A Deadly Sin: An epic dark thriller that will have you wanting to leave the lights on.

by Tracie Podger

  The dumpster was also removed for analysis, and I was about to sit down with the manager of the diner. I had a team searching every inch of the service road, looking for clues, hoping to find a footprint or something. One murder in our small town was bad enough; two would incite panic. We were unable to confirm publicly it was murder, of course, but those words scratched into the back of the plastic dumpster told me it was related.

  “Can you tell me the last time an item was placed into the dumpster?” I asked the manager, an elderly man and one the town loved.

  “It would have been closing time last night, about ten, I guess,” Harry said. “It's the last job before we lock up.”

  “And who did that?”

  “I did. I took the late shift because our regular cook didn’t show. In fact, we still don’t know where he is.”

  “And his name?”

  “Dale Stewart, he’s a senior this year. He did a couple of late-night shifts during the week.”

  My skin tingled at recognition of the name but I kept my features neutral.

  “I know this seems an odd question, but talk me though exactly how you close up.”

  “Well, obviously I cash up first. If the receipts are large, I take it home, rather than leave it here in the safe. I clean down the kitchen, power down the grills, and the last job, as I leave, is to dump the trash. I should have looked, I didn’t.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I open the lid and throw the garbage bags in, I don't hang about and look in the dumpster. Maybe I should have, he might have been in there, injured, or whatever.”

  “We don’t know yet how long he was in there. If anything, I doubt it would have been while you were still around.” I wanted to give Harry some form of reassurance; otherwise he’d be eaten up with guilt.

  “Harry, will you give a formal statement to one of my colleagues?” I asked.

  “Formal? Do you think I did it?”

  “No, by formal I mean a written statement. Just so I have it all on paper.”

  “Sure, I’ve got nothing to hide,” he said. I believed him; the guy was well into his seventies. I was surprised he’d even managed to lift a trash bag and throw it in the dumpster.

  I left him in the care of one of the officers and went to find Dean. He’d had the truck drivers taken to the station, after a medic had checked them over, and was waiting on me.

  “Dale Stewart is a cook at the diner, he didn’t show for his shift last night. Dale Stewart is a friend of Casey Long’s.”

  “Shit, do you think there’s a connection?” Dean said, as we climbed in to the car.

  “I don’t know, but I don’t believe in coincidences, either.”

  We drove back to the station and I was dismayed to see a small crowd of people in reception.

  “What are you doing to catch the killer?” I was asked. A reporter blocked my entrance.

  “We have a team of over thirty officers, deputies, and colleagues on this,” I said, as I pushed through.

  “Shouldn’t you be out, pounding the street?” he asked. I bristled.

  “As I said, I have over thirty people out there. My role is to coordinate; I can only do that when I get to my office. So, if you’ll excuse me…”

  As I passed the reception area, I motioned for the officer on duty to clear the area. We did not need a snarky reporter stirring up shit. Too often I’d curse at the local newspaper articles about police inefficiency. If only they realized, we didn’t live in an episode of CSI, half of all detective work was often done from a desk, with a mountain of fucking paperwork.

  “Prick,” I mumbled, as we made our way to the incident room.

  I went straight to the whiteboard and wrote up what I already knew, minus the victim’s name of course. We’d need to formally identify before we knew it was Dale for sure.

  “Lust. Gluttony,” Dean said, watching me and having just returned from taking statements from the truck drivers.

  “Two of the deadly sins,” I replied. “Someone bring that up,” I said, gesturing to a laptop.

  “It says here, pride, gluttony, greed, lust, envy, wrath, and sloth, they’re all sins, according to the Bible.” Pete already had a page of information up on his laptop.

  “Connect it here,” I said, wanting the information on the second whiteboard used for presentations.

  Within a minute a list was up and I stood back and studied it. “So, lust relates to Casey and gluttony to our man in the truck. Okay, I can get the gluttony, he was in a dumpster full of food waste, but lust…? What connects them?” I said, mostly to myself.

  “Have we got a religious freak on our hands?” Dean asked.

  I shrugged my shoulders. “I don’t know. Pete, find me a priest or someone who can translate what they mean. Let’s see if we can put them into some modern context. He wrote them for a reason, we need to find out what that reason is.”

  “Or he’s just fucking with us,” Dean said.

  “Or he’s just fucking with us,” I replied.

  I’d texted Eddie a couple of times, she hadn’t replied and I guessed I hadn’t expected her to. I needed identification on that body. His face was too damaged for obvious eye or hair color, but we’d have height, approximate age, build, and I wanted to know what that logo was on his shirt.

  “Dean, how about you go to Dale Stewart’s house, on the pretense that you want to talk to him about Casey? Find out if he’s there. Harry, at the diner, said he didn’t turn up for his shift.” I turned back to the list of friends, the close circle surrounding Casey.

  “And if he’s there?”

  “Ask him all the same questions we already have. What did she do out of school? Any friends she spoke about that he wasn’t aware of? That kind of thing.”

  “Okay, on it now.” He rose from the desk and left the room.

