“Not yet, but I’ll ask.” Oliver pretended to brush away more soil as Felipe returned to the other men. “Mr. Carter, may I speak to you? Why did you want the Paranormal Society involved instead of the police?”
The head groundskeeper gave Felipe a confused look. “Herman Judd had powers. Doesn’t that put him under your jurisdiction?”
Felipe exchanged a glance with Oliver over the dead man. “Herman Judd is the deceased?”
“Yes,” Mr. Carter said. As he let out a tired sigh, he nodded to the makeshift grave. “I recognized him as soon as Mr. Duncan called me over.”
“And how do you know Mr. Judd?”
“I hired him as a groundskeeper back in ‘87, but I haven’t seen him in years, not since I fired him for robbing graves.”
***
IN THE HOURS SINCEthey returned from Green-Wood with a bag of grave dirt, Herman Judd’s body safely locked in a bespelled coffin, and statements from the gravediggers and head groundskeeper, Oliver hadn’t seen Felipe. The moment he was certain Oliver could handle the unloading of the body on his own, he ran off to the archives to look for Judd’s file. With a past arrest record, there had to be something, even if the details were meager. Oliver hoped that, with a trail to follow, Felipe would be back to his normal self by dinner.
On the morgue’s table, Herman Judd stared at the ceiling with cloudy eyes. With the last of the grave dirt washed away, the injuries to the body were far more obvious than they had been at the cemetery. Taking up his pen, Oliver cataloged his findings. The insides of Judd’s thoracic and abdominal cavities were empty. When Oliver began the autopsy, he had expected to find the man’s missing ribs nestled inside his chest, but they, along with his internal organs, were gone. If the cuts on the remaining blood vessels and on his skin were any indication, the person involved had a steady, experienced hand. There were no hesitation cuts or the desperate sawing one might see in a botched dismemberment.
While the man’s tongue, eyes, and brain remained intact, the carotid artery and jugular vein on both sides of the neck had been severed. Oliver doubted it was the cause of death with the wounds so high up on the neck and so neat. It reminded him of the cut marks he had seen on the dead pigs he had used for studying wound patterns. Oliver checked his notes on lividity. Considering Herman Judd had been dead for over a day, there was very little pooling of blood to indicate his position after death. The only place there was any obvious lividity was in the man’s head, and even that was faint. It was strange. He should have been a bit more decomposed than he appeared. If he had been taken from a morgue or teaching hospital, he would have been kept cool and out of the elements, which lined up with the minimal fly eggs he had seen on and in his body. Still, it was strange enough that Oliver began to wonder if someone had tried to embalm him. He should have smelled the chemicals if they had. Taking a syringe from the tray, Oliver massaged the man’s arm before trying to draw out whatever might be left in his veins. Nothing came out but a small amount of congealed blood. He tried again through his femoral artery, and the same thing happened. No blood or formaldehyde. The cuts on his neck were starting to make more sense.
Setting the syringe and the mystery of the large hunk of skin that had been neatly removed from his back aside, Oliver focused on what he suspected may have killed him. Just above his left collarbone and in the center of his chest were what appeared to be burns. The one near his neck had the beginnings of a blister and looked angrier than the one on his chest. Red lines stretched out from the epicenter of both wounds like roots. They weren’t the telltale lines of infection as these were only skin deep. He had never seen anything like it, but if he had to guess, the one near the shoulder was either older or had been created with greater force since there appeared to be more of a reaction to it before death. He was about to turn the man over again to measure the missing flesh on his back and take photographs when Felipe’s familiar knock sounded on the laboratory door.
“Come in,” Oliver called, tossing the sheet over the man’s gaping chest. He didn’t need Felipe turning green again. When he heard the second door open, he added, “I still have Mr. Judd on the table.”
Closing the inner door behind him, Felipe looked warily between Oliver and the dead man on the table as he came down the steps, but when he realized there was little mess or smell, he relaxed a fraction. Felipe’s gaze flickered over Oliver’s hands and apron before coming to rest on his lips. Standing on tiptoe behind him, Felipe planted a kiss in the pulsing hollow beneath his jaw. Oliver didn’t think he would ever be accustomed to kisses and caresses in the lab, but he caught Felipe’s lips again before he could pull away. It was a change he didn’t mind growing accustomed to. Heat flooded Oliver’s cheeks at the look Felipe gave him as he took his place at the bench furthest away from the corpse. His mood had certainly improved.
