by Hadena James
“When you die, Death is going to retire, because you always bring far worse news than him,” I told Malachi.
“And you’re taller,” Xavier giggled.
“I know,” Malachi sauntered off to tell others.
“Stuck in the desert,” Gabriel said. “How fucking wonderful.”
Nine
Knowing that you have an active serial killer that you need to chase down stimulates the adrenal glands and creates a sort of strange euphoric high that you know is completely wrong, but can’t help enjoying. However, with the sun directly over head, creating about a million shimmery heat mirages, the adrenaline was fading. The sun made us all feel like chickens being roasted in a giant solar oven.
I was not immune and as the sweat dripped from my neck and ran down my back, soaking into the band of my jeans, I became irritable. Even the back of my knees were sweating. I could feel it soaking into my socks, which was only adding to the fact that my socks were wet from my feet and weirdly, my ankles. Until today, I hadn’t known ankles could sweat. I knew now and I was going to take that pointless nugget of information to dinner parties and barbecues to spew at unsuspecting victims.
Gabriel motioned me out of the long, double line of people, squashed together to be tested by the two nurses they had brought us. I looked around for a few moments and grudgingly stepped out of line. I instantly lost my spot to a FBI agent and mentally began swearing at Gabriel.
“They are taking us through over here, so we can get to work,” Gabriel whispered to me. Standing behind him was a nurse, who appeared to be as sweaty and hot as the rest of us. If sympathy had been in my emotional “can do” list, I would have felt sympathetic. Unfortunately for the nurse, it wasn’t and I moved towards her with sheer determination to get this stupid test over.
And it really was stupid. We had been outdoors when Xavier had poured the mercury from the heart. He’d been wearing gloves, I hadn’t touched anything, no one else had touched anything and half the people being tested hadn’t even been there when it happened. My risk of exposure was essentially nil and the others was only made a little bit higher by their decision to eat fish. However, none of it would come from the elemental mercury.
“Why are we doing this?” Xavier asked the nurse.
“Because we have a US Marshal with mercury poisoning,” she told us. We looked around. Everyone was accounted for and present as far as we knew.
“What Marshal?” I asked.
“Michael Giovanni came in with heat exhaustion and also showed positive for mercury poisoning,” the nurse informed us.
“Michael eats sushi three or four times a week,” Lucas said.
“I thought he was quitting that?” Xavier groaned.
“Why did he even get tested for mercury poisoning?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” the nurse replied tartly, “I just know that now all of you have to be tested because it is possible you were all exposed.”
“Not to Michael’s sushi,” I whispered.
“That sounds dirty when you say it that way,” Xavier gave a giggle. The nurse looked at him and her mouth fell open ever so slightly.
The rest of us were used to Xavier’s giggle. High pitched and slightly nasally, it belonged in an asylum. The first time I had heard it, I had been struck with the mental image of Satan giggling as more souls were plunged into the depths of Hell. However, you get use to it pretty quickly and once you’d heard it a few times, it no longer conjured images of the Dark Lord torturing tormented souls.
The nurse composed herself after the insane giggle and began taking blood samples and asking us questions about our general health. When she got to me, I gave her a look. She frowned at me and rolled up my sleeve.
“The other arm would be better,” I told her, pushing my sleeve back down and pulling up the other. My right arm had been scarred in earlier years by a knife wound courtesy of Gerard Hawkins, my second recorded serial killer encounter.
She inserted the needle and we both watched as my blood filled the tube. I bled fast and hard, filling the tube in almost no time. She switched out for another tube and continued to pull blood from me. After the second vial was filled, she pulled the needle out and stuck a cotton ball over the hole. I almost instantly stopped bleeding. She looked at me again.
“You should shake the anti-coagulant pretty quickly,” I told her. I clotted very fast and experience told me that she had about a minute before we would need another blood sample.
She shook both vials simultaneously and glared at me. I sighed in response. There was a name for the blood disorder that created my extremely high red blood cell count, but most people had never heard of it. I didn’t try to explain. I just let her shake the vials of my blood.
“How do you feel?” She asked.
“Hot, tired, cranky, everything one would expect to feel in the desert sun,” I answered.
“Headaches? Tremors? Muscle weakness? Twitching? Or any changes in sensations?” She continued.
“Well, I have migraines already,” I weighed the words carefully as I thought about how to answer them. “Muscle weakness, no. Twitching, occasionally, but some of that is from the scars. Tremors can accompany my migraines, but doesn’t happen without a migraine. Changes in sensation is a much trickier one.” I pursed my lips together and stopped talking.
“Why?” The nurse asked.
“Repetitive nerve damage,” I answered. “They stitch them back together, but you can only damage the nerves so many times before they start sending bizarre signals to the brain.”
“How much repetitive nerve damage are we talking about?” She asked slowly.
“Oh, a lot,” I answered. I debated whether to pull up my pant leg and just show her.
“Let me see,” she said, answering the question I was asking myself. Since it hadn’t gone well the last time I had exposed my leg, I hesitated for a second. “Well?” She pressed.
