Cat leaned over the body and began working, averting her face from the stench that rose up when the wind came in from the east. Lacerated, the girl’s skin, even what was left of her hair, had been bleached white by the sun and salt. Rancid-smelling adipocere floated from her stomach cavity, waxy and yellowish-white in appearance.
She tried to get close enough to work, but not to touch the body, or have it rub up against her. Critical evidence could be lost to the teeming surf, from the slightest pressure from her skin. Expertly, she took advantage of the current to bring the naked body closer.
It was funny how the ocean, the giver of all life to the world, also harbored death, as if trying to resurrect it. Cool aqua waves lapping against the corpse, fish swimming by below, oblivious to the horror. The sea filled up each of this girl’s cells, trying to infuse her with life, trying to bring back what was already gone.
Assessing the hands first, Cat saw that only three nails remained on the left hand, two on the right. The body’s expanding gases and the formation of adipocere had caused most of the nails to pop off. They were now lost to the sea. What struck Cat first was the fact that what remained had been washed clean. Any trace evidence—blood, fibers, hairs—would be long gone. But still the girl’s nails had a story to tell. Although bleached white, the nails were not torn or jagged. She had not fought her attacker, had not ripped into him. When his cutting began, thankfully she had been unconscious, perhaps drugged.
Cat took a clear plastic Ziploc baggie from her tethered floating medical bag. Carefully and quickly, she removed a nail with tweezers. It gave way instantly from the jellyfish-like hand, slipping easily from the flesh. She placed it in the bag and went over the seal twice with her fingers, making sure it was closed. She labeled it with a wax marker, tagged it, and continued with the other nails.
With gloved fingers, Cat examined the hands painstakingly. Each finger resembled a slimy white waterlogged cigar. She handled each gingerly, afraid the finger would simply tear away and be gone.
It was as if the body was liquefying right before her eyes.
Scrutinizing each hand, she was looking for any lacerations, contusions, or abrasions that would indicate the girl had fought for her life. Picking up the flesh, which hardly held together in her hand, Cat found a blackened mark on the anterior portion of Carrie’s right hand. Mentally Cat noted there had been a struggle. Carrie may not have clawed her assailant, but at least she had gotten one good lick in. Good.
Fighting against the ocean’s growing surge that wrapped her legs, tugged at her footing, Cat took a hair sample, both from the head and pubic region. Skin tissue samples were taken from various sites of the corpse, each to compare the decay, to determine exactly how long Carrie Ann Bennett had been at sea. Toxicology and DNA testing would tell Cat much about the girl’s time of death and whether she had been drugged, poisoned.
Cat’s chest pumped up and down, fighting for clean air. The water had done its job, preserving the body, relieving the stench. But every now and then the chest was left bare so that an unbearable stench rose up.
Having collected what she could in the water, Cat noticed the body floating close to the barnacled jetty. She did not want any further secrets lost to rocks and surf. Carefully she held the pulpy mass, turned with the waves slapping against her, and pulled it ever so gently toward shore, steering clear from rocky outcroppings.
“Come on now,” she coaxed the girl, “I’m taking you home.”
NINETEEN
Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves.
—Rainer Maria Rilke, Letter to Franz Xaver Kappus, 1903
Testing at Quantico headquarters confirmed Marlin Bennett’s worst nightmare. His baby had come home. Tissue matches substantiated beyond a shadow of doubt that the poor soul was Carrie Ann Bennett, all 133 pounds, 5-foot-3 inches of her.
Cat found conducting Carrie’s autopsy difficult. It was never easy with a floater, but having brought this one back to her mother, her father, had made it even tougher.
Cat went through the motions, as before. Further tissue samples were taken, although Cat was certain the ones at sea had been enough. Still, one couldn’t be too careful. Mercilessly, the sea had taken almost all the girl’s hair, to the point that her own father had not recognized her. When dental records and DNA had confirmed the worst, he had simply stood there, mute for a good long while. Then, as if a sudden wall of grief had struck through an impenetrable dam of disbelief, he allowed himself to cry.
Now it was Cat’s job to learn as much as she could. Invariably, in a case like this, questions only led to more questions. How was he luring them in? What was the attractant? How many more were there out there floating, left for dead?
Looking at the custard-colored mass in front of her on the stainless-steel table, it felt odd being in Dr. Conrad James’s facilities without him. She had grown accustomed to him by her side.
He still could not be located, although the Irvine PD had checked with staff and friends. Cat wondered if he had lost it, or decided to get away from this case. She had heard stories about medical examiners cracking under pressure, but she’d never actually seen it happen. Now Cat had two of his assistants helping her with this corpse. They looked forlorn, also wondering where their fallen leader was. One, appearing in his thirties, had the most intense eyes she had ever seen. The other faded into the woodwork. They both stood there, hands clasped in front of them, waiting for her orders.
Gowned, gloved, and receiving clean oxygen through forced vents above, Cat went to work. Peering over the body, she gave the standard information: apparent age, sex, condition of the body. Normally she would have been able to report eye color, obvious race, and age. But with a floater, all of these things were obscured, as if the ocean was playing its own game of hide and seek with her. For this reason, the tissue samples and evidence gathered while Carrie Ann Bennett was in the water was even more important.
