I then came to Minot forest, on the edge of town. This place was out of the way, but there was a section at a higher elevation, so when I drove the car through it I had a view of the whole town. It was spectacular. I thought about all of the romantic evenings the teenagers of the town would have had here, knowing full well that bodies had been dumped nearby. I drove around further, and looked around at the forest. It was quite moist in places, but that was because there were so many trees. I then approached a dead end – a drive-in car park. I saw I was the only person visiting the forest today. Before I left the building, I searched the internet to find out where I was going, because I knew that Minot forest was quite a big place. I knew where I was, having been here before as a child. I could remember bits and pieces, but never a strange house. I saw an old path, one that was barely visible, but it was still there, so I decided to follow that. I knew that John and Monica probably walked down that way, because that was the way that led to the river. I walked along for a few minutes, looking around. I thought to myself, what an awful place to die! Those young boys were just left here, waiting to be found by a dog walker. It was sad, very sad. I tried to think of other things to distract myself. I approached a modern-looking sign pointing to the river. If what Monica said was right, I must be getting closer. I then looked down at the river and saw that a new path had been put in. It was full of tarmac, and it was obvious that it was a recent addition. I then continued to walk along the old pathway.
Two minutes later, I came to another path, and looking in the direction it led, I saw the old house Monica had mentioned. It was indeed in the distance, and from the way Monica had described it, nothing had changed much over the last twenty years. Just as I was nearing the house, I tripped over something on the ground. It was a circular piece of metal that was fixed in the ground, and I didn’t see it because it was covered up by grass. That was just typical. Now I was covered in mud! I couldn’t go up there looking like this, so I decided to quickly drive back home, and back to the station, hoping that none of my colleagues would see me like this. Just this once, I would tell a lie to the boss, and say that there was no one home. I then thought to interview John again, to see what I could get out of him about the house. After all, he had opened up to me in the first interview, so I was likely to get more information in the second interview.
Fortunately, I was able to go home, get changed as fast as I could, and return to work without any of my colleagues noticing.
“What did they say?” said Mitchell.
“Nobody was in, sir,” I said, “but I’m going back at some point. For now, I’m going to talk to John Doe again about the house,” I replied.
“You do that,” replied Mitchell. “I hate to say it, but I’m more wrapped up in these gang killings in the city. It’s just getting out of hand now. I’m going to leave you in charge of the John Doe case.”
“You won’t regret it, sir,” I said, trying to reassure him. I was confident I was going to get to the bottom of this case. Although it was the most challenging I had come across in a while, it was not the most challenging ever, and unless something else came up to throw me off track, I knew I would be able to manage.
I walked into the interview room again, facing John Doe for a third time. This time, John looked more agitated than before.
“Hello, John,” I said to him.
“Hello,” he replied, shaking.
“You’ve had your medication, haven’t you?” I asked him, checking to see if he had actually taken it.
“Yes,” he replied.
“John, I’m here for one reason today. I want to ask you about a specific house.”
“A house?” he said, immediately alert.
“Yes. I want to know something in particular.”
I could see that John had no idea what I was talking about. He was not faking it, so I had to explain to him.
“Well, Monica, your cousin, has been to the station, and she told me that one time, a few days before the first murder, you said to her that you did something bad in this house,” I said, showing a photograph of the house to him.
John remained silent.
“What was that bad thing?” I asked him.
“I can’t remember,” he replied, pushing the photograph away.
“Why are you so reluctant to speak, now?” I asked him, frustrated.
“I have nothing to say to you,” he replied, looking me right in the eye, which was unusual for him.
“It’s obvious that you’re hiding something!” I said, becoming increasingly impatient.
“No,” he said, putting his head down.
“Well, then...” I said, thinking of something else to say, “Is there anything else...”
“My mother is wondering where I am!” John cried, interrupting me.
“What?” I said, shocked by what John had just said. Monica told me that John’s mother was dead.
“I said, my mother will be at home, worried.”
“John, your mother is dead,” I said, confused about where he was coming from.
“Why do you think that? My mother is at home right now. None of you people have told her, have you?”
“She died over twenty years ago, John,” I said.
“She talks to me every day. She sits with me when Monica is not around. She is a very old lady now, but she does her best to see me every day,” John said, his eyes almost shut with imagination.
I decided to leave things there, and stop the interview. Again, I had found another lead, and I knew I had to push the house business to one side, and focus on John’s mother.
Chapter 6
The first thing I needed to do was make sure that John’s mother was definitely dead. Although improbable, it was not impossible that John’s mother was alive. She could have faked her death for a number of reasons. People had done it before, so it would have been no real surprise for me.
