Here was a grisly detail, not released to the press: not only had the victim’s skull been beaten in, but the state medical examiner had discovered that her arms and legs had been severed from her body by a “bluntly sharp” weapon like an ax.
Kyle shuddered, reading the report. Christ! He hoped the dismemberment had been after, not before, the death.
It seemed strange to him: the manic energy the killer had expended in trying to destroy his victim he might have used to dig a deep grave and cover it with rocks and gravel so that it would never be discovered. For, of course, a dumped body will eventually be discovered.
Yet the killer hadn’t buried this body. Why not?
“Must have wanted it to be found. Must have been proud of what he did.”
What the murderer had broken Dr. Cassity would reconstruct. He had no doubt that he could do it. Pieces of bone would be missing, of course, but he could compensate for this with synthetic materials. Once he had a plausible skull, he could reconstruct a plausible face for it out of clay, and, once he had this, he and a female sketch artist with whom he’d worked in the past would make sketches of the face in colored pencil, from numerous angles, for investigators to work with. Kyle Cassity’s reconstruction would be broadcast throughout the state, printed on flyers and posted on the Internet.
Homicides were rarely solved unless the victim could be identified. Kyle had done a number of successful facial reconstructions in the past, though never working at such a disadvantage. This was a rare case. And yet it was a finite task: the pieces of bone had been given to him; he had only to put them together.
When Kyle began working with the skull in his laboratory at the college, the victim had been dead for approximately four months, through the near-tropical heat of a southern New Jersey summer. In his laboratory, Kyle kept the air-conditioning at 65 degrees Fahrenheit. He played CDs: Bach’s “Well-Tempered Clavier” and the “Goldberg Variations,” performed by Glenn Gould, most suited him. Music of brilliance and precision, rapid, dazzling as a waterfall, that existed solely in the present moment; music without emotion, and without associations.
~ * ~
The hair! It was fair, sun-bleached brown with shades of red, still showing a distinct ripply wave. Six swaths had been gathered at the crime scene and brought to his laboratory. Kyle placed them on a windowsill, where, when he glanced up from his exceedingly close work with tweezers and bits of bone, he could see them clearly. The longest swath was seven inches. The victim had worn her hair long, to her shoulders. From time to time, Kyle reached out to touch it.
Eight days: it would take longer than Kyle anticipated. For he was working with exasperating slowness, and he was making many more small mistakes than he was accustomed to.
His hands were steady as always. His eyes, strengthened by bifocal lenses, were as reliable as always.
Yet it seemed to be happening that when Kyle was away from the laboratory, his hands began to shake just perceptibly. And once he was away from the unsparing fluorescent lights, his vision wasn’t so sharp.
He would mention this to no one. And no one would notice. No doubt it would go away.
Already by the end of the second day he’d tired of Bach performed by Glenn Gould. The pianist’s humming ceased to be eccentric and became unbearable. The intimacy of another’s thoughts, like a bodily odor, you don’t really want to share. He tried listening to other CDs, piano music, unaccompanied cello, then gave up to work in silence. Except, of course, there was no silence: traffic noises below, airplanes taking off and landing at Newark International Airport, the sound of his own blood pulsing in his ears.
Strange: the killer didn’t bury her.
Strange: to hate another human being so much.
Hope to Christ she was dead by the time he began with the ax . . .
~ * ~
“Now you have a friend, dear. Kyle is your friend.”
The victim had been between eighteen and thirty years old, it was estimated. A size four, petite, they’d estimated her rotted clothing to have been. Size six, a single open-toed shoe found in the gravel pit. She’d had a small rib cage, small pelvis.
No way of determining if she’d ever been pregnant or given birth.
No rings had been found amid the scattered bones. Only just a pair of silver hoop earrings, pierced. The ears of the victim had vanished as if they’d never been; only the earrings remained, dully gleaming.
“Maybe he took your rings. You must have had rings.”
The skull had a narrow forehead and a narrow, slightly receding chin. The cheekbones were high and sharp. This would be helpful in sculpting the face. Distinctive characteristics. She’d had an overbite. Kyle couldn’t know if her nose had been long or short, a pug nose or narrow at the tip. In the sketches they’d experiment with different noses, hairstyles, gradations of eye color.
“Were you pretty? ‘Pretty’ gets you into trouble.”
On the windowsill, the dead girl’s hair lay in lustrous sinuous strands.
Kyle reached out to touch it.
~ * ~
Marriage: a mystery.
For how was it possible that a man with no temperament for a long-term relationship with one individual, no evident talent for domestic life, family, children, can nonetheless remain married, happily it appeared, for more than four decades?
Kyle laughed. “Somehow, it happened.”
He was the father of three children within this marriage, and he’d loved them. Now they were grown — grown somewhat distant — and gone from Wayne, New Jersey. The two eldest were parents themselves.
They, and their mother, knew nothing of their shadowy half sister.
Nor did Kyle. He’d lost touch with the mother twenty-six years ago.
