by Hadena James
transferred. He probably didn’t get along with a female superior. He is a bureau man through and through, but he isn’t much on females in the job. I’d say he is a misogynistic jerk. However, not to the point of doing this.”
“I wasn’t thinking of him as a suspect, just wanted confirmation that he is a jerk,” I gave Lucas a brief smile. The body was down. Xavier was still talking to Dr. Ericson. Gabriel had wandered away to talk to someone else. Arons had followed at his heels.
“And Ericson?” Lucas asked, before I could walk away.
“Ericson was very blasé about Xavier taking over his case. I don’t do well around strangers, especially strange strangers. Most coroners throw a fit when Xavier walks in.”
“Most coroners want the feather in the cap.”
“Ericson doesn’t?”
“What would notoriety do for him? Ericson is a man who has accepted his place in life and doesn’t believe it can be changed just because he solved a case. I’m sure Xavier will continue to include him, but Ericson won’t care who gets credited with the solve at the end. He’ll just be happy to move on to the next case.”
“That’s almost pathetic,” I said.
“He has become a broken man. Once, he was probably great, but we are looking at a shell. He plods forward because he doesn’t know what else to do. Most people would find him pitiful.”
“You think I should adjust my opinion?”
“Not in the least, why fake an emotion when it is just the two of us?”
“Thank you,” I looked at Xavier. He nodded at me. I hesitated.
“I heard your argument with him last night and he came in and told me about it. It’s fine,” Lucas reassured me.
“He was pretty pissed.”
“He was pissed because you didn’t take the patch off first. You’ll get nicotine poisoning doing that,” Lucas told me.
“We all stray once in a while,” I commented.
“Next time you stray, make sure to take off the patch first.”
With that, I left Lucas and the safety of the woods. I would be present at the autopsy. They may not emotionally bother me, but I still find them gross, making them my least favorite part of this job.
Ten
There were three of us in the autopsy room. Xavier, Dr. Ericson and myself, we were all wearing respirators and vinyl suits to help with the overwhelming smell of Pine-Sol. I sat on a stool, just a few feet from the medical doctors. They were busy examining things. I was busy trying not to examine anything. I knew the moment would come when Xavier called my name and I had to get up and go look at something horrifying, but I’d delay that moment as long as possible. In the meantime, I just listened to Xavier talk into his recorder.
He was busy describing the body. There were only a few ways to say that the victim didn’t have any skin left, but Xavier managed to turn this into a ten minute sentence. He might not be meticulous in appearance, but almost nothing missed his attention when he was with a body.
Dr. Ericson was closer to the body. Almost at Xavier’s elbow to be honest, but like me, he was silent. He was more interested in watching what Xavier was doing than I was. My face was starting to sweat beneath the mask.
“Eureka!” Xavier said. It sounded muffled and strange through the respirators. If there hadn’t been another person in the room with us, I would have made a sarcastic comment.
“What?” I asked instead, standing up and walking to the body.
Xavier looked at me. He was wearing goggles that made him look like a goldfish and with the respirator, the picture he made was completely comical.
“Look at this,” Xavier was pulling apart two pieces on the arm of our victim. I saw nothing.
“Ok,” I said. He let go of the arm and then did it again. “Don’t you see it?” He asked.
“No, but I don’t have bug eyes either,” I pointed out to him. Dr. Ericson gave me a look. Most coroners have to have a sense of humor. In our line of work, it isn’t just a necessity, it’s a life preserver. Without it, we would all go insane and most likely be locked up or practicing vigilantes.
Dr. Ericson seemed to be the exception. He was frowning at me.
“Sorry,” I said to him quietly.
“I understand,” Dr. Ericson dismissed it. “Most of my colleagues develop it as well.”
“There is a tiny puncture mark on her arm,” Xavier interrupted.
“And that means?” I asked.
“That means I think we know how they are subdued,” Xavier told me. “Nothing seems to be showing up on the toxicology screens, so I don’t know what he’s using.”
“It seems unlikely that in the few hours they are in his care that a sedative would leave the system,” I said.
