Free Entropy by Robert Raker Page A

eventually forgotten. It all scared me. I smiled at Mull’s daughter. Water had power, pure and simple. It was dangerous to disrespect anything one knew so little about. It had an imposing will, a purpose, and could not be enslaved or manipulated by composition or structure. It could not be instructed or controlled, commanded or tricked. It was then that I realized water was just as much responsible for death as it was for birth.
    Body Number Six (May): Jeremy Sundermond, 7 years old. The boy was discovered wrapped in a large mesh cloth and had been dumped into the river. There appeared to be have been no attempt to weigh down the body to inhibit the discovery of the crime. The material was commonly used for landscape bedding, to prevent the growth of weeds. His face had been nearly unrecognizable because of multiple lacerations and contusions. During the autopsy, the coroner would count over 62 separate wounds.
    â€œâ€¦ There was one witness to the action of the disposal of the body. No physical description of a suspect could be provided owing to the hour and proximity of the sighting. For the first time, after almost six months into the investigation, a piece of physical evidence was recovered from a crime scene; a bullet which was removed from the bottom of the riverbed. Ballistics couldn’t be matched because none of the children previously murdered had been shot or linked to any other previously committed crime. A psychological profile of the perpetrator was created with help from the Sex Crimes Section of the Major Offense Squad of the New York Police Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation …”
    Others read the case file, trying to understand why the police had failed to apprehend a suspect. Mull instructed members of the department to maintain a watch on the local weather forecasts, as well as setting up patrols around large areas of water that were publicly accessible within the township limits. It was expected that the perpetrator would dump his next victim in water, and may have been following the patterns of recent weather forecasts. But no one actually knew what would come from one day to the next. I waited feebly for the next body of water to crash up against the increasing coarseness of my skin.
    I watched the streetlights on the opposite side of the river reflect off the water and float like diseased fireflies, drowning in the night. I sat on the edge of the bank, which was sodden with water.
    The crushed guardrail on that curve had been temporarily patched. Remnants of police caution tape were still wrapped around the base of a tree as a somber reminder of Hannah’s accident. I had once thought this path of decay had started on the concrete steps of a small pool, partially filled with stagnant water. But I now realized that it actually happened a few months later, when the emergency responder pressed his lips over my wife’s and broke two of her ribs trying to resuscitate her on the banks of the river.
    I wondered how long she had been seeing him, how often in seclusion they had shared each other’s flesh and previously unrealized fantasies. Or perhaps they had never spoke about them, determined not to breach that level of emotional intimacy.
    Blood was beginning to seep through the small cotton gauze on the inside of my elbow which the woman at the hospital had taped there less than an hour ago. Some mistakes punish you forever, regardless of the act of contrition, or moreover, the act of forgiveness. In sleeping with him, that swelled, dead man, Hannah had acquired a communicable disease; a virus she which she subsequently carried and passed on to me.
    In a moment of unforgivable fragility, I had broken and forgiven her. We then made love as we never had or ever will again. I had grown hard inside her, mere days after she had being discharged from the hospital after the accident. Her plaintive voice had continually wondered aloud if I was going to leave her. When