by Hadena James
“Nope, definitely more bothered that the two of you could poison people,” Gabriel cracked a brief grin.
“Michael, do you feel alright?” Xavier asked.
“Fine,” Michael sighed at Xavier. “And I’m not one of your corpses, you’re not examining me.”
“It’s kind of fun,” I told Michael. “It’s like Mr. Hyde got a medical degree and is now intent on making you feel like a lab rat.”
“Thanks, Ace, but I’ll pass. He’ll probably try poking around my brain or something,” Michael said.
“And discover you don’t have one,” I giggled.
“Something like that,” Michael said.
“Back to poisons and mercury and mummies,” Gabriel spoke up, hushing us.
“Those three things do not belong in the same sentence. Mercury is a poor poison choice. It has nothing to do with mummies and most mummies aren’t poisoned,” I said. “So, the only thing that ties them together is that they were in the desert.”
“Hell, Gabriel, we can’t even be sure how many of the bodies belong to our killer. One, to be sure, but with the others, I have nothing. They were contorted, sure, but the salt pit could do that. As the fluids are sucked from the body by the salts, strange things are going to happen,” Xavier poked Michael in the arm. Michael gave a small yelp.
“He’s right, part of the reason for wrapping mummies in blankets and bandages is to help keep their form. Dead or not, as the muscles become desiccated, they are going to draw up into strange positions and we have all seen pictures of people getting lost in the desert and their mummified remains are all twisted and weird looking. That’s sort of the thing about desiccation,” I shrugged again.
“On the desiccated skin, needle holes may not be visible or they may look like rocks have gone through them. I can’t tell which holes are needle marks and which ones are just holes. Ace and I both ended up putting our arms through them in places and the holes were huge. At other times, the skin was so leathery that our arms wouldn’t go through it and the leathered skin just fell off. The only thing we have that points to a killer is the mercury and the mass body dump,” Xavier said, his attention still focused on Michael. This time, he poked him in the cheek. Michael gave another yelp, much louder this time.
“And the location of the body dump is unlikely to reveal many forensic clues. Death Valley is one of the harshest environments on the planet. Heat does weird things to evidence,” I added.
“Ok, so do we label it a serial killer and take over or walk away?” Gabriel asked.
“I vote we stay, we just don’t have much to work with,” I said.
“You only want to stay because there is zero humidity combined with extreme heat and it makes your body hurt less,” Xavier finally turned his attention to me.
“There is that, I might have to move,” I stared at the blank white board. “The chances of us finding more mercury in a victim is slim, but we might be able to find evidence of mercury.”
“How?” Gabriel asked.
Xavier stared at me for a few minutes. His eyes glazed over, making them look vacant. His face went slack.
“I’d say blood vessel damage, but that could be caused by the desiccations,” I shrugged.
“True, but mercury would still leave traces,” Xavier was suddenly standing. “The organs were left inside the body and while they are desiccated, if we could rehydrate them, we might be able to get mercury out of them. Small deposits would be left in the kidneys and liver.”
“Why rehydrate?” Gabriel frowned at me.
“Mercury would evaporate in a fire,” Xavier answered.
“Creating a toxic gas that could be captured as it evaporated,” I answered.
“You want me to let you burn the organs to see if there are traces of mercury in them?” Gabriel enunciated every word.
“Yes,” I answered.
“It would be a little better than a coin toss,” Xavier seemed to be thinking about it. “Anyone that had mercury poisoning would show up as positive.”
“They should eat less fish,” I answered.
“It would work, possibly, well, I’m about 30% sure it would work,” Xavier answered.
“You want me to authorize you cremating organs for a 30% chance it will tell us they were injected with mercury?” Gabriel sounded doubtful.
“Yes,” Xavier answered. “And I take it back, I’d say 20% chance it will work. Those are good odds.”
“Only if they are the odds you will get hit by a meteor on your way to work,” Gabriel answered. Michael snorted behind us.
