by Hadena James
He’d heard that the Serial Crimes Tracking Unit was in Detroit. They were irreverent, arrogant, and insane. They were lightning rods for evil. They were also known for their ability to drop violent crime rates. It was possible that the SCTU was the answer Bell was looking for. If they could clean up the city or give the people something to unite against, his mission would be complete.
One wore a necklace with an upside down pentagram. Another wore a pagan god from days long gone. None wore saints’ medals and in their line of work, they needed to. He believed either they would help the city or they’d help him. He didn’t care which.
He settled in to watch reruns of his favorite TV show. He would wait a few days and see what the SCTU was doing before taking another vessel. Detroit had waited for three decades, so a few more days weren’t going to make it any worse.
Besides, the vessel was already chosen, as was the next victim. He would continue to pick off gang members. It was the best source. No innocents harmed that way. The woman that transported the Krokodil from the Russian cooks to the Thugs for distribution would be a good vessel. Moreover, she always stopped by the church after delivering it to tithe, as if she could buy her way into heaven after the delivery of death to the streets.
It had taken him a while to figure out what was disfiguring or killing the street kids around him. His youth outreach had taken a big hit. Kids started coming in with parts of their skin dying. Others were showing up with their skin yellowing as the drug destroyed their liver. He’d finally heard one of them say the name Krokodil.
Finding out information on Krokodil had been difficult. However, when he did, it came with pictures. Pictures he hadn’t needed to see. It wasn’t the synthetic morphine that was the problem, it was the stuff they mixed it with, usually formaldehyde. It damaged the skin, causing a scaly look, or killed it, causing it to turn black. Huge, weeping sores often accompanied the use.
It had a higher addiction rate than crystal meth and worse side effects. Death was common with the drug, and it was only available in Detroit and Russia, proving just how far Detroit had fallen.
Six
The hotel room was utter chaos. Things had been tossed around the room. Herbs burned in small dishes on the surfaces. All my clothing had been unpacked and laid out on one of the beds. My mini-arsenal was also laid out near my clothing on the bed that I assumed was mine for the night.
Understanding why our room was in serious disarray was another story. However, what really caught my attention when I opened the door to enter the room was my roommate. Fiona was in a pair of bikini underwear and streaks of yellow paint that covered none of the important bits. She was standing in place, bouncing up and down, with a rod in one hand and a book in the other. Unintelligible words dribbled from her lips, filling the room with a strange, hypnotic chant that grated on my nerves.
Fiona didn’t seem to notice me. I walked back out of the room, grabbing Gabriel before he could enter his. Tugging on his arm, I dragged him back into my room. He stared, mouth open, at my roommate. He earned massive points by not moving his head up and down in rhythm to her large, bouncing boobs. Of course, he might have been too stunned by the scene to do anything more than gape like a fish.
Gabriel turned and left the room. I followed him out, letting the door bang loudly as it closed behind me. I hoped the breeze made her nipples so hard they broke off.
“She’s performing an exorcism on my stuff. May I have my own room now?” I asked my boss.
“How do you know it’s an exorcism?”
“She’s burning sage and chanting.” I looked at the door. “I haven’t a clue why she’s topless and wearing war paint on her stomach. I have never heard of that.”
“She has a right to practice her religion,” Gabriel reminded me.
“But not over my stuff. If she wants to perform exorcisms and rid the room of evil spirits, that’s fine, but she unpacked my suitcases to cleanse them. I’m pretty sure that’s why we have washing machines.”
“You think washing machines banish spirits?”
“I think washing machines are just as likely to banish spirits as topless chanting, pointless bouncing, and sage-burning.”
“I’ll see what I can do. In the meantime, you are welcome to grab a nap in my room.”
I sighed at my fearless leader. There wasn’t a lot of concern regarding our budget, but there was some. Primarily, because we already owned our own plane and had the largest operating budget allowable by a government entity, not counting our salaries. We had more financial privileges than Congress. So, when there was the ability to trim down our expenditures a little, it was done.
I understood. I also thought everyone else should understand that I was incapable of sharing a room with an incense burning, chanting, half-naked woman for very long. One of us was going to die, and if I didn’t shoot her, it would be me from her incense.
The hallway was empty now. Gabriel had gone to his room. I could follow him and take a nap or I could go into my room and piss off my roommate. Decisions, decisions. After a few moments of self-debating, I went back into my room.
Fiona was now in a T-shirt and bikini underwear. Her long legs were tanned by the sun and clean-shaven. She was still barefoot and standing over my stuff. The incense and sage still burned. She was smiling.
I wanted to kill her. Instead, I opened the window, letting in drizzly rain and cold air and letting the toxic incense and sage fumes exit. It had another effect. She put on pants. I lit a cigarette and sat down next to the window. I was still in my coat and clothing. They were damp, but warmer than being partially nude.
“I have asked you not to smoke in our room,” she huffed at me.
“I have asked you not to burn incense in our room, but you do anyway,” I pointed out to her. “The chances of you getting cancer from my second hand smoke is far less than me getting a migraine from your incense, and far less than you getting cancer from all the smoke from the burning sage bundles.”
