Violence (7 page)

Anderson nodded vaguely, tucked the card in his front pants pocket.

“Are there any other family members or friends who might be able to help you coordinate arrangements, get through this?” Crotty asked a bit gently, somewhat knowing the answer. Crotty had already looked over a preliminary rundown on Anderson which showed that Karen and Tristan were apparently all the family he had. Crotty was hoping Anderson had some other support but fearing that wasn’t the case this was also the reason Crotty was dispensing with so many details for dealing with the aftermath of crime that were usually handled by other people.

Anderson simply shook his head, locked his gaze on Crotty’s stare. Anderson knew Karen had an older sister but they were not close. Karen last saw her sister two years ago, and before that three years earlier when Karen flew to Seattle for their mother’s funeral. Their father was a long-time Port of Seattle employee who worked construction and maintenance. He died a couple years before the mother. Karen was ten years younger than her sister. The mother had Karen when she was forty-two. The parents just got to that age where the parts start kicking out after a hard run and one malady led to another. Cancer of some sort was the cause of death in both cases but it was really simply that they were advanced in years.

Crotty pulled another card out of his wallet, gave it to Anderson. “There’s some other numbers for victim’s and crisis support groups. You’re welcome to use the police chaplain whose number is also provided on there.”

“Thank you.” It was all Anderson could manage. He tucked that card in his pocket with the other one.

“Do you have somewhere to stay tonight?” Crotty asked him.

But Anderson was silent as the patrolman in the enclosure slid Anderson’s keys into the metal dish under the window.

“Maybe you want to get a prescription, something to help you sleep?” Crotty said this to Anderson more as a strong recommendation rather than a suggestion.

Anderson just nodded, gathered his car keys. There was a brief moment where he might have shaken Crotty’s hand but it didn’t seem appropriate. Anderson simply headed for the Sally Port security doors that would take him back to where his car was parked.

Crotty ran a tired hand through his hair, threw a relieved look to the patrolman. Crotty was happy to be done with this one. It’s never easy and this case was particularly tough.

CHAPTER 7

         “S
tate of Illinois - For Official Use Only.” The decal emblem on the side of a passenger van stirred a memory for Anderson who had to wait for the van to pass into the police station Sally Port before he could get to his Mercedes. Rain began to pour down in sheets.

A flash of lightning, right overhead, blanketed him as he got into his car. Anderson pulled the car door shut, but didn’t put the key in the ignition. He stared straight ahead, trancelike, the heat of his breath fogging the windshield as an explosive clap of thunder rattled him into reverie:

“We’ll remember you in our prayers,” he recollected her saying. Anderson was only seven-years-old when he was led by the faceless man to the waiting vehicle with the “State of Illinois” seal on its car door. She had no face either, the woman who called after him from the doorway of the house. It wasn’t that they literally had no features, it was simply Anderson, as a child, never saw them. Ever. It was more a survival instinct and easier if he made it a point to not become too attached. They weren’t bad people. None of them were to this point. It was usually an issue of survival for them, too. The children inside the house he was leaving were crying, that much was vivid. They cried because they thought or knew they were next. The suitcase was bigger than he was that the young Anderson had to drag into the back seat with him. The faceless man moved around and got behind the wheel of the car with the seal and drove off with the young Anderson who never looked back.

The rain was really coming down now, like tears from weeping. Maybe God was crying. Karen would have said something like that. Maybe “He” didn’t exist as Anderson always suspected, or rather insisted. Karen was the spiritual one. Tristan, too. With them gone the last piece of his soul was lost.

Anderson looked over at the ribboned iPhone box on the passenger seat next to him. He buried his head against the steering wheel. He couldn’t drive away just yet. The wipers wouldn’t be able to keep up with the deluge. Anyway, he had no place to go.

CHAPTER 8

         A
nderson was standing between the two gurneys that held the bodies of Karen and Tristan in the receiving room of the funeral home. The funeral director had given him some time alone with them, and was respectfully out of sight.

