Entropy (10 page)

“I meant to ask you about the river but I didn't want to pry,” Fasman said.

“No, I was aware that you knew, because you did the autopsy on the man they found with her,” I said.

“Yes, I did. How is your wife?”

“Distant at times, but apologetic.” I stretched my hands across my face and kept them there.

“I presume you heard about his file?” he asked.

“Yeah, I know about it.” I rolled up my sleeve and angled my arm so he could see the mark on the inside of my elbow.

“I'm sorry,” he said. I looked behind his shoulder and thought that the weather might be letting up.

Water could teach you persistence if you let it.

It took us longer to trudge through the crop than I had expected, but we eventually broke through the last few rows of corn and stood at the top of a small hill that led down to the lake. Nothing looked real. From our vantage point, about 200 feet up on a slope, we could see the lake and some of the acreage surrounding it. There was no mistaking what they had found. In the middle of the water, seemingly face up, was the body of a girl, completely naked from the waist down. The coroner dropped to his knees and closed his eyes.

If an artist took a pencil sketch of Isabella Mull's crime scene and laid it on the grass over the top of what we witnessed, one would have struggled to have noticed any dissimilarities. Not much changed in a place like this.

Isabella had been spending the night on McIlheny's expansive farm with several of her friends. Local high school football was very popular in Central and Western Pennsylvania, and the town was no exception. Players were celebrating a state title, the town's first in over twenty years. The boy she adored at that time in her life was going to be there with several other classmates, as well as most of the team members.

She had wanted to kiss him. And with those innocent urges she discovered the burgeoning insecurity of womanhood, the nervousness and frustration in the cycle of emotions and thoughts. Behind a barn she held him, kissed him, her face burning under twinges of firelight that appeared to singe the tips of the corn stalks and the long strands of her hair, so delicate that it almost dissolved in-between his fingers. She wanted to pull him closer, sleep with his taste on the naïve edges of her mouth, while not quite understanding the complexity and intensity behind the apprehension and gratification she experienced. She might not have even been sure why her heart had begun to beat faster. Isabella pulled back from him, tugging on the sleeves of his jacket. She smiled. It was all innocent and harmless. It was the last time she would press her hands against the tightness of his abdomen. No one really had ever developed a clear picture of what had happened next that night …

“Jesus Christ!” Fasman murmured, removing his glasses. He struggled to hide them in the inside of his jacket.

“It isn't her, is it?” he asked.

“No. No, it's not her,” I said.

“Thank God.”

“Someone should call him,” I said. The coroner turned his attention to the open space behind me. It was in his eyes, the images, the pain, the numbness in remembering the ambushed muscle and bone. Each of his eyes seemed almost hollow, artificial circles of glass no longer able to absorb color or light.

“He's already here,” he said, nodding in the direction of the approaching figure of Mull.

Under his weather-stained trench coat he was wearing a maroon dress shirt and a black tie. I wondered if he was perhaps having dinner with his wife, holding her hand across the table like he did years ago, before everything had become so entangled and disjointed. For too brief a moment he would stare at the small, imperfect marks her lips left on the outer edge of a wine glass. And in the smudged color he always thought she looked best in, remember not only what it was like to be audaciously in love with her, but to feel the sense of security that he once encountered in the tone of her voice and the subtle, tender movement of her hands.

With his casual shoes possessing no real grip, he slipped on the sloping land. His body slid along the mud and sodden grass. It came to rest a couple of feet from the water. Mull lifted himself up onto his knees and stretched out his arms. From where I stood, at least for a moment, it looked like he was cradling the dead girl in the palms of his hands. Mull rose to his feet.

“You know what to look for when you get in there,” Mull said. “Have someone help you bring the body out of the water. It looks like her, doesn't it?”

“Daniel, it's not Isabella.”

“It could be. It could be anyone's daughter.” Mull said.

“Where is she?”

“With her nurse,” he said.

“There are over forty people here helping. As you said, we know what to look for. Go home.”