“True,” Xavier took off the goggles. “Maybe she got a shot for something else.”
“Shingles, flu, pneumonia,” Dr. Ericson offered.
“She’s a teacher,” I added. “It could be anything, even a tetanus shot.”
“Damn, so much for the ‘eureka,’” Xavier sighed. “This body doesn’t seem any more remarkable than the others.”
“Not remarkable? It has no skin,” Dr. Ericson pointed out.
“That’s not what I meant. I meant that the body doesn’t seem to give up any more clues than the others,” Xavier corrected his wording.
“Let’s get outside, get some fresh air,” I suggested.
“You just want a cigarette,” Xavier looked at me.
“Come on,” I yanked on his arm and dragged him out into the hall. There we stripped off the vinyl protective suits and the respirators. Sweat showed on the foreheads of the two men. I was sure my forehead would look the same. I shoved the vinyl suit into a closet and then wiped my brow.
“I could use a smoke,” Dr. Ericson said, heading outdoors.
“Come on,” I grabbed Xavier again and we followed Dr. Ericson out.
Dr. Ericson had already lit up a cigar and was puffing on it when we got outdoors. I stared at the burning tip and had my own cravings flare up. Xavier handed me a cigarette. I handed it back to him.
“So, the hole in the arm is useless,” I said. “Is there anything that you might have missed? Anything different in the way the knife was used or the actual knife used?”
“Doesn’t seem to be. I’ll know more after I cut her open,” Xavier sighed.
“We’ve been at it for an hour and learned nothing,” Dr. Ericson commented. “That’s what we’ve been up against all along.”
“Yes, but you have never had Xavier looking at the bodies,” I smiled at Xavier.
“I don’t think there is much to find, despite your faith in me,” Xavier was not smiling. “Come on, let’s get back to work, especially since you seem sensitive to the cold.”
The reminder of my “fragility” was not necessary. Like most people, I did not like to admit to weaknesses. I liked it even less that there was an interloper around to hear the comment. Dr. Ericson, regardless of his profession or his association to the case, was not one of us.
I cherished that “us”. It was almost hallowed in my mind. A part of me felt slightly betrayed by Xavier’s slip of the tongue. I had built a cohesion with my Marshal unit and that was not something I did easily or often.
Xavier must have noticed. When we were in the hall, he gave me a look. It would have said nothing to the outside observer. To me, it was an apology.
We suited back up and entered the autopsy room. The respirator was already uncomfortable. I imagined lines were deeply set in my face from the plastic digging in to the flesh. The bridge of my nose would sustain the most damage. It would take hours for that line to disappear.
“Ok, let’s talk about this,” my own voice sounded strange to me through the respirator. “There is nothing different except the possible injection site?”
“Not that I see at this time,” Xavier shook his head and picked up the leg. “Come here.”
“R
eally?” I asked, moving around to him.
“Really. See this here,” he pointed to a thin membrane that was covering the muscles on the calves.
“Yes.”
“This is the body’s last layer of defense. On the two bodies I’ve examined, I have found tiny nicks in it. Or like this spot,” he pointed somewhere else on the leg, “too much skin was left. Oddly, these distinctions were not made on the other bodies and no close-ups were done. I don’t think they mean that much. I imagine Dr. Ericson believed the same, hence the reason they weren’t given any focus.”
“Sure,” I said it slowly.
“It shows the level of skill involved Ace. It is nearly impossible. I can’t think of a single person that could do this. It doesn’t matter how good any of us are with a blade, we couldn’t do this,” Xavier put the leg down.
“None of us?” I asked, doubting him. I had seen his skill with a knife. I had seen him remove tattoos from bodies with a scalpel.
“Not even me. The closest I can get with that thought is Alejandro.”
I hadn’t been to see my former supervisor. He’d been in a wheelchair since his encounter with arsenic on my first case. He’d been my boss for less than two weeks and that time had been rough. There was no need to spend time with him now. He was living with his sister and I understood his drinking was worse. This meant he was probably living on alcohol calories.
“You think Alejandro could do it?”
“Honestly, no. Not even on his most lucid, coordinated days, but he’d be the closest.”
