The police found seven bodies that morning.
Three in the first house, and four in the other. The Smiths and the Walkers. Two unassuming families, living adjacent to one another, in a quiet neighborhood in the suburbs of town, up until late the night before. The call came in earlier in the morning, when the mailman noticed the Smiths' front door had been broken into, left ajar as an unsettling cold draft, accompanied with an overwhelming stench of blood, escaped from a small crack in the door. When police officers first arrived at the scene of the crime to assess what happened, one of the neighbors pointed out that that none of them had seen the Smiths' neighbors, the Walkers, this morning, and had tried to knock on their door before realizing it was unlocked, and a similar stench began to emanate from within the house.
Detective Abigail Bishop hadn't even entered the Smiths' now-abandoned abode when one of the rookie officers approached her with the alarming news.
"So much for a triple homicide," the blonde detective mumbled to herself as the officer left to clear the area and tape off the new crime scene, but it sounded loud and clear to Dr. Jane Wang, the medical examiner, who was just about to walk her through the first few bodies in the Smiths' household.
"And the bodies keep stacking," the black-haired doctor mused with a solemn look on her face, still walking toward the Smiths' porch, albeit at a much slower pace than before. "How is it that the one time I get called here for a homicide, you have seven whole bodies handed over to me?"
"You get to dissect them," Bishop scoffed, her fingers fiddling with the camera in her hands while the other hand held the rest of the equipment, while her eyes wandered to the Walkers' quiet, near-untouched home. "I'm supposed to be the one to put the bastard who did this behind bars."
"Bas-tards," Wang corrected. "Seven bodies, in one night?"
"Can't jump to conclusions yet," Bishop replied with a sigh, looking down at the camera. "Maybe some psycho did do this all in one night. Difficult to do, but it might not be as impossible as it seems. I'll have to at least see the crime scene first, you know."
Wang shook her head. "Yeah, I'll leave the investigating to you," she said, turning around to continue her path up to the porch. "But I do think you'd like to hear what I've got on the first three bodies so far."
The first victim was a teenager—sixteen years old, found dead in his bedroom, lying face down on the bed, sheets stained with a pool of his own blood.
"Neighbors said the kid's name is Jordan Smith," Bishop announced when she entered the room, nose scrunching at the stench. Wang, the seasoned expert in her job, approached the fresh corpse without so much as a wrinkle on her face.
"Possible cause of death seems to be major blood loss from two incision wounds in his upper abdomen, right around where the kidneys would be." The M.E. was cautious in navigating through the scene, picking up the hem of Jordan's shirt before pulling it up to show the detective the wounds she was talking about.
The first thing that Bishop noticed were the dried bloodstains all over the skin, including small splotches that could've been from the culprit's fingers, but no prints. The next thing that caught her attention, however, were indeed the wounds themselves; there were two of them, one at each side of his abdomen, tilted at rather odd angles.
"Note that I said incision wounds, and not stab wounds," Wang continued. "The skin was sliced clean with some sort of sharp cutting tool, maybe a small knife or an x-acto knife, or even a surgical scalpel. I'll be able to tell more when I cut these stitches open."
The detective didn't even notice the stitches until she took a photograph of the wounds and observed the resulting photo. Sure enough, there were, in fact, stitches on the skin of the teenager's abdomen, all along the line of the slits. The thread was deep red, stained from the blood it had absorbed, and was, in fact, rather thick for surgical suture—like a common sewing thread more than anything. The suture itself was uneven, ragged as though the supposed surgeon was having a panic attack amidst the procedure. The skin around it was also ripe red and swollen, with flakes of dried blood covering the area around the wounds, with the notable exception of a few dried spots of black liquid, scattered all over the stomach and abdomen area, and even a couple on the bedsheets beneath him.
