He laid each item down on the bed. A second CSI investigator placed small numbered placards next to each—4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9. I wondered what had already been tagged 1 through 3. A third CSI photographed each item from multiple angles.
Dobbs watched me watching them, made another note on his phone. “You said you don’t know her?”
“I don’t.”
He tilted his head. “Looks a lot like you know her.”
“I don’t,” I repeated. “I have no idea who she is.”
He nodded toward my front door. “We found no sign of forced entry. You said it was locked when you got home, right?”
“It was, yeah.”
“The dead bolt, the knob, or both?”
“Just the dead bolt. I don’t bother with the other one.”
Two other CSIs were busy mopping up the water with large yellow sponges. They squeezed them out into white buckets. On masking tape, across the side of one bucket, printed in black blocky letters, was a case number, my last name, my address, and the number 2; the other bucket had the same information but with the number 3. I imagined yet another CSI studying that water in a lab somewhere, one drop on a slide at a time.
“Hey, Dobbs? We got an ID.” Wilkins was busy going through the contents of the purse. He held up a driver’s license. “Alyssa Tepper. Twenty-two years old. She lives in Burbank.”
Dobbs nodded at me. “Alyssa Tepper. Her name mean anything to you?”
I shook my head.
Wilkins whistled. “Hey, look at this.” He held up a baseball card. “This is a ’36 Joe DiMaggio from World Wide Gum.”
Dobbs went over to him. “Valuable?”
“In pristine condition, they can be worth upwards of ninety thousand. The back is jacked up on this one, though. Half the paper is missing. Left corner is torn. Still worth a pretty penny, but nowhere near that much.” He placed it on the bed along with the various other items found in the purse.
Dobbs leaned into his ear and said something I couldn’t make out.
Wilkins nodded, took out his cell phone, and made a call.
I knew that baseball card.
Chapter Four
Michael
They found a key in her purse. The key fit my dead-bolt lock.
That was two hours ago.
When my building super finally showed up, the uniformed officers standing at my apartment door wouldn’t let him in. His eyes met mine from the hallway. I turned away.
The water had been cleaned up, the buckets hauled off.
Dobbs was in my bedroom or the bathroom. He had closed the adjoining door so I could no longer see inside either room. There were at least twelve other people in there.
He’d left me on the couch. The same officers who kept my super out were clearly tasked with keeping me in.
When my bedroom door finally opened, two women from the medical examiner’s office wheeled a gurney out, a zippered black bag on top.
Dobbs followed behind them, watched as they went out the front door, then sat beside me on the couch. “Your pants still wet?”
“Damp. It’s okay. I’m fine.”
He tossed a pair of jeans at me. Underwear, socks, and a worn Big Red sweatshirt followed. All of it had been pulled from my suitcase on the bedroom floor. A CSI investigator stood behind him with a large, clear plastic bag.
Dobbs said, “Change out of your clothes into those. Everything goes in the bag. Do you have anything in your pockets?”