by Hadena James
We left the sanctuary. Xavier and Gabriel kept giving me looks. I knew they wanted to rehash my past, but I was not going to give up the ghost easily. Maybe one day, I would, but for now, conversations about my father were off limits unless it related to the case. It wasn’t just that my father had died when I was young, it was that the memories of him were sacred.
The trip had taken my mind off the dismembered feet and given me an idea. A great ape was capable of doing immense damage. To them, the human body was a fragile, frail thing and a sexually mature chimpanzee was capable of going into a rage without provocation.
It was this thought that I relayed to the guys. They looked at me like I was crazy for a few minutes. We had arrived at the Columbia Police Department before any of them said anything.
“So, you now think it could be a chimp?” Gabriel asked.
“I think it’s a possibility, just one of many,” I said.
“You were convinced it was a jaguar yesterday,” John pointed out.
“Yes, well, I have reconsidered my position. It could be a number of predators. Even the expert was not certain it was a cat, just mostly certain. It is possible that the fangs of a large cat could be similar to the canines of a chimp.”
“We found a head,” Detective Russell said as we entered the secure part of the station.
Eleven
It doesn’t matter how many times you look at a severed head, there is something surreal about it. This head had been floating in the Missouri River for a while. Large chunks of the recognizable pieces were missing, like the nose, eyes, and lips. Strips of flesh still clung to the forehead, jaw, and cheek bones. The scalp still had hair hanging from it. It dripped dirty water on to the table.
Xavier was examining the head with those strange magnifying goggles that made him look like a bug. John looked a little green. Gabriel was chatting quietly with the detective. I was trying not to peel the skin off the head.
This sounded morbid, but I was anxious to see the condition of the skull. I wanted to know if it had been crushed. Xavier was more concerned with identification.
“Teen boy, Caucasian, time of death unknown,” Xavier was rambling information into a microphone hooked to a tape recorder. “Would you go get food or read up on cannibals or anything that gets you out of my way?”
“Me?” I asked.
“No one else reads books about cannibals,” Gabriel confirmed.
“Ok, I’ll grab lunch and see if I can find a new book on cannibals. I think I’ve read them all though,” I answered.
“You can eat while reading about cannibals?” John appeared to turn a little greener.
“If it wasn’t a biohazard, I could eat in this room while Xavier boiled the head,” I told him.
“Boils the head?” John frowned.
“That’s the best way to remove all the tissue,” I walked out to the sounds of John running for the trashcan. I couldn’t eat with that noise. My stomach was good with gore, not so good with vomit. However, I felt a little better knowing that I had pushed John over the edge. It was petty, but sometimes petty was the friendliest thing I could muster.
I did not buy a book on cannibals. I bought a book on chimpanzees. I also bought lunch in the cafeteria of the University of Missouri Hospital. As I sat down, a few people moved away from me. I told myself it was the smell of antiseptic, but I knew that I also smelled a little bit like decay. It was impossible not to pick up some of that smell. The odor would attach to my clothes, my hair, my very skin and only a hot shower with some good soap would get rid of it.
The book brought back information I had forgotten and filled my head with more. There was a lot I didn’t know about chimpanzees. For example, I didn’t know that female chimps learned faster than males or that chimps laughed. I did know that they were a hell of a lot stronger than humans, despite their smaller stature and that they used tools.
I finished the book on chimpanzees and bought a second book, this one on bonobos. As I finished my lunch, I finished the second book. Bonobos were a lot less violent than chimps and much more sexually explorative. A bonobo was more likely to sexually assault a person than kill them. If a person was killed by a bonobo, it was probably an accident due to their high sex drive.
Armed with this new information and a full stomach, I headed back to the morgue. John and the detective were sitting in the hallway. The detective smiled at me. I smiled back.
“I think they are waiting on you,” Detective Russell said to me.
“Thanks,” I walked into the room.
“How was lunch?” Gabriel asked.
