Chapter Five #5
“Yeah, the media was calling him The Grave Robber—or Digger. I can’t remember which,” Mac admitted.
“After it got some media traction, when the detective asked for help from the public, it stopped. The notes say that we watched the cemetery for a while, but this person didn’t return, and we didn’t have the resources for long-term surveillance. ”
She glanced over at Alex.
“Get me the name of the cemetery, and someone I can talk to. I want a full list of EVERYONE interred there. Even if it’s a long shot, we have to follow it.”
He nodded and headed out of the room.
Now, the detectives were curious.
“So, how do you find someone who is taking a dead person’s eyes? They didn’t kill them, so is it a crime?” Tora asked.
Corbin handled that one.
“It’s a crime. You can’t go digging up a body and mutilating it. By the way, if I go down, I’m totally getting cremated. Bet on that. We see some wild shit in this job. I’m not sticking around to be someone’s Halloween decoration.”
Chris laughed.
“Remind me to tell you all about a little case at a funhouse where the killer was decking the halls with corpses of dead victims, and we had to play that game. Spoiler, it wasn’t fun. One of us nearly drowned by the nut’s hand.”
She raised her own hand.
“I’m the one he nearly took out. It’s been a fever dream since that case. I swear it gets weirder every day.”
Yeah, Elizabeth could say that again.
As for being cremated, she was being planted next to Naomi in the burial grounds. Hopefully, the living would let her be when it was her time. If not, she was going full haunt on some asses.
Gene was curious.
“Are we passing this one back to the detectives?” he asked. “This isn’t really our thing. We deal with serial killers. This person isn’t likely killing them. By default, that’s not our problem, but the local law’s.”
She thought about it.
Chris was staring at her hopefully, and she knew why. Then, there was Tora, who looked disappointed she wasn’t going to get to work with her saviors.
On top of that, this case was piquing her curiosity, and she’d be lying if she said she wasn’t entertained by it. It took a lot to give her a case she hadn’t encountered before.
This was new.
But to keep jurisdiction…
This would be a dance.
Still, she was hella curious, so she made up her mind.
“We’re going to work it, but I have to go talk to the homicide captain first,” she said. “Technically, he doesn’t have to let us work this. If that little fact about the embalmed eyeballs gets back to him, he can yank it out from under us.”
Well, that would be their first step then.
“Tony?” she asked, turning around. “What can you tell me about the skulls? Give me something. Is there trauma on the skulls? Maybe this person killed those victims and went back later for the fun.”
Chris was by his side, and with him, Alexi, and Tony, they were carefully bagging up the eyeballs.
Tony picked up a skull.
“Adult, white, and female, and yeah, there’s trauma to the skull. I’m not an ME, so I can speculate that it was BFT.”
Chris sighed.
“Can we let me do my job?” he asked. “You know, as the actual ME?”
Tony held out the head and showed him what he saw. Then, Chris acquiesced.
“He’s right. I’d say blunt force trauma, too. The nut is out of control, but he’s good at what he does.”
That was the truth.
Well, if anything, Tony was good with the dead and their remains.
From where he stood, Mac was confused. It was all over his face.
Join.
The.
Club.
This case was ten pounds of crazy in a five-pound sack. That was for damn sure.
“How do you know the gender? I thought that was only by the pelvis.”
At the question, Tony went into teaching mode.
“That’s if you don’t have a skull. There are sexual dimorphic features that will give me the sex of a victim.
They are really pretty accurate. I was only wrong once.
We had a person of little stature who I once tagged as a child.
It threw the case off, and the lead investigator was a bitch about it. ”
Elizabeth cleared her throat.
Why?
That was her circus, and he was her crazy. She’d been the one dealing with that whole mess, and it had been anything but fun.
“If you say ‘dwarf’ or anything else derogatory, Anthony, I’m sending you to HR. It took years to break you of that—mostly.”
He laughed.
“I said ‘person of little stature’. I learned my lesson.”
Uh-huh.
Somehow, she doubted that.
God knew what bounced around in his head. Elizabeth didn’t want to know on a good day.
Today wasn’t a good day.
As he stood there, Mac was curious.
“Really? Can you tell us the markers?” he asked Tony, wanting to soak it all in like a sponge. Who knew if they’d get another chance to work with the FBI.
Tony turned the skull over in his hands, and he shared what he knew. If anyone could nail the gender of a skull, it was him. Elizabeth trusted him.
Completely.
Well, not completely.
Tony made questionable choices.
“The overall size is much smaller with this skull than with a normal male skull. Look at yourself and your partner, Detective. Your head is bigger. This one is smaller. The less prominent brow ridges say female. We owe those to our caveman ancestors.”
Mac was fascinated.
“Then, you can look at the eye orbits, and get a good guess. In this case, I’m sticking with white female. The suture lines of the skull say an adult.”
Chris held out another skull, and it was fairly similar. So, he let Tony do his thing.
Why steal his thunder on this one?
“Chris has a white female adult skull, too.”
When Alexi held one out, he didn’t wait for Tony, but instead shared what he saw.
“This is going to be a mixed-race female. There are markers for African American ancestry, but there are the wide orbits of the eyes.”
Tony gasped.
“He’s right! Hey! Back off the bones, buddy!”
Alexi shrugged.
“My brother is an anthropologist. If I had a dollar for all the times he talked skulls, I’d be rich. He lives this kind of a thing.”
Tony still eyed him up, suspiciously.
He didn’t like the man.
There was something about him that rubbed him the wrong way. It was probably that his bestie was eyeing Alexi up like he was the next coming of Jesus.
Well, if there was a coming.
Or Jesus.
Because she was the ringleader and had to keep this in control, Elizabeth went there.
