The Pain Scale (4 page)

While I’d been on leave, I’d read an article in
Los Angeles
magazine about a new trend among high-end Southern California legal practices that the author referred to as “megafirms.” These were
top-of-the-line, spare-no-expense organizations that had battled the economic downturn by offering their clients a full array of luxury legal services. They also provided private security, investigative services, and just about anything else imaginable within the realm of on-demand law and order.

Sternow and Byrne was one of these firms. If you signed up with S&B, they’d not only handle all your business’s legal needs, but they’d also do a background check on your potential trophy wife, draft a bulletproof prenup, follow her when she started cheating on you, provide stellar representation during the divorce, and probably even offer up someone to intimidate her when she violated the restraining order. And they’d do your taxes. Not bad if you could afford it.

We leaned against the hood of Jen’s 4Runner as I ran down what I remembered from the article. It seemed to ring a bell for her.

“Sternow and Byrne,” she said. “They’re the ones who got all the press for buying that private military firm that was operating in Afghanistan, right?”

“Yep. They reorganized it and turned it into their new security and investigation division.”

“Nice. Benton’s lawyers have actual mercenaries on the payroll.”

We left the scene and decided to rendezvous back at the squad. None of us had eaten, and by the time we got back it would be close to quitting time. Jen and I would be working through dinner. The overtime had already been approved. I volunteered to take a detour on the way back and stop by Enrique’s for takeout.

“The usual?” I asked as she climbed into her 4Runner.

“You still remember?”

“I’m crushed you even asked.”

Before I started the car, I phoned in an order for carne asada, chicken veracruz, mixed-bean soup, steamed rice, and chips and salsa.

It had been more than a year since my partner and I had worked over dinner. Driving south down the 710, I hit the
P
LAY
button on the steering wheel. Springsteen started in on “Further On (Up the Road),” and I felt like I was going home.

Severity is in the eye of the sufferer...Pain is pain.

—David Foster Wallace
, Infinite Jest

P
AIN IS RELATIVE
. It’s been years since I’ve been able to sleep through the night on any kind of a regular basis. Even before I nearly lost my hand, I was already in a kind of pain. My wife burned to death in a car accident a few years earlier. I’ve killed two teenagers in the line of duty. And as I’ve already mentioned, I’ve been obsessing over homicides for more than a decade. None of these things has ever treaded lightly on my psyche. I was on close personal terms with Grey Goose a good long time before I ever had any major surgery at all.

On occasion, I consider the two varieties of pain I’ve experienced—the physical and the psychological. And I often believe that I prefer the physical. It’s tangible and palpable in a way that the ghosts that haunt my sleepless nights never are and never will be. There’s a hope, too, in the physical pain, a hope of some cure or remedy, of some relief, no matter how distant, that is forever absent in the other. What hope is there, for example, of forgetting the last time I saw my wife, on a stainless-steel autopsy table, her body burned and blackened, her face charred almost beyond recognition?

A few years earlier, the brass had wanted to update the furniture in the Homicide Detail squad room when the building got a top-to-bottom refurbishing. They had planned to install cubicles and
fabric-covered partitions to “delineate workspaces” and “facilitate a professional atmosphere,” as they were doing throughout the department. Ruiz hemmed and hawed, stomped his feet, and just generally made a stink until the Detective Division commander threw in the towel and let him keep the traditional squad arrangement—three clusters of two WWII-era steel desks, each facing one another, in the large open space.

I looked at Jen over our gray wood-grain Formica desktops. She’d changed into jeans and an LBPD T-shirt before I’d made it back with the food.

Over dinner, we’d talked about Jen’s hunt for a house. She’d never owned one before but had some money in the bank and thought the time was right to get into the market while home values were bottoming out. She was looking at places in California Heights and even Lakewood. I was pushing her toward Belmont Shore.

“That’s where all the cool people live.”

“I know,” she said. “That’s why I’m looking on the other side of town.”

A few hours later, the wastebaskets were full of empty Styrofoam takeout containers, the leftovers were secured in the coffee room fridge, and we were wrapping things up for the night.

It was after nine, and the rest of the squad had drifted out, one by one. We’d spent the last few hours putting together the murder book, setting up the bulletin board that would keep the most significant details of the case in plain sight, running MOs through ViCAP and NCIC to check for possible hits, and probably most importantly, using Sara Gardener-Benton’s calendar and phone and bank records to establish a preliminary record of her movements for the last days of her life. None of it was terribly exciting, but it was the legwork that would, if anything at all did, most likely lead to a break in the case. And so far, there were none of those in sight.

I looked up from the local usage detail report from Verizon with a listing of all of Sara’s calls and text messages for the last month and thought I caught Jen smiling at me.

“What?” I asked.

She looked at me and shook her head but couldn’t completely hide the grin.

Back in the saddle.

Whoopie-ti-yi-yay.

Sometime past midnight, Jen had called it a night and headed home for a few hours of sleep. I was tacking the night’s final crime scene photo on the board when I felt a twinge of pain shoot through my wrist.

“Motherfucker,” I said to the empty room.

In my seventeen sessions with the pain psychologist, we worked on things like creative visualization and guided imagery and mindful meditation. The purpose of these activities was to find a technique that could be successful in occupying my conscious mind to such a degree that it might be possible to direct my thoughts away from focusing on my chronic pain and down more serene and pleasant paths.

“So basically the point is to distract myself,” I said.

“Well...” She danced around the phraseology a bit but ultimately agreed that I was right about the basic idea.

So we imagined peaceful streams and secluded beaches and snow-kissed mountains and tropical islands and suns setting over distant horizons.

Pretty stuff.

It never occurred to either of us that pretty stuff was the exact opposite of what I needed.

I thought back over the previous several hours. The last time I remembered thinking about my pain was early in the evening, picking up dinner at Enrique’s. I had stretched my neck while I was waiting for the takeout. And before that? On the way to the crime scene.

As I felt the awareness of the pain wash over me again, I couldn’t fathom the sensation. I think I might have smiled.