The Pain Scale (11 page)

I started with their faces.

Sara.

Bailey.

Jacob.

The question was the same one we’d been asking for two days. Why?

We had the missing wall safe as a possible motive for Sara’s murder. But why, then, the children? It was hard to believe they’d been murdered to eliminate them as witnesses. But what else was there? The MO matched that theory. But the kids couldn’t have testified. They wouldn’t have been any threat at all. Didn’t the killers know that?

Maybe not. Contrary to what is depicted in popular culture, murder is rarely committed by geniuses, evil or otherwise. Killers are often shrewd but not highly intelligent. Almost all of the time, the simplest explanation is the one that turns out to be the truth.

What was the simplest explanation here?

Thrill killers, just in it for the visceral pleasure provided by extreme violence? Then why not torture the kids?

A heist targeting the floor safe? Why, then, the extremity of what was done to Sara?

Could it have been some combination of the two, as Marty had suggested?

I wound up staying up most of the night searching for other possible theories. There was nothing else viable that I could put together with the evidence at hand. I couldn’t make sense of the story. Not yet.

My father died when I was five. Among the things he left behind was a garage full of tools. For years after he was gone, I would nail and hammer and saw and generally destroy just about anything
I could get my hands on. For some reason I’ve never fully understood, I particularly loved sawing wood. Tree limbs, two-by-fours, broken broomsticks. Any scrap I could find, I would clamp in the vise on the workbench and cut. There was one old wood saw that was my favorite. I had no idea of its true age, but when I was a boy, it seemed older than anything I’d ever held in my own hands. Except for the teeth, which were polished to a fine gleam by constant use, the blade was the deep dull gray of aged steel. The handle was worn around the gripping surface, the bare wood itself almost as smooth as the varnish still adorning the corners and sides; and I took particular joy in imagining that it had been my father’s hand that had done the rubbing and wearing, and that my own hand was continuing what he had begun. I realize, of course, that the memory of the scent of sawdust, the soreness of my shoulder, and the tremendous sense of accomplishment I would feel as another piece of two-by-four clacked to the cement floor are stand-ins for the real memories I never had the chance to form.

But I still have that saw.

Late that night, after I’d turned the case over in my head as many times and in as many different ways as I could, I finally drifted off into a fitful sleep. I dreamed, as I often do, of pain. In the dream, my arm and shoulder and neck feel as though they are being rent by dozens of dull and jagged claws. The pain is greater than any I have ever felt and greater than any I can imagine, and in the disturbing logic of the dream, I will do anything to make it stop.

Anything.

I stumble out of my bedroom and into the garage of my childhood memories. From above the workbench, I pull my father’s saw from its place on the Peg-Board, rip my shirt off, and begin sawing at my shoulder. The teeth bite into my flesh, and somehow I know that this is the only answer for the agony. As I cut, the pain doesn’t worsen, but it changes. Each stroke of the blade
causes another burning surge that makes me scream louder than the last, but I continue.

With each stroke, the blade rips deeper into my flesh. Blood spurts forward and back with the motion of the saw. Ragged bits of muscle and sinew clog the teeth.

Even when the edge of my father’s saw catches on the bone of my shoulder and sends a violent jolt down my spine, I continue.

It goes on and on and on.

Finally, my arm falls to the floor. It’s only then as I look down at it, flopping and twitching on the cold concrete, that I see how much blood I’ve lost. A huge deep-red pool. I fall into it, splashing, fully aware that I am bleeding to death. My gaze drifts up into the rafters, and I begin to fade.

And then the most horrific moment of the entire dream comes upon me.

The saw has worked.

The pain is gone.

T
HE NEXT MORNING
, a little before seven, I called Goodman. Something told me he’d be awake. “Can I buy you breakfast?”

I was at The Potholder waiting for him a few minutes after they unlocked the front door. I sat at the small table in the back corner of the front room and started reviewing my notes. When the waitress came, I told her I was waiting for someone but went ahead and ordered an omelet with corned beef and bacon that they called “The Rancher” and a cup of coffee.

The walls of the place were hung with hundreds of pictures taken of people all over the world holding up handwritten signs that said,
Eat at The Potholder
. Years ago, when I’d first been promoted to Homicide, I was assisting on a domestic murder on which Dave Zepeda was the principal. He was taking photos of the vic—a middle-aged woman who had been beaten to death by her husband—and he told me to squat next to her. It was one of my earliest cases with the detail, and I’d been as anxious to please the vets as an adopted Jack Russell on his first day out of the pound. Once I was down on my haunches, he handed me a piece of cardboard and told me to hold it up to the camera. At the time, I didn’t realize how careful he had been to let me see only one side of it. He snapped several pictures and told me I’d done a good job. I didn’t think any more about it until a new eight-by-ten showed up on the squad room wall of me kneeling down
next to the bloody and bruised woman, holding up an
Eat at The Potholder
sign.

