by Hadena James
“Malachi,” Lucas took Malachi’s attention off of me. “How did you get saddled with this?”
“Punishment,” Malachi answered. “I get all the bodies that are not your serial killer because we have some unsolved cases and these bodies might hold some answers.”
“A serial killer of your own?” Gabriel asked.
“I wish,” Malachi smiled and took a seat. “Unfortunately for me, I’m still on light duty for the incident with the chimpanzee.”
I tried not to snort or laugh or both at the same time. Malachi had technically been attacked by a trained chimp. He had shot it multiple times. In Malachi’s defense, it had been trying to rip off his face. In the chimp’s defense, I could understand why the chimp had jumped Malachi. However, since it had been a trained chimp with the KC Zoo and much loved by the zoo’s patrons, Malachi was temporarily reassigned from hunting serial killers. The fact that Malachi had caught the serial killer, despite the chimp, seemed to be a moot point.
“Why did they send you here instead of the Great White North?” Lucas asked.
“Because I wasn’t needed in Alaska and this, in theory, is just as much torture as the tundra,” Malachi relaxed a little. This wasn’t his group of people, but Malachi was at home just about anywhere after a couple of seconds. I referred to it as psychopathic charm, which wasn’t far off. “I’m here to clear up any bodies that are left after you guys figure out which ones are yours and which ones aren’t.”
“That is proving difficult,” Xavier said. “I can’t figure out how long most of the bodies have been dead or how they died or anything else useful.”
“Meaning you can’t tell which ones are your serial killer’s and which are not,” Malachi said.
“We aren’t even sure we have a serial killer here,” Gabriel answered. “We’ll give it a few days, but unless something gets found that screams ‘serial killer,’ there’s a good chance we are packing up and heading home until we have something more concrete.”
“The fact that all the bodies were grouped wasn’t helpful,” I said. “It’s unusual to say the least, but the park rangers told us that a few days ago there was a torrential rain and the playa held water for several hours as a result. I’m thinking it’s possible that there were multiple bodies hidden in the desert for whatever reason and the rains washed them into the closest basin, i.e.; the Racetrack Playa. They could be all unrelated. There are definitely some homicides, but,” I shrugged.
“But homicide doesn’t mean serial killer,” Malachi finished the thought unnecessarily.
“Pretty much,” I told him.
“What about the elemental mercury?” Malachi prodded.
“What about it? I’m not a chemist and honestly, the grinding of organs and extraction of mercury sounds really good in theory, but it may not have worked properly. I was expecting to get mercury compounds, not the element itself. It is possible that something we did broke the compounds and created the elemental stuff we found in the beakers,” I said.
“And since the body can’t absorb elemental mercury, it seems unlikely to find the element in the liver,” Xavier said. “Unless it was injected directly into the liver that is and that just doesn’t make sense, it won’t kill you. Well, it will, but not quickly or consistently. Elemental mercury has been used as a laxative, pain reliever, and a stomach aid for centuries because the side effects seemed to be minimal. Only in the last century has that practice stopped because we figured out that mercury compounds are toxic.”
“That’s really damn depressing,” Malachi sat, his fingers were laced and he looked every bit like I imagined Sherlock Holmes and just as crazy. Oddly, he was also as smart, which explained why I stayed friends with the admitted psychopath. I did love Sherlock Holmes and Malachi was as close to a modern day Sherlock as one could get.
“I know,” Gabriel said.
“I’m of the mindset that if you got elemental mercury, it was probably because it was there. Why it didn’t become a compound while cooking the liver is a mystery, it should have, but then, I’m not a chemist. Also, I can’t imagine that the liver would be a repository for it,” Malachi tossed in his opinion.
“A meeting of brilliant criminal minds and no one can figure out what the hell is going on,” Gabriel sighed. “Let’s all get some sleep; it’s going to be hot tomorrow.”
