After the sudden death of a four-and-a-half-year-old son, I found no comfort in anything or anyone; the church seemed powerless to help me, as did the medical profession. I could not go out of the flat I was living in at that time and, although I tried very hard, I could see nothing but blackness and an intense longing to die. One morning I was dusting, tidying, the usual household chores, when I smelled the most wonderful garden flowers. It is difficult to describe the smell I mean—rather like a garden after rain. Being of a somewhat practical mind in such things, I looked around for the source of the smell. There were no flowers in the flat, certainly none outside, no perfumed polishes or toilet things in use. Then I sat down and for the first time since my son died I felt peaceful inside. I believe this was God’s comfort; my son felt very near and I no longer felt alone.
All I can tell you now is that I have no fear of what we call death. To me it will be shedding the material life for a spiritual life and although I have had no great revelations, I shall try to live according to His divine plan and be ready to leave when He is ready for me.
—SEEING THE INVISIBLE
TYLER’S BROTHER, ZACK, four years older, was different from Tyler in his approach to life—in particular, the church. He was there every Sunday, and he took to the Mormon lifestyle like a fish to water.
“He absolutely believed,” Tyler told me. “And he does now, too. I think the faith has been really good for him. We slept in the same room growing up. Sunday mornings, he’d shout over to me that it was time to get up for church. Usually, I’d give him an ‘I ain’t going,’ and turn over and go back to sleep. But he didn’t get all high-and-mighty about it. Nobody in my family did. I think that might be why I still feel like I have a good relationship with my faith even if I’m not in it up to my chin like my brother. If I’d been pushed to get up and drag myself off every Sunday, I think I might just hate it now. I got a couple of friends who are exactly that way for exactly that reason.”
One thing Tyler wasn’t lukewarm about was what he wanted to do in life. He was going to be a cop. The decision might have been made when he was just a kid in front of the TV, but it didn’t go away as he got older. As soon as he was twenty, he was going to join the local academy.
The decision was a hard one for Tyler’s mom, Pam, when she realized her son was really serious—that it was going to happen.
“I used to lie awake at night,” she told me, “so torn up about it. I just couldn’t imagine my boy going off to a job every day where . . .”
“Where he risked being shot,” I said, accurately if somewhat insensitively.
“Yes,” she said. “Exactly. But Tyler’s father finally convinced me. He said, ‘He has something he truly wants to do. A calling. We should be behind him one hundred percent.’ ”
And so they were.
Tyler met Brittany while he was at Utah Valley University. He’d entered because he graduated from high school at seventeen, and you couldn’t join the police academy until you were twenty. So he enrolled, took some criminal justice and journalism classes, and dropped out, with only a few credits left to earn for the year, the minute he turned twenty. Then he entered the academy.
Brittany had grown up in Utah and Las Vegas. Her mom’s a Mormon but her biological dad, Kenny, is a Lutheran, and she grew up with the same kind of live-and-let-live attitude regarding religious faith that Tyler did. Brittany’s parents divorced, and her biological dad lives in Iowa today, but he still comes out to visit his daughter and her family. “There’s pretty good feelings all around,” Tyler told me.
But Brittany’s childhood hadn’t been perfect. At the time Tyler met her, her parents were divorced, and there was the usual fallout when a family breaks apart. Tyler married her when he was twenty, and she was just sixteen.
“Sixteen, huh?” I said to Brittany on the phone one day, after Tyler suggested I give her a call to get her perspective on things. “So was life really terrible at your house when Tyler came along?”
“No,” Brittany said, clearly looking carefully for the right words and also looking to avoid the wrong ones. “It wasn’t terrible. It was just . . . a hard time.”
“And Tyler noticed that?”
“Oh yeah.”
“So,” I said, half-jokingly because it was so obvious, “I’m getting the feeling Tyler was always something of a ‘rescuer.’ ”
Brittany laughed. “Yeah, you could say that.”
Tyler officially became an officer on June 5, 2006. He was twenty-one. His first day on the job was a memorable one.
“So it’s my first day as a fully instated member of the Spanish Fork Police Department,” Tyler told me. “I’m a cop. I knew Brittany was proud of me. I knew the rest of my family was too—including my mom. My dad really got her around to the idea that if your kid has something he wants to do in life, it’s a blessing. So she was behind me one hundred percent, too, and I wanted to make her proud. That first day, Brittany and the baby waved me out the door like it was 1942 and I was going off to fight the Nazis. Needless to say, I wanted to make her proud, too.
