Super Meals: Part Eight

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Doctor Ralph landed as the sun was setting and darkness was beginning to fall on the small town where Detective Mimi Spatchcock was visiting the coroner’s office and Walter Elliot was passed out on a swing set. His rental car was waiting for him, and the on-board GPS directed him to his hotel, but before he left he searched to find the county coroner’s office. He was pleased to find that the hotel was within walking distance to the coroner, so he checked in, dropped off his travel bag, and took a walk.

His phone’s GPS directed him past the charming main street bistros and shops, down to the off-main-street second-tier stores where he turned and followed the street to the coroner’s office. It was after hours, but he tried the door anyway and wasn’t surprised to find it locked. He waited at the bottom of the stairs, strolling and checking his phone like he’d stopped mid-walk to look something up.

Within two minutes, Mimi left the building and headed down the stairs. Doctor Ralph walked up the stairs and caught the door before it closed, letting himself in.

The office staff had already left, so nobody stopped him from making his way downstairs and into the examination room. Seeing that the light was still on, he walked in and saw the half-covered corpse splayed out on the table, as well as Jane’s report on the table next to it. He moved around the table, glancing upwards and seeing the dictation microphone dangling above the table and followed the wire across the ceiling to where it was plugged into a digital recorder.

Hearing footsteps approaching, he first moved to the side of the room and unplugged the microphone, then went back to the exam table and picked up the report.

Jane walked in just after he opened it. “Excuse me,” she said. “This is a private office. Who are you?”

“Doctor Ralph Quinlan,” said Doctor Ralph. “I was brought in to check your work on this case.”

“By whom?” asked Jane.

“My employers are very curious as to your findings,” he said, ignoring the question. “You have failed to identify the stomach contents on the victim—“

“What makes you say that?” asked Jane.

“Because you’ve listed in your report that there are ‘chemical compounds’ but not what they are. I wouldn’t expect you to put failure in your report.”

“No,” she said. “I meant why did you use the term ‘victim?’ Calling him a victim implies that someone did this to him.”

Doctor Ralph was surprised, he wasn’t used to medical examiners being that quick on the uptake. He recovered quickly, though, saying “Isn’t there a perpetrator? You’ve found a dead transient. Typically in instances like this it’s a case of two homeless guys fighting over a camping spot.” He looked at the report and continued, “Like the overpass where he was found.”

Jane walked over and yanked the file out of his hands. “You’re going to have to show me some identification or leave. Now.”

Doctor Ralph clucked his tongue and moved towards the door, saying “Very well. I assume a court order would suffice to give me access to the deceased and perform my own analysis?”

“Why do you care? What kind of examination do you want to perform on a dead hobo?”

“I’ll explain to the judge and let him decide if it’s worth granting me access,” he continued, pushing through the exam-room’s double doors. “I just wanted to give you the chance to let me have a look before we took it to the law.”

Jane took out her phone and started tapping the screen, which Doctor Ralph accepted as his cue to leave before she reached whomever it was she was calling. He turned and made his way back upstairs and outside.

When he was gone, Jane stopped tapping her phone screen and went to check the digital recorder on the side of the room. She wasn’t surprised to see that the microphone was unplugged, which was why she was glad that she’d had the recorder active on her phone. She saved the file, emailed it to her personal account, then texted the file to Mimi, along with the words “Strange guy just came by, checked the body. No ID. Seems hinky. Check out what he said while he was here…” and hit “SEND.”

Super Meals: Part Seven

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The county coroner’s office was a red brick building across the street from the bigger of two hospitals in town.  Mimi pulled into the parking lot, went to the front door and flashed her badge at the security guard there, who let her in.

She had her .357 in her shoulder holster, but she’d also grabbed the pint of scotch and tucked it into her pocket.

Winding her way down the halls and to the refrigerated basement, she recalled the last time she’d come down here. It was to collect the report on the body of a 14-year-old girl who had been murdered so she could add the details to the case and properly charge the suspect they’d been holding in custody.

When Jane the coroner told her everything that their suspect had done to the girl, Mimi drove back to the station, dragged him from his cell into an abandoned interrogation room, and hit him so hard she broke her hand.

That was why she’d brought the bottle with her this time. It wouldn’t make the reports any different, but they’d be easier to hear if she could numb out the pain.

She reached the examination room and walked in, grabbing a surgical mask from a box mounted on the wall and slipping it over her face. Jane looked up when she heard Mimi enter, and she waved her over.

“So what’s the story here, Jane?”

“Hello to you too, detective.”

