Chapter 2
TWO
Liam
“It’s this weird thing, where you want Liam on your team because you want to win but you also don’t want to be anywhere near him,” Matthew comments like I’m not standing one foot away from him.
We’ve finally finished the remaining activities and are close to getting to the best part and the only part I care about: eating. But before that, we’ve been instructed to line up and wait for Alana to finish speaking with someone and give us our little pep talk at the end.
I slowly slide my arm around Matthew’s neck, very much in a “You’re my best bud” way, but with slight pressure to inform him that I could cut off his source of life with ease.
“Jesse… Jesse, please save me,” Matthew says.
Jesse eyes the situation. “I just… I really want to, but I need Liam’s help on an exam, and I don’t want to get on his bad side.”
“Everyone in life is on his bad side!” Matthew objects. “There’s not a single person who is on his good side besides Gabriel.”
“That’s because Gabriel was birthed from the womb of perfection,” I declare… rather loudly judging by the way Alana, who’s just stepped to the front of the room, looks at me.
“Let’s give ourselves another round of applause,” she says, quickly overcoming the fact that she can never be as perfect as Gabriel.
“You all did a fantastic job today! I saw the way you were all willing to work together to accomplish what you needed to do. I’m very proud of all of you and you should be proud of yourselves. ”
“I’m proud of you, Matthew,” I say as I squeeze his neck just a little more.
“Careful or you’ll make his neck even longer,” Jesse tells me.
Matthew’s head snaps around to look at him. “You told me my neck wasn’t long!”
Jesse just laughs and pats his shoulder. “I’m teasing. I stopped growing in middle school, so I have to get my kicks somehow. You could be like Liam, who has absolutely no excuse for his personality. He has the looks, the smarts, and the athleticism, but still…”
“Gabriel, Jesse is flirting with me. I feel gross inside,” I cry.
“Gross my ass!” he says as he tries to get me in some kind of headlock like I have Matthew in.
This is when I catch Michaels’ eyes and can tell that he’s strangely nowhere near as amused when the chief of police waltzes in to check to see how things are going and sees the three of us in some kind of tango.
Honestly, we should just commend Alana for how close she got us over the span of the last couple of hours.
I come to the conclusion that Chief Taylor is merely jealous that she doesn’t get to be squeezed between two men while choking one of them—that part is the most important part of it—because she pretends to see none of this.
“How did things go?” Chief Taylor asks.
“Excellent! We had teams that just worked flawlessly together,” Alana says as she waves at some team that is oddly not ours. “And teams that were very inventive.” She looks at us then decides not to wave at us at all, as though she’d prefer not to draw attention to us.
“Liam, please don’t choke Matthew. You shouldn’t choke your friends,” Gabriel says, so I’m grudgingly forced to let go of him.
Michaels’ phone rings and he answers it before drawing still.
We are supposed to be rewarded with a good lunch, but I have a feeling that an unlucky group is about to be forced to skip it.
I make sure to avoid eye contact like I did in school when I didn’t want to read out loud in the hope that Michaels won’t pick me.
But karma is a bitch and Michaels beelines right over to us.
“Paige, you’re needed. Hyde, Nye, and Fields, go along too,” he says.
“Is he sending off his favorites or the ones he’s tired of looking at?” I muse.
“Definitely the latter,” Gabriel determines. “I’m a favorite, for sure, but as your partner, I’m given no choice but to go along with you.”
“I can smell the food from here,” I say, staring longingly at it while we’re ushered out.
“I’ll eat it all for you,” Jesse promises us as we head out.
“Sometimes I feel like I would like to toss his tiny body and see how far it goes. Like a paper airplane,” I state. “Matthew would like to throw his body in a whole different way. Like onto a bed.”
“I do not… I mean… I am… a strong man… who controls my urges,” Matthew says.
“What about you, Chris? Have you cried on any ladies lately?” I ask.
“I save my tears for you, Liam,” Chris says. “All for you.”
“Gabriel, don’t be jealous, I’m surrounded by men who are all flirting with me.”
“Trust me, I’m not,” he promises me.
Chris and Matthew drive in a separate car, in case one pair of us ends up staying longer at the scene.
