Buried Dreams: Dreams and Reality, #18

Along Came Jones

J ones, I expect you to put some effort into your work today. Real effort, not this half-assed nonsense that you’ve been doing lately. Edgar Mulligan said in a stern voice. Another incident like the one last week and you’re gone, do you understand?

Yes, sir, won’t happen again, Mike Jones replied, pushing hair out of his eyes. He wanted to tell Mulligan to shove it where the sun didn’t shine and protest that last week wasn’t his fault. He hated this job; it was morbid, people looked down on him for it, but he needed the money.

Being a gravedigger paid well, especially in a cemetery this size, and just two weeks ago Robin had won a larger monthly alimony settlement, because through no fault of his own, her living situation had changed. His lawyer filed an appeal, but it could be a month or more before it was heard.

The previous week Mike and his partner, Nick Young, had been preparing two plots next to each other for the internment of a couple. Mike was running the backhoe, and he’d picked up a bucketful of dirt and dumped it off to the side when Nick started stuttering and spluttering. Mike looked and on the very top of the heap was a skull. Except there wasn’t a grave where they were digging, or at least there wasn’t supposed to be. Investigators had been brought in, an old wooden coffin was found. The coffin showed signs of collapse, as all coffins eventually do; Mike had torn into it with the backhoe, somehow managing to pick up just the head.

A coroner and an archaeologist were forced to come out and examine the unmarked grave. The coroner said that the head was already detached from the body in the coffin before the backhoe brought it up. The archaeologist said the burial matched other vampiric burial sites found in the northeast. It was the first one found in Tennessee, and the archaeologist assured everyone it wasn’t recent. They suspected it dated back to the mid-1800s when the northeast was going through a vampire scare. The cemetery had been in continuous operation since 1851, and more than 25,000 bodies had been interred.

Mike Jones didn’t know or care about the vampire scare of the 1800s. He just wanted to do his job, get paid, and go get a beer afterward. The burial plots that he‘d been digging had to be moved because of the investigation, so he and Nick moved to another part of the cemetery to get the plots ready for the car crash victims they were supposed to be burying while the doctors sorted out why the suspected vampire was buried where it was.

Nick had gone home and used Google to find out about suspected vampire burials from the 1800s in the United States. Mike had gone to the bar and put away a few cold beers. Mike knew Nick went home and researched suspected vampire burials, because the next day Nick had told him all about how they removed the headstones from suspected vampires after digging them up, cutting off their heads, and arranging their arm bones across their chests.

Mike had nodded to show he was listening, but truthfully, that was some dark shit, and he didn’t want to hear it. But he couldn’t really tell Nick to screw off with his newfound facts. Nick was Mike’s friend, even if the two didn’t have much in common. Nick helped him out a few times when he’d really needed it, including helping him get this job.

Mike had suffered a head injury at his previous job as a heavy equipment operator at a construction company, and it left him physically unable to operate some of the equipment. Partially because he couldn’t remember how, and partially because he didn’t care enough about his fellow workers to practice safety. He’d been fired after hitting a guy with the bucket of the backhoe because he didn’t want to wait for the guy to move out of his way.

When Robin accused Mike of sexually abusing one of their two daughters and of beating her when he drank, he’d been fired from that job. Then he’d gotten a job laying carpet. It wasn’t his dream job; he much preferred operating heavy equipment to spending the day on his knees installing carpet. But that crazy bitch wouldn’t leave him alone, and just weeks after landing that job, Robin had written a letter to the company managers telling them Mike had broken into the house and raped her on two separate occasions, and did they really feel comfortable sending a guy with a history of violence against women into women’s houses to install carpet? Mike had been fired again, and when he’d gotten yet another job, Robin repeated her accusations and got him fired yet again.

This all started when Robin called Mike one night awhile back and invited him over for dinner. After some beer and wine, the two had hooked up one last time for old time’s sake. It was this incident that Robin was claiming was forced and resulted in pregnancy, so now he had to pay her even more money.

Mike tried not to frown as he looked at the work list Edgar Mulligan had given Nick Young. Most grave digging happened in the evening or very early morning, when the cemetery wasn’t full of people visiting their dead relatives, but despite this being the largest cemetery in Nashville, they didn’t have a grave to dig every day. When Nick and Mike weren’t on digger duty, they were basically glorified handymen who kept the cemetery looking nice. Today’s list included resetting a headstone.