It was a perverse irony that only God seemed able to understand: how a girl could be so beautiful in life and so wretched in death. Cat recalled the girl’s photograph her mother provided the police—flowing hair, warm smile, the innocent allure of a girl turning into a woman. She felt a twinge of nostalgia. In life, Carrie Ann Bennett had not been beautiful enough to draw a crowd, but pretty in a fresh, down-home sort of way. Cat imagined she was the type of girl who liked to take her daddy a tall glass of lemonade as he cut the grass on the front lawn. Now she would never have the chance again.
Remembering the warm smile, she could feel the girl’s presence hovering, Cheshire cat-like, over her remains. Posthumously, Carrie Ann Bennett expected more of herself than most. She expected to tell Cat more than the others.
During the hours that had lapsed between the body being recovered and the present, Cat felt as if she had been caught in a whirlwind. It was always that way. The forbidden excitement from death, like a palatable force, never disappointed. The hype and expectations never fell short of what she knew to be true.
People had a real and unrelenting fascination with death’s gauntlet. That was why they slowed on the freeways to gawk at accidents. That was the grounds for the popularity of television shows like CSI and its cousins—they dealt unabashedly with the curiosity about death.
Coincidentally, that fascination as a child was what led Cat to this profession. Knowing what she did now, she wondered if she would have made the same career choice. Questions without solutions seemed to play havoc with her mind, her self-confidence. As with the other autopsy, Cat began, speaking into the hands-free mike. This young woman, like the other before, was in much the same condition. Still Cat owed it to her to be equally careful in her observations and her descriptions of what she was seeing. She could not overlook anything.
Cat’s two assistants simply stood like sentinels. She wondered if this was their first floater.
Cat turned her attention to the eyes, or lack of them. “The eyeballs are missing, ha
ving been consumed by sea life. Sphenoid is visible; a centimeter of tissue is visible attached to the interior orbital fissure…
This girl had teeth that appeared in good condition. “Dental work to the bicuspid molars were evident, three silver fillings total.” Describing this, Cat knew Carrie’s dental records were a match.
Once gain, over the entire body, the skin appeared translucent, blanched white. Cat struggled to properly describe the bleached mass. “The skin has none of the familiar patina to it, there is no ruddiness, no evidence of color at all.”
Cat moved in over the skull, examining the little hair clumps that clung precariously to the skin. Slipping her gloved hand under the head, she lifted it and felt something notched below her fingertips.
Feeling her pulse quicken, she turned off the voice recorder.
“What is it, doctor?” one of the assistants said.
“I’ve got something back here.” Her assistants moved forward, one of them slipping his hands below, the other with his hand under the girl’s back. Instinctively, they could tell what Cat needed them to do. “Help me turn her over.”
Carrie Ann’s fatty, jellied corpse did not want to turn, clinging and squishing stubbornly away from their grip. It was as if she were still floating, not wanting to give up her secrets.
“One, two, three,” Cat said as they simultaneously put more effort into flipping the body. It wasn’t so much that the corpse was heavy. Far from it. Any heavy muscle tissue had long been replaced by decaying fatty matter. It was that they didn’t want to lose any of her. Cat remembered touching a floater at room temperature when she had interned, watching a glob of fat slip through her fingers and plop on the floor. When she thought of it, the image still terrified her. She would not allow that to happen here.
“Careful now, careful…”
The corpse was halfway turned, some of her body weight borne by her mercilessly swollen tree-trunk arm. Soggy layers of skin give way, coming free from bone in one quick movement that they hadn’t anticipated. One of the assistants gave a look of sheer disgust.
“I’m losing her!” the other one shouted.
Before his words were over, the featureless putty that had once been Carrie Ann Bennett was flopped on its stomach, making an odd splat sound. Even before that, Cat looked at the cranium, searching for what she had felt.
She didn’t search long.
Even as bloated as the head was, Cat could make out the word. Someone had carved “WANT” into the back of Carrie Ann’s head.
TWENTY
For of all sad words of tongue or pen,
The saddest are these, “It might have been!”
—John Greenleaf Whittier, “Maud Miller”
You mustn’t blame yourself,” McGregor said.
“But he is sending me a message. Don’t you see? He is killing them now for blood sport. It has become an even greater game since I entered the picture. This whole national search thing. It’s a load of crap.” Cat looked at McGregor sideways. “Don’t you see, by escalating our search, we are feeding his sick fantasy. And who are we kidding? This guy doesn’t live in some backwoods trailer in South Carolina. He’s right here, right under our noses. And he’s rubbing our noses in that fact every second.”
“How can you tell that?” McGregor tried to remain calm, to soothe her. He’d seen this type of reaction before. A combination of getting too close to the case, too little sleep, and too many suspects.
“We can’t find him. He leaves us too little.” Pent-up frustration came through. “What kind of sicko enjoys this?”
McGregor shook his head. “Cat, maybe you should take some time off the case for a little while.”
“What?” Her temper flared.
