Entropy (6 page)

“Look around and see if you can find what he used. Check the equipment that's here as well. Pull her out,” Mull said turning towards me. I kneeled along the side of the basement, a pair of goggles hanging loosely around my neck.

It appeared as if there had been a savage, failed session of
Marco Polo;
a simple children's game where one participant is basically blind and has to depend on their ears and sense of touch to lead them. I remembered playing it at the local YMCA pool as a child. I recalled the uncertainty and overwhelming panic I initially had felt treading water in the center of the pool. I remembered it all, seeing Molly's ears which were badly bruised, and almost caved into her skull. She most likely couldn't hear her attacker if the wounds had not been inflicted post-mortem. Molly's fingers were also swollen, but only partially because of the water. Some of the fingers on her right hand were displaced, the joints broken at the knuckles. When it happened, it probably sounded like a branch breaking in half. I wondered how alone she would have felt at that moment. The thought both sickened and saddened me.

“Would he have bothered to even try to rig the body to remain underwater?” I asked, as I adjusted the goggles around my eyes.

“At this point, I would say probably not. Either he wanted the victims to come to the surface, or he's sloppy, but I don't put much credence to that. Whoever it is hasn't made a single forensic mistake. It's more than likely a deliberate act,” he added. “You probably won't find her body rigged, and probably not on any of the one's going further … if there are any.”

“Could he have used any of the equipment here to fill this foundation with so much water?” I asked. The volume of water lying within the basement foundation was more than could be explained through run-off from around the site.

“The equipment he would have needed was brought here on a daily basis and then returned to the construction depot which is located at another site. It could be that the equipment was rented. I'll have someone contact the construction company to see if any of their equipment was unaccounted for in the last week or so, or if it was rented out. He would have needed something large enough to hold at least 2,000 gallons of water. Even if he had used any of the equipment, there wouldn't be any complete latent prints on it. Diadan Construction is one of the largest firms on the Eastern seaboard. Their equipment could have used on any number of different sites over the last several months,” Mull added. “That's a lot of elimination prints. We won't know until the foundation is drained, but according to the project foreman we talked to, the drainage lines were operating at capacity when construction stopped. So it's possible he could have deliberately ruptured a line down there in the foundation.

“The more apt question may be why would he want to fill it with water? He knows the body wouldn't go undiscovered long enough to completely decompose. Our man could have killed her in private then placed her body in a bathtub or something similar to allow her to decompose. If he did that in close proximity to other people or buildings, he would have to somehow mask the smell. Unless the water itself is the message,” Mull said.

After pausing slightly, Mull continued. “I can understand the use of water because of how destructive it is, initially, to a corpse, and in destroying potential forensic clues. But he could dump the bodies anywhere though, dismember them, immolate them, and make them almost impossible to identify. But he doesn't,” Mull said, turning his back, and looking out at the surrounding scene. “He puts them in places where he knows that they're going to be found eventually. It may be a misjudgment on my part, but I think that whoever he is, is taunting us,” he added.

Water seeped into the basement foundation from the runoff areas and trickled down the imperfect boundaries of the incomplete masonry. Through the clear synthetic material of the goggles I stared at her as I waded towards the body. The surface of the water was cloudy and dense, littered with twigs and small insects moving rapidly from place to place. The alabaster color of the primed walls was stained by the red clay that had been washed in.

There were no ropes or bindings that broke the surface of the water. It hadn't occurred to me until I got nearer the victim's body how much she resembled Mull's youngest daughter, Isabella. A small insect tripped across the skin of the water. The displacement caused air to move over the opening of sections of incomplete plumbing, comprised of industrial plastic. It sounded like someone quickly gasping for air. The mental images that accompanied this haunting sound were excruciating and unforgiving.

“You don't have to do this anymore. I'm sure that Detective Mull could find a suitable replacement if pressured enough,” a voice began, saving me from my own thoughts. Standing in a rain poncho at the edge of the basement housing was the coroner, Walter Fasman. Normally, he wore glasses, but because of the mist, I noticed that he had taken them off. “If the perpetrator is using water to try and decompose the body, there aren't that many large, accessible areas of water that he hasn't already used, except for the river maybe, unless he starts to repeat himself,” he concluded. “Besides, without any real progress, it's only a matter of time until the federal authorities take over the investigation. It'll happen soon and then we'll all be removed from the case. We're just not well trained enough, and don't have the necessary experience to handle this kind of thing,” he said.

“Something like this shouldn't be happening here,” I said, adjusting the dry suit around my neck.

“There's no latitude to immorality,” was Fasman's reply.

“I'm sorry, but this goes beyond immorality alone.” The water appeared to close in on me. I was normally able to easily adjust to the isolation and occasional desperation of being in the water at times and embracing that feeling of quiet autonomy and the utter embrace of the water around me, but this had changed in the last few months. I watched as the coroner look over his shoulder and motion his attendants to roll out a gurney. Several minutes later, I placed my hands underneath the victim and guided her carefully along the water, as if I were teaching her to swim. The coroner knelt over the girl's body and helped to secure her inside a bag. In doing so, he cradled her fragile body so closely and almost with a paternal tenderness, that I thought he was going to whisper into her ear and reassure her that she could no longer be hurt anymore.

Body number five (May): Michael Dyer, age 29, civil engineer, father of one girl, divorced. Was pulled from the submerged wreckage of an automobile when the car he was driving veered off of a road to avoid an accident and careened into the river. According to the autopsy results, he appeared to have died on impact when the front of his skull was crushed against the steering column. He also suffered a subdural hematoma. It was determined that Dyer was not wearing his seat belt at the time of impact. He was traveling with a passenger at the time of the incident.

