Under the Bridge (30 page)

Then, as he recalls, “I just decided I'd keep some things out of my story. I wanted to help Warren. I just wanted to keep some things to myself. Before this all happened, me and Warren ended up getting really close and hanging out, and I didn't want him getting in trouble, because he was my friend. I didn't know what to do. I was up and down all that week after the arrests. I didn't know if I was coming or going. I did not know what to do.”

Sergeant Bond could tell that Dimitri was being “selective.” He could tell from the boy's uneasiness that he was holding back some knowledge about his best friend.

“Make sure you're telling it straight, Dimitri,” he said. “To be blunt about it, I think only certain areas of your story have a ring of truth. I'll cut to the chase here. You've washed a pair of pants worn by someone
who's murdered. You're the first person Warren talks to after the murder. You've seen your buddy and Kelly pursue this girl across the Craigflower Bridge. Now I know you don't question your friends about a little scuffle down by Mac's, but I think this is a significant event. I've got some problems with your story, Dimitri. I've got major problems with it.”

Dimitri sighed. “If you've got a problem with my story, then I'm sorry.”

“I see you as being a bit uncomfortable with yourself.”

“If you don't believe me, that's your prerogative,” Dimitri said, with the certain sullenness and defiance common to all confused and pimply boys.

When Syreeta walked on the bridge, she saw Reena's face in the photograph. When she arrived at school, she could not focus and was told by her teacher that it looked like she would likely receive a failing grade in math. Though this once would have been of great concern, she could now not deal with the rows of numbers in her textbook. She spent most of her time in Mrs. Smith's office. “I practically lived there,” she would later recall.

We don't think you deserve to have any guilt at all, the cops had said. We think you're a nice person. You don't need to feel guilty about this,
the cops had said.

“But I do feel guilty,” she told Mrs. Smith. “Warren wanted to walk me home that night, and I said no. If I had just let him, a girl might still be alive. Or I could have just stayed with him. I don't know why I left him. If I had stayed there that night, I can 100 percent guarantee you Warren wouldn't have done anything.”

“Syreeta, you can't blame yourself for this.”

There were geometry exams and the study of the human genome. Surely, she would fail every test and remain forever in the ninth grade, a girl with her lank hair and a blind eye.

I think you'll find yourself feeling a lot better,
the cops had said.

I think you'll find this is the worst week of your life.

She wanted to write Warren, just to see if he was okay, but the cops told her he could not receive her letters because she would be a witness against him. A witness
against
him. “You're going to be subpoenaed,” they told her. “You're going to have to go to court.”

“But what if I don't want to? Can't I say I don't want to go to court?”

“This is murder,” they said, with great disgust, unable to comprehend the bond of a young girls first love.

Who could she talk to about her strange and sudden fate? She could read her horoscope or talk to her friends. She could drift through the pages of
Seventeen.
Could anyone know what to say to the girlfriend of an accused killer? Mrs. Smith thought she should go visit her grandparents, get out of town, just go somewhere without the whispers and the talk.

She talked to the police for a second time. They came and picked her up after school. She wasn't sure why, since she'd told them, again and again, everything she knew about the conversation in the bedroom. They just kept asking her for more details, as if they suspected she was holding back something because “of your love for Warren.”

She'd heard so many stories in the hallways and smoke pit since the night of the arrests. She'd heard Kelly had told Tara and Jodene and Maya that she alone drowned Reena. That she put her foot on Reena's head, holding it under the water, while she calmly smoked a cigarette.

“I thought maybe Kelly might have done it all by herself, and Warren might have wanted to look like he
could
do something like that, even though it's an awful thing to do.”

On that Wednesday night, she slept, or thought she slept. She was afraid to sleep, and she left the radio on, as if the songs would soothe her or lull her to dream. She woke up and she was shaking and there was cold sweat all over her arms. She'd kept a bucket beside her bed because since this all happened, she'd seen the scene in her mind and awakened nauseous and trembling. What time is it? She looked at the red numbers on her clock and it was 11:00 and then it was 3:00 in the morning. She no longer saw Warren's face in her mind, though sometimes she could hear the sound of his voice. It was Reena's face she saw. “Every time I closed my eyes, I saw her face.”

Everyone at Shoreline was grounded now. Everyone at Shoreline had been told by their parents, “You are never going out again.”

Under the bridge, there might have been discovered some malevolent spirit. There were dark forces who could beat and attack your daughter, or who could turn your daughter into a brutal and careless thug.
Stay away from the bridge,
parents said, as if it was a place, an abyss, holding all the savagery.

D
R.
L
AUREL
G
RAY
is a scholarly looking woman, with cropped gray hair and gold-rimmed glasses. She might be taken for a librarian or an academic, as she drives to work dressed in tweed suits or cashmere sweater sets. Yet she has authored articles such as, “The Coronary Artery Luminal Narrowing in the Young with Sudden Unexpected Death.” As a young woman, she learned about signs of drowning by studying the lungs of drowned cats; she learned how to recognize stabbing by staring at puncture wounds in pig skin. Her hands often shake when she performs autopsies, for out of the morgue, she smokes cigarettes.

Like the Dive Unit, she often can't see anything when she examines a body. The heart blurs; the organs are too decomposed. And often she observes shimmers—fleeting colors that are translucent, temporary—and these shimmers either blind her from the search or offer illumination from the dark.

On November 24, when she looked at the young body of an unknown girl, she saw a shimmer of gold and removed a single earring, for the piece of gold caught itself, became tangled in the girls black hair.