“It’s just a suggestion. You’ve been out here for two and a half weeks. It’s plain to see you’re on edge…”
She wheeled around to look at him, stop him from going any further. “You want me to chuck it? Leave it to you local guys?”
McGregor understood that he underestimated Cat’s passion and her toughness.
“You think that would be fair?”
He said nothing.
“You think I’d just walk away from this? You think I possess that kind of righteous disregard for my investigation to have someone else simply take over? That’s ridiculous.”
“I’m saying others are capable, Cat. Someone not as close could be more objective.”
She felt her pulse throb in her neck.
“He’s sending messages to me. How could I possibly walk away from that? ‘I want.’ What the hell does that mean? I want what? I want to live, I want to die. I want to do this to every woman I meet.”
Anger, like a cascading flood, poured out. McGregor knew better than to say anything more. This was a catharsis. He’d hit a nerve. He would let it ride.
“You wonder about my sanity, think of his. How sane can someone be who writes messages into corpses’ heads and then sends them on their watery way?”
Her question reverberated in the car that Tuesday morning as they sped toward the home of Dr. Caldwell Hamilton Marsh.
“How do you think I feel?” There had been a leak from the coroner’s office and the papers had plastered the fact that the Burning Man was carving messages into his victims. This had earned Cat a dubious honor. “How do you think I feel when I walk down the street? Everybody saying ‘There she is’? Asking me what it’s like to be the object of this bastard’s affection? Everyone wants to know if I’m enjoying it?”
“People are curious, Cat. You, of anyone, should know that.”
“I do. But for the first time, my personal life has become intertwined with a case. And I don’t like it one single bit.”
Newspapers were filled with speculation about what it was he could want. Her job, money, more victims, compassion, forgiveness, a place in her heart. Cat knew he wanted none of these. He wanted to be understood for being himself.
Not just the public persona which he so carefully cultivated and crafted, but the warped, wretched side of him that only she could understand.
It was like looking at a Picasso or a Van Gogh. One could not begin to understand the artist without first studying the brush strokes…the use of color, line symmetry, light, dark.
With the Burning Man, she could not begin to understand him without studying each of the corpses, blood work-up, toxicology, his modus operandi. With each new killing, he was leaving her more clues, but they were leading nowhere specific.
His killing fever was growing. She was running out of time.
She sat sullen for a minute as they headed along Jamboree, up into Orange Heights.
Soon they came to Dr. Marsh’s home. Set back from the road, Cat could nevertheless see a sprawling English Tudor-style home, painted cream and brown. To one side, a turret speared up into the sky. In front, a proper English garden flourished—Pacific giant delphiniums, late-blooming David Austin Roses, an array of sedum and lamb’s ears. At first blush, the house seemed quite large, austere, a massive combination of wood, concrete, steel covered by a wood shake roof, which looked somewhat in need of repair. On closer examination, the house, like the man who lived there, seemed warmer, more modest than its exterior. Complexity and simplicity in one.
Dr. Marsh answered the door. From his looming exterior shone appealing eyes, a firm handshake, a sheltering persona. She understood instantly why he was a famous doctor. His sheer size made one feel protected, his personality nurturing. He did not have the “God complex” that many surgeons had. Instead, he welcomed them in easily and warmly.
“Sorry to bother you, sir,” McGregor said.
“It’s not a bother at all.” Dr. Marsh quickly pulled off gardening gloves, rinsed his massive hands under the sink. “Would either of you like something to drink?”
Both McGregor and Cat declined.
He ushered them to a formal living room, done in monochromatic furnishings, leading the eye naturally to Santiago Canyon’s hills beyond, now pai
nted green by the summer’s rains. Cat could hear the sounds of birds, wildlife outside. She supposed the point of the room was just that—to allow nature’s sounds to be the star. Magnificent white orchids dotted the room.
Cat touched one of the flowers, not believing it real.
“One of my hobbies, raising them,” said Dr. Marsh.
“They are beautiful.” Cat ran her fingers across the delicate petal, wondering how God could create such perfection in a flower and such evil in a killer.
“They are my babies. Well, at least one anyway.” Sitting on the edge of the chair, he spoke at a fast clip. Despite his size, she was sure he was the type who never sat still. It was visibly killing him to sit now.
McGregor pulled out his notebook and got to the point. “Doctor, I know you’ve read the papers. Heard of the terrible condition of the latest…” McGregor caught on his words. “Victim.”
Dr. Marsh’s face showed emotion for just a millisecond.
Before McGregor could say anything more, Dr. Marsh began talking, his voice tragic, hushed. “It’s really my fault. Nancy wanted to head off to UCLA. She was a bright young woman. She’d been offered a partial scholarship there to study English literature. After a liberal arts education, we had talked about law school for her, maybe Loyola.”
Cat watched him wring his big burly hands as he spoke.
“Her mother had accepted the fact she would be leaving. But I could not. She was my only girl. My baby. I wanted her to stay. Convinced her to do a year at Chapman, said it would be good for her. In a liberal arts education, the units would transfer. Hell, I had friends at Chapman who’d make sure they did. I just couldn’t bear to lose her yet. We had so much left to do.”
The Burning Man Page 15