Page 9 of Acting on Instinct
“Stan, hey there, you’re on speaker phone. I have two associates here in my office. If you have a sec, I wanted to go over a memory I had of ghost stories around the campfire.”
“Shoot.”
Lynx paused and looked down at her pink-pedicured toes. “We had a bonfire going. There was a kid there, I think hisname was Timmy. He’d been eating wild berries all day, and the juices had stained his skin. One of the men told him that the berry stains were permanent, that he was going to be a blue boy forevermore. And then they started to sing ‘Little Boy Blue.’”
“That was Joe’s boy, Timmy. He cried for an hour after that. But I think it was ’cause he had a belly ache from too many berries and not from us teasing him.”
“Yeah, as I remember it, he was pretty sick. After he went to his tent, someone brought up the Blue Fugates in Appalachia with an unusual blood disorder that made their skin look blue.”
“Methemoglobinemia.”
“See, I knew you’d remember the weird medical stuff,” she said. “That’s what I want to ask you about. You told us that the disorder wasn’t the oddest you’d studied. You said that in the eighteen hundreds, there were people who glowed in the dark.”
“True story. And if they glowed, they died. It was from working with white phosphorus.”
Lynx scuffed a foot back and forth along the carpet. “Why did that end in the eighteen hundreds?”
“People died by working with it, so eventually white phosphorus was outlawed around the turn of the 20th century. It went the way of eating off pewter plates or using mercury in hat making, arsenic in green wallpaper.”
“Those were dangerous times. So white phosphorus could make someone glow in the dark? Yes, that’s the story I remember you telling. But there was more to it. And I’m wondering if I can tell you some odd attributes to a man that I’ve been studying and have you weigh in?”
“I’ll give it my best shot,” the man said.
“I observed an individual, and I believe he was quite ill. Here are the signs I saw in no particular order.”
“Hang on, let me grab a pencil.”
“Stan,” Lynx said with the hint of mother-scold in her voice.
“I’ll shred and eat it when I’m done talking to you.”
Lynx laughed.
“Okay, shoot,” Stan said, and Nomad could feel the bubble of excitement in his belly. Had Lynx picked up on an illness? There was the one guy with a cast, but that was because Red had beaten him with an iron skillet at the ball.
“One, the man was running. But when he ran, he was rather stiff. He wasn’t limping, but more how I’ve seen my Nona Sophia walk when she developed peripheral neuropathy in her feet, high-stepping and rather robotic.”
“Got it.”
“Two, he had oddly rust colored hair. It didn’t match his skin tone. Kind of brassy, almost neon, he was trying to hide under his skull cap. But I saw a picture of him without the hat, and it was quite odd. Again, in the setting where that picture was taken, it was quite high-end, so he could well have been sporting the newest hairstyle from Japan or something.”
“Yup.”
“I have five of these observations in total. I’m putting numbers three and four together. He got punched in the jaw, and the puncher said it felt like a bag of aquarium gravel instead of bone. When his mouth opened, the air filled with the scent of garlic.”
“Huh.”
“And lastly, I saw a picture of the man, taken while he was in a vehicle at night with streetlights nearby. It was captured by an earring camera, so take it with a grain of salt, but I swear it looked like the guy had a faint glow around the front of his face. In the picture, he was knocked out cold, so his mouth hung slack.”
“Well, that hits the highlights. Sounds like your guy has phossy jaw. And he’s probably going to die soon.”
White jutted forward. Her eyes were intense.
“Can you tell me more?” Lynx asked.
“What you're describing are hallmarks of phosphorus necrosis of the jaw. That comes from chronic, low-level exposure to white phosphorus rather than someone getting a full whack. A full whack would have killed him a long time back. Almost instantly, in fact.”
“So what does that mean? How does it come about?” White called out. “Oh, hey, Stan. Thanks for helping us with our little mystery. I’m one of Baby Girl’s associates.” She sent a teasing wink toward Lynx.
