.6
It was not necessary for the forensics to be so thorough. He was getting impatient with the science. There was nothing to be found on her. There was not even a scent. He’d sniffed every crevice of her. She was inviolate. Her own musk pervaded even the crook of her knee. All that was left was to pump her stomach, and they would have to get her out of here for that. There was no note in her rooms. It was the first thing he had looked for when he saw that her underwear was intact. There was a journal with her ticket stubs taped to the front page: British Airways to Malpensa. There was one entry. Yesterday’s. 15.
Her handwriting had a quivering romanticism. Curves, loops and lines flowed on a slight slant upwards to the right. Taking off, gently. Occasionally, she broke off into print with words like “instincts.” The most beautifully written word on the page was: “powerful.” It was perfect script, a loop on the tail of the “p”-no break in the flow of ink and a trail at the end of the “l” that let the word into the page, taking space.
She wrote:
It is very confusing to me the person who I want to become. I understand that this is because this is a malleable thing-and not a constant. I want to be something different, or I want to be that thing in which all things are possible. This is not possible.
At this moment, I have swallowed the pill, and all my instincts are repulsed by this action. Although I understand logically that this is the way it is right now, my body knows that the time to prohibit this is over. My biology is manifesting in a powerful way. I am negating self.This is a strange feeling. Here I am-animal.
.5
What had she been reading?
He walked back into the bedroom. He hadn’t spent any real time there. He had swept right by the porter being interrogated, and headed for the left wrist hanging from the radiator—genteel. In the bedroom, there was a stack of seven New Yorker magazines on the dresser next to a print of an animation—a curvaceous highschool girl astride a panda. The girl was peering over her left shoulder. The panda’s eyes were slit open. The New Yorkers had not been touched. They were perfectly aligned and parallel to the top of the dresser. They were several weeks old. She’d put them there and not moved them. The picture had also not been touched. It had several days’ layer of fine dust.
On her nightstand: The Neural Control of Sleep and Waking. Jerome Siegel.
She had a white bookmark on page 63: EEG Synchrony and Behavioral Inhibition. She had put an asterisk by Figure 7.1 B and underlined in the footnote: “The line at the bottom of the figure marks the onset and offset of thalamic stimulation. The symbol S with an arrow through it signifies electrical stimulation.”
He photographed the page.
She wasn't an expert. The pages were too crisp and the binding was hardly creased. She was a dabbler. Read chapter four, “The Discovery of the Ascending Reticular Activating System” and forgot all about it. Catalogued it next to an article on the probable life-span of the cloud forest in the Cordillera de Tilaran, and thought herself well travelled. Like potholes in a field—a groundhog coming back up to tell the length of winter and forgetting. She wasn’t inhibited. She was obsessive.
The forensics were still flitting about the bruise trying to get it from another angle. Carefully trying not to touch her. She was still warm.
.4
They were having trouble photographing the bruise. They asked him to come over and take a look. It was blurry.
It was not a very good camera. They couldn’t get detail in that light, at the distance which the bruise could still be seen. When they used the flash—the arm glowed white and the bruise disappeared. Without the flash, it was a blur with a slightly darkened patch. He could see it only because he knew it was there. Just an inch from her left elbow on the same arm that was tied to the radiator at the wrist. It wasn’t important. It was several days old. He’d already searched her for fresh ones. There were none. This one had been an accident. She had bumped into something—the corner of the nightstand, for instance, when she went to pick her book up in the middle of the night. She didn’t see the corner.He imagined her rubbing it with her right hand and puckering her lips in a silent, “Ow,” at 5 in the morning. She was probably still jet-lagged.
.3
They took multiple photographs of the hand. The flash popped. Her fingernails like little beacons throwing off the glint like mirrors.
The towel forced the fingers—the thumb especially—into a gesture. It seemed like she might be at lunch with her hand resting against the table or that she might be about to present a cup of tea. It was locked in place but only the wrist, slightly twisted away from her body, showed the strain.
He drifted away from the forensics to let them do their business—skin-under-nails. He already knew that they would not find anything. Maybe his thumbprint on her ankle. There was no reason to suspect that the play had been foul. The towel was a decoy.
He looked around the bathroom for a subject to keep him preoccupied. There was the bathing suit. It had already been photographed. She’d recently taken it off. It was hanging from the bar next to the toilet. It was still moist.
He smelled it.
It hadn’t been rinsed.
Still had the lake on it.
He smelled the crotch.
Still had her on it.
She was ovulating.
He bawled it up in his fist. It was damp. He was hot. It was ninety degrees outside even with the sun down—hours now. The forensics looked up at him disapprovingly.
What kind of woman owned this bikini? The plastic white rings on the hips. The bright daisies, small and naïve—the bright blue and orange of a fifteen-year-old.
Later, on her hard drive, he would find a photograph of her when she was five standing on top of a slide with a large smile and a red flower bikini with white plastic rings on the hips. Her hair was wet. She had bangs. She didn’t have bangs now. The bikini was bright blue.
He circled his finger around the inside of the plastic ring. Between her breasts there was a corresponding circle, like a large bruise. The forensics came over and bagged the top. He put the bottoms in his back pocket.
.2
He took a picture of the shoes. They had a girlish quality. They were flat, and they were gold. A woman invested in nostalgia. They were the first things he could see when he entered the room, glowing in the fluorescent lights and the red tile of the bathroom. But he was not here for the shoes. He was here because of the loosely tied towel around her left wrist.
It would have been routine otherwise, and they might not have called him in. The towel changed everything.
He had inspected the towel. White. Hotel monogram. What had she been doing? With a twist of her hand, she could have “freed” herself. It was clearly a choice, a decision, a desire maybe, even, possibly. The rest of her was on the floor but her arm hung in space, the wrist attached to the radiator by a soft white hotel towel—tied gently.
Had someone else done it and left? Or had she used her own teeth to close the knot? He touched the edge of the towel. She’d used her own teeth.The forensics were closing in with their fine brushes against her fingertips. He noticed the perfume in her hair. Gardenias.
.1
She was wearing gold shoes and no stockings.
Her bare legs were scratchy. She had not shaved for a day or two. He swept his index finger on the lower half of her leg just above the outside of her right ankle, at the dip where lower calf slopes into bone. He should have put his gloves on.
His eyes darted back to the lime green of the inside of the shoe peaking out between the leather and her instep, the arch of her foot. He liked the arch. It was aristocratically high, and it served a function. It held up her weight.
It wasn’t holding her weight now. The right leg was bent at the knee at a ninety-degree angle, and the left was long and open—the knee pointing to the side, and the arch looking up at the sky, curving deep into her foot like a monolith.
