by Hadena James
I pulled on gloves. As soon as it was clean, I picked it up. It was definitely a necklace, gold box chain with a hematite pendant wrapped in gold wire. The wrapping was well done and the stone had a high polish on it. Craftsmanship went into the creation, there was no doubt about that. The chain was a mass produced chain, but the pendant wasn’t. Someone had taken the time to hand wrap the wire. The marks of the pliers were visible if one looked close enough.
“Follow the pendant,” I put the necklace aside. “Have you found anything else?”
“Does that look like a girl’s necklace?” Xavier asked.
“It could be. Cassie buys stuff like this at craft fairs and festivals. She even takes the time to buy rough gems, clean them up, run them through a tumbler, and then polish them. She doesn’t just buy it, she makes it.”
“It’s still weird that your niece enjoys doing that.”
“My niece has her own Etsy store and makes money off it. Enough to pay taxes. She wants to design jewelry for a living. She’s crafty like that.” I tried to remember exactly what my mother had said a few days before I had left about it. Something Cassie had designed had recently sold for a lot of money because it was a rare mineral, but I didn’t remember what, exactly. For some reason, it seemed important. My memory was amazing, except when it came to matters that involved my own family. Most of what they said went in one ear and out the other. I didn’t mean for it to, it just happened.
“Fine, so this could be one of the girls’,” Xavier said.
“Yep,” I answered. “What do we know about them?”
“Cause of death is probably a single stab wound to the back that punctured the heart. However, I can only confirm that on one of them. They are all female. The youngest is probably twelve or thirteen. The oldest is seventeen to twenty, and she’s been dead the longest. The first body was probably put in during the winter. The newest one was less than a month ago. The shed was sealed well, but very humid and warm. Given that we are in Texas, I’m not surprised about the heat; however, it hasn’t been that warm for that long. The humidity raises some more questions, as it isn’t that humid either. Yes, we’ve had a lot of rain, but not enough to account for this.” He pointed to the bags.
“So, our bodies were melted on purpose?” I asked.
“That’s what I think. I believe that before our killer used the shed, they fortified it, to some degree. There was no rodent activity, no raccoons or opossums sneaking in, just the insects. Once the third body was added, they somehow managed to pump up the heat and humidity in the room and start this process.”
“A warm air vaporizer?”
“That would work. Only there wasn’t any power.”
“Lye, a warm air vaporizer, it’s kind of strange, when you think about it. These are things they would do on a body farm, not in the middle of Texas. In the middle of Texas, a killer might use lye, but not a vaporizer.”
“Someone watching how people decompose?”
“That would explain the lack of rage associated with the deaths. They came back to the place at least a couple of times.”
“You’re still thinking college student.”
“It still makes the most sense.” I shrugged. “It gives her access to her victims and it would instantly garner their trust. I’m sure there are smaller colleges than the University of Texas in Austin and San Antonio. Maybe they commute to school.”
“We need some more identities,” Xavier said, pulling off his gloves. Sweat covered his palms. I wrinkled my nose and did the same. “I’ve gone through the bags and there isn’t much left of the bodies. It’s up to Fiona at this point.” He took digital pictures of the skulls and scraps of skin still clinging to them. Fiona had just gotten new software from MIT that was supposed to do digital facial reconstructions and attempt to match them to the missing persons’ database. This was the first time it was being used. He hit the send button, and then shut down the digital camera with Wi-Fi capabilities. We had some of the best toys.
Having a serial killer plan ahead was one thing. Having a serial killer plan ahead so far that they were returning to the bodies months after their deaths to help with decomposition was completely different. Given that human goo almost never really dries and there was a lot of it found, it made me wonder just how many times the killer had returned. It also made me wonder how they managed to do it without smelling as if they were surrounded by decomposing corpses. Xavier and I leaving the morgue was proof that the smell clung to a person. People would grimace as we walked by; my hair would require multiple washes. Even then, the smell might hang around for a day or two.
The smell wasn’t curable by Oust or air fresheners hanging from rearview mirrors. Febreze didn’t take it out of clothes and hair, it didn’t even cover up the smell. It just mixed with it, creating an even more oppressive smell.
There was another problem. We now had eight bodies. All of them young. None of them had been dead for more than two years, and none of them showed the uncertainties of a first time kill. Our killer might be local, but not all the bodies could be. Someone would have noticed. That was a lot for a town this size and high risk or not, they couldn’t all have been declared runaways with no follow up. The very idea wasn’t just illogical, it was ridiculous.
Our killer was importing victims. That was a nightmare. Catching a serial killer was sort of like playing roulette. You put your chips down and hoped luck was on your side. Most of the time, it is because serial killers are arrogant narcissists that like to show off. They had some patterns, some signatures, but it really was their attitude that they’d never be caught that got them caught.
Not this killer. She was all over the map. She was killing guys and girls. She was luring young teens as well as older teens to their deaths. She was experimenting with different ways to dispose of the bodies. The only thing that stayed the same was the cause of death and even that was questionable.
