Mangled

by Zachary Prescott

  The trio stared hard at one another, while doing their bid not to blink. The air grew thinner and the room felt somewhat smaller as nobody seemed willing to settle things amicably.

  “I want you two off of this case”, the cocky tone spoke again, smiling erringly but with an odd frown on his face. “I mean it”.

  Mike let off a scoff. “You’d have to speak with our superior on it but even at that, we already got assigned the job before you came and began whacking our boss in the station”.

  Detective Jake remained mute, seemingly perturbed by the manner of calm their opponent donned and the fact he didn’t at all seem perturbed with breaking into an active crime scene. His imposing physique was taunting too, while his age didn’t seem to matter either.

  “Who are you?” Detective Jake asked.

  Taking the first step forward, he passed upon seeing the man threaten to tighten his finger around the trigger. Detective Jake gently retreated his footsteps again with his eyes solely fixated on their opponent.

  “My name is Sean Stein and I need you two to get out of my way, but after I collect everything you have gathered thus far about this case”, he replied.

  Mike Rondon could barely help himself as he burst into a hysterical laugh. “Can you get a load of this guy? I mean, what audacity you must possess”.

  Turning to look at Detective Jake whose odd silence was troubling, Mike momentarily took his eyes off their opponent and in so doing, barely saw the attack and his movement. Detective Jake had seen it though and it was devastating to say the least. His legs barely moved but he had arrived before him in a blink of an eye. Mike had not noticed anything until he was pinned to the wall with a large hand on his throat and another preventing him from making use of his gun talk less of directing it at his attacker.

  Speaking in a tenser tone, Sean stared the man in the face. “You’ve got some fire in you boy… you’ve got some real fire in you”.

  Mike struggled for his voice but soon gave up as his face slowly turned red.

  “Seeing your partner right here is smarter than you, then it must be you who struck me back at the station, isn’t it?” Sean purred.

  Detective Jake felt himself both appalled and impressed by the man’s audacity but his strength was unusual too. “Let him go!”

  Sean looked to Detective Jake and smiled before knocking off the weapon from Mike’s hand to the ground and relieving his throat of the massive pressure placed on it.

  “As you wish, but I still need whatever information you got from here”, he insisted.

  Mike let out a high-pitched cough, while struggling to keep himself breathing. “What… the… hell!”

  “Do you need some help buddy?” Detective Jake teased while lending a hand.

  Mike knocked his arm off and frowned with his face regaining some paleness.

  “We aren’t giving you shit!” Mike retorted. “I don’t know what your deal or story is, but you’ve got some nerves and I will… “.

  Detective Jake interjected immediately, stepping in between his colleague and the stranger. “We will give you all we have provided you tell us exactly who you are and why they brought a CIA expert in combat aboard into this case”.

  Mike gasped, stared at Detective Jake and then back at the supposed CIA combats expert. He couldn’t see it or make any sound connection and it puzzled him.

  “How did you know?” Sean chuckled.

  Detective Jake smiled, lifted up the gun he had lifted from the man’s coat without him knowing and sighed. “This is a standard issue handgun with no traceable details and only made for special ops and the CIA… I know some people”.

  Mike gulped down hard in discomfort and shook his head. “That’s just some bullshit… stop cooking up crazy stories Jake!”

  “He is right!” Sean split the words right out to the confused stricken and looking Mike Rondon. “Your pretty boy colleague is right and I must confess I didn’t expect much brains from him but seeing you’re the brass then I must have been wrong”.

  Detective Jake ordinarily would have gloated but he still couldn’t figure out what the man before them was doing on their case.

  “Did Captain ask you aboard?” Mike suddenly found his tongue. ”What does the CIA want with a case involving an obvious serial killer”.

  “It is personal, so if you two will excuse me, I need to comb the house for evidence”, Sean sighed and turned around.

  Detective Jake stepped closer and halted just within arm’s reach of the man. “We will give you all we have but you have to keep us in the loop on anything you find”.

  Mike felt his lower jaw drop and his face looked stricken with an unexpected slap. “Are you nuts?”

  “Again, pretty boy seems to be the smart one”, Sean teased before heading for the bedroom. “I will have what I asked for when you’re ready Detective Jake and Mike Rondon!”

  His absence in the room provided them both the opportunity to share their disbelief and shock at the fact he knew their names already.

  “Who exactly is he?” Detective Jake asked himself with his head pounding with thoughts. “He seems to know us more than we know him.

  Mike looked frustrated and shouted for the umpteenth time. “Will you focus from wherever you got yourself into and figure out what our next move is?”

  Detective Jake looked startled as he lunged himself back into the reality of the moment. “We? Did you just say we?”

  Mike Rondon nodded.

  With a scoff, his colleague replied. “There is no we… but we have to give him what he wants and be atop our game if we are going to bring this killer to justice”.

  Mike Rondon nodded again, agreeing and barely believing he could ever be on the same page with Detective Jake. They exited the house looking gloom and troubled with endless thoughts and blindsided by the new person in the picture.

