Now he was sixty-seven, and of that age. He would have had to concede, as a younger man he’d often ignored his elders. He’d taken them for granted, he’d written them off as irrelevant. Of course, Kyle Cassity was a different sort of elder. There was no one quite like him.
A maverick, he thought himself. Not to be labeled. Born in 1935 in Harrisburg, PA, a long-time resident of Wayne, NJ: unique and irreplaceable.
Among his numerous relatives he’d long been an enigma: generous in times of crisis, otherwise distant, indifferent. True, he’d had something of a reputation as a womanizer until recent years, yet he’d remained married to the same devoted wife for four decades. His three children, when they were living at home, had competed for their father’s attention, but they’d loved him, you might have said they’d worshipped him, though now in adulthood they were closer to their mother, emotionally. (Outside his marriage, unknown to his family, Kyle had fathered another child, a daughter, whom he’d never known.) Professionally, Dr. Kyle Cassity was something of a maverick as well. A tenured senior professor on the faculty of William Paterson College of New Jersey, as likely to teach in the adult night division as in the undergraduate daytime school, as likely to teach a sculpting workshop in the arts school as a graduate seminar in the School of Health, Education, and Science. His advanced degrees were in anthropology, sociology, and forensic science; he’d had a year of medical school, and a year of law school. At Paterson College he’d developed a course titled “The Sociology of ‘Crime’ in America” that had attracted as many as four hundred students before Professor Cassity, overwhelmed by his own popularity. had retired it.
His public reputation in New Jersey was as an expert prosecution witness and a frequent consultant for the New Jersey Department of Forensics. He’d been the subject of numerous media profiles, including a cover story in the Newark Star-Ledger Sunday Magazine bearing the eye-catching caption SCULPTOR KYLE CASSITY FIGHTS CRIME WITH HIS FINGERTIPS. Was such publicity embarrassing? Or did it, in a way, gratify his sometimes childish vanity, his wish to be not merely known but well-known, not merely liked but well-liked? In his heart he wasn’t an ambitious man.
He gave away many of his sculptures, to individuals, museums, schools. He gave lectures for no fee throughout the state.
As a scientist he had little sentiment. He knew that the individual, within the species, counts for very little; the survival of the species is everything. But as a forensic specialist he focussed his attention upon individuals: the uniqueness of crime victims, and the uniqueness of those who have committed these crimes. Where there was a victim, there would be a criminal or criminals. There could be no ambiguity here. Kyle had no patience for the proviso…“Innocent until proven guilty.” You were guilty, guilty as hell, as soon as you committed a crime.
As Dr. Kyle Cassity he worked with the remains of victims. Often these were were badly decomposed, mutilated, or broken, seemingly past reconstruction and identification. He was good at his work, and had gotten better over the years. He loved a good puzzle. A puzzle no one else could solve except Kyle Cassity. He perceived of the shadowy faceless as-yet unnamed perpetrators of crime as human prey whom he was hunting, and was licensed to hunt.
“POOR GIRL. IT ended for you sooner than it should have, eh?”
This skull! What a mess. Never had Kyle seen bones so broken. How many powerful blows must have been struck to reduce the skull, the face, the living brain to such broken matter, Kyle tried to imagine: twenty? thirty? fifty? A frenzied killer, you would surmise. Better to imagine madness than that the killer had been coolly methodical, smashing his victim’s skull, face, teeth to make identification impossible.
No fingertips—no fingerprints—remained, of course. The victim’s exposed flesh had long since rotted from her bones. The body had been dumped sometime in the late spring or early summer in a field above an abandoned gravel pit near Toms River in the southern part of the state, a half-hour drive from Atlantic City. Bones had been scattered by wildlife but most had been located and reassembled: the victim had been approximately five feet two, with a small frame, a probable weight of one hundred to one hundred ten pounds. Judging by the hair, Caucasian.
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.
Strange it seemed to him: the manic energy the killer had expended in trying to destroy his victim in the most literal way, 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 through 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 work place, Kyle kept the air conditioning at 65°F. He played CDs: Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier and 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.
Someone’s daughter. Missing four months. By now they must know. Must be resigned.
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 in a separate plastic bag. 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.
Sun-warmed on the windowsill. Lustrous burnished-brown. Clinging to his fingers with static electricity, as if alive.
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, as in the aftermath of tension, or terror. 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 is no silence: traffic noises below, airplanes taking off and landing at Newark In
ternational 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…
“KYLE, WHAT IS this new project? You seem so…”
Distracted, Vivian might have wished to say. Her voice was hesitant and mild and in no way confrontational. For these two had been married for more than forty years and Kyle’s wife had long ago learned how to gauge his moods, how to interpret his ominous silences. Seeing him now pause on the stairs, frowning, running an impatient hand over his smooth, darkly flushed and veined head as if a thought had suddenly struck him.