“On a scale of one to ten, with ten being the best you’ve ever seen, how would you rate this work?”
“Fifty, easily,” Xavier said without hesitation.
“That seems high,” I said.
“Someday, try to take only the skin off of something and then come back to me,” Xavier answered.
“I’ll take your word on it.”
“That’s why these little nicks and slips aren’t that important. I would expect more of them. This really is almost pristine.”
“So they are important, but only because there are so few of them,” I said.
“If you want to look at it that way, then sure, but in all reality, they aren’t going to tell us much other than what we already know. The person doing this has serious skills.”
“Butcher, doctor, tanner?” I rattled off a list of persons who would work with skin.
“Sure or something completely unrelated who just happens to be very good at skinning things as well.”
“I have no suggestions based on that information.”
“I didn’t expect you to, Ace.” Xavier shook his head again. “I know there’s clues here, I just can’t seem to find them.”
“Why don’t you give it a rest? I got a message from Gabriel, I have to go to her house. Why don’t you come along and see how she lived? Maybe it will help you identify something with her death,” I suggested.
“I don’t think so. There’s still more to do here,” he waved me away.
In the hallway, a woman was talking with Dr. Ericson. She wore a no-nonsense business pants suit, black with very fine white pinstripes. Her hair was pulled back in a fashionable braided style. It also seemed to be expertly colored. I imagined when she wasn’t in work clothes, she was still perfectly fashionable.
“Marshal Cain?” The woman looked at me.
“Yes,” I answered.
“Special Agent Fiona Gentry, I’m here to escort you to the victim’s home.”
“Great, catch you later Dr. Ericson,” I motioned my escort forward.
Dr. Ericson waved, but said nothing. Special Agent Gentry led the way to her waiting car. The engine was still running in the parking lot. We climbed in and the heat was on full blast. I sat quietly, waiting for my body to adjust from the outside. It didn’t seem to matter that I had been outside for less than a minute, I could already feel the bone-chilling cold seeping into me.
We didn’t talk much on the way to the house. I was guessing she had the same impression as most FBI agents. The Serial Crimes Tracking Unit had a tendency to think about comfort first and business-looking attire last. Today, I was in a black T-Shirt that glowed in the dark, had flames on the front and a stylized-R for Rammstein. I was also in jeans that were fading and my black snow boots. The final touches were two fleece hoodies and a light coat.
In stark contrast, she had a very nice grey dress coat that hung below her knees and tied at the waist with a wide belt and fastened with large buttons. She also had on dress shoes that would cause my feet to freeze. I wondered if she had raided Scully’s X-Files wardrobe for the coat and the suit.
Anchorage is a beautiful city, when it wasn’t full of serial killers flaying their victims alive. The streets were well maintained. The areas we traveled through had manicured yards with evergreen shrubs and bushes. The houses were not the cookie-cutter ranch-style that I associated with artificial suburbs.
I was sure there was a seedy side, all cities have them. However, we hadn’t gone through any of them. They were well hidden behind the parks and pines.
In this neighborhood, the police cars looked even more out of place. There were six of them, plus two unmarked SUVs that had flashing lights. Neighbors huddled at windows or stood brazenly on the street, uninterested in hiding their gruesome voyeuristic behavior.
The house was a pretty two story painted a light shade of gray with darker gray shutters. Part of the front had a brick facade with a large window set high off the ground, curtains drawn, showing the platoon of officers on the inside. I noticed Gabriel walk past it as we parked.
A brisk walk and I found myself climbing the front steps. A large sheltered porch covered the entryway. There was a rug that said: Keep The House Clean, Please Wipe Your Feet. I ignored it. There would be no keeping the house clean. It would be covered in fingerprint dust and grime from dozens of shoes. The rug wouldn’t be able to handle all the dirt from our snow encrusted feet. Our very presence proved that someone had already soiled the inside.
“Cain,” Lucas stuck his head out the door and motioned me forward. I walked past the rug and into the house, stamping my feet on a sheet of plastic. From where I stood, there wasn’t much to see. A foyer with hardwood floors and bright pink walls greeted me.
