"Not really. She has a mind also, dad. A sheriff's son is not attracted to dummies."
Sheriff Wilson nodded to his son. "I'll keep that in my mental Rolodex, Aiden. You never know when that might come in handy."
"Aw, dad."
"Well, she is a nice girl," Beth Wilson said. "As your mother, Aiden, I fully approve of her, and I always have. She's a lovely girl."
"I guess that's it, then," the sheriff said. "There you go, Aiden. The very beautiful Marlaina is in. Mom is the decision-maker, you know. I'm just a minor bread winner."
"Dads are okay," Lisa said, "but that's only because they are always doting on their daughters more than their sons. That makes you Number One with me, dad. And it makes Aiden Number Two."
Lisa stuck her tongue out at her brother who responded by giving her his index finger.
"Why, thank you, Lisa. I appreciate that vote of confidence."
"For sure."
"Whatever," Aiden said. "Whatever any of you say, just remember, Marlaina is hot."
"As long as Aiden likes her and she's not a dope head, I'm all for her," the sheriff said. "At least, it kicks the can down the road where my son will eventually be arrested for smoking marijuana at the Baptist picnic."
"I don't do dope, dad."
"I know. At least, I think I do. But I do worry about you all the time, son."
"She's hot, dad."
"Okay. I got that."
Aiden smiled. "Hot."
The sheriff's phone rang. Robert checked the window.
"I have to take this."
"There's a cold one on the street downtown, sheriff," the voice said. "Better get down there."
"Who?"
"A jogger. You know him. It's Billie Weston."
"You're kidding? Billie Weston?"
"Yeppers."
"Christ."
The caller was Dolly Kaleston. She was the night clerk at City Hall. She worked from home at night, because the phone calls went to a special cell phone she took home each evening. From her bed, she kept watch on things that didn't need immediate response and called the mayor and the sheriff when there was an emergency like this.
"The mayor wants to talk to you about these murders."
"I bet he does. I'll meet him as soon as I work the scene," the sheriff said.
He hung up.
"Gotta go. There's another stiff lying in the street downtown. He's a jogger name Billie Weston. We all know Billie. He's half eaten like the ones in the park."
"What do you think it means?" Aiden asked his dad.
"Well, son, I think it means this is going to be one really shitty day...."
The sheriff turned, grabbed his gun, and ran out the door. It clanged shut with its typical loud bang.
"I've got to fix that," the sheriff said to himself.
#
Billie Weston was an addicted runner. Billie had been a good looking kid until something ate one-fifth of his body mass in the middle of his nightly jog. The sheriff noted that he had been chewed up on all sides, and from the four blood stains on the ground around Billie it looked like four perps at been chewing on Mr. Weston at the same time.
"What the heck!" the sheriff said. He didn't like the looks of this. Things were getting complicated and fast.
The town reporter came over and said hello.
"Not now, Payton," the sheriff said. "Do you have any photos of this?"
"Yes," Payton Bryde replied.
"Do me a favor. Do not print them."
"I have to."
The sheriff grabbed his friend by the hand.
"Listen, Payton. We can't have people seeing pictures of a half eaten corpse in downtown Lancaster. Imagine the bad publicity. Think of the business owners. It will destroy the tourist trade, and that means the motels, restaurants, and shops won't have the money to pay for your newspaper's ads. Now, you might not care about the tourist trade in Lancaster, but your creditors want to be paid, and I know you need cash all the time to keep your little tabloids afloat, Payton. So, play these murders close to your face."
"You are right about needing ads," Payton said. "That's a good enough reason for me. What should I say?"
"As little as possible. You know what to do. Report it as a suspicious death, origin unknown. The coroner is going to perform an autopsy. Interview Payton's mom, girlfriend, sister, and others to do background. But don't mention that four people seem to have eaten the poor screaming bastard alive. Got it? That might fuck things up."
"I got it," Payton said.
"So, I can count on you?"
"Of course. We've known each other for years. I know what's best for me on this."