"The killer went through all the trouble to stitch them back up," Bishop muttered, and Wang responded with a nod
"But if he thought doing this could save their lives, it didn't," the medical examiner retorted back as she readjusted the shirt back on the teenager's abdomen. "Whoever did this is worse than even the most amateur of medical students. I've seen old grandmothers in the nursing home stitch better than this." Bishop almost scoffed. "I wouldn't be surprised if the kid bled to death."
"You're not sure if he did?"
"I can't be a hundred percent positive until I get back to the morgue," Wang noted as she stood up, readjusted her gloves and began navigating her way out of the room, while Bishop continued to take more photographs of the room. "There's not a lot of blood around here to suggest he just bled out like that. There's always more than meets the eye, Abigail."
Bishop couldn't help but rolled her eyes, suppressing a smile.
The door to the master bedroom, not unlike the front entrance, wasn't just left with a small crack, but rather thrown wide open, allowing the stench of the Smiths' corpses to flood the hallways. The master bedroom itself was a mess; small shards of shattered glass and ceramic on the floor, near where the smashed lightbulb protruding from the broken lamp was, all with traces of blood. The lampshade was across the room. Feathers from pillows thrown and strewn apart all throughout the room, making it difficult to traverse the area without disturbing the crime scene. A man, lying face-up on the floor amidst the shattered glass, in a small pool of blood that grew beneath him and staining what was once his beige carpet. On top of the bed was who Bishop assumed to be the man's wife, sprawled on the mattress and appearing much more peaceful than the rest of the room.
"John and Marilyn Smith."
"Both in their late forties," Wang confirmed with a nod. "Both also suffered from two large incision wounds in the upper abdominal area, all of them stitched." She approached the patriarch lying on the floor, picked up one of his hands and pointed towards the light bruises lining the skin of his wrists. "Mr. Smith, however, also has minor defensive wounds around his arms and wrists, and signs of blunt force trauma on his head. Mrs. Smith doesn't."
"So all of this was from a possible struggle between the killer and the victim." Bishop made a brief scan around the room, taking occasional photographs to follow her gaze. "Positioning of the bodies means that Mrs. Smith might've been asleep when the killer came in—she wasn't able to defend herself, but could've woken her husband up, who fought against the killer for a bit before his head was smashed in with the lamp." She took a photograph of the lamp. "We'll need to run tests on those traces of blood to determine that for sure, though."
"I've also noticed little dots of what seems to be a dark fluid substance on the surface of the skin of all three victims," Wang added as she set the man's arm back down, and just as Bishop pointed her camera at another such dark-colored droplet that had stained the carpet, not too far from where John Smith was. "Looks like someone left quite the mess in these rooms."
Bishop took a photograph of it and frowned. "No kidding."
By the time the two of them were done with the first house, the two other officers in the scene were still interviewing a couple of the gathering neighbors, all the while trying and failing to control the curious crowd. Bishop had to admit, she wasn't surprised at the commotion this created—it wasn't often that something like this happened in a quiet, suburban neighborhood near to the edge of town, and she had no doubt that a homicide case of this magnitude would attract the attention of even people who lived in crime-ridden districts in more denser cities. She wasn't even sure if she could handle something like this, but by hell, was she going to at least try.
Just like the Smiths' house, the bottom floor of the second house was left quite untouched—no signs of struggle yet, but the stench of blood was more overwhelming than the Smiths', stinging their noses the second both women entered the premises. Even Wang scrunched her nose a bit, blinking several times and furrowed her face for one split second before her expression turned back to normal.
"You never get used to it," Bishop said jokingly, but Wang shook her head.
"I am," she said with a monotonous voice. "But I sure can't wait to see the bodies in this one."
She wasn't wrong in assuming the bodies would be different than the Smiths. There were two children in this household, an eldest daughter and a younger son, who lived along with their two parents. The younger son's bedroom was first; instead of pillows like the Smiths' bedroom, the child's toys were strewn about all over the room, though some were beheaded, while others had their cotton insides torn out. It was done on purpose, Bishop noted, because there didn't seem to be signs of struggle anywhere else in the room—there weren't even bodies there, either, but there was a rather medium-sized blood trail leading out of the child's bedroom, down the corridor and towards the master bedroom. A similar trail led out from the daughter's bedroom, and that, too, had no evident bodies nor signs of struggle.
