I know...wicked am I! (wink!!)

CHAPTER 28

It was all he could do not to spew the contents of his stomach into the waste basket that was stationed to his left. Eighteen years on the force and he had never seen anything like it. Not that they got a lot of mutilation cases in Rand...well, this was actually their first. In fact, Lieutenant Pete Murdock had to think back many years to come up with anything that was remotely close to being this brutal.

What made it even worse was the guy had still been alive when they were called to the scene. He had been sputtering words through a broken jaw; every tooth having been knocked out and lying arbitrarily around his head like the random bulbs off the string of Christmas lights...you know, the ones that keep the entire string from blinking so you single them out and toss them to the side.

The scene was like something out of a horror movie, only worse. Having come into it while the deceased was still breathing was what bothered him the most.

They had called for homicide and since he had only been a couple of blocks away, he had been the first on the scene after the officers had found the body. Horrific...gruesome...appalling; how many words were that came close to describing what he had seen upon entering. The M.E. had been called in and arrived just moments after he did.

"Hey Pete...what do we have here?"

Jarrod Carmichael had been an M.E. for six years, straight out of school; he was young and ambitious, with all the right connections to make a name for himself. He walked into the room with his normal cavalier sway, carrying his "doctor's bag" with him. What he saw was excruciatingly brutal to the eyes.

"Well doc...you tell me. It looks like the guy was on the wrong side of the railroad tracks if you ask me."

Jarrod immediately knelt beside beside the victim, opening the bag to draw out the needed instruments to complete his initial exam. He pulled out a small tape recorder and turned it on, slipping it into the pocket of his lab coat.

"Victim is male; age undeterminable at this time; lying in the prone position with what appears to be multiple blunt force trauma to the head and torso, pelvic area and legs."

While the young M.E. made his assessment, he inserted the liver probe to determine the time of death...and oddly enough, blood flowed. Almost stunned beyond words, he had stood promptly to his feet.

"Pete...this man's still alive!"

They had worked frantically after that, trying to preserve the man's life.

"Who did this to you...man...can you hear me?"

Pete repeatedly tried to get information that might help capture the animal that had done this.

After a few minutes, although it was barely audible, Pete heard garbled words spoken from the broken man.

"Must stop...Chief...Willows Peak..." he was fading fast - his words spewing forth in staccato beats, but Pete held him as firmly as he could to glean whatever answers he could, "...Plutonium."

The last words were excreted while he took his final breath, and Pete and Jarrod shared a look of astounded disbelief.

"Plutonium?" Jarrod asked, still sorting through the information as it had been given to them.

Yeah...Plutonium; Pete had an inkling that everything that had been going on at Willows Peak Ranch went far deeper and was far more sinister than they had originally thought.

"Who's 'Chief'...that's the next big mystery? Don't do anything with the body until I tell ya to."

With that, Pete dismissed himself, leaving the scene and forensic evidence to his team of experts and heading for the Sheriff's office.

۞۞۞۞

Sheriff Lyle V. Newcomb wasn't your ordinary, run-of-the-mill sheriff. He had been born on the rough side of town and most of what he had learned there was embedded in the tattoos that covered 70 of his body and the wicked scar that ran from the middle of his left temple to the tip of his mouth.

To look at him, one would think he was hewn from a solid piece of rock: a stern, weathered brow, ridged jaw, hollowed cheeks, and crooked nose lent him a piratical demeanor; all that was missing was the eye-patch, peg leg, and the parrot. His implacable, crafty eyes missed nothing; and as a result, he had never failed to solve a crime in the twenty-two years he had been serving the county.

He sat; booted feet stretched out before him, one elbow propped on the arm of his chair - looking every bit the seasoned professional that he was; the wafting smoke from his cigarette doing its part to cast the room into a haze. Detective Pete Murdock stood not two feet away, having dispelled the details of what had gone down at the crime scene earlier in the day. As disturbing as the scene had been to see with his eyes, having to visualize the gory details for an audible retelling was equally as stomach-churning.

"We have spooked someone...someone who's just made a big mistake." Sheriff Newcomb announced after Pete had finished his monologue.