I bent down and hiked my jeans up to my knees. There were dozens of criss-crossed white scars sticking up from the skin. It was so bad, I had stopped trying to shave that leg ages ago. Of course, hair didn’t grow through the scars, so there wasn’t much hair on the leg anyway and it grew very slowly. What little was there, Trevor yanked off with wax strips every couple of months.
The nurse maintained her professional composure. She examined the scars that went along my shin and calf, disappearing up my leg, under the jeans and down into my socks. After a few seconds, she pulled my pant leg back down.
“Do you stretch?” She asked.
“Every day or I’ll lose mobility in it,” I told her.
“Good,” she nodded once to me. “I would say you’re fine, but we’ll double check the blood samples. About your clotting, do you know the cause?”
“Yes, it’s a genetic disorder. Both my parents have it. My mom is on blood thinners and I take aspirin at the moment to help keep mine thinned. My hemoglobin is about 21 or it was the last time we checked. We have trouble getting it lower, but it is helpful with my job. I nearly clotted closed a neck wound that would have surely killed me otherwise,” I answered, showing her the scar on my neck. Xavier had cauterized the wound when I got it, but the truth was, I was already starting to feel better and the blood had slowed significantly when he did it.
She smiled and began to take blood from Lucas. First she tried the left arm, then the right arm, then she sighed and looked at the hulking blonde structure and tutted at him.
Lucas gave her a weak smile and took off his shoe, exposing one foot. She frowned even harder, but bent down and took blood from the top of his foot. It was obvious that this was standard procedure for Lucas. There were small marks clustered together on the top of his foot that proved this wasn’t the first time they’d taken blood from his feet. I raised an eyebrow.
“Lucas’s muscles have side effects,” Xavier whispered to me.
“It doesn’t help that someone tried to cut off his arms once either,” I added just as quietly. Lucas had
a set of matching scars where someone had tried to saw through the elbows. They had failed miserably, but it had left strange looking scars at the bends of his elbows. The raised white skin was perfectly smooth but jagged in appearance. The pain he had endured was something I couldn’t imagine. Nor could I figure out how Lucas had broken free and killed them. However, getting him to talk about it required copious amounts of alcohol and Lucas didn’t imbibe copious amounts of alcohol except once a year at New Year's.
It was nice to know I wasn’t the only one that brought out the worst in people. The entire unit seemed to rub those with psychopathic personalities wrong. We all had bizarre stories to accompany our scars, mental and physical.
The nurse motioned Gabriel forward. Gabriel was the most normal of us, he didn’t have the stories or the scars that we had. At least, not in the quantities we had. Somewhere, in the dark recesses of his memory, lurked a story or two, he had started to tell me one once and then stopped. His appearance of normality faltered ever so slightly that day and I realized that like the rest of us, he wore a mask. His was just better at hiding whatever it was that had damaged him.
Gabriel closed his eyes as the nurse drew his blood. She finished and asked him the same questions she had asked me. He replied that he was fine.
“All right, boys and girls, let’s get to work,” Gabriel said as he rolled the sleeve of his shirt back down.
“Great,” I looked at him, my bottom lip sucked in, my eyes narrowed. “Where do we start? We have no idea who the victims are or where our serial killer might live or even the most basic of evidence, an idea of what our killer is doing to his victims. I mean is he molesting them? Raping them? Why is he using mercury? Or was that a one-off and he is using multiple methods to dispatch his victims? And why is he taking the time to mummify them? That isn’t exactly a slow process.”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa, Rapid Fire, slow down with the questions,” Gabriel held up a hand to me. “I can’t even remember the first one you asked me.”
“Is he molesting them?” I repeated much slower.
“Oh yeah, I don’t know. That isn’t my department. That sounds like a Xavier thing,” Gabriel said.
“Because I can tell from a mummified body that it has been molested?” Xavier frowned at him.
“I see your point,” Gabriel’s gaze fell on me. “Where do you recommend, Rapid Fire?”
“I don’t have a clue, that’s why I’m not team leader,” I stuck my tongue out at him. Xavier giggled. It caught the attention of the nurse. She looked at him from the corner of her eye.
“Very mature, Ace,” Lucas scolded me. “I say we find headquarters out of the sun as our first step.”
“We will have to stay in Las Vegas, it is the closest place where we can find either a Marshals’ office or a FBI office. However, this is not a sightseeing trip,” Gabriel added quickly.
“What the hell are we going to do in Las Vegas?” I asked, face pinched up. Of all the cities I had ever wanted to visit, Las Vegas was not on the list. I figured I would just wind up a statistic in Las Vegas.
“It’s Vegas, baby, the world is open to us,” Lucas grinned.
“Uh, I think not,” I answered. “At least I won’t have to use the Stadium Pal much more.”
“What are we doing about Michael?” Xavier asked.
“He’s already in Vegas,” Gabriel answered. “There were a few hospitals closer, but he objected to most of them on his own weird personal grounds.”
“Because being the geek he is, he’d know that Vegas was close,” I said.
“More than likely,” Gabriel admitted.
