Chapter One
The rain pounding against his window acts as a backdrop to the shrill of his phone awakening him from sleep. He pulls himself out of bed and reaches for the call that will drag him out of his nightmares on this damp fall day and just knows that, at this hour, it’s not good news.
“Hey, Orton…it’s Tully. We have a situation over on Deacon Street. You want me to pick you up or can you meet me there?”
In the nine years since he had become a detective, and in the same time that he and Tully had been partners, Kevin had never heard him describe a scene as a “situation”. There was something he wasn’t telling him.
“Tully, what the hell is it? What’s happened?”
“Man, it’s bad. It’s really bad. I have heard the reports from the first arriving and it’s pretty sick. You may want to beg off on this one.”
There are only two reasons that one cop would tell another that he may to avoid a case. One is that it involves a family member. The other is that it would be too painful due to a similar situation being in that officer’s past.
“Damn it, Tully…spit it out.”
“It’s a family. Mom and two dead kids. Looks like a domestic, but we are not sure yet. Can’t find the ex-husband. Are you sure you are up for this?”
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It was second year as a beat cop in Flint, Michigan. He was working the 11 pm to 7 am shift in the business district on the west side of town. Sitting in the parking lot of an electronics store at midnight, clocking speeders as they drove down Miller Road. It had been a quiet night and all he wanted to do was get home to his family.
“Patrol Delta 610, what is your twenty?”
The radio caused him to jump.
“Miller Road, Best Buy parking lot.”
“Delta 610, please proceed to your residence for an emergency situation.”
His heart stopped. His wife of three years was home with their two year old son and expecting in just another eight weeks. It had to be the baby. Something has gone very wrong.
He tore out of the parking lot and headed to Davison. He drove on auto pilot, lights on, siren screaming parting the traffic like Moses and the Red Sea. He just needed to know they were okay. He just had to get there.
As he pulled into the street where he lived, his car was bathed in the radiance of red and blue lights flashing everywhere. His mind just locked on the front door. Yellow crime scene tape was being strung up all around his yard. He barely had the car in park when he jumped out and started running. He was stopped at the edge of his driveway by a Davison city patrol officer.
“Hey, patrolman, where do you think you are going? Out of you area of protection, aren’t you?’
“This is my house, asshole. Let me by. What the hell is going on?”
The Davison patrol man held him back and turned over his shoulder to call one of the detectives over. Kevin struggled in his arms, trying desperately to get away. He pulled back his right arm, hand clenched tightly in a fist ready to drop this officer and get past him to his house.
“You don’t want to do that, Officer Orton. Come with me, let me talk to you for a moment.”
Kevin stared at the detective with fear and anger in his eyes. He had to get to his wife. He needed to make sure she was okay, that his son was okay.
“Sir, what the hell is going on? Why are all these people here? What has happened to my family?”
“There is no easy way to say this. They are gone, son. Something horrible has happened here and you don’t need to see inside that house. You don’t want what has happened in there to be the memory you carry around for the rest of your life. You need to tell me who to call. You need someone here for you.”
“There is no one. My whole life was in that house.”
In the weeks that followed, he read the reports. He saw the crime scene photos. He was interviewed as a suspect and was cleared. He spent the next six months doing his very best to destroy himself with alcohol just to get the images out of his head. Just to find a place of numbness, where the pain would let go of him just for a little while. He never found that place. He quit the Flint Police force and moved away, unable to look at the daily reminders of his life that was now completely gone. He knew that he had to survive. His memory of them would keep them alive. And he owed them that. But, he knew that he couldn’t do it here. He had to go. He had to disappear.
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After a quick shower, he dressed and jumped in his car and headed to Deacon Street. This wasn’t the first case he had with a child involved. But, something in Tully’s voice told him it was going to be different. Putting the bubble light on his roof, he made his way down the streets of Carlton, Pa, heading to the North side of town. As he maneuvered through traffic, he reached into his glove box and pulled out his flask. His best friend, next to his gun. He stared at it for a moment and then through it back and closed the box. Not this time. Not for this one.