Back at camp, Xavier and I wandered around for a while. The sky was incredibly dark, but a large, nearly full moon illuminated the ground. I was awestruck by the amount of stars that could be seen, despite the lamps on tripods that were meant to keep us all from stumbling over the Sailing Stones and ruining years of research.
Eight
For several moments, I wondered if I had died in my sleep and been plunged into the bowels of Hell to burn for eternity. A thick, heavy wind moved around me, but it seemed to be making it hotter, not cooler. Sweat soaked the sheets, forcing me to remove them and leave them in a wadded heap on the floor of the tent.
The fan in the tent seemed to be mocking me, blowing a steady, hot wind across my body that did not cool down my sweat slicked skin. The blanket I had started with was in an undignified pile on the floor, tangled up with most of my clothes. It had been in the sixties when I had gone to sleep six hours earlier. Now the sun was up and the heat was climbing with every minute that passed.
The cot I had slept on had made me stiff and my body ached. I stretched my arms and legs, part of my morning routine. If I didn’t stretch every day, the scars that couldn’t be seen would start to seize up. I grabbed a soda from a cooler that had been placed in my tent and guzzled it. As I opened a second, a figure appeared on the canvas front door. Distorted fingers scratched at the canvas and I grudgingly headed for it.
I didn’t need features to know it was Malachi. Even through the distorted shadow, the figure was so impressively tall; I had a quick thought about Death, the being, not the concept. I undid one of the locks and unzipped the door. Malachi ducked and walked oddly into the tent. He zipped it behind him.
“You should be drinking water and Gatorade, not guzzling Mountain Dew in this climate,” he scolded me.
“You sound like Xavier. I don’t want to drink water or Gatorade, I want to drink soda and it isn’t like I’m going to dehydrate. Speaking of which, I need to pee,” I looked at Malachi with the sudden realization that aside from the ranger’s station, there were no bathrooms.
“They trucked in port-o-potties last night, but frankly, if I were you and all I had to do was urinate, I’d squat on the desert floor. They are already nasty.”
“Peachy,” I stretched some more, Malachi’s gaze held weight and it was smothering me. “What exactly do you want this morning?”
“Conversation with someone as intelligent as myself,” Malachi was drinking from a foam cup that was actually steaming despite the heat.
“Are you drinking coffee in this place?”
“I always drink coffee in the morning,” Malachi informed me like this should be in my mental database of him.
“Even when it’s five hundred degrees?”
“It is not five hundred degrees, I thought it felt pretty good, although you should leave a window open in your tent to keep it from becoming a sauna.”
“I’m hoping this is the only night we have to spend in this god-forsaken place,” I answered. “However, should I be required to spend a second night here, I will make sure to leave a window open.”
“Now, about your mercury,” Malachi finally sat down on the small cot. His head was touching the roof of the tent still, but it seemed roomier with him sitting down. “Did you just decide to boil organs for fun or was there a sound theory behind it?”
“There was a sound theory behind it. It just didn’t work exactly,” I shrugged. “Shit happens, this was one of those moments.”
“How very Zen of you,” Malachi stood up. “How many of these bodies do you estimate are yours?”
“Beats me; all of them, none of them, half of them,” I shrugg
ed again.
“Well then,” Malachi nodded and left my tent.
I sat on the cot, staring at the spot Malachi had vacated. There was a slip of paper on the sweaty sheet. For several seconds I stared at it, wondering if it would spontaneously combust or begin to dissolve. When neither of those things happened, I picked it up and opened it.
In Malachi’s very neat scrawl were the words better to check for specific salts. Malachi, ever the brighter of the two of us, had given me a clue. There was a little loathing that accompanied that knowledge. I called Xavier.
“Could we identify all the different salts in the bodies?” I asked quickly.
“I suppose, but why?” Xavier sounded like I had woken him and maybe I had.
“Well, if he is mummifying them before he dumps them, it is likely there will be a salt compound in the bodies that is not native to the desert. If that’s the case, then the bodies with that salt compound could belong to the serial,” I huffed a little bit.
