She shook the feeling from her knowing that she had to keep her personal feelings out of this or she would start seeing a murderer in every face she passed. Julie went to her office and started her report, wanting to get it done before she took lunch so she could swing by Bartlett’s office before grabbing lunch with Kait. The words spilled out on paper almost automatically since this report was the same as every other one she had written over the last five months. Five bodies in five months meant Halloween was sure to be an exciting night.
Julie finished her report at half past noon and signaled to Kait to lock the doors. She swung through the Sheriff’s office and left the report on his desk since he seemed to be bogged down in the pit with the detectives. Kait and Julie ran down the street to grab Chinese food for lunch and ate there since Kait still couldn’t get used to eating in the room with all the dead people.
“So,” Kait began. “I have gotten us three tickets to the Halloween Masquerade Ball, and I won’t take no for an answer. It is really cool this year. You must dress in masquerade fashion, wear your mask all night, and you are not allowed to reveal your identity to anyone.”
“Ugh,” Julie contested. “Like I need more people in my life that I don’t know who they are. I hate Halloween Kait; you know that.”
“Yes,” Kait said. “Well suck it up. Besides you never want to meet people, so this is perfect. You can make friends, and they will never know who you are in real life. You can be a human for one night and then turn back into morbid Cinderella at two AM.”
“Fine,” Julie said reluctantly. “But you have to take care of the costumes. I just want you to show up at my house, and I put on clothes.”
“It’s a deal,” Kait said excitedly.
The rest of Julie’s day was spent in meetings at the station explaining her findings over and over again to several different people in the precinct. She looked over the crime scene photos several times but couldn’t pinpoint anything unusual, besides the mutilated body dumped in the romance section of the library. Julie shook her head as she viewed the pictures unable to come to any other conclusion than the body had been hastily dumped.
Around seven in the evening Kait popped her head into Julie’s office to tell her she couldn’t go to Murphy’s that night; apparently, Tommy was having some sort of epic meltdown over his boss. It was all for the better since Julie couldn’t get the latest victim from her head. She promised Kait she wouldn’t stay too late and locked the morgue doors behind her as Kait left.
Julie went back in and began going over the latest victim's body again, thinking she may have missed something. She stood perplexed at the accuracy of etchings identical to the last body and the ones before it. As Julie went to pull the cover over the body, she noticed something in the palm of the victim’s hand. She unraveled the cold, stark grasp and found a number etched into the skin that read 43. How could she have missed that?
She went back to her office and dialed the Sheriff’s home number knowing he had already left for the day. He sounded irritated when he answered and told Julie to document it, and he would deal with it at the opening of the next day. He then ordered her to go home for the night and relax.
Julie sighed but agreed, wrote up the report, and neatly tucked the body back into the chilled holding area. She flipped lights off as she left and walked towards the front door, turning around to make sure she hadn’t forgotten anything. She heard a creak in the darkness and her eyes widened. She reached in her purse slowly knowing she had pepper spray somewhere in there when a hand tapped her on the shoulder. She jumped and whirled around breathing heavily.
“Whoa crazy,” Lydia said putting her hands up. “The doors were unlocked, so I wanted to make sure everything was okay in here, sheesh.”
“I locked the doors when Kait left,” Julie said breathlessly as she dropped the spray back in her purse. “I thought you took a sick day.”
“Well,” Lydia replied as she turned and walked towards the doors. “I took a half day. I’ll send the maintenance guy over to check the locks tomorrow. And go get some sleep or have a drink, you're even more uptight than usual, which is record setting for a human.”
“Haha,” Julie said as Lydia shut the door behind her. She took a second to collect her nerves and locked the doors as she left the morgue. They seemed to be locked just fine, weird.
The bike ride home was quick since Julie’s nerves were unhinged and she quickly locked herself inside her house, setting the alarm before she took her coat off. She was pretty sure she was the only one in town with an alarm system, but she was grateful for it especially with the recent events. Julie made her way up to her room, took a shower, threw her scrubs in the wash, and laid down, falling asleep much faster than she thought she would.
Her dreams were full of the faces of the five women brutally murdered, and Julie tossed and turned. Daylight came quickly, and Julie was relieved to see the sun pierce the darkness. She needed a vacation, but with what was going on, Julie knew she’d never outrun it.
Chapter Two
Several weeks had passed since the fifth victim had been found. Julie was a week away from Halloween, and she couldn’t stop thinking about the murder mystery no one seemed able to solve. After they had found the number on the first body, they went back through all the pictures of the other four bodies and found numbers on each of their hands. They were so random, though, not a single detective could figure out what they were pointing to:
76, 12,37,23,43
Julie was even allowed to help comb back through the boxes of evidence they had taken from the scene. It is customary for them to pick up any trash etc. within ten feet of the body in case any of it led to a clue to the murder. The only place without a box was the most recent victim, Marisa, since taking every book from the library was a little obsessive. After twelve hours of scraps of paper and old shoes, they came up with nothing that connected those numbers to anything but random. The Sheriff put it out there that the figures may just be a distraction to keep them off the killer’s trail, but Julie knew there had to be something. The killer was so meticulous in every aspect of these murders, they wouldn’t get sloppy at the last second, it didn’t fit their profile.