His relationship with his wife, Vivian, had never been very passionate. He’d wanted a wife, not a mistress. He wouldn’t have wished to calculate how long it had been since they’d last made love. Even when they’d been newly married their lovemaking had been awkward, for Vivian had been so inexperienced, sweetly naive and shy — that had seemed part of her appeal. Often they’d made love in the dark. Few words passed between them. If Vivian spoke, Kyle became distracted. Often he’d watched her sleep, not wanting to wake her. Lightly he’d touched her, stroked her unconscious body, and then himself.
Now he was sixty-seven. Not old, he knew that. Yet the last time he’d had sex had been with a woman he’d met at a conference in Pittsburgh the previous April; before that it had been with a woman one third his age, of ambiguous identity, possibly a prostitute.
Though she hadn’t asked him for money. She’d introduced herself to him on the street saying she’d seen him interviewed on New Jersey Network, hadn’t she? At the end of the single evening they spent together she’d lifted his hand to kiss the fingers in a curious gesture of homage and self-abnegation.
“Dr. Cassity. I revere a man like you.”
~ * ~
The crucial bones were all in place: cheeks, above the eyes, jaw, chin. These determined the primary contours of the face. The space between the eyes, for instance. Width of the forehead in proportion to that of the face at the level of the nose, for instance. Beneath the epidermal mask, the irrefutable structure of bone. Kyle was beginning to see her now.
The eye holes of the skull regarded him with equanimity. Whatever question he would put to it, Kyle would have to answer himself.
~ * ~
Dr. Cassity. He had a Ph.D., not an M.D. To his sensitive ears there was always something subtly jeering, mocking, in the title “Doctor.”
He’d given up asking his graduate students to call him “Kyle.” Now that he was older, and had his reputation, none of these young people could bring themselves to speak to him familiarly. They wanted to revere him, he supposed. They wanted the distance of age between them, an abyss not to be crossed.
Dr. Cassity. In Kyle’s family, this individual had been his grandfather. An internist in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, whose field of sp
ecialization had been gastroenterology. As a boy, Kyle had revered his grandfather and had wanted to be a doctor. He’d been fascinated by the books in his grandfather’s library: massive medical texts that seemed to hold the answers to all questions, anatomical drawings and color plates revealing the extraordinary interiors of human bodies. Many of these were magnified, reproduced in bright livid color that had looked moist. There were astonishing photographs of naked bodies, bodies in the process of being dissected. Kyle’s heart beat hard as he stared at these, in secret. Decades later, Kyle sometimes felt a stirring of erotic interest, a painful throb in the groin, reminded by some visual cue of those old forbidden medical texts in his long-deceased grandfather’s library.
Beginning at about the age of eleven, he’d secretly copied some of the drawings and plates by placing tracing paper over them and using a felt-tip pen. Later, he began to draw his own figures without the aid of tracing paper. He would discover that, where fascination gripped him, he was capable of executing surprising likenesses. In school art classes he was singled out for praise. He became most adept at rapid charcoal sketches, executed with half-shut eyes. And later, sculpting busts, figures. His hands moving swiftly, shaping and reshaping clay.
This emergence of “talent” embarrassed him. To obscure his interest in the human figure in extremis, he learned to make other sorts of sculptures as well. His secret interests were hidden, he believed, inside the other sorts of sculptures as well. His secret interests were hidden, he believed, inside the other.
It would turn out that he disliked medical school. The dissecting room had revulsed him, not aroused him. He’d nearly fainted in his first, pathology lab. He hated the fanatic competition of medical school, the almost military hegemony of rank. He would quit before he flunked out. Forensic science was as close as he would get to the human body, but here, as he told interviewers, his task was reassembling, not dissecting.
~ * ~
The skull was nearly completed. Beautifully shaped, it seemed to Kyle, like a Grecian bust. The empty eye sockets and nose cavity another observer would think ugly, Kyle saw filled in, for the girl had revealed herself to him. The dream had been fleeting yet remained with him, far more vivid in his mind’s eye than anything he’d experienced in his own recent life.
Was she living, and where ?
His lost daughter. His mind drifted from the skull and on to her, who was purely abstract to him, not even a name.
He’d seen her only twice, as an infant, and each time briefly. At the time, her mother, manipulative, emotionally unstable, hadn’t yet named her; or, if she had, for some reason she hadn’t wanted Kyle to know.
“She doesn’t need a name just yet. She’s mine.”
Kyle had been deceived by this woman, who’d called herself “Letitia,” an invented name probably, a stripper’s fantasy name, though possibly it was genuine. Letitia had sought out Kyle Cassity at the college, where he’d been a highly visible faculty member, thirty-nine years old. Her pretext for coming into his office was to seek advice about a career in psychiatric social work. She’d claimed to be enrolled in the night division of the college, which turned out to be untrue. She’d claimed to be a wife estranged from a husband who was “threatening” her, which had possibly been true.
Kyle had been flattered by the young woman’s attention. Her obvious attraction to him. In time, he’d given her money. Always cash, never a check. And he never wrote to her: although she left passionate love notes for him beneath his office door, beneath the windshield wiper of his car, he never reciprocated. As one familiar with the law, he knew: never commit yourself in handwriting! As, in more recent years, Kyle Cassity would never send any e-mail message he wouldn’t have wanted to see exposed to all the world.