There had been a ton of rain the past two months, which had caused flooding in parts of ten different states. This was also the only cemetery in Nashville that did not require people to use flush plaque headstones. It still allowed huge, decorative, monument-type headstones, and sometimes these fell over when the dirt in the grave settled.

One of these alabaster monstrosities had toppled during the night after they’d received another three inches of rain. Replacing headstones were tough and dangerous. Mike inwardly groaned. The other items were basically easy tasks; open the cremation mausoleum to place two urns, attach plaques to their spots, seal them up.

The cemetery handled about five different types of burials a week. These days cremation was very popular, and to accommodate it, the cemetery officials had built a large mausoleum for cremation urns. It was basically a huge room with extra walls, and in the walls were cubby holes with perfectly fitted blocks. When an urn was placed, the block was sealed in place with mortar and a plaque with the person’s name and any other desired information attached to the block. Each one would take maybe a half an hour.

This cemetery had a funeral home associated with it, but it took burials from all the funeral homes in town as long as the family was willing to pay for the plot. Tennessee did not have any laws governing what a person did with cremains and it wasn’t uncommon for people to show up with urns full of ashes belonging to the long dead that they found in a relative’s house after that relative passed away, and now they wanted the urn interred because they didn’t know what else to do with it. Mike had recently put an urn plaque up for a guy who died in the 1920s, whose urn had been found in the attic of a recently deceased grandparent. It was a bit of a game among the workers regarding who had interred the longest-dead person. Mike was in second place with the 1920s urn, another guy, Bart, was in first with an urn marked 1917.

One

W e are taking over a case from the FBI, Gabriel said after we all sat down at our conference table in the sub, sub, subbasement of the Federal Guard Neighborhood building where our offices were now located It’s not quite in our wheelhouse, but everyone who’s looked at the case agrees they are all dead and we just haven’t found the bodies.

Intriguing, I mumbled.

Over the course of the last three months, 17 women have gone missing in Nashville, Tennessee. They all look similar, and they were all seen for the last time leaving different area bars. Only two bodies have shown up, and if it is a single offender like the FBI thinks, he’s getting bolder. Gabriel passed folders down to each of us that had the FBI logo stamped on them. I opened it expecting to see a police report on the first page and was instead surprised to find a summary. All the women were in their twenties, all brunettes, some more natural than others, with spotted histories of drug abuse, alcoholism, prostitution, mental illnesses, and promiscuity. I held the unpopular opinion that prostitution was a necessary part of civilization and that society’s ostracization of the practice and the participants made society morally responsible for their status as good victims.

Did they send it to us because it’s a hard case and involves prostitutes? Fiona asked, shooting me a quick glance.

Yes and no. Yes, it’s a difficult case. Yes, it does involve murdered prostitutes, and everyone is fully aware that if Aislinn Cain has a soft spot for any specific type of victim, it’s prostitutes. But mostly, they just don’t know what to do with it. They have been theorizing it’s a sexual sadist, but the two bodies that have been found did not show signs of sexual activity or sadism. The FBI did try to insist on a liaison for the case, but our governing board nixed it since neither Lucas nor Ace play nicely with FBI profilers, so it is solely our case. I won’t lie, the FBI is kind of hoping we crash and burn with it and don’t make much more progress than they did, so they can redeem themselves a bit in the tracking down serial killers department.

Well, you don’t kill prostitutes unless there’s a sexual component or you’re on a mission from some divine power to eliminate sinners, Lucas said. However, if it was the latter, we’d be finding religious overtones at the body dumps and possibly with the bodies. I would expect them to have crucifixes branded on them or something, and we don’t see that.

The kills are almost sterile, I said, flipping the page to look at a picture of one of the recovered bodies. There’s no blood, no bruising, nothing like what I expect to find with a serial killer. Are we sure they didn’t just overdose and get dumped by a john after they were dead?

Tox screens show that while most were actively using drugs, they hadn’t in the hours prior to their deaths, Gabriel said.

Meaning he also isn’t using drugs to kill or subdue them. How is he killing them? Xavier asked.

That is a good question, Gabriel responded. The hyoid isn’t broken in either victim, so probably not strangulation, but there is petechia. The petechia indicates asphyxiation, but both coroners said they would expect bruising around the necks, mouths, or throats of the victims or fibers in the throat that don’t belong. They aren’t finding that. Their conclusion has been positional asphyxiation, which we all know just means they don’t know how it’s being done.

