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Chapter 4
“This
is why I wish they’d get the wearable camera… things,” Monica muttered from her
laptop. She sat on the hood of Michael’s
car, watching previews of the pictures she took of Samson and Lincoln flash by
her screen in the process of uploading to the city’s evidence server. “We could be focusing on the inside of the
damn place instead of waiting for the crappy internet to clean out my camera.”
Michael
was leaning back on the car nearby, watching the paramedics as they finally
closed up and got ready to leave. “If
I’m honest, I think it’s less about not wanting the cameras, and more about
budget. They don’t really have a high
police abuse rate here, so why put the money out?”
“It
shouldn’t just be called for because the
police are bad,” Monica grumbled.
Michael
shrugged, his yellow jacket crinkling against itself with the motion. “Either way, they’re busy, so we need your
camera for processing the scene. We can
complain for resources to help reduce how much you have to do it later, yeah? Finish up, so we can go inside already.”
Technically,
they could enter without the camera, but the conditions of the property and the
probable severity of what they were about to find, neither Michael nor Monica
wanted to leave it to chance. They could
easily skip something, or get hurt, or wreck evidence accidentally without a
spotter, and since they didn’t have police to spare right then, they needed
that camera’s memory space to full capacity.
Monica
was finally able to clear the camera with all the photos in queue and slide off
the hood, leaving the laptop to process.
They both headed over for the front door, then propped open by a large
rock Castillo had pulled up there before leaving. Michael was rotating the arm he’d hurt when
Lincoln slammed into him, but fortunately there wasn’t any real immediate
damage that prevented him from moving, so he refused to go with the
paramedics. He could go get it checked
out later for anything long term.
Inside
the home was a disaster as predicted.
The open door and the busted window in the master bedroom had actually
been a bit of a Godsend, because of the fact that something putrid wafted in
almost curtains of scent across the small home.
The cross flow of air helped alleviate it at least a little. Monica went through the main room to a small
door nestled in the corner and undid the locks there to swing it open
carefully. She touched as little as
possible, but they needed cleaner air.
“We should’ve brought masks,” she said with a snort.
Michael
looked around the room, the back of his hand pressed up against his nose and
mouth. “The floor looks stable and
without much by way of evidence. I have masks in the car, and a black light. Do you feel safe enough to try to figure out
where the smell is coming from?”
“Yeah,
absolutely,” Monica conceded after a look around. The furniture was raggedy, the curtains torn
and dirty, the floors unclean, but all that and the trash scattered around
wasn’t particularly unsafe. “Try not to
get eaten going to and from the car, will you?” she then cracked, lifting the
camera up so she could take a few pictures of the main room as it stood.
Michael
laughed bitterly at her, considering she
had been the one first in danger by Lincoln, and headed out of the house once more.
After
clicking away several pictures with the high grade digital camera, Monica then
headed towards the kitchen. She couldn’t
tell if it was most foul there because it was on the opposite end of the house
from the busted open master bedroom and front door, or because there was some
sort of tangible evidence generating the smell.
She gagged slightly as she went across the linoleum floor, which was
crusted heavily with dry mud and various stains. First things first, she grabbed the tall, but
narrow, window at the end and hoisted it open.
After clicking a few pictures of the small stove, she then clicked on
the overhead vent to start pulling air out.
Nothing
was in the oven, much to Monica’s surprise.
She half expected the head of a dog, or something. But there was
nothing there, so she moved on to the microwave. That produced results as, when she popped the
door open, yellow light poured down over the beige inner walls of the machine,
and copper-red stains were splashed all around the interior. While Monica knew she wasn’t supposed to make
conclusions without thorough testing of the evidence, she leaned down to take a
couple of pictures while muttering, “Oh, I hope you were too big to be put in
there alive.”
As
she snapped away, Michael reappeared with cloth masks, a spray bottle and a
black light. “Anything?” he asked as he
held out one of the masks.
“The
scent’s strongest in here,” she replied as she took the mask. The camera was left to hang around her neck
as Monica took to sliding on the mask.
“The microwave looks like he radiated a rat or something in it, but
otherwise no. And thank God this mask
filters some of it out, too.”
Michael
smirked as he placed his over his face as well, although he didn’t respond as
his eyes crossed over the floor. The
caked mud especially caught his eye. It
hadn’t rained for some time. “You know,
Castillo saw a hose outside going into a vent for the crawlspace,” he said in a
prompting tone.
Monica
looked down at the floor as well, and it hit her, what Michael was alluding to. She held her hand out, and Michael handed her
the spray bottle so she could start spraying down the floor. Within a few minutes, they had the small
kitchen lit up in the black light.