The only thing strange that day they went through the evidence was Lydia, who started out helping but ended up leaving the room thinking no one had noticed. While Julie was stacking evidence back in a box, she caught Lydia and the Sheriff in the hall, and they looked like they were talking in secret. He was scolding Lydia, and she just had her head down nodding, something Julie had never seen Lydia do, she usually fought everything. Julie shrugged it off as Lydia probably getting caught stealing or something stupid she used to do in high school. The Sheriff had always seemed to have a soft spot for her and took her in as a father figure.
For the next week, after coming up empty from the evidence search, Julie would scour the internet hoping to find some clue in other towns or states of this serial killer. Her search always ended up the same way, with absolutely nothing. Her frustration and lack of sleep were starting to wear on her, but every time she closed her eyes at night all she would see were these women, and Tommy had been acting weird lately, so there was no alcohol to help relax her brain after work.
It was Wednesday, exactly one week from Halloween, and not far from when Julie should expect another early morning phone call. Her desk was covered in sticky notes, and the only time she wasn’t thinking about the murders was when a random heart attack or car accident would land in the morgue. Julie had her headphones in trying to do some research on what the numbers could mean. She had gone through bible verses, pages of different books, astrology, and just about anything else she could think of and nothing matched up, she was starting to get frustrated.
The door to her office opened, and Lydia walked in, Kait trailing behind her. Lydia stopped in her tracks and took in the maze of sticky notes that covered Julie’s room. Her mouth was wide open when Julie looked up and noticed they had come in the office.<
br />
“Julie,” Kate stepped in front of Lydia. “I told her she could not barge in without an appointment.”
“And I told her,” Lydia said nudging Kait from in front of her. “You were the coroner, not the President. Besides I work for your boss, I can barge when I want to.”
Kait opened her mouth to contest, but Julie put her hand up and smiled. Kait sighed in defeat and began walking back to her desk, giving Lydia a nasty look as she walked past. Lydia laughed arrogantly and then looked back at Julie.
“What,” Julie asked with irritation in her voice. “What do you need?”
“Since you put it so kindly,” Lydia said as she plopped down in the chair in front of Julie’s desk, her long black hair folding over the back of the chair. “Sheriff said he thinks you need a break, so he wants you to take off until Monday. He has a fill in from a county over coming in. And before you protest he said he would call you if anything with the case changed.”
Julie didn’t say anything and just nodded. Lydia stood up, a lollipop from Julie’s desk hanging out of her mouth. She slapped at the flapping pieces of paper glued to the walls and chuckled.
“Man he wasn’t kidding,” she said as she walked out. “You really are obsessed with this.”
“Get out,” Julie said irritated as she moved from her desk and pushed Lydia forward towards the door.
As soon as Lydia had exited the morgue, Julie glanced at Kait who was giving her a pouty sympathetic look. Julie rolled her eyes and took a deep breath. Well at least for the next four days when she got stressed it wouldn’t smell like formaldehyde and death. Julie hadn’t taken a day off in three years; she had no idea what she was going to do for four days.
She gathered the papers on her desk and set them in her bag and walked towards the door, giving Kait the “call me” sign with her hands. She threw her coat on as the brisk October Massachusetts air hit her right in the feeling, and began walking home. When she reached the corner, she glanced over at the library and had the urge to go in and just look around the area the body was found. She told herself no and began to cross the street, suddenly making a right and heading straight for the library doors. Who was she kidding? She had no resolve.
The library was empty since it was the middle of the day on a Wednesday and Julie could hear the echo of her feet hitting the glistening marble floors. The library was timeworn, and Julie felt like she was walking the halls of Congress every time she went there. The romance section was in the back on the left, something Julie was familiar with since her mother used to spend hours in that section swooning over the pages of Harlequin Romance novels for years. Julie turned the corner and was slightly disappointed at the gleaming floor and organized books, though she wasn’t sure what she was expecting to find since the crime scene had been cleaned hours after the body was found.
Julie ran her fingers along the books as she walked, looking at all of the paperback titles that piled at least ten feet in the air on dusty old bookshelves. She bent down and glanced under the shelves to see if anything had rolled under, but nothing but dust covered the marble. Julie glanced left and right and decided she was probably wasting her time. She sighed and laughed at herself, glancing up as she began walking towards the exit. Something had caught her eye before she left the romance row and she squinted at the bright yellow paper sticking out from a book on the top shelf. It was probably nothing, just an old bookmark forgotten, but the fact that it was on the top shelf and not covered in dust made Julie grab a step stool to retrieve it.
Julie plucked the book from its home and noticed that it was the only area that the soil had been messed with. She pulled the book down and flipped to the page that the paper was marking. There was a highlighted line that read:
“She was a beautiful young woman, with long brown hair and breasts perkier than most 23-year-olds. I hated her. I hated that she was sleeping with my husband. How cliché could it be? The professor and his student.”