Mimi smiled under her mask, and Jane noticed her eyes crinkle and go soft, which made her smile as well. Mimi’s smile always melted Jane a little bit, even when they went through their rough patch and eventually broke up. Now they were just good friends, but Jane still loved to see Mimi smile.

“Sorry, I’m just…” Mimi started to say.

“I know,” Jane answered. “They’re not making it any easier for you, are they?”

Mimi sighed and said “No, they’re not. But I think the captain is starting to see it, which is why he gave me this one. It’s pretty open-and-shut, right? He’s a hobo found dead under an overpass. Exposure?”

Jane looked at Mimi for too long without saying anything, so Mimi asked “Right?”

Jane pulled back the sheet, revealing the hobo’s face. He was older, Jane estimated he was in his mid-60’s, with the beard you’d expect to see on a homeless man. She rolled his head to one side as she began to speak. “When he was brought in, there were several things that were noted by the EMTs who bagged him. The two most relevant points were the facts that he had recently vomited, and he was bleeding from the rectum and ears.”

“Gross,” said Mimi. “But what is that particularly pertinent to the case?”

“Because of the recent gastrointestinal distress relative to his time of death, I did a chemical analysis of his stomach contents…”

“Yeah, I know, that’s why you called me here,” said Mimi.

“I’m getting to that,” said Jane. “There was evidence that he’d recently eaten —“

“I’ve read the report,” said Mimi. “He had a bunch of fast food. We found the trash —“

“But that’s my point!” snapped Jane. “When I opened up his stomach, there was no food in there. I’ve seen more than my share of half-digested food, and what was in his stomach more closely resembled what you find in those gel-filled sneakers. And look at this…” She pulled the spotlight down to focus on his ear and handed an otoscope (the thing doctors use to look inside your ears) to Mimi.

Mimi took it and looked in his ear, which was raw, red, and to her untrained eye, looked like it had exploded. “Okay,” she said. “What am I looking at?”

Jane raised the spotlight up and said “Look, the human body hears sound by soundwaves entering the outer ear, vibrating the bones inside, then sending those vibrations through the liquid of the inner ear, and then those vibrations are carried along your auditory nerve to the brain where we interpret the sound.”

“But this guy’s ear looks like it blew up inside,” said Mimi.

“Exactly. When I examined him more closely, I saw that he wasn’t just bleeding from the ear, he was leaking cochlear fluid…” Jane looked up and saw the blank look in Mimi’s eyes. “That’s the fluid in the inner ear that transmits sound to the auditory nerve. I did a more thorough examination and found that the bones in his ears were 50% thinner than normal, and the cochlear liquid in his inner ear was 200% thicker.”

“Okay…great. So?”

“At the time he died, this man could hear twice as much as any other human being on the planet, from twice as far away.”

Mimi’s mouth dropped open under her surgical mask. Jane stood there, waiting for her to say something, but she didn’t. Finally Jane said “I’m sorry, darling, but I’ve already included it in my report. This isn’t going to be the easy, open-and-shut case you were hoping for.”

Super Meals: Part Six

Walter had sat with his head in his hands for several minutes before the stench of vomit wafted over to him. The vomit was two days old at this point, and stray animals and rodents had consumed much of it, but that kind of smell lingers, and eventually it came to linger in Walter’s nose.

Looking around, he didn’t see where it was coming from at first, but it led him, like a trail of breadcrumbs, around the corner of the highway overpass to where the dead transient had been found. The remains of a makeshift campsite were still there – some garbage was strewn around, a heavily-patched tent was battered and overturned, a small fire pit was cold and black with the ashes of scrap wood – and a few feet away from it there was police tape cordoning off a private square of land within a small copse of trees.

Curious, Walter approached the campsite. He didn’t know if there were any more people around, but as soon as he began to fear getting jumped and mugged by a hobo, something in the back of his head reminded him that he was super strong now, so maybe he shouldn’t be afraid after all.

(Like most people, Walter had less moral compunction about harming or being harmed by humans than dogs. He’d be totally comfortable punching a human in the face, but he’d hate himself if he ever had to hit or kick a dog.)

He crept across the ground, doing his best to sidestep around the debris that was spread out, and made his way towards the police cordon. When he got there, he saw that the police had spray-painted a body outline on the ground (chalk wouldn’t have worked on the wet grass and dirt, and tape wouldn’t stick) near a hole with a small hand-shovel next to it, and a roll of now-soggy toilet paper on the handle. The stink was stronger now, and from the edge of the taped-off area, Walter could see that whoever had died had fallen over near the whole, facing away from it.

The vomit remains were near the head of the outline, and between the hole in the ground and the outline’s ass-end was blood.

A lot of blood.

