Dear Tragedy: A Dark Supernatural Thriller (House of Sand Book 2)

by Michael J Sanford

  Dear Tragedy

  a dark supernatural thriller

  Michael J Sanford

  Copyright © 2018 Michael J Sanford

  All rights reserved.

  This book or any portion thereof

  may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever

  without the express written permission of the publisher

  except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  First Edition

  Cover design by Fiona Jayde Media

  fionajaydemedia.com

  Michael J Sanford’s official website

  http://www.mjsauthor.com

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  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Unknown

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter One

  Friday 7:00 a.m.

  Drip, drip, drip.

  Blood fell in swollen droplets from the girl’s severed wrist to land on a carpet already over-saturated with the stuff. The more he stared at it, the louder the sound became.

  Like Death’s gong, it sounded the passing of an evil so great that its echo might last forever.

  In all his years on the force, Jake Anderson had never seen anything quite like the crime scene laid out before him. He was retired now, at least mostly. No longer a detective with the department, he worked as an extra set of eyes. No gun. No badge. The cheap ID badge that swung from his chest pocket read Consultant. But that was only when Detective Peter Anderson, Jake’s only son, asked. And this time he had pleaded.

  Peter nudged Jake’s arm. “Any thoughts?”

  Without looking away from the gory redecoration of the small living room, Jake said, “You still have a bit of vomit on your chin. It’d be best if the others didn’t see it. For fuck’s sake, try to at least act like you know what you’re doing.”

  Peter wiped at his chin and turned to more directly face his father. And also, to face away from the living room, Jake noted. His son was brighter than the sun, but never had much in the way of nerves. Got that from his mother, rest in peace. Not that Jake would have characterized himself as brave, just numb. But as numb as his career had made him, the once quaint home at the end of Cedar Lane set him on edge. And not the good kind of edge. The hairs along his arms and neck had been on end since he’d first stepped foot inside. And that had been before he’d seen—or smelled—the carnage.

  “Dad?”

  Jake jumped, wiped at his own mouth absently, and shook his head. “What a fucking mess. And just a kid.”

  “Twelve. Only child.”

  Jake glanced at what remained of a torso, strapped to a kitchen chair with belts, lengths of rope, and at least half a roll of duct tape. “Shit,” he said, shaking his head. He could hear the painful shrieks of grieving parents from a room deeper in the house. He would have had them escorted from the home and down to the station immediately. But it wasn’t his show anymore. He was just another poor bastard left to sift through the remains of whatever twisted act this had been. “Walk me through what you know, Peter. You know the drill. No bullshit. No omission. Just think aloud.”

  “Oh, okay. Sure.” Peter walked back toward the front of the house with Jake following close after. “No forced entry at either main doors or any of the first-floor windows.”

  “Second-floor windows?”

  “Same thing,” Peter said. “Locked up tight. No sign of tampering.”

  “Alarm system?” Jake asked, tapping a finger against a control panel on the entryway wall.

  Peter shook his head. “Disabled at three thirteen p.m., presumably when the daughter arrived home from school.”

  “Parents?”

  “Both work in sales, some place in Brighton, uh, Advanced Bio-something or other. They were away at a conference overnight. Came home first thing this morning after failing to get a hold of anyone at the house.”

  “Twelve’s a little young to be staying alone.”

  “Babysitter. Ariana or something like that. Family friend. Best guess, arrived at three thirty p.m., both according to the entry in the security system log and the parents—Mr. and Mrs. Miller.”

  “Where is this Ariana—or whatever—now?”

  Peter looked behind him apprehensively. “Upstairs. Main bath.”

  Jake looked at his son and raised an eyebrow. “Jesus Christ, don’t bury the lead.”

  “She’s in the tub. Dead. Looks like she cut her wrists.”

  “You like her for murder-suicide?” Jake asked. He was already scanning the carpet near the stairs for signs of blood. It’d be near impossible to butcher a girl and then get upstairs without leaving one hell of a trail.

  “At a glance, yeah,” Peter said.

  “But not deeper than that?”

  Peter shook his head. “Too clean from here to there. And besides the slit wrists, the babysitter is…well, clean, too.”

  Jake frowned, not because he didn’t agree, but because he noticed something. He walked into the living room, carefully keeping to the exterior, and circled to the second doorway that opened up next to the stairs.

  “Got something?” Peter asked without following.

  In the doorway, he crouched and peered under a glass display cabinet. It sat six inches off the floor and beneath it was what had drawn Jake’s attention. He took out a single rubber glove from his jacket pocket and snapped it on.

  “Well, I guess we’ve already solved the mystery of how the killer got out of the room without leaving a trail a blind man could follow,” Jake said, holding up a pair of blood-soaked sneakers.

  “Could be the babysitter’s,” Peter said. “After…all this, she slips off her shoes and carefully gets upstairs to kill herself.”

