Payback Read Free Page B

didn’t bother him at all. He had grown up there and he actually enjoyed it.
    He had felt the first little twinge of excitement in a long time. Was this what it took? A few people getting completely butchered for him to feel anything with this job anymore? He knew that he needed to step out and find something else, and fast. But right now he had a case to solve.
    The biggest thing at the moment was media control. Brian had remembered a bit on how this should go down, but he still hated it. The media of today were even more relentless than they used to be because of the technology at their disposal. They could get the information onto blogs and social media within seconds from phones and a host of other devices. That was why it was even more adamant that the cops not say a word about anything at the crime scene.
    Brian finished his cigar—he had tried to quit way too many times—and stepped back into the house. The crime had actually happened in the upstairs master bedroom, but the entire house was swimming with cops and it all was being treated as a crime scene. Any time there was that much room for evidence to be collected then they had to operate that way.
    But he still hated the hustle and bustle of a homicide scene.
    Brian had asked to be moved from homicide to vice about a year before. He had grown tired of seeing thing like this and the only reason he was actually there now was because of his history with the case. There was only so many dead bodies that one could see before they just could not take it anymore. He had reached his limit of watching the awful things that people could do to each other a long time ago.
    But this case was his he felt. Arnold and John had not even asked him to step back because it was technically not his beat. One copycat murder was a random coincidence but two separate crime scenes—one of them being a double murder—was a message. Someone was trying to tell them something. What was it? What was going on here?
    “Any prints? You guys finding any semblance of this thing called evidence?” The chief walked around barking at the forensic geeks. He was getting annoyed and bullying them around a bit, which usually indicated they had not found shit. The chief could not stand when there was no evidence at a crime scene. There was a little known fact that if a murder was not solved in forty-eight hours then it was probably not going to be solved. That was too true too many times, Brian thought. If there was no physical evidence collected at the scene and they were not able to establish any motive, then the case would go cold and the killer would walk in ninety five percent of the cases. Just thinking about it pissed Brian off.
    The head lab geek looked up from dusting for prints and said no. The chief walked away disgusted. Brian tried to ignore the smell but the entire house smelled like death. The bodies had been sitting there rotting for close to forty-eight hours. They had been discovered when the husband’s employer had come looking for him when he had not reported to work or so much as called off sick for two days. When the employer arrived they noticed signs of foul play. Noticeably the smell as soon as they walked in.
    The stench of death was unmistakable for anyone and when you walked into the house it hit you in the face with a huge wave of disgusting that turned your stomach almost instantly. The smell was churning Brian’s stomach at that very second and making him regret every morsel of food that had gone into his body that morning. He had to get out of there soon. He just wasn’t cut out for homicide anymore. His body and mind had started to reject it before; that was why he had gotten out of it. He was a zombie at home and his mental and physical being had been in dire jeopardy.
    The victim’s employer, despite the smell had made their way up the steps to find the two victim’s both lying in pools of blood on the bed with their skins removed. That was the Carver’s M.O.