“So I get to the station and we go out on patrol, me and this other officer, a sergeant in the department. I was a rookie, out on his first ride, and I was beyond nervous. I asked the sergeant things like, ‘What do I do at this next intersection? Do I take a left?’ The sergeant said, ‘If you want to. It’s up to you.’ It was a crazy sensation. I was behind the wheel of a patrol car, and there’s your town all around you and it’s your job to protect it. You don’t expect what that’s going to feel like, how disorienting it is.”
“Okay,” I said. “You’re driving around. What next?”
“In just a couple of minutes, we get a call.”
“Is that unusual?”
“Yeah,” Tyler said. “I mean, kind of. It’s like fishing. You can drop your line in the water and get a bite, or you can wait five hours. There’s no telling. But that day, right off the bat we get this call on the radio: ‘6J24, can you take a possible 1085 Echo?’
“Echo means someone’s dead. I can’t believe it. I pick up the radio and tell them we’re responding. The address isn’t far away. I hit the switch for the siren and the button for lights just under it, and I start going. It’s the first time I’ve driven a car with lights and siren, and I’m not used to how cars just get out of my way. I went into a kind of tunnel vision, just not wanting to make a wrong turn with the sergeant there in the car with me.”
Five minutes later, they pulled up at the house, a one-story rambler-style building not all that different from the one Tyler grew up in.
“We get out of the car, and I’ve already sweated through my shirt. There’s a lady in front of the house, and she just says, ‘He’s out back.’ We head around, and there’s this regular-looking yard with a pretty big tree in it. Big enough that I figured it was probably there before the house went up. There’s a long, thick, horizontal branch, and a guy hanging from it.”
“What kind of rope was he hanging from?” I asked.
“Oh, just . . . ordinary brown hardware-store rope. We walk up to the guy. He’s just a couple inches off the ground, just hanging there, not moving. He’s wearing shorts and a Looney Tunes T-shirt. Like, it’s the last day of his life, and that’s what he’s wearing. I don’t know why, but that detail just freaked me out a little more than I already was. The sergeant tells me to check his pulse, so I take the guy’s wrist. It’s cold, like a frog. There’s nothing. I tell the sergeant so, and he heads back to the front of the house, leaving me there standing next to this guy. The guy’s mouth was slightly open, and he was wearing wire-rim glasses, and you could see that behind them his eyes were bugging out a little bit. But basically he just looked normal.”
Out front another vehicle pulled up and an EMT came around and listened to the man’s heart. The man was indeed dead. The sergeant came back around, too.
“The sergeant says, ‘Hey, this is your first call so I’ll take the report, but hang around.’ ”
“He said, ‘hang around,’ huh?” I asked.
“Yeah,” Tyler said. “He knew what he was doing. He’s a good guy. It wasn’t like he was trying to make me suffer. He was just basically saying: ‘Welcome to it. This is what being a police officer is all about.’ So I just stood there next to this guy, trying not to get any more wigged out than I already was. The sergeant came back again in a little bit, and I guess I looked worse than when he left because he said, ‘You look like you need to sit down.’ I probably looked about the same as the guy hanging from the tree at that point. Anyhow, that was the first time I got it.”
“Got what?”
“That flu feeling. It’s what I always get in situations like that. Still today. All officers react differently to ugly situations. Bodies, violence, blood . . . the smell of blood especially. It gets to you. Some guys don’t show a thing, but they feel it, too, or at least most of them do. One guy in our department, every time he gets called to a bad situation, a bad traffic accident or a shooting or whatever, he loses it, just pukes his guts up. Every time. He’s a good officer. We kid him about it, but we all understand. Everyone does something different. With me, it’s that flu feeling. It’s like I just get the worst flu you can imagine, instantly.”
That night, Tyler came home from his first big day on the job to a hug from Brittany. She asked him how his day at work went.
Tyler gave her a simple answer. “Honey,” he said, “I don’t think I can do this job.”
But Tyler returned the next day, and the next, and before long he discovered that he loved being a cop just as much as he had always dreamed he would. There were always bad situations, ugly ones, and sometimes downright dangerous ones. But the basic feeling Tyler usually came home with was that he had spent his day at a job where he had made a difference—made things a little better for at least one or two people, and sometimes a whole lot more than that.
