Entropy (4 page)

Body Number Three (March): Penelope Marcipio, 15 years old. Was discovered in a partially collapsed silo filled with water, waste products, and other residual debris, on an abandoned farm. A real estate agent, who recently assumed responsibility for the sale of the property, alerted police when he discovered the body while surveying the acreage. She was the first child that wasn't from the area. Penelope was reported missing over four months ago from a small town about 60 miles to the west. No one at the time the body was discovered had claimed legal ownership of the property. It was determined later that she was most likely the second victim, but was the third corpse found. The foreclosed farm where her body was retrieved was a modest property at the northern edge of town, covering about eighteen acres. Forensics teams continued desperately to relate each of the murder victims, through proximity, relationships, shopping habits, physicality, schooling, any kind of similarities at all. It was getting harder.

Boxes of tagged evidence were shipped to a specialized crime unit within the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The pressure for federal agencies to provide support had been mounting for weeks. The entire collapse and possible rebuilding of the case from the very first victim created budgetary limitations as well. Taxpayers were increasingly stretched to their limit. Officials within the remaining hierarchy of the local police department spoke quietly of reassigning Detective Mull to another case if the lack of progress continued, in order to provide a different perspective on the crimes, and establish what the newspapers termed “a sense of hope.” This would end up being the worst of the crime scenes and would have a lasting effect on everyone.

Something Mull had said about water caught my attention as I tapped lightly against the window with the back of my hand, waiting. The outside of my knuckles turned rose, the color of a frightened raspberry.

“What did you say?” I asked.

“I said it's extremely remote; more than seventeen or eighteen miles away from any interchange entrance or exit, making it an extremely isolated place to dump a body. We checked with the county records department. No one has attempted to purchase the land since the original holders were forced into foreclosure. By all accounts it's considered abandoned, but there's still a lot of belongings, records and broken furniture and personal effects still inside,” he said. “Whoever once lived here must have left almost everything behind,” he added.

“Is the bank that foreclosed still operating locally?” I asked.

“No. It's going to take a few weeks to get the records,” Mull added. “We have tracked them down, but they're in another state. Apparently, they've merged two or three times since then, so it's going to take some time to find what we need, and it will be a logistical nightmare. But I doubt that there's a connection with the people that used to live here and what we found. Yet we still have to do our due diligence, so we can rule it out completely,” he added.

Foreclosures on dairy and cattle farms were common in this part of the state, especially over the last decade or so, when larger operations opened up in surrounding states. The winters on the East Coast were harder on agriculture than the dry plains or Midlands, and there were very few people who could survive economically anymore. Most farms were only able to produce enough crops to sell for about two months during the entire year. People who had grown up here had immigrated to larger, more developed cities. The job market had been depleted over the last few years, and the technological infrastructure required for most large, advanced companies just didn't exist. The previous year a pharmaceutical company had backed out of its plans to open up a research center. Attempts to further develop a medical center had also deteriorated. A month earlier, construction was stopped on a scrap metal storage facility.

The detective signaled the driver to shut off the flashing lights and the car slowly grinded to a halt. I sat in the back seat for a while before getting out. I eventually stepped out, letting the door close but not latch behind me as I circled around to the trunk and lifted it open. I looked over the roof of the car towards the crime scene.

Cracks and impressions ruined what was a once-quaint concrete path that led up to the front porch of the farmhouse. I shut the trunk and took a few steps away from the. Near the rear of the vehicle, in a ditch was a partial wooden sign that read “fresh vegetables.” Several of the letters were missing. I wondered where the cart or stand had once been, and if anyone had ever driven by this desolate area and bought stalked corn, strawberries or fresh peaches. I remember we had such a stand on the farm where I grew up. When my father wasn't around, I used to grab one brilliant peach off the stall and run around to the back of our house and sit by the pond, watching the dragonflies skim across the top of the murky water. They used to move so fast, like miniature model planes. I used to let the juice run down my chin. It was always great when no one ever saw me. Sadly, it was the one thing I missed the most when I left home at sixteen. There should have been more.

A woman in tears was being led away from the barn by an emergency technician towards a waiting ambulance. As soon as she sat down a paramedic slipped an oxygen mask over her face. Her breathing was quick and shallow. I saw the word “forensics” stenciled across the breast of her black coat. I took a deep breath, fighting against the tightness that suddenly developed in my chest, brought on by the densely pensive atmosphere, and the disruptive familiarity of the farm that, unfortunately for me, came with it.

I looked down at my feet as I stumbled because of the large tree roots. The ground was ridden with them. It was as if someone had murdered history and buried its body here a long time ago, only that it was now beginning to grow and spread and break through the earth, like a bulb. Everything that I had tried so desperately to forget about my childhood and the past was rushing across my body, like the cold waters off the coast of Canada, where once again, I would have given anything to have been.

Water could teach you how to break if you let it.

“Let Forensics finish doing their work and then you can go in and pull the body out,” Mull said, beginning to make notes on a small writing pad. “But be careful. The initial reports say that it isn't pretty in there,” he warned.

“Is it a boy or a girl?” I asked.

“It appears to be a girl, but we don't absolutely know yet. There isn't enough light going into the opening for us to make anything more than an educated guess. The body is also face-down. Anyway, what does it matter?” he asked, as he showed his identification to another officer that questioned his permission to be on the scene.

“I guess it doesn't,” I said. I stepped into my diving suit and rubbed my hands together, as the steam of my breath mixed with the smoke from the remnants of a cigarette he had stepped on forcefully with his heel. Mull smelled like he had been up for days. More than likely the lack of progress on any one of the cases was starting to get to him. But I knew it was more than that. I think I would have been more concerned if the case hadn't affected him. I looked towards him again when he questioned me. His eyes were nearly colorless, empty.

