by Fae York
In the kitchen Emelia grabbed a glass of water, swallowing a few gulps and a couple of aspirin, trying to calm herself as she padded barefoot back to her bedroom.
You were made because I love you.
I was made because you love me.
Emelia could still hear the sweet sound of her mother’s voice in those words, a lullaby that only she had sung. It was unnerving to hear them come from the faceless man deep within her unconscious mind. Emelia shoved the covers off of the bed and stared at the ceiling, trying to stop her racing mind until sleep took her once more.
☐ ☐ ☐
Hours later, Emelia began rousing and rolled over slowly. She yawned, suppressing the urge to gag as her tongue stuck to the roof of her dry mouth. It felt like Emelia had licked the sidewalk, or a kitty litter box. Squinting, she glanced at her clock—10:10 a.m. Another groan. Half of the morning was gone already.
By the time Emelia forced herself out of bed and into the shower, it was 10:45 a.m. Hungover or not, she had wasted the morning away. Following her morning routine, Emelia made herself a smoothie and grabbed her cell to check her messages. Meredith Jane had called again. Emelia allowed the message to play over her loudspeakers while she pulled her wet hair back and out of her face.
“Good morning, Mimi Girl,” Meredith Jane said cheerily, causing a stab of pain in Emelia’s hungover head. “I still haven’t heard back from you darling and I was just calling again to make sure that you got my message from yesterday. That storm last night was quite a spectacle, was it not? Bruno kept me up half the night with his yapping. He just goes crazy when it thunders. I swear, sometimes I want to strangle that dog. Anyway, you need to call me back so I can tell you—" The answering machine cut Meredith Jane off before she could finish. Emelia snorted and rolled her eyes. Meredith Jane was a talker, and Emelia was certainly not in the mood for talking, but she loved the old quack and a phone call was long overdue.
“Call Meredith Jane,” Emelia said clearly into her phone.
“Calling Meredith Jane.”
On the second ring, Meredith Jane’s bubbly voice came on, loud enough to make Emelia wince, “Mimi Girl. My dear, how are you?”
“I’m just fine, how are you?” Emelia asked, turning down the volume with a grimace. Her head was still pounding.
“Emelia Plater. Take me off speakerphone this instant!” Meredith Jane scolded, sensing Emelia’s hangover.
Emelia grinned and picked up her phone, careful to hold it a good distance from her ear. “Sorry about that, Auntie MJ. How have you been?” Emelia prodded.
“I’m perfectly lovely,” Meredith Jane stated, “But, enough about me. You sound dreadful sweetheart. Is something the matter?”
“I’m tired, that’s all. I had a hard time sleeping last night. No need to make a fuss.” Emelia paused for a moment then asked, “When you called earlier you made it sound as if you had quite the experience the other day, what happened?”
“Oh,” with barely a breath, Meredith Jane said, “my friend and I witnessed a murder.”
“A murder?” Emelia shouted, sitting up tall on the edge of the couch, her feet planted firmly on the ground.
Meredith Jane giggled and continued, “gotcha!”
Emelia rolled her eyes and sat back again, stretching out along the length of the couch.
Still tittering, Meredith Jane continued, “actually, it was a near auto-pedestrian accident that happened right in front of us at a bus stop near Rock Creek Park on Friday evening. The gentleman . . . oh, he was a handsome fellow, with thick dark hair and striking blue eyes . . .”
“Wow,” Emelia interrupted musingly, “you got quite a good look at the guy.”
Meredith Jane rushed on, “Yes, but that isn’t important. We were waiting at the bus stop when it started raining cats and dogs! Cars were swerving, tires were screeching, and suddenly this taxi jumped the curb and was moments away from crashing into the man when he vanished.” The words spilled out so fast it was hard for Emelia to keep up.
“Wait. Slow down, what?” Maybe Meredith Jane’s years were finally catching up with her.
“One second he was there and the next he was gone! I would have thought myself mad if my friend there with me hadn’t seen it too.”