Anderson had to pay an extra charge to view the bodies outside of normal business hours but he didn’t want to be interrupted. He wanted it to be quiet, too. He hoped being with the bodies they would somehow speak to him, one last time, that he could hear something in the ethereal, otherworldly dimension outside of the normal lines of life. Maybe some of Karen and Tristan’s nudging did seep into his DNA. They always looked for God’s presence and protection. They believed in it. He sure didn’t. Especially now. They even believed he was a gift from God to them. He felt like he personally poisoned them, their chance at happiness, by the mere fact that he ever crossed their paths. Karen would have found someone else if she never met him. He was sure of that. Tristan would have been born to Karen through that relationship or Tristan’s soul would have been born to another family, somewhere.

He couldn’t set his eyes squarely on them at first. The guilt was too overwhelming, like black bile that was continually pushing up through his esophagus. He did finally look at them, first at Tristan with her perfect skin and angelic features ravaged by bloating and blotchy lividity, and then Karen with her decimated features and blood-soaked hair. It felt like his heart would burst even though he was barely breathing.

All he could think of was the circularity in life, and how he hated coming back around to something because in his case it was usually something not very good. He knew what had been done to them in the autopsy. He had witnessed one in the Army when an Ordnance specialist in his unit had died in an accident. The kid was from a nice Jewish family in Nashville and his parents had asked Anderson to witness the post-mortem examination. The Army quickly alluded to it as being a suicide but the family was having no part of that explanation.

The parents chose Anderson, he remembered, because he had met them briefly, having lunch with them at a nice restaurant in Atlanta when he and the kid were on leave from Fort Benning. Their son thought it was funny that he, Anderson, had no family whatsoever, and kept bringing it up throughout the meal.

The parents hated that their son was going to get cut up in the autopsy. They were practicing Jews and this was against their religion. But suicide was an even larger sacrilege. The body was holy, in life and death, and only for God to take, in His time.

Anyway, the Army would have ignored the parent’s objection except that Anderson said right away he thought it was an accident. The kid’s family was incredibly thankful for this. That was a long phone call, the one he had with the parents, because they wanted to know how their son was in his final days, what he said, how he was feeling. Anderson assured them he was full of life, which he was, and looking forward to the day he would be coming home.

It really was just an unfortunate mishap. The kid had gone out of their tent to urinate in the middle of the night, and didn’t want to walk the few extra yards to the temporary latrine. So he stepped over to the edge of a nearby canal and relieved himself over the side. Unfortunately, he had taken up smoking recently, more to look Army tough than anything else, and was drowsily trying to light a cigarette at the same time as he was peeing. He slipped and fell in.

The kid’s family had a big question. Why they were camped so close to an obvious hazard? But it wasn’t the Army’s fault either, to be fair, Anderson thought to himself at the time. The nature of being in the Army was to be in constant danger, everything was about expediency. Laying blame was tricky.

The autopsy itself was standard. Standard, as Anderson learned from the young Army pathologist doing the duty at the time, meant they started with a million more photographs of the body (which Anderson could agree was necessary, and heck, the body is past caring, but it still gnawed at Anderson that photos had to be taken at all) before the corpse is weighed. The body is then placed on a slab and a rubber brick is placed under the back to make the chest jut accessibly, causing the arms and head to fall away. Then a deep Y-shaped incision is made which begins at the shoulders, meets at the breast bone and continues down to the pubic bone. Once this is complete, the thick layer of skin is then pulled back to expose the ribcage and neck muscles. More cuts are made and the ribcage is sawed through, separating it from the skeleton.

With the organs now exposed, removal and examination is quite easy. Everything is taken out methodically, weighed and sampled. Veins are opened (there’s hardly any blood because of an absence of blood pressure), stomach and intestinal contents are recorded.

Once the main body has been gutted completely, the rubber brick is slid back under the head to facilitate sawing the top of the skull open. The crown cap is then pulled away making it easy to sever the brain from the spinal cord and lift it free for examination.