Murdock took a seat in the hardwood chair on the other side of the desk and crossed his fleshy arms over his chest. Too many carbs over the years had left him pudgy and soft, but he could keep time with the rest of them when duty called.

"He was just a puppet, sir...dancing to another man's tune."

Sheriff Newcomb new this, all to well, "We were about to bring him in for questioning, after deciding that tailing him had gotten us nowhere." The sheriff pulled his legs in and scooted his chair forward. He took a long, hard draw off of his cigarette and another swig of black coffee before standing up and pinning Murdock with a brusque look.

"Something tells me that if Erik Marchand had perished in that fire a couple of weeks ago, we would be none the wiser about the goings-on in this boring little county."

There wasn't going to be any argument from Pete on that one.

"If he weren't so observant..." Lyle's deep eyes took on a rare look of weighty thought, "...I shudder to think about it. Even while he was slipping into unconsciousness he was taking mental notes of what was going on."

The man had given Murdock a feeling of unease at first. His tall, lithe body was athletic and toned, and he had a way about him that spoke of stealth and training. It had been easy to think he had military training - maybe some covert operations such as the Navy Seals - but he did not. There was something behind his eyes that made Pete wonder if the man was hiding something.

Although his injuries had been life threatening, Erik Marchand stood tall as he told them what he knew about his assailant; details that any other person might have missed. There was nothing but grey in Mr. Marchand's past; having come from where he did. The circumstances behind his lack of identification had been verified and France was very lax about the "lost children" who slipped through the cracks. Perhaps there was nothing but ugliness and loneliness in his past.

Murdock could certainly relate to that.

"You made sure that Jarrod knew not to clean the body until I got there...right?" Lyle asked, pointedly; snuffing the cigarette out with the scarred tips of his fingers. Murdock nodded his head and opened the door, allowing his boss to go through first and then quickly following. Sheriff Newcomb tossed the extinguished cigarette onto the ground and then walked to the Ford Escalade distinguishingly marked "Sheriff", and drew himself into the driver's seat.

"I'll drive...you get on the radio and make sure they know we're coming."

۞۞۞۞

This wasn't the CSI of television fame...they didn't have a Gill Grissom standing around in the shadows able to solve the most heinous of crimes with a single thread of evidence. This was pure, unadulterated reality; and as far as life imitating art...this was as ugly as it got.

What had once been a young man, vibrant and full of life, was reduced to a bloodied pile of what looked like a slaughtered animal. Lieutenant Murdock and Sheriff Newcomb, hardened as they were to such sights, both had to fight the impulse to regurgitate at the sight. Gory and atrocious - the reality of it far worse than either of them could have imagined.

"According to the amount of debris under the fingernails, I'd say he put up quite a fight before succumbing to the severity of his wounds."

That was putting it mildly...as far as they were concerned. Jarrod, the M.E. was examining the body with a staunch detachment that allowed him to put aside the fact that the slab of flesh in front of him had at one time been a living human being. The examination had been going on for three hours now, having begun when the sheriff and Murdock had entered the room.

Sheriff Newcomb stepped forward, taking a closer look at the body, "Cause of death?"

"Brain hemorrhage...too many blows to the head." Jarrod stated, wryly.

"Scum that he was, he didn't deserve this...no one does." Lieutenant Murdock growled.

"I found this...I'm not sure how important it is, but it might help..." he handed the small fragment of evidence to the sheriff who clutched in his gloved hand as though it was a treasure, "...it was clutched in his hand."

The button would have otherwise been unremarkable, but the fact that it was found clutched in the hands of a murder victim made it very remarkable...very remarkable indeed.

"Get this to Denver's lab...have Shauna take a look at it...she's the best in the business."

Murdock held out a small evidence envelope, allowing the sheriff to drop the button inside and then sealed it within.

"Anything else, Jarrod?" Sheriff Newcomb asked, still doing his own examination with the scrutinizing eyes of a veteran lawman.

"No sir...but if I find anything else, you'll be the first to know."

The two men exited the room, leaving Jarrod to complete his report and bag the body. Little did any of them know that the very man they sought would soon make a fatal error...underestimating his enemy.

TBC