“Tangled”
Uc Amalu Jr
Copyright© 2012 by Uc Amalu Jr
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage or retrieval system without permission in writing from copyright owner.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual person, living or dead, events or locale is entirely coincidental.
CHAPTER ONE
"It’s another girl. She’s all cut up and her breasts…"
"What about her breasts?"
"They’re gone!"
The conversation replayed in Jay’s mind. Surely it
couldn’t be right? There had already been one murder like
that in Showsdale. Not a month ago, a young woman
bearing that same mutilation, was found. Now it sounded
like a second girl had suffered the same fate. How he
hoped that the Captain had been misinformed of the
details, but in his heart Jay knew that he hadn’t.
Jay pulled onto the side of the road and cut the engine.
He scanned his surrounding. To the right lay crude
asphalt road, full of pot-holes large enough to swallow a
small sedan. On his left was dense bush land, nothing but
square kilometres of Eucalyptus, Grey Gums and the odd
Tallow Wood. The crime scene unit, three marked cop cars
and their flurry of red and blue flashing lights, served as
an unwelcome intrusion upon the otherwise picturesque
backdrop.
Smoke escaped the interior of Jay’s cruiser when he
stepped outside onto the loose gravel, stones crunched
loudly beneath his R.M. Williams boots. The cleansing
scent of eucalyptus filled the air. Jay drew a long, deep
breath savouring the purity of the rural setting. It had
been a long time since his lungs had experienced
anything other than the toxicity of city living. He turned
his head to the sky, amazed by the clarity and how very
different two environments, only ten kilometers apart,
could be. Just five minutes drive away was the hustle and
bustle of Showsdale, a city of eighty five thousand,
spoiled by pollution, progress and careless littering. Yet
here, well this was nature at its best. Untouched.
Further up on the shoulder of the road, he saw an
ambulance. Two uniformed officers were standing by the
open back doors, their note-books in hand, speaking to a
man and a woman. Jay assumed they were the
unfortunates who had made the gruesome discovery.
The young man had a blanket and his arms around the
young woman, rubbing her arms and shoulders so
vigorously, it looked as though he was trying to shake the
life back into her. Jay stared at her eyes. They had the
vacant stare he had come to associate with shock. It
appeared that she was incapable of speaking at this point
in time, as it was the young man who seemed to answer
all the questions. Behind the couple, in the ambulance, a
medic was preparing a syringe. He held a bottle upside down and had the
syringe embedded within the small clear vessel. He pulled
the needle from the bottle, tapped it a few times with his
fingers and then leaned in between the couple and said a
few words. The woman held up her arm, without so much
as blinking. The medic wiped her arm with a tiny, white
swab and administered the shot. He then handed her a
small bottle of water before disappearing deeper into the
ambulance.
Jay reached into his coat pocket and withdrew his
notebook before making his way toward them. Beside the
ambulance, he noticed the couple’s backpacks lying on
the ground. Clipped to the front pocket of one of the
back-packs were a pair of short-range walkie-talkies and
an updated map of Postman’s Bay, sealed in a clear
plastic slip. He looked back at the shocked duo, their
heavy duty hiking boots, wide brimmed hats and high
visibility T-shirts told him they were seasoned hikers. Both
parties sat in the back of the ambulance. The woman’s
eyes were wide and stared blankly at the officers as they
fired questions at her and her male friend. One of the
officers walked over to Jay.
"Hey, Detective Marnotti. Look, I don’t think we’re going to
get too much more out of them at this stage." The
officer’s name badge read Paul Mitchell. Jay’s eyes
narrowed as he read it.
"Mitchell?" he queried.
"Yes, Sir," replied the young officer.
"Weren’t you the kid who was at the Hunt scene a few of
weeks back?'
"I sure was, Sir. My fortunes haven’t improved much, as
you can see."
Jay grinned at the young cop, admiring how well he
appeared to be coping with having attended two major
homicides within the space of a month. "So, Paul, what
have you been able to extract from our witnesses?"
Paul flipped through his notebook. "Well, their names are
Lance and Julia Sanders, ages twenty-eight and twenty-
seven. They live in Showsdale and hike here every long
weekend. Apparently, they’ve done so for the last two
years." He looked up at Jay.
"Every weekend, eh?"
"Every long weekend," Officer Mitchell corrected Jay.
"Seems it’s their hobby, Sir. They like to keep fit I guess."
Jay grinned at the idea of people actually exercising as a
hobby. His idea of a hobby was a Saturday night at Bluey’s
where he exercised his biceps by lifting a frosted glass of
ale from the bar to his lips and back to the bar again. Jay
dug deep into his coat pocket, produced a cigarette and
lit it up.
"Apart from that, Paul, what else did ya get out of em?"
Once again, the young rookie referred to his notes before
replying. "Apparently they had only just begun their hike,
when about half a kilometer into the scrub, they saw a
whole heap of birds gathering near a clearing just off the
track a ways. Julia went over for a closer look; she thought
it might have been an injured animal or something. As
you can imagine, it didn’t take them long to figure out
that it was no animal."
Jay drew back on his cigarette. "And then what?" A gust
of smoke escaped with his words.
"Well, her and Lance high tailed it out of there," Officer
Mitchell nodded over towards the scrub. He then pointed
to a small, silver sedan sitting on the side of the road and
said, "They got back to their car here, and called us. They
say that’s where they stayed, with their doors locked, until
Officer Newcombe and myself arrived."