The pathologist finished in a little over an hour but said it could have taken up to two hours, even longer in tricky cases. But this was routine. Even unnecessary Anderson thought. The bruising on the kid was easy to make out. His head was banged on the side, and his leg and arm on the same side were broken badly indicating he was trying to brace himself from the impact of the fall. If he were trying to kill himself he would have taken a swan dive, Anderson recalled thinking at the time.

Anyway, the Army pathologist said Anderson could leave but Anderson waited while they reconstituted the remains. This consisted of placing the organs into a plastic bag and dumping them back into the empty chest cavity somewhat like how you see the heart, liver, kidney and neck packaged within a Thanksgiving turkey, only on a human scale. The chest and skull cap were then sewn back up.

Anderson remembered he never wanted to see something like that again, especially with someone he knew. It wasn’t that he was particularly squeamish but that it confirmed the meaninglessness of life and his cynicism wasn’t a flattering trait. He was smart enough to know that.

He didn’t know what had ever happened with the investigation. The Military Claims Act imposes serious obstacles to a wrongful death lawsuit. Maybe the parents received some settlement. It just made Anderson feel sadder to think about it. Money would be no comfort.

The big question for Anderson was why he was thinking about this now? Why was this Army experience invading his thoughts? Maybe this was another self-preservation instinct to keep him from thinking of his complicity, his contribution to Karen and Tristan’s demise because that was all he could reflect on - why this, why that. Why didn’t he stay home and protect them? Why wasn’t he more forceful in his personality, teaching them that there is real evil in the world, to recognize it as such? Why didn’t he insist on putting in that elaborate home alarm system over their objections? Why, and this is most important, why did he escalate a bad situation, turning it into a confrontation when he could have let those guys finish out their work for the day and quietly let his friend who hired them tell them later he had other jobs for them to do in other places? The “whys” were endless and felt like cross-fibers in a tightening noose around his neck.

Maybe his helping the kid’s family then was giving him the wisdom, the knowledge to take care of his loved ones now. Anderson sided with the Jewish faith that it was really a selfish exhibition to embalm. True, it would hide a lot of the evisceration, allow for an open casket, at least on Tristan. Karen would take major reconstruction to permit even a limited viewing. But it was simply a way to keep a loved one around for as long as possible. Not let go. Injecting them. Spraying them. Coloring them. It would be just another invasion of their privacy. That was over. You are supposed to recall them in their vitality. He was going to remember them for the good and powerful radiance they brought to this grey place.

Anderson could see the flash of dejection on the funeral director’s face earlier when he said he didn’t want them embalmed. There would be a sizable charge. The funeral director’s spirits rose, though, when Anderson mentioned wanting to get Karen and Tristan a mausoleum crypt. There probably was a referral fee the funeral director would get with the memorial park. Karen and Tristan would be upset with Anderson for thinking like this, even if it was accurate. Let people cheat a little if they have to, they would say, but his way of thinking was… dammit, he had to STOP THINKING!

He had slept on the sofa at his office the last two nights. If he got a half hour of real sleep he’d be surprised. It was solely just staring into space and willing time on the LED display of the clock radio to move forward. He knew the greatest danger now was to let depression pull him into the abyss like claws reaching up from the earth. When Joyce came to work, he startled her as she put her key to the office lock. He’d pulled the sofa against the entrance and when she tried to no avail to push the door open, he just mumbled something to her about her taking some time off. He could hear her weeping as she returned to her car.

Roman left a message on his cell phone after a couple of tries to reach him directly but Anderson wouldn’t answer. Roman said how sorry he was and assured Anderson that he would keep the job sites moving, and he, Anderson, didn’t even have to ask.

Standing there now in the funeral home receiving room, every fiber of Anderson’s being wanted to hold on to Karen and Tristan for as long as possible, their physical beings, but they weren’t coming back. Their bodies had been kept refrigerated most of the time but, considering the violence that occurred, he would still have a simple visitation, closed caskets, that night.