"Good. I'll let the mayor know you are on board also, if that's okay."
"I'll call him myself, sheriff. When it comes to selling out, I think it's best to do it in person."
Robert laughed and gave Payton a hug.
"You are the best, Payton."
"Or the worst, you mean."
"Love ya, man. Make it good."
He turned to the crime scene and started clicking off pictures.
"Keep the citizens off the sidewalks and at least five blocks away from here. I don't want this shit going on You Tube and Drudge in the next five minutes. I need complete control over the media on this or there will be hell to pay from Mayor McDonald."
When he turned around, Mayor Carson McDonald was smiling at him.
"Do we have this under control, sheriff?" the mayor asked, ignoring the fact that he just heard what he had heard.
"I'm not sure."
"I can see that! Do you think I'm blind?"
"This is most likely related to the park crime that took place last night."
"Same pattern?"
"Yes."
"Which is what?"
"All the victims were chewed and their guts tossed about in the air. As far as copy cat perps go, the similarity of both of these crime scenes seems a bit conclusive, don't you think?"
"Indeed. Anyway, I may be dull brained, sheriff, but remember it's just a political stance. Everyone wants to seem smarter than the mayor, you know. So, even though you think I'm dumber than snake shit, I'd like you to remain fully cognizant in that higher brain of yours that its just a ruse, because I'm fully capable of rapidly seeing the overall pattern that is emerging here."
"But?"
"But this is very dangerous stuff."
"Dangerous stuff? Five people are dead in less that twenty hours. Yea, I call that dangerous. In fact, it's very dangerous, Mr. Mayor."
"Listen, sheriff. Lancaster is a tourist Mecca."
"You aren't telling me something I don't know, Mr. Mayor."
"Anyway, Sheriff Wilson, our stores, restaurants, bus tours, car rentals, and hotels make a lot of money off the families who come here to gawk at the Amish, and I think that they are going to stay away if they think that their little kids are going to be eaten as truffles. So, we can't let them know that their children might just be consumed as sweet meats by some weirdo who snacks on them right here on the main drag in Lancaster, Pennsylvania which they are about to visit! That's not good for business in Lancaster, if you get my drift."
"You are right, Mr. McDonald. But on the other hand, if it gets out, think how much money we could get from the goth, heavy metal, and ghoul fans. They might increase Lancaster's revenue streams even more."
"Don't give me any gruff on this, sheriff. I run a good town here, and we've never seen anything this graphic as long as I've lived here, and I want it covered up, buried, and silent as a warm summer heat wave. Got it?"
"Got it, sir."
"Good. Take care of it."
As soon as he turned around, he was talking with Payton Bryde, the newspaper editor and reporter. That was good. Maybe Payton's cooperation would cover over the horror that this town was being subjected to and that in turn might help keep the mayor off the sheriff's backside.
"Payton, we need to keep a leash on this. I can't have people all over the eas
t coast thinking that Lancaster is dangerous, because if that happens, this place will be like the World Trade Center's death hole. The stores will close, the FOR RENT signs will go up, and people without money to pay rent will move to another town where they can find a real job."
"So, you want me to lie, mayor?"
"No. Not that all all."
"What do you want from me, Mr. Mayor?" Payton asked.
Mayor McDonald looked at Payton and put his arm around him. "Listen, son," the mayor said. "We are all in this boat together. We sink or swim on the same tide. When a ship as big as Lancaster sinks, Payton, we all die at the same time. We have to insure that the ship stays afloat, that Lancaster thrives. Otherwise, we all starve, and our power to survive diminishes. The world exists for the wise, Payton. You and I are just small bubbles in that larger sea of magnificent froth in which the rich control everything, and the poor remain convinced that they are in control. You and I are the poor, Payton, and it is always our duty to tell everyone that we are not poor but are middle class and happier than hell with our lot even if we know better. So, if you understand this and know that the rich aren't going to bail us out if we go down, then you will write your stories to make Lancaster the safest tourist destination in the universe. And it is. It is far safer and less hostile than the Moon, Mars, and Mercury where we'd all die instantly from exposure. You see, son, it is all a matter of perspective. In the larger picture, Lancaster is the safest of all towns in this wonderful cosmos in which we are just a tiny part."
