Entropy (22 page)

***

Using an accelerant that was very common and hard to trace, the vacant Missouri clinic quickly burned. The intense heat of the incendiary fire poured into the night sky. The beast raged. The dried shrubs around the building wilted. Paint dripped along the walls, and appeared as tears falling from the face of a Roman statue.

Instead of decomposing, fire sterilized the world, ridding it of disease and impurity. Moreover, it left nothing behind. She painted a biblical verse on the stamped pavement of the parking lot. In the unoccupied spaces unblemished by ash and smoke I observed her. The winds pulled at the smoke, coiled it, and turned it from side to side. The darkened core of the fire widened, its incandescence transforming the pale, cold blue of her eyes as she became visibly excited by the danger and the destruction.

I moved closer to the burning building. The heat reached out and embraced me. It felt baptizing. It changed the texture of my skin. The smoke burned the inside of my throat. She moved closer, cinders settling against the delicate creases of her skin, like patterns in black snow. The clothes she wore were nearly identical to those Noemi had worn the weekend of her sister's wedding. The material was a brilliant blue against the intense flames. As she turned to face me, portions of the engulfed building collapsed behind her.

Her people had scattered as the rest of the building, except for a lone wall, laid in ruin. Our job was done. William McCoy could nearly be a thing of the past, an abject nightmare recounted in a training textbook. As I started the fire, I thought that I'd just have to burn down a few more vacant buildings before being able to move on. But as it would turn out she wouldn't let me go that easily. And as I watched her, sweat streaming down her face, her hardening nipples pressing through her blouse, I was now not so sure that I wanted to move on so soon.

As the fire continued to burn, she was spinning around in circles like a child, an adolescent of darkness. Sirens began to sound in the distance. She stood in front of me, and wiped the sweat and ash from the side of my face with her right palm. I watched her open her lips and lick away the grime.

“It's time to go,” I said. She took my hand and led me to a stolen car that a member of her organization had left for her, parked less than a mile away.

Later that night she led me into her bed.

***

The living room was humid and the confinement choked me. I looked out the window. Rain, which had been falling constantly against the pavement, drifted into an unfamiliar pattern of confusion, like it didn't understand its purpose, what it was supposed to do. Above the fireplace on a floating shelf were shadowboxes, photographs of Noemi and me, taken during that weekend her sister got married in Morrow Bay.

Time succumbed when she was near, paralyzed into an infinite stillness by the depths of her compassion and her unyielding altruism. She had looked so beautiful. Her blue sundress was offset by a pattern of pale yellow flowers. On another woman it may have appeared ostentatious. But hanging loosely over her shoulders and exposing her neckline, it made her demure and unassuming. I remembered how confident she was, holding my hand, never affected by my reluctance in posing for photos – given my caution in never wanting to be recognized.

The waters behind us on that small island never moved, and ceased to even twitch under the boldness of the sunset. It was unique to me, seeing so many empty boats resting on its surface. They were just idle decorations. Out on the deck of the restaurant a gentle breeze blew in off the sea, cooling the cup of coffee in my hand. With my back to the water I watched a father hold his daughter against his chest, her tiny fingers tugging at his lower lip. I could read his lips as he spoke gently to her. He asked his daughter who is this.
Who is this
?

We would never have children because of what happened there in Morrow Bay.

Who was I?

Jonathan Levin. Arrested in June for indecent exposure when sighted masturbating in public inside an alley, located behind a state store. Is currently wanted for questioning in connection with the disappearances and murders of several children in Pennsylvania. Considered to be a person of interest in at least two other disappearances. Recent reports lead the authorities to believe he is traveling up and down the East Coast. Current whereabouts unknown.

There were continual neighborhood watches organized by parents. Men and women walked the darkened streets at night with flashlights. It looked like a constant state of Halloween every evening, except there were no costumes, and people were too frightened to open their doors. I slid back the curtains in the living room and turned off the few lights Noemi had left on that afternoon, before going to her parents. I locked the front door and waited to be contacted by my handler. There still wasn't much information that I could pass on to him.