“That’s a good idea, why do you sound pissed about it?”
“Because it was Malachi’s,” I admitted.
“Ah, I’ll call and have them start collecting all the salts and testing them,” Xavier hung up.
I continued to sit in the stifling tent, hoping to bake to death and not have to go outside to pee or see Malachi again. His very presence was irritating me, but only because he had shown me up. There was another scratch on my tent canvas.
“Go away,” I told the shadow.
“I have a present for you,” Gabriel’s voice came through to me.
“Fine, you can come in,” I said.
Gabriel was carrying a strange looking contraption. He held it out to me. There was an odd shaped cup with a tube that went into a large bottle. The entire thing was opaque. Gabriel handed it to me.
“What the hell?” I glared at the thing, willing it to tell me what it was.
“It’s a ‘Stadium Pal’ for girls. You pee in the cup and it fills the bottle, then you just empty the bottle,” Gabriel told me. He was grinning.
“I guess Malachi wasn’t kidding about the port-o-potties,” I sighed.
“No, no he wasn’t. Who knew a hundred federal agents could make five portable toilets that disgusting in less than six hours? And knowing how you feel about everything shared, I thought this would be of use to you; more so than the portable toilets. The Stadium Pal is brand new. I bought it for you a couple of months ago, but I could never think of the right time to give it to you. I picked it up for stake-outs. You can actually wear it under your clothes. There’s a strapping mechanism to hook it to your leg and straps to hold the cup like underwear. I took those off figuring you’d kill me.”
“You figured correctly, however, I appreciate it. I was not looking forward to trying to squat in the desert and not pee on my shoes,” I admitted.
“It is much easier if you can stand,” Gabriel grinned wide enough to expose perfectly white and proportioned teeth. If mine didn’t keep getting knocked out, I would have envied him. However, since I had dentures on the upper part and was working on the lower part, my smile was just as white and perfectly proportioned. My real teeth were not that attractive even before they started ending up in puddles of blood. My mother had considered braces, but it had seemed a lost cause after my first adult tooth came out in a school incident at the ripe old age of twelve.
“You seem to be in an unusually good mood considering we are wondering if we are sitting in the desert for no reason,” I fidgeted with the Stadium Pal.
“They found something last night that you are going to love, serial killer or not,” Gabriel somehow managed to spread his grin even wider. I considered asking if it hurt his face to smile like that and decided not to ruin whatever mood he was in.
“What?” I pressed.
“You’ll just have to see it,” Gabriel sort of crab-walked out of my tent. I used the Stadium Pal and left it behind to dry in the sweltering desert heat.
“Ok, I’ve peed and I’ve had a soda. What are you so happy about?” I asked my commander.
“Over there,” Gabriel pointed. My gaze followed the tip of his finger. I saw sand, sand and more sand. Some of it was different colors, but for the most part, it looked like sand and I had seen plenty of it yesterday. I narrowed my eyes at him.
“Whatever it is, I don’t see it,” I told him.
“See the rebar sticking out of the ground?” He asked.
“Ok,” I squinted at a piece of rusty metal that was standing out of the baked desert floor. In front of it was a rock. I expected to see a rock there though, so it wasn’t all that miraculous or interesting.
“It moved,” he finally told me.
“The rebar?” I asked.
“No, the rock, Ace, the rock moved almost half a foot last night,” he said.
“Gabriel, I hate to ruin the day for you, but it moved because some idiot hit it,” I commented dryly.
“How do you know that?” He asked.
“Because Xavier and I watched someone trip over it last night when we returned from the hospital morgue,” I told him.
“Really?” His face crumbled.
“Really,” I answered.
“Man, everyone got really excited about the movement of the rock,” Gabriel’s shoulders followed his face and they slumped.
“Sorry,” I looked around. “Did you ask if someone hit it?”
“Yes, they all said no,” Gabriel frowned at me.
