Entropy (2 page)

My training classes for the winter semester didn't start for almost another week. The child was found face-down in a backyard pool the morning after the first snowfall of the season, just hours before the New Year. There were no footprints on the ground anywhere around the pool. The snow that had fallen would have covered any usable tracks. It was brutally cold outside. I looked out the passenger-side window of my car into the backyard. Something repulsive existed in the complicated stillness that fought its way through the dense air. The crime scene itself was about sixty to seventy feet wide, and encompassed a good third of the rear of the property. At the farthest point sat an old stone fireplace filled with dead branches and loose rocks. A technician was placing samples from that area into a clear jar. The remains of a rusted swing set rested at an angle; the fittings that had once secured it snapped and embedded into the ground. With the low light it looked like a tin giraffe broken off at the ankles. I raised my shoulders and inhaled in the hope I could exhale the dread.

Icicles caught in the naked branches of trees were like helpless prey in winter's silken web. There was a dead bird lying underneath the overturned patio furniture. Nothing appeared to move - even the men and women who were carrying equipment onto the property; and the one journalist courageous enough to face the weather, trying eagerly to wrap his arms around a story with some substance. Not much happened here. Only one other time had something like this happened to this community. It wasn't something anyone wanted to think about. The figures that stood around the crime scene resembled a morbid display from a grade school student's diorama: prolonged hardship in a shoebox. Winter had only temporarily stopped the process of decay.

I blew warm air onto my hands, started to stretch out a pair of latex gloves and sat down on a series of stone steps that led up to the front door of the house. The blank stone embraced the frigidity of the surroundings. Curved lines of vapor from my breath trailed over the peak of my right shoulder and disappeared into the bitter cusp of the approaching twilight. My solitude was broken by the trudging steps of a homicide detective in a large overcoat.

“Remember, try to keep your hands behind you and not to touch anything until the scene has been documented, sketched and photographed. Once they mark the precise spot where the body was found, they'll call on you to pull her out,” the lead detective instructed, snapping a pair of rubber-lined gloves over his large hands. The shape of his wedding band bulged against the tight fitting rubber.

Daniel Mull was standing within close proximity to me; close enough, that I could have reached out and brushed the snowflakes from the shoulder of his dark jacket. Instead the delicate white powder would fall upon his shoulders, sit there introspectively for a few seconds before disappearing into the shallow grave of the material. He took a final drag from his cigarette and dropped the butt from his fingertips and buried it into the dirt and ice with the heel of his shoe. It sounded like bones in a meat grinder. For a few awkward moments he stood watching me with little pity, as if weighing up whether I had the mettle to do the task before me.

“Are you sure that you can do this?” he asked, as he folded his arms across his broad chest. “It isn't easy. And to be honest, it's something that will always stick with you,” he added.

“Yes,” I said half-heartedly. I could see the disdain that he had for me in the way he held his body rigid, and the condescending tone of his voice. Maybe I was wrong, and it was merely indifference. He could have just been trying to stay warm. The detective was a hard man to read. “I've done this before,” I said.

“I know. It was in the file. There aren't more than a few certified divers in this area of the state, and our department doesn't have one. We placed a call requesting help but no one else could get here because of the weather. The main roads leading here from the upper portion of the state have been closed. There was one other diver we were able to get a hold of in New Jersey, but he isn't familiar with any police procedures. In some ways, you are. You took a few courses last year and it would take time to train someone else on what to look for. That's why the decision was made to call you,” he said, and looked at me over the top rim of his glasses. “But if it's all the same, I'd rather have had someone else who was properly qualified,” he said.

“I'm fine. I wasn't in the water that long in Providence,” I noted. “I don't know how much help I can be though,” I said.