I’ve seen one case of positional asphyxiation in my career, and there were indicators that the person had indeed gotten into a position that didn’t allow them to breathe. I found bruising on the chest and buttocks. Eventually, we learned she’d been locked in a cedar hope chest and left to suffocate. Since she was bigger than the box, her knees were stuck in her chest, hence the bruising. Her buttocks and lower back were pressed very hard for a long time against the back of the box that held her. Although, I will admit, we could never determine if her position eventually made it impossible to breathe, which was possible, or if she just ran out of usable oxygen in the hope chest, which was also quite possible. Worldwide there are maybe 15 cases a year of positional asphyxiation—most of them involve hanging upside down. The blood freely flows into the upper part of the torso, putting extra stress on the heart and lungs. However, that too leaves signs because there are some blood flow issues occurring in the feet and legs of the person it’s happening to, Xavier said.

All I can tell you is that you can go back over the bodies and decide if you see evidence of them hanging upside down when we get there. Nothing like that was noted on either coroner’s report, though, Gabriel said. We literally only have two bodies, which is why I said it’s a little out of our wheelhouse. Normally, Xavier has at least a handful of victims he can take apart and look at while Ace and Lucas use those victims to evaluate the killer’s mindset. Here, all we have are similar missing persons cases, unless by some miracle we find these bodies.

I hate to be that person, but what if the FBI is wrong, and it’s not a single individual? Maybe they only found two bodies because the murderer isn’t responsible for more than these two bodies, and the other missing persons are unconnected, I said.

Who are you trying to kid? You love to be that person, Fiona said. Since I started with the SCTU, you are always the person that trots out the least likely scenario and least likely killer. Oh, acid is like poison, I bet it‘s a woman. Oh, this victim was killed a lot different from that victim, it must be two killers. Fiona commented matter-of-factly. There was no sarcasm in her voice whatsoever, she was just being straightforward, as is typical of Fiona.

You’re right, I am that person. I agreed after a moment. This is probably not a woman. Contrary to what pop culture would have you believe, most prostitutes either service male clients or female clients; they don’t just flip-flop based on who is offering them the money. Twenty-something females working in Nashville are going to service the most populous type of client; men in their thirties and forties who are unsatisfied with their world.

Why do you say that? Xavier asked.

Because these women are pretty, Lucas answered for me.  

Prostitutes are usually average in looks, Fiona stated. They aren’t the homecoming queens or the runners-up. They are the girls who had boyfriends, but never won any real notice for their looks. These girls, though, they could be beautiful, meaning they aren’t street hookers. They are escorts, either working for madams or for themselves. They aren’t standing on corners giving half their earnings to thuggish pimps.

In a city like Nashville where there is a huge division in incomes, escorts make sense, I said. But escorts aren’t giving hand jobs for ten bucks in the front seat of a car, unlike the street hookers, so how is he paying for them?

Another thing to consider is these women weren’t on dates when they went missing; they were out for a night on the town with friends. Does he know, then, that they are escorts? Furthermore, it suggests he’s a good-looking guy, probably well groomed, because these girls are not accepting rides from men who look like the Unabomber or men who are ugly; unless he’s a rideshare driver, but there’s no evidence of them contacting a taxi or rideshare before they went missing, Lucas said.

‘Good-looking gals are suggestive of a good-looking male offender, which is why the FBI is convinced the murders are sexual in nature, Gabriel said. Furthermore, he isn’t picking them up in the bars, which is also weird. Three girls left with friends and then just vanished between leaving the bar and the next morning, when people were trying to get in contact with them.

We’re going to stick with this whole one-serial-killer theory, huh? I asked.

For now, yes, Gabriel said.

I don’t see evidence of a partnership, Lucas answered.

I didn’t mean a partnership. We’ve run into overlapping serial killers in the past. Before the organized events in Los Angeles 20-plus years ago and now, there have been as many as six serial killers working in a single population at one time, like we found in Detroit a handful of years ago. Why can’t something like that have happened again? I pressed.

My biggest argument against that theory right now is that if that were the case, we’d be seeing street hookers mixed in with our escorts, Lucas replied. He had a point, but I didn’t concede it. It didn’t help that from what I could tell by my limited reading, none of these girls were full time escorts—12 had only dabbled in it, one was working it as a full-time job, and another had only started talking about trying it out because she needed to pay off student loans faster than she was going to by just waitressing. The other five had never been arrested for prostitution and had never mentioned to friends or family that they might be participating or interested in participating in sex work. Who knew, maybe that was the divider for two serials, one that only took escorts and one that didn’t take escorts. Or maybe I just wanted the challenge of overlapping serial killers.

