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Detective Randy Kit hated days like this.
Fourteen years working homicide, and he still hated having to clean up the mess. He stood at 6’2”, with brown hair and a lean face, wearing a black suit and matching trench, wishing he had brought an umbrella. It was a wet morning, as most mornings were in Bellingham, but this just had to be the worst.
It wasn’t soft morning droplets, but a downpour. It was cold and dim, and they had had such beautiful days the past couple of weeks, how could it have gone so terribly wrong?
Well, just look at the dead girl for your answers, he thought.
The phone call had come in at about 5:30, a pair of early morning joggers out running through the cemetery before the caretakers had even arrived to manicure the lawn had made the call frantically.
The body was left on display atop the grave of Linda Murphy, who had been killed by her husband John Murphy, also known as The Nighttime Man—a case he had known all too well, as it had been the first case he had ever worked.
He had been fairly green to homicide, just six months in when he was put on the Nighttime taskforce. He had met the child, Catherine Murphy, who had witnessed the brutal slaying of her mother by her own father.
She had been the one to put him away.
He had kept tabs on her throughout the years, and had checked in with her after her father had successfully escaped from prison. The last thing he knew was that she had been in California, and that’s where he had figured she still remained—but this dead girl had Catherine Murphy’s face.
God, she smelled, even in this rain—though Randy assumed that it was because rain was causing her to decay faster or something, like a chair in a damp garage growing moldy and old.
But that wasn’t the worst of it.
Her organs and bits of fleshy pieces laid scattered around her lifeless body, the downpour washing away most of the gunk and making the organs look slick and revealing every mushy crevice.
One of the inspectors unclipped the hooks on her corset, and an assault of gasses left her body. Randy was glad that they were all wearing masks.
Her entire cavity had been hallowed out and she was like a barrel of blood and bone, completely empty on the inside. The colors deep red and purple, as well as hints of blue and black. There was a myriad of colors inside of her, like paints dumped in a bucket or poured in a bowl.
“Randy, come take a look at this!” a female voice hollered at him.
He hated getting close to the bodies, and this had to have been the worst. She had been tortured and mutilated in the classic style of her father.
“What?” he asked the young woman holding a pair of tweezers in her white-gloved hand.
There was a piece of squared paper at the end, stained with hints of blood on its edges.
“It’s a picture, of a boy...” she said.
A young face stared back at him, an adolescent boy with dark hair hanging in large eyes. He had a soft face and no trace of a smile, and it had obviously been cut out of a yearbook.
“All right, we need to find out who this kid is; I want it tested and we need to get fingerprints.”
“I don’t think we’ll be able to find any on the body. It’s rained too much, and I’m guessing she’s been out here for hours. This kind of work—it takes time.”
Randy nodded.
“Just get whatever you can and quickly.”
“There’s one more thing,” she said to him, her large brown eyes staring at him indifferently from above her white mask.
“The heart—it’s missing.”
Randy began to get closer to the body, once again inspecting the girl’s face, when another cop—a young man in a uniform who was no more than twenty-three—came running up to him.
“A call just came in from some students about their missing roommate. From the sounds of it, it’s the same girl!”
––––––––
Aaron had been unable to sleep. After everyone had finally left, he and Chase had draped a throw blanket over Amanda’s sleeping body and retreated to his room, stripping down to their underwear and crawling into bed. Chase had passed out rather quickly, lying on his stomach with his strong arm draped over Aaron’s naked chest. They smelled of too much nicotine, too much weed, and too much booze, all of which mingled with the delicious scent of their lingering cologne.
He watched the light grow brighter and brighter in its graying hues, moving slowly from the floorboards and stretching first across the bed before reaching the ceiling.
The melody of his phone shocked him out of his stupor.
Everything inside of him told him not answer it. Every instinct he had told him to ignore it and let it go to voicemail, but he did so anyways, reaching sluggishly for it under the weight of Chase’s arm.
It was Tammy’s number that flashed on his screen.
“Hello?” he asked with a raspy voice.
“Aaron, Aaron, it’s Carolyn.”
“Oh, hey, what’s up?” he asked with a sniffle, louder this time and trying to clear his throat.
“Who is it?” Chase asked into the pillow.
“It’s Carolyn,” Aaron responded with a smile.
Chase’s face was turned towards him, his cheek and lips crushed against the pillow.
“Aaron, listen to me!” The urgency in her voice sent a shiver down his spine. “It’s Andy... she’s missing. Something has happened to her. Aaron, it’s bad....”