For over a month, I had been researching a different angle around the murders. Sometimes children were kidnapped and then sold on-line to another sexual predator. So that's what I had been examining while Noemi spent much of her time in New York, trying to re-establish her stalling career. On weekends she came home, but she hadn't been back for a couple of weeks. Dirty dishes looked like fossils piled high in the sink. I missed her. But I was no longer the man that I had promised her I would be.

Before crawling deeper into that realm, I prepared myself by dropping a couple of ice cubes into a glass and opened a bottle of scotch. Leaving the kitchen, I passed through the living room and stoked the fireplace. I missed watching her read quietly in front of the fire during the winter. I longed for the warm glow of the flames to highlight the curves of her body, to cast shadows upon the already darkened places that I wanted to relearn, rescue, and bring back with me into the light. It was in those weeks before her sister's wedding that I finally found the bare thread that would cause entire mystery to finally unravel, but what it revealed was a crumpled and disgusting truth.

Countless nights I had waited for that elusive clue, as photographs of children for sale flashed across my laptop. The first thing I was looking for were any pictures of children who had been previously assaulted and murdered. It wasn't a certainty, but I thought that one or more of them had been abducted by someone who lived nearby, and had been sold subsequently to another pedophile. The crime scene descriptions were notated on a legal pad, and reading parts of it made me uncertain again. However the forensic discoveries didn't match with what I believed had happened. Each scene, each murder, seemed too personal to be a sexual appetite spun out of control.

But the trauma to the corpses was significant. It was never an accidental act of malice. It was brutality in its purest form, not simply misguided urges of love or passion. Child sexual slavery was common globally. It existed in a more underground way in the United States and was thought to number some tens of thousands of victims. People just didn't want to think that a parent could sell their child to someone like what I had attempted to become. Not here.

There were so many places where an individual could go, an individual like Jonathan Levin. Sorting through the thousands of photographs of exploited children was unbearable. It was nothing more than an arid wasteland of sexual depravity and ravaged innocence; an amoral flea market of flesh. The children in the photographs that were sent to me varied in race and age.

One young girl, who appeared around fifteen, was for sale. The image was originally posted in March with a price of $10,000. She was dressed in a light yellow shirt, her hair pulled to one side. A man's hand was draped across her shoulder. She was visibly scared. It was apparent in the placement of her hands, the subtle angle in which she held her head. I recognized something about her. Undoubtedly, the young girl was under duress. It wasn't clear, but she appeared to be bound to the chair around the ankles. There were no names underneath any of the photographs, just numbers. I saved the file and increased the canvas size.

In subsequent stills I tried to place where I thought I had seen her previously. A second photograph showed a man's hands raising her dress higher on her thighs; her light colored underwear was just visible. One comment described the girl as a unique bud soon burgeoning, blossoming. Each one merely needed cultivating. She was very pretty. I swallowed hard, stood and walked to the kitchen. Beads of sweat fell into an empty glass at the bottom of the kitchen sink. I thought about calling Noemi in New York. But what would I tell her? I didn't want her to know what I had been doing in the investigation. It would have condemned her to live in the same filth and corruption that I did, suffocated by horrors that she could have never possibly imagine. And I loved her too much for that. The hand towel I used to dry my face smelled like vanilla.

Each one merely needed cultivating
…

***

Two weeks had passed since I had first seen that girl's photograph. It troubled me, being unable to determine her identity, and as I result I saw her everywhere. In grocery stores I would see her pass the end of an aisle, or ride off in the passenger seat of a minivan. At times, she would ride by the front of our house on a bicycle. She never spoke, but I imagined her voice was soft and inoffensive. I requested more revealing images of her. I had also corresponded with several other individuals wanting to purchase a child, and provided them with the images that had given to me. At least none of those children existed. Each one was fabricated, free of the burden of misuse and neglect. Opposing that, were the remaining images of that girl in the yellow dress.