“Good, I read up on great apes and ate a turkey sandwich. I was told you were waiting on me.”
“We’re about to start x-raying the skull, we figured you would want to be here for it,” Xavier told me.
“You thought right,” I said. “I bought you a sandwich. Wait, why were x-rays not taken before you began examining it?”
“They were,” Xavier pointed to a piece of film. I picked it up and held it to the light. It only sort of looked like a human head. There were too many bones and debris, something was definitely wrong with it. As I stared a little longer, a fish began to take shape.
“Is that a fish?” I asked.
“Small flathead catfish to be exact,” Xavier answered. “We think it crawled in through the neck where it had been detached from the torso and took up residence in the skull. I took out the fish while you were eating, which is why John is no longer in the room. The fish is over there.”
It was indeed a small catfish, maybe six inches in length. Xavier had put it in a jar full of fluid. It didn’t seem like a six inch catfish would fit inside a human skull. Also, to make room for a catfish, the brain would have to be gone.
“Where’d the brain go?” I asked.
“The beauty of being submerged in water with tiny scavengers. Tiny water creatures, probably fishlings, swam up the nose and in through the eyes and ate the brain as it decayed. After it was gone and other small scavengers ate at the neck region, that catfish swam inside the head and got stuck,” Xavier said.
“Not a very smart catfish,” I shrugged. The intelligence or lack thereof in catfish was not something I knew enough about to debate. However, it didn’t seem like a very smart move.
“Now, if you wouldn’t mind,” Xavier pointed to some gloves. I put on a pair of the nitrile gloves, they were purple and about a size too big. “I’d like to take x-rays and then I’m going to boil the head. Gabriel said he’d take a rain check on the head boiling, but I figured you could assist.”
“Sure,” I shrugged. “However, it’s that time. You need to eat. X-rays and head boiling will have to wait.” I pulled a very squashed sandwich out of my hip pocket. Gabriel laughed. Xavier shook his head.
“You should invest in a bag,” Xavier took the sandwich. “Not a purse, but like a tote bag to carry around your Kindle and for food runs. I get tired of squashed sandwiches.”
“At least it wasn’t a salad,” Gabriel laughed again. “Let’s get him an unsquashed sandwich and take a break.”
“Uh,” I frowned. “Can we do the x-rays really quick?”
“I guess,” Gabriel leaned against the table. “It will give you something to do while the rest of us eat.”
“Thanks,” I said, ignoring the dig. Xavier took X-rays. The nice thing about the digital age was that it took no time for the film to develop. I grabbed the six print-outs and we left the morgue.
Once inside the cafeteria, John sat quietly sipping some water. He refused to look at the plates of the others. I believed it was his first autopsy and boiling heads wasn’t setting too well with his stomach. Neither was Xavier’s chicken salad sandwich or Gabriel’s cheeseburger. Some people just couldn’t eat after being in a morgue.
The new x-ray was in my hand, being held up to the shoddy lighting in the cafeteria. It was hard to make out any real details. To improve the lighting, I was shining a flashlight through the back, but it was stil
l a poor substitute for a light booth or whatever they called them.
The skull seemed to have lots of fractures. Spider web cracks that radiated from central points on different sides of the head. I picked up another film and found a black spot in the ghostly white image. A few inches away was another black spot. The spider webs were more apparent in this shot.
I put the film and my head down on the table. We could ignore chimpanzees, lions, tigers, and bears. The black spots were missing pieces of the skull. Few things could do that; alligators, crocodiles, and jaguars. I was finding the more I thought about it, the more I realized there were a lot of things capable of attacking and killing a human being. Especially a teenaged boy. Even a large anaconda or Burmese python might be able to do some serious damage to a skull. I’d heard of them killing people before, full grown adults, but only children seemed to be at risk for being eaten.
“What’s the bite force of an anaconda or Burmese python?” I asked.
“It’s not a snake,” Xavier said. I stared at him. We all still had secrets, but the way he put it made me wonder if he’d seen snake attacks before.
