This was the age of the deadly COVID-19 global pandemic after all, and we lived in Alaska, a state that, in normal times, tends to kill people in all sorts of creative ways—bear maulings, drownings, cliff plungings, freezing to death, avalanches, mangled car crashes, or just plain getting lost in the wilderness and never being heard from again. Just a year and a half before Annabella was born we lived through a magnitude 7.1 earthquake in Anchorage which, though terrifying and destructive, somehow claimed zero lives, a fact that presented itself as a warning: You’re all just barely surviving this place. 

That night I awoke in the early AM hours and couldn’t fall back to sleep. Reaching instinctively for my iPhone—it’s always there, always ready to entertain—I opened up the Facebook app and the first post I saw was from NBC News, which read: Bags full of human remains have been discovered along the shoreline in Seattle, police say. This was a shock, of course, but mostly because it was Seattle, a place I knew well, not because of the heinous death and disposal of human remains. That part was presented with intrigue. The social post alone gave me a lot to unpack. First, it said “bags” plural, which makes you wonder: how many bags are we talking about? Is this two bags, or is it a landfill of human remains dumped on the shoreline? Are these a couple of thin plastic grocery bags or a mountain of hefty sacks? It makes a difference.

I clicked into the article and read on. There were few details, other than to say that someone called in “a suspicious bag on the beach.” The discovery itself seemed full of intrigue. Who finds a bag on the beach and starts poking around to see what’s inside? I see bags and trash all the time, but never think to call the police. I’d surely never go for a sharp stick and say “let’s see what we got here!” It begs the question: Is the caller involved, perhaps playing a dangerous game of cat and mouse with police? Or is this truly just a boring old curious jogger situation?

The article mentioned that one of the bags was found in the water, which seemed to raise the stakes. Murder at sea? Police couldn’t say anything more about this “active investigation.” And that was about it. Unless I go out of my way to google this case later, I will probably never know the answers to these burning questions. Nevertheless, there I was, just feet away from my sleeping wife and our newborn daughter, conducting an investigation into the number of bags of body parts on some beach two-thousand miles away.

It’s no wonder that my mind so readily conjures thoughts of my own mortality. Death of all kinds is plentiful, often heaped upon us, easily accessed, consumed, and dismissed with just the swipe of a finger. Is anyone surprised by anything anymore?

When Victoria and I first met we became hooked on the popular television show CSI Las Vegas—this, the original CSI, being far superior to the near-comical Miami and New York versions. We’d bought all of the DVD sets and binge-watched them long before binge-watching was a thing. One of our favorite episodes was called “Fur and Loathing,” in which a deceased male victim wearing a raccoon suit leads Gil Grissom, the savvy scientist, and Catherine Willows, the hardened investigator, into the seedy underworld of “furries,” adults who like to have orgies while wearing animal costumes. In this case, things turned bad for the raccoon: “It started as a skritch, but then everyone got into a fur pile, and pretty soon we were all yiffing,” one of the furries explained. Grissom and Willows eventually crash a fur pile and, spoiler alert, use forensics to nab the killer, thus wrapping up a tidy 45-minute story arc. Those plucky CSI’s always solved the case.

CSI was known for it’s graphic computer-generated shots of fatal wounds, and detailed depictions of the manor of death. We might follow the bullet into the victim and see it tear a hole in his liver as blood and flesh make a dramatic squishing sound, like when your foot gets stuck in the mud. The autopsy scenes were always of interest, as cadavers were often splayed out, their sternums cracked open, with detailed descriptions of their mortal wounds. Our raccoon, for example, was both hit by a car (“your basic massive internal trauma”) and shot (“through and through”), all of which we see and hear in great detail. The team concluded that this must’ve been a bad night, “even for a raccoon.” At the time, Victoria and I were working entry-level jobs at a small market television station in Anchorage, and my highest aspiration in the industry was to play a dead body on CSI—something that, sadly, went unfulfilled before the show’s run ended.

Between CSI episodes, we kept a steady diet of Forensic Files, a show profiling real life murders that were solved using scientific evidence. The show’s narrator always took such joy in revealing that the killer was caught (“they were both TRIED and CONVICTED of first-degree murder and sentenced to DEATH”). We were also frequently drawn into episodes of Dateline by Keith Morrison’s languid drawl, full of rapturous intrigue and certainty that almost everyone was guuiilltyyy. 

Morrison once featured a story on Dateline that Victoria and I knew well, the high-profile murder of Bethany Correira in Anchorage in 2003. The television news station we worked at gave the story daily coverage for months, and we hung on every detail. Bethany was around Victoria’s age, a beautiful young girl from the small town of Talkeetna. She disappeared from her apartment seemingly without a trace. It took detectives nearly a year to unravel the mystery, eventually determining that property manager Micheal Lawson, a man with a history of violence against women, had assaulted and murdered her in a nearby building, which he then set on fire. He buried Bethany in a shallow grave near a gravel pit outside of town. “A year of exposure to weather and wild animals left little of Bethany to find,” Morrison croaked.