The Pain Scale Read online

  Also by Tyler Dilts:

  A King of Infinite Space

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Text copyright © 2012 Tyler Dilts

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Thomas & Mercer

  P.O. Box 400818

  Las Vegas, NV 89140

  ISBN-13: 9781612186023

  ISBN-10: 1612186025

  For Nicole

  Contents

  PART ONE: COMPLAINT

  Eight

  Four

  PART TWO: PRESENTATION

  Three

  Five

  Five

  Seven

  Nine

  Six

  Zero

  Six

  Two

  PART THREE: DIAGNOSIS

  Seven

  Four

  Five

  Three

  Nine

  Six

  Eight

  PART FOUR: TREATMENT

  Four

  Six

  Three

  Seven

  Three

  Nine

  One

  Two

  PART FIVE: PROGNOSIS

  Two

  Three

  Ten

  Five

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  PART ONE: COMPLAINT

  Absent thee from felicity awhile,

  And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain,

  To tell my story.

  —William Shakespeare, Hamlet

  Eight

  WHEN I SLEEP I dream of pain.

  “On a scale of one to ten,” the new doctor asked, “with zero being no pain at all and ten being the worst pain you can possibly imagine, how would you rate your current pain level?” He was young, not far past thirty, with thinning red-blond hair and freckles tinged green under the fluorescent lights. Wore surgical scrubs under a white coat and a fake smile. An ID badge identified him as Dr. Ballard. It was maybe the ten-thousandth time I’d been asked the same question in the previous thirteen months.

  “Did you read my file?” I asked.

  “Of course, Mr. Beckett.” He looked confused, as if I were accusing him of something. Must have been the edge in my voice.

  “Do you know what I do for a living?”

  “You’re a police officer.”

  “A homicide detective.”

  “Oh. Well.” He didn’t follow.

  I wanted to tell him my problems with his question. Why it was meaningless. Why I was so sick of it I could barely keep myself from screaming. I wanted to tell him about the things I’d seen. It would only take a few examples. To tell him the kind of pain I could imagine. And that the reason I could imagine it was because I’d witnessed the actions that caused it with my own eyes. To tell him, for example, about a woman who’d been flayed alive by her husband after she had asked him for a divorce. About a six-year-old boy who’d been immolated by his welder father with an oxyacetylene torch because he’d gotten up to ask for a glass of water after bedtime. About an elderly woman who’d been dismembered by her meth-addled grandson because she wouldn’t surrender her Social Security check. I wanted to tell him about dozens of cases I’d worked, about the bodies of people who had experienced pain so extreme it would be beyond the imagining of anyone who hadn’t beheld its victims for themselves.

  I wanted to tell him I could imagine pain that would make him weep.

  I wanted to tell him that it felt like I had a bear trap tearing into my wrist and my arm was plunged shoulder-deep into a vat of boiling oil.

  Instead, I stared at the FDA food pyramid poster on the wall and said, “Eight.”

  He examined the scar tissue that, but for a quarter of an inch on the top of my forearm below the base of my thumb, formed a shiny pink band around my wrist, just about where my watchband used to be. More than once it had been mistaken for one of those charity cause-of-the-month rubber bracelets.

  He poked at it a few times, then began typing into a computer on a rolling cart tethered to an outlet in the wall. “It’s been, what, eight months since the last surgery?” He didn’t look away from the monitor.

  “That’s right.”

  “And you’d like a refill of your prescription?”

  “Yes.”

  “You know Vicodin can be habit forming.”

  “You don’t say.”

  He still didn’t look at me. I couldn’t tell if he didn’t get the sarcasm or if he was just ignoring it.

  “Have you thought about Advil or Tylenol?”

  I was glad the nurse had already taken my blood pressure, because I imagined it rising every time he opened his mouth. The deep breaths I took didn’t help.

  “Look at me,” I said.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Quit typing and look at me.”

  He did. Mouth hanging open, green eyes wide with confusion, as if he didn’t know what to do with a patient who was going so far off the script. Didn’t they cover that in med school? Wasn’t there a handout or something?

  I let him stew in the awkwardness a few seconds before I spoke. “I’m only here because my old pain management specialist moved to Idaho and the HMO said I have to start from scratch.”

  He didn’t answer. I don’t think he knew what to say.

  Across the room, I heard my partner’s ringtone sound from the cell phone in my coat pocket. She knew where I was. It could only mean one thing.

  “Look,” I said, “I know you’re just trying to do your job and all, but you need to understand something. The things that I’ve seen, that I’ve experienced, have taught me more about pain than you’ll ever know. That ring you just heard means someone’s dead and I’m all out of time to sit here and chat with you. Either write me the fucking prescription or refer me to the new pain-management doctor.”

  He did both.

  As soon as I was in the hallway, I speed-dialed my partner, Jennifer Tanaka. We were next up in the case rotation, so she’d stayed behind at the Homicide Detail’s squad room downtown while I came to my appointment.