As she always did when we had this argument, she stormed into the bathroom and turned on the exhaust fan. It suited me. It left me alone with the chilly wind in a room that stunk, but I was mostly alone. I thought better when I was alone.
Rain had not been in the forecast. The chances of rain had been zero right up until it started to rain. Sometimes, even the weather person got it wrong. It was probably not their fault. Michigan had a history of wonky weather, just like Missouri.
Most of the evidence would still be gone. The fire and water would destroy everything it touched, leaving only a few tenuous clues as to what the killer might be up to. It had happened before and it would happen again.
It proved the killer was smart. He had never had rainfall on his killing field before. It was only because of the rain and the hoses of the firefighters that there would be anything left at all. It was hard to keep a body burning at 1,800 degrees for several hours with Mother Nature having a tantrum.
That was the other problem. It was hard to keep a body burning at 1,800 degrees for very long without fuel. My mind conjured images of flaming ships, burning from Greek Fire. Unfortunately, the recipe for Greek Fire had been lost to the ages and could be ruled out as a fuel source. In addition, Greek Fire had help from pitch-covered ships made of timber.
Houses were not covered in oily flammable tar. Timber wasn’t even the primary ingredient for a house any more, not with vinyl siding and drywall. There was still a lot of it around, but drywall didn’t burn well, unless it was soaked with something else. The vinyl siding might have increased the temperature of the burn and maybe the duration, but not enough to make a house fire 1,800 degrees.
Most petroleum-based products didn’t burn that hot. Some sodium compounds would, but it was hard to lay hands upon flammable sodium. Besides, the rain would have made them hotter, not put them out if the killer was using some sort of sodium.
I closed the window and lit another cigarette, just to keep Fiona trapped in the bathroom. The average h
ouse fire was 1,000 degrees, well short of the necessary temperature to reduce a body to ash. They also didn’t burn for hours, which was the other element. Tightly wrapped clothing could protect a body or cause it to burn hotter, depending on the material and ignition source.
My memory betrayed me and for a moment, it thrust me back into the Brazen Bull. Warm air rushed in and out of my lungs. Bodies were jostled in the close confines. My heart rate increased before I could thrust the memory away. I hoped the victims were being killed before they were set on fire. The thought of all those people burning to death horrified me. I was afraid of dying by fire. Not smoke inhalation, but actual fire. I had seen a video once of a protesting Buddhist Monk who set himself on fire. His body could be seen praying as he fell to his knees, rocking back and forth, as the flames ate at his skin and clothing. It had lasted over three minutes. He never once cried out or even made a noise. I’d read stories of people who had been tortured by putting them against hot metal plates, their agonizing screams echoing off dark corridors and the high vaulted ceilings of the torture chambers from the Middle Ages. Their skin melted and their muscles cooked, as they died slowly. If I had a fear, it was death by fire.
My body was tired. The sage fumes and incense made me feel off kilter. My stuff was still strung around the room after the exorcism. I grabbed a pair of roller-skating giraffe pajamas, a pair of socks and a pair of underwear and went to beat on the bathroom door.
Fiona opened it. Her face was set in a frown and her eyebrows were drawn together so close it looked like she had a unibrow.
“If you come out here, I’ll smoke in the bathroom with the exhaust fan, get a shower and change out of these wet clothes. However, I expect you to put the rest of my stuff back into its respective bags.” I pushed past her, not giving her an option. I shut and locked the door behind me. The bathroom smelled of sage. The ancients had burned lots of sage. Between that and a lack of indoor plumbing, I thought I had a good idea why all of them hated their miserable lives.
It bothered me that I hadn’t smelled any accelerants. Everyone kept pointing out that I had a super sniffer and chemicals that burned had a distinct smell that could trigger a migraine. It seemed sage and incense made it impossible for me to smell. This was surprising since I smoked. It seemed I was so used to the smell of cigarettes that it no longer bothered my sense of smell.
As I finished my cigarette, I let the shower run. The butt went into the toilet. My clothes went into a heap on the floor. I would shove them in a “to be laundered” bag when I got out.
As of late, I had been avoiding long showers. There were too many things for my brain to think about. I was still coping with losing Nyleena, even temporarily. Malachi as my moral companion hadn’t worked very well. By the time we’d caught Patterson, I was completely in his corner, believing he was justified in his trimming of the family tree and other miscellaneous persons that were unnecessary to society. I hadn’t bothered to start with the whole “grandfather is a serial killer” issue.
Luckily, Malachi was off helping Interpol. His serial killer expertise was necessary in Belarus. The idea of a serial killer in Belarus was strange to me. I had only dealt with American serial killers and we had enough for the entire world and then some.
Today, though, I relished the hot water. My skin had gotten cold with the rain. A bluish tint had settled over my toes, something that I was used to, but dared not share that information with the team. Xavier would slap me in a hospital and have me checked out for hypothermia before I could get the word spelled. The circulation in my legs was bad, making my feet more susceptible to injuries like hypothermia and broken bones without my realizing it had happened.