  The phones rang, fingers clattered on keyboards as the civilian staff tasked to the team tried to come up with answers, clues. I’d asked for any similar crimes to be sought, any unsolved murders of high school children, and I wanted to find that damn pickup.

  I hated waiting. I hated silence. I decided to head on over to the medical examiner’s office and see what was going on. I had no desire to be around when the body was removed from the truck, but that should have happened already. Maybe I could get some answers to the million questions floating around my mind.

  I was buzzed straight through when I’d arrived and walked the sterile corridor to where I hoped Eddie would be. I looked through the glass window in the door and saw her dressed in her coveralls, with a mask over her nose and mouth. I guessed she wasn’t enjoying the stench of rotten food either. She looked over and gestured to the side, I understood what she meant. There was a second door beside the one I was looking through, it opened into an anteroom that housed the clothing and paraphernalia Eddie needed for this type of investigation. I was half tempted to shake my head and wait; but time wasn’t on my side.

  I pushed through the door and grabbed what I thought would fit. I pulled on white overalls and picked up a facemask. I held it to my face as I walked through a connecting door. The room was cold, the air conditioner and extractors were on full blast. Dan was busy hosing down the floor, so I understood the worst of the autopsy had already taken place. Silver trays were lined up on a counter, thankfully covered with blue paper towel.

  “I really need to know who this guy is,” I said.

  “Well, the dead can’t speak their names but he’s male, young, I’d hazard a guess at between seventeen and nineteen. Fit and healthy, muscular beyond the norm for his age, so I’m guessing he’s into sports of some kind. I have a call out for a dental match, but I’m afraid we can’t do facial recognition. He has no distinctive marks. Brown-haired.” Eddie reeled off some facts as she worked.

  “Intensive injuries, as you can imagine, however, it wasn’t rotary blades that killed him. See here? These wounds are more refined, if you look closer the edges of the skin is cleanly cut. The rotary
blade cuts are wider and jagged.”

  “What caused them?”

  “I’d go with some form of blade, a large blade. I should have something for you to work on later tonight. Mich, I’ve seen a similar wound before, a farmer, if I remember correctly, didn’t quite angle his scythe the right way, cut his own leg off and died as a result of blood loss.”

  “So, he was dead before he ended up in the garbage truck?” I asked.

  “I’ll have that answer later but judging by that wound…” She pointed to a slash mark across his stomach. “I imagine so.”

  ‘He’s a big guy, our perp must have struggled to have gotten him in a dumpster,” I thought out loud.

  “There’s no way, with that injury alone, he’d have climbed in himself.”

  “Anything on the dumpster?”

  “Dan is finished with that, you can send your guys over for fingerprinting.”

  I nodded my head and left through the anteroom, depositing the overalls and mask in a biohazard bin. I made a call as I walked to the front entrance, instructing the forensic team to make their way over. I didn’t hold out much hope for prints. Well, I say prints, I imagine the dumpster would be covered in them, but narrowing them down to our killer was going to be a bitch.

  “Dale Stewart didn’t return home last night. Parents weren’t overly concerned, seems it’s the norm for him to take off to a party and return a day or so later. Last seen going out for a run the previous morning,” Dean said, as I entered the incident room.

  “Have we got a picture of him?”

  Dean pointed to the whiteboard. A photograph of a smiling, brown-haired eighteen-year-old stood alongside his football teammates. Underneath someone had written some basic details, including height. He certainly matched our victim on everything other than looks.

  “Okay, let’s round up the friends. Get them in here. I also want some subtle, and I mean subtle, protection.”

  “Don’t you think we should wait for identification?” Pete asked.

  “No, the kid I saw over at the doc’s is that kid, I’m sure of it. Whether our killer is targeting that group of friends, I don’t know, but I’m not willing to take any chances. I want an update meeting here…” I consulted my watch. “Four o’clock. Let everyone know.”

  A very uneasy feeling started to settle in my stomach.

  I sighed; I hated crying. Why did girls cry? Crying made me angry. It wasn’t going to save you, little girl. “It’s a waste of energy,” I told her. I tried to wipe her tears away, but she shook her head in disgust at my touch. That annoyed me. Didn’t she see I was helping her? She was greedy, so very greedy. I told her that was a sin. She begged, of course, they all do. But Mother told me to ignore her words.

  I was also angry that I’d had to take my eyes off Mich. I liked to look at him, to hear his voice; it gave me shivers. I had a photograph of him; it was pinned proudly to my wall, with the others. He was alive, the others weren’t. I wondered what we’d do when we were finally together. Would he fuck me like he did the bitch? Or would he let me fuck him? I felt my cock stiffen at the thought. Oh, Mich, did you know what you do to me?

  I picked up the crucifix that I’d made as a child. It was one that I’d been regularly punished with. I loved it. I licked it. It tasted of Casey. I prayed in front of it. Then I looked at my sinner, dressed in her designer clothes, with her gold earrings and necklace shimmering as the light from overhead reflected on them. I tutted, too much excess, too much love for money. Oh, Vicky, I warned you, I tried, but you never listened.

  A very cocky Louis Chapman sat in an interview room, he rested back on two legs of the chair, and I hoped it would topple. The smirk on his face irritated me.

