by Hadena James
Something very thin caught my attention. It jutted out of the ash, a seedling sprouting after a forest fire. I looked at Gabriel and the arson investigator and pointed. The investigator came over. He stared at the small wire.
“What is it?” He asked.
“That’s what I want to know,” I told him. “Can we pull it out?”
“Yeah.” The investigator walked away. He talked to someone else, they handed him a flag and he came back. He didn’t sink into the ash as I expected, his feet making miniature clouds as he stepped carefully to reach the prized object.
He pulled it out. It was very thin. The color was dark and dingy. In total, it was roughly an inch and a half long if it had been unfolded. However, it was curled with the tip pointing out. The investigator looked at it for a few seconds. A second thin wire hung from it. This wire was straight and approximately three inches long. He brought it to me carefully.
“What is it?” Gabriel asked, crowding between the investigator and myself. I held it up, pointy side down.
“It’s an earring.” I told him. “A long, dangly earring, most likely handmade.”
“Most of the metal melted. Something that thin would have melted too,” the investigator told me.
“Did the fire get over 4000 degrees Fahrenheit?” I asked.
“Probably not,” he answered.
“Then it wouldn’t have melted. If you have a metal allergy and go to a jewelry store, they sell you platinum. If you have a metal allergy and like to buy things a little cheaper, you go handmade and you pick up Niobium. Niobium is a transition metal that changes color when it’s electrified. It is also non-ferrous. Melting it requires a sustained temperature of 4400 degrees Fahrenheit. So, even if the fire had reached the melting point, it probably wouldn’t have sustained such a high temperature for a long enough period of time to melt it. It melted whatever was on it; glass crystals or beads, maybe even pearls, but it didn’t melt the niobium.” I told them. “Unfortunately, it is very popular in handmade jewelry. Tracking it to a designer without having any of the other bits will be impossible. It’s cheap to buy, cheap to use.”
“How cheap?” Gabriel asked.
“Oh, very cheap. A package of 10 pairs of niobium earring wires like this might run you ten dollars, depending on where you buy it. That’s why jewelry stores don’t like it. It is considered a cheap metal. A package of pins for holding the beads is also going to be inexpensive.” I stopped admiring the metal. “Thing is, unless you’re allergic to metal, you don’t buy niobium. Silver is cheaper, silver or gold plated is even cheaper than that. If you used the most expensive brand of crystals on the market with the niobium, you could still make a pair of good earrings for less than five bucks. Much more wallet friendly than platinum.”
“Are you a chemist?” The arson investigator asked.
“Aislinn is just an expert,” Gabriel pursed his lips, “on a lot of different things. If she says it’s niobium and an earring, I’ll have to agree with her. I’m a little surprised that she knows the jewelry aspect of it though.”
“Elle is allergic to metal, so is Cassie. I did a lot of research so that they could get their ears pierced some years ago. They did and we all learned to make jewelry from niobium and different beads, crystals, pearls, and God only knows what else. I still make both of them jewelry for Christmas.”
“I can’t picture you making jewelry.” Gabriel frowned.
“Neither can I,” I told him.
Five
It was raining again. The entire United States was going to be submerged at the rate Mother Nature was leaking on us. It wasn’t a storm, just a steady rain; not too hard, more than a mist, miserable weather to be outdoors in.
Amazingly, the house was burning despite the rain and the firemen's hoses. It had been mostly charred rubble and ash before the rain started. It reminded me of a horror movie. The good guys, namely us, were waiting around for the fire to be put out, hoping to have evidence still inside. The bad guy was getting further and further away. Trying to stay a step ahead of a serial killer was hard enough without fire damaging all the evidence.
The sky opened up, and the rain that had been steady became a downpour. The raindrops hissed as they hit the flames, the hot wood and metal, and anything else close to the fire’s heart. My hair was plastered to my head in a few seconds. The raincoat I wore was pointless. It was obviously not rated for storms, which was what this was quickly becoming. The wind was picking up, making a whistling, whooshing noise as it moved through the trees and down streets. The first peal of thunder was loud, echoing off houses. My eyes searched the sky for the flash of light from a second bolt of lightning. It came after about ten seconds.
Growing up in the Midwest gave one an understanding of thunderstorms that was more instinct than conscious knowledge. All those times spent huddled in the basement of a house, the wind whipping the outdoors into a frenzy while the sky attempted to lower the human population one strike at a time, led to learning little tricks. The speed and intensity of lightning strikes was one of them. If one was fast enough at math, they could figure the probability of being struck by the killer lightning. I wasn’t fast enough. I was brilliant, but not at advanced mathematics. There are different areas of genius. However, I could tell how fast the storm was cranking up in intensity by watching the lightning.
I frowned at the sky. I really wanted to curse at it, but cursing Mother Nature was never a good idea. She had a quirky, insane sense of humor. I could see her hitting Lucas with a bolt of lightning as retribution for the curse.
Now, however, the fire wasn’t what was destroying evidence, it was rain. The drops were getting larger and hitting with harder velocity. They began stinging my skin.