I’d never seen Dave as disappointed as he was when The Potholder refused to hang it on the wall even long enough to “get” me with it. Every time I took it down off the wall of the squad room where it had found a final resting place, a day or two later a new copy would appear. Eventually, when I had developed a sense of gallows humor strong enough to win the old-timers’ approval, I gave up and it disappeared, leaving me grateful that the Homicide crew thought that was hazing enough for a new D3.

I considered sharing that story with Goodman. We’d only spent a few minutes together, but my instincts told me he’d see it as a tactic deployed to ingratiate myself to him. Which, of course, was what the whole breakfast meeting was. The only question was how obvious I should be about it.

When he came in, I waved him over to the table. He looked sharp and alert. His suit was either freshly cleaned and pressed or an identical match to the one he’d been wearing when we’d met at the station.

“What’s good here?”

“Anything with grease.”

He ordered an omelet, too. “The Irisher.” Potatoes, cheddar cheese, and bacon. Another of my favorites. It made me want to trust him. Yogurt and berries or egg whites would have concerned me.

“I’m sorry I was kind of a dick at the squad.”

He let the stern facade he’d been projecting ease and raised an eyebrow. “Your partner tell you to do this, or your lieutenant?”

“Neither one. This is all me.”

He wasn’t buying it.

“But I am trying to head them both off at the pass.”

That satisfied him enough for us to ease into a few minutes of small talk about Long Beach. He’d worked a joint task force
investigating harbor smuggling a few years before but hadn’t met anyone from Homicide until this case.

When the food came, I said, “Now, there’s some apparent aesthetic value.”

He took the bait, but I couldn’t tell if he knew it was bait. So I told him the story of how the phrase had entered the LBPD lexicon.

“A couple of months back, two uniforms picked up a guy with a camera taking pictures of the Edgington oil refinery. They figured he must have been some kind of terrorist, because why else would he be taking pictures of a dump like that? Turns out he’s just a reporter, but when they asked him what he was doing, he said he was an
artist
.”

Goodman let out a little chuckle at the word.

“So, of course, that was enough to freak the unis out even more. One thing leads to another, and finally the chief has to make a statement. Says that it’s the responsibility of the LBPD to question anyone taking photographs ‘of no apparent aesthetic value.’”

“And next thing you know...” he said.

“Right. Every cop in town is using it to describe anything from the crappy evidence in his investigation to how his wife’s ass looks in those pants.”

We’d fallen into an easygoing rapport. Just two old cops shooting the shit. Of course, the “No apparent aesthetic value” line had peaked in its popularity weeks ago, and the first time I had ever uttered the phrase was in the station with Goodman and his partner.

After we traded a few more war stories, I asked him how the congressman was doing.

“Seems to be holding up well. Mrs. Benton, too. The son’s a basket case, though.”

“That’s what it looked like to us. The lawyer won’t let us get close to Bradley. Anything you can do about that?”

“I’m not really as deep in that circle as you probably think. I just give the congressman a report every day. Usually not even to him. Kroll gets it. But I’ll see what I can do.”

We finished eating, and he asked me for directions to the courthouse, which I was fairly sure he didn’t really need.

On my drive downtown, I saw a small Craftsman for sale that I thought had real potential. There were no more flyers in the box on the signpost, so I wrote the real estate agent’s name and the address down in my notebook and made a mental note to tell Jen about it.

As I was telling Jen about breakfast with Goodman, Ruiz called us into his office.

“Have you seen this?”

It was a video recording of the Bentons playing at a park I didn’t recognize. The kids were next to each other in two swings, and Sara was taking turns pushing them. First Bailey with her left hand, and then Jacob with her right. She’d found a perfect rhythm, and her smile was as wide and bright as those of the children.

“We don’t have this,” I said. “Where did it come from?”

“Channel Four. It led every local news segment this morning.”

“Where’d they get it?”

“Go find out,” Ruiz said.

Before we were even back at our desks, Jen was on the phone. Her first call was to a sergeant in Media Relations.

“Hank? This is Jennifer Tanaka from Homicide. You gave Lieutenant Ruiz the new video of the Benton family from Channel Four?”

She listened as she sat down and began scribbling on a yellow legal pad on her desk. “And that’s the producer?” She wrote some more, made vaguely affirmative verbal noises, and hung up.

“Want to go to Burbank?”

“Where’d you get the video?” I asked the assistant producer a second time. Her name was Marisol Vargas. She was midthirties, with a bad face job that left her cheeks too high and her mouth too tight. When she’d introduced herself using a heavy Latino accent for her name and an uptight Brentwood parlance for everything else, I couldn’t help but wonder if, at some point, she’d aspired to be on-air talent and had settled for this.