“We were having dinner when I was called. I haven't spent more than a few hours alone with my wife since this all started. I feel the guilt every time she looks at me when I'm called, so much so that I feel that I can't breathe. She wanted to go to that inn, the one that's always lit up at night past the interstate. We reserved a small table in the corner so we could be alone together. We were going to spend the night there. Our food was late, but I didn't care.”

Mull then continued, in a retrospective, personal manner that I had never seen before. “The McIlheny's had given me flowers to put on the table. I drove all the way up there this morning just to make sure everything was right. I watched as the flowers collapsed in this extraordinary vase that was handcrafted and painted by that artist, the one whose daughter you pulled from that pool. As it was filled, the water swirled around the stems. As the water level rose higher towards the mouth of the vase, I couldn't stop thinking that those flowers were children, drowning, swallowing, their necks breaking at the smallest of places …” Mull's voice trailed off.

Mull was still lost in his own tortured thoughts for a few moments before he continued.

“We were going to just lie there naked in each other's arms, pretend that we were surrounded by, I don't know what to call it, innocence. I wanted so much to forget about her and what had become of her … to forget what had become of me. What does that say about me, that I wanted to lose sight of her, to forget my disabled daughter?”

“It doesn't say anything.”

“I wanted to so much. It had been so long since we just talked, but I was afraid that in listening to my wife, she'd say that I've never given her what she wanted,” he admitted. “To feel protected, cherished, listened to. I have so much respect for my wife that I couldn't make love to her like that, thinking about dead children. After what happened to Isabella, there was so much we just couldn't do because of the amount of care she needed. My wife had planned so much for her and none of that will ever happen. It's her child,” he said.

“She's your child as well, Daniel,” the coroner said trying to comfort Mull. “You can't let yourself lose sight of that because of what's happened.”

“Isabella doesn't even recognize me anymore. I've seen it in her eyes, the way she studies me. She communicates so intensely with her eyes,” he said. “It's the most remarkable thing I've ever seen.”

“She's a beautiful, vibrant girl,” I said.

“I know. I'm so proud of her. So much help is needed here, but I don't know what to do.” Mull raised his head and I saw streaks of mud mixed with tears scrolling down the sides of his face and onto his neck. It was getting dark. “I've let that monster stay untethered and look what it has led to,” Mull said.

“You're not responsible for what has happened here,” I said.

“We're all responsible,” Mull replied.

***

I placed the regulator in my mouth and inhaled. There wasn't much that I could see. The drops of rain striking the surface of the water were calming in a way that I could never describe, considering what lay near me. The girl was simply drifting back and forth. There were no preliminary indications that her body had been rigged. Neither her hands nor feet were bound. I passed underneath her body and moved the beam of a flashlight over her darkened silhouette. If there was trauma induced I couldn't tell. I broke the water near her shoulders. Using a flashlight pen, I pulled aside sections of her hair. There was a large contusion on her scalp consistent with what was termed as blunt force trauma.

Isabella's skull had been fractured in two places as well as several vertebrae in her neck. The wound was made by an undetermined blunt instrument, most likely comprised of iron or steel. The indentation from the wound measured almost an inch in diameter.

Moving counter clockwise around the body I positioned myself at her side. The girl's right arm had been almost completely detached below the joint at the elbow. Filleted tendon and bone protruded from the crude incision.

Isabella had her pelvic bone crushed. Her left ankle was broken in four places. Isabella suffered three broken ribs and a punctured lung. It was determined that she had had intercourse prior to being attacked.

An acrid stench clutched at the fragile breath of the night. I inhaled so forcefully from the tank that I thought my ribs would crack. I closed my eyes for a moment and removed the regulator. With as much precision as I could, I searched around her body. The poor girl, later identified as Mindy Yhros, was fully nude below the waist with severe bruising evident on her thighs, abdomen and feet.