“There has been some really nice stuff,” he told me. “Incredible stuff. About four years ago, me and Harward were on patrol when we got a call that a six-year-old boy had collapsed on an elementary school playground. We got out of the car and found the kid lying by a jungle gym on the playground, on the grass, stone still, his face purple, and no breath. The chief of our unit was there, and he’d been administrating CPR but with no result. We had an adult defibrillator with us. But twelve is the minimum age for an adult defibrillator. Use it on a six-year-old, and you risk basically blowing his heart up.”
“So what happened?”
“Well, I had to make a decision, obviously. I figured, this may kill him, but he’s pretty much dead already. So I lay the grips on the kid’s rib cage, shout ‘Clear!’ and Harward turns on the juice. The charge blasted the kid three inches into the air.”
And, as it happened, back to life. On the operating table later that day, surgeons discovered the child had a heart condition. No one had known anything about it until that moment on the playground when he’d simply collapsed in the middle of playing a game.
“I run into that kid from time to time,” Tyler said. “He’s doing great, and Spanish Fork being a small town I run into his mom, too. I don’t know. I guess it might sound corny, but that’s the kind of stuff I became an officer for. Not to be a hero, but to feel that sense that yeah, I made a difference today.”
“So why did you do it?” I asked.
“Do what?” asked Tyler.
“Put that mechanism on him. The kid was six. The device wasn’t safe for kids younger than twelve. What if you’d killed him?”
Tyler thought for a moment.
“Well, you have to remember that he was basically dead already. I mean, he wasn’t breathing. His face was purple. He had about a minute or two before there wouldn’t be any option left at all. Plus . . .”
Tyler hesitated a moment more.
“Plus what?” I said.
“There was just something that told me to do it. That it was okay.”
That “just something” came up a lot with Tyler. Like most police officers, he got used to paying attention to what his intuition told him. He would go inside, listen, and act on what he heard.
“So who’s telling you that stuff?” I asked.
Again there was a silence. Then Tyler, a Mormon, told me, an East Coaster almost completely ignorant about what real Mormon life is like, something I didn’t know.
“Your guardian angel?” I threw out.
“Yeah,” said Tyler. “I think you could say that.”
“So,” I asked, “do you believe you have a guardian angel?”
“Oh yeah,” Tyler said.
“Is that something that Mormons believe—that people have guardian angels?”
“Oh sure, it’s one of the main teachings. You learn it really early, and it sticks.”
“So,” I said, “when you were, like, ten, if you needed guidance with some problem, you’d turn to your guardian angel?”
“Sure.”
“Is that what keeps you out of trouble today?”
“Yeah, I’d say so. I think I’d have to say yeah.”
I knew that though angels are a nonnegotiable part of Christianity as a whole, not all Christians believed in guardian angels. I knew that Catholics did and that a lot of Protestants and Evangelicals didn’t. But I was not really interested in that. What I was interested in was that Tyler lived an extremely challenging life, in which he had to make fast decisions all the time. Tyler’s day-to-day life was not cozy and abstract. He could be killed any old time. His life was serious. He saw a lot of suffering, a lot of death, a lot of ugly, ugly things. How did he manage it? That was what interested me. And with this piece of information, I thought I had another clue.
So all told, Tyler loved his job. All told, it was what he thought it was going to be. Not all peaches and cream, but not all garbage and misery either. But somewhere along the line—about five years into his ten years on the force—something started to change.
“I went from loving my job,” Tyler said, “to hating it. In the beginning, I’d figured: you show the people you deal with respect, and they respect you back. Of course, if you’re struggling to put someone in a choke hold because he’s drunk and disorderly, he’s not going to have a lot of nice things to say to you at the time. But I’ve had more than one guy who I’ve dealt with when they were all messed up on something—drugs or alcohol or whatever—and later, when everything was straightened out and the guy’s paid his fines or done his month of jail or probation or whatever it is, he’ll come and find me and tell me that he appreciated how I dealt with him. He’ll say, like, ‘I know I was pretty messed up, and giving you a challenge. You could have smashed my head against the pavement, something like that. But you didn’t. I just want you to know I appreciate that.’ ”
“Wow, that’s happened?” I said, for some reason surprised at this idea.
“Oh yeah, a bunch of times.”
“That’s pretty nice that someone would do that. That they’d see your side of things and make that effort.”
“Oh yeah,” Tyler said. “It definitely is. But . . . ”
“But what?”
“But in the last five years, things have just done a complete one-eighty. I hate to say it, but basically I don’t like my job now. It’s like something’s changed. And not just here either, not just with me. Now you turn on the news and you see five cops who’ve beat the crap out of some guy for no reason, or even killed him.”