“Are you sure he’s ok?” I asked Xavier.
“No, not at all. He’s sick; he won’t admit it and he won’t let me look at him. I’d say heat stroke or exhaustion,” Xavier said.
“If he stops sleeping, I’m voting for plague,” I answered.
“You are obsessed with plague,” Lucas answered.
“Actually, in the desert, Bubonic Plague is not that uncommon. It isn’t exactly running rampant, but we have plague outbreaks in the drier states and fleas are pretty hearty, they can survive in places like Death Valley as long as they can find something to munch on,” Xavier gave me a wicked look. “However, plague has an incubation period. He has heat stroke or something similar.”
Xavier walked over to Michael. He touched Michael’s arm again. This time, Michael responded like he’d been shot, knocking over his chair as he backpedaled away from the doctor. Xavier narrowed his eyes and looked at Gabriel.
“Michael, sit down and let Xavier have a look,” Gabriel told him.
Michael sat down in one of the other chairs. Xavier began looking him over. When he touched Michael’s arm again, Michael gave a strange yowling noise.
“You have sun poisoning and you’re dehydrated. You should go to the hospital for treatment and you most certainly should not spend another day in this heat,” Xavier said as he turned back towards Gabriel. “So, may Ace and I go incinerate organs now to find mercury vapors?”
“I really think this is a bad idea,” Gabriel gave a long sigh. “But go ahead.”
Xavier winked at me and grabbed his bag. I stood up, following at his heels. In my head I was making a list of equipment we were going to need.
“And make sure you wear protective gear!” Lucas yelled at our backs.
“This is morbid,” I said to Xavier, after we had started the SUV and pulled away from our temporary headquarters.
“I know,” Xavier said. “It’s also very interesting. I’ve never burned organs in an attempt to trap mercury vapors to prove there is a serial killer. You know what we’re doing, right?”
“Yeah, sort of,” I answered. “I think it works on the same principle as everything else. Organs are porous, so in theory, when they are cooked, they should release any liquids in them as vapor. However, since these are desiccated organs, I’m not entirely sure about them. It might require some effort to get them to burn. And the drying process might have already released all the mercury as vapor.”
“What do you think is our chance of success?” Xavier asked.
“Maybe 4%,” I answered.
“I am so glad you weren’t trying to persuade Gabriel then,” Xavier pulled into the morgue.
The coroner’s office was located in the basement of a hospital. The hospital looked and smelled like other hospitals, except for the adobe exterior that looked like the real thing.
This coroner’s office did not remind me of most coroners’ offices. The head of the department was a woman and her office was decorated by framed pictures of smiling children and homemade artwork; including a family portrait made from macaroni noodles. I stood very still while Xavier explained to her what we wanted to do. At first, she looked shocked.
“And you think this will work?” Dr. April Bulger asked.
“Well, it won’t hurt to find out,” I finally spoke since she was staring at me. “The theory is sound, the application of it, not so much.”
“You realize if
it works you’ll be releasing a toxic gas, right?” She asked.
“Yes,” we both said in unison.
“The system will need to be contained anyway or we won’t trap the gasses,” I said. “We need an evaporation system.”
“This is the craziest thing I’ve ever heard,” Dr. Bulger said before leading us down the hallway to another room. She picked up two attendants along the way. One looked like Laurel, the other like Hardy. I tried very hard not to dwell on the thought or break out into giggles.
“Ace comes up with lots of crazy ideas, the scary part is that they usually work,” Xavier said as we entered the room.
With the precision of any doctor performing surgery, he removed a desiccated liver and then stared at the beaker.
“Well?” I pointed to the jar.
“How am I supposed to get this in there?” He asked.
It was my turn to stare at the beaker. The opening was smaller than I had intended. The solution was obvious.
“Tear it apart,” I told him.
“It won’t burn if it’s torn apart,” Xavier said.
