The skull was clean. The room smelled like ammonia and boiled meat. Combined it created an unpleasant odor, add to it the knowledge that the meat smell was coming from decaying flesh and well, my stomach certainly wasn’t growling.
Xavier had his magnifying goggles back on. I had my own set. We were rubbing shoulders, literally, as we looked at the skull. Xavier kept talking into a microphone. I didn’t have a microphone to talk into, so I said nothing and just looked intently.
There were four definitive punctures. They were evenly spaced and between them were small marks that Xavier had confirmed were from the other teeth scraping the bone. Cracks spider webbed out from the puncture marks, except along the cranium sutures, where the skull was slightly misshapen. The cranium sutures were where the two halves of the skull fused together. This one had a jagged break where the sutures had broken. Small chips of bone were missing from there as well.
This was the weakest part of the skull. The break and missing chips were caused by excessive pressure being placed upon the sides of the skull, forcing the bone to give. I compared it to a picture from my file that had once belonged to my father. It was similar, but it wasn’t exact.
“Uh, Houston, we have a serious problem,” Xavier suddenly stood up and stepped back from the table.
“Ok,” I stepped back as well, suddenly concerned about biohazards. Xavier didn’t step back from bodies very often.
“We need an odontologist,” Xavier told me.
“Why?” I looked at him.
“That spot,” Xavier pointed. “I’m pretty sure it’s teeth marks.”
“It’s been mauled by an animal.”
“No Ace, I think they are human teeth marks. I think someone bit down on the brow hard enough that their teeth left an impression on the top of the eye socket and the forehead.”
“Who bites an eye?” I asked.
“Someone fighting or,” Xavier didn’t say it.
“Or someone feeding.” I made a face. “That isn’t exactly a fleshy area.”
“True and I saw no evidence of cooked flesh,” Xavier said. “Maybe it was a fight.”
“I’ve bitten some odd places when fighting for my life.” I reassured him.
“Like?” Xavier raised an eyebrow.
“The fleshy part under the arm. It’s very tender.” I stopped. “Of course, I didn’t do it hard enough to leave teeth marks on bone. I’ve taken off ears.”
“With your teeth?”
“No, actually, since my teeth are mostly fake, I try not to bite. The ones I have might not hold up under the pressure. The fake ones might come out of my mouth.”
“Ok, so we won’t jump to conclusions, one bite mark does not make a cannibal.”
“Especially since there has been an animal feeding on the body, a powerful animal. That might be why we have a head and feet but nothing that goes between them.” Even though the words were coming out of my mouth, I wasn’t buying them. Some years earlier, a man had walked into a fast food restaurant in a major city with a machete. He’d cut off the head of a patron and held everyone hostage while he chewed on his victim’s face. Two hours into the hostage situation, police had managed to shoot him.
No one understood why he did it. He had seemed like a normal, well-adjusted guy who’d just celebrated his twenty-sixth birthday and the birth of his first child. There were no marital problems, no history of mental illness, nothing to indicate such an urge was building inside him. The news had reported it and a Native American shaman had spoken on record about the man being possessed by a wendigo. Since the subject had been killed by police, there hadn’t been an answer to why he did it. Possession by a wendigo didn’t seem that far out of the realm of possibilities to me.
We were used to senseless violence. Desensitized by the mayhem that we saw so often. However, the thought of a person chewing on the face of another person unsettled me. It wasn’t the act of cannibalism. Those sorts of things I was used to, I’d once seen a body dressed like a headless hog and run across an open fire on a spit. The spit had been complete with long handled turner, cold beer, picnic tables, and all the neighbors. The victim had been missing their head, arms, legs, nipples, and genitals. All the identifiers to mark it as human and not swine.
It was the idea that our victim might have been chewed on raw or worse, while still alive. Cannibalism wasn’t just taboo, it spoke of more primitive times, when Aztecs made sacrifices to their gods by drinking the blood or consuming the flesh of their fellow man. However, they cooked them first. Alive was different, it didn’t speak of primal urges and early history. It spoke of wildness. It was more feral than primitive.