Tyler paused, knowing he was in a zone where he could say something he didn’t quite mean, where he might end up rethinking what he said later and wishing he’d put it differently. He’s not a complicated guy, but in a funny way, he is a complicated guy, and in the course of trying to get a handle on how his mind works, I’ve come to realize that there really and truly is a certain something else that he turns to when he’s out in the field, even when he’s not fully aware that he’s doing it. He goes inside, and—without really even knowing he’s doing it—he asks something inside him what to do. Then he comes back out and does it. I can sense him doing that now with me.
“I mean,” Tyler continued, “there’s always been those cops. Cops who’ll say, ‘Oh boy, we got this guy on a DUI and he’s giving us some mouth.’ There’s plenty of guys like that outside the force, and there’s some guys like that in the force, too, no question. You know they became cops because it’s a great way to boss people around or beat them up and get paid for it.
“But the thing is, there’s way less of those than the good ones. I mean, just way less. But these days at least, it seems like those kinds of cops are the ones drawing all the attention. Even though there’s thousands of other cops who aren’t like that at all, who joined up for good reasons. The right reasons. It’s like four jerks somewhere in South Texas can be officially appointed by the media to stand for what all cops are like. I feel that every day. I’ll be driving around in my squad car now, and someone will just flip me off.”
“For what?” I asked.
“For nothing!” Tyler said, seemingly freshly amazed at the fact of it. “Just because I’m a cop, and cops are the bad guys now. Well, that is unless someone needs you. Then you’re okay for a while. But even that’s frustrating because there’s so much going on these days with people. You’ll get called to some house where a guy’s flipping out because he found out his wife’s been cheating on him, and you’ll come in, and it’s like everyone will turn and look at you and basically say: ‘Okay, you’re here. Fix this.’ And, you know, you can’t. You wouldn’t believe some of the situations cops get called to these days. Family stuff. Psychological stuff. Stuff there should be other people to handle, professionals in those areas. But there aren’t. Not anymore. Not like there used to be when there was money for that kind of stuff. And sure, of course you want to help. But you can’t, at least beyond calming the situation down or whatever. There’s just so much in life you can’t fix these days. If you want to learn that fast, become a police officer.”
I sympathized with that desire to fix the world and the knowledge that you can’t—that you can barely fix anything. It made me think of a new question.
“What’s the most frustrating type of case you get called on?” I asked. “Like, the worst I-can’t-fix-this situation?”
“Oh, that’s easy,” said Tyler. “The sex cases. The sex cases will just drive you nuts.”
At first I figured Tyler was talking about prostitution—that maybe there was some section of Spanish Fork with a red-light area, and he had to go back every night and deal with the same people.
But it turned out he was not talking about that.
“The abusers. They’re what really get to me. We get called to a lot of home abuse cases. Situations where a dad or a stepdad is abusing one of his kids, or more than one. Taking advantage of them sexually. It’s brutal. You take the kids away, but you don’t know for sure if it’ll hold, if they’ll end up back in that house. It just makes you feel so powerless.”
“What are the worst ones you’ve had in that department?”
“Easy again,” Tyler said. “The elders. They’re the worst. They’re what really get you.”
Once again, as an East Coaster, I didn’t understand the reference. “Who are the elders?”
“The elders of the LDS,” Tyler said, and at first I had to stop and recall what LDS even meant. Then I remembered: Latter-Day Saints. Tyler was talking about Mormon elders who abused their kids. I’m used to the controversy surrounding the Catholic clergy in recent years, and I of course know that this kind of thing happens among Evangelical churches, basically all kinds of institutions everywhere, and how much heartbreak it causes the members of these churches, both clergy and laypeople, who believe and who struggle with the realization that someone of their faith could do such evil. But somehow this was still surprising news to me.
“Does that happen a lot?”
“No, no,” said Tyler. “Not at all when you look at the big picture. I really want to emphasize that, because I love my faith and I love the people in it. I mean, Mormons are just like every other faith that way, or I guess every other faith—I’m no expert obviously. But it seems to me that in any religion there are always a few bad apples, and just like in the police world, sometimes those bad apples work hard to get to the top of the heap, because that’s where they can do what they want and have as few people above them to stop them from it. Ninety-nine point nine percent of Mormons are the nicest people you could ever hope to meet, and that goes for the elders, too. It’s just like any other church, any other institution. There’s just the bad ones is all. And it only takes dealing with a handful of cases like that to make you wonder. To shake your faith in this stuff.”
By this stuff, I took it that Tyler basically meant “the world.” It was the old, old question: If there’s a God, how could he have set things up this way?
