15 Signs Of Murder (Fifteen thrillers)

by Luis Samways

  And then I heard somebody on top of the stairs, behind me. I looked up and saw Officer Mullins. He was a uniformed P.D. patrolman who worked the murder cases with us. A good kid. But right then, I wasn’t interested in seeing his face. All I was interested in was getting whatever was grating at San out of him. But that would have to wait. We were summoned upstairs to do our jobs.

  “Guys, come on. What are you waiting for? It’s a real mess up here, and Shaw wants to know why you two haven’t arrived on scene yet. I just got off the cell with him. He sounds pissed,” Mullins said as he joined us on the stairwell. “What’s going on?” he asked, sounding concerned.

  We didn’t say anything. We just looked at each other and came to the conclusion that this would have to wait.

  We joined Mullins and walked up the stairs toward the third floor.

  “How bad are we talking about?” I asked.

  “Depends how you take to little girls being mutilated. I’d say it’s pretty bad, all right,” Mullins replied.

  There was a sudden pause as we approached the hallway. I could hear flashes going off. They must have belonged to the CSI cameras. And then the smell of copper hit me. Another unique smell that only surrounds death and decay. Judging by the lack of “dead body” smell from the offset, these kills were fresh.

  We made our way to a black door that was half ajar. A big red hand print was smudged on its surface. It belonged to a child. And it wasn’t paint that the print consisted of. It was blood.

  San saw the print and shook his head. “Fantastic. Just what I need right now,” he said, bracing himself as we entered the crime scene to a hue of camera bulbs flashing and yellow police tape. Somewhere in between the chaos lay a bloody crime scene. Once our eyes adjusted, it didn’t take a trip to the optometrist to notice the carnage that lay at our feet.

  Nineteen

  The first thing that hit us was the sight of blood. Copious amounts of it, at that. Obviously, throughout the years both Santiago and I have seen our fair share of the stuff. It’s an occupational hazard. Blood tends to dominate the foreground of murder scenes. There’s no escaping it. It’s not like we’re squeamish or anything. We’ve seen a lot of bad things in our careers. But as far as what lay behind that black door in Charlestown, that ranks up as one of the worst things I’ve seen.

  “It’s the fact that there’s a kid dead that really makes this seem bad,” one of the CSI guys said from under his mask as he noticed the look of disgust on our faces.

  “I’ve seen dead kids before,” I heard Santiago snap back at the CSI, which took me by surprise.

  “Cool your jets,” I said as I gave him a stare I knew he’d decipher as his final warning before I got serious. It worked. He didn’t say another word.

  “All the victims were stabbed?” I asked.

  Mullins nodded. “The little girl had her throat slit as well. Besides that, seems to be the same M.O. as the other two murders,” Mullins said.

  I breathed in a thick lungful of air. It was as if the atmosphere was heavy, colliding against the inside of my lungs. My neck and back felt sore. My legs hurt. My feet were stinging, and my eyes felt like they were close to melting. But I had to get myself in the game. There was no time for rest. Maybe after this murder scene I could convince Shaw to let us have a few hours’ sleep. God knows, San looked like he needed it. But for the time being, the only thing that I was allowed to do was work the scene. Personal time would have to wait.

  “I’m going to get an eyeful of the scene,” I said, turning to Santiago and giving him a nod. He returned one and then turned to Mullins. They started talking about the particulars of this case as I walked away from them and did my thing.

  I noticed the little girl was the first body I saw. She was sprawled on her back, facing up. Her eyes were still open. She had a look of terror ingrained in her pupils. She was dark-skinned, as was the rest of her family. I couldn’t look at the girl anymore. I had to find something else to preoccupy my mind. I knew how she died anyway. There wasn’t much I could get from her corpse. Besides a few nightmares when I actually get to sleep.