“Well,” I frowned and then shook my head. “That’s because I’m an idiot. Tear it up and put it in the beaker.” I repeated and grabbed some distilled water. I poured it in over the liver, and then stoppered the top with the special evaporation cork. Hardy scrounged up a Bunsen burner for me and I lit the flame. For a couple of moments, I was mesmerized by it. The flame was a light blue color until the very top where a sudden splash of yellow could be seen. It swayed and danced above the burner. Xavier pushed it under the beaker, breaking my attention.
We waited. Distilled water shouldn’t boil, it requires contaminants. Luckily, the liver was just such a contaminate and the water began to boil rather quickly.
As it boiled, the water vapor moved up the evaporation tube into a second, rounder container. This container was cold and the water condensed on the sides, running down and pooling in the round beaker.
The liver was beginning to fall apart within the heated flask. The desiccated organ was vigorously rehydrating, only to have the fluids cooked out of it again. The process was tearing it into tiny bits, but no one was going to miss a liver or two from a closed casket funeral.
Finally, the beaker boiled dry, leaving only a filmy, greasy residue on the bottom that was sort of blackish in color. We gazed into the top beaker. There was a tiny drop of silver in it. The mercury was perfectly round within the water and just about the size of a pin head. Xavier slipped on magnifying goggles that made him look like a goldfish and stared into the beaker.
“I’ll be damned, it worked!” Xavier said.
“Surprised me too,” I admitted giving him a gentle shove with my shoulder. “One down, dozens to go.”
Xavier left the goggles on and we began to repeat the process.
Seven
If I had been a fan of liver before, I wasn’t anymore. Of course, I hadn’t been a fan of liver prior to rehydrating them and then heating them to release any poisonous gasses that might have contributed to their demise, so there was nothing lost.
The minute samples of mercury had been isolated and were currently undergoing scientific analysis in a lab. The doctor that had picked up the samples was surprised by our method of extraction and told us he was looking forward to examining it.
I was hoping to never see mercury or liver again.
“Well?” Gabriel asked as we dragged our tired, worn out carcasses into the ranger’s station where we were still temporarily set up.
“I’m never eating liver and onions again,” Xavier flopped into one of the chairs and groaned.
“To say the very least,” I mimicked his gesture with a different chair and realized why he groaned. The chair was hard, despite the padding, and made my spine ache ever so slightly.
“Did it work?” Gabriel pressed.
“Yes,” Xavier said shaking his head no.
“Then why are you shaking your head no?” Gabriel asked.
“Because while we got mercury and mercury vapors, some amount of mercury is normal in the human system,” Xavier answered. “The only thing I can say is that some of the livers had mercury, some didn’t and some that did had more than others that did and that seems ambiguous at best.”
“Did you learn anything useful?” Lucas asked.
“Loads,” Xavier answered. “Like the skin is pretty interesting. However, I don’t know anything about the damage that has been done to it because I don’t know where it was before it ended up in the desert.”
“You just said you learned a lot and now you are saying you didn’t,” Gabriel took a deep breath. “So did you or didn’t you?”
“I think what Xavier is getting at is that some of the bodies had lots of holes in them. And I’m going to put serious emphasis on the word ‘lots’. Some of the holes might be from scavengers and insects, some probably weren’t, but it could be because they blew across the desert floor and bumped into things or it could have been caused by any number of unknown factors,” I answered. “However, there are six bodies that we are definitely leaning towards murdered and of those, four are definitely the same killer.”
“So we have a serial killer,” Gabriel let out his breath with a whooshing noise that blew strands of hair that had fallen out of my ponytail and covered my forehead. I leaned back away from him. “Sorry.” He gave me a sheepish look.
“You could do with a Tic-Tac,” I told him, dismissing it with a wave of my hand. “The six we know are the same have holes around the mouth and eyes. No idea why, the desiccation process has distorted the size of everything. They also seem to have puncture marks in a couple of places.”