“Let's just be glad that the body wasn't disposed of in the river. And if it was summer, no one might ever have found her until she washed up along the coastline.” He withdrew his pack of cigarettes and offered one to me. When I declined, he shrugged his shoulders and placed one between his lips. They were severely chapped. He scratched at them when he spoke as if his mouth was dry. Although he had arrived less than an hour before I did, he already appeared spent, his eyes dull and bloodshot. He pulled continuously at the flesh below his Adam's apple. The muscles in his throat twitched continuously, as if he had swallowed sand a few minutes before instead of coffee. He gestured towards a group of men huddled around each other, listening to the instructions of the coroner.

“This may not be the last victim,” Mull finally said. “There's a strong chance that I might have to call upon you again to go into the water, so don't fuck anything up for the forensic guys. It'll just make things harder,” he said, leaving me in little doubt as to his confidence in my resolve and abilities.

“What? You think this could be a serial killer or something?” I asked.

“Not necessarily. Not here anyway. This place is so isolated. So far, there's nothing to suggest that yet. Most of it will depend on what the coroner's report concludes. They can match up the details of this death with previous unsolved crimes, but we've only ever had one here,” he said. I waited for him to say her name. When he didn't, he began again. “We're trying to find the parents now. We sent a car over and found an invitation to an art show on the kitchen table. She might have just fallen in; an accident. But God only knows what people think nowadays when something like this happens … what they're probably thinking.” He motioned to the other members of the department. “If it's pedophilia or a non-random sex crime, there is a tendency for the behavior to be repeated. It could turn out that this is just the beginning.” He paused and genuflected. “Things like this, that girl, rarely stay simple,” he said.

Simple.

There was a haunted tone in his voice, expressed heavily in that word, his intended connotation, and the way it fell from his lips as if the word was weighted by a small stone.

Simple.

The cigarette that burned slowly in his hands trembled. He looked now like he did when I had taught his daughter how to swim; he was the anxious father standing in the shower of fluorescent light that cascaded on the water of the pool from the ceiling, the chlorine smell saturated deep into the towel he wrenched continuously with his bare hands. I wondered if he still did that when he became unsettled.

“What's so simple about the murder of a child?” I asked.

“Don't misunderstand me. I'm not trying to be insensitive. I merely mean it's never as easily definable as black and white, right and wrong. People try to justify things and it often gets in the way of what is actually the truth underneath,” he said, stepping carefully across a patch of ice, and down a series of broken concrete steps into the backyard towards the pool.

“What are you saying?” I asked following after Mull. I slipped momentarily on the ice and reached out to brace my fall on a deck chair. The arm of the chair splintered.

“I'm not an expert on sex crimes, especially those involving young adolescents, but from what I have read, they don't just rape or assault a single victim and then stop. It's often not as isolated as it sometimes appears. It's not a part of the perpetrator's functionality,” he answered. He reached out his hand to prevent me from moving further into the area of the crime scene and continued. Again I thought of his daughter. “I'm just trying to make you understand the consequences of what I am asking you to do. This might not stop,” he said.

“Then it'll give you some time to find a replacement for me. What about brutally murdering a victim? If that's what happened,” I said, stamping my feet lightly on the ground to keep warm, and generate blood flow in my extremities.

“It's too early to tell how brutal the assault was. We don't even know if she was violated sexually. Whatever happened though, it certainly is a bleak scene,” he added. “Like I said, it may just turn out to be a tragic accident. Then no one will need either one of us,” he added. A woman in a turtle-neck sweater was on her knees, sifting through a loose pile of soil around the edges of the in-ground pool. Mull walked over and spoke to her. I watched him move from one area of the marked crime scene to another, like a dancer pacing through his marks choreographed from a textbook.

Mull and I had much in common with one another, despite our distant upbringings, although he would never admit it. That, among other things, was probably why he didn't want me here. It was like I was his foil, an altered mirror image, the villain unobstructed, who thwarted his attempts at prestige and destiny, and constrained his movement. He looked past me when his attention brought his eyes towards the barren edge of the pool. It made me feel rejected; a novice understudy to the immorality play laid out before us, on a stage of fallen snow, concrete and darkness. But there was no audience, no applause; no one to comment on the job you were doing, or to offer praise. I wanted to be sick. Mull's gaze eventually crossed my own. We were both men whose lives hadn't turned out as we had expected. In a blunt matter of speaking, we were failures.

