Ch. 1 The Sharp County Slasher
Chapter 1
I sipped my coffee and clicked on the local news website: "Police Investigate Gruesome Murder in Ash Flat". The corners of my mouth insisted on ascending as I read the details: the body had been found dismembered, the parts arranged in a tipi-style campfire and set ablaze. Perfect execution, if I do say so myself.
—
It’s not every day that something so brutal happened in this little town, and it really irked me that the media was given so much information. Somebody needed to reign in their rookies. All that information going public hinders investigations.
Regardless, it was time to get up and start my day. I’d been called out of retirement as a consultant on this case because there was a phoenix carved into a tree at the scene, my signature, though no one else knew that; they only knew that I worked the case. Being retired for the past decade had been pretty boring, so I both welcomed the local Sheriff’s Department calling for my assistance and worried they might finally catch on to me. I just had to hope they were as slow as they used to be. Prison doesn’t go well for cops, especially with thirty years of your own arrests residing in the general population.
Sharp County, Arkansas is home to about 17,000 people over 600 square miles. Trees fill most of the landscape, segmented by highways and dirt roads. The only notable town is Ash Flat and there really ain’t much here except a Wal-Mart and a Pizza Hut. A few little stores and a Casey’s gas station round out the needs of the locals. You’ll miss it if you blink.
Most small towns don’t have a lot to police like the big cities, but that doesn’t mean crazy doesn’t happen. The North Central Unit prison housed 800 men, 240 of which were sex offenders, and it’s only 40 miles away. Oftentimes, when those guys got out they couldn’t go home, so they settled in nearby areas, especially here. Not something I much cared for, and I did my part to mitigate it while I was active. If the county would find someone worthy enough to take over, I could die happy.
At the undecorated, all white interior sheriff’s department, the two on shift deputies, and the Sheriff applauded as I entered. I’d trained everyone that worked in this side of the building during my thirty plus year tenure, save a couple rookies. These few good people took it upon themselves every day to protect their community. That made my heart happy.
“Good morning, Hilrey.”
“Good morning, John. You seem to be walking better.”
“It’s a prosthetic.”
Guess he’s not in a joking mood today. “Who’s my handler on this one?”
“I’m glad you asked. Now don’t get sideways on me, Hilrey. She’s new to us, but she’s not new to the job.”
“You’re putting fresh meat on a case this big?”
“Like I said, she’s not new. Worked Homicide in Chicago.”
“Interesting.” I nodded and looked around for the person of interest holding my hands out. “Where is she?”
“Dakota!” Sheriff Booker’s holler echoed through the small department.
A slightly larger than petite, but fit, latin woman in her thirties approached from one of the older offices that had been turned into the only interrogation room. Her hazel eyes stood out against her tanned skin, but they suited her, as did the pants suit that was smart and flexible. She moved with an athletic grace. I bet she runs fast. She kept her dark brown hair long and neat, unusual for a lady cop, but respectable to have that kind of commitment.
“Yeah, Sheriff?”
“Detective Diaz, meet Detective Higgins. He’s retired now, but he solved more cases himself than the rest of this county combined over the past thirty years. He’ll be your consultant on this case.” The Sheriff patted me on the shoulder, then smiled and limped away, leaving us to finish the pleasantries.
“Impressive. What is that, like seven?”
I chuckled. “Funny. Seventeen-hundred-seventy-six. Forty-one homicides.”
“Okay, that actually is impressive for such a small population.” She frowned. “A bit disturbing, too.”
“While we’re comparing dicks…” I gestured my right hand toward her in a bladed fashion to request her statistics.
“Somewhere over a thousand. I quit counting after. That was four years ago.”
“And how many homicides?”
“I didn’t count. Didn’t want to know. But, considering my cases were exclusively homicides the past four years, I’d guess around two hundred.”
“Well, now that is impressive. But, I must ask you a pertinent question,” I said, trying to lay on the charm. She was unphased.
“Shoot.”
“Have you ever been in the woods?”
“Ever? Of course. Admittedly, I don’t spend a lot of time there.”
“Then there’s a lot to learn young Grasshopper! It’s not every day a hiker comes across the remnants of the deceased.”
“Please.” She rolled her eyes at me. “A shithead is a shithead. They’re all the same.”
“Ya know, we don’t catch the smart ones.” She didn’t respond. I had hoped to impart some wisdom on her, but I’m too new. She’s witty and there's potential there, but I needed to build a rapport, just like in any case. Miss Diaz was stubborn, like a bull. I needed to prove to her that she needed my help. I’m getting old, and there’s no one to carry on my legacy. Maybe there shouldn’t be.
“Shall we look over the case? I’m fairly certain I don’t need you, but the Sheriff insisted.”
She brought me to the room she’d come out of before. It was meticulously, impressively organized. Pictures from the crime scene hung on the wall in perfect lines using the mortar between the bricks as a guide, nothing imbalanced. Picture number one showed a hole in the skull that looked like it was hit with a club. The evidence bags were situated on the folding table in the exact positions they were found at the scene, charred remains in a sort of campfire arrangement like in the photos. An upside-down bowl inbetween it all to emulate the placement of the larger remnants of the body that were taken by the coroner. It was like I was there.
“OCD much?”
“Organization solves cases.”
“Can’t argue with that. What are these?” I pointed to an evidence bag containing two very small white objects wading in a black sandy substance.