I looked on the internet for records of John Doe’s birth. I had deduced from what Monica told me that in 1992, John was seventeen or eighteen, so he was born in either 1974 or 1975. With that lead, I searched for every birth record for a John Doe born in 1974 or 1975. Fortunately, there was only one record, a John Doe born in March 1975. That made him thirty-seven years of age. I thought he was much older than that, but there we had it. The birth records gave me his mother’s name. Her first name was Francesca, but there was no mention of the father. Her maiden name, Dell, was on the birth certificate. This meant that Francesca was not married when she gave birth to John. After that, I looked for a death certificate for a Francesca Dell. There was one, but it was in 1999, and Monica told me that she had died before the killings, so I looked for a marriage record with Francesca Dell. One result came up, indicating that Francesca had married a couple of months after John was born, to an Eric Doe, so John’s father had been in his life. However, I then discovered that Eric died six years later, so his mother had to bring him up alone. After that, I went on to discover that when John was fifteen, his mother was killed, just after he was diagnosed with schizophrenia. On her death certificate it said she had died in a car accident. I searched for a newspaper article detailing events of her death, and was able to find some information. Francesca was the driver, and she was giving two friends a lift. She then crashed suddenly. She died, but the other two survived. Nothing could be done to save her. She was definitely dead.
After this revelation, I was glad to establish that John’s mother was, without a doubt, dead. This made things more interesting, and although I did not want to say it to the others, I was beginning to get excited, because I knew that this case was becoming more and more challenging by the minute. My next stop was John’s house. I was looking forward to seeing it for the information it would give me into his way of life, and hopefully more insight into his character.
Once again, I arrived in the area, and this time I drove up to John’s house. Not surprising, no one was around, or so it seemed. Monica had given me
a key, so I was allowed to look inside. I knocked on the door, to make sure no one was in. I probably should not have done that, because it would have given someone an opportunity to run away. I waited a few seconds, and then I looked in the window. There was no sign of life. It was possible that John was making things up, rather than imagining things, just to throw me off track. However, I did not envision John as a criminal mastermind. After all, he did not have to come in and confess.
I stood around a moment before deciding to enter the house. Before I entered, however, I was stopped by a woman who stood outside the front gate and greeted me.
“Hello!” she said, in a very friendly manner.
“Hello,” I replied, not knowing what else to say.
“Has John done something?” she asked.
“That is official police business,” I replied. “Who are you?”
“My name is Laura. I’m an old friend of John’s.”
That name rang a bell. John had mentioned Laura in the first interview, but I did not tell her that.
“Are you his friend now?” I asked her.
“Yes,” she replied, “of course. Me and John have been friends for years, but I haven’t seen much of him recently.”
“Really? Why’s that?” I said, hoping for a little bit more information.
“I’ve been busy recently. I’ve volunteered for Dog’s Trust. I love animals so!”
“Do you?”
“Yes. Do you know, I’ve spent half the morning rescuing a squirrel from a drainpipe? And the other day, this cat got a splinter in its paw. Oh, sorry, I’m rambling on now!”
“It’s alright,” I said, getting bored already. “So, how long have you and John been friends?”
“Oh, you’re giving me an interview now, are you?” laughed Laura. I liked this woman, because she was rather cheerful and sociable.
“No,” I laughed. “I’m just trying to find out a bit more about John, that’s all.”
“What’s this about?” she asked again.
“I can’t say... yet,” I said, knowing that sooner or later this whole case would be released to the press.
“It’s something serious then, isn’t it?” asked Laura, looking quite apprehensive.
“What makes you say that?” I said.
“John’s always been a funny one,” she said.
“What do you mean?” I asked her.
“I don’t really know. He never seemed to fit in with the others.”
“I know that he’s a schizophrenic.”
“Really? I didn’t know that!”
“You didn’t?”
“Well, I’ve never really thought about John like that.”
“Laura, do you remember Monica? She lives just around the corner.”
“Oh, Monica! Yes, I do. Me and her were really good friends at school.”
“Do you still see her now?”
“Now and then,” Laura replied with confidence. “I say hello to her, and that’s it.”
“She hasn’t been behaving strangely, has she?” I asked her, secretly hoping for an affirmative answer.
“No. Like I said, I don’t see her much. Monica is somebody who tends to keep to herself. Like me, she is unmarried, and she does not really do much, not like she used to, anyway.”
“She used to go out a lot?” I asked, feeling as though I was getting somewhere.
“Oh, yes! I used to see her all the time,” she said, “even at somebody’s one hundredth birthday party. She went out at four o’clock that day, and stayed out until twelve, when the other party finished!”
“Really?” I asked. It seemed to me that Monica had rather strange behavior. Although she seemed perfectly normal when I talked to her, she seemed to have an unusual past.
“Yes! And she used to flirt with everyone, in school. Shortly after Richard’s death, she just forgot about him and moved on to somebody else.”