  I realized that the way the bodies were positioned meant the little girl was the first to get it. She probably screamed, but it was too late. The killer slit her throat next to the door. She collapsed in a heap on her back. Her mother ran into the hallway. She was then stabbed in the chest four times. She had leaned against the hallway wall when she perished. A huge blood smear rode up the wall all the way down to where she collapsed. I walked passed her corpse and saw that same innate fear in her eyes. They were still open. The fact that she’d seen her daughter die moments before being brutally stabbed hit me the hardest. I felt my heart squeezing under the emotional barrage of sympathy that was coursing through my sternum.

  There was a door to the right of the hallway. In total I noticed two more doors, another on the right, next to the first one, about two yards down from where I stood, and another door on the left. I decided to walk through the first one on the right. It was the kitchen/living area. I saw another body in there. This one belonged to the father. He had three neat little holes in his chest. He was slouched against the refrigerator. There was another blood smear running down the appliance. It flowed all the way down to the dead father. The dad was the only one who had his eyes shut. That told me one of two things. Either he didn’t see it coming, or he chose to shut off the horrors that he was facing and die with a little hope that it might work out.

  Unfortunately, it didn’t work out. He was killed nonetheless, and so was his family. There was nothing of any interest in the kitchen. From what I could see, there was hardly any evidence, either. I could see the CSI people working their tails off on this case. They were bagging up articles of clothing. Knives and forks. A few towels. But that was what this game was all about. Trying to get a grasp on what happened. You were taught to not discard anything on a murder case. The smallest of things could contribute to nailing a killer. That’s why the crime scene people pick up everything. No matter how minute, chances were that in three hours, the apartment would look bare. They would have stripped it of all its individuality and personality. The dead family wouldn’t know that their home was being ransacked and searched for clues. The last thing they would have seen before dying would have been their family pictures on the walls. The coffee maker in the kitchen. The fridge. The big-screen TV. That sense of home. They would have felt a bundle of emotions when they were being killed. They would feel shocked that it was happening in their own house. They would be scared for their other family members. And then they’d black out, their life’s goals and hopes slipping through their grasp. All because of some stranger at the door, someone who knocked on it and murdered whoever he saw.

  I decided to leave the kitchen. I’d thought that the little girl would be the one to rattle me the worst. But it was the father. He was the one I found the hardest to be around. The pictures on the walls made it clear why. He was a good dad. He had pictures of him and his two kids at Disneyland. At the Grand Canyon. At wildlife parks.

  The building they lived in portrayed them as something different. When I walked into the crime scene, I imagined it to house a family of no-good hoodlums. But I got something different altogether. A hard-working African American family with goals and aspirations, taken away from them in a blink of an eye.

  The bathroom was where the final body was. It belonged to the brother. He was tall and athletic. He had a few tattoos, but no gang ones from what I could tell. He, too, had been stabbed. He was still seated on the toilet. He must have been taking a dump when the killer struck. I could see by the way his body was slouched on the toilet that it caught him by surprise. He was wearing some headphones. The music was still blaring out of them. He wouldn’t have heard his family screaming for their lives. The music would have drowned that out. And then the bathroom door would have been smashed open. The killer would have lunged on the unsuspecting teen, cutting at his throat until his head was barely on his shoulde
rs.

  “Shitty way to go,” I muttered under my breath.

  Twenty

  Day Two of the Investigation:

  8.34 a.m.

  After a night of heavy drinking and sex, Amber Reeves got out of her boyfriend’s car. It was a Shelby 2013 model. Nice and slick. The sort of curves that caught the girls’ attention at college. It worked like a charm. He got the attention of girls, all right. He had one of the best girls by his side.

  Amber was a cheerleader and had the body of porn star. Tight stomach. Wavy hair. Amazing legs.

  She looked ditsy but was anything but. She was a smart girl. She knew how the streets worked, and she certainly knew who her friends were. She wasn’t under any false impressions that her boyfriend was in love with her. No, sir. She knew what he wanted. He wanted the same thing that every guy at college wants.