“Yeah,” I said. “The world today can shake your faith in anything.” And, of course, I meant it.
One case in particular stuck in Tyler’s mind. He and another officer were called over to the house of a prominent local Mormon elder. A report had come in that he had regularly been molesting his two daughters, nine and eleven. Tyler knocked on the man’s door, and the man answered it. He asked Tyler if he could come back some other time. He was very busy, because he was preparing his talk for the next day—a Sunday—when he was to preach at his local congregation.
The combination of hardened experience and stubborn innocence I’d seen so often before in Tyler once again came to the fore. I could hear in his voice not just his rage but his sheer incredulity at the situation.
“Here’s this guy, busy writing out this sermon that’s going to tell everybody how to live upright in the eyes of the Lord. And meanwhile he’s regularly been abusing these two girls who aren’t even teenagers yet. It just makes your head spin. We charged him, took him in, and he got what he deserved. But it sticks with you.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Evil will do that. I recently learned something about one of the higher-ups in my elementary school back in the seventies—the guy who administered the discipline, the guy you made sure you steered clear of because he was really strict. He was like the original authority figure for me—the guy that, to this day, I still associate with what authority means. Well, it turns out that all the years I was at that school, he was molesting the female students. In the end, it was a girl in my grade who ended up bringing him to justice.”
America started out as a country that was going to try to address this evil element in humankind—this fallen, corrupt nature that Adam and Eve’s sin pins on us—in a new way. America was to be the place where the New Man was to be born—a being who lived beyond the sins of the past and was directed toward the hope of the future.
What this hope eventually turned into was what high school and college teachers call the “myth of progress.” Our love of progress, our need to feel that we are “moving forward,” as everyone likes to say today, is based on the notion that we can find a way out of human corruption. Like the Babylonians who built the ziggurats or the men who built the Tower of Babel, we believe that progress in itself is a kind of stairway to heaven.
Yet look what that so-called progress has led to these days.
As a kid, Tyler had had an easy time with progress. Like most Americans, he liked the idea on principle. But for ten years his work on the force had been slowly, steadily—you might even say mercilessly—grinding away at that idea. He was returning home at night with dead eyes; when Brittany saw them she knew what kind of day Tyler had had. She didn’t even bother asking, as she knew that in those moments, she was doing him a favor in just staying quiet. On nights like that, Tyler would be torn between his desire to spill his guts, tell Brittany every last ghastly aspect of whatever case he’d worked on, or to shield her from it. To take a shower, change into fresh clothes, have a couple of beers, and declare the day closed.
But those doors rarely stayed closed, badly as Tyler wanted them to. They swung open, and out came the images, the sounds, and the smells. As any police officer, and anyone who’s been in battle, will likely tell you, smells, just in themselves, can be mysteriously terrifying, mysteriously panic-inducing. It almost seemed to Tyler sometimes as if they had minds of their own.
Faith is a language: one that each of us learns, or doesn’t learn, from others or just by ourselves. No one goes through the world not wondering what the world is about—what kind of place it is. But some wonder more than others. And at a certain point in his ten years on the Spanish Fork Police Force, Tyler began to realize that faith was a language he didn’t fully speak. Not well enough. Not well enough to handle what he saw each day. He may still have had a guardian angel, and he may still have relied on it to see him through each day, but his contact with that being was growing ever more tenuous, and the more tenuous it got, the more lost, the more defeated Tyler felt as he faced the evil of the world.
Gradually, so slowly that Tyler didn’t even realize it at first, something inside him started to shift. The daily ugliness started wearing on him in a way it hadn’t during his first years on the force. He’d come home feeling dirty, and the dirt wouldn’t wash off. His guardian angel, perhaps overtaxed by the sheer amount of daily material it was tasked with shielding Tyler from, was letting way too much slip past.
In the two years leading up to the episode at Spanish Fork Bridge, two incidents occurred that undermined Tyler’s attitude toward his job with a new kind of power. They made him start questioning things—things about life—that he hadn’t thought about heavily since he was a kid.
“This’ll sound dumb,” Tyler said to me, “but these two things that happened, they started me in on more than just having problems with my job. They started me in on having problems with life. With what it’s about. With whether it’s about anything at all.”
While Tyler and Brittany’s house was being built, they went to live with Brittany’s mom, Shelly, and her stepdad, Kirt, in Springville, a town not too far from Spanish Fork.
