“One victim, twenty-three, Monique Gaspirini. She’s, well, what’s left of her is upstairs in the bedroom. Let’s head up there.”
They followed her through the house, forensics giving them some booties and latex gloves to put on. There were masks as well and everyone coming down the stairs were wearing them, but Gunn and Stanton declined.
As they walked past the kitchen, Stanton looked over and saw one of the techs taking photos of a frying pan that was on the burner. Something was in the pan and he stopped and looked more closely: it was a human heart. Part of a heart anyway and Stanton noticed the other portion on a plate that was on a dining room table in the adjacent room.
“You fuckin’ kiddin’ me?” Gunn said when he saw what Stanton was looking at.
“It gets worse,” Erin said.
They climbed the stairs and saw stains on the carpets; they were boot prints, outlined with blood. At the top of the stairs they turned left into a bedroom and Erin opened the door which was half-closed.
The room looked like the back of a butcher’s shop. Blood and hair and organ and other tissues were smeared on the walls. Something was nailed on the closet door, it appeared like a kidney. On the bed were the remains of what Stanton could only guess was once a human being.
“If you notice,” Erin said, pointing with a pen she held in her hand, “the face is missing. We haven’t found it yet but he, or they, might’ve taken it as a trophy.”
“It’s one man,” Stanton softly said.
“How do you know?”
“There’s only one set of boot prints going down the stairs.” He leaned down, closer to the bed. Though her legs were still there, they had been severed from her torso.
“You ever seen anythin’ like this?” Gunn mumbled.
“No,” Stanton said, rising.
Gunn turned to Erin. “Why did you call us out here, Er? You got enough man-power without us buttin’ in.”
“I’ve never…I don’t think I’m the best qualified for this type of case. I’m happy to do it and I can figure it out as I go, but I could use a head start. If I went to other detectives in my precinct, well, it’s hard enough being one of only six females in homicide. I don’t need to go begging for help too. They’d lose respect for me. But I also know what I don’t know. And I don’t know what this is.”
Stanton swallowed and turned to the only window in the room. He walked over to it and looked outside. You could see down onto the street. A tech walked in just then and began filming and taking measurements.
“All right,” Gunn said, “we’ll help you. What d’ya need?”
“Just what I said, a head start. We’ve notified the family and are talking to all the neighbors but it doesn’t sound like anybody has anything to say other than they’re shocked.”
“She have a boyfriend?” Stanton asked.
“Yes, but we haven’t been able to get ahold of him. One of the neighbors identified a man she saw here a few days ago but it could be her boyfriend. She’s working with a sketch artist right now to get us a face.”
Stanton noticed something on the victim’s right shoulder. He approached and bent down over her. His heart was racing; he never knew if the dead were truly dead and hardly anything would have frightened him more than one of them sucking in breath, crying for help when there was nothing he could do.
“Look at this,” Stanton said. The other two crowded around and looked at what he was pointing at. It was a small circular wound on the flesh.
“Cigarette?” Gunn said.
“No, but it’s definitely something involving heat. The outer dermis is completely melted away.”
“Huh,” Erin said.
The tech behind them said, “I need photos of her back if you guys want to help me lift.”
Erin nodded and they gently lifted the girl up as the tech took photos. Stanton glanced at her back; it was filled with the circular burn patterns.
“ME will be able to tell us more,” Stanton said. “I’d like his autopsy report as soon as it’s done, as well as any forensics reports.”
“You got it,” Erin said. “Anything else?”
“Yeah,” Gunn interjected, “keep your gun next to you at night.”
CHAPTER 30
Emma Lyon stood at the head of the classroom and watched the clock. The exam was the second of the year and it was the most difficult one she gave. On a first exam the students would be frightened enough; by the third and final exam apathy and a full semester of work would wear them down; but the second exam was the great test. They would be overconfident from the first exam, assuming they knew what was coming next, and then be thrown off by the difficult and esoteric questions. They would be unsure what was coming and the apathy of the third exam would be shaken away.
The exam was focused around entropy and Gibbs energy. The topic made her uncomfortable; she was never one to see science as a closed system and applying entropic principles to daily life was a frightening prospect. According to thermodynamics, thermal energy always flows from regions of higher temperature to regions of lower temperature. This process reduces the state of order in the initial system so, in a manner of speaking, entropy is the measure of chaos in a system. And as the second law of thermodynamics has shown, entropy only increases or stays the same; it is never reduced.
When she first learned this principle, images of empires laid to waste, of entire species gone extinct, of space stations destroyed, of planets made uninhabitable filled her mind. She saw humanity as a species that was born, reached its apex, and began its slow decline into chaos and then extinction. It was a thought that stuck with her and made the actual subject much more difficult than it needed to be.
“Time,” she said, “please put your pencils down.”
Groans of joy and frustration from the class of twenty-eight. A few mumbles came up about the pure difficulty of the exam and more than one person was certain they had failed.
“You can turn in your scan-tron sheets on my desk. I’ll see you guys next week and we’ll begin modules fourteen and fifteen so make sure to have those read.”
The class filed out and she sat down at the desk, waiting for a few stragglers as they gathered their items and placed the sheets down on the desk in front of her. When they had left, she gathered the sheets together and placed them in a folder. For just a moment, she considered throwing them away and assigning grades randomly to stress entropy’s point. It would be poignant and humorous at the same time, but she felt few of her students would find it amusing and instead she just placed the folder in her bag and walked out of the classroom.
She decided she wasn’t going to pick anything up from her office and would instead just head home.
It was a long drive on a freeway that was congested to the point of immobility. The radio announced that four separate accidents had occurred and officers were trying to clear them both up as quickly as possible. She rolled down her window and leaned back in the seat, trying to calm herself as wafts of exhaust came into her car. Eventually she had to roll the window back up.
Her cell phone rang. It was Steve Cutler, the dean of the college of science.
“This is Emma.”
“Emma, it’s Steve. Didn’t catch you at a bad time, did I?”
“No.”
“I need you to cover that symposium next Thursday and Friday up there in San Francisco.”
“What? Steve I told you I can’t do that. I have several labs and a research thesis that’s due for publication in just-”
“No excuses. Just do it.”
“This is the third time you’ve sprung something like this on me. I don’t see too many other tenured professors getting that.”
“No one else can do it. Just suck it up and go. You might like San Francisco.”
“What is all this about, Steve? Is it because I told you to go home to your wife?”
“I was drunk when I did that. Pussies like yours are a dime a dozen out here. Don’t flatter yourself. Now go to that fucking symposium and quit being such a pain in the ass.”