Finish reading on the plane, Gabriel said. Bravo team is in California working the Peninsula murders, which means they are out of our way on this case. Our last case had been in Pennsylvania, and Malachi’s team had ended up being dispatched to Ohio. While these are separate states and should be far away from each other, we’d found ourselves bumping into them. We were investigating ricin poisonings, and they were investigating kidnapping murders; and yet somehow, one of their victims turned out to be related to one of our victims and things had gotten messy, as things always do when Malachi is around.

The flight between Kansas City, Missouri, and Nashville, Tennessee isn’t that long. While most of the country couldn’t place either Missouri or Tennessee on a map, the two states actually touch, albeit Tennessee was on the opposite side of Missouri from Kansas City. I will never forget when I was in college at the University of Michigan, a classmate had asked me where I was from. When I’d said Missouri, she’d asked if that was in Europe. After some explanation of where Missouri was located in the US, I learned she had grown up in Springfield, Illinois, which was literally less than 100 miles from the Missouri/Illinois border. Her amazement when she’d learned the two states touched still stunned me all these years later.

We were in the air less than an hour and a half. A government issue black SUV with overly dark tinted windows was waiting for us upon arrival. Unlike the FBI, the vehicle plates on US Marshal SUVs simply listed it as a government vehicle and did not identify what division it belonged to. FBI SUVs had plates that said US Government - Federal Bureau of Investigation. Even Homeland Security plates identified their vehicles as belonging to Homeland Security. However, the US Marshals were always supposed to be incognito, so we didn’t have our division identifiers on our vehicles. Having said that, every worker at the airport and everyone outside it near the fence knew we were US Marshals, as the woman that handed Gabriel the keys was wearing one of our signature dark windbreakers emblazoned with the words US Marshals, and at least for the moment, the rest of us were also wearing our US Marshals jackets; some of us were even wearing the matching caps. We were expected to dress in street clothes while investigating, but the jackets and hats were required wear for takedowns. Fiona’s travel bag was also branded with US Marshals on the side. My US Marshals duffle bag had caught fire in Pittsburgh and I hadn’t yet replaced it, so my duffel bag today was dark purple with the words Crown Royal on it. I didn’t have the foggiest idea where I’d gotten it, it had just appeared among my stuff after my old one burned up.

I adjusted my hat in the mirror-finish of the back passenger’s side window. When Gabriel had called me five hours ago to tell me we had a case, I’d been in the middle of the great hair debate. Could something be done with it or did it just need to go up? I’d been on hormone injections for three weeks at this point, preparing to donate eggs to Lucas and Trevor’s baby-making cause. This was our second attempt at them, we’d started them once over the summer, but due to headaches and an increase in swearing and feeling, we’d stopped for two months and restarted them in the fall. Xavier had recommended I take off for the entire duration of the shots this time, but if I had to sit at home and deal with my hormones for six full weeks, I’d become the next serial killer wanted by the SCTU. I was starting to feel moody, and sometimes a bit irrational. I wasn’t sure which bothered me more; they were both awful. It had caused me to do some serious thinking.

First, I didn’t know why women had sex to begin with. Add to it the hormones associated with trying to get pregnant, and well, humanity should have gone extinct eons ago. I found women like my mom, who had done this four times, completely mind boggling. She even told me she enjoyed being pregnant, convincing me that my mother was a sado-masochistic lunatic. I was no longer surprised Kenzie hadn’t handled giving birth well. I was only doing injections for six weeks. If I had to be pregnant and give birth, I’d end up with psychosis too. I found it more surprising that more women didn’t turn into psychopaths during pregnancy and immediately after birth. I was having moments when I wanted to shave my head, followed by moments where I plotted out the death of some random person that had bumped my cart in the grocery store six months ago, and all of those were followed by moments where I’d see a dog outside that looked lonely and then cry for three solid hours. I’d cried myself to sleep the night before because some commercial on TV had shown a girl make friends for the first time over s’mores. I’d had to have popcorn covered in chocolate syrup and marshmallow fluff before I going to bed to cry myself to sleep. Yes, even without serial humanity should have gone extinct eons ago.

You’re crying, Lucas said to me, and I suddenly blinked and found tears on my eyelashes. What was I crying about? Possibly that ridiculous commercial or my hair in a ponytail tucked under my hat or maybe one of my legs was longer than the other.

This is your fault, I said to him.

We appreciate it more than you’ll ever know. He smiled and opened the door for me.

Ace, are you sure you don’t want to take some vacation time? he asked as I got into the vehicle.

