There is only so much a person can learn from three decomposed bodies and several bags of human goo. Xavier was currently gleaning every kernel of information he could from them. I was sitting on the counter, wondering if there was anyway the smell was ever going to come out of my hair. It may not have seemed like a big deal, but the truth was the smell could cling for days, and you got used to it. Once that happened, you didn’t realize how badly you smelled.
Xavier had on his googly-goggles. They magnified his vision, which in turn, magnified his eyes when he was wearing them. It showed the small blood vessels that filled the whites of his eyes, feeding his optical nerve and pupil. The contrast of the red within the white was stark, making my eyes want to water in response.
The autopsies, if that’s what they could be considered, were boring. The bodies were going to hold few, if any, real clues. The newest one had probably been in that shed for a month or more. The atmosphere had been conducive to a massive amount of insect activity.
Instead, I booted up a movie on my phone and let the sounds of Indiana Jones wash over the room. Xavier hummed along to the theme music as he did something terribly gross with the bags of human remains. I didn’t hum along and I didn’t watch him.
Indiana was in the middle of being offered monkey brains for dessert when something metallic clanked in the room. I couldn’t resist, my eyes drifted to the stainless steel table where Xavier was sifting through the bags. There was a metal colander on the table that made my stomach flop. Xavier was staring intently at the table though. I tore my gaze away from the colander and looked at his googly-goggles.
Covered in gunk was an object about eighteen inches long with a heavy stone attached to one end. It didn’t take a genius to figure out it was a necklace. Xavier was carefully cleaning it with a solution that smelled a bit like hydrochloric acid and lemons.
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. Kids 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.”