We came away from the photo evaluation with more questions than answers and a lot of things that needed to be thought about. I wish the body was still available there were a couple of things I would have liked to look at more closely. For example, why were the hands clear of blood? They had to be wiped clean? If I just had my throat cut, the first thing I would do is bring my hands to the wound. She very likely did not die instantly despite the savageness of the wound.
My next stop was to visit Major Barkley. I simply wanted to confirm that the wound would not have caused instant death; the hand thing bothered me. I also want some form of confirmation of the murder weapon. We did not have it, but I needed to make certain that I was thinking this in the right direction, basically big knife. He agreed that although she would have bled out losing consciousness within less than a minute she would not have died instantly from the wound.
He also felt that my assessment of the weapon was valid. A weapon that was swung, like an ax or shovel could inflict a similar type of injury, but there was a lack of room to make the swing and also it would have given Alyssa the chance to make some type of defensive move.
“Some type of a saw could have done that type of damage, but again, it would have been cumbersome as well as leaving a much more jagged wound.”
“Makes sense,” I thought aloud.
“I am thinking that the cutting instrument would have to have been at least 5 inches long to have inflicted that kind of cut. A smaller blade would have required multiple slashes.” As he picked up a scalpel and swung it around in a slashing motion.
Over dinner I was in the corner again, and this time I was left alone. I was thinking, what I have so far. A young and reasonably small but fit woman attacked from behind by someone with a knife. The attack was unexpected, and quick. Where her hands bound before the attack?
The slasher had to be reasonably powerful but limited to a men’s large jumpsuit. The killer posed the victim in a biblical pose at the scene of the murder. He (or she) then left the scene and went west on a path dumped the jumpsuit. But what then, cleaned up, rejoined the group they were associated with and walked around like nothing has happened.
Ok, I lack a motive, and there are some obvious ones that would work. The most obvious is retaliation for the deaths of Lauren or Marisa but that does not really help narrow much down. What else could it be? Maybe someone felt that the murder would keep the two groups from joining up, and if so they may have hit a homer here. Or maybe she knew something that someone wanted to remain a secret? But what secret?
I was reasonably certain it was not part of our original Connecticut part of the group. But I could not speak for the members of the Hinsdale group nor the Bikers. I was reasonably comfortable with the people who had been rescued from Camp Danbee.
Aug 2nd
Here we go again. I got called into the office of The Three. Understandably, they wanted an update as to what I have found or figured so far. I told them what I had, although Anne had pretty much already filled them in on it.
Much too all our surprise Billy arrived at the gate at about 10 AM. He was on his Harley. He asked if he could talk with me. He knew that I was one of the last living people to see his brother alive and also that I knew where his fellow Rider had made his last stand. He wanted to pay his respects. I could understand that, although I am certain that he was also thinking about the murder and wanted to give or take away some information. This was an opportunity to talk with him about the events.
I have not been out on a motorcycle in almost a year and it felt good to have the chance to ride. I had forgotten about how relaxing it was to just have the countryside slip on by. One of the interesting things that I always remembered about riding was the way you would travel though smell zones. A dead animal, or a fresh cut field of grass would stimulate the mind, sometimes to thoughts of days gone by, sometimes the idea of our own mortality. By this point the dead smell zones were few and far between, despite the massive die off of humanity, you did not often catch the whiff of decay.
As we neared the west side of the lake, I stopped and we talked briefly about what I had seen in those final minutes.
“We got as close as we could but that there had been a large number of Zoms that surrounded him making his escape impossible. We had done what we could to help him out but that in the end he was overrun and as the horde fell upon him he ended his current and future suffering.”
Can we get to him now?” asked Billy, staring off into space.
“Maybe, there may not be a lot of Zoms standing that did not mean that they could not cause problems as ankle biters, we just need to be careful.”
We slowly drove in the last half mile or so to where the bodies were piled up. Near the top of the heap was the body of the biker I had seen. At this point due to decay he was unrecognizable except by his colors. Billy looked around and saw the other Riders as well as a couple of Outlanders in the pile. He commented that it was a strange alliance but under the circumstances there was probably more commonality between the two clubs than with the rest of the world as it stood.
He wanted to remove the denim vests from his fallen comrades but I told him that it was not a good idea because of bugs and contamination. I suggested that we burn the bodies with the Zoms they had defeated. I asked if wearing their colors like the armor of Vikings of old would meet the needs of a proper farewell. (Yeah, I am doing it again, over dramatic writing, cut me some slack okay, we are at the end of the world).
