Entropy Read Free Page B

my feet lightly on the ground to keep warm, and generate blood flow in my extremities.
    â€œIt’s too early to tell how brutal the assault was. We don’t even know if she was violated sexually. Whatever happened though, it certainly is a bleak scene,” he added. “Like I said, it may just turn out to be a tragic accident. Then no one will need either one of us,” he added. A woman in a turtle-neck sweater was on her knees, sifting through a loose pile of soil around the edges of the in-ground pool. Mull walked over and spoke to her. I watched him move from one area of the marked crime scene to another, like a dancer pacing through his marks choreographed from a textbook.
    Mull and I had much in common with one another, despite our distant upbringings, although he would never admit it. That, among other things, was probably why he didn’t want me here. It was like I was his foil, an altered mirror image, the villain unobstructed, who thwarted his attempts at prestige and destiny, and constrained his movement. He looked past me when his attention brought his eyes towards the barren edge of the pool. It made me feel rejected; a novice understudy to the immorality play laid out before us, on a stage of fallen snow, concrete and darkness. But there was no audience, no applause; no one to comment on the job you were doing, or to offer praise. I wanted to be sick. Mull’s gaze eventually crossed my own. We were both men whose lives hadn’t turned out as we had expected. In a blunt matter of speaking, we were failures.
    The water could teach you how to hate if you let it.
    The oval spectrum of another officer’s flashlight penetrated the complex milieu that advanced on my sense of decency; the proprietary standards I thought that I had understood. There was a protective sheet that covered the recessed pool. It lay partially unfastened, pulled back slightly at one corner and folded over from right to left, similar to the way a person unmade their bed, or removed a blanket from their sleeping body. It appeared commonplace and innocuous. Someone leaned over with a small instrument and removed some of the strands of rope that had been untied and deposited them into a plastic bag that had the word “evidence” stenciled across the side.
    â€œThe perpetrator could have used his or her bare hands, and left samples of skin behind or hairs, any fragments of DNA, maybe even material from a glove,” Mull said walking towards me. I stepped closer to the pool and looked at her body, as if I were retrieving a moment from my childhood, trying to gain access to something that in adulthood I no longer had the right to see. When she had been discovered, the officers initially suspected that the girl drowned, even though the pool was partially drained. But a person could drown in just inches of water. I could see the top of where the waterline had once been. Only about two feet had been drained. I wondered why it hadn’t been completely emptied.
    Small bits of ice formed crystals in the girl’s hair and along her ears. They looked like earrings she might have taken from her mother’s dresser when she wasn’t looking. A fragile touch of frost rested gently upon the water’s surface, so that you could still see the darkened color of the once-chlorinated and soiled water underneath. Depending upon the angle from where I stood, it looked like the ocean along the Canadian coastline at dusk; a majestic body of water but without the tragic and pitiful stench of the dead. I wanted desperately to be there, hundreds of feet below the surface, alone, warmed by the mists and strands of acetylene from a welding torch floating in the current. I remembered how when the strands broke apart they looked like the tentacles of an emaciated jellyfish; tired and skinny.
    The photographer arrived in a squad car about forty-five minutes after I was called. I felt uncomfortable as I stood there and watched