Entropy (9 page)

Body Number Seven (June): Mindy Yhros, 14 years old. Her body was discovered in an isolated lake that rested at the rear of the McIlheny's farm at around 5 p.m. When she was removed from the water it was evident that one of her arms had been lacerated almost completely to the bone. The coroner revealed the mutilation to be postmortem. No one was able to determine with any certainty how long her body had been there before it was found. After it was discovered and all the examinations had been completed, the coroner resigned.

The initial belief after the first body was discovered was that the perpetrator was attempting sexual gratification and had killed the victim in panic. However, this was unsubstantiated and had been quickly dismissed, especially after the brutal discovery of the body of Molly Janikowski and the other children. Other Federal agencies had gotten themselves involved, especially after I was shot at on the river, even though I was considered by everyone to be a civilian. Some State bureaucrats felt that Mull had underreacted and that the department wasn't doing enough. Ballistics tests were run on the bullet removed from the riverbed. No matches were found. Everyone was at breaking point.

The rain continued to fall, the passing winds pulling the drops horizontally across the once serene aspects of the sweeping farms and houses along Ardmore Avenue. It looked like a thousand sewing needles falling from a basket. Wisps of fog swirled through the beams cast from the car's headlights before rolling over some gaunt, discolored stalks of corn; the emaciated remains of fallen agriculture. A few spoiled vegetables had been gathered into a pile, along with a rusted garden rake along the side of the house. Several cobs had broken from their stems and collapsed onto the clay soil. The dislodged pieces of corn looked like rotted teeth. The land, for so long the provider of different kinds of vegetables, looked exhausted, burdened by venality and entropy.

Even though the crime was believed to have been contained to the rear of the property, officials had cordoned off the entire farm. The McIlheny's adjoining house appeared deserted. It was set on a small hill about 200 feet from the beginning of the field. No lights were on in any of the windows at the front of the house.

I drove a few hundred feet into a cleared area beyond the main house, near a barn and some dilapidated equipment, and shut off my car's engine. One of the tractors had no wheels. It rested against the right side of an unused silo that had been filled with cement. I closed my eyes for a second and thought briefly about Penelope, and that frightened, distorted gaze pasted almost recklessly across her face. But not all of the violence here was physical, and that was oftentimes the hardest to determine.

These reactions that I had made me realize that I was grieving, but just not for that particular girl or the victims that I had pulled from the water. It had started off that way, imagining what they would have experienced and felt before they were murdered. I would often lie awake in bed thinking about it while listening to the patterns of Hannah's breathing.

Even before the events at the river, I had wondered what would become of us with all that had happened. What too would become of the parents of those unfortunate children if and when the cases were ever closed? How would we go on living here after everything we had promised each other was ruined by misdeed and mistrust? All the local fairs and craft shows that were held here would never have the same innocence to them again, the same sense of community and decency.

The rain gathered in a puddle in front of me and I was struck by the color of the water. It was so dark that all I could sense was the complete absence of anything vivid or stunning. I stepped away from the driveway and noticed a pumpkin partly wedged underneath the front porch. It had a face painted on it which was clearly the work of a child, but the countenance was worn and faded. I wondered if it had been designed last year and had remained unnoticed all this time. Instead of feeling assured by the innocence that the old discarded pumpkin represented, I again became immersed in my intensely deliberate and ritual occurrence of desperation and self-pity, and I wasn't quite sure that it would ever stop.

Floodlights shining upon the back of a barn highlighted a group of forty or so volunteers who were going to attempt to search the surrounding woods. It would be difficult to see anything because of the weather. Reports of winds reaching sixty miles per hour were being broadcast over the radio. A member of the department was instructing the volunteers on how to search properly. Each individual was to stand about twenty-five feet apart from the next, and to proceed in a straight line. Although I hadn't been to church in some time, the scene reminded me of a minister preaching to his flock. The shadows cast from their bodies stretched out across the uneven grass, like hands folded in prayer. Nevertheless, there was still something corrupted in its existence. Purity had abandoned us.

There were no tire tracks that I could see with the limited visibility through the fields of corn, except those made by the McIlheny's tractor. About 15 of the 560 acres had been tilled over, allowing for some placement of vehicles and equipment. Reaching into the trunk to get my gear, I listened to the coroner's van struggle to gain traction in the mud. Without damaging a substantial portion of the local crop, there was no way to get a vehicle close to the edge of lake. It would therefore be difficult to get emergency lighting or generators through the field as well. The local news station had offered to send its helicopter to provide some overhead visibility, but it had been grounded due to the high winds. Budgetary constraints would also put a damper on how much compensation the McIlheny's would be given if a large portion of their produce was ruined during the investigation. It was difficult for people to accept, because economic distress was increasing.

I lifted an air tank onto my shoulders and started trudging through a few rows of where the corn had been flattened. The coroner lifted a gurney from the back of his van. All of the children who had been murdered had suffered an incredible amount of trauma, most of it post-mortem. None of them had been injected with any type of illicit drug. The soil rose around my feet as I walked through the aisles of corn, the blades of the starched stalks slicing across the nape of my neck. We were all a community of victims, only the individual crimes were different. The wheels of the gurney pressed into the soil. The apparatus hitting the ground must have sounded different to the coroner this time, less sedentary. This wasn't the first time he had been here on an investigation. The ground had been harder back then, because of the drought. I slowed my pace and allowed the coroner to catch up.

