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The person kneeling next to the body suddenly stood up and motioned for guys with a gurney to come over. I hadn’t been introduced to this person, but judging by how short they were, I guessed it was a woman. However, HAZMAT suits are notoriously gender neutral. It could just have easily been filled by a reptilian hominid exterritorial with dwarfism as a woman.
I don’t have enough peppermint oil for this, I thought, taking a step back as the men came closer. Vivisected bodies have a distinct smell. One that could gag a maggot. I had shoved a fingertip full of peppermint oil balm in my nose before getting out of the SUV to combat it, but it wasn’t going to be enough when they started picking up the pieces and putting them on the gurney to take them outside.
However, the inside of my nose was still tingling from the peppermint oil, even though I could only faintly smell it. Fiona must have seen something on my face, she extended a small metal container to me. She used more than just peppermint oil, she added a trace of lavender to her “please don’t let me throw up because of the smell” balm. I accepted and using a gloved fingertip I swiped my fingertip along the top of the balm and spread it under my nose and around my nostrils hoping beyond hope that the extra lavender and peppermint oil would cover the smell.
Several cops in suits were moving even further away from the bodies in the temple, moving towards the doors from what I could tell, probably so they could rush outside as need be. I had a disturbing thought, at least the bodies weren’t still sizzling and smoking. In one of my chemistry classes, we had dissolved the flesh off a dead mouse using sulfuric acid, the same kind used in drain cleaner. It had been one of those pivotal moments in my life, I had stopped studying chemistry afterwards and when I had needed one extra biology credit, I had wussed out and taken botany.
The coroner’s assistants were carefully wrapping the body parts in plastic sheeting. I didn’t nod my approval, but only because I realized I was about to. Xavier was up close and personal giving some advice on the best way to move them and gather all the evidence. Someone else in a HAZMAT suit showed up with a wet/dry vacuum.
Sometimes I marveled over how many everyday items were used in crime scene investigations. Kimberly was talking again and I didn’t know what about, distracted by the scene in front of me, waiting for them to screw up and lose what was left of the woman’s organs on the floor. It sounded like something from a bad movie, but I had seen it happen before. Most people did not split bodies in half, and even the most seasoned coroners occasionally didn’t think things all the way through.
“Ace?” Xavier asked, turning around.
“Sorry, what?” I responded.
“You okay?”
“Mostly,” I answered, eyes still watching them wrap the body to be picked up.
“You don’t look it,” Xavier said.
“Sulfuric acid, especially not an 80/20 mix like what is found in drain cleaner, wouldn’t dissolve bone in just one night.” I told him.
“I think it might have had help with the spine.” Xavier told me.
“That is a brutal way to kill someone,” I sighed after a moment. “I cannot think of a lot of things more painful at the moment.”
“Do you want to be there for the autopsy?”
“Not really, I think the smell of the acid will get to me fairly quick, even if the room is well ventilated.”
“Yeah,” Xavier answered. Xavier and I had learned that sometimes my nose was helpful during an autopsy, but not this one. This autopsy would smell of sulfur and dissolved soft tissue, those smells would be stronger than any others.
“Are you okay?” Fiona asked me as Xavier went back to the bodies and assistants.
“Not sure why everyone is asking me that.”
“You look haunted,” Fiona answered.
“She’s thinking about our psychology class.” Kimberly answered. “I had a similar problem at the first two murder scenes.” I hadn’t been thinking about our psychology class, but now that she mentioned it, I was. Some death cults and terrorist organizations used acid as a form of punishment. Some acids become more corrosive when mixed with water and or salts off the human body, making them extremely brutal forms of punishment.
There had been a cult in Central America during the 1980s who made members that wanted to leave, submerge their hands in hydrochloric acid. When they attempted to wash the acid off, it would become stronger. Most died because the pain sent their bodies into shock. If they didn’t, they usually lost the hand thanks to infections like gangrene. It was a strong deterrent to not leave the cult.
In the movie Alien v. Predator, Predator had used the acidic blood of the xenomorph to mark the girl as a hunter. I could think of a handful of cults that had done similar things, using acid to etch a person’s position onto them, permanently. It was a demented form of branding in my opinion.
Our psychology professor had studied cults and cult mentality for his thesis, and while cults normally fell into the realm of sociology, figuring out how a cult member ticked had earned him some academic acclaim. What he hadn’t mentioned was that his sister had been a member of a cult, a murderous death cult, that thought bringing about the end of days was their mission and the only way to accomplish that was to kill the antichrist before he could grow up. They had killed every male child born into the cult, because their leader had been convinced that he would father the antichrist.
His sister had been a victim of the cult. They had allowed her to leave, and then after she had been deprogrammed and my professor had started his thesis, they had killed her, her new husband, and their two small daughters, in some bizarre way. I didn’t remember the details of their deaths and I wasn’t sure it was important at the moment, but if anything could cause someone to be haunted, it was memories of people brutally murdered for reasons that didn’t make sense. At least serial killers killed because they liked it. I understood that more than believing you were going to father the antichrist and killing all male children born to you as a result.
However, what I remembered most about our group psychology class was that our professor became a cult leader himself. My last semester there he managed to convince a bunch of undergrads to abandon their academic pursuits and follow him to a little ranch somewhere in Wyoming. There had been a lot of effort expending covering it up. I had to admit, if you were going to specialize in learning how the willpower and psychology of an individual can be subjugated to conform to the psychology of a group, teaching it was a good place to start and cult leader seemed like a natural extension of that knowledge.
With help from Xavier, they started lifting the body that had been dissolved into two pieces up into the air. We all took several giant steps away from it. The fluid that had been puddled on the floor got larger as it drained down the plastic sheeting, and we all took several more steps away. Fiona tapped my arm and I handed her back the small metal container that had her balm in it. I also dug my container out of my pocket. She took both of them. Mine was stronger than anyone else’s because I had a condition that gave me a heightened sense of smell and dead things were really hard on the olfactory system and stomach.
Everyone seemed to follow Fiona’s lead, pulling out their own containers of balm. Lucas passed his container to Kimberly, which she gratefully took and began to smear liberally around the bottom of her nose. A version of it could be bought commercially, but we made our own because the commercial stuff wasn’t always strong enough and because we went through a ton of it. It was just a mix of coconut oil, shea butter, beeswax, and essential oils like peppermint. Everyone had their own spin on it, because we all liked different smells. Lucas used eucalyptus and vanilla. I loved vanilla and refused to mix it with anything that was going to associate the smell of vanilla with death in my brain.
Kimberly gave him a wide smile. She had something already smeared under her nose, ever so often I’d catch a glint of light off of it, but I was guessing it had stopped working because her face looked a little healthier after she applied Lucas’s balm under her nose.
After they got the body up onto the gurney, I noticed that several detectives and officers had all left the building. The area around the door was now devoid of people. We weren’t talking and we all followed the body out the door with Lucas being nice enough to open it for the men with the gurney. Sadly, both bodies fit on it, because one could be moved around like a jigsaw puzzle piece and fitted into the areas the mostly intact body left empty.
