BECOMING — Chapter Four

by Patrick Baggatta

I found a wooden stool at the far end of the room and watched the lab geeks seal up invisible fibers, trying to let my head relax into the case. I could hear Hammond asking TV cop questions in the background. I muttered shut the fuck up about a hundred times, but it was my own shortcoming to care that he was wasting his time.

I’d already committed Ashley Brown to memory. It wasn’t easy going. I had the feeling she didn’t like being admired so closely, a by-product of being a product model, maybe. I’d found her picture several times in the portfolio books stored in the attached office. She was hard-wired to be there and not be there at the same time. She was a lifestyle, a prop, a feeling you were supposed to get when you purchased the right detergent. She was not to be studied too closely. She was not real. Reality puts us out of the buying mood. But she was real now.

I was trying to soft focus the room one last time before making my first move. “What’s behind the sheets?” A passing tech, assumed the question was for him.

“Nothing. Some photos.”

I went to look for myself, taking a wide berth around Ashley who was still there under my orders. I peeled back the first curtain. It was soft, expensive shit. The wall was bare. I caught a whiff of fresh paint. I worked my way around the perimeter, the same all the way around except for one wall that contained a neatly lined column of portraits, all of the same woman. They were technically good, professional, but they didn’t exactly send me. The girl struck me as forgettably pretty and I got the impression that this was what you got when an advertising photographer tried to recapture his verve for the art he’d long since sold down the river.

“Warner’s here,” Hammond called to me from the door. “The uniforms are keeping him downstairs.” It was time to meet the photographer. “Tell them to let him come up.” I wanted to see how he entered the room.

Lynch Warner, a bullshit name if ever I heard one, turned the corner a moment later and ran straight for the body. It told me he probably loved her. A mad dash like that was an instinct to save. Of course, that didn’t mean he wasn’t in on her death, it just meant he didn’t feel good about it. He’d have to be rattled.

“Get away from the body,” I demanded from my stool. He stopped and looked at me as if I’d just pissed on the Pope. I leaned back on the stool, letting him know I had the support of the room. I didn’t need to act personally to get my way. He stood and approached me because he knew he was supposed to.

“You can take the body now,” I told the coroner.