It was then that it struck me. Monica and Richard (the fourth victim) were an item? Then I thought even deeper––John said that he had written a love note to Richard, which lured him into the woods. Could Monica have written that note instead?
“I need to ask you one more question,” I said. “And you might think this is a little bit stupid.”
“Not at all,” said Laura. “Fire away!”
“Well, do you remember years ago, when Richard Cold was killed?”
“Yes, I do. It was a sad time, with the others dying, too.”
“Well, Richard received a note which lured him to his death. Do you remember if Monica wrote that note?”
“Yes. She wrote the note and pushed it through into Richard’s locker. Nobody was looking.”
“How do you know this?” I asked.
“Well, she told me.”
“Did she?” I asked.
“Didn’t you know? Monica and Richard were an item!”
“This is news to me!” I cried. “And thank you for your time! Also, I would appreciate it if you didn’t tell anyone about this––not yet, anyway.”
“You have my word,” said Laura, waving goodbye to me.
Laura had helped a lot. I could not believe what I had heard. In the interview, John said that he was the one who pushed the note through the locker, but I had a witness who claimed otherwise.
I returned to the station and made some phone calls, just to verify that Monica and Richard were an item just before his murder. I made a few calls to people who were in the same classes as Monica and Richard, and also to Richard’s parents, who confirmed that Monica and Richard were indeed dating at the time of his death. Now I was suspicious of Monica more even than John, and I strongly believed that Monica had something to do with the murders.
Chapter 7
I did not doubt Laura at all. For whatever reason, she knew she’d gotten Monica into trouble. Perhaps she didn’t want to lie to the police, or she accidentally let it slip about the note, but she was telling the truth, because other people said that Monica and Richard were boyfriend and girlfriend at the time of Richard’s death. This was something I needed to think about. Monica had lied in the first place, and I had evidence of it, so now I was ready to put pressure on her. I arrested her for suspicion of the murders, and it was her turn to be formally interviewed.
I entered the room, and she sat as still as a stone. Her hands were not trembling. Her eyes were barely moving. Perhaps she was traumatized by the whole thing, but I knew that was probably not true.
“So, Monica,” I said, as I walked through the door, “I am going to ask you again. Did you write Richard that love note the day he died?”
“No, I didn’t,” Monica said, with a very firm tone of voice.
“Well, you see, I have a witness who said you did.”
“Who on Earth told you that?!” she yelled, showing that she was confused.
“I’m not allowed to say. Now, I’m going to ask you this again. What was your relationship like with Richard Cold?”
Monica shrugged. “He was only a classmate,” she replied.
I almost laughed, because I knew for a fact she was lying to me.
“Here’s the problem. You see,” I said, “I know for a fact that you are lying to me about that, because I have eight witnesses who will argue otherwise. They all say that you were boyfriend and girlfriend until the day Richard died.”
“That’s bull!” she cried, still attempting to deny things.
“Well, the more you lie to me, the less I trust you,” I said. “And to be honest, I have little faith in you now, if any, so you’d better tell the truth, and tell it right now!” I became more and more firm with her throughout the interview.
Monica sat there, silent. Her shoulders were right up tight, then finally she dropped them, and gave a big sigh.
“Okay, I’ll tell you the truth this time,” she said.
I thought to myself, finally!
“Well, Richard and I were going out with
each other, until the day he died. Are you happy now?”
“Did you write the note?”
“I honestly can’t remember that! I don’t remember little details like that,” she said, becoming desperate for me to trust her.
“Well, it’s a big thing, actually. Probably the biggest thing in the whole case at the moment, because whoever wrote that note was right in the middle of Richard Cold’s death. So I’m inferring that whoever wrote that note is the Minot Hacker.”
“I might have wrote it, but I really cannot remember something from twenty years ago!”
“Alright,” I said, “But if somebody said you wrote it, or that they saw you write it, then you probably did write it.”
“I understand that. But maybe someone else saw me write the note, and used it to follow Richard to the woods.”
“Ah!” I said.
“What?” said Monica, clearly puzzled by my reaction.
“I didn’t mention what was in the note!” I said, unable to keep the excitement from my voice, knowing that I had caught her out.
Monica knew that was it for her.
“Please, don’t do this,” she said. “I promise you, it’s nothing to do with the murders.”
“But it is,” I said. “Otherwise, you would tell me.”
Monica knew that she had to tell me the whole truth.
“Well. It’s John,” she said quietly.
“Has he confessed to you?” I asked her.
Monica nodded.
“I didn’t want to say anything,” she said. “But just before he came to the station the other night, he told me he was the killer, and how he did it. He told me he was going home. I didn’t know he was coming to the police station to confess, though!”
The Untimely Death Box Set Page 47