"What time frame we lookin’ at?"
Paul flicked over to the next page of his note-book and
then back again. "They got here at roughly 8am,
saw the
body at about 8.15am, we were called at 8.34am and
arrived on the scene at approximately 8.57am. We called
for back up at 9.10am and they got here at 9.30am, a few
minutes before the coroner and crime scene unit."
"Did they touch or disturb the body?" asked Jay.
"According to them, they laid nothing more than eyes on
it. I have to say that I believe them. They’re pretty shaken
up, Detective."
Jay crushed out his cigarette and picked up the butt.
"Okay, Paul, make sure you get all their personal details
and ask em to come in to the station for a more detailed
statement tomorrow, if possible." He then handed his
cigarette butt to officer Mitchell and said, "Here, kid, take
care of this for me before the C.S.U collects it as evi-
dence!" With that, Jay turned in the direction of the crime
scene and walked off.
He followed the lead of the iridescent yellow crime scene
tape that cordoned off the area, scanning for any unusual
footprints, tyre tracks or drag marks along the way. There
was nothing out of the ordinary that he could see, but
then again after all the cops that had traipsed through in
the past hour, it would be difficult to tell who made what
trail anyhow. As soon as Jay entered the scrub, the
sunlight dimmed through the canopy of the trees,
causing the temperature to drop somewhat. A few
hundred metres further down the track, Jay saw three
more officers scouring the area for clues, and over to his
left were the coroner and one of the ambulance medics,
crouching beside a white sheet.
Careful to watch where he was stepping, Jay weaved his
way through the ferns, twigs and leaves scattered about
the ground, until he reached the grisly scene. The medic
stepped aside and allowed Jay access before nodding to
the coroner and walking back toward the roadside.
"G’day, Jay,” the coroner greeted him. “I was hoping I’d be
seeing you today."
"Oh yeah? And why is that, Seth?"
Seth Pierce had been the attending coroner in a majority
of the cases Jay had caught over the last ten years. The
man, whom Jay thought had about as much personality
as a turnip, even resembled one. His balding head
sported just a handful of thin hairs and his face looked as
though it had seen better days. Personal appear-ances
aside, he was a likeable fellow. Jay often wondered if
Seth likened his position of Coroner as the next best
thing to being a serial killer. It did allow him the luxury of
feeding his morbid fascination with the dead, and their
cause of death, while remaining safely within the con-fines
of the law.
"Well, you and Ben are working that Hunt case right?"
"That’s right, what about it? ‛
Seth leaned in closer to Jay. "I wouldn’t like to say this
too loud, or have it spread around, it’s just my personal
observations you understand…"
"Spit it out already," Jay interrupted, his patience fading
fast.
Clearly taken aback with Jay’s hostility, Seth spoke
quietly. "Well you have another female victim, late teens to
cut up pretty bad. Both breasts are gone and her
abdomen… talk about a mess."
"Any estimate on the time of death yet?" Jay asked,
realising the Captain hadn’t been misinformed.
"At a rough guess, I’d say sometime in the last twenty
four hours. She’s in slight rigor mortis. Her toes and
fingers are stiff. The lower temps in here could have
slowed things down a bit," Seth said, looking around the
scrub. "But the pooling of the blood on the underside of
her body tells me she’s been here at least eight hours.
Time of death may be between ten and midnight last
night."
Seth lowered the sheet from the victims chin and showed
Jay exactly what had hap-pened to the girl. Jay saw a
cut over her temple, so deep it was actually gaping open.
Her neck was red and bruised, as though she had been
strangled or choked at some point during her attack.
Jay crouched down beside the body his eyes fixed on her
chest; he couldn’t believe the ferocity of the attack. Her
breasts had been hacked off with such savagery that all
that was left was jagged and torn pieces of skin and
exposed flesh. He peeled the sheet back further, exposing
the rest of the victim’s naked, muti-lated body. When his
eyes reached her abdomen; he felt he was going to be
sick. It was so torn open and cut up, that he saw what he
was certain were her intestines spilling out of the cavity.
"I’ve seen enough," he said, pulling the sheet back up to
her chin. Seth placed bags over her hands and kept them
in place with tape, to secure any trace evidence that may
be there.
"C.S.U have been combing the area for evi-dence," Seth
informed Jay. 'So far they’ve come up with squat! No
personal effects or identification. It’s almost as though
she just fell from the sky."
"Well it’s a pretty fair bet that didn’t happen." Jay rubbed
his forehead.
"They’ll keep looking, but it’s safe to assume that they’re
not going to find anything. They’ve been here for over an
hour now and they’ve turned up nothing."
"You’re a real breath of fresh air, Seth. You know that?"
Jay was annoyed at Seth’s negative attitude. "Would it
hurt to show a little positivity?"
"Sorry, pessimism comes with the job. There’s never too
much to be positive about."
Jay stood up and placed his hands on his hips.
"Are you leaving already?" Seth asked.
"No, just gonna go check in with Ben. Gimme a yell when
you’re ready to move her, okay?" said Jay, already
making his way back up the hiking track.
"Will do," Seth waved at Jay and returned to the body
lying at his feet.
Jay slid into the driver’s seat of his cruiser and laid his
head against the steering wheel, his breathing shallow
and erratic. He flipped his phone open and began to enter
Ben’s number. It was then that he spotted the barrage of
news vans and reporters converging on the site.
"Parasites," he scowled.