by Dan Wells
“Hey Lauren,” I said.
“Is that the paperwork?” Mom asked, looking over my shoulder at her.
“I’m almost done,” said Lauren, and Mom went into the back.
“Is it here already?” I asked.
“They just dropped him off,” she said, scanning the sheaf of papers one last time. “Margaret has him in the back.”
I turned to go.
“You surviving?” she asked. I was anxious to see the body, but turned back to her.
“Well enough. You?”
“I’m not the one who lives with Mom,” she said. We stood in silence a moment longer. “You heard from Dad?”
“Not since May,” I said. “You?”
“Not since Christmas.” Silence. “The first two years he sent me valentines in February.”
“He knew where you were?”
“I asked him for money sometimes.” She put down her pen and stood up. Her skirt matched her jacket, shiny black vinyl. Mom would hate it, which was probably why Lauren bought it. She gathered the papers into a uniform stack and we walked into the back room.
Mom and Margaret were already there, chatting idly with Ron, the coroner. A pale-blue body bag filled the embalming table, and it was all I could do not to run over and zip it open. Lauren handed the papers to Mom, who glanced at them briefly before signing a few sheets and handing the whole stack to Ron.
“Thanks, Ron. Have a good night.”
“I’m sorry to drop this on you this time of night,” he said, talking to Mom but looking at Lauren. He was tall, with slicked-back black hair.
“It’s no problem,” said Mom. Ron took the papers and left out the back.
“That’s all you need me for,” said Lauren, smiling at Margaret and me and nodding politely to Mom. “Have fun.” She walked back to the front office, and a moment later I heard the front door swing shut and lock.
The suspense was killing me, but I didn’t dare say anything. Mom was barely tolerating my presence here as it was, and to appear overeager now would probably get me kicked out.
Mom looked at Margaret. Given time to prepare themselves, they looked fairly different from each other, but on the spur of the moment like this—in drab housework clothes with their makeup left undone—you could barely tell them apart. “Let’s do it.”
Margaret switched on the ventilator. “I hope this fan doesn’t give out on us tonight.”
We put on our aprons and scrubbed up, and Mom unzipped the bag. Whereas Mrs. Anderson had barely been handled, Jeb Jolley had been scrubbed and washed and picked over so many times by Ron and by the state forensic agents that he smelled almost entirely of disinfectant. The stench of rot seeped out more slowly as we rolled the body out of the bag and arranged it on the table. He had an enormous “Y” incision cutting from shoulder to shoulder and down the center of his chest; in most autopsies this line would continue down to the groin, but here it degenerated just below the ribs into a jagged web of rips and tears over most of his midsection. The edges were puckered and partially stitched, though many sections of skin were missing. The corners of a plastic bag peeked out through the holes in his abdomen.
I immediately thought about Jack the Ripper, one of the earliest recorded serial killers. He tore his victims apart so viciously that most of them were barely recognizable.
Had Jeb Jolley been attacked by a serial killer? It was certainly possible, but which kind? The FBI split serial killers into two categories: organized and disorganized. An organized killer was like Ted Bundy—suave, charming, and intelligent, who planned his crimes and covered them up as well as he could afterward. A disorganized killer was like the Son of Sam, who struggled to control his inner demons and then killed suddenly and brutally each time those demons broke free. He called himself Mr. Monster. Which kind had killed Jeb, the sophisticate or the monster?
I sighed and forced myself to discard the thought. This wasn’t the first time I’d been eager to find a serial killer in my home town. I needed to get my mind back onto the body itself, and appreciate it for what it was rather than what I wanted it to be.