  “The babysitter,” Jake said. “How tall would you say she is?”

  Peter checked his notepad. “Uh, I don’t know. Tall, though. And she’s a retiree, for what’s it’s worth.”

  Jake stood and extended the sneakers toward Peter. Peter leaned into the room, but still wouldn’t enter it. “Not sure I can picture an old lady in a pair of soccer cleats,” Jake said. “Not to mention these are kids’ shoes. Probably our victim’s.” Jake nodded toward the mantle where a line of plastic trophies was arranged, each with a soccer ball atop it.

  “Well, shit…” Peter said.

  “Yeah, that abo
ut sums it up. Here, bag these, would ya?”

  Jake crossed back to the entryway and waited for Peter to put on gloves and take the soccer cleats from him.

  “Well, she didn’t do this to herself,” Peter said, sealing the sneakers into a large plastic evidence bag.

  Jake nodded, but had already moved on to other trains of thought. He peered out the narrow window next to the front door. He could see a bit of the next nearest house, diagonally across the road, but not well. He opened the door and stepped onto the welcome mat. The morning air was clean and fresh, carrying a hint of rain, a stark contrast to the air in the house.

  Jake couldn’t make out any of the windows of the neighboring house, and the street was lined with overgrown trees. Peter would know the genus and species, he was sure, but all Jake knew was that they were trees. And that they greatly obscured any possible witness sight lines. Privacy for victim and killer alike. The shadows didn’t play favorites. Bastards.

  “Pets?” Jake asked, turning back to the house.

  “Uh, not sure. Why?” Peter asked.

  Jake pointed to the paw-print pattern on the welcome mat at his feet.

  “Oh, of course, I’ll go find out right now.”

  Jake laughed and grabbed his son by the shoulders, spun him around and walked him down the entryway. “Forget the pet, I was just thinking aloud. Have you talked to the parents?”

  “Only briefly. I haven’t… Uh, well, I took one look at the living room and called you.”

  “I see. Well, go and do that now. If it wasn’t either or both of them, they’re bound to know something. See if they can confirm that those are the victim’s shoes. I’ll go and have a look at the babysitter and around the victim’s bedroom, and let the techs process the living room. They just rolled up.”

  Peter nodded and fished out a notepad from his pocket. “Good plan. We’ll meet up later to compare?”

  “Sure thing,” Jake said.

  Peter nodded and walked further into the house. Jake walked back to the front door and opened it just as Miguel Erto was reaching for the knob.

  Already in full coveralls, Miguel took one look at Jake and threw his arms wide. “DS!” the man shouted as he moved in for a hug.

  Jake halfheartedly fought off the advance before caving in to the man’s embrace. Miguel gave Jake a heavy-handed pat on the back and extricated himself.

  “It’s just Jake now, Mr. Erto,” Jake said with a smile.

  Miguel feigned offense, but broke it with a toothy grin. “Then I suppose you’ll just have to call me Miguel.”

  “Sure thing, Mikey. Well, I hope you brought your full kit and didn’t eat breakfast this morning,” Jake said, standing aside to allow Miguel inside.

  “Ha! Of course not. You know I never eat before a job, and I’d heard a rumor that you’d be on scene. That tells me plenty right off. How bad is it?”

  “Climb-into-your-dreams-and-fuck-your-mind-six-ways-to-Sunday bad.” Jake stepped to the doorway of the living room and nodded.

  Miguel slipped on a pair of plastic booties, took one step into the room, and then backed out again. “Shit.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Looks like a kid.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Where’s the rest of the body?”

  “Around,” Jake said, gesturing at a couple fingers he had noted earlier, spread out under a coffee table. “Got a second in the master bath, but this is the main attraction.”

  Miguel cursed again, but walked over to the chair that was in the middle of the living room. Jake stayed in the doorway, not wanting to contaminate any evidence. And not wanting to step through the blood of a child.

  “Might want to actually call in an assistant for this one,” Jake said.

  Miguel waved a blind hand in Jake’s general direction.

  Jake waited in silence while Miguel set about his grisly task. Jake never understood the science part of the job, often relying on Miguel to dumb it down for him. People he understood. At least, he thought he did. Looking at a living room painted with gore, he wasn’t so sure that was true any longer. He’d seen countless dead children over his tenure, but nothing half as bad as this. Most of it was just a feeling, but it was usually all he had.

  “Been dead less than twenty-four hours. About fourteen or so, I’d say,” Miguel called out. “Give or take.”

  Jake nodded. That put time of death in the neighborhood of five p.m. the night before. If the parents could confirm their alibis, it would rule them out fairly definitively. Jake looked toward the back of the house. He could no longer make out the overt misery of the pair. Evidently, Peter had at least gotten them to shut up.

  “Had to be the parents, right?” Miguel asked.

