Читать книгу Never Suck A Dead Man's Hand: - Dana Kollmann - Страница 9

Last year I rejoined the living. I turned in my uniforms, flicked the last bits of mung (a generic reference to unidentified human chunks) from the soles of my boots, and gathered my court summonses. I was still technically on maternity leave, but I knew long before I left for my twelve-week hiatus that I wouldn’t be coming back. I had cleaned out most of my personal belongings before my leave started and was grateful that a few of my friends offered to pack my remaining things and leave them in a box beneath my desk. I was grateful because I hate good-byes, and I just wanted to sneak into the building, drop off a few things, grab what was left of my personal effects, and get out quickly without being noticed.

My plan worked. It was 2:00 A.M. on a Friday, and I knew all too well that everyone would be busting their chops running from one Crime Lab call to the next. I placed the last of my uniforms on my supervisor’s desk along with my pepper spray, conduct and field manuals, keys, biohazardous equipment bag, respirator, rubber boots, and identification card. I couldn’t help but notice her calendar and the big letters under March 7 that read: DANA BACK ON SHIFT 1. I felt a lump growing in my throat and blinked back the tears that had begun to well up in my eyes. I couldn’t believe that I was doing it. I was quitting. I was never coming back. Never, ever again.

I picked up my ID card and looked at the photograph one last time. It was discolored from being exposed to fingerprint powder every day for the past ten years of my life and deep gouges ran through my face from the card being swiped hundreds of times through the readers that secured the Lab. Even without the discoloration and gouges, it was still an awful picture of me, but I smiled thinking back to the morning it had been taken. I had been on overtime because of a stabbing in the pouring rain the night before. A woman beat the hell out of her husband with a frying pan and then stabbed him, all because he complained about the way she cooked his fish. When she was finished punishing him, she threw the frying pan off the balcony. I remembered getting rain soaked as I photographed the frying pan, a spatula, and the poor little lake trout filets that were hanging in the azaleas. I looked a wreck in the photograph, but had the excuse of being soaking wet, covered in grease, and smelling like fish. I shoved the card under my pile of uniforms.

I walked into the Lab’s main area and took down the placard above my desk that had my name on it. Then I peeled my name off my mailbox. I didn’t bother to look through the mail that had accumulated over the past three months. If it was important, they knew where they could find me. I grabbed what remained of my things, turned off the light, and left.

It was a straight shot to the elevator, but I decided to take the long way out and cut through the evidence processing laboratory. The room was pitch dark with only a dim ray of light from the street eleven floors below casting a faint glow on the superglue chamber. I set my things on the evidence table and walked over to the window. Everything outside looked so quiet and peaceful. It was such an irony that the most spectacular view was from the very room where evidence from the most heinous and violent of crimes passed through for processing.

I sat down on the radiator and looked around the dark lab. I wondered how many hours of my life had been spent surrounded by these four walls. I sat there in the dark for a long time—just thinking. It was difficult to believe that a decade had passed since I walked through the Crime Lab doors for the first time, green with experience but so eager to learn. I wouldn’t have believed it if someone told me that I would eventually become the most senior civilian investigator in the Lab whose experience would be topped only by one detective. I didn’t regret a single moment of my time spent in Crime Lab, but what I did regret was allowing the job to become such a core component of my life and letting my personal identity become so inextricably intertwined with the work that I did. I wished that I had listened to the words of the firearms examiner a few years before when he said that I would “love this place more than this place would ever love me.” He was right. Although I felt like I was an integral part of the unit, I was really nothing more than a number and the Lab would continue—with or without me. That stung.

My decision to leave the Crime Lab had been a long time in coming. I struggled with the idea for well over a year, but it wasn’t until my husband, Bob, and I brought our infant son home from Guatemala that I realized that I needed to reevaluate my priorities. I no longer wanted to work midnight shift, have rotating days off, or be faced with an endless stream of overtime. I wanted to spend Christmas under the tree, not looking at the guy who made himself into an ornament and dangled lifelessly from its branches. I didn’t want the cranberry sauce on the Thanksgiving dinner table to remind me of blood clots anymore. And I didn’t want the Fourth of July fireworks to take me back to the time when they misfired and landed in a crowd of spectators. I wanted a job where you’d get in trouble for saying things such as “He needs his rectum swabbed” or “Can you fish that rubber out of the toilet for me?” I wanted a normal life.

My walk on the wild side started years before. My mother didn’t care what I did for a living, as long as I wore a dress to work. My father just hoped I’d find someone willing to pay me to do something, anything. My brother held a prayer vigil in an attempt to convince God to land me a job in another country. And me—I wanted to work with dead people.

So there I sat, strapped in what looked like an electric chair. A huge, rude, inhospitable mass of muscle sat behind a nearby table and studied a piece of graph paper that was spewing from an antiquated-looking polygraph machine. I wanted a job as a civilian crime scene investigator (CSI) more than I had ever wanted anything before, but the steps involved in landing one of these coveted positions seemed to never end. I had applied for this job over a year ago and although I had passed the panel interview, physical assessment, and background investigation, I still had to get through the damn polygraph and psych exam.

My interest in death was my parents’ fault. My dad, a city cop turned firefighter, had become quite familiar with the crime-laden streets of Baltimore and quickly realized my brother and I would become corner hoodlums if we attended the public school in our district. In 1972, we packed up the Monte Carlo and moved to the boonies. We escaped crime all right, along with the other pleasures of urban living such as municipal pools, community playgrounds, and corner stores. My friends and I spent the long summer days engaged in contests to see who could pick the most beetles off the rose bushes. One of our favorite pastimes involved exploring the woods for witches and evidence of the sect of half-human, half-monkey people who lived on Derby Drive a million years before us. We found the bones of the monkey people along with the remains of small animals that provided proof our ancestors were meat eaters. I slept with the bones of the monkey people tucked between my mattress and box spring for nearly a year until my dad discovered them while trying to identify the source of the foul smell that constantly emanated from my room. Seems one of the bones still had a little meat on it.