Margaret opened the body’s abdomen, revealing a large plastic bag containing most of its internal organs. These were normally removed during the course of an autopsy anyway, though of course in Jeb’s case they were removed at or slightly before the time of death. Even if they’d been removed, though, we still had to embalm them—we couldn’t just throw part of your loved one away because we didn’t want to deal with it, and we weren’t equipped with a crematorium. Margaret set the bag on a cart and wheeled it over to the wall to work on the organs; they would be full of bile and other junk, stuff that the embalming fluid couldn’t deal with, so it all had to be sucked out. In a normal embalming this is done after the formaldehyde gets pumped in, but the nice thing about an autopsy body was that you could do the embalming and the organ work at the same time. Mom and Margaret had been doing this together for so many years that they moved smoothly, without need to talk.
“You help me, John,” said Mom, reaching for the disinfectant—she was too much of a perfectionist not to wash a body before she embalmed it, even one as clean as this. The body cavity was wide and empty, though the heart and lungs were mostly intact, and Jeb’s midsection looked like a deflated, bloody balloon. Mom washed it first and covered it with a sheet.
A thought came unbidden to my mind—the organs had been piled up at the scene of the crime. Very few killers remained with the bodies after the fact, but serial killers did. Sometimes they posed it, or defaced it, or simply played with it like a doll. It was called ritualizing the kill, and it was a lot like what had happened to Jeb’s organs.
Maybe it had been a serial killer. I shook my head to clear the thought away, and held the body while mom sprayed it with Dis-Spray.
Jeb had not been a small man, and his limbs were even plumper now that they were filled with stagnant fluid. I pressed my finger against his foot and the impression held for a few seconds before rebounding slowly. It was like poking a marshmallow.
“Stop playing,” said Mom. We washed the body, and then took the sheet back off of the main cavity. His insides were marbled with fat. There was still enough of his circulatory system in place to use the pump, but a lot of open wounds and leaks would make the pump lose fluid and pressure. We had to close those up.
“Get me string,” said Mom. “About seven inches long.” I took off my plastic gloves and threw them in the trash, then began to cut lengths of string. She reached into the cavity and probed for severed major arteries, and each time she found one I handed her a piece of string to tie it off. While we worked, Margaret turned on the vacuum and started sucking all the gunk out of the organs, one by one; she used a tool called a trocar, which was basically just a vacuum nozzle with a blade on the end. She punched it into an organ, sucked out the gunk, then moved on to another.
Mom left one vein and one artery open in the chest cavity and began connecting them to the pump and the drain tube; there was no need to open the shoulder when the killer had already opened the chest for us. The first chemical in the pump this time was a coagulant, which seeped slowly through the body and helped close the holes too small to seal by hand. Some of it began to leak out into the empty torso, but this flow soon stopped as the coagulant contacted the air, hardened, and sealed up the body. I used to worry that it would seal the exit tube as well, but the opening was large enough that it never got the chance.
While we waited, I studied the slashes in the body’s abdomen. They were certainly animalistic, and one area on its left side had what looked like a claw mark—four ragged slits, about an inch apart, that extended nearly a foot toward the belly. This was the work of the demon, of course, though we still didn’t know that at the time. How could we? Back then, none of us even suspected that demons were real. I placed my own hand over the marks and guessed that whoever made them had a hand much bigger than mine. Mom frowned at me, and was about to say something when Margaret grumbled an
grily.
“Dangit, Ron!” she shouted. She didn’t have much respect for the coroner. I ignored her and looked back at the claw mark.
“What’s wrong?” Mom asked, walking over to her.
“We’re missing a kidney,” said Margaret, pulling my attention immediately. Serial killers often kept souvenirs of their kills, and body parts were a pretty typical choice. “I’ve gone through the bag twice,” said Margaret, “you’d think Ron would manage to send us all the organs, for crying out loud.”
“Maybe there wasn’t one to send,” I said. They looked at me, and I tried to look nonchalant. “Maybe whoever killed him took it.”
Mom frowned. “That’s . . .”
“Entirely possible,” I said, interrupting her. How could I explain this without mentioning serial killers? “You saw the size of that claw mark, Mom—if this was an animal going through his innards, it’s no stretch to think that it ate something while it was in there.” It made sense, but I knew this was no animal. Some of the slashes were too precise, and of course there was the orderly pile of innards. Maybe a serial killer who hunted with a dog?