“Crocodile or alligator?” I turned to the other predators that had instantly leapt to mind.
“That’s possible,” Xavier agreed. “Ok, Miss Morbid, let’s go boil the head.”
“Hey,” I stopped him. “What’s that?” I pointed to a spot on the film with my flashlight.
“A spot,” Xavier told me.
“Is that the technical term?”
“Yes, it is.” Xavier stood and cleared his tray. “Now, if you would like to join me for some skull boiling, we’ll see what that spot is.”
“Right behind you,” I stood.
“I’m going to sit this out,” Gabriel stood. “I’m sure I have other things I need to do.”
“Like what?” I asked.
“Important things,” Gabriel answered, “like keep my lunch down.”
Twelve
The skull was clean. The room smelled like ammonia and boiled meat. Combined it created an unpleasant odor, add to it the knowledge that the meat smell was coming from decaying flesh and well, my stomach certainly wasn’t growling.
Xavier had his magnifying goggles back on. I had my own set. We were rubbing shoulders, literally, as we looked at the skull. Xavier kept talking into a microphone. I didn’t have a microphone to talk into, so I said nothing and just looked intently.
There were four definitive punctures. They were evenly spaced and between them were small marks that Xavier had confirmed were from the other teeth scraping the bone. Cracks spider webbed out from the puncture marks, except along the cranium sutures, where the skull was slightly misshapen. The cranium sutures were where the two halves of the skull fused together. This one had a jagged break where the sutures had broken. Small chips of bone were missing from there as well.
This was the weakest part of the skull. The break and missing chips were caused by excessive pressure being placed upon the sides of the skull, forcing the bone to give. I compared it to a picture from my file that had once belonged to my father. It was similar, but it wasn’t exact.
“Uh, Houston, we have a serious problem,” Xavier suddenly stood up and stepped back from the table.
“Ok,” I stepped back as well, suddenly concerned about biohazards. Xavier didn’t step back from bodies very often.
“We need an odontologist,” Xavier told me.
“Why?” I looked at him.
“That spot,” Xavier pointed. “I’m pretty sure it’s teeth marks.”
“It’s been mauled by an animal.”
“No Ace, I think they are human teeth marks. I think someone bit down on the brow hard enough that their teeth left an impression on the top of the eye socket and the forehead.”
“Who bites an eye?” I asked.
“Someone fighting or,” Xavier didn’t say it.
“Or someone feeding.” I made a face. “That isn’t exactly a fleshy area.”
“True and I saw no evidence of cooked flesh,” Xavier said. “Maybe it was a fight.”
“I’ve bitten some odd places when fighting for my life.” I reassured him.
“Like?” Xavier raised an eyebrow.
“The fleshy part under the arm. It’s very tender.” I stopped. “Of course, I didn’t do it hard enough to leave teeth marks on bone. I’ve taken off ears.”
“With your teeth?”
“No, actually, since my teeth are mostly fake, I try not to bite. The ones I have might not hold up under the pressure. The fake ones might come out of my mouth.”
“Ok, so we won’t jump to conclusions, one bite mark does not make a cannibal.”
“Especially since there has been an animal feeding on the body, a powerful animal. That might be why we have a head and feet but nothing that goes between them.” Even though the words were coming out of my mouth, I wasn’t buying them. Some years earlier, a man had walked into a fast food restaurant in a major city with a machete. He’d cut off the head of a patron and held everyone hostage while he chewed on his victim’s face. Two hours into the hostage situation, police had managed to shoot him.
No one understood why he did it. He had seemed like a normal, well-adjusted guy who’d just celebrated his twenty-sixth birthday and the birth of his first child. There were no marital problems, no history of mental illness, nothing to indicate such an urge was building inside him. The news had reported it and a Native American shaman had spoken on record about the man being possessed by a wendigo. Since the subject had been killed by police, there hadn’t been an answer to why he did it. Possession by a wendigo didn’t seem that far out of the realm of possibilities to me.
