by Hadena James
It was another mystery of the universe. I would unlock the secrets of black holes before I understood why Nyleena had been my companion since I was five years old. Since it was something I couldn’t answer, I choose to ignore the reasoning behind our strange friendship, just letting it exist.
My thoughts were interrupted by another face. This one much younger than my own. The face of a three year old girl that had been plastered all over the news in the weeks before I was abducted. In the pictures, light blue eyes had sparkled from under thick black curls. She had been smiling and holding a kitten. A normal three year old by all accounts, except that she had gone missing and her uncle had been Mr. Callow. She was suspected to be his first victim. Her body had never been found. I didn’t know why I remembered her face or the photograph of her that had been in the newspaper and on the TV news. My mind worked in mysterious ways, even for me. I racked my brain for her name and came up empty.
My father had come home from work one night, a day or so after her disappearance. He’d been angry. Not at us, his family, but at life in general. He’d been a God-fearing man; praying at meals and at night, tithing to the church, going to mass when his job allowed. It was the first time I ever remembered him swearing. He’d slammed the door to his home office and shouted “God Damn it!” at the top of his lungs. After that night, he no longer made us pray before meals or came into my room and prayed with me before bed. He swore more often and stopped going to church. That Christmas, he skipped Midnight Mass and then never returned to church again. Somehow, in the short months that Mr. Callow had been committing dreadful acts of violence against the children of the city, my father had lost his faith. He never found it.
While I believed my father was most likely a sociopath, I didn’t believe he was like me. I believe he was more capable of feeling. I also believe that at some point, he just gave up. It’s hard for a sociopath to feel, it requires effort. The only real emotion is anger. My father was an angry man for the rest of his life. I think after Callow and the other child murders he’d seen, he just stopped trying to be human and started letting the monster take control.
Sixteen
“We have body parts!” Xavier shouted through my door. I flopped over in the bed and stared at the ceiling. There were some phrases that required caffeine before being shouted. That was one of them. I hadn’t slept well, even for me. My dreams haunted by images of my father. In my dreams, he had a face; a face that I knew was his, but couldn’t exactly put together now that I was awake. When I got home, I might ask my mother for a few photos of him and sister. Not being able to remember their faces bothered me, but I wasn’t sure why.
Xavier began knocking on the door. It was a formality. He had a key card to my room. Mostly he was giving me time to be prepared so that I didn’t kill him when he rushed in.
Which he did about ten seconds or so after he started knocking on the door. His excitement was evident. I glared at him.
“Did you hear me?” He asked.
“Yes,” I answered. “What time is it?”
“About seven,” Xavier told me.
“In the morning?” I frowned, looking for soda or some sign of caffeine.
“Yes in the morning,” Xavier followed my gaze. “There’s soda in the car.”
“Great, is there one in my room?” I asked.
“I don’t know, did you stock any in your room?”
“Good question,” I climbed from between the covers. Now that I was standing, I had a better view. There had been a few sodas last night, but I wasn’t sure if any of them were left.
“If you drank less soda, you might sleep better,” Xavier suggested.
“If I drank less soda, I might kill people,” I found a bottle of Coca-Cola on the table. It had been opened, but I was pretty good at tightening the lids back so they didn’t go flat. I opened it and downed what was left.
“How much soda do you drink?” Xavier frowned.
“I don’t know, three most days, four if they are really long days.” I answered. I preferred soda, but tried to curb the addiction by adding in bottles of water. Unfortunately, I couldn’t convince myself to drink tap water, which was much cheaper. Also, the water had to be flavored. I’d found two brands of flavored water that I could drink. One wasn’t all that great for me, but I loved it. The other was better for me and I liked it a lot less. “I’m usually too busy to drink more than that.”
“Maybe you should drink Sprite or something in the evenings,” Xavier suggested. I pulled an empty 7-Up bottle from the trash. “Well, what do I know then?”
“Exactly. So, do you want to tell me about the body parts?” I asked.
“They’re body parts, what is there to tell?”
With that, I grabbed clothes and went to take a shower. The shower was very quick, just long enough to lather up soap and get my brain into functioning mode. I ran on pure instincts for the first hour I was awake, unless I showered.
As I pulled my hair up, still wet, into a messy bun that would require work later in the day, I caught a glimpse of my reflection. The face that stared back at me was a stranger. It always was. The scars, eyes, and hair were mine, but the rest of my features, weren’t part of my memory. The skin was still tanned from summer. The eyes had dark circles around the bottoms of the lids. Three small scars were near the lips, created when my teeth went through it in my younger days.
I spent roughly thirty seconds staring at the reflection that stared back. A reflection that was me and yet, not me. There were glimpses of my mother in my face, but the dark hair and dark eyes were entirely those of my father. My mother had blue eyes and light brown hair. Genetics told me my father had to have had dark hair and brown eyes.
Hair up and clothing on, I left the bathroom and the stranger in the mirror. I had never asked Malachi about his feelings on his reflection. I wondered if he felt as disassociated from it as I did.
“You look pale,” Xavier frowned.
“I always look pale,” I answered.