Walter put the scene together in his head and felt the urge to throw up, himself.

He did.

Walter Elliot didn’t want to be outside anymore, he wanted to go home. He had to work in the morning, after all, and throwing up had taken a lot out of him, so he decided to head back to his apartment.

Glancing around to make sure nobody was watching, he took off at a run towards home. From the overpass to his apartment was only a mile and a half, so he expected it to pass quite quickly.

He was out of breath with a stitch in his side after two blocks, and had to slow to a walk. He was tired, his stomach was cramping, and his legs hurt; he hadn’t had that much exercise in years, to be honest.

He was also extremely confused.

He had possessed superhuman strength for about an hour, and now it was gone. He was drained, completely sapped, and wanted to sleep. He was passing by a park and thought maybe he should sit down for just a few minutes, to get his breath back and let his legs recover.

He half-stumbled over to the swings and sat down, leaning his head against the chain. Within two minutes, he was asleep. He didn’t even wake up when he fell backwards off the swing, he just lay there with one foot suspended on the rubber strap that was the seat, and one foot cocked to the side.

It began to grow dark.

Super-Meals: Part Five

There are an astonishing number of applications available for free for your smartphone of choice that scan police frequencies, and a very respectable number of apps that browse news reports. Fewer, however, is the number of apps that scan both news and police feeds, and none of them are free (but the best of them run headlines and reports across your phone screen like a stock ticker, which can be quite entertaining to watch when you have time to kill).

In all the world, however, there was only one app that monitored the internet and airwaves, including police feeds, news feeds, blogs, and social media channels; it perpetually searched these feeds for a single keyword, and displayed the results on the phones of only five men. The app had been programmed to rank mentions of this very specific keyword and display them on these five phones if and only if certain criteria were met.

When these criteria were met and the notifications were sent to these five phones, only three men of the five even bothered to check their phone to see what it was. Only two of them ever recognized the notification for what it was.

But only one of the five men ever paid attention to the notifications.

The app was written by a 19 year old programmer who was headhunted out of his college, given a ludicrous salary, and then sequestered in a room underground, beneath a certain fast-food chain’s corporate headquarters in Illinois, where he was fed a steady diet of pizza and highly caffeinated drinks and allowed to play all the video games he wanted all day, every day, in exchange for creating this one app and keeping it running.

The one men in five who paid attention to it, was Doctor Ralph Quinlan, Head Chef (and chemical engineer) for a massive, worldwide fast-food chain that was putting less and less food in their “food,” and more and more chemicals.

 This time, when the app buzzed his phone, it notified him (and the four other men, one of whom wouldn’t even look at it) that an unidentified transient had been found dead in an underpass and among his few possessions were the remains of a meal purchased at a local branch of the fast-food chain in question, and that the autopsy had revealed several irregularities in his stomach contents.

Doctor Ralph’s brow furrowed at the news. He wasn’t in charge of public relations, that was Tami’s job down on the 14^th floor, but he knew that if this fast-food chain were somehow implicated in a death, Tami would call him and ask him to prepare a statement that she could read to the general public, and Doctor Ralph hated writing statements to be read to the general public.

The general public, in his opinion, couldn’t understand polysyllabic words (like “polysyllabic,” for example), so he typically had to re-write his statements three or four times to dumb them down to the fourth-grade level, as per standard press-release guidelines.

So he called Tami and told her to give him 48-hours before she remarked upon this death at all. She agreed, because he worked on a higher floor than she did, and she knew that it would be at least 48 hours before the death was picked up by local news and mentioned at all by any media outlet other than the app on Doctor Ralph’s phone (Tami secretly hoped that someday she would be given access to the app, and was pretty close to getting it. She had convinced one of the five men who had it to ignore it, and this had not gone unnoticed by the other four app-holders).

After he hung up with Tami, he opened another app on his phone and booked a plane ticket for the next available flight out of Chicago O’Hare airport, destined for the small town where Mimi Spatchcock was about to stumble across Walter Elliot.

He then told his research and development team he would be gone for several days, but while he was away they should continue working on their current projects (after getting approval on the “onion,” they had begun synthesizing various forms of cheese), then he sent a text to the board of directors that simply read “I’m taking care of it. Will update within 48 hours.” Those who bothered to read texts from Doctor Ralph would know what he was referring to, and if they called Tami and got confirmation from her, they would leave it at that.

Doctor Ralph kept a travel bag in the trunk of his car at all times for just such an occasion. He was also a platinum flyer and a gold star member at several hotels, so by the time he reached the executive lounge at the airport, his travel plans were solidified. While he waited for his flight, he reviewed the police report.