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, having 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.