The Body Farm, page 24
Then there are the everyday poisons, so ordinary that they fly beneath the radar in a different way. Large amounts of potassium can be lethal, but it also occurs naturally in the body and is always found in the blood. Why would anyone bother to test for a substance that’s definitely going to be there? Toxicology reports focus on a couple hundred possible poisons, but there are thousands more in the world. In truth, almost anything can be fatal in sufficient quantities. Too much nutmeg. Too much salt. Too much water.
Even air can be a problem. Once a cadaver came to the Body Farm, a woman who’d died of cardiac arrest. But given her comparative youth, Jackson and Cal, our MDs, were not satisfied with this verdict. Cardiac arrest means only that the heart has stopped beating. It is a symptom of death, rather than the cause.
So Jackson did a thorough autopsy. He scanned for surface and subcutaneous trauma. He examined the seven locations in which a needle can be inserted without being noticed by most medical examiners. At last, he found an incision beneath the woman’s tongue. Someone had injected her with a syringe full of empty air, which formed an embolism and stopped her heart.
And, of course, there are accidents—or deaths that appear to be accidental. The world is a dangerous place. People fall down the stairs and slip in the shower. They get drunk and crash their cars. They leave cigarettes lit and burn their houses down. With a little help, life can be fatal. A loose wire. A stove left on. A push at the wrong moment. An unseen, guiding hand. Even if the police suspect foul play, they can’t act without corroboration. Innocent until proven guilty, after all.
Corpses are like postcards, written unknowingly by the killer, full of unintended clues. Fingerprints. Hair. Droplets of saliva or tears. Without meaning to, the murderer might record whether they were right- or left-handed. They might hint at whether they had done this before. (An inexperienced, nervous attacker leaves different marks from one who is confident and assured.) They might indicate their height and weight. (A blow struck by a short skinny woman is quite unlike a punch from a six-foot-tall 350-pound man.) At the Body Farm, my colleagues and I can read these things printed on the flesh in the killer’s unique script.
To get away with murder, it’s best to dispose of the corpse altogether. A wood chipper and an eight-foot grave. A deep lake, a length of chain, and a cinder block. A concoction of lye and bleach, melting the flesh like warm ice. No evidence at all. No trail for the police to follow. No message for the medical examiner to decode. No body, no crime.
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What was the tipping point for me? Not Emerson’s first letter, or the late-night phone call, or the pathetic poem. Not the nights I lay awake in bed, tossing and turning, finally getting up to verify for the tenth time that every door and window was locked and that you were safe and dreaming in your shared bed. Not the second call, which came one morning while you ate breakfast and Beatrice sat beside you at the table, smiling cheerfully with the phone to her ear so you wouldn’t be alarmed. Only heavy breathing, she said later, but that was bad enough. Not even Emerson’s third letter, in which he described me as an “androgynous nothing person.”
He had always treated Beatrice’s lovers that way, as though they couldn’t possibly live up to his example or offer any real threat. He would graciously forgive her each time, too, clucking his tongue and reveling in his own magnanimity.
His assault on our family went on for weeks. Another letter on blue card stock, which the two of you avoided like it was radioactive. You collected the rest of the mail and left that envelope in the front hall for me to find on my way to work. More heavy breathing down the phone. A single rose tucked beneath the windshield wiper of Beatrice’s car. How did he know which one was hers? I went to the police then, but the officer said exactly what Beatrice told me he’d say. Emerson hadn’t done anything illegal. Was I even sure it was him? The car was parked on the street; anyone could have put the flower there. If the guy became violent or trespassed on our property, I should file a police report for sure. Then it would be too late, I said, and the officer raised his hands, palms up, in a gesture of helplessness or supplication.
I fervently hope that you don’t remember that brief, terrible phase of your young lives. Beatrice’s nerves tautened like a guitar string pulled too far, ready to snap. I subsisted on coffee and energy pills. A bracelet in a velvet box left on the porch. Another electric-blue letter covered in drawings of hearts. A dead bird in the grass of our backyard—had it fallen from a nest in the pine tree, or had a Machiavellian maniac tossed it over the fence as a warning? A midnight call, consisting only of kissy noises and sexual groans.