She held her breath, and prepared for the worse.
The Smiths' house was clean compared to the Walkers'. Bishop had to put a hand over her mouth so she wouldn't throw up on the spot. A bloody handprint was smeared across the wall and ending where the hand was, half-attached to its owner whose guts had been ripped out like the dolls in the other room—a quick look at the person's face and Bishop realized it was the matriarch of the family. Her husband was on the other side of the room, his chest decorated with multiple stab wounds, with trails of blood leaking down from the wounds and almost soaking his entire shirt. Their children, as she had suspected, had been dragged into the room with them, lying face down on the carpet floor, entrails laid out for all to see.
Bishop swallowed hard when she noticed there was something odd with the blood smeared across the wall, right above where the husband laid. It was painted with what looked to be two fingers of a hand, too smooth to obtain prints from, with what Bishop could assume to be the victims' blood, considering the thickness of the crimson letters spelled out for her to see.
GO TO SLEEP, it said.
"That's," Wang spoke up, as soon as she, too, read the message the killer had left them, "not something you see everyday."
Bishop hesitated for a moment before she lifted the camera up and took a photo of it.
"Well, I can assume what the causes of death are for these poor folks in here."
Bishop looked down, pointed the camera at the body of the family's patriarch, and tried not to gag as she took the photos.
"Multiple stabs to the chest, some in the abdominal area, and cuts along the arms." The doctor carefully raised one of the arms with both hands, head moving around as she tried to get a better look on the body. "From what I can tell, the killer struck most major organs and severed quite a few major arteries, enough to kill them within seconds. It'll be like solving a jigsaw puzzle trying to perform autopsies on these poor souls."
"Are there any specific incision wounds like the Smiths'?"
Wang shook her head. "These are stab wounds—all about the same length and width. A larger blade, for sure—one that's significantly larger than the weapon used to cut the Smiths' open."
"So, basically a completely different M.O. altogether." Bishop sighed and looked around the room. The mere presence of the bloody message was already enough to send shivers down her spine. "Two families, both neighbors with adjacent houses, and two different M.O.s."
Wang looked up. "Two different killers?"
"Sure starting to look like it." It was uncanny how vastly different the two crime scenes were, and yet, they both occurred on the same night. When she was first informed of the case, she thought it was the result of a burglary gone terribly wrong, but this was far worse than simple burglary. The scene was staged—the children's bodies, the message on the wall. "Whoever killed these people had that intention from the start."
Wang scoffed and nodded back to the message on the wall. "Well, that's for sure a telltale sign of the making of a serial killer, if I've ever seen one."
"Let's hope not." At least, she hoped not. Seven bodies in a single night was not looking to be a great beginning to a potential serial killing case. "Time of death?"
"Rigor mortis hasn't fully set in for any of the bodies so far," Wang said with a tilt of her head. "I would say both families were killed last night, around midnight and about a similar time frame with each other. Again, I'll be able to tell once I start examining them in the morgue." She set the arm back by his side. "I think I'll be taking up on that drink offer by the time we're done with this."
Bishop couldn't help but scoff. "Seven bodies—that's what it takes for you to go out for drinks with me?"
The doctor stood up and started heading for one of the other bodies, but even despite the nonchalance in her expressions as she glanced over the abandoned entrails of the children, Bishop could tell she was at least a little bit perturbed still. "Well, if you lived closer to the city," Wang said with a semblance of a smile, "I would be more than happy to."
Bishop's gaze turned distant at her friend's words. "I've got a good job here," she said as she turned her camera towards at the nightstand. "A good life in a good community. People who I can greet and smile at every single morning. Why would I give it up for the city life?"
