Eliza was not at work that morning. She hadn't been in the office for about a week. This was unusual. Of all of Adam's coworkers, he couldn't think of a single occasion when Eliza had missed a day at work, up until this sudden disappearance. She was the sort of busy body that you'd assume had no life outside of work— at least, that would explain why she was so aggravatingly interested in everybody else's lives. She loved to gossip, and unfortunately did not restrict that activity to the water cooler, as far as stereotypical work environments go. Adam could hear her whispering thises and thats to her cubical neighbor across the aisle all day long. Besides that, she was an unremarkable person. Pixie cut. Brightly colored outfits. Oversized teashade glasses. Adam had been enjoying the absence of her obnoxious presence, up until today, when even the lack of her buzzing chatter couldn't ameliorate the pile of shit he was in. The entire package of insurance claim paperwork that he and his team had been updating the past week for a client had been sent to the printers with an egregious typo. The forms were only really being updated to change the label "Husband/Wife" to the more politically correct "Spouse," but the client had authorized them to check for any other spelling or grammatical errors as well during the redesign.
Either as a puerile joke by one of the interns, or as an honest, if idiotic mistake, the client CEO's name, buried in a paragraph of legal bullshit, had been "corrected" from Lovelock to Lovescock. Adam didn't make the blunder himself, but had failed to notice it before giving it his approval, so naturally it was his ass that got hammered. After lunch, Adam just went home. If anyone noticed, he'd deal with it on Monday.
***
Adam forced a Xanax down his throat, dry. He'd have gotten a glass of water, but setting foot in the kitchen where Eliza's head was impossible to ignore seemed like too daunting of an adventure just yet. Selling prescription drugs to college students was a morally grey enough crime that Adam didn't lose any sleep over it. And in times like these, it was handy having his own pharmacy spread out on his coffee table. He was certain he had a Quaalude mixed in there somewhere, and taking one of those sounded like a great way to chill the fuck out. Between crumpling to the floor in despair, and finally making it to the bathroom to vomit, it had occurred to Adam that he might not have to go to prison if he just cleaned up his fucking drugs before calling the police. And it had occurred to him while shoving the mess of bottles, scales and baggies into a trash bag that taking some of his fucking drugs might make this situation a lot more bearable.
Adam really didn't like thinking of himself as a drug dealer. That title brought to mind images of skeevy hoodlums, standing on inner-city street corners, handing out baggies of meth to junkies. Adam wasn't involved in any sort of organized criminal network. He just knew a dude that worked at a pharmacy. In addition to their own expired medication, the pharmacy also had a receptacle where customers— or anyone really, could dispose of their own unwanted or expired medications. From there, regulation stated that they should be deposited into little baggies containing a chemical that would dissolve the medication to be safely thrown away. Buying those chemical baggies was, however, expensive. To cut down on overhead, Martin, the pharmacy manager, paid Adam twenty bucks a sack-full to dump the old medication in the river.
Dumping expired prescription drugs into the river would be pretty bad for the environment, Adam figured. Waste not, want not. Reduce, reuse, recycle. Whatever.
With his coffee table cleared off, Adam sits down on it, and turns around to survey the scene spread out in front of him. Either the Xanax was starting to work, or he had just looked at this mess enough times that he was becoming a bit numb to it, but it did not illicit the immediate revulsion in him now that it had been prior to this point. His mind began to fully process now what it was that had transpired in his apartment.
From the copious gout of clotted blood, and the drag marks across the carpet, Adam guessed that Eliza had been beheaded to the side of the room, near the hall. He had a hard time imagining anyone carting a dead body all the way up here without being noticed, so he guessed Eliza must have been alive when she came here. But there wasn't really any sign of a struggle. All of the drugs on Adam's table were right where he'd left them after passing out doing inventory of the latest haul from Martin's. None of his furniture was knocked over or molested— except for being covered in blood, of course. Adam wondered how many people had been in his apartment today. Did only one person do this? One person plus Eliza, of course. Perhaps one person did the deed while the other restrained her?
The body looked like it had been dragged to the center of the room, where... whatever it is that was done to it happened. The edges of the ring of carnage were messy, like bits of flesh had been flung around in a circle and landed wherever they fell. But closer to the center there was a complex symmetry. The entrails had been formed into intricate coils. The skin of her torso had been butterflied out in a complex way, giving the surface impression of a Rorschach test. It was as if two wolves had torn into her torso in a perfectly mirrored fashion.
The mayhem was fractal-like. The closer that Adam looked at it, the more detail he saw. He began to realize that Eliza had not been be-headed per se. Taking a closer look at the torso, it looked like the back of her skull had been cut out, so that the rest of the head could be removed, except for the brain. The brain, in fact, was missing, along with the connected spinal cord. Each and every vertebra had been split down the middle— indeed, it looked like all the nervous tissue was gone. This may not have been completely obvious to a layman, but Adam had been a medical student. He had made it through several years, before having a panic attack and defaulting back to an associates in communication. Following his panic attack, he had been unable to look at blood of any sort without feeling nausea. Until today, apparently.
Adam's mind took a moment to process that thought. Today. There was something about that idea that didn't set in his mind. He had been working under the understandable assumption that this murder had taken place today, in the five or so hours between when he left this morning and when he got back over lunch. After all, he certainly didn't have any memory of there being a gruesome scene of gore spread across his living room when he woke up on his couch. He didn't recall Eliza's cloudy white eyeballs meeting his gaze while he made coffee this morning.
And yet, all of the blood that was soaked into the various surfaces of his apartment was completely dry. There were flies and maggots all over the place. The flesh was rotting, the smell alone told him that. And that doesn't happen in five hours. More like five days. And... indeed, Eliza had been missing for at least a week. Oh my god, am I a murderer? he thought. More importantly, am I losing my fucking mind? Why don't I remember this... this shit everywhere? How have I not been tracking blood out into the hall way? Has it been on my clothes? He looked down at himself. He was, disgustingly, wearing the same white button up and slacks as he did yesterday. No blood to be seen. He raked his fingers through his short, greasy hair.
He took a few deep breaths. The Xanax was doing wonders for his nerves. Why didn't he take these more often? He was pretty god damn sure he didn't kill this woman. He could account for his own whereabouts every evening for the past two weeks. He had been religiously binge-watching The Wire for the second time each evening recently. He was a creature of habit. Home. Remove tie. Heat up the pre-prepared dish he had made for the week on Sunday. Scotch. Watch three hours of television, and then pass out. He slept on the couch as often as he did in bed. He deviated from this ritual very little. Yesterday he had picked up a pizza on the way home. The night before that he had made a stop to grab a fresh bag of pills to "dispose of" from Martin. And on Sunday he had cooked, but the meals were simple enough that this had really only eaten into an hour or so of his T.V. time.
A quick checked that he didn't have any time unaccounted for. He'd watched forty-three episodes so far in this binge, he was still working through season four. The math added up. So assuming his brain wasn't just completely fabricating hours of his life, he definitely wasn't a maniac.
Beyond that, he could potentially deduce the earliest day this could have happened on. The pile of dishes in the sink hadn't been there all week. He hadn't added any dishes to that pile since Monday evening. He'd just left them stacked on the coffee table and counter like a slob since then. With the head of his coworker sitting snugly on top of that pile of dishes, the murder must have happened after Monday evening. Which also meant that Eliza had been missing from work for several days before she died.
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