Page 14 of Red Snow
“What the hell is going on?” I ask her. “The perimeter is huge. What gives?”
Danielle takes a deep breath before speaking. “Once you see the crime scene, you’ll know why. You need to prepare yourself for what you’re about to see. This isn’t normal. This woman has been brutalized and put on display for the whole world to see. It’s fucked up, and I just want you to be prepared.”
“Damn, I’ve never seen you like this. How bad can it be?”
“She’s been decapitated, Jarrod. That’s how bad it can be.”
“Jesus! Decapitated?”
“Yeah. But there’s more. It’s . . . just go see for yourself. Then we’ll talk.”
Danielle moves to the side like a bouncer granting me access to the club, and I feel anxious to see what all the fuss is about. She didn’t even act like this during the Tongue Snatcher case, and that was pretty fucked up. I approach Marcus, who’s rocking a thick blue button-up and black pants, and the two of us shake hands. He looks just as tired as I feel right now. It must’ve been a long night for him too.
“What’s up, man?” I say to my partner.
“Hey. This is bad. It’s really bad.”
“Must be. Danielle wasn’t being her usual cunty self,” I reply behind a chuckle.
“Well, there’s a good reason for that. Come on, I’ll show you.”
Marcus turns around and leads me through the thick snow towards the school. As we approach, I see a gaggle of people moving around like ants. It’s a clusterfuck of forensics guys and blood splatter analysts, as well as a few uniformed officers and the medical examiner. Once we push through all of them, I see it. I lay my eyes on what’s got Marcus and Danielle acting funny, and I totally understand.
It’s a snowman. Sounds harmless, right? Well, it’s not. This snowman is constructed of a giant snowball on the bottom, a medium snowball in the middle, and a woman’s severed head on the top. Her eyes have been gouged out, and I can tell from the loose and torn skin, the tool used to decapitate her was something rough, and she was probably alive and fighting when it happened. On the ground beneath the most macabre snowman ever, is a mound of snow drenched in blood. It’s a horribly graphic scene. Who the fuck would do this? Who would display a woman’s head like this in front of an elementary school?
My heart hurts just from looking at it. Just like Danielle, I feel speechless. This isn’t something you see every day, and I have to take a few steps back just to process it all. Marcus, sensing my discomfort, puts his hand on my shoulder and pulls me away. When I turn around, I see Danielle again.
“Yeah, fucked up, isn’t it?” she says rhetorically. “Do you feel like shit? Are you pissed off that somebody would do this? Well I hope so, because this is your case, and I need you to use all the emotion you’re feeling right now to catch this bastard. Starting now, get it together, do what you two do, and bring this motherfucker in. Once the media gets ahold of this shit, it’s going to be huge, and it’s going to shine a bright spotlight on us. I need you two on top of your game, and I know you always are, which is why this is yours right from the jump. I need you to do what you do, except I need you to do it faster. Now get to work.”
“What do we know about her?” Marcus asks while I stand there trying to gather my thoughts.
“Nothing yet. All we have is her head,” Danielle says, still struggling to keep her emotions at bay. “That’s why I’m putting you two on this. Find out who she is, where she works, if she has family, the whole nine. You know how this works, so get to it. I want to be brought up to speed every single day, and I need to see progress every day. Got it?”
“We got it, Danielle,” Marcus answers for both of us before Danielle walks away in a hurry. She obviously doesn’t want to be around this crime scene for another second.
“How you doing? You good, man?” Marcus asks as he faces me. I shake my head like I’m literally trying to get something out of it.
“Yeah, I’m good. It’s just a bit much to see this early in the morning.”
“Long night?”
“Yeah,” I reply. “We’ll talk about it later. For now, we gotta get control of our crime scene. What have all these forensics guys touched so far?”
Marcus faces the crowd and puts his hands on his bony hips. “Not much. A teacher came to work a little early and found the head. Danielle was first out and then the forensics guys. She kept them from messing up the scene. They just started moving when you got here and the three of us started talking.”
“Okay, well they need tostopmoving then.”
I take a deep breath and let it out with a huff. Shit just got serious, and there’s no room for nerves, anxiety, or anything else that could hinder solving this case. This is what Marcus and I do best. Time to solve another crime and bring this motherfucker to justice. I start walking back over to the crime scene.
“Alright, I need everybody to stop moving right now!” I command. Everybody in their uniforms and Tyvek suits comes to a standstill to listen. “This is officially our crime scene now, and I need all of you to stop what the fuck you’re doing until my partner and I have done our walk-through. Don’t touch anything, don’t fucking breathe on anything unless we tell you to. Just hold on for a bit until we look the scene over. Thank you.”
I turn around and see Marcus eyeballing me with a half grin.
“Subtle,” he says, chuckling.
“Fuck subtle. We’ve got work to do.”
As the two of us approach the gruesome scene, I grab a pair of latex gloves from one of the blood splatter analysts and snap them on before pulling out my cellphone. I go to my camera app and click pictures of the entire scene as a whole, then I walk through it and take pictures of details, of which there are few. No footprints, which means it was snowing when this person set this whole scene up and his prints got snowed over. The parking lot also doesn’t have any tire tracks in it, which means the same thing. Other than the snowman and the severed head on top, there’s nothing here. There may be more once the snow melts, but whoever did this took their time. The school’s parking lot is poorly lit at night, so they had time to make this happen.