She was just grateful they had something.
“Christopher, I need DNA on all of the eyeballs. I’m going to need to get victim names. I’ll talk to the homicide captain, and discuss that this person is taking eyes and heads.”
She looked over at Ethan.
“He’s taking heads, right? Or is this something else, because I’m already behind the eight ball on this one, and I’m an hour into this case?”
Blackhawk stared at his wife as he thought about it, trying to figure out a way to see if this correlated.
Meanwhile, Chris turned the one over, and he checked the neck where the vertebrae had been attached. There were chips to the bone.
While he didn’t like ‘guessing’ or speculating, he would give his wife what he could to ensure she was safe.
“The head was violently removed. Whatever tool was used shook the head, and caused small marks in the bone. I’d say cut off, but without the vertebra, there’s no way to tell for certain. Find us vertebra and I’ll give you a definite answer.”
That didn’t seem like it was happening unless the cuckoo fairy went further off the reservation on this one.
So, with his assessment…
Yeah, she was good with that.
“We have to figure out ID, and then, we’ll go from there. If they were just dug up, we have desecration of a corpse. We’ll let the detectives run it. We’ll monitor.”
Ethan was staring at a chair.
“EJ, did you hear me?”
He looked over, thinking he had a way to prove that this killer wasn’t just harvesting eyeballs, but also heads.
“Sorry, I was working on the profile, and thought about something. Do we have a black light?” he asked. “I need to check something.”
Uh, okay.
Well, whatever her profiler needed, if it would give her a clearer picture, he was getting it.
Hell!
If he asked for a trampoline and a trombone at this point, she’d make it happen.
When Chris called for Benjamin, and told him what he needed, it didn’t take the man long to bring everything they required to do this.
It was going to be a process.
“Give me a second to black out the windows,” Ben said, as he and techs put up screens to do just that.
It didn’t take long.
Then, he was ready.
“What do you want me to check?” he asked, focusing on Elizabeth.
She deferred this to her husband.
Willingly.
Ethan pointed.
“Start with the chair, and what’s around it. Then, I want you to spread out. Check the jars, and the skulls.”
The room was dark now, thanks to the screens, and Ben started the light.
With the first sweep over the chair, they had their answer.
Like he suspected, the chair glowed like the Fourth of July. Someone was shooting off something, and it wasn’t fireworks.
“We have semen,” he admitted. “Someone was jerking off pretty hard,” he said.
Elizabeth stared at Ben.
“Scan. Don’t commentate. We’ve all worked crime scenes. We know what was painted, and with what.”
God.
She missed Chrissy.
How Chris was dealing with babysitting this bunch was beyond her. He had to be exhausted. She was, and she only had to deal with the lab techs a little. Chris spent his whole day surrounded by grown children.
He kept going and the closer he got to the shelves, the less fluid trace there was.
“So he sat in the chair, staring at the collection, and jerked off?” Tora asked. “That’s his second hobby, post-stealing heads and eyeballs?”
Blackhawk went there.
“Yes,” Ethan said.
Oh, he already suspected more. The jerking off gave this a different angle, and that sexual affliction told him one thing.
Perverts had to pervert.
With his acknowledgement, Elizabeth knew what that meant.
In fact, she sighed.
Oh, and it was an exasperated one, too. This circus was about to get wilder. Someone was sending in the clowns.
BIG.
TIME.
“What?” Corbin asked.
He was new to serial killers, and if he was honest, this team got the weird ones. Yeah, he’d worked under Gene and Ethan, but when they left, he handled good, old-fashioned killings.
This was NOT one of those.
Elizabeth explained.
This was going to suck.
“The killer views the collection as sexual,” she said. “It’s going to be tied to his masculinity. The second we touch this collection, and remove it, the person is going to spiral. Not only did we steal his collection, but we incapacitated his sexual gratification.”
Ethan was saying nothing.
He was weighing it all in his head, and his wife was right. She’d nailed that. This made it even more difficult, and that was always problematic.
ALWAYS.
“Hit the skulls,” Gene said, curiously. “Let’s see if he’s gotten handsy with them, while getting handsy with himself. If he did, Elizabeth’s right.”
Ben headed that way, and when he shined the light on them, they were clean.
The outside.
Because this wasn’t his first case with a crazy at the helm, Chris went there.
“We can see that the jaw has been wired to the upper jaw, so the killer wanted them intact for a reason. Now do the underside of the skull. You know, where the back of the throat would be.”
He did as he asked as Tony flipped the one victim’s head over. It lit up like the chair had.
And she knew.
“He’s using the head as a masturbatory aid?” Elizabeth asked, horrified. “Dick on bone? That can’t be comfy.”
All the men cringed.
Someone liked some pain to get off.
Ethan nodded.
“If he’s doing that, he’s likely committing necrophilia, too. In fact, I’d bet on it,” Ethan said. “We need to find the owners of the heads, and eyes, and then, we need to have them exhumed. Buckle up. This is about to get weird.”
Well, holy shit.
Why the hell wasn’t she surprised?
* * * The Blackhawk Family * * *
Nearby
Watching
Oh, he was very unhappy.
Someone had made a huge mistake, and they were now all over his collection.
He could see them blocking off the building.
This wouldn’t do.
Not.
At.
All.
Now, he needed to regroup, and think about this. All of his years of work were now lost because there was no way he’d get all of their precious eyes back.
Shit.
That meant he was going to have to start a new collection.
And he didn’t like that.
Not.
At.
All.
Oh, defiling what was his pissed him off, and he was just smart enough to get revenge.
Before this was over, The Grave Robber would have the last laugh.
They’d gone too far.
This insulted him.
To his core.