That boy wasn’t the only body found that day. By that evening, the count was up to five. They more or less made a kind of wide circle miles apart. I think in hindsight you could have made a sloppy-ass pentagram out of that, but really, it was just five bodies in a circle, so you can’t really avoid that kind of association.

The first body put up all kinds of alarm bells. I’ve never seen that kind of brutality at a scene. I can’t even imagine what it would take to do that to a person. The chief agreed and made it an all-hands-on sort of day. Every free badge we had was canvasing the area, doing door-to-doors. There weren’t even any doors out there to bang on, but we went until we found some then found some more.

Will and I split up going with different patrol officers to help the effort, the idea being we could cover more area faster and have experience on hand instead of patrol officers who didn’t know what the fuck they were looking for or what to ask screwing things up. The standing order was to lock things down and that was what we planned to do. I got paired up with a patrolman named Garrett. Good cop, I’d known him for a few years, had beers with him, but then again, I knew most all the patrol officers. It was good for the job to know as many as you could, get to understand if you could trust their work and their word. He was the kind of guy who you just knew would always work patrol and who didn’t have any interest in the politics and games that came along with a sergeant’s badge.

Needless to say, it was a long day. Will and I pulled doubles, splitting up, like I said, with unis to patrol the area. Will paired up with Officer Garcia, who I didn’t know too well, but who Garrett said was solid. We got nothing for the trouble. No witnesses. No IDs on the bodies. It would be a couple days til we could get autopsy reports and a week for tox. Still, it’s the job.

Second body was found about five miles from the first, hanging from a tree. Just about the most haunting fucking picture I could have imagined seeing. That late in the season, tree didn’t have any leaves left on it. It was already a weird sight, a lone tree standing out in the field by itself, growing in dirt drier than all Hell. If there was something positive to take from it was that we saw it in the light of day. Skies were overcast, but still, I couldn’t imagine coming across that sort of thing at night. Insult to injustice.

The body was female, also around twenty. She’d been…I guess there’s no other word than mutilated. She had short brown hair, but it wasn’t. It looked like it’d been hacked short by a weed whacker. Her chest had been cut…I mean…cut off…both of them…She hung from the tree, her wrists and ankles bound in barbed wire like the first one.

As dumb as it sounds, we ruled out suicide. There was nothing there she could have stood on to be strung up so high in the tree.

Report got written and we kept searching.

It was just after noon when we found vic number three. I don’t think I’d eaten since before the shift started. I’m guessing you can imagine why that might be. I already felt exhausted and was going to force myself to get something in my stomach. When the call came across the rover whatever ideas of food slipped away. Made me want to smoke again for the first time in over a year.

Few miles past the second vic was an abandoned farm. You could barely even call it that. Whatever existed as a farm house was barely a skeleton, but a good bit of the horse barn still stood. I think maybe it was chance or maybe some kind of cop intuition that brought a patrol out there. The body was found in the barn, his head was still submerged in an old slop trough. Hands and ankles bound same as before, extensive bruising on the body. Beat and then drowned.

I don’t know many cops around that have ever had to be on the scene of two murders in the same day, let alone three.

…let alone what was still to come.

I left that scene numb. The sickness had almost turned into something else. Pity maybe. I can’t really put a name on it.

By then we had a pretty good idea of what was going on and a half-moon arc pointing us in two directions. We focused the majority of our resources along those rough lines and found the next two bodies within the next hour.

Number four was found on a dirt road closer to victim number one than number three. The body was burned beyond recognition, it wasn’t until later that we identified it as a him. Same bindings as before. He’d been bound before being lit on fire. The wire was blackened from the flames. The smell of kerosene still lingered on the body. That was the first sense I really remember. The smell. Not a burnt body, but the accelerant the perp had used. Come to think of it, I don’t remember a smell at all with the others. There also wasn’t any sort of burn marks around the body, so we knew he’d been moved from somewhere. Even something as little as that meant something. It was something we could hold onto when all around us we felt like we were adrift, witnesses in someone else’s world. We didn’t understand the rules and were just trying to get through the day.

The last body by comparison was almost anticlimactic. Another male, that made four of the five, throat slashed. The slash was clean, done with something sharp. Same bindings. Similar bruising.

I was on scene before Will rolled up with his patrolman. He got out of the car and walked up, looking like Will looked, but tired like the rest of us in his own way. He handed me a cup of coffee. He’d never done that before. I think I still feel grateful for it. I ask him what he thought. Four men and one woman killed, all found in the same day.

I remember he shook his head. “Five men, I think.”

The day had been hard enough that I actually had to stop and think about that for a moment and tell him there were four men and one woman.

He nodded, not dismissively, just acknowledging the words I said. His drawl was low when he said the words. “Yeah, but I think he was trying to make the girl look like a boy the way he did those things to her.”

To be honest, the thought never crossed my mind. I mean, why would it? There was a part of me, the part that wasn’t a cop, but just a guy who couldn’t comprehend the things we’d already seen. The cop part tried to put it all into context, tried to figure out reason so we could track down whatever animal could do what he’d done. Will just thought different. Whatever he saw in the victims was outside of being a man.

…yeah, Will was a good investigator. Not smart like some guys, but really level-headed, straight-forward. He didn’t get riled up like some of us, he just kept on swimming no matter how dark the waters got.

 ***

Ahlers finished the rest of his coffee and tossed the cup to the waste basket near the door, missing. He cursed softly as he got up with a groan to retrieve it.

“You’re not telling us anything we couldn’t read in the report,” Taggart said. He was on edge, Ahlers wondered why. Where was the pressure coming from to make him push like that? Ahlers wasn’t sure he would ever talk to a suspect like that during an interrogation, let alone a former cop who he was just asking about an old case. He kept that to himself though. Whatever the source of the fire, he wasn’t going to get anywhere by throwing gas on it.

“I’m just trying to be thorough,” Ahlers said, sitting back down.

“It’s appreciated,” Monroe said. He sounded sincere enough. That bothered Ahlers even more. Why the two different angles for a sitdown? There was something going on they didn’t want to tip off too soon. Ahlers figured he could try to ask and deal with the run around, or just get back to the story.

“When did you first see the house?” Monroe asked.

Ahlers nodded absentmindedly to himself. “It was around sunset when we got the call…”