High Strangeness

Chapter Four

He recognized the journalist on the table, now missing for four weeks. He was assigned her case, briefly, before it disappeared from the roster. Her friends, her co-workers, all described a fun, happy woman with an acerbic wit and dreams of a journalist.

A woman who loved her job.

A woman who cut the world off and vanished.

Here she was. Next to her on another table, with another white sheet pulled up to the shoulders, was a short, pale, man with severe scarring on his head and along his jaw. Garrett, the morgue technician on duty, tapped a pen on the table the man laid on.

"We IDed them both," Garrett said. He placed his hands behind his back and attempted to straighten his slumped posture. Skinny, absent a chin, and attempting to grow facial hair that was as light as it was sparse, Garrett seemed perpetually in adolescence.

"Who's he?" Peter asked, pointing to the short, scalped man. Detective Peter Femia was on his tenth year, and on his fifth year of saying it was his last before he found a new line of work. Peter's husband, John, stopped celebrating, because he knew his husband's quick glances at Craigslist for a new job or the occasional perusal of a university website was a show, but for whose benefit he was never sure.

"Tim Johnson. Also missing for about four weeks or so. Lost his job and walked away from everything. We found them side by side in the alleyway twelve hours ago."

"Robbery?" I asked.

"Doesn't appear to be. But we do know one thing. They killed each other. Literally bled out in an alleyway, knives out."

"Knives?"

"Nothing special. Just serrated kitchen knives. Probably purchased from a dollar store. No one heard a thing. No one saw a thing. They were found by a transient approximately two days after they died."

"Thanks for calling me," Peter said.

"Don't tell anyone," Garret said.

Peter asked if the bodies were different from the others that had been found. Two bodies turned up in the Hausman Preserve, far from any maintained hiking trails. One was found in the aftermath of the TexNation fracking well explosion in Nobility, TX. Three more in different parts of the city, including one literally laying in the middle of a busy crosswalk. Despite hundreds of potential witnesses, no one saw him drop down onto the street. If Garrett's autopsy report was correct, the deceased remained invisible for nearly three days before his corpse was struck by a car.

Each body, among the old scars and days old seeping wounds, had a large t-shaped incision on the chest, which appeared to be an autopsy scar. One that had healed. Major organs were missing from many of them, including hearts, livers, lungs. Eyes and tongues were also missing in some cases.

Each body, taken from the morgue during the night. Each day, Garrett found his reports missing. No one, not even the officers who called them in, had any recollection.

"Can I have your notes? Copies, of course, and anything else you have," Peter asked.

"Afraid not."

"No?"

"Look, I owed you one, and we are way past even now. When I come back in the morning, they will be gone. Along with my notes, security tapes, you name it. Like they were never here. Anyone who would go to that much trouble, ensuring an autopsy is done with copious notes before just...disappearing them? I'm not fucking with them."