“…seem so distressed. Kyle?”
Kyle looked toward her, and paused. Then he seemed to wake from his trance and smiled, saying, “Am I? I don’t mean to be.”
In this way, polite, pleasant, he deflected her question. His immediate response to an interruption of his thoughts was often a smile.
“Is it…anything we can talk about?”
“Is what ‘anything we can talk about’?”
He wasn’t angry with Vivian, he was protective of Vivian. But he did rather resent her use of the word distressed.
Not very likely, that Kyle Cassity would be distressed.
He had no interest in discussing his forensic work with his wife, or with anyone except fellow professionals. Her naive questions and invariably emotional responses bored him. If he confided in Vivian about the skull, her soft face would stiffen. Her fingers would flutter at her throat and her eyes would register alarm, dread, even hurt.
Oh Kyle, how can you work with such ugly, such hideous…
Why do you ask, then?
You’re my husband, I want to know. I want to share…
No. You don’t.
In his domestic life, Kyle made every effort to be good-natured. As a younger man, he’d been difficult: but those days were gone. He no longer allowed his frustrations with his work to erupt into displays of temper with his family. He no longer saw other women, he no longer became involved with sexually attractive, needy, manipulative women. He’d outgrown not passion exactly, for often he felt still the wayward pangs of sexual desire, but the capacity for taking passion seriously. Among those closest to him Kyle had cultivated his good nature like a paper mask. Not a rubber mask that clung to his face and might have interfered with his breathing, not a gargoyle-mask that called attention to itself. Kyle Cassity’s mask was smiling, affable, kindly, patient. He’d been a charismatic lecturer at the college, and he maintained some of that spotlit affability around the house. Through the mask’s mouth he could even kiss, sometimes. Brushing his lips against the lips of the woman who was his wife. Brushing his lips against the cheeks of the adults who were his grown children, and now the young children, scarcely known to him, who were his grandchildren. Through the mask’s smiling eye-holes he regarded the world, that region of infinite chaos, sorrow, and cruelty, with a sunny equanimity.
Vivian was saying, not accusing but simply saying, in the manner of one naming a mystery, that he hadn’t seemed to be sleeping very well lately, and he didn’t have much appetite, and she wondered if he was working on something stressful…“I wish you would tell me. If there’s anything you can talk about?”
“Vivian, yes. Of course.”
He was on his way out. Though it was nearly 10 P.M., he wanted to return to work. Through dinner he’d been distracted by thoughts of the skull, that was now about one-quarter re-assembled. Once he reached a critical point in the reconstruction, the remainder would go quickly: like completing a jigsaw puzzle. His heart yearned for that moment with the avidity of a young lover.
His lips brushed against the woman’s cheek, in passing.
IN PROFESSOR CASSITY’S spacious high-ceilinged office adjacent to his laboratory there was a sofa. Old, battered, but comfortable, having been put to variegated pragmatic uses over the years. If needed, he could sleep there.
“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, hair styles, gradations of color of the eyes.
“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: so soft.
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 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.
Yet not clearly, for her face was in shadow. That hazy-gray shadow where fluorescent lighting doesn’t reach. A perverse and sickly sort of shadow like a gauzy forgetful mind. Nor was her voice clear. She stood about fifteen feet from Kyle in the doorway leading to his office. Turned slightly at the waist as if she’d only just noticed him, or if she meant to show her small but pointed breasts, her slender waist. A man’s hands could fit around that waist. In her ears glittered silver hoop earrings. Her smile was sweetly shy, hesitant. Her chin was narrow as a child’s, her nose was small and snubbed. Her skin was pa
le, smooth, luminous. Her hair in a wavy, lustrous tangle fell past her shoulders and looked as if it had just been brushed.
Dr. Cassity! Dad-dy. See, I revere you?
Kyle woke, startled. His head had slumped forward onto his crossed arms, he’d slept at his workbench beneath glaring fluorescent lights. Against his warm forehead, an impress of bone fragments. He rubbed his face, his dazzled eyes.
Wanting to protest, nothing like that had ever happened to him before.
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 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 specialization was 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. That such things should be! That such things should be allowed! Someone, a man like Kyle’s own grandfather, had the privilege of taking up a sharp instrument and making an incision in human flesh and beginning to cut…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.
I Am No One You Know: And Other Stories Page 22