Ossuary

When Detective Casper Clock first met Jessica Flywheel, her panties were around her ankles and her ass was in the air.

She was dead. She’d been decaying for thirty-one weeks in an irrigation ditch along I-376 outside Monroeville, Pennsylvania. Mile Marker 76, just past Squirrel Hill. She was there along the east bound lanes near what was then Exit 7 for Edgeville, found by a hitchhiker under a cover of trash and early morning frost. Aside from the panties, she was naked, wrapped in several Hefty trash bags. Her personal effects were nearby, mostly frozen to the ground in ditch water.

Under the circumstances, Clock and the forensics team had been called in under a homicide investigation. Much of police work is a simple formulation. Naked and dead in a bag along the highway, didn’t typically lend itself to much speculation after all.

When Clock arrived at the crime scene, it had been already scoured for evidence, photographed and the team was waiting for his say to load the then-unnamed woman’s remains in to a body bag, then a gurney, then an ambulance, and then whisked off to the morgue at West Penn. He left the Caprice idling on the shoulder, and clambered out to survey the scene. He squatted over her body, taking in the details, pulling his tweed trench close to keep out both the cold and duel stenches of diesel and adiopocere. He lifted the corner of trash bag covering her head. The wheels turned in his mind, but there wasn’t much to see, really. Bones. Litter. Teeth.

Entropy. Things were always falling apart.

“Load her up.” He barked motioning the EMTs in. “Careful, there’s not much to her left.”

Casper lost a coin toss to a state trooper to open and inventory her rucksack; later at the autopsy he would win a second toss to go through her wallet, discovered later, five yards further down the ditch. The wallet contained two guitar picks and her ID and little else. The driver’s license, lead Casper to her parent’s modest rancher in Forest Hills.

Worst part of the job, perhaps.

Despite the tears, Detective Clock learns a lot about Jessica through her family. More than he needs to. Bad marriage followed by worse divorce. She had been in and out of clinics. Bipolar, suicide attempts. Couldn’t hold down work. Spent most days in her childhood bedroom writing songs about the husband and children and innocence she’d lost. The works. Old story, maybe. Casper’s own girlfriend had been in and out of hospitals and had flexed her razor courage more than once. She, too, was god knows where with god knows who right now.

The long and short of it was, the crime scene fit much more neatly with Ms. Flywheel’s several suicide attempts than the suspected rape and murder. Jessica Flywheel had on two prior occasions stripped naked, and wrapped herself in trash bags to suffocate herself, steeling her nerve and suppressing her breathing with rum and Tylenol cold caps. Her pack, indeed, had held a mostly drained liter of Jacquins’s white and an empty blister pack of cold medicine. The first time she had done it was in her parent’s back yard; the second time in a grove of trees at the end of the cul-de-sac. Each time she was caught, revived, and placed into treatment. This time she found that lonely spot in the chokeberry along the Buffalo-Pittsburg highway. She’d disappeared about Easter. The family had hoped for the best. Hoped she had just run-off somewhere.

He set the proffered coffee mug on the coffee table, and made as polite an exit as he could. He’d heard enough. Just some loose ends to tie up. Now that they had a name the coroner would get her medical records and officially tie the wallet to the skeleton.

Jessica Flywheel became Casper Clock’s last case.

There is a machinery to the universe, a clanging whimsical mess of linkages and sprockets and springs. The earth is something of a mad carousel with fevered pipe organ heart. Few get that. Casper got it. He’d become a cop as one becomes a watch maker.  To reset the gears of society when they slip and ware.

But nothing was working now, the rust and wobble and groaning of the works becoming more than any man could hold it together. He couldn’t take another lost girl along the highway. He retired, stepped back. The world is fascinating, intricate stuff. Better to watch it crumble with your eyes wide open!

The second time Casper met Jessica Flywheel was just now, on the sixth floor landing of his small Baltimore walkup. He was scuttling up with a liter of Jacquin’s, tucking in for a chilly autumn night in the Inner Harbor.

When her phantom lurched out of the shadows, he recognized her instantly from her DL photo. Not the skeleton he’d met twenty-years ago. That photo was imprinted on his memory. She had kept her married name, not Flywheel. Casper had surmised much about this over the years. One of a million haunting thoughts. Behind her license, she also kept an emergency 50 cents for the phone. Back when you could still find a pay phone. Not that she had tried to call anyone when things got bad.

She stared, blue eyes faintly glowing under unkempt matted hair. Mouth-half open, in a dull, sad expression. The thousand-yard lithium stare of the medicated.

She was beautiful, though. It was obvious that she had failed to realize this fact in death as she had in life. She said only “I’m sorry.” And then she vanished into the gloom of the stairwell as quickly as she had come. No more need to be said to a fellow world-weary soul.

“I understand,” Casper breathed, and thoughtfully fumbled with his keys. “I’m sorry, too.”

Jacquin’s on a cold night offers a degree of tranquility only if mixed with some hot cider and a dash of vanilla.

Also, when he pulled the bottle out of the paper bag, something clattered to the floor and found itself a spatula’s length under the stove. A couple of guitar picks.