by Hadena James
Seventeen
“Aislinn Cain, US Marshal, sociopath, serial killer expert, and philanthropist,” Xavier said as Young and I entered the police station. Word of my work for Mr. Barnes had obviously gotten back to the police station.
“It was a simple matter of putting a horse in a pasture to decompose and be scavenged,” I told him.
“Oh no, it was not. It was a matter of driving a tractor older than I am to move said horse to pasture,” Xavier teased.
“Surely my Missouri roots did not escape your notice. I’ve driven tractors in the past. I’ve driven that exact model of tractor as a matter of fact.”
“I just can’t picture you on a tractor,” Xavier squinted at me. “I mean, you just don’t seem the farming type.”
“Keep laughing it up, see if I don’t Taser you,” I said.
“You did a good deed, don’t feel embarrassed about it,” Xavier said.
“Name one time when I have been embarrassed.”
“Good point. Aside from dead horses, did you find anything useful?” Xavier asked.
“If I had, I would have called you. Anyone else have any luck?”
“No,” Lucas shook his head.
“How much of this blasted county have we searched?” I asked.
“Not even a quarter of it.” Gabriel informed me as he put fresh maps on the table. “Fiona found matches for the girls you found yesterday. They all disappeared from San Antonio and one was only thirteen.”
There was a lot of disparity between our victims. That really bothered me. It didn’t matter that serial killers rarely followed their patterns all the time, but it was that this pattern was a like for teen girls and an understanding of chemistry. Chemistry was incredibly useful to killers. A serial killer with an understanding of chemistry could dispose of bodies, make bombs, and more effectively remove evidence.
“A park ranger just found a body, they want you,” a cop stuck her head in the door. She immediately exited.
We followed in our standard issue black SUV with tinted windows. Young was ahead of us. Nails could be seen through the tinted back window. Maybe co-owning a dog would turn out to be a good thing. I texted my mother.
The declaration that a park ranger had found a body was a bit of a stretch. The park ranger had sort of found a body. The usual peppermint balm wasn’t needed, the smell in the air was not of decomposition. It was hard to describe. It was acrid and stung the eyes, making them water. It made the nose burn and no amount of balm was going to help.
There was a liquid-like substance in a huge puddle on the dark, hardwood floor. Burn marks ran away from the puddle in long trails. The floor near the puddle was becoming spongy and my feet sank a little as I stepped on what used to be solid wood.
One side of the body was more recognizable than the other with only a few holes and burns to the flesh. A single brown eye stared blindly at the ceiling. The other was part of the liquid substance on the floor. I kept far enough back to keep it from getting on my shoes. I wasn’t sure it would eat the soles, but it might.
“I won’t know for sure until I get a facial enhancement, but I’m fairly certain we just found Shawn Steiger,” Xavier announced.
“What does that to a person?” A uniformed officer asked. He was a bit green in the face.
“Sulfuric Acid,” Xavier and I said in unison.
“Isn’t that a regulated substance?” The lead detective asked.
“Yes,” I answered, “all acids are regulated. However, that’s kind of misleading. When was the last time you had to sign to buy a gallon of good drain cleaner?”
“Never,” the detective answered.
“And yet, the primary ingredient in really good drain cleaners is sulfuric acid. Not Drano or Liquid Plumber, those both use lye, because lye is great at eating through fats. They are not as effective if the clog is made of materials other than fats, like toilet paper. Sulfuric acid works by breaking down most biological materials, including cellulose, the main component in toilet paper and wood,” I looked at the floor. “It also becomes more corrosive when mixed with water. A couple gallons of that, the tissues and hair are dissolved very quickly. It will eventually eat through the calcium in the bones as well, but that takes longer. Our killer was very sloppy with the drain cleaner, which is why half the face is still intact along with the limbs.”
“In other words, next time you flush your daughter’s pet goldfish down the drain, pour in a little drain cleaner made from sulfuric acid afterwards to keep the bones from mixing with toilet paper and creating a clog,” Xavier explained.
