His name isn’t important. Maybe for someone, maybe once, but not for us, not now. There are times when it is just plain hard to tell what is important. Sometimes it’s something so simple as getting a job done right.
But not today, not this morning after a long hard rain. The only vehicle the cop finds today is a yellow maintenance truck with two laborers, waiting.
The tape must be stretched. No one to step over, nothing to be touched, certainly not the little man in the Harley-Davidson shirt, nothing to be moved, taken, dropped, no footprints, fingerprints, cigarette butts, candy wrappers. Do not even breathe on the scene. And when the detectives arrive and when the evidence technicians arrive and when the supervisor’s supervisor arrives and when all the other nosy cops who heard it go down on their radios arrive, none of them, not a one, gets beyond that tape without the cop records each name, star, and time. Log it all, everything. The report the cop writes will go on file. Two years from now, five years from now, ten years from now, if someone wants to know, it had better be there and it had better be right.
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The laborers are sent to block the main gate while the cop and his supervisor wait. Both regret that coffee, so hastily left behind. The cop remembers another supervisor who sent for a hot dog and ate it in the presence of a man with a hole in his head. It’s not that you’re insensitive. It’s something more subtle. Death, when you see it like this, how should you behave?
It’s hard to explain why anyone would want to be an evidence technician. True, there are people who become proctologists and periodontists and urologists, and who would want to do what they do, but at least they earn money at it, real money, and at least the flesh they touch is living. Your ET, he’s just a cop and he makes a cop’s living and a job like this, this neat little man, freshly washed in the rain, is almost too nice to be true. They appreciate this, you can see they do when they arrive with their little satchels and cameras. It is clear now that there are no bloody knives, no spent shell casings, no matchbooks with the murderer’s telephone number written inside the cover, no clues at all, only this little man in the Harley-Davidson shirt. Now the cop steps over the tape and watches the ETs work. It is time to find out who this little man is and if he is going to be somebody and something important.
The cop sees that the little man’s hands, left and right, are scarred between the fingers with old cigarette burns. Old scars. And fresh burns. Here is a smoker who has nodded off many times and not even awakened for pain. “No tracks. What do you suppose he was on?” The ET shrugs. There are so many substances on the street. So many cheap ways to die.