There was only one image that I remembered in excruciating detail, although there were some forty images in all, each overlapping and bleeding into the next. Even when she wore different clothes in succeeding prints, I always saw that yellow dress, the one with the pale flowers scattered across the waist. The girl was on her knees, up against a corner in a barren room with little furniture. Paint must have chipped off of the wall because there were flecks of white on the left side of her face. Her hands were bound behind her back. There was a man behind her, his hands gripping her buttocks. He was naked from the waist down and about to sodomize her. There were no distinguishing features about him, no scars or tattoos. What made me forget all of the other photos and remember this one was the dead lily he had forced into her mouth. There were tears in her eyes.

Each one merely needed cultivating …

There just seemed to be no limits or boundaries in a case like this. Some of the things that I recalled saying with an apparent ease during the wiretaps, frightened me. There wasn't a choice. I thought again about calling New York. Would she understand how it made me feel, to tell some pervert that I wanted to buy a video of an eleven-year-old girl engaging in anal sex? That I got turned on by watching a fifty-year-old man insert his fingers into an eight year old's vagina? I could never tell her how horrifying and crippling it was to pretend to want to fuck a twelve-year-old boy, and then go to bed with her. Instead I reached out to my handler and passed over what I had discovered, giving him IP addresses, and details of the communications I maintained with some of the suspected pedophiles. But I hadn't forwarded him everything.

Not when I finally remembered where I had seen her, that girl in the yellow dress.

I didn't establish the connection immediately because the photographs that connected me to her identity had been taken inside a small, brightly lit room surrounded by metal tables. Instruments were laid out next to her on a tray. I could no longer determine what color her dress was. It didn't look yellow, but jaundiced. It probably reeked of urine. The flowers patterned along her waistline had wilted. Ligature marks were scattered across her wrists and ankles.

It was her autopsy photos. I had found them in the back of a file.

Penelope was the third victim, found dumped in an abandoned grain silo. I wasn't sure why I didn't hand over that photograph. Maybe in some abstract way I identified with her, isolated and abused, trapped by the animalistic nature of the human condition. I sorted through the rest of the file. There were other photographs of her: one taken at her confirmation; another in the room at the hospital when she was born. She was a beautiful child. It said in the police notes from when her parents were questioned that she wanted to be an agriculturalist.

I scattered the images captured at the crime scene across the kitchen table. By all accounts the surrounding area had been searched properly by a team of forensic experts, and nothing was found. I pushed them aside, and stared at her, naked and stitched like a rag doll. I reread the autopsy report. Traces of blood, stool and grain were embedded underneath her fingernails. She had been sexually violated multiple times prior to death.

***

We had been in Morrow Bay for almost a week. Noemi believed we needed the time together. There were over fourteen men and women working diligently to apprehend a suspect. I had quietly left the number to the hotel with my handler in case another body was discovered. The place where we stayed was quaint, and still considered an active and functioning fishing village. We often dined at a small seafood place that had been recommended to us, which specialized in local lobster and crab.

I could smell the ocean wherever we went, even in the warmth of the little bakery in the middle of town. At sunset the atmosphere was beautiful, as reds and then purples stretched across the stillness of the bay. There wasn't much to do, except peruse local shops and enjoy the local landscapes. It was quiet and I wasn't sure exactly who to be. Part of what now identified me, unfortunately, was the noise that accompanied me; a deafening sense of dread and malice, disguising itself in the gulls coming in with the morning sunrise.

As much as I struggled to, I just couldn't put the case aside. There was no way to offset the dejection and the suffering that came with it, even there. Noemi went for drinks with her sister and cousins at a pub at the end of the pier. I waited for her to leave and then powered up the laptop I had been using during the investigation. I leaned against the rail of the balcony that led off from our room, and opened up a file on the most recent body that had been recovered. There was a gentle breeze coming in off of the water.