“Does that happen?” Young asked.
“More than you think,” Xavier answered. He looked at the floor. “I’m going to need the floor taken up for processing. We’ll need a HAZMAT team to extract the body as well as the floor.”
“It’s still eating the remains?” The detective asked.
“Yep,” Xavier said, “the floor is spongy, so it is still destroying the cellulose inside of the wood. There has really been nothing to neutralize it and I don’t feel like we should contaminate everything by dumping several hundred boxes of baking soda on it.”
“Hey,” I pointed to the throat of our victim. All the tissue had been dissolved and only the bones were visible. The sulfuric acid was already working on the bones, as they were already becoming discolored. There were a few nicks on the hyoid bone as well as the spine behind it.
“I’m going to need at least one box of baking soda,” Xavier said. In adults, the hyoid bone was one of the strongest bones in the body. In children and teens, it had yet to completely ossify. It was soft enough that the sulfuric acid wouldn’t have the same difficulty dissolving it as other bones in the body. The nicks were unlikely to be from the acid, but it was evidence that we could lose at almost any time due to the lack of ossification.
Someone came up to Xavier with a box of Arm & Hammer. I raised an eyebrow, trying to figure out who carried baking soda in their car. Xavier slipped on gloves, removed the hyoid, and dropped it into the box. With his fingers holding the top flaps in place, he gave it a few good shakes, embedding the bone in the baking soda.
Looking at the hyoid bone reminded me of the necklace. We had names; we could identify the owner or discover if it belonged to the killer. There seemed nothing of real value in the abandoned station except Shawn Steiger.
I stood up and walked the open area. The wood was firm. The windows were gone from one wall. A rack was built into the wall. Leaves littered part of the floor, leftover from sometime. Inexplicably, there were bits of glass mixed in with the leaves. It almost looked like the leaves and glass had come in at the same time. The rest of the room didn’t seem touched by weathering.
A small armadillo ran from behind the counter towards a back room. It was small enough that it still belonged to a mother. My guess was that they both lived inside the building. My feet followed it, as if I could interrogate the armadillo and find out information about our killer.
The back room was in disarray. Papers had been left in a closet, animals had scattered them about the space. Something hissed at me. A large, black cat had the small armadillo cornered and didn’t want me muscling in on its meal.
Armadillos were carriers of leprosy and a few other diseases. Not that this was the armadillos fault. Nature needed animals to carry diseases and pass along to others, to ensure that balance and order was kept.
The cat hissed at me again. If the cat had been in here long enough, it could have killed the armadillo’s mother. The thing would die regardless of whether I interfered or not. The cat didn’t have a collar, but it was still at a healthy weight. I decided not to leave the armadillo at the mercy of the predator. I pushed the cat away with my foot and picked up the armadillo.
The shell was still soft. The claws weren’t very long. It made a strange screeching noise that made me reconsider my decision to save it. Once I had hold of the armadillo, I snatched the cat by the back of the neck, yanking its feet from the
ground. The cat made even worse noises, yowling and hissing as it attempted to kick its feet and gain control of its dangling body.
Lucas rushed into the room. He stood in the doorway and watched me for a moment, saying nothing. I’m not sure there was anything to say. There wasn’t any blood visible in the room.
“Material witnesses,” I told Lucas as I handed him the yowling predator. I kicked at some of the papers, still looking for blood. If the cat had eaten the armadillo’s family, there would be remains somewhere. Armadillos never strayed far.
“You realize they build burrows, right?” Lucas asked.
“Yes, and carry leprosy. Would you prefer to hold him?”
“Leprosy aside, that animal is too young to live without a family.”
“Well, I don’t know any animal rescue places in Texas and the ones in Kansas City aren’t going to come here for an armadillo. Having said that, the cat was going to eat it and I wasn’t sure that was exactly the right thing either. He’s fat and healthy.”