“It was June 2013. Brit and the kids and I had just got home, and we were unpacking when I got a call on my cell. It was the lieutenant down at the station. He told me there’d just been a report of a deceased male and a deceased child found at a home. I was coming up on my first ever cycle as detective, so I figured the lieutenant thought that even though I was still technically off duty, this would be a good first case for me to work. I wouldn’t be the lead investigator, but I’d follow along, keep my eyes open, and just get a handle on working a case in that capacity.”
Tyler and a partner drove to the residence and learned more details. A woman had come home to the house where she and her brother were living with his two-year-old son, following a breakup between him and the child’s mom. The sister found a message taped to the back door, written in her brother’s hand.
“The note,” Tyler told me, “said what to do with his property, who to leave this and that to, not to go inside, and to call the police.”
The sister went in anyhow. The living room was in complete disarray, lamps knocked over, and there were what looked like blood marks on the walls. She went upstairs to the room where her two-year-old nephew slept and found him laid out on his mattress on the floor, as he would usually be. The child was wearing just a diaper, and he was dead. The sister could see blood in his hair and bruises, heavy and dark like storm clouds, on the pale skin of the boy’s back and arms.
In a panic, the woman searched the rest of the house. There was a basement workshop where her brother spent a lot of time, and it was there that she found him. He was dead on the floor from a gunshot to the head, the gun he’d used still in his hand.
“When I got there,” Tyler said, “the place was taped off and ready for investigation, but still not too many people had gone in. I met with the other investigators and the lieutenant. He told me we were going to go through the house and I was going to videotape it. Once the search warrant arrived, I got on my marshmallow suit and went in.”
“Marshmallow suit?” I asked.
“That’s what we call the hazmat suits they make you wear in situations like that. It minimizes your impact on the scene, and it keeps you safe from any blood or other materials that might be present. It’s bulky and you feel like an astronaut, but you got to wear them. So we walked through and I filmed, going from room to room, focusing in on every detail I felt might be of importance. I walked into the kid’s bedroom and there was the mattress on the floor, and the kid. You could see he was heavily bruised from being beaten—that that was the cause of his death. But the thing was, it came home to me all of a sudden that all the blood marks that were on the walls of the house—they were there from the kid being thrown against them. There were a bunch of mostly empty vodka bottles down in the living room by the TV, so it became pretty clear what had probably happened. The guy had gotten just crazy drunk and thrown his kid all around the house, bouncing him off the walls like a doll. There was blood on the kitchen table so he’d probably slammed him down there a couple of times as well. Then when he’d finished—or maybe he passed out for a while and woke up back in his senses—he did the only thing he figured he could do. He took his kid up to bed and laid him down, put him to bed. Then he wrote that note for the door to protect his sister from seeing what had happened, and went down to the cellar and took his own life.”
“So,” I said, “a man under enormous psychological pressure snaps, and gets taken over by a rage that knows no limits. He becomes someone else basically. Then the rage passes, and the man, in a pathetic last gesture of affection for the boy he killed, lays him down to rest, just like it’s a normal night. Then he goes down to his basement and commits the last—the only—action available to him.”
“Yup,” said Tyler in the same paradoxically profound yet gee-whiz way he has. “That’s pretty much it.”
“That’s about the most tragic and sad story I’ve ever heard.”
“Yeah,” said Tyler.
Then, to lighten the mood, I said, “I guess I’d make quite a detective myself.”
Tyler laughed and said, “Yup, you sure would.”
But it turned out there was more to the story. The next morning, after a full night without sleep investigating the crime scene, Tyler went up to Salt Lake City and watched the child’s autopsy. Doctors placed the boy on a table, cut his chest down the center, clipped open the rib cage, examined and removed the tiny, orderly placed organs from within his chest cavity, then peeled off the rest of the child’s skin.
“These guys,” Tyler said, “I knew they were professionals. You do anything enough, you get used to it. But watching a boy pretty much the same age as my son get gutted and skinned like a deer—it was tough.”
Tyler went home and grabbed his kids and hugged them. He hugged Brittany, too. It only took one look at his face for Brittany to get the gist of what he’d been up to all night and all morning.
“She can read me the minute I walk in the door,” Tyler said. “My face, my skin color . . . she says I get this kind of stare, and when she sees it, she knows I’m mostly not there, that a good slice of me is absent, and that I can’t come back even though I want to, and that she just has to wait a while.”
That day, Brittany had long since begun to wonder just how much more of her husband his job was going to take away from her. But over the next few months, the memory of the incident faded, or seemed to fade.
Then came the case that changed everything.