“Auntie, are you su—” Emelia began.
“Of course I’m sure. It was the wildest thing. I think he may be part of some sort of devil’s cult or something. He had the strangest markings on his neck.”
“Markings? What sort of mark—” Yapping filled Meredith Jane’s end of the call, cutting Emelia off.
“Sweetheart, I have to take Bruno out or he’ll make a mess all over the floor. I’ll call you later this week, okay? Love you.”
The phone cut out, leaving Emelia feeling uneasy and annoyed. Between the unsolvable cases at work, last night’s weird dream, and Meredith Jane’s outrageous story, she’d had enough abnormality in her life for the week. With her head throbbing in agreement, Emelia decided to use the day to sleep it all off.
Hopefully Monday would bring some structure and sanity back into her life.
5 Doe Cases
Monday dawned crisp and clean, the smell of freshly fallen rain and renewed earth still clinging to the chilly air. Emelia enjoyed this sort of weather and drove to work with her windows cracked.
After she drove for a bit in silence, Emelia felt her emotions rising as the rhythmic sound of the road beneath her tires began to dull her senses. She turned her audio book on, cranking it up a little more loudly and allowing it to distract her.
Emelia arrived at work a few minutes earlier than normal, which was surprising because she had left a few minutes later than typical. Regardless, it was nice to not have to rush up to her office.
Tamping her emotions down deep, Emelia punched the call button at the elevator bay and waited in the same spot she always stood in until the doors slid open with a ding. When they did, Emelia took two steps into the elevator and hit the appropriate button without even looking. Once the elevator reached her floor, the doors slid open to show Gavin walking by. He stopped in his tracks, and a giant grin spread on his face as soon as he saw her step out of the elevator.
Groaning silently and forcing herself to not roll her eyes when Emelia realized he was the first person she was going to have to deal with today. She attempted something that could barely be called a smile and prepared herself for the exchange of pleasantries.
Emelia had an overall commitment to being respectful to people and she still considered Gavin a person, but she was close to segregating him into the “other” category. Which would supersede the civility clause under which she currently operated. On the other hand, he was wearing a Star Wars tie despite it being the first day of the workweek. Didn’t he own anything more . . . normal?
“Suuuup Emelia. You, uh, have a good weekend with your grandpa?”
“As good as going to an assisted living center can be, Gavin. Thank you for your concern,” she said through gritted teeth. It was too early in the morning for this.
Not listening, or not taking the hint, he continued obliviously, “Yeah, real bummer about you missing drinks with us, it was hella crazy man. Steve had to be carried home. You should come with us next time. I’m sure Janean would really appreciate it.”
Something about the use of the word “appreciate” grated at Emelia, especially since she didn’t think Janean cared one way or the other if she came.
Emelia started looking for an exit to the conversation, hoping beyond all hope that Sandra or Jay would show up and save her from her current predicament. Help did not arrive however, and she was stuck with Gavin’s poor attempts at an extended conversation using last night’s episode of Game of Thrones.
When Emelia realized he was going to keep talking, regardless of her input, she muttered a goodbye and almost sprinted to her office, hoping he wouldn’t follow her. He didn’t, thankfully, but Emelia did hear him chuckle as she walked past. There was no way he didn’t kno
w exactly what he was doing.
Emelia grabbed the paperwork and folders out of her inbox beneath her nameplate. Fuming despite herself, she grumbled silently. How can there already be this much stuff in my inbox at 8 a.m. on a Monday morning?
This time as she entered her office, Emelia opted to close the door behind her. She wasn’t prepared to speak to anyone else and didn’t want to give passersby an excuse to approach her. The closed door should get the message across that she didn’t want to be disturbed. If someone really needed to contact her, they could call her on the company phone or knock on the door. Hopefully, no one would.