“Are you alright?” he asked.

“Fine. Why?” I couldn't tell if I was shaking because of the cold, or what was happening.

“Nothing. Forget it. I'm going to talk to the photographer. I want to make sure he gets pictures of the other structures as well, and not just the silo, but a wider scope of the acreage. I don't want to miss anything,” he said. His determination was intense, but sometimes caution led to the corruption of certainty.

I moved in front of the car and looked closely at the decaying silo and attached barn for the first time. It was situated to the direct left of what appeared to be dairy cattle housing, with metal bars separating the stalls. The paint and the materials underneath the exterior had started to decay away. It was hard to tell what color it had once been. Less than eight feet away from the body stood the barn, which was being searched thoroughly and had been sealed off by the department. There were rotted hay bales all around the sides of the structure. The dilapidated farmhouse stood opposite the barn. It was odd, but the smell reminded me of an old, musty book. Some fall decorations were toppled against an immobile tractor. The tires were missing. The intense flash of a camera flickered in the distance. A photographer came out of the barn and moved along the side of the house towards the rear of the property. Someone yelled out something about not forgetting to take pictures of the water well out back.

“It'll be a couple more minutes,” one of the forensic experts said to me, reaching out for my shoulder as I started to move nearer the scene. When I looked closer I noticed that it was the coroner, Walter Fasman. I had seen him at the other crime scenes, but had never been this close to him until now. I tried, when I wasn't in the water, to keep my distance.

“You can wait in one of the squad cars if you want to. Just put on gloves if you're going to move around inside any of the buildings, especially the house, in case you touch anything. They haven't checked some of the areas yet. Besides, they'll help keep your hands warm,” he added.

I ducked underneath more caution tape and pulled the collar of my coat higher up my neck. The screen door to the farmhouse, filled with holes, hung diagonally off its rusted hinges. I opened it slowly, hoping what was left of the supports would remain intact. The smell from outside had penetrated the oppressive darkness within. I felt for a light switch, but there wasn't any power. Portable lights from the fire department were supposedly on their way, but it would take them some time to get here, as a result of the weather. There was just so much mud around the old house. The living room windows were broken, and what was left of the glass swayed back and forth in their frames, like paper moving in an auspicious breeze. Outside the photographer snapped another picture. In the quick light from the flash I could see further inside the farmhouse, trying to gather as many details as possible in the truncated visibility. There were darkened squares on the walls, indicating where paintings or portraits had once hung.

Another camera flash.

I could see an old-fashioned steel radiator running underneath the window ledge. I hesitated slightly then touched the surface. It was terribly cold. I remembered how I had burned my hand on one when I was younger. I instinctively pulled off one of the gloves. The scar was still there on the flesh of my palm but most of the original color of the wound was gone.

There was a small, cracked, terracotta flowerpot, the dried soil scattered across the chipped paint. There was a barely legible name imprinted across the rim. Lily. I wondered how old she had been when she had made it, or simply put her name on it. I looked out through the remains of the windows and scrutinized the darkening sky, the vacancy and the isolation of what was happening here.

I tried to remember what color the leaves had been that day; that last day on my family farm when the adolescent sun was burgeoning atop the blighted stalks of corn and oat plants, brightening the peaches a bleached russet shade that changed from beautiful to dangerous, like a rotting apple to the inside of a woman's mouth …

The photographer brushed aside the branches of some dead foliage then concentrated on the empty field behind the house.

Another camera flash.

Then another.

And another …

I stepped quickly through the door of the farmhouse and back outside. There was a rusted porch swing on my right that overlooked the woods next to the house. Several men and women were moving through the edge of the woods and I noticed the small moons of their flashlights scattering across the barren trees. Mull had asked that volunteer firemen and municipal workers be brought in to thoroughly search the surrounding woods. The tragedies of a truncated childhood were beginning to scream louder in my head when I heard Mull call out to me from the direction of where the body had been found.

The soil around the base of the silo was saturated, moist, and there were various patterns of footprints indented into the ground. It appeared to be a bottom-loaded storage compartment which made it the oldest style of farm silo. Most modern farms now used top loaders because repairing them was much easier. In all, the stave silo measured some 250 feet in height. Even though there was no sun, I shielded my eyes with my hand when I looked towards the top.

“How did it get filled with water?” I asked.

Mull turned around and scribbled something onto his notepad and then gave low toned verbal directions to another officer before finally answering my question. “Most likely the heavy rains we had the other night raised the level up some. There's a large section of the cone that covers the top that's missing, or has simply broken away over time. Snow that came in through the opening could have simply melted. There's been a lot of it this year. The inside of the cylinder appears to be intact, but you could give us a better answer on that once you're inside. What's in there could have been building up over time. It might just be a coincidence. The perpetrator might have filled it with water to decompose the body, but I don't see how he could have done it. The well out the back of the property was just searched and it's as dry as a bone and there were no depressed tire tracks leading towards or away from the silo according to the first officers on the scene. Then again, we don't know for certain how long the body has been here. After you pull the body out, go down as far as you can and see what else is in there,” he instructed.

I grabbed the industrial flashlight that I used for commercial diving, and crossed underneath the caution tape. A second photographer stepped down from the aluminium ladder that was being used to ascend to the top of the silo. He stumbled through a few puddles when he reached the ground, tumbled onto his chest and remained on his hands and knees for a few minutes. His stomach and back muscles contracted violently. I closed my eyes and turned around as he began to vomit.