  “Thanks for the booty call, babe. Catch you later, yeah?” Rodney said as he put the car in first and sped away, leaving Amber on the curb near her house.

  “Yeah, thanks for the three minutes of below-average sex, jerk!” she said under her breath, flipping her middle finger at the taillights of the Shelby. She watched the car disappear around the corner. She was just about to turn around when something caught her eye. She saw a man parked a few yards up the road. His car was lodged against the curb on the opposite side of the road, parallel to her house. The car was jet black. She couldn’t make out the make, but something about it spooked her. She brushed it off and made her way through her front yard gate. It creaked open, making the chirping birds in the trees even louder.

  She quickly glanced at her watch and noticed the time.

  “Shit!” she huffed, walking up the three little steps that led to her door. “Mom’s going to flip out when she sees me.”

  Searching her bag for some keys, she saw a note on the front door.

  Glad to see you’re finally back. Your brothers and I have gone out. You know, to that thing called school. I’ll be back at 10. You’d better be home. If I find you sleeping on the couch, you’re dead, missy!

  Love you lots.

  Mom.

  “It’s my day off! Gosh. I can’t have any fun around here,” Amber said, ripping the sticky note off the door and scrunching it into her bag. She finally found her keys and opened the front door. On entering the spacious house, she could smell the aroma of fresh cookies. It made her stomach rumble. She ignored it and made her way up the stairs. The banisters were made out of marble. They were slippery, and Amber enjoyed the feeling of them as she brushed her hands over them. It might have been the Ecstasy wearing off, but she enjoyed it nonetheless.

  “Shower time,” she said, realizing that she would have to get the stink of sin off her before her mother returned.

  Her mother wasn’t a strict parent by any means. But what parent likes to see their kid having a remotely fun time? Exactly. No one.

  She slipped out of her party clothes and got into the shower. She hadn’t bothered to pick up after herself. Her clothes formed a messy trail from the stairs all the way to the bathroom down the hall. The hot water hit her skin and made her feel energized almost immediately.

  She was enjoying her R&R when she heard a faint knock. She stopped washing her hair.

  …..

  There it was again. Another knock. Somebody was knocking on the door downstairs. It seemed urgent.

  “Mom locked herself out again!” she said, reaching for a towel as she got out of the shower. The transition from hot to cold made her perfectly toned skin come out in prickles. She wrapped the towel around her torso and quickly got out of the bathroom. The hallway was a little colder. The floor felt as if it was sticking to the soles of her feet. She jogged down the stairs toward the front door. She made sure the towel was tightly wrapped before answering.

  Through the glass panel on top of the door, she could tell by the shadowing that whoever was knocking wasn’t her mother.

  The shadow standing at her door looked like it belonged to a man.

  She grabbed the handle and opened the door.

  Twenty-One

  My alarm clock was having a seizure by the time I smashed my fist on the “off” switch.

  “Fuck the alarm,” I found myself saying as I sat up in bed.

  I stretched my arms wide, as if I was readying myself to save a goal in a soccer match. We sometimes played division soccer with the other precincts around the state. I was always goalie. Santiago, on the other hand, was our star striker. He had gifted feet. He would slice and dice the ball between defenders just outside the box. And then he’d flip from left to right, turning like a ballerina, and he’d get his left foot on the ball and smash it into the back of the net. He held the record for the most goals scored in our league. Pretty slick for a blubbering, emotional wreck.

  To be honest, he wasn’t usually a blubbering fool. He always had his emotions in check, but last night at the family “murder house,” he lost his cool – we’d already nicknamed the murder scenes for easy reference. The family were the “murder house.” The governor-to-be and his wife were “dead presidents,” and the woman on her porch was “rocking chair.” As you can tell, we tended to go a little off-mark with the names. It helped us detach ourselves from the victims. On the official reports we were obviously much more formal. Shaw would have a heart attack if we accidentally sent off papers with the nicknames of the cases on them. Let’s just say that this politically correct world we now live in would keel over and die if they knew what we were calling certain killers and vic’s behind their back.