“Teeth. What’s left of ‘em. The killer made a mistake. I have to assume these usually burn off, considering the construction of the fires,” she said, sifting through a box under the side of the folding table.
“As would everything else, yes?”
“Yep. Something went wrong this time.”
“You think there’s more than one victim?”
“I do. Or, at least, there will be more. This is too calculated.”
“Interesting theory.”
“Think about it. Fire consumes everything. If it’s hot enough, which the tipi set up would account for, it all burns away. Can’t find nothing.”
“Burn away bones?”
“Bones turn to ash at 1650 degrees Fahrenheit. In a properly constructed campfire, such as the tipi, the internal temperature can reach much higher. Everything else, the skin, the hair, the organs, they just become part of the ether, fertilizing nature. Our killer is smart.”
Maybe this new player isn’t so stupid after all. Just new? I’d done this job long enough to learn that the smartest criminals rarely got caught. The one surefire way to get a confession was to attack their ego just right. Psychopaths hate that. But, finding them in the first place was the real challenge. I must say, though, having your ego stroked felt so good.
“Do you have any leads so far?”
“Directly? Nothing. However, I dug through the old case files in the basement and found one similar. One of yours, actually. Never solved.” She handed me several folders from the box.
On top was what she wanted me to see, but just underneath, peaking at me like an old acquaintance, was a newspaper clipping: “Cop Kills Child Predator.” Really it was about a boy who was barely twelve. He hid under the bed while his stepfather cracked his belt, at least that’s how the boy described it. The bruises would fade, but the fear wouldn’t, I remembered thinking. He was going to kill that boy eventually. He couldn’t fight back so I fought back for him. My name, Higgins, was mentioned all the way at the end.
“The Campfire Murders,” I said aloud with a chuckle, as if it were just some old relic. The Magnum Opus of my life’s work, I suppose. I removed a great deal of evil from this world back then. I hope she doesn’t look too far into it.
“That’s the one. Care to walk me through it?”
How exciting! “The bodies were always hung at the ribs from a noose on a large branch over a fire. The noose was far enough away from the base of the tree to keep the tree from catching fire while the body cooked, and the noose was soaked in wax to keep it from catching on fire. By the time any campers or hikers found them, there wasn’t much left to investigate. The scenes were well thought out and consistent.”
“You only ever identified two of the victims?”
I nodded. “Skin was generally gone or charred beyond anything usable at the time, along with clothing or any personal items that may have been on the body. The genitals were always removed and placed in the victim’s mouth, but the fire damaged them beyond any helpful material. Nothing else at the scenes, except the same picture, carved into the very tree they hung from.”
“A bird, right? Like the one at my scene?”
I pointed to the third picture on the wall. “A phoenix. A symbol of cleansing for the sins of the victim. Purification.”
“Sins of the victim?” she asked with piqued curiosity.
“One of the two identified was a serial child rapist. He’d spent a short time in state prison for kidnapping a girl, but his lawyer found a technicality in the investigation that got him a new trial, suppressing the evidence originally used to put him away. ‘Fruit of the poisonous tree,’ they called it.” He was an especially vile bastard. Went right back to his old ways the second he got out.
“Unfortunate. Bad investigative techniques lose a lot of cases.”
I nodded. “The second was an honest man. His death was different. No genitals in the mouth, and the noose was around his neck, not his torso.”
“The killer was surprised? Maybe a rushed job?”
It was much worse than that, but I’ll likely have to take that to the grave with me. “It definitely could have been. Though I never identified the other vics, I followed up on the rapist lead. There’s a correlation with known sex offenders going missing around the same time.”
“That gives a possible motive. It also gives me a lead. A bad one, but still a lead. These are similar enough cases, I’m going to work them together for now.” She picked up the bag of teeth and some other bags with soot and char spreading along the inside like a disease. “Where’s the crime lab?”
I couldn’t stop myself from giggling. “This is Arkansas. There’s only one crime lab in the whole state, and it’s in Little Rock. We have to send it down there, in an escorted vehicle by the way, and they get back to us in six weeks to a year.”
“You cannot be serious.”
“1 Natural Resources Drive. I know the way if you like. Or, we can send a new guy with the fancy new smart phone GPS and wait. Your call. Either way, we’ll have to wait for the results.”
“Fine.” She shook her head. “Let’s look at some other angles. Tell me more about the case with two bodies.”
I sighed. “That was the last scene. The killings stopped afterward. One of the victims was one of ours.”
“Maybe the killer got scared?”
Or it was too much to continue afterward. “Maybe. The whole department got involved after that. All six of us.”
“That’s never easy, investigating the loss of a friend.”
“There was no evidence. We had no way to track anything. DNA technology wasn’t what it is today, and very few people’s DNA is on file anyway.”
“Why didn’t the FBI come in on this?”
“Oh, they came. They just weren’t very helpful. Back then it was a little different. They consulted, but they didn’t have the same protocols and resources like they do now. It wasn’t until the 70’s that they started developing Serial Killer protocols, and they weren’t good until more recent years.”
“How did you ever solve anything?” Detective Diaz slumped her shoulders as she sat in the only empty chair, defeated. I’d only given her bad answers to all of her very pertinent questions.
“Welcome to Arkansas, the fourth poorest state in the union. C’mon. I’ll take you to a spot to clear your head.”