Accused: (Mystery Series) (My Murder Mysteries #3) (7 page)

I thought that Miranda was perhaps jealous of my amazing achievement, since I knew that she had not used that sort of deductive power in her life, and even if she was assigned to the Minot case, she would not solve it, and the true murderer would have gotten away with it, sending an innocent person to prison. Although I was very proud of what I had done to help those families I did not brag about it, nor did I mention it once to hint to the others that I was pleased with my huge success.

To my bewilderment, there was still a newspaper article about me pinned up on the boss's wall when I entered the room, even though seven days had gone by. I was very pleased that Clive Mitchell had thought so much of me – that was something else for Miranda to be jealous of.

"Well, to be honest, Miranda," I'm glad the whole thing is over with," I replied to her before I went into the boss's office, ready to be assigned to my next murder case. I assumed it was another gang killing, because that was what they generally were; the gang violence in North Dakota was at the highest ever rate in 2012, which made me tired sometimes. However, I knew I should never assume anything that I thought might not be true, and indeed I was about to be proven wrong, when Mitchell assigned me to the case.

"Williams," he begun, smiling slightly as I entered the room, "I have a new case for you, and I think you'll like it."

"Alright," I replied, waiting for more information and eager to discover what the man had in store for me. Inside, I was honest with myself that not much could be trickier than solving the Minot murders, but I knew I could be surprised.

"Well," said Mitchell, "this morning, we, or should I say, a dog, found a body of an unidentified victim. There is not much left but bones, and they appear to be a female. I'll let you look at this person and you'll see the rest. It's obvious that this person died decades ago. I've chosen you for this case because I trust you. I have faith that you will find the killer of this person, no matter how hard it will be. You have already demonstrated your amazing skills to me, so this should be no problem to you."

I was quite annoyed at Mitchell's assumption, because he should not have put that much pressure on me. Sometimes murders are unsolvable, especially cold cases, since there are no leads from the start. It's sad, but unfortunately, Mitchell did not see it like that. He saw me as the God of criminal catching, and I knew I wasn't. Although I was talented at what I did, I could not make any deductions about things if I did not have anything to deduce from, and this case seemed just like that. On the other hand, it was worth a shot, and it was better than working on all of the gang killings all the time, so I was ready for the challenge, leaving others to work on the gang killings for a second time. I predicted they would now be very annoying, but now I had more important things to focus on than whether I was right about that.

I arrived at the crime scene: it was an empty field in the middle of nowhere, seemingly. There was nothing else around except Nature. There were no houses and no public facilities. It was just an empty field. A few hundred feet away, in the distance, I could see several small hills which were clumped together, but that was literally all there was to see. There were no roads around, as the field was connected to other abandoned fields. It was only then that the local forest could be seen.

I approached the forensics team, knowing that the body would still be there. As a matter of fact, what the boss said was right – it was not actually a body, only bones. However, there was something on the body that I noticed quite quickly: a pink dress. The person who was killed obviously wore a pink dress that night, so anybody could deduce that they were out at a social event of some sort.

"Have you got any DNA on this person?" I asked a forensic scientist.

"Unfortunately, we've looked around the area, and there are no fingerprints on the victim's dress, and obviously, any fingerprints that would have been on the victim are gone now, and there are no hairs anywhere on the body, aside from her own. So no, there is no DNA evidence, I'm afraid," he replied.

That was a huge drawback for me. DNA was the easy way out, but it looked to me as though this case was going to be a tough one.

"Do you know how the victim was killed?" I asked the forensic scientist.

"The scratch marks on the bones suggest that the victim was stabbed at least nine times," he replied. "But it is possible that they were stabbed many more times than that."

Inside, I felt sick.
How could somebody do this to another human being?
I asked myself, although it was no more horrific than any other case I’d worked on.

I took another look at the bones, especially the facial expression. Although there was nothing left except bones, I could clearly see that the victim died in pain. The mouth was open, but there were no teeth.

"There's no teeth!" I cried.

"Yes. That's one of the most horrific parts. The person who did this probably pulled this woman's teeth out, from what I can tell by looking at the mouth," replied the forensic scientist.

I thought I was going to throw up. Why would somebody do that? Perhaps it was to make sure the body was not identified. That was the only explanation I could think of right now. Other than that, torture. Now that the victim had no teeth, I could not even compare the victim's teeth with any dental records. This was going to be a very hard case for me, but I felt a strong connection with the victim, for some reason. I made it my new personal goal to make sure that the person who did this would be caught, dead or alive.

Chapter 3

My first step was to conduct some door-to-door research around the area, to see if anyone knew anything about this mysterious unidentified woman. I hoped and prayed there would be someone old enough to remember the disappearance of a woman in the area. I was not completely certain that the dumping ground was in fact anywhere near the place where this woman lived, but the killer obviously knew the area well, or else they would not be able to find this place, since it was in the middle of nowhere, and it would be virtually impossible to discover this place by accident when looking for a place to dump a body. This murder was planned, and I was sure of that. Somebody wanted this woman dead for whatever reason, and so I desperately needed to establish the woman's name or identity, and I could work from there.

I started with the door-to-door enquiries, but, to my great misfortune, no-one knew a thing about it. For years people had been walking their dogs through this field, completely ignorant of the fact that they were walking over a dead body. It was a shame that no-one had tried to regenerate the field, because if a farmer had found her years before, we would have had perhaps half a chance of identifying this woman. Since the door-to-door enquiries did no good at all, I decided to return to the station, to wait for the post-mortem.

