The Shell Collector

Mr. S had always been a collector of everday items.  In his bedroom closet was a jar containing every fingernail trimming he had produced since birth.  Every toenail trimming too.  He sometimes wished the toenail trimmings were in a different jar, but they were already mixed in together because his mother had been putting the trimmings into the jar since he was just an infant.  She was the one who had started him collecting small items for arbitrary reasons.

Mr. S had a lot of jars with odd contents in his closet.  Boxes too.  Of course, the jar with nail trimmings was the only jar or box that contained anything his body had ever produced, other than the small jar of babyteeth.  All the other jars and containers held items he had collected.  There was a small olive jar with the fat black beetles that had landed on him while hiking in the mountains.  There was a large mayonaisse jar holding the seeds from the grapefruits and oranges he had eaten over the years, a crackerbox with all his old worn-out shoelaces, a gallon paint bucket full of paperclips all rusting together. 

The contents of other containers were more suspiscious looking.  There was one jar with the coverings of magnolia blossoms that looked like dried leather of unknown origin covered with a fur of faint blond hairs.  There was an asparin bottle with the bones of mice recovered from owl pellets.  Another bottle contained every piece of broken costume jewelry that Mr. S. had every found flattened and scratched-up in a parking lot.  A smaller more suspiscious bottle contained nothing but the smaller of the women's earrings, which had once been in the main jewelry bottle but had since grown so numerous that Mr. S. had separated them out.

Mr. S. often walked through neighborhoods and picked up items in the street.  In fact, Mr. S. had just gotten back from an afternoon walk in the park when the detectives arrived one evening to arrest him. 

Mr. S. was winded from his walk and excited to examine the day's finds, so he paid no attention to the two men in suits who followed him into the apartment building.  It never occured to Mr. S. that they might be there to see him, and they gave no indication that they might be, until they saw which door he went to open.  Mr. S. had barely gotten the door unlocked before they pushed him into the apartment and cuffed him from behind. 

The detectives had radioed for back up immediately, and Mr. S. was wisked away in the back of a police car before he knew what was happening.  He didn't even have a chance to set down the bag of acorns he had collected that day in the park.  As disturbed as Mr. S. was by the intrusion and arrest, he still had to stifle the urge to ask that he be allowed to place the bag of acorns into the closet.  He had just the jar for the acorns, a jam jar that was just the right size.

Mr. S. had forgotten about all that now.  Now he was down at police headquarters, sweating under a naked bulb in a concrete interogation room. 

Back at his apartment, the forensic techs were still working on his closet, cataloging all the jars and boxes.  They worked slowly with gloved hands, removing one item at a time, which was then dusted, sprayed and photographed.  Any jar with unidentifiable contents was sampled for chemical analysis.  Had he been there to see it, Mr. S. might have admired all the methology and care they used in making their own smaller collection from his things.

Detective Hogel didn't waste any time watching what the forensic team was digging out of the closet.  Instead, he browsed through the photo album on the coffee table, searching for any photographs of the victims or their homes.  He didn't find any, but he kept flipping back to one photograph in particular.  It was an old polaroid, and like most of the polaroids, it had a caption written beneath it.
 
The caption read, "The great shell collector poses with his latest catch before extracting and cleaning the shell for display."

The snapshot was of a man on a beach.  It was Mr. S. dressed in tacky tourist clothing, dark socks with sandals, his white face and arms turning a painful-looking pink under the Mediterranean sun.  The sunburnt tourist was holding a small white seashell with a dead hermit crab dangling from it.  What Detective Hogel saw in his mind was a completely different picture.