  “What’s up?” I asked.

  “I hope you’re ready to get back in the saddle.”

  I’d only returned three weeks before from a yearlong medical leave, and the first cases we’d caught had all been rubber stamps—a murder-suicide (an out-of-control husband and his unfortunate wife) and a convenience store robbery in which the clerk and the fourteen-year-old gangbanger trying to rob him both wound up dead. They all required the reams of paperwork inherent in any homicide investigation, but little more.

  “Something interesting?”

  “Yeah. It’s bad. Mother. Two kids. Bixby Knolls. Looks like a home invasion. I’m on my way now.” There was a waver in her voice I couldn’t remember ever hearing before.

  I wrote the address in my notebook and told her I’d meet her there.

  They used to call Bixby Knolls “uptown.” They don’t so much anymore, but its Los Cerritos neighborhood is still one of the oldest of the old-money sections of Long Beach. While most of the city has grown denser and taller, with cutting-edge architecture and designs to meet the ever-increasing upmarket demands of gentrification, Bixby Knolls is still the place to go for a traditional starter mansion with half an acre to call its own. Bordered by the concrete channel of the Los Angeles River on the west and hemmed in by the 405 freeway on the south and the Virginia Country
Club on the north, it’s a quiet neighborhood, still clinging to the notion that ostentatious bragging about wealth is just plain bad form. The homes there are luxurious enough that they never took the hit the rest of the real estate market did. The prices start at just under two million.

  Driving up Pacific, I watched the neighborhoods grow more expensive and expansive with each passing block. It doesn’t take long after the street passes under the San Diego Freeway to reach those seven-figure price tags.

  It turned out I didn’t even need to check the address. By the time I got there, there were already three cruisers, two unmarked cars, and the Crime Scene Detail’s van.

  Something was off. There was way too much activity for such an early stage of the investigation.

  I parked my Camry across the street in the shade of a hundred-year-old oak and got out. Half a dozen uniforms were hanging around the sidewalk in front of the house. I knew most of the names and faces, but nobody spoke. Just a few nodding heads. The house was a large colonial-style two story, white with very well-tended landscaping and a sprawling lawn at least fifteen yards deep, bisected by a stone pathway. As I was walking up, Jen came out of the front door and met me halfway.

  “What’s up with the crowd?”

  She didn’t answer. That surprised me.

  I softened my tone and said, “What’s inside?”

  Her eyes narrowed, and her jaw tightened. She’d taken her coat off and wore a sleeveless black silk blouse. There was an uncharacteristic tightness in her back and shoulders as she ran a hand through her spiky black hair.

  “Don’t know yet. Just had a quick look at the bodies, then I saw you pull up. Thought I’d let you give them the once-over before we dig in.”

  “You all right?”

  She bit her lip and gave her head a single shake. “Just fine,” she said, her right fist clenching and unclenching as she spoke.

  I didn’t believe her.

  On the last major case I’d worked, I was attempting to apprehend a suspect when he attacked me with a knife. Not just any knife, but a Gurkha kukri, which has a large and heavy downwardcurving blade that’s designed to maximize chopping ability. If it hadn’t caught on the stainless-steel band of my watch, the doctors assured me, I would have lost my left hand. Instead, I’m told how lucky I am, and five surgeries later, I’d recovered 90 percent of my pre-injury function.

  The pain, though, remained.

  The double front door was ten feet high and opened onto a two-story foyer. A wide, marble-treaded staircase curved up the wall to the right. Cops and criminalists moved up and down it with room to spare. I followed the trail of uniforms.

  At the upper landing, I found Lieutenant Ruiz, the LBPD Homicide Detail commander. He was the most solid boss I’d worked for in more than a decade and a half with the department. The Texas Rangers had trained him back in the eighties, and he had risen quickly through their ranks. But in those days, Latinos only advanced so high, and he’d had to migrate west to head his own squad. Rumor had it that the Rangers’ brass was concerned that they might not be able to distinguish between a Mexican lieutenant and the coyotes and narco mules they faced off against on a daily basis. “The tortilla ceiling,” some called it. Ruiz never said anything about it, though, and the whispered stories spread. But he had left Texas in the past, all but for a slight vocal inflection he was never quite able to shake. I heard it when he greeted me.

  “Danny.”

  I nodded back at him. “Hear it’s bad.”

  “Yeah. Mother, two kids. Sara Gardener-Benton, Bailey and Jacob. Six and three.”

  It was unusual for him to be on the scene at all, especially before the detectives. It meant that someone had bypassed the normal protocol and he’d already sounded the bugle for the cavalry. I wondered if the family mass killing on its own was enough to raise the case’s profile so high.

  There were uniforms and criminalists at each end of the hall.

  “Different rooms?”

  “Mother in one”—he nodded toward one doorway—“and kids in the other.”

  “Which is worse?”

  “Depends how you think on it.”