Julie found this line very odd, and she ran her fingers down the page and stopped in shock at the number at the bottom. This was page 43. Forty-three was the number etched in victim number five’s hand. Was this just some crazy coincidence? Julie’s first reaction was to call the Sheriff, but she wanted to gather more evidence before she brought him one small book from the top shelf of a bookcase. Julie pulled a zip lock bag from her work case and carefully closed the book inside. She felt like she was stealing, but she didn’t want to get any more fingerprints on it than she had to.
Over the next four days, Julie went from place to place searching the areas where each victim had been found. Every location yielded another book, all different, all romance, and all about a woman describing the “other women.” Every page correlated with the numbers etched into the victim’s hand. Julie was excited yet mortified at her discovery, and on Monday morning she showed up at the Sheriff’s office with five zip lock bags holding five different books.
Sheriff Bartlett looked up at Julie and then back down at the books on the table in confusion. He picked up one of the bags and flipped it over to read the back. He began to open it, and Julie reached out.
“No,” she exclaimed, her hair frizzy and a look of over-caffeinated on her face. “That’s evidence.”
The Sheriff sighed and motioned for Julie to have a seat, he never did take her very seriously. He watched as Julie fumbled with her bag and tried to smooth the wrinkles out of the scrubs she had grabbed from the drier before pedaling her way to work. She resembled a drunk homeless woman.
“What are you talking about?” the Sheriff asked.
Julie took a deep breath and rattled off all the details of what she had found over her four days off. She told him about the first book, the trips to the crime scenes, and the correlation between page numbers and victims. The Sheriff listened intently and then picked up his office phone.
“Lydia,” he said. “Find Schroeder, tell him we have a break in the case.”
“Good job Julie,” the Sheriff said as he hung up the phone. “That was some excellent, but sneaky, detective work. I’ll pass it to the detective. Now please go and clean all the sticky notes from your office.”
“Sheriff,” Julie began feeling less than enthused by his response. “I thought since I found all of it, you would let me help with the investigation.”
“Julie,” the Sheriff sighed. “We’ve had this discussion before. You know you can’t just go playing detective. You are the County Coroner; you have your job, and you are excellent at it.”
Julie’s mood dipped immediately, and she gathered her bags and turned towards the door. The Sheriff tapped his pen on the desk and called Julie’s name before she made it out of the office. Julie turned, ready to take a lecture on doing work that wasn’t her job.
“Look,” the Sheriff said kindly. “If we don’t find anything else until Monday, I’ll let you do some work with the detective.”
A huge smile smeared across Julie’s face, and she ran over and threw her arms around the Sheriff’s neck. He sat rigid with a small grin on his face and watched as Julie skipped through the pit on her way back to the coroner’s office. Julie was ecstatic; she just needed to keep her nose clean for a few more days, and she would be able to help with the case. But what was she going to do for five days, without having to be part of the Halloween party planning?
“Hey,” Kait said as Julie walked through the door. “Holy crap you look like you died and came back to life.”
“Yea,” Julie said shyly. “I had a long weekend.”
“I figured,” Kait said following Julie back to her office and watching her pull the little sticky notes from the walls. “You didn’t answer a single text I sent you. Anyways, I got your outfit. I need you to try it on tonight to make sure it fits. So I’ll just walk home with you tonight, K?”
“Uh, yeah sure,” Julie said slightly distracted. “Won’t Tommy be upset?”
“Oh,” she said brightly. “No, we are fine, besides he works tonight and I promi
sed I would stay out of trouble.”
“Trouble,” Julie laughed. “You haven’t been in trouble a day in your life.”
“Yea,” Kait said. “Anyways, what were all those books you brought in this morning? I saw you stumbling towards the Sheriff’s office.”
“Oh!” Julie was excited and sat down at her desk to tell Kait every detail of what she found. Kait listened intently, which was weird since she usually floated off into Kait world.
“Wow,” Kait said when Julie finished. “So do you think this will help them find the guy?”
“I don’t know,” Julie shrugged. “It's a start, but it is going to take a lot of work to find out. And when did you get so curious about this stuff? I thought it gave you nightmares.”
“Meh,” Kait said nonchalantly. “I have nothing else better to do since Tommy works all the time and you’ve been playing detective.”
“I’m sorry,” Julie said appreciatively. “Tonight there will be no talk of work. Just Halloween fashion. Promise.”
Kait perked up and bounced back to her desk. Julie smiled knowing she had made her best friend’s day. Only two days until the dreaded Halloween party, and Julie couldn’t shake the feeling that something was about to happen. This Halloween may just be the most exciting Halloween that Julie, and this town, has ever seen.
Chapter Three
Julie had no idea where the last two days had gone, but she found herself standing in her bedroom waiting for Kait to bring her Masquerade Costume to her. It was Halloween and Julie was uneasy about the fact that, if the serial killer stayed on schedule, it would only be a few days until they struck again. Julie stood in front of the mirror staring at herself. She was always tall and lean, but by the looks of her reflection, she thought she might need to stop skipping meals all the time. Julie’s long blonde hair was pulled back tightly into a little bun, and her bra and panties actually matched for once, probably because Kait picked them out to go with her costume.
One Little Letter_A Bad Boy, Second Chance Romance Page 58