“One less armadillo isn’t going to put a strain on the ecology of the region.”
“Perhaps not, but I still wasn’t going to let the cat eat it.” There were no signs of armadillo inhabitation within the building. There was definitely evidence that the cat had been living there for a while.
“So, you’re almost normal again.”
“In this case, the cat is no different than a serial killer. It can go to a home, it doesn’t have to eat the armadillo.”
“Black cats are the hardest cats for a shelter to adopt out. Too many superstitions surrounding them.”
“Bleach spots into his fur. They do it with dogs,” I said.
Lucas gave a quick laugh, shook his head and walked out. I frowned. What the hell was I going to do with an armadillo?
Eighteen
Shawn Steiger’s last day on earth had not been a very good one. His stomach contents had included chicken contaminated with salmonella. He’d knocked his leg on something, probably a coffee table, which had left a nasty black bruise on his shin. His toe was broken around the same time and was roughly the same shade of black as the bruise. If he hadn’t been murdered, he would have had several weeks of misery ahead of him.
Xavier had found a large quantity of alcohol in his system. Not falling down drunk, but he wouldn’t have been thinking clearly. I remembered what that idiot Simon had said; he’d gotten a booty call. I was fairly certain this meant he’d gotten called by someone who wanted to have sex, but I hadn’t Googled it yet for final confirmation.
The same could have happened to Shawn. Having such a crappy day, if someone had offered him sex, he probably would have been overjoyed. However, he wouldn’t have known about the salmonella poisoning yet. A broken toe and banged up shin was still grounds for a bad day. Most likely, he willingly left the party with his killer or he left to meet her.
I was under no illusions about the sexual activities of teenagers. It always surprised me how many people really believed that teen sex had only started in the last few decades. Teens have been jumping in and out of bed with each other since the beginning of time. The biggest change was our perception of it. Aside from the upper class, teens were usually married by age sixteen. The upper class kept their girls from marriage a little longer, but they were engaged by seventeen or in some cases, a year or two earlier. It was just the marriage that was delayed. Hell, in some cultures, as soon as a girl started menstruation, they were of marriageable age.
Our modern day morality had swept this under the rug, proclaiming teens should be abstinent until marriage and using history as its example, while quietly ignoring the fact that the majority of teens were indeed married. I was sure that Cassie was sexually active. I hoped that she used condoms and did not send out booty calls.
Then again, the day had been full of people not having good days. One of our three female victims had also been having a very bad day before being murdered. According to the parents of Esperanza Cortez Pena, she’d gone to a store to buy a computer and other items, as their house had been burgled the day of her death. At some point, heading to the store, her car had broken down. It was at this time that she had met her killer. It had also been Esperanza’s seventeenth birthday.
Tina Little was our thirteen year old. She was active in soccer and her church. She was always doing something to help with local charities. Her grades were average. Her parents were average. Her life was average. Stranger danger aside, Tina was not high risk for anything except a medal for community service.
Liberty Kent, the third victim, had been eighteen. She had just graduated high school the year before and was working two jobs. Her goal was to save enough money to get an apartment the following year and start attending a community college. Like Tina and Esperanza, she was not high risk.
Greg Johnson had been six feet six inches tall the day he went missing from San Marcos. He was a basketball player and by all accounts, a steroid user. He was our biggest outlier. His size and physical abilities might explain why his killer had sliced through his Achilles’ tendon.
Angela Schmidt had been twenty and a college student at the University of Texas. Her roommate claimed she suffered a touch of obsessive-compulsive disorder. She wrote all her papers out longhand then typed them, twice. The other big issue, according to her roommate, was being the first person to class. She always left early, but if she were the first one there, she would stand outside in the hall until someone else had taken a seat. She also couldn’t be later than tenth to sit down or she would skip class. On her last day, she had gone missing after her last class of the day. She’d made plans to meet her roommate and two other girls at a restaurant near campus, but she had never shown up.