If I stay at home, I’ll eat more s’mores popcorn and binge-watch baking shows, I told him. Then I won’t be able to come back to work because I won’t be able to pass the required physical for my return. It had been decided that because I worked for the SCTU and was doing hormone treatments for fertility, I would be required to pass the same physical as US Marshals returning from maternity leave after my treatment was over. The treatments were super doses of hormones to ready my eggs for release, or in my case, harvesting. It was more intense than birth control, but less intense than actual pregnancy. However, from what Xavier could find, I was the first psychopathic female to undergo the treatments. As such, we hadn’t been sure if I’d have any side effects or what they might be. Three days into this set of injections, I’d become a train wreck. To my horror, I was again feeling on a much deeper level more often. I still wasn’t feeling sympathy or empathy, but all the emotions I normally felt, I was feeling much stronger than normal and I hated it. It made me really appreciate my normal lack of deep emotions.

Two

We drove to the motel from the airport. Gabriel pulled into the parking lot and stopped but didn’t park, and none of us got out. There was broken glass over much of the parking lot. Several of the exterior rooms’ doors appeared to be broken. There was an outdoor pool surrounded by a broken-down fence, and on the concrete between the pool and the fence we could see drug paraphernalia lying around.

Enough is enough, if you don’t apologize to Gretchen so she’ll stop booking our reservations in places where we are sure to get killed, I’m going to quit! Gabriel said.

Who? I asked.

You! Gabriel snipped.

What did I do? Who is Gretchen?

I think that is the most succinct way ever to sum up our problem with travel, Fiona quipped.

I really don’t know who Gretchen is or what I did to her.

Gretchen is the assistant that handles all travel arrangements for the SCTU. If we didn’t have our own personal plane, we’d probably be put as standbys on overcrowded flights every time we had to travel.

I’ve met this woman in person? I asked.

Yes, before we traveled to Anchorage to capture the guy skinning women alive, Xavier said. She was wearing a black suit with a pink undershirt. She came by our offices to give us our warm-weather gear.

The woman who brought me the blindingly bright yellow ski suit?

Yes, that’s Gretchen.

What did I do to her? I asked.

If I remember correctly, you said if someone were to put your dead body in that hideous thing you’d come back and haunt her family until the line died out and there was no way you were going to step into it while alive and she should have more common sense. Since then, she’s been punishing all of us by putting us in terrible motels.

Oh, I don’t remember saying that. To my credit, I really didn’t remember saying it, but I believed that I had. I hated the color yellow, and it brought out the worst in me. How do I apologize for that? I mean, obviously, it hurt her feelings if that’s why we keep getting stuck in terrible motels, but why did it hurt her feelings and how do I fix it?

Good grief, Fiona said. She was digging around in her bag and pulled out her phone. I’m not staying here, and I don’t think Ace is even remotely capable of mending that fence in the amount of time we need it mended, so I will find us another hotel, one that doesn’t have drug dealers living in it full time.

When we get back to Kansas City, I will arrange a meeting for you and Gretchen with supervision and you will give her a heartfelt apology for being an abusive jerk, Gabriel told me.

We should wait until I finish these shots, I told him.

Nope, your tears, even if they are over ice cream and hormones and not this problem, might help your cause, Lucas said.

I can’t believe you said you’d haunt her family until they all died out, Fiona said. Well, let me clarify, I believe you think things like that often enough, but the fact that you said it out loud to someone blows me away. Oh my, I’ve gotten used to your psychopathic side.

Eventually, it happens. In people who are co-dependent and in a relationship with a psychopath, it’s a problem when the antisocial psychopathic side becomes normalized, Lucas said. Thankfully, to work for the SCTU, co-dependency isn’t an option, and neither is having a truly submissive personality. Which means when we become normalized to it, it isn’t a big deal.

Good to know, Fiona and I both said at the same time.

Thirty minutes later we were pulling into the parking lot of a LaQuinta in a touristy section of town. I figured our SCTU jackets would get some looks, but most people were surprisingly polite about them. Of course, Gabriel had told the person on the phone who we were and that we were in town for work. Gabriel pulled up under the awning and I grabbed my red duffel bag and jumped from the vehicle as soon as I heard it click into park.

Once upon a time, the more paranoid version of me believed my scars were what people stared at when we arrived at a job. However, Fiona’s presence had dispelled that. She didn’t have near the scars I did and people were just as likely to stare at her as they were me. I finally figured out it was the idea that this petite woman was wearing a jacket that proclaimed her main job in life was to