“No, you look like you, overly tanned with bags under your eyes from not sleeping. Right now, you look pale, wan, like you’ve seen a ghost.”
“I don’t know what to tell you.” I shrugged.
“And now your color is returning,” Xavier frowned harder. “This has something to do with the reason you don’t have mirrors in your house, doesn’t it?”
“I have mirrors.”
“You have one mirror, in the guest bathroom.”
“It’s a mirror.”
“One day, Lucas and I will pry it out of you. You should just make it easy on yourself and tell us what you see in the mirror.”
“I see,” I thought about it. “I see what you see.”
“For some reason, I doubt that very much,” Xavier ushered me out of the room.
Xavier had said body parts and I had expected an arm, maybe a set of legs. I was staring at six waterlogged extra-large duffle bags. Each sat on its own table. From what I understood, their recovery from the Missouri River had been difficult and one person was being treated for exposure and hypothermia.
The Missouri River is dirty, smelly, and unpleasant on good days. On bad days, it was dirty, smelly, unpleasant, and body parts bobbed to the surface and got stuck in the ice that formed near the edges. However, how ice formed anywhere in the river amazed me. There was actually a limit on the number of fish you could eat from it because of pollution.
Of course, it was a favorite dumping site for serial killers in Kansas City as well as other cities along its winding route. I wasn’t sure why the Missouri seemed to hide more bodies than the Mississippi, but it did.
Anything that spent any time in the water, smelled. It was a strange, dank, dirty, oppressive odor that smelled of fish, decay, and only the gods knew what else. The fact that the body parts were decomposing added to the aggressive odor that permeated the bags and filled my nostrils.
“Good grief,” Gabriel exclaimed as he entered the room behind us. “I thought the
cold slowed decomp.”
“It does,” I answered. “That distinct aroma is from the water in the river. There’s a reason I would never swim in it as a child. Even then it reminded me more of sewage than water.”
“It isn’t that bad,” Xavier said.
“Your nose must be dead,” I answered.
“No, yours is just extra good.” Xavier countered. “Ok, let’s see what’s in the bags.”
Xavier opened the first bag. The arm he pulled out had definitely been in the water a while. The bag had protected it from the scavengers, but it had lost its color and sheen, making it appear waxy. There were marks all over it. Some were definitely human bite marks. I frowned.
By the time he emptied the bag, we had a head, torso, both arms, hands attached, both legs, sans feet, and an assembled body. However, saying we had a full body was incorrect. We had most of a full body. There were definitely some important pieces missing.
The first noticeable problem was that the torso had not only been cut above the waist, but it had been sliced open in front. All the organs were missing. The ribs and back had been cleaned, meaning the flesh and muscle was gone and bone was visible. The same was true of the thighs. The femurs were there, but only the ends had any tissue left.
Once you stopped noticing the very obvious missing chunks of the body, the smaller ones became apparent. Small and medium sized wounds covered the arms, legs, face, and torso. There seemed to be an equal number of human bites and bites from something larger.
Xavier and I exchanged looks. Neither of us said the “c” word out loud. Technically, people did bite others hard enough to take out chunks of flesh and spit it out. A famous boxer had done it with an ear during a match.
“What are the chances those were made postmortem?” Gabriel asked.
“Why bite someone that’s dead?” I asked.
“I’ll have to examine them,” Xavier said.
“How long?” Gabriel asked.
“A couple of hours,” Xavier answered.
“Quick estimate on how many bite marks are there?” Gabriel pressed.
“Human or other?” Xavier countered.
“Human,” Gabriel was staring at the corpse like it was going to get up and strangle him.
“Over sixty,” Xavier answered.
“That is a lot,” I frowned. “Why bite someone over sixty times?” As soon as the question popped out of my mouth, I wished I could shove it back in. I knew the answer. A fetish biter might bite over sixty times, but not all of them would remove chunks of flesh. That was hard on the jaws, unless you were used to eating raw meats. The average person takes 90 bites a day for their total meal intake. I didn’t know why I knew that, I just did. If the majority of your diet is raw meat, that’s where the most bites are going to come from. A human could live on meat alone, as long as it wasn’t rabbit. It wasn’t recommended, but a healthy human could provide a cannibal with a pretty good diet.
“Hey,” Xavier said, “this one didn’t have a crushed skull.” He pointed to the x-ray of the bag. His gloved fingers played over the decaying flesh.
“How’d he die?” Gabriel asked.
“I’m not Houdini, I can’t just make answers appear from thin air, I’m going to have to examine him,” Xavier snipped.
“Fine, call when the two of you find something,” Gabriel left. John practically ran over him as they both exited.
“Cannibal,” Xavier said to me.
“Eating is the only reason I can come up with for taking over sixty bites out of a single person.”
“Me too. On the flip side, he didn’t die of the bites. His throat was crushed.”
“Is that supposed to make it better or worse?”
“Better,” Xavier put on the goggles. “I can tell you now that some of these were post-mortem, but others, well, this kid was alive for them.”
“Of the six cannibal cases we’ve dealt with, none have eaten people raw. They’ve all cooked them, like food.”
