“We have body parts!” Xavier shouted through my door. I flopped over in the bed and stared at the ceiling. There were some phrases that required caffeine before being shouted. That was one of them. I hadn’t slept well, even for me. My dreams haunted by images of my father. In my dreams, he had a face; a face that I knew was his, but couldn’t exactly put together now that I was awake. When I got home, I might ask my mother for a few photos of him and sister. Not being able to remember their faces bothered me, but I wasn’t sure why.
Xavier began knocking on the door. It was a formality. He had a key card to my room. Mostly he was giving me time to be prepared so that I didn’t kill him when he rushed in.
Which he did about ten seconds or so after he started knocking on the door. His excitement was evident. I glared at him.
“Did you hear me?” He asked.
“Yes,” I answered. “What time is it?”
“About seven,” Xavier told me.
“In the morning?” I frowned, looking for soda or some sign of caffeine.
“Yes in the morning,” Xavier followed my gaze. “There’s soda in the car.”
“Great, is there one in my room?” I asked.
“I don’t know, did you stock any in your room?”
“Good question,” I climbed from between the covers. Now that I was standing, I had a better view. There had been a few sodas last night, but I wasn’t sure if any of them were left.
“If you drank less soda, you might sleep better,” Xavier suggested.
“If I drank less soda, I might kill people,” I found a bottle of Coca-Cola on the table. It had been opened, but I was pretty good at tightening the lids back so they didn’t go flat. I opened it and downed what was left.
“How much soda do you drink?” Xavier frowned.
“I don’t know, three most days, four if they are really long days.” I answered. I preferred soda, but tried to curb the addiction by adding in bottles of water. Unfortunately, I couldn’t convince myself to drink tap water, which was much cheaper. Also, the water had to be flavored. I’d found two brands of flavored water that I could drink. One wasn’t all that great for me, but I loved it. The other was better for me and I liked it a lot less. “I’m usually too busy to drink more than that.”
“Maybe you should drink Sprite or something in the evenings,” Xavier suggested. I pulled an empty 7-Up bottle from the trash. “Well, what do I know then?”
“Exactly. So, do you want to tell me about the body parts?” I asked.
“They’re body parts, what is there to tell?”
With that, I grabbed clothes and went to take a shower. The shower was very quick, just long enough to lather up soap and get my brain into functioning mode. I ran on pure instincts for the first hour I was awake, unless I showered.
As I pulled my hair up, still wet, into a messy bun that would require work later in the day, I caught a glimpse of my reflection. The face that stared back at me was a stranger. It always was. The scars, eyes, and hair were mine, but the rest of my features, weren’t part of my memory. The skin was still tanned from summer. The eyes had dark circles around the bottoms of the lids. Three small scars were near the lips, created when my teeth went through it in my younger days.
I spent roughly thirty seconds staring at the reflection that stared back. A reflection that was me and yet, not me. There were glimpses of my mother in my face, but the dark hair and dark eyes were entirely those of my father. My mother had blue eyes and light brown hair. Genetics told me my father had to have had dark hair and brown eyes.
Hair up and clothing on, I left the bathroom and the stranger in the mirror. I had never asked Malachi about his feelings on his reflection. I wondered if he felt as disassociated from it as I did.
“You look pale,” Xavier frowned.
“I always look pale,” I answered.
“No, you look like you, overly tanned with bags under your eyes from not sleeping. Right now, you look pale, wan, like you’ve seen a ghost.”
“I don’t know what to tell you.” I shrugged.
“And now your color is returning,” Xavier frowned harder. “This has something to do with the reason you don’t have mirrors in your house, doesn’t it?”
“I have mirrors.”
“You have one mirror, in the guest bathroom.”
“It’s a mirror.”
“One day, Lucas and I will pry it out of you. You should just make it easy on yourself and tell us what you see in the mirror.”
“I see,” I thought about it. “I see what you see.”
“For some reason, I doubt that very much,” Xavier ushered me out of the room.
Xavier had said body parts and I had expected an arm, maybe a set of legs. I was staring at six waterlogged extra-large duffle bags. Each sat on its own table. From what I understood, their recovery from the Missouri River had been difficult and one person was being treated for exposure and hypothermia.
The Missouri River is dirty, smelly, and unpleasant on good days. On bad days, it was dirty, smelly, unpleasant, and body parts bobbed to the surface and got stuck in the ice that formed near the edges. However, how ice formed anywhere in the river amazed me. There was actually a limit on the number of fish you could eat from it because of pollution.