He hadn’t fully trusted Letitia, but he’d been sexually aroused by her, he liked being in her company. She was a dozen years younger than he, reckless, unreliable. Not pretty, but very sexual, seductive. After she vanished from his life he would suppose, sure, she’d been seeing other men all along, taking money from other men. Yet he accepted the pregnancy as his responsibility. She’d told him the baby would be his, and he hadn’t disbelieved her. He had no wish to dissociate himself from Letitia at this difficult time in her life, though his own children were twelve, nine, and five years old. And Vivian loved him, and presumably trusted him, and would have been deeply wounded if she’d known of his affair.
Though possibly Vivian had known. Known something. There was the evidence of Kyle’s infrequent lovemaking with her, a fumbling in silence.
But in December 1976, Letitia and the infant girl abruptly left Wayne, New Jersey. Even before the birth Letitia had been drifting out of her married lover’s life. He’d had to assume that she had found another man who meant more to her. He had to assume that his daughter would never have been told who her true father was. Twenty-eight years later, if she were still alive, Letitia probably wouldn’t have remembered Kyle Cassity’s name.
~ * ~
“Now: tell us your name, dear.”
After a week and a day of painstaking work, the skull was complete. All the bone fragments had been used, and Kyle had made synthetic pieces to hold the skull together. Excited now, he made a mold of the skull and on this mold he began to sculpt a face in clay. Rapidly his fingers worked as if remembering. In this phase of the reconstruction he played new CDs to celebrate: several Bach cantatas, Beethoven’s Seventh and Ninth symphonies, Maria Callas as Tosca.
~ * ~
Early in October the victim was identified: her name was Sabrina Jackson, a part-time community college student studying computer technology and working as a cocktail waitress in Easton, Pennsylvania. The young woman had been reported missing by her family in mid-May. At the time of her disappearance she’d been twenty-three, weighed 115 pounds, photographs of her bore an uncanny resemblance to the sketches Kyle Cassity and his assistant had made. In March she’d broken up with a man with whom she’d been living for several years, and she’d told friends she was quitting school and quitting work and “beginning a new life” with a new male friend who had a “major position” at one of the Atlantic City casinos. She’d packed suitcases, shut up her apartment, left a message on her voice mail that was teasingly enigmatic: “Hi there! This is Sabrina. I sure am sorry to be missing your call but I am OUT OF TOWN TILL FURTHER NOTICE. Can’t say when I will be returning calls but I WILL TRY”
No one had heard from Sabrina Jackson since. No one in Atlantic City recalled having seen her, and nothing had come of detectives questioning casino employees. Nor did anyone in Easton seem to know the identity of the man with whom she’d gone away. Sabrina Jackson had disappeared in similar ways more than once in the past, in the company of men, and so her family and friends had been hesitant at first to report her missing. Always there was the expectation that Sabrina would turn up. But the sketches of the Toms River victim bore an unmistakable resemblance to Sabrina Jackson, and the silver earrings found with the remains were identified as hers.
“Sabrina.”
It was a beautiful name. But Sabrina Jackson wasn’t a beautiful young woman.
Kyle stared at photographs of the missing woman, whose blemished skin was a shock. Nor was her skin pale, as he’d imagined, but rather dark, and oily. Her eyebrows weren’t delicately arched, as he’d drawn them, but heavily penciled in, as the outline of her fleshy mouth had been exaggerated by lipstick. Still, there was the narrow forehead, a snub nose, the small, receding chin. The shoulder-length hair, wavy, burnished brown, as Kyle had depicted it. When you looked from the sketches drawn in colored pencil to the actual woman in the photographs, you were tempted to think that one was a younger, sentimentally idealized version of the other, or that the two girls were sisters, one very pretty and feminine and the other somewhat coarse, sensuous.
Strange, it seemed to him, difficult to realize: the skull he’d reconstructed was the skull of this woman, Sabrina Jackson, and not the skull of the girl he’d sketched.
Always, Sabrina Jackson had been the victim. Kyle Cassity was being congratulated for his excellent work, but he felt as if a trick had been played on him.
He contemplated for long minutes the girl in the photographs who smiled, preened, squinted into the camera as if for his benefit. The bravado of not knowing how we must die, how our most capricious poses outlive us. The heavy makeup on Sabrina Jackson’s blemished face made her look older than twenty-three. She wore cheap, tight, sexy clothes, tank tops and V-neck blouses, leather miniskirts, leather trousers, high-heeled boots. She was a smoker. She did appear to have a sense of humor: Kyle liked that in her. Mugging for the camera. Pursing her lips in a kiss. The type who wouldn’t ask a man for money directly, but if you offered it she certainly wouldn’t turn it down. A small pleased smile would transform her face as if this were the highest of compliments. A murmured “Thanks!” And the bills quickly wadded and slipped into her pocket and no more need be said of the transaction.
The Best American Mystery Stories 2003 Page 27