But the tipping point came when I saw Emerson with my own eyes.
I’m still not sure what woke me. I’d been sleeping lightly for weeks, startling at every sound, but there was no creak of floorboards or tap of branches on the window that night. I slipped out of bed, listening to the ringing silence, the carpet cold beneath my bare feet. Beatrice lay on her belly with her feet in the air. My ridiculous, wonderful wife.
I padded down the hall to check on you both. You were in Lucas’s bed this time, sleeping head to foot. I wondered if you’d started out the night that way or if you began with both heads on one pillow and one of you migrated. You were wild sleepers at that age, kicking and rolling in frantic motions that never woke either of you.
I went to the window to make sure it was locked. And there he was, standing on the sidewalk, staring up at the house. At your room.
My heart jolted violently enough to knock the wind out of me. I don’t know if Emerson saw me through the curtains. He did not react to my appearance, at any rate. The streetlamp turned him into a copper statue, dressed in a puffy coat, hands folded behind his back, blond hair glittering. He was taller than I’d expected. His stance suggested he’d been out there a long while, despite the cold. An unnerving stillness. Endless patience. As my eyes adjusted to the watery glow, I saw the expression on his face: chin lifted, a small smile.
I read once that geckos can hold a pose for hours, exerting no energy while remaining perfectly alert, ready to launch their tongues at the first appearance of prey with the speed and lethality of a bullet. They are harmless to humans but vicious predators of insects. There was something of the lizard about Emerson as he lurked there on our street, motionless, vigilant, waiting.
I watched him watching us. I stayed where I was for god knows how long. The two of you mumbled in your sleep, smacking your lips and rustling amid the blankets. My leg began to cramp and I needed to pee, but I didn’t move from my post at the window until Emerson pivoted on his heel and strode away. I kept my gaze on him until he turned the corner and disappeared into the darkness.
○
Once I make up my mind about something, I act quickly and decisively. I have always been like that. I wanted to buy our house the moment we stepped inside, and we made an offer that same day. Beatrice longed for babies before I did, but the instant I knew I was ready too, we went hand in hand to the sperm bank.
I decided to murder Emerson the night I saw him.
The idea had been bubbling away at the back of my mind for some time, but I had not taken it seriously. We all think crazy things in the privacy of our weird little brains. To blow off steam, I’d considered means and opportunity. Motive I already had in plentiful supply. It had become a game to play during sleepless nights or quiet moments at the Body Farm. A reverse whodunit, figuring out how, in theory, I might get away with it.
Female killers are not caught as often as male. It skews the statistics. In fact, no one really knows how many women have committed murder. The records track only those homicides that result in arrest and conviction. It’s impossible to count the successful killers—the ones who are never found out, never suspected at all.
The evidence of women’s prowess in this area is anecdotal but compelling. Cal, one of the MDs at the Body Farm, worked at a hospice facility for years before coming to Lyle. He was shocked, he said, by the number of sweet old ladies who confessed on their deathbeds that they’d poisoned or suffocated somebody decades ago. None of their relatives or friends ever dreamed of such a thing, Cal said. These women made it to old age, to the point of their own demise, with their crimes undiscovered.
In the break room, my colleagues and I debated the gender disparity of murder. Everyone had a different theory to explain it. Luis believed that social conditioning was the root cause. At a young age, boys were encouraged to lash out, to dominate, whereas girls were taught to contain and control their anger. As grown women, this ability allowed them to act with premeditation and cool heads, which accounted for their success and secrecy.
Hyo thought it was a matter of cleanup. Men couldn’t properly scrub a toilet or discern when the carpet needed vacuuming. How could they ever hope to leave behind a sterile crime scene? In addition, most women had decades of experience scrubbing bloodstains out of their underwear. Men wouldn’t know to soak the fabric first and wash in cold water, since hot would induce the stains to set.