"Because you've got potential," Wang retorted back, looking up briefly to glare at the detective before returning back to examining the matriarch's body. "The folks over there can always use an extra pair of hands, especially ones as good as yours. They'll be thrilled to have you there."
Bishop looked up from her camera and glared at her friend. "Jane."
"And besides," Wang continued, disregarding Bishop's protest. "It's about time you moved out of this little old town, don't you think? I mean, there's nothing left holding you back here besides this job. And how often is it that you get a case here? This is the rare outlier of the bunch, I'm sure, but I know I don't get bodies that often from this place. That's always a good thing, of course, but you know what I mean."
She brought up some good points, but she had been urging her to move out for the past couple of years now, so Bishop was no longer a stranger to this sort of conversation from her friend and colleague of almost a decade now. All she could do was smile at the doctor and resumed her work.
"I'll think about it." She wasn't going to, but Jane was a stubborn woman, much more than Bishop could ever be. She was one of those people who wasn't going to take a 'no' for an answer—evidence being that, despite having grown up in a typical Asian-American household, she chose to go against her parents' wishes of her becoming a physician and went on to become a forensic pathologist instead. Bishop knew this conversation, too, wasn't going to go down easy unless she herself surrendered, no matter how much she didn't want to.
Of course, she also knew the real reason Jane had been trying to get her to move out of town and to the city. The pathologist was a good friend, first and foremost, despite surface appearances.
But she wasn't going to think about that now. Like Jane said, they had a case now—Bishop had a case now, with quite the impressive body count. She hadn't been religious for a long time, but she hoped to God this count was final.
The chief of police called her into his office later that noon.
Bishop had no idea what she would be called in for. She had never been in trouble throughout her line of work, or with the chief or fellow colleagues, for as far as she knew. She also wasn't due for a promotion or anything, with the slow trickle of work coming in for her to make progress with her achievements, both professional and personal. The chief himself was often a man of few words; he would lend a hand or ear out to his subordinates if needed, but almost never requested their presence in his office unless it was either of the aforementioned reasons.
But as Bishop approached the door to the chief's office, she could've sworn she heard two distinct male voices—one of them the chief's, and the other being one that she could not recognize at all.
She knocked on the door and waited.
"Come in."
She turned the knob and opened the door, stopping dead in her tracks when she noticed the man sitting opposite to the chief, who turned his head towards her upon her entrance. The first thing she noticed was the suit—a formal business suit, complete with tie and everything but lacking a briefcase to complete the businessman look. He looked to be about a few years older than Bishop was but still younger than the chief, clean-shaven, somewhat rugged with the exception of the deep-set frown that made him appear older than he was, with a sharp nose, cold steel eyes and short dark hair.
On the other side of the desk was Chief McCormick, greeting the detective with a warm smile on his round face. "Bishop, come in. Have a seat."
Bishop entered into the room as prompted, trying to not stare as she took a seat next to the man in the suit.
"What's this about, sir?"
He pulled himself closer to the desk, his palm resting on a brown manila folder. He never had much clutter on his desk, other than a pencil holder and a wood-framed picture of his wife and daughter on the corner of the table. Most files he had was kept in cabinets and drawers behind him, so she couldn't help but think that the fact that he had a rather thick folder in front of him, in addition to the man in the suit, was just the slightest bit disconcerting.
Even more so when she soon noticed the man had a similar folder wedged between his hands and his arm, securely in his rather protective hold.
"This," the chief began, gesturing to the stranger, "is Special Agent Joel Gilliam of the FBI. He will be joining you under a joint investigation over the mass homicide case you were assigned to this morning."
She stared at him and frowned. "What?"
"This is not a debatable issue, Bishop—not this time." He turned to the man in the suit, who she didn't notice had took out his badge and held it up to her for a few seconds before returning it to his pocket. "Special Agent Gilliam, this is Detective Abigail Bishop, the detective in charge of the case. You will be working with her for the duration of the case."