But, I too, was jumping to conclusions. Large predators didn’t share their food well. Whatever had crushed our victim’s skull, wouldn’t have willingly shared the violence of the kill or the spoils of victory. Perhaps the bite to the face was done during the initial abduction. It was a tender spot, like the fleshy part of the underarm. Or in the process of shoving the victim into the cage, there had been a struggle and the bite mark had happened then. Or perhaps Xavier was wrong and it wasn’t a bite mark, but something entirely different.
This last suggestion seemed the least likely. Xavier had seen things that most of us couldn’t imagine. He and Lucas had spent time in jungles and deserts where the rules had no longer applied. I hadn’t heard all their stories, just enough to know the two men had aged quickly due to the things they had experienced. I glanced sideways at him. Unlike Lucas, I never wondered if the dark haired man who always needed a shave and a shower, could read my mind. I did worry that one day, I would cross a line and hurt his feelings.
This desire to not hurt his feelings was not a natural instinct for me. During the time we had worked together, I had come to appreciate Xavier. Until I had joined the SCTU, I could count on one hand the number of people that were important to me. Now, I had to use two and Xavier was definitely one of them.
“Do we call Gabriel or the odontologist first?” Xavier asked.
“Do you know an odontologist?”
“No,” Xavier answered.
“Then I suggest we call Gabriel. He’s the one that usually arranges for us to have an expert.”
“Ok,” Xavier drew out his phone and called Gabriel.
I went back to examining the skull as well as the pictures that we had taken beforehand with the flesh still on it. The face had decayed. The features were relatively indistinguishable. There was a hole where the nose had been eaten away. The eyes had been missing. The eyelids had been missing. Scraps of flesh clung to the forehead, but not enough to show a bite mark. The lips and ears were gone. The teeth had begun to come out of the decaying gums, leaving only a handful on the top and bottom jaws.
I gave up on the pictures and went back to the skull. I didn’t know what I was looking for, anything that jumped out at me. My gaze wandered back up to the top of the skull, where the sutures had split. It revealed nothing more, keeping the secret of what had cracked it hidden. We needed an animal expert. We needed an odontologist. We needed DNA results. We needed bodies. Bodies yielded clues, but the skull only gave us tantalizing tidbits of information that may or may not help.
I left the room, stripping off my gown, mask, goggles, and gloves along the way. We needed a zoologist. We were in the right place. The University of Missouri had once been renowned for its School of Journalism, but in recent years, science had taken the spot of the best program, particularly biological sciences.
The chief medical examiner had a very nice office located on the same floor as the morgue. The walls were a light gray, the ceiling slightly darker with lots of dark walnut wood furniture. It didn’t have any chrome, silver, or stainless steel accents. All the accents were marigold yellow. I instantly disliked it. Yellow was my least favorite color. I abhorred it. It was irrational to abhor the color yellow, but I did.
“What can I help you with Dr. Cain?” The medical examiner asked as I walked into the office. The door had been open, so I’d rapped my knuckles against it as I entered.
“We need a zoologist,” I told him. “Or someone that can identify the animal that crushed our victim’s skull. I figure the University is a good place to look for one of those.”
“And you need my help finding one?” He asked.
“That would be awesome. If you know one, that would streamline the process, otherwise, Gabriel will find one.” I sat down in one of the chairs. “But that is not why I’m here.”
“Then why are you here?”
“I do not know,” I answered. “It just seemed like the right place for me to be at the moment. How long have you been the chief medical examiner?”
“Seventeen years,” he answered.
“Oh,” I answered. “Did you work here when the jaguar attack came in twenty-five years ago?”
“No, I was still in school twenty-five years ago.”
“Ever see a jaguar crush a skull?”
“No,” the doctor gave me a queer look.
“In the time you’ve worked here, have you ever seen someone come in with a crushed skull?”
“Car crashes, boating accidents, skaters losing battles with pavement, being beaten to death, I’ve seen my fair share of them.”
“I believe Dr. Reece has as well, but I feel like we could use a second opinion.” It wasn’t like me to question Xavier’s judgment or my own. The ghost of my father could be felt.
“If you wanted a second opinion, you could have just asked,” Dr. Burnett told me.
“I’m sure I could have, but I did not know that was what I wanted until about five seconds ago.”