Nathan Jones had definitely been high risk. Hopefully, life for his little sister would be better now that I had kicked their father’s ass. It would be tragic for their mother to lose both children.
Gail Vincent had also been from Austin, but she had been a junior high student. At the tender age of fourteen, she was in foster care. Her parents had abused and neglected her. They’d even pimped her out to pedophiles. Since she entered the system a year earlier, she’d run away twice. Her maternal grandparents lived in New York. She’d never met them, but her only prized possession had been a postcard from them dated before she was born. It had been her goal to find them. Calling her high risk was like saying that anteaters had claws.
Shawn Steiger had not been high risk. Exactly the opposite, in fact. He had been a good student, a member of the student council, and a senior who had been accepted to Yale. He’d lived in the exact same house all of his life. His parents were devastated by his death.
Our final victim was Bonnie Turner. She was sixteen, no record, good grades, but not really a joiner, she didn’t belong to any clubs or play any sports. She was shy, quiet, and taking meds for anxiety. Her father had died in a freak accident when she was nine and she’d had some problems with agoraphobia ever since. He had been beheaded while trimming a tree. The rung of the ladder he was standing on broke and he’d fallen on the running chainsaw, cutting his own head off. Bonnie and her older brother, Cameron, had been holding the ladder.
The missing persons’ summary sheet for each of the victims did reveal a tiny spark of information. None of them was short. Not just not short for their age, but average by adult standards. Even the two young victims were at least five feet, four inches tall.
The frown appeared on my face without my approval. I could feel the corners of my mouth turning down, wrinkles were forming on my forehead, and my eyes were narrowing. I sighed, trying to get rid of the frown, but that just made me frown more.
“Our killer is diminutive,” I announced. Everyone turned to look at me. The conference room had been quiet right up until I opened my mouth. “Look at the descriptions of our victims. They were tall and even if they weren’t playing sports, they weren’t thin or incredibly overweight, but they were within the average weight for their height. How does a girl wi
th OCD disappear? Or a girl who battles agoraphobia? They must have felt completely secure with their killer. The only thing that explains it is age and stature. None of them perceived her as a threat. So, either our killer knows the Vulcan Death Grip or she poses as someone very non-threatening. Most people equate physical stature with physical capabilities. Bonnie Turner wouldn’t have trusted a woman who was taller than she was, she was being treated for anxiety. Anxiety disorder means everything is a potential hazard. Her killer was not only non-threatening, but somehow reassuring.” That little voice in my head whispered to me. I ignored it.
“Like little person diminutive?” Gabriel asked.
“No, that’s too short. I’m thinking someone who is below average height and possibly, weight,” I said. “Think about it. Why cut the Achilles’ heel? Why was the hyoid bone struck by the blade, but the ribs haven’t been? She’s short. Shawn was probably bending into her when she stabbed him in the throat. Greg Johnson had a nick on his rib from the blade, but he was six feet six inches tall. That’s tall, even by modern standards.”
“Ok, a short serial killing med student or anatomist. That shouldn’t be hard to find,” Lead Detective Mark Skartal said. I didn’t know where Hight had gone, but I missed him at the moment. Skartal was shaping up to be a jerk.
“Your sarcasm is noted,” I snipped at him. I considered Tasering him, but in a police station in Texas, this seemed like a really bad idea. I didn’t think they would be as nice as the sheriff’s department in Anchorage, Alaska. “Also, that hematite necklace was not identified as belonging to any of our victims. I do not believe it was just lying around in the shed while the bodies of three young women decomposed into puddles. Somehow, it got tangled up and dropped by the killer. Hematite is not expensive, but I believe the gold wire is. It is high quality jewelry wrapping wire. I’m sure the lab report will tell us that it is eighteen karat. I’m thinking a local artisan made it, unless it was purchased off a small artisanal website or Etsy, which would be awful, because it’s unlikely to be traceable.”