Kenneth, who had more experience with the law enforcement side of things, believed it had to do with ego. Men overestimated their own intelligence and made mistakes as a result, while women often underestimated themselves, leading them to plan more thoroughly and take greater precautions.
Georgina felt it all came down to motive. Women held grudges, she said. They could wait years before taking action, long after any apparent motive had faded from everyone else’s minds. Men didn’t tend to let things fester that way. They either acted at once or moved on.
And LaTanya said that women were simply the smarter sex, more capable of doing everything under the sun, including homicide.
Now that I have become a murderer myself, I believe all of them were right, more or less.
○
Do you remember the fairy tale that obsessed you during that time? I hope so, since I read it aloud to you daily for weeks on end. You’d found it on one of your shelves, a hand-me-down picture book with no cover, the pages soft from use. I still don’t know the title. The spine, like the cover, had been torn away by some other child’s hands.
The heroine was a “golden-hearted woman.” No other personality traits were mentioned, but perhaps they weren’t needed. She caught the eye of an evil wizard, who cursed her, transforming her into a bee. That was the part I liked. Any story with an insect in it gets my vote. She flew unhappily from flower to flower, growing weary, so lonely, until a kind farmer held out his hand and gave her a place to rest. His touch transformed her back into her human shape. They married and lived happily ever after. Heteronormative but sweet.
“What happened to the evil wizard?” you asked every single time I closed the book.
“It doesn’t say,” I told you.
“Did he die? Did he go to jail?”
“I don’t know.”
You were never satisfied with this answer. Eventually you would climb off my lap to finish the story on your own, drawing crayon illustrations of the wizard boiling to death in a pot or falling off a cliff. You killed him a hundred bloodthirsty ways and cheered his demise, then asked me to read the book aloud again.
I’ve heard people say that children can’t fully understand death. That’s why they crave such cutthroat stories and playact such barbaric things. (Once the evil wizard had his arms and legs ripped off by elephants; another time he got kicked into a volcano.) But I think children are perfectly capable of understanding what death is. They’re not naive and guileless; they’re clear-eyed about the limits of justice. They know that the world of fairy tales is better than ours.
Real life isn’t fair. In my work, I’ve seen the full measure of what human beings can do to one another, and I’ve seen the limits of our justice system too. But in a fairy tale, there’s no need for cops or courts, since the story itself brings balance. Murderers have their eyes plucked out by doves or drown in the sea, while good people are guaranteed to live happily ever after. The Body Farm wouldn’t exist in a fairy tale. Why would anyone study death and decay in a world where magical retribution is a fundamental law of nature?
That’s the reality I want.
The book with no title became your obsession because it broke the most essential rule of fairy tales: it wasn’t fair. You wanted to hear the story over and over because it bothered you, not because you liked it. Yes, the golden-hearted woman and the kind farmer were rewarded by fate, as they should have been, but what about the evil wizard? You kept hoping that he might finally be punished this time. And then, when the ending let you down again, you wrote a better one yourselves.
○
My plan was simple. The best plans always are. I bought a burner phone on my way to work, taking a leaf out of Emerson’s playbook. He used disposable cell phones so that he could harass Beatrice and threaten her without leaving a paper trail. She would go to the police and show them a string of terrifying text messages, and they’d tell her there was no way to be sure of the source.
One night, as Beatrice slept, I scrolled through her phone. (To be clear, I usually respected her privacy. This was a one-time breach of my moral code, done only in exigent and extreme circumstances.) As I suspected, Emerson had been bombarding her with texts for weeks, from a slew of different numbers—messages she hadn’t told me about, not wanting to worry me. Beatrice never replied, but that didn’t stop him.
Using my new flip phone, I texted his most recent number, posing as Beatrice. Emerson believed she would do that—contact him of her own volition, after all this time. Can you imagine? I asked to meet him in an isolated spot, late at night. He agreed. We worked out the details of our rendezvous, him and me.