I followed Lucas out of the foyer and into a living room. The first thing I noticed was the fireplace. It was the dominating feature, dark bricks around the exterior and a grate full of ashes. The second thing I noticed was that all the framed photos were smashed.
The glass littered the floor, reflecting the light, causing the carpet to dance with prisms. The pictures were unrecognizable. Some had been scratched by the breaking glass, others were just obscured by the plethora of cracks. There were ten photos total on the mantelpiece, each of them smashed near the center. It looked as though someone had gone through and slammed their fist into each of them.
“There’s more,” Lucas said, turning from the living room and moving towards the stairs.
Glass was sprinkled on the stairs. Most of the photos had fallen, bringing down their nails with them. The few that remained fastened to the wall, were like the ones in the living room; cracked to the point of obscurity.
At the top of the stairs, the trail of glass continued. The walls of the upstairs hallway had been lined with framed family photos that were now lying on the floor. Most of the frames had broken, spilling the glass and the photos into desecrated heaps of trash.
I slipped on a pair of gloves and reached for one of the pictures. It showed our victim, smiling and happy, with a group of children. The children were all smiling. I turned it to Lucas.
“She was a fifth grade teacher for sixteen years,” he told me.
“That’s a lot of suspects,” I answered, my eyes returning to the photo. All those smiling children seemed grotesque in the glass littered hallway. I put it down.
“Someo
ne was very angry,” Lucas said as I stood.
“Yes, they were. Why didn’t she get up and investigate someone smashing all her photos? It would have been very noisy,” I continued to stare at the glass.
“That is the question for the ages,” Lucas frowned.
“Maybe Xavier is right,” I said.
“Right about what?”
“He found a puncture mark on the victim’s arm. Since she was a schoolteacher, it could be nothing; a flu shot, tetanus vaccine, so I dismissed it. But what if it was a sedative?”
“Something that works fast and vacates the system just as quick?” Lucas shook his head.
“I don’t know much about sedatives, but anything is possible.”
“While he is waiting for it to take full effect, he goes through and smashes all the pictures, then grabs her and walks out of the house?”
“Sounds like a good theory.”
“He hasn’t smashed pictures in the other places.”
“You are the one that is always talking about escalation,” I smiled at him. “Maybe this is an escalation of behavior. Or perhaps he has and we just don’t know about it.”
“Something else for the locals to keep back?” Lucas raised an eyebrow.
Eleven
Several hours later, we were back in the conference room at the US Marshals’ office. The conference room was many things, but comfortable wasn’t among them. The walls were a drab beige color with grey industrial carpeting. Up to this point, I had always considered grey to be one of my favorite colors, but a few days in Alaska had changed that. When things weren’t white, they were grey. I wasn’t sure if it was to hide the cinder residue that seemed to permeate the streets or just because color hadn’t happened in Alaska.
The conference table was a rectangular monstrosity of plastic and metal. There were ten office chairs done in fake black leather. There were four whiteboard on the back wall and one on each of the side walls. The final wall was covered with panes of glass that looked into the Marshals’ office.
The windows had blinds that were closed. White in color and in need of a good dusting, it was obvious that they weren’t down very often. Oppressive fluorescent lighting was stuck in the ceiling at regular intervals.
The whiteboard were covered in photos and handwritten notes in different colors. Gabriel, being cute, had given me a pink marker to put my notes up with. So far, there weren’t many. I got up, went to the board and found the picture of our newest victim. Over her head, in my messy handwriting, I put the word “sedated” with an arrow pointing at her grisly remains.
Both Agent Gentry and Agent Arons were now in the room. They had integrated themselves into our part of the investigation. I agreed with Lucas, they were both looking for a way out of Alaska and this was their ticket. I also agreed with Lucas that bringing us in to solve it wasn’t going to get them the promotion to warmer climates they desired.
I stared at some of the other stuff written on the boards. Lucas, Gabriel and Xavier had all put their stamps on it. Their handwriting streaked colorful stains across the whiteboards, providing not just information, but a colorful piece of artwork in the white and grey