“Yeah,” Xavier poked a rod into one of the larger holes. “So, I’m looking at these other marks and they are definitely not human. Who eats raw meat with an animal?”
“Maybe the human fed the leftovers to the animal.”
“I don’t think so,” Xavier looked at me. “This one, he was still alive when the creature bit him. Since some of the human bites took place after he died and some of the animal bites happened while he was alive...”
“They fed together,” I cringed as I finished Xavier’s sentence.
“Do you want to tell John over dinner or do you want me to do it?” Xavier gave a snort of laughter. Yes, we were still in the hazing phase with Poor John.
Seventeen
“Because raw meat is so incredibly hard to chew, humans tend to cook it first,” Xavier said, cutting into a steak that bled profusely. “Seasoning, tenderizing, and cooking, all make meat more palatable. Otherwise, the muscles in our jaws would be very powerful, like a tiger or crocodile. However, they aren’t, so we’ve had to invent ways to eat meat.”
It had been John’s suggestion to go for steak, so I had obliged and taken him to George’s Pizza and Steakhouse. Columbia, like most cities, had a no smoking policy in all public buildings, including bars and restaurants. However, George’s was just outside city limits and much to everyone’s chagrin, you could smoke before, during and after your meal. But they had good pizza and good steaks.
If I had been slightly less of a jerk, I would have taken them to G&D Pizza and Steakhouse. It was all owned by the same family, but you couldn’t smoke in G&D. Of course, G&D would have been busier, as it was, there were only a handful of people, most of them men, hanging around the restaurant.
I was eating a pizza. Gabriel and John had ordered steak. John had since pushed his well-done hunk of sirloin away and was looking a little green. Gabriel kept at his, not letting Xavier’s conversation bother him. Although, he had ordered his steak medium well, which was unusual for Gabriel.
“Also, given the number of bites,” I continued. “The person has to be feeding. We counted ninety-two on one victim, not counting the predator bites. That is not a person with a fetish, that is a person enjoying a single meal. On average, a person takes one hundred bites a day. If you only eat one meal a day, then it would make sense that the person gorged at the single feeding.”
“And it isn’t like the person woke up one morning and decided that eating raw human flesh was a good idea,” Xavier interrupted. “They’ve been at it for a long time. They must have massive jaw muscles. Humans have to develop those muscles to get to the point where taking that many bites of raw meat is even possible. Not to mention chewing the stuff.”
“Is this a theory you’re working with?” Gabriel asked.
“Everything’s a theory until it isn’t,” I answered. “Of course, there are some problems with the theory. For example, we think the human and predator are feeding at the same time and I can’t imagine why. Most large predators are not keen on sharing food, unless they’re pack animals, but cats tend not to be pack animals and the skull crushing kind of leads away from dogs. A bear or crocodile might do it, but a crocodile wouldn’t leave such neat bite marks. A domesticated bear might share, but honestly, I can’t think of a single predator that I would want to share a meal with, especially not that close. That’s like eating off the same plate.”
“Another problem is the length of time it would take to build up jaws strong enough to take chunks of human flesh out, chew it, swallow it, and go back for more,” Xavier jumped back into the conversation. “We agree that this would take conditioning. This person didn’t start out eating people, they started out eating other things and moved up to people.”
“How does this jive with the case from twenty-five years ago?” Gabriel asked.
“I’m not sure, according to the notes I’ve read, there were no human bite marks on the single body they found. Of course, if the river was the dump zone then too, there’s no telling. The river hides most
sins, at least for a while.” I thought back to a rash of drownings that had happened in the Missouri River during the same time. Six people in three months, it didn’t seem like a lot, but it had been to me. All the victims had been young, like I had been, and it seemed disproportionately high compared to the number of swimmers. However, the current was strong and swift, the bottom littered with debris, both natural and man-made, in hindsight, it seemed easier to go missing than survive a swim in the muddy Missouri.
“We have experts coming in tomorrow to give us more information about the human and animal bite marks,” Xavier finished the conversation as he polished off the steak.
“Anything you’d like to add?” Gabriel looked at me.
“The pizza’s good,” I answered.
“I should have ordered a salad.” John groaned.
“You get used to it, eventually.” I smiled at him.
After dinner, we returned to the hotel. As I have said many times, I would rather be busting down doors and breaking skulls than investigating. Investigating required patience and finesse, I had neither. We’d made preliminary identifications on two of the victims dragged from the bottom of the river. However, we weren’t handling the notifications, we weren’t exactly “family friendly.” Families thought we were cold, callous, and occasionally, crass. Once in a while, Gabriel would have the hellish task of dealing with families, but for the rest of us, families were off-limits. I was fine with this. I didn’t understand my own family, understanding other families was impossible. I tended to find the faults and ugliness just beneath the surface of grief and poke at it until it reared its mean head. I’d done that in Alaska and found a serial killer, but I’d done it in Mobile, Alabama and nearly gotten shot by a woman who had been aiming at her husband after he had molested her daughter. A daughter that had run away because of the abuse and that I had taken all of about three minutes to figure out once inside the family. Monsters came in all shapes and sizes, I brought out the worst in them and they couldn’t hide behind their masks for very long when I was in a room.