“We are looking for The Tall Man,” I said to Gabriel as he drove us back to the US Marshals building. It was located near the local police department headquarters and was a little more inviting.
“I don’t know what that is,” Gabriel informed me.
“It is a movie character from Phantasm.”
“Really? I was sure I was about to get a lecture on the historical significance of The Tall Man as some sort of boogeyman.”
“Not everything is rooted in history. There was also a movie, starring Jessica something, where she is kidnapping children and taking them to safety using an urban legend called The Tall Man. And there might be a true crime book with the same title.”
“Might be?”
“I have not read it, but the name sounds familiar.”
“Sometimes, I seriously worry about you.”
“Perhaps you should worry about whoever made the tea they were drinking. Did you see their faces when they took their first sip? It was priceless.”
“It was whiskey. They made a whiskey face,” Gabriel corrected. “I saw them pull and pour from the bottle. Almost everyone needs something to calm their nerves when talking with us.”
“It might have come from a whiskey bottle, but it smelled like tea.”
“You didn’t even get close to them.”
“I did not have to, the bar smelled like alcohol, to be sure, but they were drinking tea.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Remember, I once smelled semi-frozen feet hung from a power line in socks.”
“Trust me, that is not an event I will forget any time in the future.”
“Then you should trust me when I say they were drinking tea.”
“Think the tall guy spiked the drinks with whatever killed them?” He changed the subject.
“I do not know. Nevertheless, seriously, how many guys around seven feet tall can there be in a city of one hundred and forty thousand people? A hundred, maybe a hundred and fifty, unless people are just unusually tall in South Dakota. We know he is older, because she did not feel the need to card him and he is white. That cuts it down even further.”
“You want me to have Fiona check DMV records for men over thirty-five who are white and very tall, don’t you?”
“That would be awesome,” I told him.
“What if he isn’t from around here?”
“Then we talk to the twenty or thirty guys that are from around here, eliminate them, and find other avenues to explore.” I thought for a moment. “Xavier could go along to see if they have Marfan’s Syndrome, might save a few lives that way. They did a genetic test on Malachi once to check for it, but he doesn’t have it, which is good, given his line of work.”
Gabriel shook his head and parked. Sometimes it was just better not to follow along with my thought process. It could be a hard path to follow.
Fiona was hanging up pictures on the whiteboard. Xavier and Lucas were conspicuously absent. Gabriel frowned as we entered the room.
“Where are the other two?” He asked Fiona as she hung up the fifth victim.
“Coroner’s office,” Fiona answered.
“It is unusual for Lucas to go there,” I stated. Normally, I got to sit in the morgue with Xavier. Lucas hated the place more than I did. He said it was a constant reminder that when we died, our body was left to be butchered and plundered. I thought that was a bit of a stretch, but I didn’t argue with the group much, at least not about important things.
“Why did they go there?” Gabriel asked.
“I was just about to start writing that up there,” Fiona pointed to a picture stuck on a whiteboard of a brunette with dead eyes and mildly blue lips. “The lab found sleeping pills in her system.” She pointed to the next one and the fourth picture, “These two had antidepressants in theirs, and this one had a large dose of a medication called Atarax, along with an antidepressant. Xavier was mumbling about incompetence and he stormed out, so Lucas went with him.”
Most antidepressants had antianxiety properties, while Atarax was an allergy medication. However, it wasn’t just used for allergies, it stopped panic attacks. Cassie used it as her rescue drug. She had been having anxiety issues since finding herself trapped and cooking in a Brazen Bull. While being medicated for depression or anxiety wasn’t uncommon, especially among women in their twenties, it did give us a little more insight. At least one of them thought she was having a panic attack and like most antihistamines, Atarax had sedative effects.
All sorts of things could be dangerous when mixed with antidepressants, sleeping pills, and other sedative inducing medications. Most of the time, the victim went to sleep and failed to wake up. There were few indicators of foul play when this happened.
It was the panic attack that bothered me. Panic attacks had a wide variety of symptoms, some even mimicked heart attacks. It meant that the person could have been experiencing symptoms of something else and thought they were having a panic attack.
Belladonna came back into the forefront of my mind. The symptoms of poisoning mimicked a panic attack. It would also interact with the other drugs the victims had taken. The sedation properties of each would increase the chance of death.
I couldn’t really think of any other poisons that would do the same thing. Most poisons left visible traces. The victims vomited, had uncontrollable diarrhea, started bleeding from the mucus membranes, or it took a long time and they suffered hair loss, weight loss, sallowness of the skin, malnutrition, and excruciating pain, as they died a slow, miserable death.
Xavier might think of something else, but it was unlikely. Historically speaking, poisons were as important as wars. They had changed the course of mankind on numerous occasions. There was even some proof that important families had kept professional poisoners on staff, as if they were no different from any other type of hired help. It had been hard to study torture and the Middle Ages without understanding poisoning and about how it changed the world.
While we officially had five female victims, there were a few others, mostly bones that could also fit this pattern. The previous victims of a serial killer were often more revealing than the most recent ones. They all had unknown causes of death and the time between kills could easily explain why the first ones had been buried and these were not.
Witness statements of then and now had the victims leaving the bar in a highly intoxicated state. However, the bar tabs had only shown a few drinks and the blood alcohol levels weren’t high enough to justify a highly intoxicated state. Suddenly, I knew exactly why Xavier was yelling at the coroner’s office staff.
I was also back to believing that belladonna had been administered to our recent victims. Along with sweating, nausea, and death, it caused disorientation and could make people appear intoxicated. History told stories of people ingesting the poisonous berries and then laughing right up until they died.
“Hey, Fiona, I think we need to rethink our theory about South Dakota lacking a coven of witches,” I said as I wrote the word on the board in bright pink.
“Belladonna?” Gabriel frowned at the word.
“Few poisons are less messy,” I shrugged.
“I just want to point out that I’m a pagan, not a witch, and that I have never been to South Dakota before today.” Fiona held up her hands.
“I know,” I answered. “If you were going to kill someone it wouldn’t be with belladonna. You may not like getting messy, but you’re still more likely to beat someone’s head in with a rock than poison them.”
“Thanks, I think.” Fiona smiled.
“How would I kill someone?” Gabriel asked.
“Boring stories,” I answered, looking at the early murders. “These were all highly intoxicated when they left the bar as well. It seems even more likely the murders are all related.”
“Why stop for so many years?” Gabriel asked.
“It’s a pain in the ass to distill belladonna,” Fiona offered. She was gaining a sense of humor too.