Work
Twenty years ago, the critics had called his work banal. His wife had disagreed with them, she could see his vision. The models had been her idea. She had been his first. One night, while they made love, she had handed him a Polaroid camera and told him to take pictures of her face as she orgasmed. The moment would be stunning. He had, as he thrust into her, he had snapped picture after picture.
After their love-making, he’d gone into the studio and selected one of the photos. Her green eyes had been almost closed, showing just a touch of white from beneath heavy lids. Her mouth had been open, but she was chewing on her bottom lip, creating a red spot from her teeth. Her dark brown hair had been spread about the pillow, messy but beautiful.
He’d painted it with more enthusiasm than he had shown for the art in ages. At the next gallery opening, it had sold for more than fifty-thousand dollars. It was a staggering figure for the artist that was barely twenty and had been called banal just a few months earlier.
However, she couldn’t be his only model. Together they had scoured model agencies and colleges looking for models. The success of that one painting could never be repeated.
He had been ready to give up again, toss in the towel and go to work at a school or something teaching art. Yet, she had another idea, why not paint models in their final moments? She had found him a model and after several hours of thinking, she finally broke a few thermometers and sucked the mercury into a syringe.
The effects had been amazing. The model’s leg had curled up in an unnatural position. She had screamed at first, so he had shoved a rag into her mouth and started snapping pictures.
A few days later, while painting the photo, his wife had drowned in their pool. Tears began to fall down his cheeks as he remembered the moment. He’d gone outside to call her in to look at his masterpiece. She had been lying on the bottom of the pool. He’d jumped in, but she couldn’t be revived. He had done the hardest thing ever at that point, he had tossed her limp body back into the pool and gone back inside.
Once inside, he’d made sure the body was safely hidden in the basement freezer. He had thrown a tarp over the painting and splashed some wet paint onto a blank canvas. Then he went back outside and pulled her from the pool again, while dialing 9-1-1.
They had instructed him to do CPR if he knew how. He said he did and through tears and mild hysteria, he had once again started the life saving service on his dead wife. The paramedics had shown up and pulled him off a few minutes later.
After the funeral, he emptied the swimming pool and pulled the cover over it. He couldn’t hardly look at it, let alone leave it full to mock him for the rest of his days in the house. He made plans to move.
Then he remembered there was a body in the freezer in the basement. He didn’t move. He spent months filling the pool with salts. His wife had been very fond of mummies, she said they were ancient works of art. He had researched the topic for a while before realizing he could do it with a pool full of salts.
One day, in April, almost a year later, he dumped the frozen body into the pool. A few days later, he dug it back out, it was starting to smell. He stuffed the mouth, nose, and other orifices with rock salt.
It hadn’t been enough. The body began to smell again, this time only taking a day. He had to dig it back out of the pool and figure out what to do. It took a while; during that time, the body was returned to the freezer. He drained the blood and found the mercury in the process. He saved it for another model.
Finally, he thawed it, cut it open and stuffed it full of salt. Afterwards, he tossed it back into the pool. This time it worked. The body didn’t smell or at least not enough to cause problems. He placed the cover back over the pool and entered the death portrait into a show.
It had sold. He had found success again. He couldn’t believe it. The critics called it amazing and inspired. He agreed. His wife had inspired him. And with her dead, what better way to honor her memory. He began painting backgrounds of her favorite places and inserting the dead models into them.
But he had to be smart about it. He couldn’t kill every model. That would make the bodies pile up too fast. It would make the agencies start asking too many questions.
He hired models from agencies and painted them in imagined sex or death poses. He trolled for other models in the throwaways that wandered the streets of Vegas every day. The
hookers, the homeless, the endless line of truckers looking to make a buck while delivering a load, he was always careful about the models he killed.
Slowly the money and fame had started coming in, but he was getting tired of painting. He began experimenting with a new medium, clay. Now he took pictures and began sculpting the faces of death.
The new medium was excellent for expanding his audience. The clay provided him with the ability to create larger versions with more detail. He had gone through the older photos and picked some of his favorites, creating clay versions of his paintings. That had fueled him for a couple of years and bought him more fame, more acclamations.
Then he had felt it was getting stale again. It was time to start with new models. He was able to sculpt about six a year. Those statues were bringing in enough money that he could be considered eccentric, but brilliant; a privilege of the rich.
His neighbors no longer cared that he had filled in his pool and never uncovered it. They no longer cared that he had never remarried or that he lived like a hermit or that occasionally it appeared that some prostitute was visiting him. They no longer took notice of these oddities. They only cared that they could claim they knew the famous artist; that he was their neighbor even.
He poured a glass of wine as the sun set behind his house. The city of Las Vegas never slept, the lights could be seen in the distance, illuminating the darkening sky. They kept the sky a strange reddish-black color that even the brightest stars couldn’t penetrate. Only the moon dared to pierce the lights of Las Vegas.
It had been a while since he had been out to the desert to stare at the stars. From his house, they were invisible. But he couldn’t go to the desert tonight or any night for some time. The news had announced they had found bodies, dozens of them, in the Racetrack Playa. He didn’t need to see them to know that they were his bodies. He’d been burying them in the sands surrounding the playa for years. It had been his wife’s favorite spot. Now, he would need to find a new place to put his models.