"Sir, I can handle the case myself—"
"And I'm sure you can," the chief spoke over her, his voice calm despite hers, as he glanced over to her with a sympathetic gaze. "I know you can. But I am aware of how severe the circumstances surrounding this case is, and I do believe you wouldn't mind having an extra pair of eyes and hands helping you get this job done sooner. I've seen the evidence you've gathered thus far, and we believe it is in our best interest to catch the bastards who did this before it's too late."
Bishop hoped it wouldn't resort to this. Wang wasn't wrong when she said the bloody message was a characteristic trademark of a potential serial killer, especially considering the ambiguity and latent message within it that she hadn't even gotten a chance to look over yet. But Bishop had her own fair share of experience in the matter, so she was no stranger to it, either. She knew she couldn't dispute the chief's stance on this.
"But this case is in our jurisdiction."
"And the feds have every right to take it from us, if they so choose it," the chief reminded as his voice turned stern but not strict—it was, however, enough to force Bishop to slump in her seat, shoulders dropping in defeat. "That was Agent Gilliam's original intentions. However, I was able to negotiate a joint investigative effort between the FBI and our department instead, as I am sure that both of you offer invaluable effort and insight to solve this case as soon and efficient as possible. In fact—"
The chief briefly glanced over towards the federal agent, who gave him a curt nod, before the former picked up one of the brown manila folders and handed it over to Bishop. She sat there almost confused, but took it anyway, immediately flipping the cover over as soon as it was in her hands.
"—Special Agent Gilliam has reason to believe he has knowledge of who may have potentially killed those families."
Bishop's eyes widened, as her eyes immediately shot up, gaze turning from the chief to the man in the suit. "What?"
"Well, there is strong evidence against one of the potential suspects." Special Agent Joel Gilliam's voice was about as pleasant as his appearance—distant, professional and cold. The type of person who didn't have many friends outside of work, Bishop thought to herself. "A known spree killer, with preference for entire families as his victims, especially those with young, teenage children—but otherwise a textbook serial killer with, should I say, several exceptional peculiarities."
Bishop furrowed her eyebrows, frowning at the man's words. Then she looked down at the open file in her hands, and her eyes immediately landed on the small photograph that was attached to the front page of what turned out to be a criminal profile—it was a picture of a person, or what resembled a human being, but with striking paper-white skin, a pair of large, wide-open bloodshot eyes with small black pupils, and disheveled black hair of significant length, but what sent spiders crawling down her spine was the smile—their lips were smeared with red though she doubted it was lipstick, and the corners were inhumanly wide, almost as if they had been torn or ripped open up to their cheeks.
She almost dropped the folder straight to the floor. "What the fuck is this?"
Instead of a direct response, she heard a rather aggravating sigh from her right. "I should've warned you beforehand," the man in the suit spoke, with a rather gentle tone that became unsettling as it came off as rather monotonous despite his presumably well-meant intentions. "His name was Jeffrey Woods. A troubled child with a violent streak—his former neighbors indicated he might have been a victim of bullying throughout childhood, until the boy snapped one summer day in 2008, and attempted to murder who I assumed were the children who were bullying him."
Children, the man had said. Children. Not teenagers—no older than thirteen, at most.
"A few days later," the agent continued, "his house was set on fire, and though the boy was saved on time, he suffered from second-degree burns, became permanently disfigured and was hospitalized for weeks. Hospital staff said it drove him mad—he started laughing to himself erratically and talking incoherently to himself. The night after he was discharged from the hospital, he killed his parents in their bedroom, as well as his brother, before he disappeared."
"Disappeared?"
"A few weeks later, another family turned up dead in their home just a couple miles from the Woods' former residence. Another family was targeted a week after, but the attempt left one surviving victim alive who was able to fend off his attacker before the perpetrator escaped. The description he gave of his parents' murderer matches almost perfectly to the last known physical description of Jeffrey Woods."