By the time I entered high school, my friends had found other pastimes, but not me. One Friday afternoon my mother came home from work and discovered what she thought was dinner simmering on the stove. She opened the lid to her stainless steel crab pot and discovered six dissected cat carcasses boiling away. I tried to explain that I had volunteered to stew the cats to get rid of the soft tissue so my anatomy and physiology class could study the skeletons the following Monday, but my words fell on her furious deaf ears. She threatened to call the men with straightjackets that wrap teenage girls in cold, wet sheets and take them away to their new bedrooms with padded walls. As ordered, I carried the pot of cats to the deck so my father could see what I had done when he came home. He just stood over the cats while shaking his head and commented how the crabs would forever taste of formaldehyde. Over the weekend, the water in the pot froze and the cats wouldn’t budge. My mother grounded me for what seemed like an eternity and I was the object of my classmates’ ridicule after it was announced that we would be studying the skeletal system from pictures in our textbook.

As I approached high school graduation, I decided I really wanted a career working with the mummies, skeletons, and bog people that I had read about in National Geographic magazine. I announced my decision to major in archaeology, but my mother was less than thrilled. I was reminded that archaeology involved dirt and digging and that those “dirty looking earth-mamas” didn’t wear dresses to work. The following fall I found myself inserting Foley catheters into grumpy old men. Somehow, I had been enrolled in the prestigious Union Memorial Hospital School of Nursing. The program was excellent, so excellent that I knew I absolutely hated it from day one. In the first few months, my weekly marches to impromptu sensitivity training had worn a rut in the hospital corridor. I studied nursing long enough to shave a dead guy’s face and then I quit.

After nursing school, things seemed to fall in place. I wound up studying archaeology and amazed my mother by actually landing a full-time job as nothing other than an archaeological field technician (AKA Shovel bum) within a week of graduation. I returned to school a few years later and obtained a graduate degree in forensics and was hell-bent on working as a CSI, even if that meant letting a stranger wire me to a chair and ask me probing questions.

I stared blankly at the wall and waited for the polygraph examiner to ask me the next question. I had already been yelled at for moving even though I hadn’t twitched a muscle and wound up sighing from the stress of the attack. Apparently, deep breathing was also a no-no because I was berated for oxygenating my blood and then made the grave error of offering an apology. It was becoming all too clear why the examiner wore her weapon on her hip and I figured applicants she didn’t like left the interview with a severe case of “lead poisoning.” Intimidation was a big part of the polygraph process and I just had to play the game. My thoughts were interrupted by another question. “Other than what we’ve talked about, have you ever stolen anything?” Her voice was dry and monotone. I didn’t like her.

I was silent for a moment as I thought about the question. My heart was racing and I could hear my pulse pound in my ears. I had already confessed to the pens, adhesive notepads, and correction fluid I unintentionally “stole” from former employers. The examiner’s eyes shifted between the polygraph printout and me as she waited for my answer. “No,” I stated with all the confidence in the world.

The examiner glared at me for a moment and then screeched her felt-tipped pen across the graph paper as she made a series of mysterious circles and slashes. This made my heart beat faster than it already was and my hands trembled. I feared this would register as deception on her stupid little machine. I glanced at her out of the corner of my eye and caught her smirking as she subtly shook her head. She did it because she knew I was looking at her.

When my brother and I were kids, my parents told us we had to be good or Jesus would put black marks on our souls. We really didn’t know what would happen if we exceeded the maximum allotted number of black marks, but that was precisely what made them so scary. Every few Sunday afternoons we were dragged into confession since it served as the spray and wash for our souls and restored our innocence. My fear of Jesus and his black marks had kept me on the straight and narrow and I had done absolutely nothing that would prevent me from getting this job—not even the incident that involved the backhoe and peach schnapps.

I had also been polygraphed by two other police departments and was waiting for the next step of their application processes. With three agencies in the game, I prayed that someone would hire me. Having lost all self-confidence and feeling about as big as an ant, I waited for what would be the final question; a question that would foreshadow the bizarre road I was about to travel as a CSI. In the most serious voice she asked, “Have you ever engaged in a sexual act with a chicken?”

WWhhaatt? Did I hear that right? I took a moment to contemplate the logistics of getting it on with a chicken. I was particularly confused about what part of the chicken would go where. I’d have to give this one more thought on the way home. I didn’t even care if I passed this test anymore and decided to answer with something other than the structured yes-no response. In a tone as dry and serious as the examiner’s, I answered, “A couple of jackasses maybe, but no ma’am, never a chicken.”

When I walked into the Police Department Training Academy on February 13, 1995, I thought I was opening the doors to a brand-new career. What I didn’t know was that these doors also invited me into a world that was much different than the one in which I had been living.

I would spend the next decade in a place where people called 911 to report aliens in their televisions and kangaroos on the beltway. A universe where women carried their cigarettes in unimaginable places and men requested ambulances because they couldn’t maintain erections. A realm where pigs and dingoes replaced dogs and cats as indoor house pets and families barbecued chicken on their linoleum floors. A realm where people died holding Tombstone pizza boxes and bodies were tossed next to DEAD END and NO DUMPING road signs. Never did I think that I would have a dead man’s fingers go in my mouth or have a corpse fall on me. This is the stuff you don’t see on television, won’t read in a novel, and is just too damn weird to make up! Allow me to share with you the true stories that I’m forbidden to tell at my dinner table. Turn off your television and let me tell you the way it really is.