Kansas City had the second highest serial killer rate in the country. However, it couldn’t hold a candle to Detroit. Society and the government had abandoned Detroit. The entire city had become a slum. A city where the dead outnumbered the living seven to one and that was just the dead that had been discovered. If one bothered to check the stats, they found at least two murder victims a day in the ghostly hulk of the forsaken industrial complexes that once drove the entire country into prosperity. How far the mighty had fallen was still being discovered, but I imagined even the rebels from Heaven had not fallen so far.
However, building a federal guard neighborhood like the one in which I lived had not worked for Detroit. The city government in its infinite wisdom had originally built the neighborhood within the limits of the crumbling metropolis. It had burned down six times during construction and on each occasion, the guards had been slaughtered. Eventually, they had managed to get one built in the suburbs, but the flaming memories remained and cops refused to attempt to live within the city they policed.
On my one previous visit, I had walked the streets. It was a war zone, one we were losing. Perhaps if they hired mercenaries as cops and rescinded most of the laws that protected the rights of the citizens, they could regain control. However, even that seemed risky. Like serial killers, mercenaries tended to remove body parts.
Seven
A handful of bones and teeth sat on the exam table. Xavier was turning a tooth over in his fingers. The jawbone that had once contained them was missing, most likely reduced to ash. Teeth were actually stronger than bones in a fire.
However, we did have a few clues. A serial number on a metal knee and some pictures of drawings on the floor where the body had been found. I was trying to make sense of the drawings. None of them was complete. My mind kept searching for ways to complete them and make them intelligible. I’d been at it for hours and had not come up with a single solution.
The police believed the drawings were graffiti. I believed they were made of melted salt, which made them significant. Many religions used salt in rituals, but there were other reasons to use salt. Of course, if it was for another reason, the drawings were just melted puddles that had formed into interesting designs. Either was a possibility at the moment.
“Voodoo?” Xavier asked as he put the tooth down.
“One of many,” I answered. “Even Fiona uses salt. Or it could be there for a completely different reason. It could be a matter of torture, a literal rubbing of salt into the wounds. It might be there as a desiccant. Bodies burn easier if they aren’t filled with fluid. The mummies we pulled out of Death Valley last year would have gone up like a wax figure. Or I could be completely wrong and it isn’t salt, but something else. It just doesn’t look like paint to me. Maybe it’s crayon. Maybe it’s wax from candles. Maybe it’s another substance that I can’t think of because my brain is mush from all the frucking sage burning and naked chanting.”
“Did she do it again?” Xavier asked.
“Isn’t once enough?” I countered. “I will never unsee that picture. It is seared into my memory for eternity.”
“Maybe you need to be more open minded.”
“My religion doesn’t force her to deal with my naked breasts bouncing up and down while I’m covered in bright yellow war paint.”
“You don’t have a religion.”
“That’s true, but if I did, it would not require such activities to be done at the expense of others.”
“You wouldn’t even make a good hedonist because almost nothing makes you happy.”
“This morning, when I was thinking about the house fire, I remembered being in the Brazen Bull. In my memory, I could still smell the heating bronze and all the people inside it. My niece has changed her shampoo since then. I wonder if she can remember the smell too.”
“What does that have to do with happiness or hedonism?”
“I’m pretty happy I didn’t die in that monstrosity,” I told him. “I hope he kills his victims before torching their bodies.”
“It’s a good question. This guy really isn’t giving us much. Are we even sure it’s a guy?” Xavier asked.
“Female arsonists are as rare as female serial killers. Combining the two would be like winning the lottery and the Publisher’s Clearing House sweepstake
s in one day.”
“You sound like Lucas,” Xavier told me.
“The difference is that I understand being a sociopath from the inside and he doesn’t. Do you know sympathy and empathy are the hardest things to fake? I will never understand how anyone feels, and reading body language can be subjective. When I choose to feel guilt, it isn’t guilt like you feel or Gabriel feels. It’s a forced guilt that has nothing to do with the real emotion. I would feel something for killing Malachi, but it wouldn’t be guilt and I don’t think it is an emotion that humans ever feel. So, when I talk about serial killers it is either facts I’ve gleaned from books or my own understanding of their personalities. It is never about the psychological circumstances that go into being a sociopath or psychopath.” I decided a change of subject was in order. “Can you tell me anything about the victim while we wait on Fiona to figure out who it is?”
“They had good teeth,” Xavier said, “because that’s very important. Whoever it is wasn’t a junkie and had access to dental care. There’s a cavity in one tooth, but I get the impression it had been filled and the metal fell out of it.”
“During a struggle or during the fire?” I asked.
“That I don’t know. Either is possible. If it fell out in the fire, you would think we would have found it. Do you have any idea how hot silver amalgam has to be to melt?”
“2,700 degrees,” I told him.
“Oh, you do know.” Xavier looked at me for a moment. “Why do you know?”
“Fillings have to be removed to cremate a body,” I told him. “This means they must not melt in a furnace at 1,800 degrees, so I looked it up.”
“Creepy and disturbing, but not unexpected from you. I don’t believe the house fire ever got that hot.”
“I’m still trying to figure out why the house fire got that hot and managed to stay that hot. Cremation isn’t fast.”