Mumbling a string of curses under her breath and exhaling loudly, she thought about Gavin. God, he is just the worst. But Emelia wasn’t going to let him ruin her day, so she brushed their encounter aside and replaced some files and loose papers in the filing cabinet before crossing the room to check on her plants.
Out of habit, Emelia straightened the picture above them, not that it needed it, and returned to her desk to get started on the day’s work.
Emelia sat in her comfortable chair, but even its embrace unable to sway her from the mood she was in. Propping her right foot up on the leg of her chair, she sat up straight and opened the first file sitting on the small stack of work before her. It wasn’t anything important or exciting—then again, when is anything on my desk important or exciting?
“What in the hell is wrong with you, Emelia?” she muttered out loud, shaking her head and slid that file to the side. That wasn’t the right attitude to have. Emelia was an adult, and sometimes that meant she had to do things that were boring. Repeating that mantra to herself, she glanced at the next few loose sheets in her inbox and noted that they were all interoffice memos that people still insisted on sending around.
Emelia moved on to the next folder, a fairly thick one. When she opened it and looked at the first paper, she saw the header page of a significantly sized autopsy report. Emelia glanced at the name and her heart skittered and jumped: John Doe.
She scanned the first page of the report, discovering that the victim had been hit by a car near the Lincoln Memorial and declared officially dead at the scene. From there he had been taken to a nearby community hospital then transferred to her lab where the official autopsy was performed.
“Strange . . .” Emelia mused as she reread that detail. Her lab was focused on matters related to the security of the nation and other cases specifically under the jurisdiction of the FBI. Why would a victim of an auto-pedestrian accident need to be brought into the FBI?
Emelia flipped through the next pages, skimming the details provided by the coroner. Too bad this guy didn’t wink out of existence and avoid such a gruesome death like Meredith Jane’s vanishing man. There was nothing abnormal about these findings; everything was in line with the expected trauma experienced in an auto-pedestrian accident.
According to the coroner’s findings, the man had been in perfect health and had, indeed, died of blunt force trauma to the head as a result of the car accident. Emelia turned all the papers over and examined the pictures, wondering if she could spot something unusual, maybe something everyone else had missed.
The first picture was of a man who would have been utterly handsome if his skull had not been caved in on one side. He had short brown hair and she could tell that his now bloodstained clothes had once been impressively pristine. He was dressed head to toe in striking black and white and she was willing to bet her life on the fact that he was wearing the latest fall fashion.
Emelia had seen this specific outfit—including that interestingly designed collar and exact tie—on a mannequin in a high-end department store when she had walked through the men’s section recently to buy some socks for her grandfather. She had admired the outfit so much that she even stopped to feel the beautifully woven fabric. Then, Emelia had seen it again on the cover of GQ in the grocery store the other night. Although the model in the magazine had done the outfit proud, this man in the photo she was holding wore it even better. The hair on her arms stood on end. Something was familiar, but she couldn’t place it.
Emelia kept looking closely, turning each picture over slowly, but nothing else caused her to pause until she neared the end of the pictures.
One image stopped her cold and a swoosh-swoosh-swooshing sensation began filling her skull, akin to a migraine. She shook her head in an attempt to clear the feeling and studied the picture closely. Emelia was staring at a snapshot of the back of the victim’s neck. There was a curious looking striped tattoo that seemed to be slightly off center and uncomfortably asymmetrical.
Wait, didn’t Meredith Jane say something about a tattoo on the vanishing man? What did that mean? Were there multiple men getting into car accidents, or was this guy the one who supposedly vanished? Meredith Jane was old, true, but Emelia didn’t think she’d confuse someone getting hit by a car with someone “vanishing.”
She glanced at the picture of the tattoo again then returned to the beginning. The demographics information stumped her because the coroner had made a note that he estimated the man to be in his 50’s by outward appearance, but by all rights, this body was that of someone in his late 20’s to early 30’s. Puzzled, she went more slowly through the stack of papers, coming across a request to have tests ran on the deceased’s molars because it appeared that there were fillings missing.
