Page 2 of Identity Unknown
“You got how close to the body?” I hear myself asking the right questions.
“Close enough to get a good look without disturbing anything. He’s nude with no sign of personal effects so far, and I don’t think he’s been dead all that long…”
It could be someone else.
“Are we sure it’s him? Let’s start with that.” I envision his compelling face. I hear his lyrical voice and easy laugh.
“Average height, slender, with long wavy gray hair. A tattoo of a pi sign on his left inner wrist,” Lucy describes, and I go hollow inside. “There was a pungent odor that I could vaguelysmell through my face mask. Sort of vinegary. Sharply acidic like white vinegar.”
“Any guesses about the source?” I hear myself asking as I try to quell my inner turmoil.
“Only that I smelled it all around the body.”
“What about obvious injuries?”
“A lot of trauma, especially to his face and head…”
No. No. No…
“His skin is strangely red,” she says. “Maybe from some type of radiation, and there’s a vortex of apple blossom petals around him like a crop circle…”
“A what?”
“It appears he was dropped out of the sky by a UAP…”
“Excuse me…?” I’ve paused my pen on the call sheet.
“A UAP,” Lucy repeats. “An Unidentified Anomalous Phenomenon. A UFO. Whatever you want to call it.”
Pressing the old phone’s handset close to one ear, I cover the other with my free hand, trying to block out the racket behind me. Members of my staff are talking in loud voices. A blaring buzzer announces the morgue’s vehicle bay door is opening. Water pounds in every sink, the cooler door slamming with a thud.
Lucy explains that at around six o’clock this morning, a UAP was detected on radar flying low and slow near the Oz theme park. After the Secret Service was notified that Sal was missing, my niece conducted an aerial search for him. Not having any luck, she decided to follow the flightpath the mysterious object had been on and was led directly to the body.
“Whatever the thing was, it flew over the very spot in the middle of the Haunted Forest,” Lucy explains. “The low-flying craft had a signature that doesn’t match any algorithm. And since it wasn’t witnessed by anyone that we know of, we don’t have any clues as to what the UAP might have looked like to an observer.”
“A UAP as in a spaceship from another planet?” I glance around, making sure no one can hear me.
“What I know is that Sal Giordano was jettisoned from some type of flying object identity unknown,” Lucy states. “It was unrecognizable to radar. And to electro-optical, telemetric and other sensors. Also to spectrum monitoring. That doesn’t mean it was from outer space. But we can’t assume it wasn’t.”
“I’ll plan knowing that’s a possibility.” My mind races through how best to handle this.
“I need to ask a couple of questions,” Lucy then says, another Stryker saw whining and grinding behind me.
“Of course.”
“You saw him yesterday.”
“Yes. It was his birthday.” I push away what I’m feeling.
Guilt. I should have asked more questions.
I envision him squinting in the sun and smiling at me as we chatted on his driveway, both of us in a hurry. He was eager to get on the road, and I’d dropped by after a court hearing. He was dressed in cargo shorts, a loose white linen shirt like an ad for Banana Republic. I remember he seemed preoccupied as if something weighed heavily, but I didn’t pry. I never have. I assumed he was in a mood because he wasn’t happy turning sixty.
“Sounds like you were one of the last to see him alive.” Lucy’s voice over the phone, her helicopter thud-thudding. “What can you tell me?”
I explain that I dropped by his house late yesterday morning with a gift basket he could take on the road. I knew he was on his way to West Virginia’s Green Bank Observatory, its steerable radio telescope the largest in the world. He’s been a frequent visitor since graduate school, the place important to his work.
“Did he mention having trouble with anyone? Anything unusual going on?” Lucy asks.