Page 83 of Shhh…It’s A Killer Story

"Reed," a voice said from the corner.

It wasn't Walker. It was the state prosecutor’s investigator, a man named Vance who spent most of his time behind a mahogany desk in the capital. Walker didn't wait for introductions. He didn't even offer a hand. He just reached down, picked up two glossy eight-by-ten photos from the stack, and flicked it across the laminate table. It slid smoothly, stopping an inch from my belt buckle.

"Last night," Walker said, his voice flat, dry, and entirely devoid of the political warmth he usually cultivated for the local papers. "Two victims. Male and female. Found them, one in the old kiln shack behind the timber yard on Route 4 and the other one in an old building, just outside Blackridge."

I looked down at the photos.

Fuck.

It wasn't a disappearance. The bodies weren't hidden under pine needles or tucked into the rocks where the wolves could get them. They were displayed. The man was bound to a wooden beam with heavy electrical wire; his face turned toward the door as if he’d been waiting for the first light. His face frozen in an agonising scream. Words carved on his chest, and it looks like something in his mouth... Why the fuck is his dick in his mouth as if he choked on it.

Who the fuck would do this.

The woman was sitting at a table, tied to the chair with a belt, her face also frozen in a scream as her body was brutalised by cuts and bruises, where her throat should be but no longer is just mangled flesh as if someone carved out her vocal cords. Her hands on the dinner plate in front of her cut from her body. A note next to her.

You’re welcome

My stomach dropped. I had seen bodies before. I had seen soldiers torn apart by explosives. I had never seen cruelty arranged like artwork.

"They weren't murdered there, Elias," Derek said from the whiteboard, his voice losing its usual lazy cadence.

"They were staged right there after being murdered somewhere else. The blood pooling doesn't match the position of the wood grain and dinner table. Whoever did this spent three hours in that shack with them. Making them staged like that. These bodies aren’t even killed the same day. They were killed four days apart."

Fuck.

"Notes were left," Walker interrupted, his voice sharp as he tried to claw back the authority in the room. He pointed a stubby, nicotine-stained finger at a secondary document on the board.

"A single piece of ledger paper. Written in black ink. No signature. Just a line about 'You’re welcome.'"

The room went completely quiet. The hum of the fluorescent lights overhead felt louder now, a vibrating B-flat that seemed to drill into the back of my skull. The missing persons case, the slow, frustrating game of tracking shadows through the trees was officially dead. We were looking at a double homicide. A slaughter. The turning point had landed on the table with the dry sound of a glossy photograph, and the air in the station felt ten degrees colder.

"Elias," Derek said, finally moving away from the white board.

He crossed the floor with the long, loose stride of a man who spent four years carrying a sixty-pound pack through the desert.

"You ugly bastard."

Before I could clear the glare from my face, his arms were around my shoulders, crushing me in a bear hug that smelled of tobacco and salt air. He punched me hard in the left bicep hard enough to leave me later and let out a loud, bark of laughter that broke the stiff, suffocating tension of the room like a stone through glass.

"You haven't changed a bit," he grinned, his blue eyes bright under the harsh lights. He had a new eyebrow piercing, a tiny silver bar that caught the light every time he moved, and the dark, intricate feathers of an eagle tattoo wrapped around the sides of his neck, disappearing under the collar of his black tactical shirt. He looked exactly like what he was a sniper who had transitioned into private security without losing the grin that usually meant he’d found something to shoot at.

Behind him, Mason didn't move.

He remained leaning against the edge of the table; his hands tucked into the pockets of his dark utility jacket. He didn't offer a hug. He didn't even shift his weight. He just stared at me with those cold, slate-grey eyes that always looked like they were measuring the distance between his boots and your throat.

"You look like shit, Reed," Mason said, his voice a low, gravelly monotone that had no edge to it, just flat, solid weight.

"Good to see you too, Mase," I muttered, nodding back.

His black hair was cut short, almost down to the scalp at the sides, and the dark, heavy ink of Celtic knotwork crawled up his neck, tracing the line of his jaw before disappearing under his ear. His fingers, wrapped around the edge of the table now, were covered in tiny, faded scars from years of working as a breacher, the guy who went through the door first when the fire was hot. He didn't smile. I’d known him for twelve years, and I’d seen him smile twice both times when something was burning down.

Standing between them, the contrast was the same as it had been when we were in the sandbox.

Derek laughed; Mason didn't. Derek filled the silence with questions about the local diner and the quality of the beer at the tavern; Mason created a three-foot perimeter of absolute quiet around himself that even Sheriff Walker didn't seem eager to cross. One was sunshine, the guy who kept the unit from killing each other when the water ran out and one was thunder, the heavy, brutal force specialist you called when the negotiation had failed.

I sat somewhere in the middle. The guy who would plan how the attack would happen, where and when. Now a detective who had to take the mess people left behind and turn it into something a judge would look at.

"I don't care how many years you three spent in the sand," Walker barked, his voice rising as he slammed his palm onto the laminate table, his face flushing a dangerous, dark red.