Past Due

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THERE IS SOMETHING perversely cheerful about a crime scene in the middle of the night, the pulsating red and blue lights, the great beams of white, the strobes of photographers’ flashes. Festively festooned with yellow tape, a crime scene at night is a place cars drive slowly by, as if before an overdone Christmas display with bowing reindeers and whirling Santas. In the uniformed workers busily going about their business, in the helicopters spinning madly overhead, in the television vans with their jaunty microwave disks, in the reporters giving their live reports, in the excited onlookers excitedly looking on, in all of it lies the thrilling sense of relief that the arbitrary finger of desolation has squashed flat this night a total stranger.

Unless the corpse within the tape is not a total stranger. Then, suddenly, the crime scene at night is not so cheery.

I didn’t yet know why I had been summoned to the crime scene at Pier 84 on Philadelphia’s dank waterfront, or whose death was the subject of this swirl of activity, but I knew the deceased was not a total stranger or I would never have been called, and that was enough to turn the cheeriness of the scene into something bleak and icy. The possibilities flitted through my mind like bats through a dusky sky, an endless swarm, each swoop or swerve carrying its own name and causing its own jolt of fear.

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