Mull still stood at the edge of the lake when I started to carefully guide her body ashore. There was a black bag not more than a few feet from him. When I passed around her hips and ankles, I noticed a flower resting on the water, placed discriminately between her legs.

Body Number Eight (August): James Stanachek, 6 years old. Was discovered in a small abandoned quarry that hadn't been used in nearly a decade. It used to supply limestone, construction aggregate and sand to various parts of the state. It had been shuttered and advertised for sale for the last three years, without attracting any buyers. This was the only crime scene during the investigation where Detective Mull was not present. Two weeks after the body of Mindy Yhros was found on the McIlheny's farm, he was reassigned from the case. A departmental hearing found him emotionally unfit to make objective decisions because of the similarities between the ongoing case and the unsolved one involving his daughter.

The winds dragged the rescue line from the helicopter across the stretched mouth of the quarry as I held on tightly to the harness that suspended me some 115 feet above the abandoned crevasse. Abandoned, it had also remained isolated, being set back from the main highway. There was a derelict car parked behind some brush. That was what had led someone to contact the department. That was all it took sometimes. But the sad fact was that most physical crimes went unsolved, regardless of the advancements in forensic medicine and technology. There were machines that could measure almost anything. What the computers and the experts could not measure was the human condition, and how degraded and violated a sexual assault victim felt, and the hatred it bred from within; or how contracting a communicable disease from an affair made a woman feel when she tried to put her arms around her husband at night. Those people didn't talk. They suffocated.

The bottom of the quarry was filled with loose rock, trash and debris tossed into it throughout the past few years. The water level in the pit had recently climbed higher due to the flash flooding at the beginning of the previous week. I tugged at the secured line and instructed the pilot to slowly lower me further.

The stench from the water collided with the gusts of the wind, and I thought that I was going to vomit into the regulator that I had just fastened between my lips. This one was going to be bad, I could just tell. Pieces of the rickety, broken sawhorses that had once blocked off the entrance to the site had also fallen into the opening. I looked down upon the soiled water and suddenly felt extremely isolated. I thought I could see portions of a chain-linked fence.

The winds were causing the helicopter to have trouble maintaining a steady position. However in just a few more minutes I would be lowered to water level and able to loosen the sling from around my waist. I could then turn on my high-powered flashlight and look for another child. Not long after, the helicopter crew would send down a metal gurney on the same line. I would have to search slowly; because there was no telling how deep the quarry was from this height. The department was trying to contact the city engineer's office to find out. More often than not in these situations, I just had to go under and hope for this best.

Suddenly, the winds picked up further and the helicopter violently bobbed around, swinging me like a pendulum. The co-pilot sitting in the opening of the helicopter door motioned his hand across his throat. That was the signal that the winds and rain were excessive and that they wanted to stop and continue the search when the weather cleared. I raised my hand to wave them off and signaled for them to drop a little faster. This was too important to me. I couldn't stop now. The helicopter passed through a pocket of turbulence and dropped. The sudden movement caused the rescue line that I was on to swing violently to the right. My body struck the quarry wall tearing a hole in my suit. The momentum of my body jerked me back towards the center of the opening again and towards the opposite quarry wall.

Before striking the rocks again, I unclasped the line and dropped the remaining 80–90 feet into the water, praying that it was deep enough and I wouldn't strike the rocky bottom. Upon impact, the metal regulator smashed against my teeth. I could taste blood in my mouth and throat. The troubled world around me suddenly tumbled into darkness.

I couldn't see anything for a few moments because the impact of crashing into the quarry had left me somewhat confused. I wasn't sure where I was initially. I shook my head. Looking up through my diving goggles I watched the helicopter climb higher, out of the opening of the quarry safely and then disappear. The tail end of the down draught pulled me back under the surface. I panicked for a second as if I were drowning before I started breathing evenly and steadily. I bobbed back up to the surface of the water. I fully regained my composure after a few more moments and tread water as I tried to find my flashlight. The depth of the quarry, the rain and the murkiness of the water from soil run-off furthered impaired the poor vision that I already had.