Stripped by Brian Freeman Page B

and tall, and his uniform was baggy at the shoulders. His blond hair was cut as if his mother still sat him in a chair and clipped him with a bowl over his head. He kept picking at his long chin as if he had a pimple that wouldn’t go away. Serena didn’t think he could be more than twenty years old, and she realized that he was both terribly earnest and terribly nervous.
    Serena got out of her Mustang. “Good morning, officer,” she said. “You got us out here pretty early.”
    “Yes, ma’am,” he told her, with a Texas twang in his voice. “I do realize that, and I’m real sorry. I’m Officer Tom Crawford, ma’am.”
    Serena introduced herself and Cordy, and Crawford did everything but curtsy.
    “How long have you been on the force, Tom?” Serena asked.
    “Oh, coming on a month, I guess.”
    Pretending to rub his eye, Cordy glanced at Serena and mouthed, “Shit.”
    Serena shook her head and sighed. Rookies.
    “Well, Tom, you’ve got a blue car here. We had a witness who thought she saw a blue car speeding away after the hit-and-run on the boy, but that was in Summerlin, which is several miles and a few tax brackets away from here.”
    Crawford nodded, still scratching his chin. “Yes, ma’am, I read the incident report about that boy Peter Hale and the hit-and-run in Summerlin. Terrible thing. Word for word, I did. And I’ve had my eyes open all week for a blue car. See, we got a call overnight from the security company that patrols these lots, and they said this here car hadn’t been touched in at least a week or so, and they were figuring it was abandoned. They were planning on having it towed, and they wanted to know if we wanted to take a look at it first. The overnight super, he thought we should just let them yank it, but I heard it was blue, see, and we’re just a whiz straight down the parkway from Summerlin, and that accident was just about a week ago. So I thought it was worth checking out.”
    “It took the security company a week to call it in?” Serena asked, shaking her head.
    “Yes, ma’am, I’m afraid so. They rotate a lot, is what I think, and the guy who made the rounds tonight hadn’t been in the lot since last weekend.”
    “Go on,” Serena told him, yawning, and hoping she hadn’t been dragged out of bed for nothing.
    “Well, when I came out here, the first thing I did was check the front of the car. And sure enough—well, let me just show it to you.”
    With loping strides, Officer Crawford guided them around to the front of the Aztek and used the big steel flashlight on his belt to illuminate the car. Serena sucked in her breath. The dead center of the hood was bowed, the grill punched in. The shell of the bumper was cracked and the license plate twisted as if it were on its way to becoming a paper airplane.
    Crawford got down on his knees. “If you look real close here, you can see fibers stuck on the grill. There’s other stuff, too, could be skin and blood.”
    Serena had seen half-eaten corpses in the desert without her stomach turning over, but something about the damage to the car—not much damage at all, really, for what it had done—left her swallowing back bile. “Good work, Tom,” she told him somberly.
    Cordy was silent, but his copper skin paled. He kicked the ground with the toe of his shoe, his hands shoved in his pockets. Only Crawford seemed unaffected and even enthusiastic about what he had found—but he was young, and this was a big deal, the kind of story he’d be telling the other rookies for the next year. He hadn’t been in the Summerlin street last Friday afternoon to see Peter Hale’s broken body, blood puddling under his head. To hear his mother wailing. To see the vacant, dead grief in his father’s eyes.
    It was an upper-middle-class neighborhood, the kind where both parents had good jobs and twelve-year-old boys were latchkey kids, taking the bus home after school, letting themselves inside to watch television and play video