“Curious . . .” Emelia muttered aloud. “That must be why they gave me this case . . . so I can run the forensic odontology . . .”
Something shifted unexpectedly inside her. She glanced up, feeling as though someone else was in the room with her, but it was empty. Several people had just walked past her window that adjoined the hallway, so she chalked it up to that. As Emelia lowered her eyes back to the paperwork, she momentarily took in the small plaque in front of her on the desk. It read:
To the living we owe respect, but to the dead we owe only the truth. –Voltaire
“So . . . John Doe . . . what is the truth of your story and why are you here in my lab?”
Emelia looked several more times through every piece of paper and read every written word in the Doe’s file. Still, nothing jumped out at her. She was beginning to feel as though something had been lost or had been missed altogether. Emelia closed the file and pushed back from her desk. Raising her arms above her head, interlinking her fingers and stretching the palms upward, she bent slightly to each side, stretching her body. Emelia felt as though she had been focused on this case for weeks.
Emelia settled in at her station. Deciding that it would be more effective to quickly complete an old case before starting a new one, she stacked the John Doe case information on the back corner of her station so it wouldn’t distract her. By lunchtime, Emelia felt as though she had made no further progress on the old case and wanted to throw a tantrum. Going for a walk seemed more professional. Emelia stopped in the cafeteria and got a power protein smoothie to sip on as she strolled around the grounds, hoping the clean air and blue skies would support her in shifting her attitude. Walking really did help ease troubling emotions.
Knowing that she would have to go back to her office to wrap up the paperwork on the previous case, Emelia decided she would get the microspectrophotometer started on analyzing some of the Doe’s items because it could run without her supervision, whereas the odontology testing would need her attention during the process.
Emelia rifled through the zipped plastic bags and selected the one containing all the scraps of fabric they had collected from the Doe’s body. She pulled out the two pieces of fabric that were labeled “shirt” and looked closely at them. One piece was stiff and saturated with a sort of sickly brown color which was obviously dried blood. The other was still pristinely white. Emelia raised it close to her face, eyeing the weave. The feel of the fabric perfectly matched the tactile memory of the sleeve she had touched in the department store.
Organizing everything in her work area first, Emelia then drew a few threads through the cle
an, white fabric and placed them in the microspectrophotometer where an intricate system of light waves would pass through the fibers and identify the makeup of fabric, as well as estimate the age of fabric.
As she watched the equipment begin its first processes, Emelia estimated that the fabric would be aged no more than a year; given how quickly fashion evolved these days. She couldn’t imagine it being any older. For some reason she couldn’t explain, Emelia felt a nudge to place a few fibers of the blood-soaked material in another machine to have it analyze the fabric and the blood itself. As she walked away from the machine, she nearly toppled into a man walking toward her.
“Oh, Jay. Hi. Sorry. I nearly plowed you over.” Emelia’s voice was breathy from being startled.
“No problem, Emelia,” Jay said, smiling. “I was actually coming to find you. They told me you had come to your office to finish a report.”
Emelia nodded, shifting from foot to foot, feeling apprehensive.
“Have you been given any new cases recently?” he asked.
Weird question. “I . . . uh . . . I was given a case this morning but had to complete the case I started on Thursday. It took a little longer than I hoped it would, but I am getting to the new case now. It’s the John Doe that came in Saturday afternoon.”
“Oh, I’m sorry you’ve been burdened with that case. I know how much you like these sorts of puzzles, but the Does are low priority, especially for someone of your talents.”
“It’s not a burden, really, Jay,” Emelia said, her eyes glittering with barely concealed excitement. She was so intrigued with this case. “I am actually really interested in it and looking forward to the research.”
“Oh.” He shifted and looked around, clearly uncomfortable with what he was about to say. “There’s actually a high-profile case that came in today. Organized crime related. I’d honestly be a lot more comfortable if you handled it instead of one of the other guys. I know it’s not as intriguing of a case, but this is a much higher priority.”