He was struggling to carry his gear through the mud and to hide the distress and solemnity that was beginning to find its way parasitically into the skin of his eyes, face and lips. He appeared sullen, like the vacated sacks of seed that were strewn about, discarded. Lifting the air tank further onto my shoulders, I bent over and took an end of the gurney. The pressure to solve the case, to provide physical confirmation of guilt, weighed heavily in his demeanor and, surprisingly, his hands. The equipment jostled and shook within my grip and it wasn't always because of the terrain. I glanced over my shoulder and observed his grip, watched with interest as the muscles in his hand twitched, the veins prominent at the surface of his skin.

“Thank you,” he said. The deeper we entered the field, the more intense the smell became. Most of the farmers around these parts used manure as a natural fertilizer. To those from a more industrial landscape it might have seemed rustic. It was an odor I would have given anything to forget, but it still was preferable to the smell of the dead. I stopped for a moment in the middle of a gap between the rows of corn. The coroner asked me whether we were lost. Whenever I didn't know where to go, I always instinctively headed for water.

Water could nurture if you let it.

Up behind the house, the volunteers had dispersed into the surrounding woods carrying flashlights. There was a massive amount of ground to cover, with some areas of the woods being many miles deep. As we moved deeper into the acreage, I looked back when I noticed the angle of the floodlights change slightly. There was someone leaning on a ladder, changing the direction of the light to shine upon the field. It wasn't much to navigate by, just enough to make the points of the stalks behind us irradiate.

I remembered Hannah and the way her hair looked in the sun as it fell down across her shoulders. It was the only thing that could ever take my attention away from her eyes. However this pleasant image was quickly replaced by the thought of the marks on the inside of her elbow; the symbol of her betrayal. I rolled up my sleeve and ran my fingertips along my forearm. I could still hear her muffled sobs in the sound of the rain as I desperately tried to put measurable distance between the image of her provocative body and the inundating sadness that made it difficult for me to breathe.

It started to rain more heavily. The light that was momentarily behind us had faded into the thickness of the crop and the spray. We quickened our pace as the sky darkened around us.

“I can't see anything,” the coroner called out, struggling to maintain his balance on the uneven ground. Loud claps of thunder echoed through the atmosphere and I could feel it through the soles of my shoes. I pulled harder on the gurney in an attempt to keep moving, even though my companion wanted to stop and find shelter.

“As long as we keep moving in a straight line we should reach it soon,” I said.

“We should have gone in through the back end of the property,” he complained.

“There's no way to get your equipment close enough. We'd end up having to carry it regardless. We need to keep moving,” I tersely replied.

“Where are we?” the coroner asked.

“I'm not sure how much farther we have to go,” I admitted, trying to shield my eyes from the stinging rain. The clawing mud was clinging to the wheels of the gurney, so pulling it became useless. A line of lightning lit up the horizon for a moment and illuminated the tree line at the rear of the property.

“All this metal we're carrying makes us sitting ducks,” he said anxiously, his lips beginning to tremble slightly. I set down my end of the gurney and held my hands above my eyes, straining to see just a few yards in front of where we stood.

“It looks like there's a shed about a hundred feet up on the right,” I said. We readjusted our grip on the gurney and started through a thick patch of taller stalks. Within minutes we were standing on a small, broken concrete slab in the remains of a shed that was in obvious need of repair. There was just enough room for the equipment and us. A few bags of feed were stacked in a corner. I sat down carefully on the heavy burlap bags.

The farm had been in the McIlheny's family for nearly eighty years and during this time some renovations and additions had been made, mostly in the last decade or so. The main house had been painted beige and one of the old dairy stalls had been torn down. There used to be dairy cattle, but demand dwindled as the population in the surrounding towns decreased, so they had switched to crops and some perennial flowers which took up most of the rear of the property. I turned around and set the air tank down against a half-empty bag of grass seed. The receipt still attached to the outside of the bag was dated from July, four years before.

“Haven't seen it like this in a while,” the coroner said as he leaned out the broken door and glanced up at the sky.

“These kinds of storms burn out pretty quickly. We'll be able to get to the body in a couple of minutes,” I said.

“I'm not sure that I can do this anymore.” He removed his glasses and was trying to wipe off the spots with his undershirt. He was trying to find the proper words to use but they were being drowned out by the streams of water that poured in through a small hole in the roof. “I've never seen this level of trauma on victims before,” he said.

“Has a case you worked gone this long without establishing a clear suspect?” I asked.

“Most cases go unsolved after the first forty-eight hours, regardless of anyone establishing a clear cause of death,” he said grimly. “That's often followed by years of incomplete evidence chains, false leads, and re-interviewing witnesses' years after the fact. They're called cold cases for a reason. After a while, things just get pushed aside. No one wants to remember where they were when someone was shot dead on some side street. It's the same for me believe it or not. When cases get reopened or are assigned to someone new, we get autopsied as well. I don't want to have to recall how much a child weighed when they died, or describe in precise, anatomical detail how they were violated repeatedly. I just can't. When I became a pathologist it was like being a doctor in some respects. We were taught to be distant, desensitized. It's difficult to admit, but if you don't run as fast as you can from it all … well, I understand why you're in the water so much,” he admitted.

He had kept looking down at his hands almost the entire time he was conversing with me, obsessively making fists and rubbing the ends of his fingers. I noticed that they were very clean, even with the conditions outside. But he was still scrubbing them, as if the blood and bodily fluids of the victims still stained the creases in his palms.

“Why have you stayed on the case through all of this? A certified diver from another precinct could have replaced you,” he said, without any tone of disrespect for my lack of experience. “Surely they could have found someone else?”

“When it first started, I'm not sure, but I … somehow felt needed. I knew that really wasn't the case. To be honest, I became a bit fascinated by what was happening. It allowed me to be somebody else for a while I guess, until that accident in the river.” I raised my eyes and continued. “Now, I don't have anything else but this,” I said. The rains softened a bit but still pressed down hard. I stood up and gathered my gear.