“What?” Aaron began to shake, the phone trembling in his hand. He used the other to steady it against his ear, and Chase was already sitting up and placing his hands on his arm and leg to try to calm him.
“The cops will be here any minute. Just stay where you are. We’ll all be over as soon as we can.”
Aaron began to shake his head furiously, and his vision became blurred with tears.
“No. I’m coming over. I need to—”
“You need to stay there. We know what this is about. How are we supposed to explain any of this? We’ll all be persons of interest! Just stay there, Aaron. Chase’s apartment is probably the safest place you could be right now!”
Chase, having heard Carolyn shouting through the phone, took it out of his boyfriend’s hands and placed it to his ear.
“Don’t worry, Care, I got it.”
Carolyn breathed a sigh of relief as soon as she heard his voice.
“Thanks. Tammy found her.... Chase, it was horrific.”
“Do you think—”
“No, I don’t.”
Chase gave a nod and hung up the phone.
Aaron couldn’t understand. Could it possibly have been her father, fulfilling his promise to come back and take revenge on the daughter who turned him in? Or was it really something else? Something that had been born a decade earlier in the grout of dingy tile in a middle school bathroom?
Chase had said he felt that it was coming, whatever that was, and Tammy had already been stalked.
This shouldn’t have been Andy’s destiny. This shouldn’t have been the fate that awaited the girl who had seen her mother get butchered, and who had had to try to put her life back together and become a whole other person with a chance to start anew.
Another phone went off in the living room. It was Chase’s, and he was quick to hop out of bed and run out into the living room to retrieve it.
Aaron sat in the bed and listened, hugging his knees and unable to stop crying. He heard Chase asking ‘are you sure’ over and over again, and then he dropped a few ‘fucks’ for good measure before hanging up the phone and turning on the television.
“Aaron!” he called out, but he didn’t want to answer. “Aaron!”
He felt sick, and the room was spinning. Aaron braced himself against the nightstand and stood, taking in a few deep breaths and steadying himself before making his way out into the living room.
Chase was standing between the coffee table and the television. Amanda had already gone and so it was just the two of them, and the gray morning light coming through the open blinds of the sliding glass door out onto the balcony lit Chase like a stage light.
Chase stood there in his black briefs, his strong tattooed legs keeping him steady. One arm was hugging his torso, and the other was bent with the remote pressed against his bottom lip, his eyes looking out from the disheveled mess of his jet-black hair at the flat screen, which showed police tape around Bayview Cemetery.
“That was Amanda.... She said they found the body of a young woman in the cemetery....”
Chase looked at him, his face anguished.
“No.” Aaron shook his head.
“Baby...”
Chase’s face told Aaron everything. This was happening. This was the reality. He needed to accept it.
“No, no, no!”
Chase was quick to wrap his arms around him and draw him close. Aaron cried against his shoulder, while his eyes fixed to the flat screen and watched the blurred footage of two employees from the Coroner’s Office removing a body in a bag from the scene. He had been here once before. He had seen the corpse under the bag, he had seen the unnatural shape of a body still beneath black plastic.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry...” Aaron cried over and over again.
“This isn’t your fault,” Chase cradled the back of his head and kissed his hair. “We don’t know what any of this is, and we have no way of explaining it.
“I mean, who is our suspect? A kid who’s been dead for going on ten years? How does any of that make sense?
“In what world could something like this come from any of that?”
“The Nighttime Man, as John Murphy had become known, drugged his victims and numbed them before mutilating their bodies while they were still alive.
“He had managed to evade capture until March of ʼ93, when, after his wife Linda discovered the student I.D.’s of three of her husband’s victims, John Murphy had brought his wife here, where, like all of his other victims found in various locations throughout the city, he drugged her, numbed her, and eviscerated her.
“His daughter, Catherine Murphy, had been the one to testify against him in court, and it was ultimately her eyewitness testimony to the murder of her mother, that put The Nighttime Man away.
“Now, it seems, after fourteen years, the people of Bellingham and greater Whatcom County have to once again ask themselves, is it safe to turn out the lights?”
The words of the copper-haired reporter echoed in his brain. Could it not be Bailey at all? Could it have been The Nighttime Man? Aaron didn’t know what to believe and he was afraid to settle on something either way.
Chase was right. They didn’t know what this was, and aside from her father, a dead teen boy was the only suspect they had. Between the two, her father seemed the most plausible, which is why it was the hardest for him to believe.