His was the first body that I pulled from the water that wasn't related to the case, and that wasn't the body of a child.

There should have been nothing different about it. The body, although under the water, weighed more than all of the others. It was hard to tell for sure though with the current pulling constantly, moving the appendages and frame of the body through the fluid with a blunt, reckless force.

I got the call out from the department at around 5 a.m. on a Thursday morning because they thought that I might be needed. I wasn't asleep at the time so the early hour really didn't really bother me. And I was alone. I almost wanted an emergency call to happen so that I could escape from the claustrophobia of uncertainty and evasion that had started to seep and ebb into our house over a period of months and was now at a point of saturation. Although it was not visibly noticeable, I knew it was there.

It was like mold - no, a spore.

That was its genesis, a small microbial organism cleaving the kinetic balance of my marriage. I had inhaled it into my lungs from the stagnant water from which I had pulled children. I carried its characteristics and biology into the molecules of the water that we drank and the water that we bathed in.

Hannah was in California researching a documentary and I was here packing the gear that I might need for the call-out, hoping that I would not have to go into the water again. Yet I knew that I would. I could smell both her blooming grace over the top of the humidity, and a rank stench in the emptiness of the garage. It was odd that I hadn't sensed this before.

There was a multi-vehicle accident on one of the back roads adjacent the river. The exact cause was yet to be determined, but there were some preliminary reports from eyewitnesses that heavy, dense fog may have played some part in the crash. As I listened to the scanner on the way over, they called in repeatedly for paramedics and emergency lighting to be brought to the scene. When I arrived at the scene some six or seven minutes later, the area directly around the crash had been sectioned off, with a barrier and two plain-clothed officers were diverting traffic into the oncoming lane to give the first rescuers on the scene room to work. The road would eventually have to be completely closed off. I shut off my car's headlights, depressed the button to unlock the trunk and grabbed a set of road flares.

The routine of doing this work should have been more of a burden than it was, carrying the swelled honor of the dead on my shoulders and placing them into the back of a van. But the relationships, the false intimacy that I had with their lifelessness, was simple, unadulterated, uncomplicated by the burden of guilt and apprehension. It couldn't be betrayed because it did not exist in the truncated and limited vocabulary of the dead. The light cast by things in the world outside and above just didn't penetrate the water that deeply. Nothing that rested down there could be exposed. Even the truth became suppressed underneath all the rot and debris.

When I arrived on the scene in the early gray light, I was told that two people had been pronounced dead and that two more would need to be air-lifted to the nearest medical center. One of the vehicles had become engulfed in flames when the fuel tank ignited after the collision. Plumes of somber, black smoke suffocated the atmosphere. It looked like the barren streets of a war-torn republic. A third car had careened off the side of the road and broken through a barrier. It rested on its passenger side in the thick mud on the edge of the bank so I probably wouldn't have to go into the water. I felt somewhat relived. The water in the river was resilient, bitter and cut through your suit as if the molecules of its chemistry were serrated.

I stepped carefully around some of the damage and set flares down at certain points. It was hard not to notice the charred human remains in the car that were almost glued into position against the seats, their faces stretched in horror. They looked like plastic dolls. Melted wax paraffin dolls.

One of the officers asked me to place more flares farther down the road where it disappeared around a blind bend, almost 800 feet from where the wreckage started. His hand shook when he pointed into the mist. I couldn't tell the difference between the smoke drifting around the bodies and the fog that wrapped them gently in reticence.

I thought of Hannah's breath moving along the asphalt, searching for me through the ruins, neglecting insignificant places and objects, before collapsing on the dark flesh of the water, thinking I was trapped, submerged underneath. I wanted to hear her voice, now distant by thousands of miles. I imagined her looking down from the cement rim of a lighthouse, gazing upon an opaque canvas calling me home, her voice an incredible siren; her love and her sound so immense and unyielding, it could break through the vast desert of oceans, rip through the hull of a ship and unthread the sails of any vessel that attempted to mute her. I imagined her coming closer, her speech leading me, guiding me to land and sanctuary, or to collide upon the irregular debris of desolated cliffs. I begged for the sun to rise, and for its first fingers of light to tear through the dark fabric of ambivalence which tightened against my body.

It sounded like extinction; a series of loud impacts leading to entropy and decay. It was mortality. I had no other way to describe what scattered through the density of the atmosphere and the trees. It was something that I had never heard before, that sound. If I hadn't been there, I would have never been able to clearly tell what it was. It was piercing, powerful and enduring.

In the distance ahead of me, a vehicle travelled around the sharp, oncoming curve, the pale, raspberry fog from the flares spinning and trailing off into oblivion. The car sped past, the driver must not have seen me. Then, there was that sound behind me. I turned and ran towards it. In the moments after the car had sped past me, the vehicle had swerved onto the shoulder of the road to avoid the wreckage of the accident and at speed had crashed through the guardrail, sailed past the overturned car that still rested motionless in the mud and landed hard in the river.

The currents at that time of year were fast and the chances of the driver and any possible passengers surviving were minimal, especially if the windshield of the automobile had been compromised. No one knew how many people were in the vehicle. By the time I arrived, the car had been submerged for almost four minutes. There was no time to lose.

I hadn't latched the trunk of my car so I was able to slide quickly into a wetsuit and secure a compressed-air tank over my shoulders. I was struggling to catch my breath in the cold, early morning air. The air was so sharp that it hurt my chest just to inhale, as it tore through my lungs like they were tissue paper. In a dream-life state, I ran towards the submerged car and watched the water break suddenly around my feet and begin to pull back around my ankles. Soon, I was knee-deep in the frigid waters and watched the distant landscape of the high-rises disappear from my line of sight.