“And all of the six had mercury in the liver, but Ace and I were talking about that. It seems odd that there would be elemental mercury because mercury isn’t absorbable by the liver. For whatever reason, the liver acted as a vessel or something for the metal and we cooked it out,” Xavier said.
“That’s true, mercury is not a soluble element except as a gas. The fact that any mercury showed up at all, is nothing short of miraculous. So we heated the liver where we found the mercury in the heart and got zip,” I told them. “And we can’t tell if that body has the holes in the eyes and mouth because the face has mostly gone away. We called a couple of anthropologists and archaeologists about rehydrating mummies, but it seems taboo to some degree and even the medical examiner couldn’t give us an answer on how to do it.”
“Is it possible that the mercury was something environmental?” Gabriel asked.
“Not on this planet,” I answered. “Mercury doesn’t get sucked into the human heart just randomly. It had to be inserted by mechanical means.”
“She means it had to be injected into the blood stream directly,” Xavier said. “We’re really tired and I’m going to have nightmares about livers. Do we have hotel rooms?”
“We have camping gear,” Gabriel answered.
“Uh, I do not camp,” I answered. “At all, ever.”
“It’s good to expand your horizons,” Gabriel smiled at me.
“Yeah, except I’m a serial killer magnet. Hotel rooms with security locks and dead-bolts are rare deterrents, I imagine a canvas tent is even less of one,” I argued.
“True, but the fact that we are surrounded by almost one hundred law enforcement agents should help,” Gabriel said.
“Where’s Michael?” Xavier interrupted my snippy reply. I turned and scanned the room. The geek was absent, but his missing presence hadn’t really been noticed by me or Xavier by the sound of it.
“He is at the hospital, being treated for exposure,” Gabriel answered.
“Exposure usually refers to cold weather exposure; hypothermia and frost bite,” Xavier answered.
“Well, he has heat stroke, a severe sunburn and sand burns. I would consider it a case of exposure,” Gabriel answered.
“Semantics,” Xavier waved the argument away. “You seem to be in a bad mood.”
“I
need to know if we have a serial killer on the loose or just a bunch of random bodies and I have no answers,” Gabriel answered.
“That makes you cranky?” I asked.
“Yes, because I have about a hundred agents combing Death Valley in the dark, looking for corpses that may or may not be significant and I have to do a press conference at some point because all of this work is not going unnoticed,” Gabriel said. “Hence the camping gear, I want us on site in case they find something.”
“Gabriel, anything biological will be pretty useless if found,” I told him. “The desert does that to biological material. Also, it speeds up corrosion of anything else. A good sand storm can make a car look ten years older than it really is in just a couple of hours. Imagine what months would do to it,” I told him.
“Don’t piss on my parade just yet, Ace. Tomorrow, if we have nothing, you can say I told you so, but not tonight,” Gabriel pointed his finger at me. I raised an eyebrow.
“The FBI is here, aren’t they?” I asked.
“Yes, along with half a dozen Marshal units and locals, even agencies with secret initials are interested in this case,” Gabriel told us.
“Why?” Xavier asked.
“Because a plane went down about fifteen years ago in this desert and they never found the wreckage, but it was carrying something that I don’t have the clearance to know about,” Gabriel sighed and suddenly looked older than any of us in the room.
“So no hotel room just yet?” I was still trying to get out of the tent thing.
“Nope, but we got padlocks for your zippers. I recommend you use them, there are things far worse than serial killers lurking about the desert,” Gabriel looked at the door.
“And any victims that are not your serial killer will be turned over to us,” a warm, silky voice said from behind me. The body would match the voice, dark, silky, dangerous and dreamy. However, the warmth was a facade, people without feelings never felt warm and fuzzy.
“Malachi,” I turned in my seat.
“Aislinn,” Malachi spoke my name like it was sacred. To him, it might have been. Nyleena was my touch stone, I was Malachi’s, which said all sorts of things. I suddenly understood the padlocks comment from Gabriel. Malachi was far worse than any serial killer I had ever met.