“Yeah, that will work I guess,” said Billy
We threw gasoline on the pile the best we could being careful not to expose ourselves to ankle biters. Billy tossed the cigarette that lit the mass of twisted bodies. We watched it burn for a while. Billy was quiet, head bowed.
We stopped on the ride back to rest for a while. We talked about the bikers that had been killed at the lake. The discussion drifted over to the bikers who had attacked Hinsdale. He did not seem too disturbed by their deaths. He had very little to say good about the lot of them. They were men with no honor; to him they were petty thieves and thugs.
As the conversation moved along, we got to the current members of the group he was with. Overall his take on them was that they were mostly good people. Marisa had done a good job of holding them together after the fighters had left to raid the surrounding towns. She was a strong woman that had good sense. She was attached to the leader of the fighters, and he thought that she did love him, but she also knew what he was and almost seemed to know how their relationship would end.
“Tanya, now she is a saint considering what the fighters had put her through.”
He had talked with her a few times and she believed that God would strike down those who killed her sister and her children. She also believed that she would someday see her husband again.
I stopped him, “Do you know her last name or any information about her husband?”
“I think it is Lewis, but was not sure, she had told him that her husband was a cop, maybe the one that the fighters had ambushed and killed.”
In the back of my mind I thought that perhaps Captain Lewis had survived. He was not the one in the gang’s videos.
Billy said that Heather was a biker girl through and through. She was with the group when he arrived and appeared to have been hooked up with them long before the world fell apart. She was actually not a bad person, perhaps a few bad choices when she was younger. Her guy had been killed back about three months ago. He was out riding when a deer ran into his path. There was a crash and he was most likely killed when he slammed against a tree. When he did not return that afternoon, a search party went out. They found him, most of him and killed the feasting eaters that were working on him. She was doing okay with the grieving, and kind of hung out with him (Billy) much of the time. There was a bond between the two but it was not really a romantic relationship.
I asked him about the two who we had killed doing the sniper attack. He said that the woman was Maggie. She was an ex-mi
litary type who had a thing for other women. She had hit on Taylor and Marisa but they both had rejected her.
“I think she kind of carried a grudge over it. She never really fit in and grew to hate Marisa in particular. They were oil and water.”
The other guy was Paul, he was kind of a chicken shit and like a little rat. He was usually sneaking around and although never caught, we figured him to be the one that was stealing food and other peoples stuff. He did not like the idea of the groups joining up. Billy figured that while the groups were separated Paul had a chance to be the stud, kind of the last man on earth type thing. Paul was toughest on Alyssa. He got a sick pleasure out of dominating her. He made her his slave on a lot of levels.
Taylor and Chelsea were two women with the group. They had been found, or kidnapped by the bikers. Billy said that they were there when he joined the group. Taylor must have been some kind of a manager or director or something because she had established herself by taking charge of supplies and rationing them. She was good at it. She was also a really nice person. She did not fit the mold of the group at all. But it was a symbiotic relationship she gave them stability of resources and they protected her.
Chelsea was another that had been “drafted”. She and Taylor were both in their mid-twenties and “cleaned up good”. Chelsea was cheery and upbeat even though she was treated like a sex object of the gang. She held tough and did not let that get her down, at least on the outside.
“There was a deeper and darker side to her, there had to be, how else could she be so upbeat when at the end of the world?
I asked him if he had any idea who had killed Alyssa.
“If they had not been killed, either Maggie or Paul would have been good choices.”
But really, he did not think it could have been any of the remaining members of the gang. Alyssa had been a good kid, never bothered anyone, did what she was told and no one had any reason to hurt her except Paul, he was an asshole.
We rode back toward the camp. My mind was racing as we rode. The fresh air the smells and a buzz in my mind from the information that Billy had given me. When I got back, it was dinner time. There was a lot of buzz going on that usually got quiet when I was close by. I am sure that people were wondering what was going on with the murder.
Both Cyril and Fred came over to talk to me during dinner and all I could do was shrug my shoulders when they asked what I thought. I would like to tell them, but there was not much other than a lot of loose thoughts going through my head and I really did not want to get into it with anyone until I had a little more of an idea where I was going.
After talking with Billy, I did not think that anyone in the biker group would have done it. But at the same time I had been with the people from my own group for a long time and I had not seen anything that seemed to make any one of them a likely candidate. I needed that one little thing, that one thread and this mystery all could unravel. Well, I will let the stew cook for a little longer.
August 3rd
I sat down with Henry and Teckla this morning and told them what I had so far. It was kind of disappointing to report so little. Anne and Margo were also aware of what was going on. I could not really keep the information from them.