“I take it your trip to the archives was a success,” he said, nodding to the folder in Felipe’s hand.
“It was. We were very lucky; despite being arrested by the police, one of our investigators belatedly got involved and miraculously took notesandgot a copy of the police file. Oh, and there’s even a mugshot, so we can confirm it’s him.”
Sidling next to Oliver, Felipe held the photograph beside Herman Judd’s face. He was several years younger in the picture and seeing his face animated changed the contours, but the shape and features were the same. His time spent in jail had taken their toll.
“It’s him.”
“Agreed. So I took a look at the investigator’s notes, and their account pretty much agrees with what Carter and Duncan said.” Balancing the folder on his lap, Felipe replaced the photograph with a ragged sheet of notepad paper. “Herman Judd worked at Green-Wood Cemetery for about four years before he was arrested and charged with two counts of grave robbery, vandalism, and desecration of a corpse. The latter charge didn’t stick, and he was sentenced to four years on Blackwell’s Island. He got out of jail six months ago.”
“How did he get caught?”
“The case notes aren’t wonderful, but it seems tombs and graves were being broken into more regularly than they had been in the past. Mr. Carter was suspicious and decided to spy on Judd. He eventually caught him trying to open a mausoleum. Carter fired him and the arrest came after. Apparently, a family member came to pay their respects and discovered their family’s mausoleum had been broken into. When they went inside, they found the coffins unsealed and a brooch their great-aunt had been buried with was no longer on her body. The police tied Judd to the brooch. He had sold quite a bit of jewelry to the same few pawn shops, but they could only prove he stole from that family’s dead. I wondered why the Paranormal Society hadn’t been involved from the start, but it seems Judd didn’t tell anyone about his powers until he had been in jail a while.”
Oliver leaned against the counter and frowned. “That’s strange. From what I’ve heard, most people usually jump at the chance to deal with the Paranormal Society instead of the police.”
“I don’t know, but whatever his powers were, they aren’t listed in the file, and he never tried to use them to escape jail. They may not even have anything to do with his illicit activities, so he didn’t think to say anything, or maybe he had run-ins with the society in the past. There aren’t any listed in his file, but if he used an alias in the past, it’s possible no one realized they were the same person.” Felipe shrugged and set the file aside. Looking from Oliver to Mr. Judd, Felipe asked, “Any ideas on what killed him?”
“Some, but nothing concrete.” Felipe nodded along as Oliver went over his preliminary findings: the strange marks on his chest, the missing organs, and lack of decomposition. “There is one more oddity. His back has been... Well, not de-fleshed in the technical sense but skinned.”
Helping Oliver roll the man onto his back, Felipe stared at the block of missing flesh. It took up the majority of the man’s back, running from a few inches below his shoulders to the small of his back. As with the rest of the cuts on Herman Judd’s body, it was clean. Whoever removed it took only the dermis and epidermis and nothing more.
“Could they have removed a tattoo?” Felipe asked.
“Isn’t that a bit large for a tattoo?”
“I’ve seen some beautiful back pieces done in other countries. I don’t know if he ever left the country, but if he was in jail for years, he would have had plenty of time to sit for one that large. Or they could have removed several smaller ones in one piece.”
“Perhaps. Still, I don’t see the purpose in removing it. In medical school, if someone was brought in for dissection and they had a tattoo, it didn’t affect what was beneath it.”
“And no one ever took souvenirs from their corpses?”
Oliver shuddered. It was one thing to keep specimens that could be used to teach others about conditions or anatomy they would otherwise never see. It was another to pocket gall stones or teeth and turn them into gruesome trinkets to whip out at parties. When he was in medical school, he had seen more instances of disrespecting the dead than he would care to think about. His classmates flung offal at each other when the teacher’s back was turned and posed for silly photographs with skeletons and flayed corpses. He had ignored their salacious remarks and focused on what they were supposed to be doing, yet he was the weird one for not wanting to join in. Oliver drew in a long, slow breath. When the dead awoke at his touch, it was hard to forget they were once living people.