Now I wonder: Was he really so arrogant, or was he delusional? Did he actually believe that one day it would be him and Beatrice, a perfect match, destined for each other? Did he buy the story he kept selling? Or did he see the situation clearly—predator and prey, psychopath and victim—and the poems and diamond rings were simply weapons in his vast arsenal? How much was gaslighting with the intent of causing harm, and how much did he regard as true?
I guess it doesn’t matter. Actions are important, not motives. That’s what LaTanya always tries to explain on the stand. The jury wants to know why the victim was killed, why the murderer did it, but the only thing science can reveal, at the end of the day, is how.
I met Emerson at midnight, in a place of my own choosing. I wore a hat and scarf and he didn’t know it was me until it was too late. I won’t go into the details. That is not my purpose, and I don’t want you to be burdened with those images.
When he was dead, I wrapped his corpse in a tarp, wrestled it into my trunk, and drove to the Body Farm. It was my turn to take the graveyard shift. We all hate doing it, so we follow a rotating schedule. Temperature, insect activity, fungal growth, humidity—these things don’t stay constant after nightfall, and it is essential that we observe our subjects around the clock. But the Body Farm is creepy after dark, even for us. The trees rustle menacingly. Darkness erases the visual markers of death—liquefied eyeballs, putrefied flesh—that we normally count on to remind ourselves that these are corpses, not people. At night, the Body Farm seems to be inhabited by a watchful, unmoving crowd.
In addition, the dead are not always silent. Fresh cadavers sometimes sigh or groan. I’ve heard them pass gas. I’ve seen them twitch their fingers or blink. As they move further through the process of decay, the sounds don’t stop; they merely change. Sometimes month-old corpses bubble or belch. In rare cases, they explode, their torsos ripped apart from within by a profusion of volcanic gases.
That night, I parked by the back door, where there are no security cameras. Why would there be? We only ever use that entrance to receive the dead or throw away hazardous waste. To get that close to the building, we have to pass through two locked gates with keypads. The cameras face outward along the walls, keeping teens and miscreants away, rather than monitoring the researchers inside.
I fetched a gurney and wheeled Emerson’s corpse through the halls. I did think briefly about keeping him there, on the grounds. I could mock up the paperwork of a new admission. I could smash his face and snip off his fingertips, rendering him unidentifiable. I could find an appropriate resting place for him and watch him molder away until there was nothing left but bones.
There was an odd symmetry to the idea. I imagined counting the maggots that devoured him and measuring the life cycle of the coffin flies that made their homes in his flesh. In life he had been a pernicious soul, causing only harm, but in death he could be useful. His body would provide data and aid the noble cause of science, and I would be able to savor my revenge.
I blame the graveyard shift for that particular line of thought. I am not normally such a ghoul, but the Body Farm is eerie in the wee small hours.
I cremated him. We have our own incinerator, for obvious reasons. I needed to use it that night anyway, since we’d amassed more skeletons than we could utilize, picked absolutely clean by insects and bacteria, nothing left to learn. I burned four skeletons and Emerson, then went out onto the grounds to do my work.
○
I wish I could tell you that it upset me to take his life. That’s what I’m supposed to say, isn’t it? That it left me nauseated and shaken. That I could scarcely look at myself in the mirror afterward. That it haunts me to this day.
But the truth is quite different. Years at the Body Farm have reshaped my reaction to death. Emerson was a problem for me to solve. At work, I solve objectively disturbing and disgusting problems all the time. What’s the most efficient method of removing blowfly eggs from the mouth of a corpse? Use a child’s paintbrush. What’s the ideal preservative for beetle larvae? Alcohol or naphtha. What’s the best way to change Emerson’s body from alive to dead? That was the problem before me: a man who ought to be a corpse. I found an ideal solution. Doing so was no more repugnant or upsetting than any old shift at the Anthropological Research Center.