Payton turned away. "The mayor thinks I'm a damned idiot," Payton thought. He walked the length of main street and looked back at the sheriff. He was talking with the mayor about how to salvage the tourist season. Some horrible people were eating Lancaster's citizens, including their precious tourists, just for the fun of it. If he reported it honestly, the town would dry up. "What am I going to write about this?" Payton asked himself. He wasn't sure, but it'd just have to be another fluff piece designed to keep the lid on Lancaster. It wouldn't gain him a Pulitzer Prize, but small towns had different needs. What was popular in New York City was a form of anathema to the locals in Lancaster County. "I'll figure out something," he thought. He always did.
#
Coroner Davin Dieneck sailed through the crime scene like a snowy white egret scarfing up little schools of evidence minnows from the shallows. He bent down, snapped photos, placed samples inside zip lock crime bags, spoke into a recorder where his observations could be archived point-by-point, and kept others as far away from the crime as he could.
The scene was still practically virgin, and he worked fast, wanting to get Weston's corpse into the morgue next to the four half-eaten victims whom he had already carved up with his expert surgical mannerisms. He could practically feel the cutlery in his hands carving up Mr. Weston as he worked the street.
The blood spray indicated splatter from all four sides of the victim, which was unusual, since most victims were cut either in the back or front, but not everywhere at once. This seemed at first glance to be either a group effort or a situation in which the perp was so active that he couldn't feed from just one spot but felt the need to circulate from each angle, making new tears into the victim's flesh from all sides in order to enjoy the feast even more. If that were true, he might have wanted to humiliate the victim. This could mean that the perp knew the victim and had a grudge. It would have been a big one. The guy was going to suffer big time if the perp had anything to say about it.
The coroner placed the victim into a body bag and lifted it into the medical ambulance.
"Here we go, Billie Weston."
From here it was just a matter of coasting over to the morgue for Dr. Dieneck's autopsy. Lancaster was becoming a busy place for the coroner, and with the extra work, he'd be putting in for overtime pay which meant he could afford better booze, something that hadn't materialized here in several years. He could use the extra pay.
#
Coroner Davin Dieneck pulled up to the coroner's building. What seemed strange to him was the way the door was standing partly open. Had he forgotten to lock it? Glass littered the area, and, as he approached the entrance, he noticed that the lock which had always been very old and flimsy at best had been broken open from the inside. The wind could not have done that.
Dieneck phoned the sheriff.
"Yea," Robert answered. "Found anything of interest?"
"Yea."
"Give."
"The door to the morgue is standing open. I'd like you to come and investigate."
"Good idea. I'll be right there."
Three minutes later, Sheriff Wilson pulled up. He got out of the car and surveyed the door. As he did so, Deputy Drimylos Schoenholtz pulled up. "Cover the front door, Dimmie. Look's like someone may be inside."
The deputy ran around to the back and assumed the position with his pistol.
"I'm ready!" he yelled.
Sheriff Wilson looked at the coroner. "Why did he have to yell just then?" he asked the coroner.
"I dunno, sheriff. He's young and I guess you just can't fix stupid," the coroner said.
"Well, you are certainly correct there!"
The sheriff opened the front door to the morgue. It creaked loudly. "Seems to be unhinged a bit, Davin," he said. "Better get that attended to, today."
The sheriff entered with gun drawn, swaying right and left. He passed the reception area and went through the door to the autopsy room. Inside, he noticed that the tables and sheets were all askew, pushed this way and that as though some teenagers had vandalized the place just to piss off the city. He cleared the building, and told his deputy to bring the coroner inside. In a minute he was there, standing next to the sheriff.
"Holy shit!"
