Yesterday's headline in The Olympian was: Body parts found off Libby Rd.
It turns out that somebody apparently got murdered, and some guy on Libby Road (which is out in the boonies, just outside Olympia) found a couple of severed legs in his yard.
Jake and I were intrigued. How often do dismembered body parts show up in somebody's yard in your own town?! Well, actually, the answer to that one is a little fucked up. We'd heard about the dismembered body on a television news program, and so we decided to try to find the news online. So Jake typed "dismembered body, Olympia," into a search engine, and I'll be damned if he didn't end up with a few HUNDRED matches.
Of course, not ALL of them were about dismembered bodies, but many of them WERE... And apparently many of them were about DIFFERENT dismembered bodies...
Ew.
Well, okay, fine, so Olympia apparently has a higher-than-average number of dismemberments.
Jake and I decided to go help the police find the rest of the body.
Well, we at least wanted to drive around the area and see if we could see anything...
So we drove out there, noting "mysterious fresh mounds of dirt," and "old trucks that must belong to the killer."
But we chickened out about asking the police if we could aid in the search. We saw police cars, some undercover-cop vans, crime tape, and two news vans, so that was just going to have to satiate our curiousity.
"Uh, Helena?"
"Yeah?"
"Why did you and Jake want to find a dead body?"
Well, I'm not rightly sure. It just seemed very intriguing... I imagine if I actually FOUND a dead body, especially a murder victim, and especially a dismembered one, I'd be pretty upset. But I've always had this fixation with detective work, and with solving murders, and so forth... Hell, I used to believe that the guy who lived behind my parents' house was a murderer, and I used to document what times he was home, and what times he left, and so forth... I LOVE a good murder-detective story. The more unique, the better. Granted, apparently dimemberments in Olympia aren't all THAT unique (run-of-the-mill dismemberment?), but they're pretty damned interesting, anyway.
My friend Aaron and I were once on a quest to find a dead body. It wasn't really an active quest or anything... But we'd decided that we were sort of like Mulder and Scully, and we were going to solve a crime. We wanted to locate a dead body, preferably a murdered person, for whom there could be a fascinating investigation.
Well, sure as hell, Aaron found a dead body.
It was wrapped in a black plastic bag ("Wrapped in plastic!"), or maybe two plastic bags, and dumped in the middle of a tiny, dirt road, out in the middle of nowhere. Aaron had seen it as he was driving the back roads to my apartment. He called from his cell phone:
"Are you working today, Helena?"
"No. Dude, what's up?"
"Get your shoes on. I'm coming to get you, and I'll be there in ten minutes..."
"Dude! What's going on? Are you okay?"
"Dude! You're not going to believe this... I was driving... Well, I still am driving... And I was driving around these back roads and stuff, and I found a body..."
"No, you fucking didn't..."
"I did! I found a body! But I didn't go near it... It's in this plastic garbage bag... Heh! Garbage... [Aaron and I liked the word "garbage"] Anyway, it's in a garbage bag, and there's like, blood coming out of it all over the road... Helena, I saw blood!"
So we went to investigate the scene of the crime.
The body WAS actually a body, but it was the body of a deer. We assumed that somebody had shot it, and it fell off the back of their truck. Gross. Anyway, people can get permits to kill deer, so it wouldn't have been a very interesting investigation, had we pursued it.
Anyway, I wouldn't make a very good detective. Not REALLY. I think you need a certain sort of mind to be a detective -- I mean, a really GOOD detective, like Mulder or Scully, or Nancy Drew, or somebody... It's the same sort of mind you'd need to be a really great waitress or waiter. And I wasn't a good waitress at ALL. I sucked ass, and not in a nice, wholesome way. I forgot people's soup. I'd dump dressing on customers by accident. One time, I made a retarded lady cry because there were raisins in her tuna salad, and I forgot she didn't like raisins.
I'm just not the right sort of person to be a detective. Or a waitress. Blah.
A look at today's headline in The Olympian reveals that more parts have been found: part of a torso, now.
Ew.
Well, I WAS hungry for breakfast...
With love from your resident bad waitress-detective,
~Helena*