Perhaps there wasn’t a single serial killing female at work in San Marcos. Perhaps there was a team or a trio. Perhaps, like Detroit, there was more than one and they were just crossing lines because the town wasn’t really big enough for two serial killers.
It seemed unlikely that the three dead girls in the shed today were from a different killer, since at least one had in fact been stabbed through the heart. Maybe one killer knew about the other and was dumping bodies in the same location. It was highly coincidental, but not unheard of. It had happened multiple times in California.
The notorious Interstate 5 that ran the length of the state of California was a serial killer’s paradise. Towns are sparse, the road has several spots that are scenic outlooks, and there are some cell phone coverage issues. Starting in the 1970s, serial killers had been frequenting the interstate to both collect and dispose of victims. There were several instances of more than one serial killer working the interstate at one time. Since serial killers did in fact vary their victim preferences, methods of killing, and disposal methods from time to time, there were still victims that were only tentatively identified as belonging to a particular killer.
San Marcos was small, but it was a satellite for two larger cities with a major interstate running through it. However unlikely, it was possible that there was more than one killer working the stretch of road between San Antonio and Austin. With San Marcos being almost the center between the two places, it would be a good place for two serials to work and overlap without much suspicion, as long as they were importing most of their victims.
Austin had a population of nearly a million people. San Antonio was only slightly larger at one and a half million people. Our victim pool wasn’t the measly fifty thousand that lived in San Marcos, it was the nearly two and a half million people that inhabited the area. More if we included other satellite towns and rural communities.
It also greatly increased our suspect pool. There wouldn’t be a statistic for how many people had once lived in San Marcos and now lived in one of the other two cities, but it would be high. Ki
ds would go to college in the larger places. They’d find jobs there after high school. Even if we limited the search to females between the ages of fifteen and thirty that had lived in San Marcos for at least one year, our suspect pool could easily be two or three hundred thousand people.
Another factor entered my mind. It was possible that the population of San Marcos increased on weekends. It was a small town with lots of seclusion, the perfect place for older teens to hook up with younger teens for a weekend of underage drinking. Relatives would travel back and forth to see each other. Just because someone lived in Austin or San Antonio wouldn’t mean they would be unfamiliar with the area around San Marcos. Cousins liked to hang out together if they were roughly the same age. It was just a fact of life.
I sighed.
“What?” Xavier asked as we walked the half block from the makeshift coroner’s office to the police station.
“I keep thinking of San Marcos as a small town and it isn’t. It’s a satellite town. The two are very different. Our suspect pool just became enormous.”
“Do you ever have good news?”
“I co-own a puppy.”
Thirteen
Upon arriving at the police station, Xavier and I were met with people holding their nose. We both ignored them. The walk had depressed him. If I had been capable of such an emotion, it probably would have depressed me too. Since I wasn’t, I just felt tired. I wanted a hot shower with lots of soap. Tons of soap. I might have to go buy soap because I wasn’t sure our hotel would be able to provide me with enough soap and shampoo to wash away the psychological aspects of human goo.
After twenty minutes of explaining why our victims couldn’t all be from San Marcos and another twenty minutes explaining the concept of a satellite town and the migrant population, I flopped into a chair. Now, my entire team looked depressed, except Fiona, who looked irritated. She’d identified a few of the victims. It supported my theory.
One was a local high school boy, but the others were from either San Antonio or Austin. The three new girls had yet to finish going through the software reconstruction. It would be tomorrow before we could start comparing their faces and body measurements to missing persons’ reports. We had great toys, but they weren’t always the fastest.
“Wow, what is that smell?” Ranger Young and Nails entered the room. Nails gave a small whine. Xavier and I held up our hands. We’d spent several hours sifting through decomposing humans. We could no longer smell it. “I was going to ask about dinner, but I think I lost my appetite.”
“I want a shower,” I told him. “A long one with enough soap to wash a herd of elephants. I want my clothes burned, that smell will never come out, and I want dinner.” My stomach growled in agreement.
“Me too,” Xavier nodded.
“Why don’t you two go back to the hotel, get cleaned up, and rejoin us here,” Gabriel said. “Well, maybe not in this particular room, we might need a new conference room while they sterilize this one.”
“There isn’t enough air fresheners in Texas to make this room smell better,” Lucas informed us. “Normally, you guys smell bad after an autopsy, but this takes the cake.”
“That reminds me, we think that our killer went back to our three young ladies in the shed to help speed up decomposition. We also think she sealed the room,” Xavier said.
“You think?” Gabriel looked puzzled. It was rare for Xavier and me both to guess. Usually, the statement was “we know.”
“Think,” Xavier agreed. “There wasn’t any evidence of chemical accelerant like with the well, but you don’t always need chemicals. Bodies in hot, moist environments decompose faster than in dry or cool environments. Since it’s May in Texas and not August in Texas, it seems unlikely that the decomp was completely natural, especially given the melting effect that we witnessed with the fatty tissues. The most likely culprit is a warm steam humidifier. However, that seems impractical, but we haven’t thought of anything else that would do it.”
“Which is why we smell so bad,” I added for good measure.