My first instinct was to return to the hotel. My second was to stay exactly where I was. The second won out because I had no desire to deal with Fiona and her stinky incense. The rain was better, even acid rain melting my skin would have been better and that was always a possibility in places like Detroit.
The problem with Detroit had started before I was born. It wasn’t the decline of the car industry, but the plateauing of it. No extra jobs were being created, despite the continued influx of residents to the city. As it continued to grow with no work, people turned to other means or they left their possessions and ran away. Those that stayed turned to dealing drugs, prostitution, thievery and countless other illegal enterprises. The mob had always had their fingers in the pie, but they were losing power.
As the 1970s drifted away and the 1980s got into full swing, new problems arose. Primarily, gangs began proliferating the neighborhoods. The people began to flee the city.
By the mid-1990’s, over two-thirds of the population of Detroit had moved to the suburbs. It became the murder capital of the world. Even the mob decided it wasn’t worth the risk to do business there anymore. It was at this time that the decline of the auto industry started. People just stopped wanting to come to work: fewer workers, fewer cars, and fewer profits. This led to fewer jobs, which only hurt the city more.
Enter the next decade and it got worse. The gang violence had reached all new highs. The battles over turf were bloody. The city began to resemble a war zone, not a city. The arts and culture center remained alive and thriving, but only because they moved it closer to the factories and further from the population centers. The factories had hired private security firms to keep their property and workers safe. This helped keep the arts and culture centers safe. These security officers weren’t rent-a-cops. They were trained mercenaries without a more profitable war to fight.
With drugs, money, and prostitutes proliferating the streets in 2004, another monster arose; the Russian Mob entered Detroit. The mob was brutal, but the Russian mob was like a hydra on steroids and crack cocaine. Gangs began uniting to fight the Russian mob, and falling before the ex-Soviets who had seen far more bloodshed at poker games than the gangs had created in 30 years.
In 2014, things hadn’t improved. The
re was still a lot of gang violence. The Russian Mob was firmly established within the city limits. It was still the murder capital of the world. It also held records for rape, drug deals, and home invasions. Oddly, the culture and art centers were now doubly secure. The Russian Mob was intent on protecting these areas because they liked them too.
During my last visit, I had seen Russians with machine guns standing in front of a crowded theatre. No doubt one of their leaders was inside, watching a play, but the Russians with machine guns were a great crime deterrent.
The police of Detroit were doing their best to fight the war they were losing. It was worse than the creator of Robocop had ever imagined. In another ten years, who knew what the state of affairs would be in Detroit.
“Do you want an umbrella?” Lucas asked me.
“Nope, I prefer drowning rather than getting struck by lightning,” I told him.
The flames were gone. Smoke still rose from the rubble. Hissing noises still reached my ears between the crashes of thunder. The rain was clearing my olfactory palate. Smells were beginning to penetrate and the dirty rain was becoming white noise for the nose. I wasn’t sure this was a good thing.
House fires are full of smells, most of them noxious. Most people imagine that charred wood is the most prevalent smell. It isn’t. It’s all the metal in the house. When metal heats up, but doesn’t melt, it tarnishes and the sulfurous smell of oxidizing metal was strong. Under that was the smell of the charred wood and charcoal. Charcoal briquettes for the barbecue grill weren’t a requirement. The smell appeared at all fires because of the wood.
My feet moved me closer. The heat had abated to small spots of warmth in the rain. The smell I was searching for was there. The house had been abandoned, which meant it was possible a large quantity of small animals had died in the fire, but it was unlikely. Animals tended to be smart enough to run away from fires. Yet, the sickly tang of burnt meat hung in the air.
Finally, there were some chemical smells, but none of them stronger than the smell of burnt flesh. Gasoline and other flammable liquids, but all could be accounted for considering it was a house set on fire by a serial killing arsonist.
I stepped back. My mind was relatively sure there was a dead body in the rubble. It would take hours to get to it. My clothes were heavy from the rain. I was getting cold, making my body ache. The reality of the situation was that I was going to learn very little within the next few hours, so going back to the hotel was my best option.
“Well?” Gabriel walked up to me.
“Well,” I shrugged, “something was cooked inside the fire. If I extrapolate from that, I think that given the circumstances, the body might not be entirely gone. If it had burned as hot and as long as the others, I wouldn’t be smelling burnt meat.”
“You say the prettiest things.” Gabriel turned and made a sign over his head.
“I do, don’t I?” I commented back. “Would you like me to rephrase it?”
“It wouldn’t sound genuine if you did. I’d wonder if you had been replaced by a pod person,” Gabriel told me.
“What’s a pod person?”
“You’ve never seen the movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers?” Gabriel sounded surprised. I didn’t know why. We had already established that I lived in a black hole of my own making.
“I can honestly say that I have never even heard of it.”
“Then I know what we’re watching on our next movie night.” Gabriel had gotten someone’s attention. They were walking towards us very slowly, as if they were waiting for the place to blow up.