He pulled into the parking lot of a low cost apartment complex that sat behind a bar on Deacon Street. Tully was standing in the doorway of the vestibule that acted as an entrance way to the two downstairs apartments and the stairwell to the two upstairs units.
“Kev, it’s the unit upstairs. On the left. CSU is up there now processing. They are expecting you.”
Orton had become famous for his initial crime scene investigations. He would walk a scene like he was planning to recreate it on canvas later, studying every nuance. He soaked in every piece of information that he could process. He was known as “The Machine”, for the way it seemed he could turn off his emotions and just look at a crime scene as if it were just another moment in time.
He walked up the stairs and crossed the landing to the open doorway. The first thing that hit him was the bitter, copper smell of blood in the air. He knew at that moment this wasn’t a normal domestic. Spousal homicides were usually crimes of passion, quick..a knife or a gun…used in a heat of the moment. Overkill was rarely a consideration. His experience told him this was something else.
The living room was small, sparsely furnished. A couch lined one wall, across from that sat a small tube television set with a VCR attached. Both sat on wooden milk crates being used as a makeshift entertainment center. The floor in front was strewn with children’s videos. Other than a turned over ashtray on the coffee table, there seemed to be no disturbance in this room at all. The windows were covered with bed sheets, taped at the top of the window sill to keep them in place. There was no sign of violence at all in this area.
He made his way into the kitchen and dining area. One medium sized room that acted as both. There was an old wooden dining table with three unmatched chairs around it. The kitchen was clean and well kept, except for the blood in the sink. Someone had cleaned up after themselves here, but made no effort to hide that it was done. He was careful to open drawers and cabinets without leaving a print. There didn’t seem to be any fingerprint dust in the room, it had not been processed yet.
The crime scene techs, walking around in white paper suits, were processing the hallway that led to the rear of the apartment. There was blood all over the walls of the hallway, decorating it. It didn’t appear to be arterial spray, more like intentional flows of blood…like the start of a graffiti tag…intentional in their placement. It was in this moment that his chest began to tighten. His breath became quick. And his mind started to fray at the edges. This was too familiar.
He walked to the first bedroom door, the master bedroom, and carefully stepped over the blood drops on the carpet in the doorway. The body of a woman, Caucasian, in her mid-thirties, still laid on the middle of the bed. Nude, accept for a pair of old woolen socks, she was laid out…posed as if she were Jesus on the cross. Both her hands were bent at strange angles, the wrists appeared broken, the palms turned in a direction they were never meant to go. This woman suffered before death. Again, the familiar scene struck him like ice water through his veins. He struggled with his composure.
A call from outside the room got his attention and shook him from his frozen moment of anxiety.
“Hey, one of you officers want to come in here? You need to see this, now!”
Kevin walked quickly into the hall to find Tully standing in the doorway of the second bedroom. He turned to face Kevin and his face was ashen.
“Jesus Christ, man. What the hell is going on?”
“What are you talking about? What is it?”
“Just stay there. Don’t come in here. Trust me. I got this.”
“What the hell is it?”
Kevin pushed his way past a crime scene tech and made his way to the door way. Inside the room he could see nothing but blood. Blood seemed to be in every corner of the room. A small lamp in the shape of Sponge Bob was sitting on a old and battered night stand. The bodies of the children were covered with blood soaked sheets, waiting to the medical examiner to come and tell everyone what they already knew, that they were dead.
Everyone’s attention, strange to him, seemed to be somewhere else in the room. Somewhere, that at this angle, he could not see. He stepped past Tully slowly, sensing something that was going to change everything that he thought about this case…about what he saw.
The closet that stored the clothes of these small children was fronted by two double doors, wooden and painted yellow. The outside had carefully drawn and painted representations of the same character that was displayed by the lamp. But, it was the inside of the doors that had everyone’s attention. White backs made the red of the blood used to spell out the message very stark and almost threatening. The words took a few moments for him to process. As the anger and fear welled in his chest, he began to lose control and allow the past to come rushing in. Spelled out, in the blood of the poor little children left like garbage on their beds, the place they should have felt the most safe and secure was the message.
“Hello, Kevin. I am back! Lets play.”
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