“I’ll check the papers,” said Mom, peeling off her gloves and tossing them in the trash as she went up front. Margaret searched through the bag one more time, but shook her head; the kidney wasn’t there. I could barely contain my excitement.
Mom returned with a copy of the papers Lauren had handed the coroner. “It’s mentioned right here in the comments section: ‘Left kidney missing.’ It doesn’t say they’re holding it for evidence and testing, it’s just missing. Maybe he had it removed or something.”
Margaret held up the remaining kidney, pointing to the severed tube that led to the missing one. “This is a recent cut,” she said. “There’s no scarring or anything.”
“You’d think Lauren would have mentioned something,” said Mom irately, setting the papers down and pulling another pair of plastic gloves from the box. “I’m going to have to talk to her.”
Mom and Margaret went back to work, but I stood still, a buzz of energy filling me up and emptying me out at the same time. This was not an ordinary murder, and it was not a wild animal.
Jeb Jolley had been the victim of a serial killer.
Maybe he’d come from another town, or maybe this was his first victim, but he was a serial killer just the same. The signs were obvious to me now. The victim had been defenseless, with no known enemies or close friends or relatives. His friends from the bar said he’d been peaceful and happy all night before he left, with no fights or arguments, so it wasn’t a crime of passion or liquor. Someone with a need to kill had been waiting in the lot behind the Wash-n-Dry, and Jeb had been a target of opportunity, in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The newspaper and the crime scene itself had told a confusing story of fury blended with simplicity—of mindless animal violence giving way to calm, rational behavior. The killer stacked the organs in a pile and, apparently, took the time after tearing the body apart to slow down, and remove a single organ.
Jeb Jolley’s death was practically a textbook example of a disorganized killer, lashing out ferociously and then remaining at the scene, devoid of emotion or empathy, to ritualize the body—to arrange it, take a souvenir, and leave the rest for everyone to see.
It was no wonder the police hadn’t mentioned the stolen kidney. If word got out that a serial killer was stealing body parts, it would cause a huge panic. People barely felt safe as it was, and this was only the first death.
But it would not be the last. That was, after all, the defining trait of serial killers: they kept on killing.
4
It was early October—leaf-burning season. Fall was my favorite time of year, not because of school or harvest vegetables or anything mundane, but because the citizens of Clayton County would rake up their leaves and burn them, flames soaring high into the crisp autumn air. Our yard was small and treeless, but the old couple across the street had a large yard full of oaks and maples, and they had no children or grandchildren to take care of it for them. In the summer I mowed their lawn for five dollars a week; in the winter I shoveled their walks for cups of hot chocolate; and in the fall I raked their leaves for the pure thrill of watching them burn.
Fire is a brief, temporary thing—the very definition of impermanence. It comes suddenly, roaring into life when heat and fuel come together and ignite, and dances hungrily while everything around it blackens and curls. When there is nothing left to consume, it disappears, leaving nothing behind but the ash of its unused fuel—those bits of wood and leaf and paper that were too impure to burn, too unworthy to join the fire in its dance.
It seems to me that fire leaves nothing behind at all—the ash really isn’t part of the flame, it’s part of the fuel. Fire changes it from one thing to another, drawing off its energy and turning it into . . . well, into more fire. Fire doesn’t create anything new, it simply is. If other things must be destroyed in order for fire to exist, that’s all right with fire. As far as fire is concerned, that’s what those things are there for in the first place. When they’re gone, the fire goes, too, and though you may find evidence of its passing you’ll find nothing of the fire itself—no light, no heat, no tiny red fragments of cast-off flame. It disappears back to wherever it came from, and if it feels or remembers, we have no way of knowing if it feels or remembers us.
Sometimes, peering into the bright blue heart of a dancing flame, I ask if it remembers me. “We’ve seen each other before. We know each other. Remember me when I’m gone.”