I turned away from the house. The street was not crowded with looky-loos. The rain kept the desensitized public at bay. In this neighborhood, I wouldn’t have expected very many anyway. There were two flophouses, three with yards that had flowers growing in them, a handful that were abandoned, and a handful that were struggling to maintain some real semblance of life, but failing. This meant that the street held two drug houses, three houses of older people who refused to move away from their homes, a handful of families eking out a living and struggling to survive the brutality of the city, and everyone else had given up and moved on.
However, having no looky-loos and no reporters was unheard of. Normally, the press was beating a path to our hotel rooms. I hadn’t seen any sign of press interest in these killings. The victims, as unknowns, were most likely the throwaways of Detroit, a feat since most of the city seemed populated by societal throwaways. The lack of interest was unnerving and irritating. I didn’t really like having my face splashed on the front page or even on the twelfth page, but someone should care about the victims of a serial killer. It was the job of the press to find these unknown loved ones and reunite them with the deceased while tearing through their lives to find out why that person had become a victim.
This was the other reason I hated the press. They often blamed the victim for doing something they shouldn’t have been doing and this transgression was the cause of their becoming a serial killer victim. The night some deranged monster broke into my off-campus apartment, intent on killing me, it was my fault for going out drinking that night. The fact that I hadn’t been drinking or that it had been my first night out in months, didn’t matter to the vultures. They had used a broad brush to paint me as the average college student, intent on partying the night away. In the news, it had appeared as if I had been asking for it. In my experience, people are rarely at fault when becoming a serial killer victim. There are exceptions. A few cases of volunteer victims came to mind, but they were definitely not the rule.
“Ready to go back?” Gabriel asked.
“Not particularly,” I answered. “I’m sure there’s something to do here.”
“It will be several hours, maybe even a day, before we can get into the ruins. Xavier should have a body in a couple of hours though. You can go back, get some sleep, and wait to join the autopsy.”
“What are you going to do?” I asked him.
“I’m going to figure out why the hell there isn’t a single reporter on scene and no, you can’t go. Even when they are being nice and helpful, you are antagonistic. Given the circumstances, I believe you will be openly hostile and possibly, dangerous. I don’t need you arrested again.”
“I’m allergic to fake smiles anyway,” I turned towards the SUV. My fate was sealed. I would have to deal with my roommate.
The Priest
Bell sat alone in his study. His notes for the next day were in front of him. His dinner was getting cold next to them. Mrs. Swanson had delivered his food that evening. He was perfectly capable of cooking, but many women in his congregation delivered meals to him in the evening. Being a priest didn’t preclude him from being able to use a stove, but the ladies in his congregation were convinced that a single man couldn’t possibly be eating healthy without someone to fix his meals. They had created a schedule to make sure they didn’t have three or four of them show up in one night.
Unlike other places he’d been stationed, he didn’t have an army of monks, priests, and officials to support him. It was he and a few laymen. When he needed help, he had to call the monastery in the suburbs. Even then, sometimes it was hard to convince them to send someone. Some years earlier, long before Bell had been moved to Detroit, the monastery in the city had been raided during a riot. The looting, pillaging marauders had slaughtered every priest and monk within the walls. They had then turned to the convent next door and massacred all the nuns. The Catholic Church had tried to fill the ranks again, but no one wanted the job. They had closed down the other churches leaving only St. Michael’s Church of the Holy Trinity open.
This made his congregation very large, servicing around 10,000 people. St. Michael’s was left open because it was the largest church in the area. It could hold around 3,000 people. This meant that they still had to do some rearranging for Mass. Sunday held two morning masses, one afternoon mass, and two evening masses, making it a very busy day.
Bell liked the busy schedule, ju
st as he enjoyed the solitude and silence afforded to him by living in the small house next to the church and not in a monastery. It was also the first time in a long time that he had real privacy. He could write his sermons, watch Father Ted and anything else he might desire, and snack whenever he wanted. The rules in the monasteries were too strict to allow such indulgences.
Usually, cottage life was reserved for those serving in small parishes in small towns. They were more common outside the US. He hadn’t wanted to come to Detroit. His first few weeks here, he had been unhappy. Then it had come to his attention that he could help the people if he took desperate measures.
God worked in mysterious ways. While listening to confessions one afternoon, the idea had come to him. A wretched man sitting across from him, a screen providing anonymity, began confessing to crimes he’d committed and asking for forgiveness. Crimes that made Bell sick to his stomach.
Detroit was the Gateway to Hell. He had proof. He had listened to good church going folks confess to the most heinous of crimes. If the devil wasn’t here already, he was paving the way.
That is when Bell decided the only way to close the gate was to make the people of Detroit better. The only way to make the people of Detroit better was to give them a real enemy. He’d dug out his literature on exorcisms and even found a few satanic texts and began his real mission. He’d found his calling. He was here to hasten the coming of the devil to heal Detroit.
Summoning the devil or any demon was turning out to be harder than Bell expected. He had tried Ouija boards, encouraging sin, and summoning spells, but none of them had worked. Now, he was trying human sacrifice. The first couple hadn’t gone well. Then he realized he needed a vessel for a demon to inhabit. The next couple had failed as well, but his plan was working, just not the way he expected.
