ME's Office - Cook County Morgue
The chief medical examiner's office is a fairly unremarkable place. It has everything one might expect. A desk, computer, bookshelves of work-related texts, and a couple of filing cabinets. There seem to be very few personal touches here, although a photo of what looks like a happy family sits on the desk. The photo is obviously old, however, and rather faded. One wall of the room, opposite the door, is constructed so the upper half is glass, and the morgue can be seen clearly. If someone had the inclination, they could stand here and watch cadavers being dismembered. Why anyone might want to is another story.
After lunch. The morgue business is going on as usual. Hazel is in her office, putting finishing touches to a report she absolutely has no desire to file. And then she will have to think of a way to write another report, which changes a lot of the details to something people will *believe* as well as fitting the facts. She does not look happy about any of these things.
"I bought dessert." Never bury the lead, Nadia pokes her head around the door to the office and waves a paper bag with the smell of rich and gooey chocolate brownies emanating from it. She isn't in work clothes today, jeans and a t-shirt with a long sleeved button-down thrown over the top for an extra layer of warmth. "I also brought something the techs missed from the Bell case. Or maybe ignored." The brunette shrugs, brows lowered in a frown.
Hazel looks up from her screen and sighs. "Oh, you are saving my sanity! Right now I need some dopamine real bad. Bring them here! And if you can show me more on the Bell murder, I absolutely need it. I spent the past six hours literally taking that poor bastard apart piece by piece. I have some very unpleasant answers. And trying to work out how to report them is giving me a headache. If you have more for me, I'd owe you a big one."
"I've not submitted mine yet either, I interviewed the grandmother a couple of days back and she's in a mess." Nadia strolls over to the desk and deposits the bag down, it's still warm so she must have stopped by a bakery on the way in. "This is registered to evidence but..." She pulls an evidence bag from her back pocket and drops it next to the treats. It contains a very large fang, the kind of thing that any CSI worth their salt should have spotted and at least catalogued. "Mrs Bell said his body reminded of a factory accident her father got in, machinery ripped his arm clean off."
Hazel takes the bag up and examines the tooth with a rather sick expression. "Well, that just about confirms it. This is bad." She takes out a brownie then bites it. And goes to a drawer to produce two glasses and a bottle of whiskey. "You're going to want this. And I won't hear anything about being on duty. This is medicinal." She rises, and closes the blinds on the window, so people in the morgue cannot see. Once she retakes a seat, she waits a moment... "Look, how open is your mind right now? Do you want to hear the truth, however crazy I sound, or do you want the party line? I can give you that, and you can walk away from this... if you can."
"This week? This week I have had reports of someone's pet cat getting hit by a car then turning up on the doorstep full of some kind of black ooze, I've had a string of murders that would usually be a little OTT for a slasher flick, oh and one of the boys sending me a dude who was convinced he had a tiny ufo that landed in his back yard and wanted to know what we were going to do about it. Then we have Angel, who is one of those murders and apparently got torn apart by something with fangs in his own yard, quickly and quietly enough that it didn't wake his grandmother sleeping in the house. I'm fine with weird." She snorts, reaching for a brownie for herself. "Ok maybe I'm not *fine* with it, but it always ends up on my desk so..." Nadia doesn't turn down the whiskey, in theory this is her weekend off.
Hazel gestures to a chair. "Sit down then. And keep the glass handy, you might need a refill." She taps her keyboard, and brings up the report, and the photos. They are very graphic, but that's the job. "Ok, so this kid was terrified. I mean, from a biochemical standpoint. I think he must have been like that for a while. He was probably running for his life for a while. Twenty minutes, maybe a half hour. Frankly, I am amazed he didn't have a coronary. He was in good shape. And hope can keep someone alive. From what I read he got to the grandmother's place just as whatever it was caught him. If he had been even a little faster, he might have made it inside. No clue if it would have saved him but... so close, but so far."
Nadia pulls up a chair and positions it so she can see the screen. "So from what I got out of Mrs Bell, Angel usually had soccer practice after school and occasionally hung out with friends at Ogden park after. He was usually home by 6.30 but his curfew was 8.00." She pulled a notebook out and checked the details, "Mrs Bell woke up around 8 o'clock feeling a sense of terror somehow, she called for Angel then went looking for him and found him..." Her free hand gestures at the screen, if a picture is worth a thousand words then these images said more than either of them ever could about the state the teenager was found in.
Hazel winces. "Damn. Poor woman. Nobody should ever have to see their grandchild dead, let alone like that. She must be a wreck." She eats more brownie, the sugar may sustain her. "Anyway, I read the report that was put in from the initial examination of the scene and body, and frankly, someone had done a really good job of cramming what they found into their own narrow view. I wasn't happy with it, so I assigned the actual autopsy to myself. And, well. This is what I found." She pulls up the specifics. "All the flesh on his left inner thigh was ripped away. Meat, muscle, sinew, and tendon. It takes a crazy amount of strength to do that. You ever tried to bone a joint? Well, whatever did this ripped him open like he was a slow cooked brisket. And... this is where it gets really unpleasant." Oh, it wasn't before? "It was done with teeth. These are bite marks. But, from everything I can tell from reconstructing the way the teeth align, this was not some crazy wild animal. I mean a bear, or a wolf or something, you could expect that sort of strength, but a bear bite is pretty disctinctive. And I do not see a bear chasing someone across the city for a half hour just to do this, and then not eat him. No. The strength used is way too high for a human but... it's a humanoid jaw. I'd stake my career on it. Hell, I probably have done already. Not a human... but humanoid, at least."
