Faustino stood, scooped up his coffee mug, and went to the machine near the door to get a refill. The coffee was lukewarm and tasted like shit, but he felt the caffeine working through his cells even before he got back to his desk. He set the mug down on the corner and went to the board—sixteen dead in as many years.
“Do you want me to start with the most recent and work my way back, or the other way around?”
“Your call.”
Faustino turned back to the board. “Backwards it is.”
For each of the sixteen victims, the board displayed a photograph of the deceased, and in many cases, a secondary photograph taken when they were still alive, necessary because of the state of the bodies when found. Above each photo was a strip of tape with the date. The earliest contained the full date—August 8, 1978, as did the six that followed, but by 1984, they only listed the year. With all the murders taking place on August 8, it seemed redundant to keep repeating the same date.
Faustino, along with all those who didn’t refer to this case as the Wall of Weird, called these murders the August Eights. Aside from the date, the condition of each body linked them all together.
Faustino went to the bottom right of the board, to the most recent murder. “Arden Royal, twenty-seven-year-old male, found behind a Dumpster in Upper Saint Clair one year ago today, August 8, 1991. Same condition as all the others. No apparent motive, no evidence of value collected at the scene. Like the others, we’re confident he was killed somewhere else and dumped here.”
“1990, we’ve got Tama Krieg. Sixteen years old, a member of the South Side Bandits. She had a couple of arrests, petty stuff, mostly. Sounds to me just like a kid trying to fit in under poor circumstances. Her mother said her grades were solid before she dropped out of high school. I checked, Cs and Ds, mostly, but passing. She was found behind a Burger King downtown.” He paused at the crime scene photo, her body lying on the ground, unrecognizable, then went on to the next two, pointing at both.
“1989 and 1988, both male, both unidentified. 1989 was dumped behind a warehouse. 1988 was left right on the sidewalk near Three River Stadium under a blanket. He was there for two days before someone realized he wasn’t just some homeless guy sleeping it off.”
“Were they robbed?” Fogel asked.
Faustino shook his head. “We don’t think so. Even though their wallets were missing, if they carried them at all. We found wallets on many of the other victims, cash still inside. The motive here isn’t robbery. It’s possible someone took the wallets after the bodies were dumped, but I honestly don’t think anyone would be that brazen. One look at the condition of the bodies would be more than enough to scare away someone out for a quick buck.”
“Tell me about the cause of death.”
Faustino exhaled, his eyes shifting over the photos. “At first glance, they all appear to be horribly burned. Like they were soaked in an accelerant, then lit up.”
“But it’s not fire, right?”
“Nope. They look burned, but the Medical Examiner is confident that is not the case. The burn-like marks cover every inch of their bodies, even between fingers and toes, their tongues, internal organs—every cell evenly destroyed by whatever this is. Their clothing is untouched.”
Fogel took a sip of her coffee. “Redressed after?”
Again, Faustino shook his head. “I’ve touched them. The skin was completely dried out, almost like powder, no moisture left at all. With the slightest pressure, it cracked and flaked away. The wind picked it up. We did significant damage just getting them into body bags. There is no way someone did this and then got fresh clothing on the bodies after the fact, no way. They died in these clothes. Whatever happened, somehow started on the inside, at the cellular level.”
“I’ve heard some of the guys say this is spontaneous combustion.”
Faustino crossed back over to his own desk, drank some coffee, grimaced, and set the mug back down. “I looked at that early on, researched the hell out of it. I didn’t believe any of that shit going in, but I found a lot of evidence to support it’s a real phenomenon. There’s even video—people super heating from the inside, sweating, then bursting into flames. It always seems to start at the mouth—smoke coming from the mouth, then the nose and ears. Freaky shit, but that’s not what we have here.”
“How do you know?”
“In each of those cases, the fire spreads. The clothing goes. Many of them set their surroundings on fire. It happens so fast, the fire is usually contained, but there is external damage of some sort. We’ve got none of that here, not on a single one of them,” Faustino said.
Fogel nodded back at the board. “1987. Andy Olin Flack. I remember that one, it made the news for a few days.”
Returning to the board, Faustino tapped at Flack’s photos—a before and after. “Thirty-three years old, from Bethel Park. Serious pervert. We found piles of child pornography at his house. He was found a few miles from home in an alley off Brownsville. This is one of the few crime scenes where we did find something.”
“What?”
Faustino crossed back to his desk, tugged open the top metal drawer on the left, and rifled through the contents. He located a legal size manilla folder and opened it on the top of his desk. The folder didn’t contain much—about ten pages of typed paper and a few photographs clipped to the inside flap. He studied the photographs for a second, then slid the folder to Fogel. “This guy was carrying a wallet, and we were able to lift prints that did not belong to him.”
“I’m guessing they weren’t in the system?”
“Nope. We think our perp pulled it out to get a look at the ID. He or she didn’t touch the cash or the credit cards. From what we can tell, nothing was taken.”
“Ballsy move, without gloves.”
“Or panicked, or just plain stupid. Who knows?”
Fogel studied the images, three in all. The first was of the wallet, a black leather bifold opened to the center, driver’s license on the left side, a Visa and a few other cards on the right, everything covered in white fingerprint powder. She frowned. “How big were Flack’s hands?”
