“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 wepicked 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.
“Please do not speak of it to anyone outside this room. We don’t want the person behind this to realize that they’ve been caught, in case they try to hide the rest of the remains,” Matthew explains before turning to me. “If you two don’t have anythingmore here that you’d like to look at, you could head to the zoo. We’ll get this area finished up. The rest of the team is already on the way.”
“Yeah… I want to make sure the transport truck is examined and have someone check all of the bags that were brought in on that truck,” Gabriel says. “While I don’t think someone broke into the truck and did it, we can’t ignore the possibility and accidentally miss something.”
“On it,” Matthew says. “We’ll check the truck. I think you two are going to have better luck at the zoo.”
