13. Chapter 13

Chapter 13

Aaron

"L et me guess. This guy's a piece of shit."

"Nailed it in one," Coleson replies.

I wave at Mitchell behind me before he can walk into the room and fuck anything up. Mitchell is my deputy, but he's still young and green and has never been on a murder site before. "Stay here and keep the press out if they show up."

He nods, his lips pale around the edges. He doesn't want to come in. There's no smell since the body is fresh, but I can tell he doesn't want to come into the room in the off chance it's messy. Blood splatter isn't for everyone. Hell, it's why I ran for sheriff and not detective. I'm just the guy that comes in for the update and brainstorming.

Coleson waves me through to the back porch where the dead man lies in a puddle of blood. "Todd Daniels. Age thirty-eight. Found by his sister when he didn't pick her up for a doctor's appointment he was supposed to drive her to. She got an Uber and came over to check on him."

"I thought you said he was a piece of shit. A shitty person doesn't drive their sister to the doctor."

"Yeah, well a good person doesn't have a list of hookers taped to his refrigerator. So here we are."

"Hookers again. Why are all murder victims into hookers? It's not even the hookers that kill them most of the time."

"It's the type," Coleson says, nodding sagely. "They make poor life choices, in general. That's why they get killed."

I snap on an offered glove. "How'd this one die?" I ask, bending down but not touching the victim. I try to look under his neck to see if his throat was slit. There's a lot of blood, though. This one wasn't blunt force to the back of the head.

"Screwdriver up through the bottom of his chin."

"Ouch."

"At least we think it was a screwdriver. Forensics says it looks like the perfect size and shape for a flathead. No murder weapon that we can find."

"Footprints?"

"We swept it. Nothing at all, and what we do find is oddly shaped. It's like the person doesn't wear normal shoes."

"Like space shoes?" I chuckle at my own stupid joke.

Coleson shrugs and smirks. "Or just someone that knows how to cover the tracks."

Someone smart and knows how to cover up a crime scene. "Any ties to Murphy Beckett?"

"Ah," Coleson points to the ceiling like he has a great idea. He shifts his always-present toothpick to the other side of his mouth. "As a matter of fact, guess what club this guy is a member of?"

"Is there a motorcycle in the garage?"

"Ding, ding, ding!"

"Any payments or business ties?"

"Nope. Just the club membership card in his wallet. Oh yeah, wallet is intact and not taken. There's no cash in it, but I don't know if the killer took anything. It looked like it wasn't touched. It would be smart not to touch it. The more a perp handles things, the more opportunity to leave skin or prints behind." Coleson sniffs and puts his hands on his hips. "I think Daniels and Hammons are related, and I'll treat them as such. Cannon doesn't fit, though. Cannon was just bizarre that he was tortured and cut up while the others weren't. Different dirty work people but maybe the same orders from Murphy Beckett?"

"Possibly?" I look around the room, thinking and gnawing at my lip.

Two men were hastily murdered in the last few weeks. Someone took their time with George Cannon. What Ellen said about Beck Lenin comes to mind. He was violent with Lucy and got rough with the petite Ellen. Something scratches at my brain, but I can't nail it down.

"There's good news, though," Coleson says from behind me.

"The killer left a signed confession so that I don't have to make an ass of myself by telling the press we have three murdered men in a few weeks and absolutely nothing to go on?"

He holds up a baggie with a hair in it. "Found this in the living room. It's definitely not the victim's."

I look away from it and back to the dead man on the floor. "One lone hair? After all of these forensics on all these crime scenes? No viable footprints. No fingerprints. Nobody saw anything unusual. No suspects we can pair with the fibers we do manage to find. No DNA with a system match yet." I blow out a breath and stand, snapping off the gloves as I walk to the kitchen. "And this hair was in the living room and not even on the back porch area where he was killed? Are we checking it out and running the DNA through the system?"

"Yep. Bartlett from forensics says she can have results to us by later tonight if the person is in the system. If it belongs to the one of millions of hookers that come to the house, we'll be able to narrow it down if we've ever arrested the person. At least we can ask some questions."

I laugh sarcastically and shake my head. Coleson frowns. "You don't like this theory?" he asks.

"Did the neighbors say there are lots of women through here?" Coleson silently nods. He looks down because he knows what I'm going to say next. "It doesn't feel like a woman. It feels like a man who is angry, has a small dick, and is pissed off about something. The guy had hookers in his house all the time, and he wasn't exactly a housekeeper," I say, waving my hand around the kitchen and the old pizza boxes and overflowing trash. "I'm actually surprised we only found one single hair that didn't belong to the victim."

"We also found a pair of panties. We sent them for evaluation, but they were, well, they were kind of crusty and hidden under his bed, so I don't think they were from today."

"Any porch cameras nearby?"

"A few with nothing unusual around the time it happened. I say nothing unusual because most of the neighbors have the sensors set to only pick up something when it comes on their own property. One is set to pick up outside their own yard, but there's a bush blocking the view."

"Jesus Christ. We have nothing. It's like an angel of the Lord just swoops into the houses and kills these pieces of shit like a vigilante of the Chicago suburbs." I pause and brace my hands on Todd Daniel's kitchen counter. I have half a mind to open the fridge to see if he has any beer or something harder. "How much do we even care?"

"Honestly, not as much as if it was happening to decent people, but I still don't want a killer on the street, and I don't want you to look like an asshole on primetime television."

I smile. "Thanks."

"Besides, if we can tie him to Murphy and get a warrant, that's solving a whole other bag of dicks."

Coleson and I stand in a dead man's kitchen in silence, fuming at our own ineffectiveness as Mitchell comes around the corner. "Detective Coleson, I'm sorry to bother you, but the coroner's here for the body."

My eye catches a stack of takeout menus and odds and ends on the counter, and I rifle through them as the coroner troops in with his team and greets Coleson. I block out their conversation as I go through the stack, mildly curious what the man orders for takeout, until I find a half page of paper torn off from a yellow legal pad. The paper is stuffed in between a Chinese takeout menu and a bank statement, and I recognize it as an address on Stone Street. I squint at it and shake my head a little like I've been punched. I know that address, but it rattles around in my head for a moment before I can place it. When I do place it, I practically vomit.

It's Lucy's.