Of course, it was a favorite dumping site for serial killers in Kansas City as well as other cities along its winding route. I wasn’t sure why the Missouri seemed to hide more bodies than the Mississippi, but it did.
Anything that spent any time in the water, smelled. It was a strange, dank, dirty, oppressive odor that smelled of fish, decay, and only the gods knew what else. The fact that the body parts were decomposing added to the aggressive odor that permeated the bags and filled my nostrils.
“Good grief,” Gabriel exclaimed as he entered the room behind us. “I thought the cold slowed decomp.”
“It does,” I answered. “That distinct aroma is from the water in the river. There’s a reason I would never swim in it as a child. Even then it reminded me more of sewage than water.”
“It isn’t that bad,” Xavier said.
“Your nose must be dead,” I answered.
“No, yours is just extra good.” Xavier countered. “Ok, let’s see what’s in the bags.”
Xavier opened the first bag. The arm he pulled out had definitely been in the water a while. The bag had protected it from the scavengers, but it had lost its color and sheen, making it appear waxy. There were marks all over it. Some were definitely human bite marks. I frowned.
By the time he emptied the bag, we had a head, torso, both arms, hands attached, both legs, sans feet, and an assembled body. However, saying we had a full body was incorrect. We had most of a full body. There were definitely some important pieces missing.
The first noticeable problem was that the torso had not only been cut above the waist, but it had been sliced open in front. All the organs were missing. The ribs and back had been cleaned, meaning the flesh and muscle was gone and bone was visible. The same was true of the thighs. The femurs were there, but only the ends had any tissue left.
Once you stopped noticing the very obvious missing chunks of the body, the smaller ones became apparent. Small and medium sized wounds covered the arms, legs, face, and torso. There seemed to be an equal number of human bites and bites from something larger.
Xavier and I exchanged looks. Neither of us said the “c” word out loud. Technically, people did bite others hard enough to take out chunks of flesh and spit it out. A famous boxer had done it with an ear during a match.
“What are the chances those were made postmortem?” Gabriel asked.
“Why bite someone that’s dead?” I asked.
“I’ll have to examine them,” Xavier said.
“How long?” Gabriel asked.
“A couple of hours,” Xavier answered.
“Quick estimate on how many bite marks are there?” Gabriel pressed.
“Human or other?” Xavier countered.
“Human,” Gabriel was staring at the corpse like it was going to get up and strangle him.
“Over sixty,” Xavier answered.
“That is a lot,” I frowned. “Why bite someone over sixty times?” As soon as the question popped out of my mouth, I wished I could shove it back in. I knew the answer. A fetish biter might bite over sixty times, but not all of them would remove chunks of flesh. That was hard on the jaws, unless you were used to eating raw meats. The average person takes 90 bites a day for their total meal intake. I didn’t know why I knew that, I just did. If the majority of your diet is raw meat, that’s where the most bites are going to come from. A human could live on meat alone, as long as it wasn’t rabbit. It wasn’t recommended, but a healthy human could provide a cannibal with a pretty good diet.
“Hey,” Xavier said, “this one didn’t have a crushed skull.” He pointed to the x-ray of the bag. His gloved fingers played over the decaying flesh.
“How’d he die?” Gabriel asked.
“I’m not Houdini, I can’t just make answers appear from thin air, I’m going to have to examine him,” Xavier snipped.
“Fine, call when the two of you find something,” Gabriel left. John practically ran over him as they both exited.
“Cannibal,” Xavier said to me.
“Eating is the only reason I can come up with for taking over sixty bites out of a single person.”
“Me too. On the flip side, he didn’t die of the bites. His throat was crushed.”
“Is that supposed to make it better or worse?”
“Better,” Xavier put on the goggles. “I can tell you now that some of these were post-mortem, but others, well, this kid was alive for them.”
“Of the six cannibal cases we’ve dealt with, none have eaten people raw. They’ve all cooked them, like food.”
“Yeah,” Xavier poked a rod into one of the larger holes. “So, I’m looking at these other marks and they are definitely not human. Who eats raw meat with an animal?”
“Maybe the human fed the leftovers to the animal.”
“I don’t think so,” Xavier looked at me. “This one, he was still alive when the creature bit him. Since some of the human bites took place after he died and some of the animal bites happened while he was alive...”
“They fed together,” I cringed as I finished Xavier’s sentence.
“Do you want to tell John over dinner or do you want me to do it?” Xavier gave a snort of laughter. Yes, we were still in the hazing phase with Poor John.