Page 13 of Dead Man's Wish
“I told Bexley, and Di probably relayed it to you, but I made the decision to keep the answers you eventually asked for simple. At the time, there wasn’t a reason to rake through the hurt with you, and truthfully, it wouldn’t have happened right off the bat either.”
“We had school to finish, too,” Jaiden tacked on.
“That’s all true, but you’re here now.” I placed my hands on both boxes. “Brent is dead,” I said, punctuating it with a tap. “Everything in here is the surface level of what we found, criminally or personally, as it relates to Brent Hale.”
We were in work mode, so I didn’t soften the blow of his name, but Bex only met me with equal professionalism. I took the lid off the box with his name on it.
“Not every piece of evidence we collected is in here, but the most important things you need to know first are.” I pulled out three tattered leather journals. They were well worn, abused by the boy’s angry grip and hateful writing over time. They were in sealed evidence bags, but I held them up to see anyway. “These have been cleared and processed fully and there’s nothing else we could possibly collect from them. You can take them out and hold them, read them.”
When I paused, she looked up at me.
“You want me to read that shit?” Disgust twisted her face. She knew they weren’t academic journals and she let me know how much she despised this whole thing already.
“I can’t give you a full understanding of Hale. I’m not a psychologist. In fact,I’mnot the brightest, fast-tracked to her PhD psych I know.” Her eyes rolled at my statement but it was true. Bexley was smart, incredibly so, and she was determined to take advantage of that. “I know when you dive into this box and read these journals, you’ll approach this case with an understanding we just can’t piece together with untrained minds.”
“Bishop.” Bex groaned before dropping her head into a hand. “I’m pretty sure we’ve already accepted the consultation request; you don’t need to butter me up with silly things.” She huffed a laugh to herself. I put the items back into the box and opened the other lid. “I assume you’ve determined it’s a copycat killer?”
“You have no idea how right you are,” I started. “But also, how wrong. I didn’t put it together until the third murder, and it’s not even some grand tale of connecting dots and noticing patterns. They were similar enough, but only like an orange is similar to an apple only by the category of fruit. Without that small similarity, superficially, there’s no need to categorize them as the sameanything.”
“I’m really going to fucking hate this case,” Bex whispered, falling back into Jaiden’s shoulder.
“At least this is just your first time hearing it,” Diane piped up from her throne.
“Ignoring the nosebleeds over there.” Shooting a smirk to my wife, I started reading from my notes. “Young women, petite or physically active that live alone, no height preference, no hair color preference, and no social class preference.”
“That sounds like a free-for-all serial killer nightmare. He has no preferences? None?” Bexley looked astonished. “What’s the age range? The likelihood of an opportunist involving themself with Brent’s particulars isn’t just unusual, it’s highly unlikely.”
“Is it still possible, though?” Jaiden asked.
“Yeah, it’s possible. Just increases the difficulty a bit.” Bex looked at me again, waiting as my hand disappeared into the second box. “If there’s no correlation in the victimization then whatever Bishop discovered has to be an undeniable—”
She stopped talking when I held up a Polaroid of her. Bex rushed to her feet and crossed the open space for a closer look. She couldn’t see the writing, just the picture front.
“That’s not recent,” she stated. “It’s not even from that October when Brent terrorized the city. This was taken during a student event in September before the first campus murder.” She stared longer and the room fell into an unnerving stillness. “This didn’t come from the evidence collection at Brent’s house?”
“Yes and no,” I answered. “I had the lab compare the film, the numbers, even had them date the ink on the back.” I turned the photo over, showing the handwritten date.September 15, Bex in auditorium.“It’s Hale’s handwriting, the film came from a batch we collected on-site, and it was printed and noted around that time frame.”
“So, what does that mean exactly? We know Brent died.” Jaiden had a hard exterior but over the years, I learned those were the moments he was most emotional over her.
“He did, and I had the paranoid wherewithal to get those records double-checked and his grave exhumed to be sure this wasn’t the sickest long con a serial killer’s ever managed.”
“You exhumed his body?” Bex asked, her face twisted in a look that almost resembled shock.
“This was left at the last crime scene in June. I wanted to make sure our facts were still reality before I called.”
“If you only have one picture, what connects the other two murders to this one?” Jaiden’s voice was laced with hopeful doubt.
“The M.O. isn’t consistent like you’d think. There’s a red herring for cause of death, and only after I got the full autopsy reports back did I see they were connected. There was a single stab wound through the right lung from behind.” I pulled out a copy of one report and held it out to Bexley.
“Premortem torture and then a slow death when he’s done playing with her? Nothing ritualistic, nothing sexually motivated so far, and no pattern for a victim,” Jaiden surmised as Bex looked between the boxes.
“How do I catch you?” she whispered.
Four
Journal Entry
May 17, 2016