The water could teach you how to hate if you let it.

The oval spectrum of another officer's flashlight penetrated the complex milieu that advanced on my sense of decency; the proprietary standards I thought that I had understood. There was a protective sheet that covered the recessed pool. It lay partially unfastened, pulled back slightly at one corner and folded over from right to left, similar to the way a person unmade their bed, or removed a blanket from their sleeping body. It appeared commonplace and innocuous. Someone leaned over with a small instrument and removed some of the strands of rope that had been untied and deposited them into a plastic bag that had the word “evidence” stenciled across the side.

“The perpetrator could have used his or her bare hands, and left samples of skin behind or hairs, any fragments of DNA, maybe even material from a glove,” Mull said walking towards me. I stepped closer to the pool and looked at her body, as if I were retrieving a moment from my childhood, trying to gain access to something that in adulthood I no longer had the right to see. When she had been discovered, the officers initially suspected that the girl drowned, even though the pool was partially drained. But a person could drown in just inches of water. I could see the top of where the waterline had once been. Only about two feet had been drained. I wondered why it hadn't been completely emptied.

Small bits of ice formed crystals in the girl's hair and along her ears. They looked like earrings she might have taken from her mother's dresser when she wasn't looking. A fragile touch of frost rested gently upon the water's surface, so that you could still see the darkened color of the once-chlorinated and soiled water underneath. Depending upon the angle from where I stood, it looked like the ocean along the Canadian coastline at dusk; a majestic body of water but without the tragic and pitiful stench of the dead. I wanted desperately to be there, hundreds of feet below the surface, alone, warmed by the mists and strands of acetylene from a welding torch floating in the current. I remembered how when the strands broke apart they looked like the tentacles of an emaciated jellyfish; tired and skinny.

The photographer arrived in a squad car about forty-five minutes after I was called. I felt uncomfortable as I stood there and watched the photographer appear to take pleasure in his odd esotericism. When he signaled that he was finished, I zipped up my suit and watched the detectives and forensic team stare at me from the edge of the pool. I stepped down the ladder in the shallow end, paused where the ground sloped downwards, and closed my eyes. I should have turned back.

The pool seemed deeper than it actually was in the dull light. Like the rest of the yard, it had suffered from neglect, and the walls looked like faded copper. I followed the concrete slope into the deep end. The girl wore an indigo dress. Petite, dark shoes covered her feet. A dark, purple ribbon struggled to break free from her hair. She looked like she had fallen out of the frame of a painting. All of it should have been beautiful. Water gently swirled around the crown of my head when I moved under to see if anything obstructed her. There was little room underneath where she floated. I prodded my hand around the bottom of the pool after being told to look for any kind of instrument that might have been disposed of. I wanted her to have drowned. I flexed my knees and secured the body inside my arms. I was surprised at how heavy she was. After ascending the incline back towards the ladder, I handed her body over and went back down into the water, although I wasn't sure why. Moving a flashlight back and forth I checked the edges of the pool. The only things displaced in the water besides me were the shells of some cicadas and several petals of a flower.

Body Number Two (February): Timothy Reisbaugh, 9 years old. Was discovered in a shallow, man-made fishing pond at the edge of the only playground area for miles, Conemaugh Park. Some children who were going ice-fishing discovered the body. Most of the time, kids just played ice hockey there when the pond froze over and the ice was thick enough for anyone not to fall through. The preliminary autopsy showed discernible patterns similar to the trauma inflicted on the first child I had pulled from the water around a month earlier. Yet no one was willing to state categorically that the cases were connected without any concrete physical evidence. Unfortunately, there wasn't much progress in the first case. There were still no suspects. There wasn't even a person of interest, once the parents had been ruled out. No one who lived in the area around the park remembered seeing or hearing anything out of the ordinary.