  “This case doesn’t add up for me”, Mike sighed before getting into his car.

  Detective Jake couldn’t agree more as he took another look at the seemingly abandoned house which had been wiped clean by a professional at least.

  “There is something else I am not seeing about all of this”, he concluded to himself.

  The body count didn’t make any sense and to make things worse, he still had to figure out who had found him out and why his works had been compromised and brought to light.

  “I need to see the bodies… “, he muttered to himself just as the sound of a mug being smashed against the wall coincided with his.

  A visible image of a frustrated looking Sean Stein could be seen through the window before he pulled the blinders shut and block Detective Jake from seeing any more of his tantrums.

  “What is your deal?” he asked before heading for his car.

  There were too many unanswered questions and he needed them sorted soon or he could be on his behind within a short period should the men around him being to make findings. Normally, he would trust his work and the amount of expertise he had attached to each killing, but his perfection seemed dented now; someone obviously knew him to be the killer and must have dumped the last body in there before alerting the police.

  Someone was playing a dangerous game and Detective Jake couldn’t come to think of anyone in the slightest as he pulled out of the parking space he had occupied. For the first time in a long while, his heart seemed unsteady; he was nervous as hell; something about Sean made him nervous… something about the case did that to him too.

  ***

  Seeing her hovering around the dead bodies in the coroner’s work room didn’t bring any comforting feel but he had little to no choice. Asides the hassle involved with getting stuck in traffic for an hour, and the fact many of the bodies might be bagged within a few days so their families could find some closure. He couldn’t leave without seeing them for himself or noting anything else his revealer might have left behind.

  “I never thought you to be the kind to visit morgues D
etective”, Sarah Connell chimed upon noticing the man walk into the room.

  With a subtle smile spread across his face and his hands tucked into his pockets, Detective Jake shrugged. “There is never time to sleep in times like this”.

  She agreed with a subtle nod and invited him over to the first body. His handwork stared him hard in the face, and he could barely forget how it had all gone down; from every cut made and every incision carried out. It felt like reliving the moment again and it made his insides filled with anxiety.

  “Whoever did this must be a craftsman… I mean, one handy and of exceptional use of his hands”, Sarah pointed out while handing him a pair of rubber gloves.

  Receiving them and slapping them on his hands, he smirked gently and looked at her. Her face beamed with some feeling of gladness as though she drowned herself in the sight of the dead bodies.

  “Correct me if I’m wrong but are you admiring his work?” he asked with a slightly raised brow.

  Sarah let off a loud chuckle and a rather embarrassed one as she hurried to the next body without giving a response.

  The detective pushed further. “You fancy his works don’t you? I am right!”

  She looked around the room hurriedly before looking back at him. “Yes! I do, but not for the horrible reasons but the magnitude of perfection he placed into it… you have to appreciate his work of art if you are to understand it at all”.

  Streams of pride and warmness coursed through his spine but he did well to keep his emotions in check. The woman was definitely an odd duck but she seemed experienced and unperturbed by the sight of dead bodies.

  “What can you tell me about the bodies?” he asked, peering down at the thirty year old woman he sliced up three years back.

  Her gawking eyes reminded him of every detail during her dissection and how she seemed at peace afterwards before he assembled her parts into the bag and disposed of them.

  “Well, other than the fact our killer goes after women, not much but I did find two notable sides to his killings”, she explained.

  Detective Jake didn’t expect himself getting nervous but he was. He felt like a child about being graded for his work by a class teacher and he would have her just hurry up and tell him what she thought rather than continuing to dally about.

  “Firstly, many of the ladies died a year apart from the coroner’s report with the exception of one”, she began explaining. “The weirdest part is the last body, which is the recent killing but one I mistook to be the first”.

  He paused, looked around the room and familiarized himself with the bodies he was certain he had done in. Asides the few body parts on some bodies, they had remained intact with the help of the bag he placed them in.

  “The new body?” he asked.

  There had been no new body, or at least none for him since the year before. In fact, he had hoped to hunt for a prey before the revelations came to light.

  Sarah grinned, yanked at his arm excitedly and pulled him towards the inner room where a body lay atop the table. “The new one must be months old from what I can tell and as much as the killer tried replicating his own work, it just doesn’t look entirely alike… I mean… “.

  “There are dissimilarities”, Detective Jake assisted in finishing her line with a tender frown atop his face. “This is different”.

  She smiled, nodded and tapped him hard in acknowledgments on his shoulder. “Look who’s got an eye for detail… you’re right as rain”.

  Her words of flattery didn’t seem to interest him though, while the intended replica to his works seemed crude and obviously difficult to take in. There were clear disparities from the method used to the manner in which the lady had been killed.

  “We found lots of differences, from the incision marks to the crushed windpipe which means this particular lady was strangled and dissected possibly after she was already dead”, she pointed out. “It gets even weirder”.

  “How so?” the detective looked on in a perplexed state.