  I didn’t know what he meant. But I’d find out soon enough.

  Whoever killed Sara Gardener-Benton had done a real job of it. Her body was spread eagle on a four-poster California king in a master suite so large it made the bed itself seem small. Each of her limbs was tied taut to a corner post with three-quarter-inch synthetic mountaineering rope in knots that looked like they must have been tied by professional sailors. She was naked, and it was obvious even from twelve feet away that she’d been tortured extensively. Her body was deeply bruised, and she had bled profusely from her genital area.

  The ME from the coroner’s office was examining the body. He was a small man in his fifties. Bald and hard.

  “Carter,” I said. “What do you know?”

  “They beat the shit out of her, then raped her with a broken broomstick.”

  “They?”

  “Yeah. I’m fairly certain you’ll find it was a two-man job. Beat her first, then one held her down while the other tied. After that, fuckers probably took turns.”

  I looked at the puddle of blood between her legs. The top surface had begun to coagulate. The comforter had slid or been pushed off to the far side of the bed. I squatted and lifted the dust ruffle with a gloved finger.

  “Hasn’t bled through,” Carter said. “Probably won’t. This mattress is a top-of-the-line Simmons. Got this extra pillow-top layer of padding here on top. Synthetic fiber and memory foam. Not completely waterproof, but close.” He looked up at me. “You’re wondering how much she bled.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Too early to know for sure, but I’m betting it was the blood loss that got her. She probably passed out while they were still working on her.”

  He didn’t bother mentioning the shock or the pain, either of which might have hastened her loss of consciousness. I wondered if she really was lucky enough to have passed out.

  Bailey and Jacob were in another room down the hall. From the Barbie and Disney princess decor, I had to guess this one belonged to the girl.

  Her body was face up on the floor, with her face twisted toward her left shoulder. A dark-red-black tangle marred the corn silk smoothness of the hair on the side of her head. She wore blue jeans with an elastic waistband and a pink polo shirt, the collar stained with blood. She’d been shot twice behind the ear with a small-caliber weapon, probably a .22. Another round had left a crimson stain in the center of her chest, just about where she would have held her hand while reciting the Pledge of Allegiance.

  Jacob had been hiding in the closet. His jeans were just like his sister’s, but he wore a Toy Story T-shirt on top. He had been shot three times in the face and once in the chest. It was hard to see through the blood-soaked fabric, but it looked like the slug in the torso had gone right through Woody’s left eye.

  I couldn’t guess what he had done to warrant the extra bullet. He’d held his hands up to protect himself, but they’d done nothing—from the angle of the wound, it appeared that one of the shots had pierced his left palm and continued on into his skull.

  What does a three-year-old feel when looking into the barrel of a gun?

  A second door led out of the bedroom and into a large bathroom. Bright colors, double sinks, separate shower and tub, a toilet behind its own door, and finally, another exit into the next bedroom. It was more luxury than any child could need, but at least they shared. Maybe there was a lesson or two in that. Not that it would do them any good now.

  Through the second door, a Thomas and Friends theme dominated the room. The little tank engine was everywhere—curtains, sheets, and pillowcases, and especially in the wooden-track toy train set laid out on what I’m sure was a custom-made table. It was a full-size sheet of plywood framed by white pine one-by-sixes and mounted on short four-by-four legs that raised it about eighteen inches off the ground. A perfect height f
or a three-year-old engineer. I couldn’t help imagining Jacob grinning as Thomas chugged around the yards-long loops and curves of track through the village of plastic buildings.

  I swallowed at the catch in my throat and tried to rub some of the pain out of my wrist. Neither action had much effect.

  Downstairs, I found my way into what was either a family room or den. It always seems to me that one of the great challenges of wealth must be coming up with names for all the rooms in your house. I supposed it didn’t really matter what the Bentons called the room. What I found most interesting was the display of family photos that covered most of one wall. Something struck me as odd.

  Ruiz and Jen came into the room behind me. He spoke first. “The man in the pictures is Bradley Benton the Third.”

  That’s when I got it. He was in almost every picture. I scanned the rows. Bradley Benton III with guys in suits. Bradley Benton III on skis. Bradley Benton III on a boat with a big fish. Bradley Benton III in many places with many people wearing many outfits. There were even a few pictures with Bailey and Jacob. And, all the way on the left, a single image of him with Sara. A wedding photo. The one thing that was completely clear from the array was that Bradley was the star of the show.

  “Bradley Benton?” I asked. “Any relation?”

  “Yeah,” Ruiz said. “The victims are the daughter-in-law and grandchildren of our congressman.”

  “Terrific,” I said.

  That explained the high profile.

  I looked back at the photo of Bradley and Sara. She was beaming like most brides on their wedding day, but he wore a smug expression on his face, and an overweening arrogance emanated from his eyes. Just the kind of look that made me want to Taser someone.

  “What?” Jen asked me.

  “I don’t like him.”

  “No surprise there.”