"My first thought was bear as well, but in Englewood? Nah. Dio." Nadia runs a hand through her short curls and then nudges the evidence bag towards Hazel. "This didn't come from a human jaw though, no human I've ever seen anyway. It looks..." She sips the whiskey, letting the heat curl down her throat. "It looks like it should be on the set of some bad monster movie." Hazel had never yet made her feel like she was crazy but this rabbit hole was only getting deeper. "I saw the chalk line and the original photos, it looked like something had butchered him alright but... "
Hazel takes up a bag from beside her computer. Another tooth. "Snap. In this case, lower left incisor. To lose one tooth looks like misfortune, but to lose two..." She ate more brownie. It helped. "I'm going to subject this to some DNA profiling, and I'll try to find something - anything - to match the bite pattern. Hell, I'll go back to early hominids if I have to. But it is odd... a beast this strong, but it loses two teeth in the attack? What's that all about? Do they not have decent dentists in monster town?" THen she sighs. "Worst part. Ready? After ripping his leg open with its mouth, our mystery man proceeded to guzzle down his blood like he was frat boy with a six pack at the playoffs. They pretty much stuffed the opening of his femoral artery into their mouth and guzzled down as much as they could manage, as rapidly as possible. I can't think of many things outside of really bad horror stories that could do that."
"Delightful..." She tried to channel her grandmother's best disapproving voice, the kind that came on the heels of some faux pas like wearing pants to church. "But why...I mean there's got to be an easier way to get to the artery than pulling the whole thigh off? Like, ignoring the 'why did they want to drain his blood in the first place' and the 'how the hell do you figure out someone has been used as a human juice box when they're already in that much of a mess' of it all." Nadia stared at the two fangs side by side, neither of them had any place in a human mouth as far as she could tell. "Ok, stupid question time. Are we looking at some batshit serial killer who is planting fangs as some kind of signature? Are we sure they belong to our killer? Because I'd expect them to be covered in blood as well and this one was blending pretty well with the gravel when I spotted it."
Hazel purses her lips. "That's a good question. Several good questions, actually. Let me think." She considered the options. "I am not going to say for certain, but an attack like this? It's a frenzy. I don't think the assailant had much control over themselves. Not when they did this, anyway. Maybe once they had drained him, they could have gained some control, but this was not a rational, calculated act. They wanted the blood and went berserk to get it. Cheerful thought. And they're still out there." She leans back in her chair and ponders. "I might know more once I analyse the teeth. But if the thing was that crazy, it wouldn't have had the forsight to plant the teeth. I'd say they came out during the attack. It's bizarre. If they came from the same mouth. It would be a huge coincidence if they did not. If you can leave yours with me, I can confirm that from DNA, at least. Even if I have no clue what it is, if they match, they are from the same thing."
"I'll have to log it for chain of evidence - even if it never gets turned in I want to make sure my ass is covered by the paper trail - but sure I can leave it here. The ME's office isn't exactly out of bounds for physical evidence right." Nadia returns to the whiskey. "So...This goes no further right? I don't want a psych assessment in the middle of all this. Are we talking some kind of... vampire? Or maybe someone who thinks they are? Because I'm pretty sure that drinking that amount of blood isn't good for a normal person." She sets the glass down, almost empty now, and drums her fingers on the table. "We are actually talking about something... not human? Somehow?" Weird things existed in the world, spiritual things, but vampires? Nadia might have an open mind but some things required more of a stretch than others. She reaches out to run her fingers over the bags containing those two fangs.
Hazel pushes the bottle over, should refills be required. "I'll look after the tooth as if it were my very own. Chain of custody is not a problem, I sign those on a weekly basis. But... well." She scratches her nose. "I cannot see how this could possibly be human, and I am not sure I know any humanoid animal that could do this. I mean, I am not an expert on primates, but this definitely does not seem how a gorilla might behave. So, hypothetically, I would say that we are looking for an as yet unspecified creature that seems to go into a frenzy and drinks blood. I mean, it does sound pretty vampiric. Not your Gary Oldman in a fancy hat, but... haemivorous, certainly."
"More Max Schreck." Nadia agrees, accepting the implied offer of a refill. "There have definitely been attacks by large primates but we're back to the fact that this thing chased our boy across town for half an hour. I've got a few names and contact details of the rest of his team and the friends he hung out with, I guess my next step is more interviews and maybe spending at least a part of my weekend off wandering around Ogden to see if I can pick anything up there. I'd do it on the clock if I didn't think I'd start getting a whole rash of fake bigfoot sightings being dumped in my in tray." Her lips purse in irritation, she might be good at her job but the rest of the precinct is less than forgiving of who she is on top of the fact that she's a young, female, detective.
Hazel grunts. "I know how that goes. I've had to doctor so many weird reports to make some sort of sense..." She breaks off, and wrinkles her nose. "Let's just say this is not my first rodeo. There's a whole world of weird out there, and when it makes corpses, as it tends to do, they land on my desk. I can dig a little, call a few people I know. I might get some leads on this. Maybe it isn't an isolated incident. I have a feeling that we best not share this one around, though. And if you start getting grief for lack of progress, send the problem this way. I'm used to dealing with it. If a case runs into a dead end, blaming the forensics is pretty much par for the course."
"I'm not a fan of passing the buck to be honest and yeah, I hear you on the weird. Not necessarily corpses but anything that screams paperwork or dealing with crazies. Basically if it's not either high profile or open and shut it eventually ends up getting dumped on me." She snorts, "Probably didn't help when I offered the Captain feverfew tea for his headaches rather than popping advil like they're smarties." Nadia tips back the remains of her drink and finishes up her brownie. "We'll both do some digging then, give me a call when you get anything back from these?"
Hazel drains her glass. "You can count on it. I don't want another kid like that on my slab. This job is bad enough without having to see that sort of thing. Give me a staightforward shooting any day. Those are easy."
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