  The press always summed up the names of the killer really well. A nice little headline with a pun in it. We didn’t. We call a spade a spade. A psycho a psycho. A tragedy a tragedy.

  My cell phone went off. I was still sitting in bed. I had a cigarette on the go and was just about to wash my mouth out with last night’s bedtime nightcap.

  “Yo!” I said, swigging on my Jack Daniels. I swallowed it. I thought, Fuck it. Might as well get a little buzzed. I mean, who knows what sort of sick shit is waiting for us today.

  “Frank, it’s San,” I heard the voice say on the other end of the phone.

  “Hello, darling!” I replied. I was trying to gauge his mood.

  It worked wonders. He sighed loudly into the phone, the speakers popping under his breath, and said, “I’ll be there to pick you up in ten minutes. Don’t jerk me around. Be outside when I get there. I don’t feel like waiting for you to crack one out or whatever you do that seems to make you smell salty when you get in the car.”

  I was horrified at his accusations of me pleasing myself before work. I would never dream of doing such a thing, but I thought he deserved to have his chain pulled. So I played along.

  “Better out than in,” I said. Almost immediately, the phone went dead. “Bye-bye!” I muttered, putting my cell phone down on the bedside table.

  I was just about to get out of bed when my cell went off again. I quickly grabbed it, thinking San had thought of a comeback. He usually did that — hung up, that is — and then called back. So when I answered, without thinking, I said, “You want to come over and touch each other up? Saves us all the hassle of doing it by ourselves. Might as well get a little fun out of this partnership.”

  The line was silent, but I knew somebody was there. I quickly glanced at the caller I.D. It was Shaw.

  Now you’re going to get it Frank! The voice in my head echoed between my ears.

  “As much as I enjoy a good lay once in a while, I think I’ll pass,” my boss, Chief of Police Shaw, said. I could hear his voice cracking under his vocal chords. He sounded as if he had been up all night.

  I didn’t apologize. I just said, “Thought you were somebody else.”

  “Ah, that’s too bad. You had my hopes up, Frank. I didn’t mention this yesterday, but you can have that lieutenant job for free. You don’t need to sleep with the boss. I’m okay on that front. You and I wouldn’t work. Just too much baggage, plus I’m a lot older than
you, so I’m more experienced.”

  I started to laugh. “You’re in a good mood! We catch the killer or something?”

  “No, but we’ve got the next best thing!” he replied, sounding mighty chipper, which wasn’t like him.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  There was a slight pause, and then he said, “We’ve got a surviving victim who saw the car he was in and the killer’s face.”

  Twenty-Two

  They shall all fucking die, the cowards that they are. The fear in their eyes. The smell of shit between their ass cheeks. I can see them shitting themselves when I come knocking. I can hear their heavy breathing as they contemplate the reality in which they live. I can hear them praying to the gods as I slash them with my knife.

  It’s sick, really. They should know better than to mess with me. They should know that it’s highly unlikely that they will walk away from such a thing.

  But don’t worry, world. I’ll get them. I’ll get them all. Expect a new video soon. This one will be my goriest. I haven’t found them yet. The people who are to star in this next upload, that is. But once I do, I’ll be plenty sure to wrap them up real nice. Keep them real fresh. All for your viewing pleasure.

  RANDOM RICK

  WWW.BOSTONSPREEKILLER.COM

  RANDOM RICK was happy with his latest blog post. He gave it the once-over, looking for any grammatical errors. He was meticulous like that. Not many killers would waste their time with such a thing. He was all about making everything as professional as possible. He wasn’t a slouch. No, sir. RANDOM RICK was a man to be feared and revered. He was all about garnering respect. It was his mission.

  He nodded his head gently and pressed “enter” on the keyboard. He didn’t notice the girl standing behind him. She was leaning over him, watching him work. She wore a black T-shirt and baggy denim pants. She had long black dreads and was what most would consider a “goth chick.”