"Want to explain?"
"Give me a minute."
The coroner checked the cold slabs where he stored the bodies. They were clean.
"So where are the Smiths?" Coroner Dieneck asked. "They were here in my autopsy guest room happily pushing up their proverbial little corpse daises and passing gas on their ice cold slabs. What did I do wrong? Do you think I gave them too much respect?"
"Maybe they needed some exercise," Sheriff Wilson said. "Just because they were city folks doesn't mean they don't like to work out some."
"Very true, and also very funny. But that doesn't explain what clowns picked them up and took them outside."
Deputy Drimylos Schoenholtz was a bit confused. "It's taking a kid's prank a wee bit too far to kidnap cadavers, coroner."
"They must have a terrific sense of humor, Davin, the sheriff said. "That's for darn sure. I hope my son doesn't have anything to do with this, because I'd hate to hurt the back of my hand whipping his young ass."
"You think it's him?" Deputy Drimylos Schoenholtz asked.
"I always think it's him," Robert said. "I have nightmares. I'm a worried father. If he wasn't spanking clean this morning at breakfast, I'd have checked him out for using the jogger for an evening snack. That's the way we fathers are, you know." He looked at the coroner and nodded. "We are always suspicious of our children. Isn't that right, coroner?"
"Well, yes. It is that way.”
“Look at it this way, Davin. I know in the back of my suspicious dad-mind that my son, Aiden, is always up to no good. The only trouble is the sheriff has a lot of trouble pinning anything criminal on Aiden and making it stick. That little devil been so clever even his bumbling sheriff of a father has been unable to nail him."
"Well, I'll be darned," Deputy Schoenholtz said. "I had no idea Aiden was that way. He seemed like a nice well behaved boy to me, sheriff."
The sheriff winked at Coroner Dieneck, then turned to Dimmie and said, "You'll learn these things after you have kids of your own, Dimmie. Then, you'll be as confused as the coroner and I am about how to keep a handle on them. Raising kids is a tender and erratic call."
"If you say so, sir."
The sheriff and the coroner had carried the joke far enough
. They both laughed. The sheriff patted Dimmie on the back. "We're lying," he said. "Aiden doesn't do stuff like this. The only trouble is figuring out where the bodies have been taken. Last night the high school kids probably set them up like dead puppets around town. I suspect they did it at the high school. We need to find those bodies and we need to get it done before the town finds them."
"A sheriff that cannot protect corpses is a sheriff that doesn't last very long," the coroner reminded Dimmie.
"There's only one thing wrong with that statement," the sheriff said.
"And what would that be, sheriff?"
"You signed for them. So, you are the responsible party. Not me."
The sheriff called the town carpenter and told him to fix the doors to the morgue first thing and to keep his mouth shut about it.
They helped the coroner move the jogger into the morgue. Instead of putting him on a table, they placed him atop one of the cold slabs and pushed him into the morgue's refrigerator, but first the coroner took his internal body temperature at several spots to ascertain the time of death. He wrote it down.
He sat and waited for the carpenter to fix the door, making certain no one else entered the morgue before he investigated it for evidence of vandalism including fingerprints, boot marks, and anything else his investigation might turn up.
"I'll pursue these little bastards, if it's the last thing I do," The sheriff whined. "I hate it when this happens."
Losing four corpses was not going to look good in the newspaper, and he'd have to talk with the editor about keeping this under wraps. How he was going to do that he wasn't exactly sure.
"Maybe bribery might be the answer. Besides, reporters work cheap. Maybe a free coffee at the restaurant might do it for Payton," he said to himself. "I wonder what this is going to cost me."
CHAPTER SIX
Cadaver Hunt
Wilson and his deputy leaned against the side of the high school. They had feverishly checked the campus inside and out. No dead bodies.
"We are in deep enough shit with the park murders and now the jogger," Sheriff Wilson told Dimmie. "We have to find these bodies before it gets out that someone snatched them away right under our noses."