Beyond
the layers of dirt and crusting, the bright blue streaks were
unmistakable. They led in from the main
room, across the small kitchen, and then became a mess in all directions by the
sink at the opposite end of the entry.
Michael saw evidence of contact with the floor closest to the sink that
appeared inconsistent with dragging something like a dead body. “It looks like new points of contact here,”
he said as he passed the black light blindly up to Monica. “I’ve seen this when someone’s had a door
slammed into them.”
“Uh,
alright…” What did that even mean? She didn’t bother to clarify, however, as she
watched Michael start to grope around under the cabinetry lip for something,
and leaned down a bit to see what he could possibly be doing. “What are you…?”
She
didn’t get her question finished when something clicked in the floor, and
Michael was sliding the paneling out just a tiny bit. Just enough to clear the cabinetry lip, and
then he was moving as he swung the hatch up and over. Fortunately, the nose-mouth mask helped
shield him from the awful scent that had clearly been lingering down there for
some time, waiting to launch out at the first person who got there. Upon opening, his eyes were struck like the
vapor of onions and causing him to well up reflexively and crane his head away
for the moment.
After
a breather, he gestured for Monica to set the black light to the side and start
taking pictures again. “He brought a
body in here, forgot the swing on the door here. So, when he swung it open, he dropped the
hatch on the vic,” he said as he pulled his flashlight from his back pocket. “It’s a blunt splatter that came from the top
and sides of the body, with little pooling underneath the point of contact.
“Makes
sense,” was Monica’s only reply. But did
it, though? Did it really? Monica knew she’d be able to ask
clarification later. She felt as though
she was losing her mind a little with that nearly palpable smell all around
them. It was sick, moist, and she knew
they’d be washing it out of their hair and pours for at least a week.
Michael
turned the powerful but small light on and beamed it into the area below. Answers came pretty quick about the origin of
the smell, since it was right below.
They both had been hoping for an animal’s body over that of a human, but
found no such luck there.
Surrounded
by water possibly a half a foot, maybe just a bit more, was a badly decomposed
body. The skin appeared to have been the
first to go, rotted free from the muscles.
Possibly skinned as opposed to left to rot? Its sex was impossible to tell without better
conditions to study it in, which was odd as its eyes peered up through messily
half-lidded eyes to the forensic specialists standing above. Zooming in, Monica could even see that the
person had rather brilliant green eyes, even beyond the hemorrhaging that had
taken on a gross, brown rot.
She
squatted down by Michael to take more pictures, and he put a hand on her
shoulder to make sure she wouldn’t suddenly go toppling into the muck
below. “You can tell they were put in
here for the long haul, but I don’t get the water,” she commented. She could see the way plastic sealed the
bottom and walls, holding everything like a pool, but what was the point of it?
Michael
locked his teeth as he thought about it, glancing over at the microwave. He wanted to make a joke about cannibalism,
but somehow, it just wasn’t funny when it looked like it was really
happening. “I’ll make the call to get
some help out here from Millet’s Peak so we can get it out without disturbing
too much.”
Monica
and Michael had dug a body or ten out of weird places—usually livestock, but a
couple of bodies before too—so that wasn’t the problem. But they usually had a lot more space to
collect evidence, and safer air to breathe.
After all, normally pulling any type of body came from various sorts of
rural country accidents. They were going
to need the fire department, cranes, all sorts of things to break open the side
of the house and access the body from the outside to extract it safely and with
as little evidence loss as possible.
***
And
that extraction took forever. Almost eleven hours, because Michael and
Monica had to dress up and then sludge around in watered down body juices to
get everything together that they would need before helping get the body back
to the morgue next to their office. By
the time they got back, Michael was all but rolling into the backseat of his
car to get a little bit of sleep before he would have to proceed with the
autopsy.
Monica
was pretty convinced she was going to fall asleep while transferring her
pictures of the house and body from the camera to her work desktop. The only thing that kept her from getting
angry at Michael getting shuteye was the fact that Monica technically didn’t
have to be there for the autopsy. They
ran two suspended cameras and a voice recorder as witnesses that Michael spoke
to so he could focus on his work in peace as he preferred.
However,
as though being hand delivered from God, Deputy Vince Castillo arrived,
dropping a cup of coffee on her desk for her.
“Since that looks boring enough that you could sleep to it,” he remarked
as he stood beside her with his own cup.
“No
kidding,” Monica sighed, turning in her seat to face him. Even her hazel eyes showed the exhaustion she
was feeling. She scooped the cup along
the way and blew into it to cool it down a tiny bit. “Honestly, if they just budgeted out enough
money for me and Michael to get new computers, it’d speed our work up. But they’re insisting on working them until
they explode.”