I started having chats, I like that better than interviews, with everyone. Some folks I was a little more intense with. Family, true family members I tended to go light on. Perhaps it was unfair, but they were family. Of the family members I could only think of two that had even a remote motive which was Nick or Jan doing payback for Lauren’s death. But that seemed unlikely, certainly on Nick’s part.
One of the questions that I always asked, so if you had to pick someone to be the killer, who would it be?”
The answers that I got most often were “I don’t know or I don’t want to say.”
August 4th
Happy Birthday to me. Today I focused on the Hinsdale Survivors. I really was not so sure that I had a feeling that any of them were responsible for Alyssa’s death, but I did need to ask the questions. I started with the Major. This was to show proper respect as well as give the rest of the survivors the idea that no stone would be left unturned. We had a nice chat, but he did not have much in the way of insights for me. He could give me the best guess and limited forensic analysis but he did not know the townies as they might know themselves, he had been a late joiner to the group.
Grace on the other hand was filled with speculation not only of who it might have been, but why. She had it narrowed down to four people. The first two were based upon a revenge model in which Jan and/or Nick were the killer(s). One of the bikers had killed Lauren and one or both were extracting their revenge.
The other thought was John, the teacher with his rumored past. She had mentioned the rumors before but never went to great detail on it. So I asked her about this.
“John” she said, “Was an unmarried science teacher who taught in the Hinsdale school system where he also did some coaching. There were allegations that he had been a sort of pervert who had cameras set up in the showers and locker room and also had been involved with a couple of his students.”
She went on that none of it had ever been proven. It seems that in the two cases that were almost put together the girls ran away to parts unknown. So without the witnesses or victims the police were never able to charge him. And without the truth or conviction the town was unable to terminate him on mere suspicion of being whatever he was supposed to be.
Her final suggestion was that it was Steven. She said that he had been in the army, and had served in Iraq or Afghanistan and was not right. She figured that he was a nut and a rapist being military and all. She figured that when Alyssa refused his advances that he overpowered her and cut her throat.
As you can guess the visit with Grace ate up the most of the morning. But when all was said and done she did give me someone to look at a little more. I still did not buy the revenge thing with Jan and Nick. That was just so not them.
Steven, he was a weirdo, and he did disappear a lot but I am not sure that I find the rape/murder because of PTSD very valid.
Now John, now he was something else. Perhaps I am letting my mind chase something that was not there, but since I first met him there was something strange about it. He just did not strike me as right. I had to find out more about these rumored incidents with the girls. But that would not be easy.
After lunch I went through some of the others. Armand, Ethan and Larry all had little to offer that had not already been tainted by Grace and her gossip. It was almost dinner when I finished with them so I decided that I would do the other three in the morning. Michelle would be first and perhaps she would share something about her brother that might help me. But the biggies would be Steven and then John. I had to prepare for those two. They were right now my two best suspects of those in the compound.
August 5th
I started the morning with Michelle. I had already spoke to Mark about her and although his view was rather slanted he was emphatic that she had nothing to do with the murder and that they were together that afternoon, doing ‘things’.
I never really did not see her as a suspect but figured that she might have some useful information about Steven and she did. I did not realize where he had been or what he had done in his life. And in the end I realized that like many vets who had comeback from “Hell” he had brought some demons with him. In his case he did not create the demons.
Steven was next and he was different. He had been different for a while. The “stoner” that I had first met in Hinsdale had really changed, a lot. It was almost as if he was back among the living normal people. His hair was cut, he was focused and he had a mission in life again.
As I said, this change had taken place well before the murder so I did not think that they were connected. But I was curious as to why the change. Thanks to Michelle I had a little bit of an idea of what had turned him from a respected helicopter pilot in the Iraq war to the mess that he had become but I think
I needed to get the real story from the horse’s mouth. So I asked.
Steven looked at me for a few moments and then looked down. He was still tormented by what had happened, but was learning to deal with it. He told me “I did three tours in Iraq as a Black Hawk Pilot. I primarily did troop delivery and retrieval.”
He had a couple of missions toward the end of his tour that had gone very wrong and because of lack of support higher up the food chain, a number of people he felt he could have saved by flying in were killed.
“I became disenchanted with the way the folks higher up were running the show. And I did not up for a fourth tour but rather came home and just did the best I could to self-medicate the nightmares away.”
He told me that in some ways he had wished he had flown the missions to rescue the troops against orders even if it meant that he could have been killed but he had still been a good little soldier to that point.
The Event Trilogy (Book 1): Life After the Meteor Page 25