“Ok then,” I looked around the rock and rebar strewn playa. There were more people standing around than I could count. That also meant there were more people than I cared to be introduced to, but I could remember the face of the agent that had tripped over the rock. I scanned the crowd and found him. “There, that guy, in the FBI jacket with short reddish brown hair, brown eyes and a sore arm, he tripped over it.”
It had been dark the night before, but the tripod lights and the bright moon had made the desert floor look illuminated. This illuminating effect had made the FBI agent visible to some degree. However, I didn’t need features to recognize a person, a habit formed by watching for perpetrators in the dark. The way they walked, stood, moved, along with their height and build were all identifiers to me.
“How do you know his arm is sore?” Gabriel asked.
“Because he ran into the rebar, I’m sure it bruised. He was actually jogging, hit the rebar, tripped over the rock and then looked around to see if anyone had noticed. Xavier and I did, but we were standing beside a tent, I don’t think he saw us.”
“Damn, Ace, I thought it was time to call the scientists.”
“Like they’d come back here!” I snorted. “It will take at least a month or two to get new scientists on the Sailing Stones project.”
“That’s depressing,” Gabriel started to walk away. Xavier, out of breath and beat red, stopped him by stumbling up to us waving his hands. We both stared at the overly heated, out of breath doctor. I wondered if I should offer him a Gatorade that Malachi had left in my tent. He stopped for a moment, drew in a few ragged breaths and then let out a long rattling wind that seemed to stir from deep within his very core. Once that final sound was gone, carried away by the constantly blowing breeze that seemed to tear at the skin, Xavier stood up and looked at us.
“Yes?” I asked him after he made us wait another second or two.
“We got some results back. They are finding salt in all the victims, but only a handful have a very specific type of salt - iodized sodium chloride,” Xavier said proudly.
“Uh,” I frowned at him. “Considering the quantities of table salt consumed by Americans, that is hardly earth-shattering news.”
“You found table salt? Like the kind found all over the country in diners with rice granules?” Gabriel was also frowning.
“It doesn’t matter how much salt we eat, it doesn’t pack itself into our body cavities or solidify into chunks under our skin,” Xavier said.
“Oh, you found chunks of table s
alt,” Gabriel continued to frown. “That makes all the difference.”
“How much iodized sodium chloride?” I ignored the sarcasm, suddenly interested.
“Several pounds mixed with potash, soda ash and a plethora of other salts,” Xavier answered.
“Iodized sodium chloride should not be mixed with the other salts,” I said.
“Bingo!” Xavier shouted. “We have a serial killer. And we have at least eight victims ranging in mummified stages without giving up any clues about their ages, weights or identities. I’ve called in a mummy expert.”
“So you mean this table salt is important?” Gabriel seemed confused.
“Yes,” I said. “And I officially hate Malachi for being smarter than me.”
“He’s smarter than all of us,” Xavier said. “None of us thought to test for individual types and amounts of salts present.”
“It still pisses me off that it was his idea,” I sighed.
“Isn’t it more important that we detected a serial killer?” Gabriel asked soothingly.
“I suppose,” I looked at Gabriel. “Have you considered questioning Malachi about it? Maybe he thought of the salts because these are his bodies?”
“I would be far more creative than that,” Malachi’s voice came from behind me.
“Acid, I know,” I answered, turning on him. “You are free to exodus to wherever you need to be.”
“When did you become so bitter?” Malachi asked.
“When you started lying about your IQ,” I smiled at my childhood friend. The rivalry was friendly or as friendly as it could be between two imbalanced individuals.
“Ouch,” Malachi smiled back. “I came to tell you that I’m glad you identified your bodies. You have a new problem.”
“What would that be?” I asked.
“This entire area has just been quarantined because someone heard about your mercury incident yesterday,” Malachi answered. “None of us are going anywhere. We’ve been exposed to mercury vapors given the heat and other environmental factors. We all have to be tested and what not.”