Castillo
snorted. “I’m not even quite sure how to
work even a quarter of the programs you two do,” he commented, eyes lazily
fixed over Monica’s shoulder as each uploaded picture flicked on by. The police of Garretsville didn’t have much
reason, usually, to deal with any technology that wasn’t in their cars. Office staff, the coroner’s office, and the
daily deliveryman were constantly being lured in to help them, instead. “So, what kind of initial assessment has Hays
obtained when looking over the victim before he died in the parking lot?”
Monica
hummed while taking a drink of her coffee.
It was bitter, all black, but she said nothing to Castillo. He always seemed to forget that she liked some sort of creamer in there, but his gestures
were always appreciated. “The victim is
female based on bone and musculature.
We’re processing her dental records right now, but she looks young, or
at least well-kept based on her teeth,” she presented. She pulled up a separate program that would
update a slideshow of the photos without disrupting her slowly flipping through
them. “When we were observing her in
there, we suspected that the lack of skin was a cause of the human decay that
made up the pooling of the basement, but when we got her back here for initial
observation, she still had skin on and behind her ears.”
“You
didn’t notice it there?” Castillo asked.
He sounded a bit shocked, if only because the duo was normally far more
observant than that.
“We
sort of did, but we didn’t want to clean her ears of all that gunk until we
could properly process and pack the samples of what we cleaned off.”
“And
you were pretty shaken,” Castillo added, in a tone that said he just remembered
that himself.
Monica
shrugged passively, having decided to take her bruises and stow away the whole
attack on her side for another time.
Possibly with a therapist.
“Hey,
wait,” Castillo said, leaning over her shoulder more. He reached out and pointed at the screen when
Monica halted flipping through the scene photos. “…can you go back a couple, then forward?”
“Sure.” Monica obliged, counting to five as she
flipped two shots back, then two shots forward.
As she did so, Castillo’s finger migrated to the eyes and he asked for
her to do it again once she was finished.
It was after the second time that she started to see what Castillo was
seeing. She started a pattern of
flipping through the three images over and over again.
The
angle of the shots was almost identical to each other, with Monica having moved
herself just slightly in each. She’d
been doing slow, progressive circles around the body to make sure she hadn’t
missed a thing.
She
had been standing over the body at the head, taking pictures straight down on
the face at that point. The chest
muscles could be seen in the shot, raw and tattered in some places. The muscles and veins of the neck were nearly
non-existent, which they were assuming, on first glance, was the injury that
killed her. Her jaw hung open and
slightly to the side, the damage spanning high enough to cut at the jaw hinge’s
tendons.
None
of that was what mattered right then, however.
They found themselves staring at the victim’s green eyes, so remarkably
intact. Half-lidded and cloudy as they
were, their condition was amazing. And
so too was the fact that it appeared as though they changed position in those
three images. Those bright green disks
appeared to be fixated on the camera itself, observing. Watching from behind a curtain of death and
waiting for the opportunity to jump out at her.
Monica
and Castillo stayed silent, not wanting to speak since they were both reasoning
in their minds that Monica hadn’t moved that
much, though that was the first time it seemed like the victim’s eyes had
changed position to follow her instead of remaining still as one would
believe. Though, it was likely they
weren’t ready to discard exactly what they were seeing after what happened with
Brad Lincoln. The doctors were still trying
to reason out what they witnessed there.
On a
hunch, to dispel what they were thinking about, and knew they were on the same brain wave, Monica went much further
into the large number of photos for when she was by the victim’s side. She figured it’d be a good way to dispel
their worries, but any lower would have shown her chin only.
The
victim’s eyes were a bit wider then, still fixed on the camera. It looked as though she’d been disrupted from
some sort of deep slumber, and was just watching a visitor at her bedside.
“What
the hell is going on?” Monica asked, rhetorically, her voice cracking as she
spoke.
“That
isn’t exactly normal, is it?” Castillo confirmed, sounding as disturbed as
Monica was.
Monica
managed to get out a shake of her head.
She would have spoken, but her words caught in her throat as a soft
tapping sound broke through the current silence in the air. They both looked towards the open office
door, which went directly into the morgue.
The tapping was light, and periodic with several seconds in between
each. Tapping, clicking, like
fingernails on metal.
The
two looked at one another in silence, listening to that clicking. It was as though they were each waiting for
the other to offer to go see first. Several
breaths later, Castillo set his mug down on Monica’s desk and started for the
door. His hand went to his holster,
thumb flicking open its secure strap. He
wasn’t sure what dots Monica was connecting, but for him, there had been way
too many odd cases they’d worked recently to not just give that extra bit of
effort. He just hoped to God it wasn’t what
his mind, admittedly weighted from being a horror movie fan, was conjuring up
for him on the way.
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