Anything You Say Can and Will Be Used Against You Read Online Free Page A

teacher two days dead, strangled, laid out on her bed as though she was taking a nap, still wearing her bra but no underwear. We suspect the boyfriend.
    The next week, he came home with a gift basket full of perfumed oils, lotions, and soaps. “All natural,” he pointed out shyly, “just like you like.” It took me three years, but I finished off every item in that basket.
    I don’t use the washer and dryer at home for uniforms that are drenched in the smell of death; I worry that some lingering residue might attach itself to my other clothes. Some officers claim that digging a hole and putting the clothes in the ground for several days cuts the odor. I’ve never tried this; the thought of burying my uniform is too painfully absurd. Kean’s Dry Cleaning has a special deal for uniforms that have done the death beat: two washings, a steaming, and a buck-fifty off the regular price. So I take my uniforms, tied up in a white plastic bag, to Nancy at the Kean’s on Government Street, and she returns them three days later starched and hanging in clear plastic.
    But I imagine I still smell it, that the fibers have absorbed something holy and horrible that no amount of washing can erase. It’s only recently that I’ve realized I have absorbed it. This smell, death, it is a part of me, as pure and real and present as any memory of the child I once was.
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    Almost every morning of my childhood I awoke, reluctantly coming to consciousness, soothed by the warm, drowsy smell of yeast and flour and sometimes cinnamon. I would lie there in bed and hold an image of my mother downstairs, still in curlers perhaps, up since 5:00, now reading the Boston Globe and drinking her coffee while the morning’s bread rose and turned golden behind her. And from the bathroom that adjoined my room came the squeak of flesh on porcelain, the lazy lap of water as my father, dozing, dreaming of his boyhood, shifted in the bathtub.
    My mother baking for her family in the quiet of their slumber; my father distant in his memories, immersed in water: this is how I woke nearly every morning in my parents’ house.
    Fall in Massachusetts: burning leaves, roasted chestnuts, Indian summers, baked beans simmered slow and long, the salty bite of distant ocean in the air, and a crispness I’ve never found in the Deep South. That brilliant splash before the winter retreat when the world was swirling, crackling leaves waiting in some pile to embrace me. The wet, hungry earth; the sharp, sweet grass and mulch. In the winter, the world out my window had no smell but cold. It was a glittering fairyland of black and white—sparkles and snowflake patterns and frost and fluffy waist-high snow draped on trees, fences, my mother’s garden.
    During the spring and summer, our house stayed fragrant, full of flowers and cuttings: pine, wisteria, pansies, forsythia, violets—always something from outside, from one of my mother’s greatest loves, the garden. She would often pinch loose the petals of a rose or peony, snap a twig of French lavender or basil and crush it in her hand, and say, “There, smell.” And we did, my brother and I; we smelled the dirt and warmth of her hand. Years later I would yearn for this tenderness at times of terror: inching through a dark building, talking down a suicide, alone in a house with a burglar twice my size.Suddenly, irrationally, I wanted her hand there, cupping my chin, the feel of her roughened moist flesh, the gritty soil full of mystery and promise.
    As I grew older, into the double digits, I sought time alone in the house, without brother or parents. I prowled from room to room, standing in each doorway for a minute or so, taking it into me—the sight, smell, feel of each room, as though this absorption could somehow help me read and correct the increasingly strange and distant interactions between my mother and father, between my parents and myself.
    I would