  Jake smiled at his friend. “Doubtful, but Peter’s talking with them now. What else you got for me?”

  “Uh, well, the head was removed, obviously, as were the fingers, hands, and toes. First look, I’d say the toes went first, followed by the fingers, and then hands. All removed perimortem. The head, post.”

  “Sounds like torture,” Jake said, thinking aloud.

  “I’ve seen torture. We both have, but this…” Miguel said, again reflecting Jake’s own thoughts. “I mean, shit, far as I can tell, this girl was strapped to the chair, had most of her fingers removed, as well as all but the big toes, and then the hands at the wrist. Died from blood loss. Again, my best guess.”

  “And then the killer took her head off, for good measure.”

  “Yeah,” Miguel said, standing. “And it wasn’t pleasant.”

  “Being dismembered rarely is,” Jake said.

  “Well, yeah, shit, I just meant that in the world of dismemberment, this was particularly rough. Amateur. Worse than amateur. A real hack job. Especially the head.”

  “Could be their first time at…this,” Jake said, waving his hand.

  “Hell of a way to start a career in murder.”

  “No way this is their first murder, at least not likely. But maybe straight-up killing got boring.”

  Miguel crouched and picked up a severed hand. He examined it briefly, before placing it carefully into an evidence container. “Well, whatever the case, they were determined. The cuts are shallow, which would almost make me think hesitation, but there are just so many. Whoever did this kept at it. Actually, I take back what I said. I think the first hand removal resulted in death.”

  “But they kept going. Finished the hand, then did the next, and then the head…”

  “Yeah. Like I said, determined.”

  Jake merely nodded. Determined wasn’t quite the word he had in mind, but he’d heard all he could handle for the moment. He walked for the stairs, calling over his shoulder, “Keep me posted, yeah?”

  “Sure thing, Jakey.”

  Jake gave a middle finger and climbed to the second floor. He could only stare at a blood-stained room for so long. He would never understand how techs like Miguel could do their sort of work day in and day out. If not a bloody living room, then a corpse-filled morgue. And all the cutting and stitching…

  The first room at the top of the stairs was the master bath. Jake stepped in and gave it a quick once-over. It was blindingly bright. Everything was white—walls, floors, towels. Everything except the exsanguinated body in the large, claw-foot tub.

  Jake leaned over the tub and examined the body long enough to confirm what Peter had said—too tall and clean to have been involved in the mayhem of the living room torture. There was little doubt that Miguel would agree after all the required collection and testing.

  Both of the woman’s wrists were opened up, parallel to her arteries. Each gash ran nearly the full length of each forearm. As Miguel would say, that took a lot of determination, but as Jake surveyed the scene, he couldn’t find a blade. It was certainly possible that it was something small like a razor blade and had fallen out of view, disguised by the blood in the tub, but it was just one more thing that scratched at the back of Jake’s head. Another gut feeling.


  He tugged at his beard as he turned in place, eyeing the floor. Stark white, well-polished, and devoid of any apparent blood.

  “You were neat about it, I’ll give you that much,” Jake said aloud.

  Murder was messy. The living room was a disaster. But the bathroom was neat, well-contained, strangely so after having been downstairs. Two killers? Jake looked back at the tub. An actual suicide? The simplest answer was usually the right one, but how on Earth did one elderly babysitter cut a girl into literal pieces before making it upstairs to kill herself, all without leaving any obvious trace between point A and point B? At first glance, they were two separate incidents. A grisly murder downstairs and a fairly routine suicide upstairs. But Jake didn’t believe in coincidences.

  Jake sighed and made to leave, but stopped as the incoming morning sun reflected off the over-sink mirror. He paused, moved back a step, then forward again, keeping his eyes on the mirror.

  “Son of a…” Jake said to the corpse as he approached the mirror for a closer look.

  Jake could see the object of his fascination more clearly when he positioned his head at the mirror edge and looked across it, but it wasn’t until he turned on the hot water and let the steam gather that it became clear.

  Whenever the mirror had last been covered in condensation, someone had drawn a simple smiley face on it, dead center.

  “I don’t suppose this was your doing?” Jake asked the body in the tub.

  Only the sink answered.

  Drip, drip.

  Jake wrenched the handles closed and hastily left the room, not liking the chill that had wrapped itself around his neck.

  The second room Jake poked his head in showed itself to be a likely candidate for the victim’s room. Too many bright colors to be an adult’s. His phone rang as he entered. He paused long enough to fish it out and thumb the green button before sitting on the edge of the bed, atop a flower-printed comforter.

  “This is Jake,” he said.

  “Yeah, I know, I called you,” Amelia said.

  “Oh, sorry, old habit. What’s going on? Is Dani okay?” She was the only reason his ex-wife would call, and only if it was something important. She didn’t bother calling anymore just to bitch.