“Aislinn’s correct. Normal decomp is unpleasant, but when the fatty tissues melt, they release different chemicals than when they decay. The lack of scavenger activity coupled with the fatty tissue melting created bacteria-laden pools of brownish-black goo that was once a human being. That goo smells a lot worse than just a rotting corpse. Also, it has to be handled differently than solid matter, so we were essentially stirring it up, like stew boiling on the stove that gets the lid taken off and then stirred. It releases more odors,” Xavier added.
“I think I’m going to be sick,” Young sat down.
“It could be worse,” I told him. “When encountering cannibals, most of the time, they are cooking. Some twisted cosmic joke or something. Anyway, a clean cannibal keeps his lair from smelling like decay, so instead, you smell things like roast and steak. The olfactory system triggers the hunger centers in the brain. You’ll begin salivating and your stomach will rumble. Your brain knows you are smelling humans cooking, but your body just thinks of food. This system might not be triggered in hard-core vegetarians and vegans. I’ve never had one around to ask.”
“What the, good Lord, I just, wow.” Young said, stringing the unfinished thoughts into a single sentence.
“Yep, it’s pretty gruesome on this side of the fence,” Lucas told him. “Makes you wish you had gone into basket weaving or joined a punk band instead of becoming a law enforcement official.”
“You guys do this every day?” Young said.
“Well, not every day. We get days off. For every three days spent on a case, we have to take one day off before we can move to another. So, if this case takes six days to wrap up, we’ll have two days of zero serial killers before we return to duty. At least, most of us will. Aislinn will sit around reading true crime books while violent action movies play in the background,” Gabriel said. “We’ve been at this for roughly thirty hours, we’ve earned one day off.”
“Hey, hey,” I interrupted. “It’s not just violent action movies. I also enjoy British cop dramas and British comedies. I watch those while reading too.”
“Do you have ADHD or something?” Young asked.
“No, her brain just doesn’t work like ours,” Fiona piped up. She was packing her equipment. “Aislinn’s brain works at warp speed. She can’t do just one thing at a time. It doesn’t require enough brainpower, so she has to multitask. While she was helping Xavier in the morgue, I imagine she was also doing Sudoku problems and watching TV on her tablet.”
“Indiana Jones on her phone,” Xavier said. “No puzzles, she was busy mentally cataloging the amount of goo found to see if it was too much for three small females.” I frowned at him. I had at one point been calculating that. Then he’d found the necklace and my brain started compiling facts about gold, necklaces, and hematite.
Xavier and I did what we were told. In the privacy of my own room, I put my clothing in a trash bag, tied it up, and set it outside the door of my hotel room. I noticed there was already a bag outside of Xavier’s. Neither of us had been kidding about getting rid of the clothes. It was a pity really. It was one of my favorite T-Shirts that had the Black Knight from Monty Python and The Holy Grail.
Someone had been nice enough to give Xavier and me each several bottles of complimentary shampoo and multiple bars of soap when we stopped at the front desk.
Showers are interesting things for me. My brain never shuts off, literally. It is part of the reason I have trouble sleeping. At twenty-eight, I had been successfully bathing myself for more than two decades. It was automatic, mechanical, and required zero thought. Once in a great while, if I was exhausted or injured, I could shower and only do minimal thinking, but those times were rare. In a normal state, my mind kicked into overdrive the moment the water hit my skin, because my body and hair would get washed with no help from my brain.
Today was a normal day. As my hands emptied the second bottle of shampoo and began lathering up my ha
ir again, my brain was in full swing.
Over a million people a year went missing. The most at risk age group was fourteen to eighteen. Even in the modern day, with cell phones carrying GPS and the world revolving around debit cards, a person could still vanish without a trace. Some were no doubt dead, and their body just hadn’t been found or identified yet, but not everyone who went missing could be dead. It was impossible to believe that the ten thousand serial killers at work in the US were each killing one hundred victims a year that we weren’t finding, on top of the ones we were finding.
Of course, not everyone that was murdered was killed by a serial killer, but that still put the number of victims per killer every year at a staggering ratio.
One million plus people every year in a country that only held about three hundred million people was mind boggling. On top of that, we had roughly two hundred thousand a year murdered. Another two and a half million died of natural causes.
The only reason our population wasn’t dropping was because people were breeding like rabbits. In the previous year, there had been just over four million babies born.
The Serial Crimes Tracking Unit arrested thirty-one serial killers and mass murderers per year, on average. The Violent Crimes Apprehension Unit did the same. This year, we would catch more than our average, because of our adventures in Detroit. However, it didn’t seem like either of us was making much of a difference. For every serial killer we took out of the general population, there was one preparing to take the empty space.
Suddenly, I wondered if my work was worth it. The answer was yes, simply because if we weren’t catching sixty or so serial killers a year, we’d be ears deep in them. No other law enforcement group was catching as many killers as we were. The number wasn’t increasing, because we were catching them.
It wasn’t causing a decrease in the number of people that went missing every year. There were other factors at work with the missing. Factors that I couldn’t fathom. It was impossible for me to imagine someone just walking away and disappearing. Even though that was exactly what my grandfather had done.