Later that day, the post-mortem came back, and inside it, it revealed that the woman probably died somewhere between the years of 1980 and 1990. That was useful to a certain extent, because if I were to find a lead, I could relate back to this to help identify the woman. However, it did not help me get any closer to identifying the woman at the moment, which was the most important thing. All I needed was one person to come forward and say that they knew this mystery woman. Someone did. I was certain of that. Someone had to know the details about this woman's disappearance. The report also said that she was probably between the ages of twenty and thirty-five. That narrowed it down slightly, but it still did not help much. I was going to go and use the missing person's database to see if I could get a lead on this, but I asked Mitchell (not the boss, the other Mitchell) to go instead, as I was too busy analyzing the report.

The report also contained the grisly details of the woman's death: where on the body she was stabbed, how deep the wounds were, what type of instrument was used, and so on. It proved to be of little use, even though I now knew exactly how she died. I had previously deduced that the person who killed her was a psychopath, though a very clever one, as they had gotten away with it – up until now, at least. I hoped this person was still alive so that they could be punished for what they did. No-one at all deserved to die that way.

Mitchell returned with several files full of details of women between the ages of twenty and thirty-five who went missing between the years of 1980 and 1990 in North Dakota. Finally things were narrowed down a bit, as there were only thirteen reported missing people. For the first time I was beginning to get quite excited, since I now had pictures of people and different pieces of information to go on. Sadly, none of the files gave any details about a woman in a pink dress – some had been out at parties the night they vanished, and others were at home, so I was able to narrow things down even further, but I still had seven women who were on the suspect list for being this woman. I was close, but sadly, not close enough, as I could not come up with a convincing argument, with evidence, that any of the women in the files was actually the dead woman. I assumed that most of these women were dead themselves, but I knew deep down that one of these women was the woman we had found. Although it was possible that the woman was not reported missing, it was improbable, as there was likely to be someone who noticed her disappearance and reported it.

Seeing nowhere else to go, I decided to launch a public appeal in order to see if anyone knew this woman. This was probably (and hopefully) going to be the most challenging part of the case. The television and radio companies stormed in with this story, and they were eager to report the discovery of this mystery woman. They gave details of where she was found, and the pink dress that she was wearing. I was hoping that someone would be able to recall the pink dress, even though there was no mention of it in any of the missing person's files. I knew that it was a long shot, but worth a try, as I had nothing at all to lose.

I was extremely lucky, because the very next day a visitor arrived at the station wanting to talk to me about the missing woman.

"Hello," I said to her as she walked in.

She was a small woman, aged around fifty, and she wore cheap clothes and she was quite plump. Her hair was greasy, her face full of spots, but she approached me in a friendly manner.

"My name is Lesley Kurtis," she said, quite nervous about talking to me.

"I'm Tammy Williams," I said, eager to see what this woman knew. "I understand that you have some information about the woman we found?"

"Yes," Lesley replied, taking a seat. "And I think it might be very useful to you."

"Go on," I said.

"Well, I think the missing woman was Eve Roberts, if you don't know that already."

I remembered the name from one of the missing person's files. She had gone out for a party that night, but the person who reported her could not recall what she was wearing.

"And why do you think that?" I asked Lesley.

"Because she was wearing the pink dress the night she went missing. I remember it. I am...
was
a very good friend of Eve’s, and when she went missing I knew she'd been murdered. It was just so unusual of her," Lesley replied in a fairly shaky voice.

I was beginning to get very excited now.

"And why did you not say any of this before?" I asked her.

"Because one of my other friends said she sorted it out. She said she told the police everything and that there was no need to speak to them. I've only just realized that she never mentioned the dress. I know it's Eve. It has to be," replied Lesley, getting fairly excited.

"Right, and can you tell me about the time she went missing?" I asked her.

"I can't really remember," she said.

"Can you remember the last time you saw her?"

"Well, we were at the party just a few miles away from here, in a club. A lot of people were quite drunk. Eve went out for a cigarette, and that was that. She never came back in."

Lesley started to cry now.

"It's O.k.," I said, reassuring her.

I thanked her for the help she gave me, and gave her the contact details should she ever think of anything else. I now had the name of the victim, because Eve went missing in 1988, and she was twenty-eight years old. In a way, come to think of it, she looked quite a lot like the skeleton. I now had the name of the victim, and I prepared for the rest of the journey ahead.

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***

Sample of
Wicked
by H. B. Rae

http://www.amazon.com/Romantic-Thriller-Wicked-Suspense-Mystery-ebook/dp/B016YGYTUA

Chapter 1

"How old were you when you learned there's no Santa?" Devin McGee asked while tossing long strands of silver tinsel up in the air to cover the top branches of the Christmas tree. He remembered the tree seeming to be so colossal when he was a little boy. Just like the Christmas holiday itself. It was all consuming and he loved it even now that he was nineteen years old.

"There's no Santa?" Jessica said, shocked, her hand to her throat and a grimace on her face. "Are you kidding? I still believe in Santa." she said, smiling down at the last batch of sugar cookies she was about to shovel into the oven.

"Did your parents tell you or did you find out...on the streets?" Devin looked at her through squinty eyes.

"Yeah, the word around town was hey man, this Santa dude, total figment of someone's imagination. Not even real. Every parent in the world is in on the conspiracy."

Devin began to laugh as he continued overloading the tree with the sparkling strings. He looked outside and saw the snow was still falling. It wasn't hard. Not by Alaskan standards. If they got three or four inches that would be a nice start to the holiday season and no need to put the chains on the wheels of his car just yet. All Devin wanted was the old Dodge Neon to just last one more winter. Just one more and then he'd be off to Anchorage to college. The town had everything a young man needed to survive within walking distance, even in the middle of winter. The convenience store, Laundromat, sporting goods were all two blocks away.