It had been a shrewd move on Thomas’s part to assign Jacqueline to the morgue first. He knew that she would likely be able to dissect, find, or do whatever medical-type procedure was needed to uncover real evidence better than the other two. So sending her in first would be the best way for him to uncover any hidden clues.
At least, it had been a good strategy in theory.
What Thomas didn’t realize was that in this particular case, there were certain beneficial elements to being the individual to uncover the evidence from its original state.
Jacqueline seemed shocked when the maid escorted her into the morgue. Instead of a human corpse on the metal table, this time it contained the massive ten-foot bull shark that had been swimming around Darrel’s body.
Up close and out of the water, the shark seemed even larger. It was easily twice her size. She walked up to it and looked into its foggy, dead white eyes. Jacqueline didn’t do anything intrusive at first; she just walked all the way around the shark’s corpse, checking for any obvious exterior trauma.
It was hard to say what killed the shark, but then again, that certainly wasn’t why she, or it, was here.
“What the hell am I supposed to do with this damned thing?” she said aloud, looking toward the maid by the door.
The maid swallowed and shook her head. She would be no help, clearly.
“I need a cigarette,” Jacqueline said to no one in particular.
Or maybe she was talking to the shark? She’d always had this weird habit of talking to unconscious, comatose, or dead patients, and sleeping babies, at the hospital. It had earned her the nickname Tag Whisperer among her coworkers at the hospital from which she’d recently retired. As in, “There goes Jacqueline, chatting with another tag again.”
Either way, she knew she couldn’t smoke down here. She’d asked the first time she was down in the morgue, inspecting Mr. Cho’s burned corpse. Besides, smoking would likely only activate the commercial fire sprinkler system she saw installed in the concrete ceiling.
In the end, she knew what she needed to do next. It was time to stop stalling. She grabbed an extra-large scalpel from the small instruments table. Surprisingly, Jacqueline had participated in the dissection of a shark before, but that had been many, many years ago back in high school. She remembered very little about that experience. And what she remembered most was Michael, the guy she’d had a crush on. She’d spent more time watching him watch the dissection than she had spent watching the dissection herself.
Damn cute boys. She always knew they’d be the end of her eventually. They were good for nothing.
Mostly.
Jacqueline laughed aloud just before making her first incision. She supposed she must’ve looked crazy to the maid by the door. Not like that mattered, really.
She started with a shallow incision at the shark’s excrement hole, going all the way up to a few feet below its mouth. The shark’s skin was thick and unbelievably tough, and there were moments when she had to use two hands to push the scalpel forward. Were it not for the razor-sharp blade on the high-end scalpel, she doubted that she’d have been able to make the incision all the way.
After a few more rounds of tentative cuts, almost relying more on that scene from Jaws where they cut open a tiger shark than her medical training or her memory of a high school shark dissection, she finally managed to find the shark’s stomach.
Jacqueline grabbed one of the paper masks from the table and put it on over her mouth and nose. She tossed another one toward the maid.
“You may want to put that on, sweetie, it’s about to get even smellier in here, I think,” she said.
The maid hesitated but eventually retrieved the mask from the floor and put it on.
Jacqueline cut open the shark’s bloated belly. Then she screamed and took a sudden step back as milky digestive fluids spilled out across the table and onto the floor, followed shortly thereafter by a human head.
Darrel’s head rolled out onto the table, the hair wet and soggy from being inside the shark’s stomach for at least an hour. But it couldn’t have been too much longer than that because it wasn’t partially digested or anything just yet. It wasn’t exactly pristine, but it was still easily recognizable as a human head that had at one time been attached to the body of one Darrel Gleason.
But that almost made the sight more grisly and horrific in a way. Jacqueline leaned over and vomited on the floor next to the pool of shark stomach fluids. The maid covered her already masked mouth, likely attempting to keep from following suit.
It was a good five minutes before Jacqueline brought herself to look at the head again. After all, unless she wanted to end up like him, or worse, she still had a crime to solve. So she gritted her teeth, then reached out and rolled the head so it was faceup.
That’s when the red ball gag strapped on to Darrel’s head became visible for the first time. Jacqueline looked away for a moment. Then she reached out with her nitrile-gloved hand and touched the red ball stuffed inside Darrel’s mouth.
Jacqueline stood there and stared at it for a few minutes, perhaps debating whether to try to take it off. But, either way, she didn’t. She left the gag strapped to his head and continued inspecting the rest of it.
There were some cuts on the face, likely from when the shark had bitten the head off, but no other immediately visible injuries. As she worked her way around the slimy, matted hair, she found an indentation in the back of the head. It was a definite, clean fracture in the skull, as if he’d been struck very hard by a blunt object.
Shortly after finding the head wound, the estate bell dinged. It was time to switch areas. Jacqueline took off her surgical gloves and practically ran for the door. The smell of shark insides was not something you really ever got used to.
And it was the first thing that Bryce noticed when he got down to the morgue next. The smell was almost unbearable. The maid down there was already wearing a small paper mask, and Bryce quickly found one on a nearby table and strapped it on. Not that it really helped much.
The next thing he noticed was that there was a huge shark on the metal table instead of a human body like usual. Bryce circled the table, careful to avoid the puddles of milky goo on the floor. It was a big shark. And the human head sitting next to it made it look even bigger.
Jacqueline had already done the hard part, and Bryce didn’t really know where to start. He just looked at it all for a while. But then he eventually put on a pair of purple nitrile gloves and inspected the head more closely.
The ball gag was impossible to miss, obviously. The head wound was much harder to find, but Bryce still found it fairly easily. Not having to waste time slicing open the shark, and only having one object, really, to examine, left him with more than enough time to eventually find it.
Near the end, bored and unsure of what to do next, he decided to take off the ball gag. It was on a black leather strap with metal snaps. He undid the snaps and pulled the red ball from Darrel’s mouth. Spit, slime, and traces of water spilled out of the severed head’s mouth.
“Gross!” Bryce yelled, taking a step back.
After collecting himself, he leaned in and lowered the victim’s jaw. He grabbed a penlight from the table and shined it inside the open mouth. Nothing but a few teeth fillings. It had been worth a try, at least.
Thomas was the last to investigate the morgue. By the time he got there, the head had been removed from the shark and the ball gag from the head’s mouth. If the awful stench bothered him, he didn’t let it show like the other guests had.
At first, he didn’t recognize what the ball gag was. He just stood there holding it in his gloved hand. He turned it over in his hands several times and eventually snapped the snaps back together.
Then Thomas moved on to examining the head itself. He started by looking inside the victim’s mouth. Then his ears. Eventually, he inspected the rest of the skull, finding the same skull fracture that the other two had.
Thomas also finished early. He used the rest of the time trying to talk to the young maid, to find out more information she might know. She refused to engage him. She’d always found this guest particularly creepy, as had much of the other staff. Had the circumstances been different, they all might have even started an “office” pool, predicting who was likely the killer.
And had they done so, she most certainly would have put $5 on this creep.