Bishop was almost tempted to look down at the file again. She wanted to read if what was written there, on an apparently official, typed-out report, matched what seemed like a strange urban legend that the man just told her. She was debating whether having that image once again ingrained into her mind was worth verifying the agent's words.
Instead, she glared at the man in the suit, making sure the skepticism was obvious in her expression. "And how come this is the first time I've heard of this? This kid who turned himself into some serial killer who murders entire families? How is he not in federal custody?"
His eyes weren't meeting hers. He didn't dare to, she thought.
"We have been putting significant effort to keep this under wraps—prevent this information from leaking into public media, which, you should know, is understandable." She pretended to ignore the condescending tone in his voice. "The first time his case did make it to the media, people made him into an urban legend—a horror story used to scare kids at night. People started calling him 'Jeff the Killer', which spawned more attacks with shorter cooling off periods, as well as messages left behind to taunt the police, all signed with 'JTK'—Jeff the Killer."
He glanced between Bishop and the chief now, with every possible wrinkle on his face furrowed. "But despite being a reckless individual, with absolutely zero inhibitions and leaving every single possible evidence pointing his crimes towards him and him alone, he just disappears. Every single time we have gotten close to catching this bastard, he just disappears off the face of the planet, only to resurface some weeks or months later with another stack of bodies, all under the same M.O.—multiple stab wounds made with a kitchen knife, puncturing multiple major organs and blood vessels, often with bodies disemboweled, some bite marks and bloody messages meant to taunt us."
Disembowelment. Like those children in the second house.
"And how are you sure this isn't some copycat killer?"
The man looked at her with a knowing look, and a hint of a smug smile. "He left his trademark, should I say, catchphrase in your latest crime scene."
"'Go to sleep'," Bishop recounted almost immediately, suppressing a curse under her breath.
"His few surviving victims all mentioned multiple things in common, all tied to their attempted murderer," the agent said, with a single, acknowledging nod. "His physical description, the weapon he had, and one trademark demand: 'Go to sleep'."
Silence. Maybe he took her lack of response as bewilderment, perhaps mixed with confusion and a subsequent loss of words—that was, until she couldn't help but find herself laughing. A small chuckle, coming off as somewhat of a half-hearted scoff, but she felt the corner of her lips turned upwards just ever so slightly, as she briefly looked towards her superior—who, surprisingly enough, had an expression more grave than usual—and shook her head before tilting it at an angle as she turned to stare back at the agent.
"And I'm supposed to believe this—this kid-turned-serial-killer, who has been evading both the police and federal agents for nine whole years, by somehow magically disappearing just before he gets caught?" She shook her head again. "Why do I find this extremely hard to believe?"
His answer was almost instant. "Because it is," he promptly said, as calm and collected as ever. "I am aware that it is. I had doubts about coming in here—" He briefly turned to the chief, "—even more so to concur with the terms of our agreement, sir." He turned back to Bishop, though his gaze did not seem as hostile as before this time around. Or he turned it down on purpose. "But I was told that your skills and insight are, as the chief had described, 'invaluable' to this case, and I agree. I know of your track record, Detective Bishop. I am not overwhelmingly impressed, but I would say it's quite remarkable, considering your relative experience.
Relative experience. He compares federal agents to a local detective from a small town in the middle of nowhere.
"Sir." The chief's expression had not changed, even as he turned to address her. "You believe him?"
"He is a federal agent, Bishop," the chief said without hesitance. "There's things that even our mayor has never told us about, and I dated her for three years in high school. God knows what else the government is hiding from us."
At least she tried to put up a fight, Bishop thought to herself. At least she tried, even when she had a feeling from the beginning that it was a fight she had little chance in winning.
So much for a big break in her career.
But. She started chewing on her bottom lip as she forced herself to glance down at the file in her hands, trying her hardest to stop her eyes from wandering to the picture. I'm still in charge of this case. And if the feds can't catch this bastard, I sure as hell can.
At the very least, she thought, she could try.