  She yanked at his arm again in what he could perceive to becoming a norm and hurried him off to the closest body, which was one of his own works. Staring down at the dismembered body of the prostitute he had dismembered six years before brought mixed feelings to his insides.

  She stopped just before the body and turned the neck to the side before pointing at a needle mark. “You’d find this on every other body here but this one… it is baffling and I barely know what to make of it”.

  He would agree with her on her latter statement and a worried look across his tired face.

  “It is almost like someone decided to adulterate a Picasso painting… urgh!” she groaned.

  He couldn’t agree even more and it creamed his corn too. “Someone polluted my work!”

  His pride felt struck and damaged immediately. His work and legacy had been contaminated in the most bizarre of ways. Slowly returning to the last victim, he reached for her neck, turned it to the side and found nothing close to a needle mark, while her jewelries still clung to her ears in what was an absolute “no-no” for how he operated.

  “Could this be a copycat?” he turned to Sarah immediately to confirm. “Can there be the possibility that this is a copycat trying to mimic the same person that murdered those women?”

  Sarah took her time to respond but she seemed somewhat confused. “It could be or it could be a protégé being taught… it is often the case in instances like this”.

  His ears hummed with disbelief and his knees felt wobbly as though they threatened to cave in.

  “Whoever this is or who they are, they need to be found immediately”, she added.

  “Why?” Detective Jake stared with no words easing past his lips but she seemed to have gotten the drift.

  With a gentle reach for the forehead of a dead body to her left, she replied. “If we have a protégé as you suggested, then it is definite that someone else is going to get hurt”.

  Her voice bore enough seriousness and worries this time to leave him worried. She was right as rain and he had sensed it too.

  “I don’t have a protégé”, he murmured to himself before heading for the door. “This is unbelievable”.

  “Goodnight Detective Jake”, Sarah greeted from behind.

  Looking back around and waving subtly, he answered. “Have a wonderful night”.

  He needed the clear air to think. It was going to be a really long night.

  Chapter Five

  W

  addling through the darkness after parking in the driveway, barely able to get his vision in focus as he struggled for the keys in his jacket pocket, he heard something drop.

  “Shit!” he murmured, realizing the keys had slipped from his pocket and unto the ground.

  Bending over to retrieve the keys came with the blowback stench from his alcohol infested breath as the whimsical smile lit his face and brought with it memories of the fun night he just had. Fondling the key to no avail into the keyhole after trying them one after the other, his luck finally struck and sent the door ajar while he slipped into the darkness and slowly shut the door behind him.

  Feeling the wall to his left for the switch, he made contact and lit the room before stopping dead in his track and almost having a heart attack by the sight of the man whose disregards for personal boundaries knew no bound.

  “Jesus Christ! You fucking scared me!” he yelled.

  “Hello Luke! Looks like someone has been having a good night”, Sean Stein spoke, cross legged in the “Papa” chair.

  Captain Luke looked around the room for any more surprises and almost staggered over a couch in his path before heading to the kitchen to get himself some water. He soon returned, holding a bottle of almost emptied water in one hand and the look of disapproval in his face.

  Taking a good gulp and tossing aside the empty container, he spoke, “How did you even get in here and what are you…?”

  “What am I doing here?” Sean co
mpleted the query for him.

  The Captain walked over to the big sized couch and helped himself into it.

  “Well, since you asked, I will give you an answer”, Sean added. “Let’s begin by you telling me why Susan’s house was stinking of bleach when I went there and what happened to all her personal items”.

  “What!?” a shocked looking Luke asked.

  Sean shook his head, chuckled and sat upright. “Don’t mess with me Luke… what exactly is going on here and why was my ex-wife’s house bleached like it was a goddamn hit house?”

  Luke still looked lost and his expression didn’t differ even though he was drunk. He managed to remain upright though while Sean looked impatient and had begun pacing along the living room floor.

  “I was really worried and had to break into the morgue tonight you know”, Sean continued.

  “Jesus Christ, Sean! What’s with the breaking and entering?’ Luke heightened his voice. “I didn’t want you on this case and I still don’t feel you can manage it, but my hands are tied”.

  Sean sneered, chuckled and shook his head. “I had a feeling you didn’t really collude with the boys upstairs to have me come work on this situation but I must confess that I am really disappointed”.

  They both shared a rather deep stare before Luke looked away and towards the floor.

  “I need answers Luke and I need you to tell me everything you know”, Sean mellowed his tone and came closer. “Nobody bleaches an ordinary police officer’s house unless something really crazy is going on”.

  Luke upped himself from his seat and walked to the window. “She isn’t the only one that got killed Sean”.

  Sean Stein remained mute momentarily before approaching the man. “Have you seen the bodies? Have you had the decency of following through before you’d tell me that?”

  Luke gave no response but couldn’t help the stinging feel in his chest as he regretted his own cowardice and inability to face Susan’s dead body. He had kept away from the morgue for that sole purpose.

  “I have my best men working on this and I trust them”, he turned around with a frown. “One of whom you assaulted today just like you did me in front of my men!”