The Death Box. J. Kerley A.

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      Beside the van three men and a woman were clustered in conversation. Cops. Don’t ask how I knew, but I always did. A dozen feet away a younger guy was sitting atop a car hood looking bored. I wasn’t sure about him.

      The entrance was a plastic door with a handmade sign yelling ADMITTANCE BY CLEARED PERSONNEL ONLY!!! the ONLY underscored twice. Though I hadn’t been cleared – whatever that meant – I’d been called, so I pressed through the door.

      It was cool inside and smelled of damp sand. Centering the space was a pit about twenty feet by twenty. Above the pit, at the far end of the tent at ground level, were several folding tables. A woman in a lab coat was labeling bags atop two of the tables. Another table held a small microscope and centrifuge. I’d seen this before, an on-site forensics processing center.

      I returned my attention to the pit, which resembled the excavation for an in-ground swimming pool, wooden rails keeping the sandy soil from caving. Centering the hole was an eight-foot-tall column with two lab-jacketed workers ticking on its surface with hammers. I estimated the column’s diameter at five feet and watched as a white-smocked lab worker dropped a chipped-off shard into an evidence bag. When the worker stepped away, a photographer jumped in. The scene reminded me of a movie where scientists examine a mysterious object from the heavens. Shortly thereafter, of course, the object begins to glow and hum and everyone gets zapped by death beams.

      “You there!” a voice yelled. “You’re not supposed to be in here.”

      I snapped from my alien fantasy to see a lab-jacketed woman striding toward me, her black hair tucked beneath a blue ball cap and her eyes a human version of death beams. “Where’s your ID?” she demanded, pointing at a naked space on my chest where I assumed an identification should reside. “You can’t be here without an—”

      “Yo, Morningstar!” a voice cut in. “Don’t kill him, he’s on our side.”

      I looked up and saw Roy McDermott step from the far side of the column. The woman’s thumb jerked at me.

      “Him? This?”

      “He’s the new guy I told you about.”

      The woman I now knew as Morningstar turned big brown death rays on Roy. “I’m in charge of scene, Roy. I want everyone to have a site ID.”

      Roy patted dust from his hands as he approached, a luminous grin on his huge round face and the ever-present cowlick rising from the crown of semi-tamed haybright hair. He called to mind an insane Jack O’Lantern.

      “I’ll have someone make him a temporary tag, Vivian. You folks bring any crayons?”

      Morningstar’s eyes narrowed. “Condescension fits you, Roy. It’s juvenile.”

      Roy climbed the steps from the pit and affected apologetic sincerity. “I forgot his clearance, Vivian. I’m sorry. All we have time for now is introductions. Carson, this is Vivian Morningstar, our local pathologist and—”

      “I’m the Chief Forensic Examiner for the Southern Region, Roy.”

      “Carson, this is the Examining Chief Region of the – shit, whatever. And this, Vivian, is Carson Ryder. We’re still figuring out his title.”

      Morningstar and I brushed fingertips in an approximation of a handshake, though it was more like the gesture of two boxers. Roy took my arm and swung me toward the pit. We stepped down on hastily constructed stairs, the wood creaking beneath us.

      “Now to get serious,” Roy said. “Damndest thing I’ve seen in twenty years in the biz.”

      Three techs stepped aside as we walked to the object. Seemingly made of concrete, it resembled a carved column from a temple in ancient Egypt, its surface jagged and pitted with hollows, as though the sculptor had been called away before completion.

      “More light,” Roy said.

      The techs had been working with focused illumination. One of them widened the lighting, bringing the entire object into hard-edged relief.

      A woman began screaming.

      I didn’t hear the scream, I saw it. Pressing from the concrete was a woman’s face, eyes wide and mouth open in an expression of ultimate horror. She was swimming toward me, face breaking the surface of the concrete, one gray and lithic hand above, the other below, as if frozen in the act of stroking. The scenic was so graphic and lifelike that I gasped and felt my knees loosen.

      Roy stepped toward me and I held my hand up, I’m fine, it lied. I caught my breath and saw ripples of concrete-encrusted fabric, within its folds a rock-hard foot. I moved to the side and saw another gray face peering from the concrete, the eyes replaced with sand and cement, bone peeking through shredded skin that appeared to have petrified on the cheeks. One temple was missing.

      My hand rose unbidden to the shattered face.

      “Don’t think of touching it,” Morningstar said.

      My hand went to my pocket as I circled the frieze of despair: two more heads staring from the stone, surrounding them a jumble of broken body parts, hands, knees, shoulders. Broken bones stood out like studs.

      My hands ached to touch the column, as if that might help me to understand whatever had happened. But I thrust them deeper into my pockets and finished my circle, ending up at the screaming woman, her dead face still alive in her terror.

      “It was found yesterday,” Roy explained. “A worker was grading land when his blade banged a chunk of concrete. The foreman saw a mandible sticking out and called us. We had the excavation started within two hours.”

      Most municipal departments would have needed a day to pull the pieces together, maybe longer. But that was the power of a state organization. The FCLE arrived, flashed badges, and went to work.

      “What formed the column?” I asked.

      Morningstar tapped the object. “The concrete was poured into an old rock-walled cistern. Stones initially surrounded the object, but the techs spent last night dislodging them.”

      “Any idea when it was put here?”

      “Could be a few months, could be two years. I’ll get closer as we analyze more samples.”

      “You’re gonna find different times,” called a basso voice from above. “Older bodies, newer ones. The bottom bodies may go back years, decades even.”

      I looked up at a guy on ground level, mid-forties or so, dark complexion, black suit, gray shirt. His sole concession to festivity was a colour-speckled tie that seemed from one of Jackson Pollock’s brighter days. The man’s gleaming black hair was swept back behind his ears. He wore dark sunglasses on a prize-winning proboscis, more like a beak. With the clothes, nose, and down-looking pose he called to mind a looming buzzard.

      “What you been up to, Vincent?” Roy asked.

      The guy brandished the briefcase. “Copying property records at the Dade County assessor’s office. Someone had to know the cistern was here, right?”

      Roy nodded approvingly. “Come down into the hole, Vince. Got someone you should meet.”

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