•   •   •

The burden was on Dr. Laurel Gray to provide proof more tangible than the stories being told in interrogation rooms. She was to find the cause of death. Her report would, it was hoped, hold something more scientific than cartoon drawings and hip-hop fairy tales. Blood had been washed away by rain and washing machines. The truth was fading fast in the web of loves and lies and gossip, and it would only fade faster when the lawyers began to try to protect their clients from punishment. By looking at blood, bruises, the heart, Dr. Laurel Gray might be the only one now able to establish the truth about the death of Reena Virk.

*

In the morgue, Reena is now a girl without opinions or dreams. She is a Deceased Female. She is Case No. 97-2749-33.

“The morgue is very sterile,” Sergeant Poulton, in attendance, explains. “The body is on a metal table, and there's a metal stand as a head support. Everybody's gowned and gloved and in little slip-on boots so you're not introducing new elements into the area. The pathologist does a narration as she's doing the autopsy. I was taking notes and another officer was taking photographs.”

“Measured, the girl is 5′6. She is 182 pounds.” Dr. Laurel Gray said. In her external observation, she saw no needle marks, no signs of drug use or disease. “She's a very healthy girl.”

“The body is intact, but the skin on her hands and feet is starting to slip away. I would estimate she spent a week in cold water.”

Dr. Gray took a number of swab samples, and then removed Reena's bra and the camisole tangled up around her neck.

“It is certainly apparent that she received a very severe beating. The following observations regarding bruising are:

bruising and swelling under both eyes

very bruised cheeks

a large laceration on her lips

nose bruised; bloody discharge in her nostrils

red marks on tops of both shoulders (an odd symmetry to the bruising on shoulders, almost a circle)

bruising on collarbone

“thermal burn”—circular red mark—above right eyebrow

on left side of back of head, a mark that is textured in a manner consistent with a sneaker

also pattern of footwear on the left side of her back

a large bruise on left side of voice box—this bruise appears to come from a “karate chop” type blow”

Opening the girl's mouth gently, Dr. Gray says: “Her teeth are clenched. Her tongue is clenched in her teeth.”

“The body was X-rayed and examinations showed no broken bones. No fractures. No dislocations. This further corroborated by physical examination. Examination of body for sexual assault indicated no obvious signs present and no genital trauma.”

An incision was then made. “It's a Y-shaped incision,” Sergeant Poulton says. “From one shoulderbone to the other, then straight down to the belly button. They peel that open, and then they snip all the ribs out. That comes out in one big slab.”

Dr. Laurel Gray noted: “Damage to the liver and pancreas. Multiple blows sustained in the abdominal area. The layers of her abdominal wall are deeply bruised in a number of locations. Mesentery
torn away.
Organs crushed. Separation of fatty tissue from muscle tissue. A ‘crush convulsion' injury, as often seen in car crash victims.

“Most severe damage at torso. Evidence of internal bleeding in the chest and lower abdomen. This consistent with a forceful kicking or stomping in the abdomen area.”

Dr. Gray removed Reena Virk's heart and she weighed it on a sterile scale.

“The heart is about the size of a hand,” Sergeant Poulton says.

Dr. Laurel Gray would later testify, softly, that “Reena Virk had long, luxurious hair.” Now the hair was shorn. On the bare scalp, there was evidence of “severe bruising. Most severe at the back and front of her face. Extensive bruising under the skin of her face. Multiple bruises under the tissue. This bruising is almost a complete mask right up to the skull bone.

“There is a substantial degree of general hemorrhaging and trauma. Brain is swollen. No indentations or abrasions to the skull. Sufficient concussive injury to cause unconsciousness.”

Dr. Laurel Gray motioned to the photographer. “A bruise in the shape of a sneaker print is on the back of the brain.”

Another incision was made. The brain was removed and, like the heart, was weighed. The brain was sliced for further observation.

The lungs too were weighed, and here, in the place of breathing, the most crucial evidence was discovered.

“Internal examination of the lungs shows a white frothy substance. This would be consistent with the mechanism of death by drowning.”

Death by drowning, was the conclusion written on the report. “Alive when she went into the water.”

Dr. Laurel Gray, when looking closely at the lungs, finds something delicate and hidden, below the telltale white froth. This too is telling of
Reena's agonal gasp—
agonal
meaning the last breath before death. Reena's last breath had been in the dark waters of the Gorge, and she had taken in this before her lips were forever closed.
This.
Dr. Laurel Gray removes this carefully, as carefully as she can, in the same careful way the men floated the body. She holds this in her hand. This is soft and curved and so tiny. She counts these small pebbles, which had once been on the bottom of the waterway. There are eighteen pebbles, and before she will finish, she will hold these pebbles in her shaking hands and count them, very carefully.

S
ERGEANT
G
OSLING
was back in the darkness of the Gorge. By the bridge, he was careful, for there were rusted nails near the wood beams, and he did not want to spike himself. He felt slowly, his hand touching the cold underneath, where he felt the roughness of gravel and silt. The pages he found were loose and floating, no longer white, but a certain kind of ivory, and they wavered and lilted, out of his reach. He touched something sturdier then and brought this discovery up with him as he rose toward the sun. This object was, to his surprise, “pretty pristine.”

The words were not yet gone, and he knew they would dry and be legible, for most ink is permanent, and most words survive. It was strange, he would say later, because he was looking for her clothes or a weapon: those were the objects he'd been sent to find. Yet under the bridge, as he floated and touched, he found this undestroyed gift. Though he was not looking for it, in the cold waters, he found Reena's diary.