Mr. Crowley, the old man whose leaves I burned, liked to sit on the porch and “watch the world go by,” as he called it. If I happened to be raking his yard while he was out, he would sit and tell me about his life. He had been a water-system engineer for the county for most of his life, until last year, when his health got too bad and he retired. He was old anyway. Today he ambled out slowly and painfully propped his leg up on a stool after sitting down.
“Afternoon to you, John,” he said. “Afternoon to you.” He was an old man but a large one, big-framed and powerful. His health was going, but he was far from feeble.
“Hi Mr. Crowley.”
“You can leave these be, you know,” he said, gesturing at the leaf-covered lawn. “There’s plenty more to fall before we’re done, and you’ll just have to do it again.”
“It lasts longer this way,” I said, and he nodded contentedly.
“That it does, John, that it does.”
I raked for a while longer, pulling the leaves together with smooth, even strokes. The other reason I wanted to do his yard that afternoon was that it had been almost a month and the serial killer hadn’t struck again. The tension was making me nervous, and I needed to burn something. I hadn’t told anyone my suspicion that it was a serial killer, because who would believe me? I was obsessed with serial killers as it was, they’d say. Of course I’d think this would be one. I didn’t mind. It doesn’t matter what other people think when you’re right.
“Hey John, come here for a second,” said Mr. Crowley. He gestured me over to his chair. I grimaced at the interruption, but calmed myself and went over anyway. Talking was normal—it’s what normal people do together. I needed the practice. “What do you know about cell phones?” he asked, showing me his.
“I know a little,” I said.
“I want to send my wife a kiss.”
“You want to send a kiss?”
“Kay and I got these yesterday,” he said, fiddling awkwardly with the phone, “and we’re supposed to be able to take photos and send them to each other. So I want to send Kay a kiss.”
“You want to take a picture of yourself puckering up for a kiss and then send it to her?” Sometimes I didn’t understand people at all. Watching Mr. Crowley talk about love was like hearing him speak another language—I had no idea what was going on.
“Sounds like you’ve done this before,” he said, handing me the phone with a shaking hand. “Show me how
it’s done.”
The camera button was pretty clearly labeled, so I showed him how to do it and he took a shaky picture of his lips. I showed him how to send the photo, and went back to my raking.
The idea that I might be sociopathic was nothing new to me—I’d known for a long time that I didn’t connect with other people. I didn’t understand them, and they didn’t understand me, and whatever emotional language they spoke seemed beyond my capacity to learn. Antisocial personality disorder could not be officially diagnosed until you were eighteen years old—prior to that it was just “conduct disorder.” But let’s be honest: conduct disorder is just a nice way of telling parents their kids have antisocial personality disorder. I saw no reason to dance around the issue. I was a sociopath, and it was better to deal with it now.
I raked the leaf pile into a large fire pit around the side of the house. The Crowleys used the pit for bonfires and hot dog roasts in the summer, and invited the whole neighborhood. I came every time, ignoring the people and tending solely to the fire—if fire was a drug, Mr. Crowley was my best enabler.
“Johnny!” Mr. Crowley shouted from the porch, “she sent a kiss back! Come look!” I smiled at him, forcing myself to feign the absent emotional connection. I wanted to be a real boy.
The lack of emotional connection with other people has the odd effect of making you feel separate and alien—as if you were observing the human race from somewhere else, unattached and unwelcome. I’ve felt like that for years, long before I met Dr. Neblin and long before Mr. Crowley sent ridiculous love notes on his cell phone. People scurry around, doing their little jobs and raising their little families and shouting their meaningless emotions to the world, and all the while you just watch from the sidelines, bewildered. This drives some sociopaths to feel superior, as if the whole of humanity were simply animals to be hunted or put down; others feel a hot, jealous rage, desperate to have what they cannot. I simply felt alone, one leaf sitting miles away from a giant, communal pile.