We were used to senseless violence. Desensitized by the mayhem that we saw so often. However, the thought of a person chewing on the face of another person unsettled me. It wasn’t the act of cannibalism. Those sorts of things I was used to, I’d once seen a body dressed like a headless hog and run across an open fire on a spit. The spit had been complete with long handled turner, cold beer, picnic tables, and all the neighbors. The victim had been missing their head, arms, legs, nipples, and genitals. All the identifiers to mark it as human and not swine.
It was the idea that our victim might have been chewed on raw or worse, while still alive. Cannibalism wasn’t just taboo, it spoke of more primitive times, when Aztecs made sacrifices to their gods by drinking the blood or consuming the flesh of their fellow man. However, they cooked them first. Alive was different, it didn’t speak of primal urges and early history. It spoke of wildness. It was more feral than primitive.
But, I too, was jumping to conclusions. Large predators didn’t share their food well. Whatever had crushed our victim’s skull, wouldn’t have willingly shared the violence of the kill or the spoils of victory. Perhaps the bite to the face was done during the initial abduction. It was a tender spot, like the fleshy part of the underarm. Or in the process of shoving the victim into the cage, there had been a struggle and the bite mark had happened then. Or perhaps Xavier was wrong and it wasn’t a bite mark, but something entirely different.
This last suggestion seemed the least likely. Xavier had seen things that most of us couldn’t imagine. He and Lucas had spent time in jungles and deserts where the rules had no longer applied. I hadn’t heard all their stories, just enough to know the two men had aged quickly due to the things they had experienced. I glanced sideways at him. Unlike Lucas, I never wondered if the dark haired man who always needed a shave and a shower, could read my mind. I did worry that one day, I would cross a line and hurt his feelings.
This desire to not hurt his feelings was not a natural instinct for me. During the time we had worked together, I had come to appreciate Xavier. Until I had joined the SCTU, I could count on one hand the number of people that were important to me. Now, I had to use two and Xavier was definitely one of them.
“Do we call Gabriel or the odontologist first?” Xavier asked.
“Do you know an
odontologist?”
“No,” Xavier answered.
“Then I suggest we call Gabriel. He’s the one that usually arranges for us to have an expert.”
“Ok,” Xavier drew out his phone and called Gabriel.
I went back to examining the skull as well as the pictures that we had taken beforehand with the flesh still on it. The face had decayed. The features were relatively indistinguishable. There was a hole where the nose had been eaten away. The eyes had been missing. The eyelids had been missing. Scraps of flesh clung to the forehead, but not enough to show a bite mark. The lips and ears were gone. The teeth had begun to come out of the decaying gums, leaving only a handful on the top and bottom jaws.
I gave up on the pictures and went back to the skull. I didn’t know what I was looking for, anything that jumped out at me. My gaze wandered back up to the top of the skull, where the sutures had split. It revealed nothing more, keeping the secret of what had cracked it hidden. We needed an animal expert. We needed an odontologist. We needed DNA results. We needed bodies. Bodies yielded clues, but the skull only gave us tantalizing tidbits of information that may or may not help.
I left the room, stripping off my gown, mask, goggles, and gloves along the way. We needed a zoologist. We were in the right place. The University of Missouri had once been renowned for its School of Journalism, but in recent years, science had taken the spot of the best program, particularly biological sciences.
The chief medical examiner had a very nice office located on the same floor as the morgue. The walls were a light gray, the ceiling slightly darker with lots of dark walnut wood furniture. It didn’t have any chrome, silver, or stainless steel accents. All the accents were marigold yellow. I instantly disliked it. Yellow was my least favorite color. I abhorred it. It was irrational to abhor the color yellow, but I did.
“What can I help you with Dr. Cain?” The medical examiner asked as I walked into the office. The door had been open, so I’d rapped my knuckles against it as I entered.