  “Can you tell me about your relationship with Casey Long?” I asked, consulting the notes of our previous meeting to see if he said the same thing.

  “We were friends, you know? Nothing serious.”

  “No, I don’t know, how friendly were you?”

  “Are you asking if I fucked her? Of course, so did many others.” He openly laughed and I ground my jaw to keep the words from escaping.

  “You don’t seem overly concerned that one of your friends is dead.”

  At that his father, another obnoxious man, sat forward. “Is my son a suspect?” he asked.

  “No, Mr. Chapman, not yet anyway. As you know, we are trying to find who killed your son’s friend, who left her to be found in a school hall. I just find it odd that your son is amused by my questions.”

  “I’m fucking scared, okay? This shit is serious. I know that. I was with her just before…” Louis clamped his mouth shut as my, Dean’s, and his father’s heads turned toward him.

  “When were you with her, Louis?”

  He didn’t reply. “Now is not the fucking time for withholding information,” Dean added.

  “We camped out, okay? All of us, she didn’t tell her mom because she was grounded.”

  “When, Louis?” I growled out my question.

  “Just a couple of nights, last week.”

  “When, Louis, exactly when? After her mom reported her missing? After I came and spoke to you? During a missing persons’ investigation, where I’d invested time and officers looking for her?”

  He nodded his head. “I told her that her mom had reported her missing. She thought she’d go home and it would all be okay.”

  “Instead, she was murdered. Had they known where she was, maybe she might not have been,” Mr. Chapman said.

  Although the sentiment was on the tip of my tongue, I wouldn’t have subjected the kid to the level of regret and guilt his father had just placed on him. Silence ensued.

  “Where were you camping?” I asked.

  “That old house, the derelict on Perry Street. We go there sometimes, see who can sleep inside without getting freaked.”

  I knew the house, it was run-down and for years the kids of the town would dare each other to go inside. Some said it was haunted. I didn’t believe that, of course, but it provided hours of fun for them, and hours of not so much fun for the police in chasing them off.

  Dean rose without me having to say anything. He’d send someone over to investigate. As he opened the door, Samantha was outside, she waved a piece of paper in her hand. Dean took it from her, read it, and then looked over to me. He motioned with his head for me to join him.

  “Louis, you’ve wasted police time, withheld information, I could charge you for that. But right now I have something more important to worry about.”

  I rose; the meeting was over. I left Samantha to escort Louis and his father from the station.

  “Dental match, our victim is Dale,” Dean said.

  “That was quick. Fuck! Forget sending someone to that house, I want us to go.”

  I heard the sigh and saw the shiver that ran up Dean’s spine as we pulled up outside the house, I chuckled at his discomfort.

  “Used to come here as a kid, never liked the place. I don’t know why they don’t tear it down,” he said, as we exited the car.

  “Who owns it now?”

  “Not sure, I think the daughter of the family who lived here, she lives in Florida somewhere.”

  We walked to the front of the property, and I cupped my hands around my eyes to look through a window. I was staring into a living room with furniture covered in white, very dusty sheets. There were a few bottles of beer littering the floor. We made our way around the side of the property to the backyard. The grass was brown, burned from the heat of summer and as unkempt as the house. Overgrown bushes lined either side of what I assumed was the boundary, and toward the back was a patch of scorched earth. I walked over to it and crouched down. Someone had lit a fire there, ash and charred sticks sat in the center.

  “At least they cleaned up,” Dean said, walking toward a plastic bag full of bottles.

  I had no real clue if visiting the house would add anything to our investigation, but it was the last known whereabouts of Casey’s at least. I wanted to
get in but procedure would be long-winded. I walked to the back of the house and stood by the door. It was ajar.

  “Remind me again, we can enter if we think a burglary is in process, can't we?” Dean said, not needing confirmation as he pushed open the door into a kitchen.

  The house had clearly been empty for many years, occupied only by vermin and kids wanting to get their kicks. A layer of dust covered every surface and that showed up the handprints and small footprints of whatever animals had taken over.

  We walked through the kitchen and into a hallway. There were four rooms off the hall, each contained furniture. Three of the four rooms had the furniture still covered over. The last one we entered, some kind of library or study, had chairs exposed and looked like it had recently been used.

  The white sheets were piled in a heap in one corner and the chairs arranged in a semi-circle in front of an open fireplace. I checked out the grate, it looked as if it had been used. Like the bonfire outside, charred wood and ash were piled up.

  It was a scrape of something against wood that had us reach for our guns, then still and listen. The sound had come from above. I glanced over to Dean, and as quietly as possible, we made our way up the stairs. I kept my back to the rail, facing toward the source of the sound as we ascended.

  Like the floor below, there were four rooms off a central corridor. We crept to the one above the room we’d been in. The door was ajar and I motioned to Dean that I was going to push it fully open.

  The door creaked and scraped against the floor as it sprang open. Both Dean and I swung our raised guns through the doorway at the same time. The room was empty, save for a bird trying to escape through a closed window.

  “Fuck,” Dean said, as he lowered his gun.

  I holstered mine and walked over to the window. With a rattle of the pane it slid open and the bird was released. I turned to look around the empty room.