“So… a pet crematorium,” I say as I head toward the address I’d been given. “Interesting place to dispose of a body.”
“How do you think it works? I know they bag the pets after their death… so do they check the animal before cremating it?” Gabriel wonders.
“I don’t know,” I realize as I pull up to the place. “I feel like we’re about to find out.”
We park the car and head inside where we’re immediately greeted by an older man who looks more than a little stressed out.
For a man who deals with dead bodies on the daily, you’d think he’d have a better handle on something like this, but Gabriel has informed me that most people do not have a handle on finding dead bodies like I do.
Matthew and Chris come in behind us as we walk up to the man and introduce ourselves.
“I’m Detective Hyde, and we have Detectives Paige, Nye, and Fields.”
“I’m Daryl and my son Jerry is around here somewhere,” he says before a man in his forties steps into the room who has a striking resemblance to the man who is talking to us. “R-Right this way.”
“Can you tell us what happened?” Gabriel asks as we follow the two men.
Daryl responds, “My son was handling the cremations from this morning’s pickup.
We got one from the zoo that was sent to be cremated.
Generally, if it’s something exotic, they have to watch us cremate it, but they didn’t require it this time.
So we picked it up like we would pick up any animal from the vets, but what he found inside… ”
Jerry looks back at us. “To be ultra safe, we usually open the bag just enough to check the animal with the tag. Very rarely do tags ever get switched, but I would hate to send the wrong ashes back. So I opened the bag and the dog’s back was facing me, but something just…
it felt off when I grabbed it, you know?
I don’t know. I guess after doing this for years, you get a feel for things.
Like… if it was someone’s pet, I’d have assumed it was a toy in the bag or something they tucked in between their legs or maybe even some type of tumor, but the zoo doesn’t do stuff like that. I pulled the bag up and…”
He gestures toward the cart that’s holding the bag. I pull my gloves on and walk up to the cart before tugging the bag open enough to see inside. The animal looks like an African wild dog, and between his legs is a head… a human head.
“Huh,” I say. “They almost got away with it too. Once it was inside there, no one would be any the wiser.” I eye the furnace and realize how close this person came to getting away with hiding the murder.
Since it was an animal from the zoo, he really didn’t need to check the bag.
I have my doubts they ask for the ashes back, so if Jerry hadn’t been so meticulous, the head would have burned up without a single person noticing.
I examine the head, immediately drawn to the cut that’d severed the head from the neck as I realize how perfect the cut was.
Someone knew what they were doing, and there don’t appear to be any jagged lines, telling me that the tool they used was extremely sharp.
The head once belonged to a Caucasian male with short brown hair and a trimmed beard.
He appears to have been in his thirties, though age can sometimes be hard to tell.
There’s no sign of decomposition, but the head seems to have been placed in a freezer.
“How often do you pick up animals from the zoo?” I ask.
“Places like vet clinics, we go once or twice a week, but the zoo generally doesn’t have that many dying animals, so we’ll pick up whenever they need us to,” Jerry says.
I nod. “Did you get any other animals from the zoo in the past week?”
“A couple of birds we cremated earlier in the week, but their bags were so small I would have noticed something off by feel or weight,” he assures me. “Birds are extremely light.”
“How long have you had this animal?” Chris asks.
“Received it today. The zoo doesn’t like animals to sit.
There are some strange people out there that could take the body of an exotic animal for its pelt or horn or whatever it is that piques their interest. So we make it a priority to cremate either with them watching or right away if they release the animal without someone observing. ”
“The head is frozen, so it’s not likely that someone popped it in on the way over here,” Matthew says.
“Nah, whoever added it did it at the zoo.” I stare at the head, wondering what tales it could tell me. I bet it’d be interesting, whatever it is. “Let’s see if we can get an ID on the man.”
I roll the head over to check for any signs of what killed him because the head had to have been removed after death.
There’s no cut this clean on a person who is alive and reactive.
He has some blunt trauma to the back of his head but I’m not yet convinced it’s the reason for his death.
There’s something off about the head, but it’s hard to tell why when he’s been crammed in the freezer and in a bag with a dead dog that’d had a necropsy.
“Have you told anyone else about this?” Matthew asks.
“No, we called the police immediately,” Jerry says.