Garretsville Crimes - Chapter One

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 INTRODUCTION:

The following story is one that is slow in the making, but one that I'm taking an entirely different approach with when it comes to... everything, really.  I'm trying to write in an area I know for scenes: small farming community.  I've lived in and been to big cities, but I would have to say that where I live now has the most impact when it comes to what it looks like, the people, whatnot.

The world you see here is very much like yours and mine, but doing worry: the world you've seen in prior shots is still very relevant, even for this story!  If I have my way with it, you'll one day get what's going on.

Also, I'm not a doctor and have done as much research as I can for what this story will have.  So keep that in mind if you are vastly more intelligent than me (and you probably are).  :* :*



   “What sort of ingrate would do something like this?”  The words fell out of Michael Hays’s mouth as he stared at the scene before him.

    “A sociopath, for sure.”

    Two children, estimated to be eight and ten years of age, laid in physical ruin at the edge of a country road, common in the town of Garretsville.  A small town of just four thousand, and about an hour away from any major cities, the lack of crime allowed the all of four police officers and any volunteers who offered their services to hunt for the boy and girl after they were reported missing by their respective parents.  After the brutalized bodies were discovered, the single medical examiner of the town was called out to investigate.

    Michael Hays was a young man of only thirty-two, born and raised in Garretsville.  His higher education took him elsewhere, but in the end, he returned home because of a sick mother and the fact that the last medical examiner seemed to have vanished with no trace beyond a letter of apology to his family.

    He walked over to the bodies, head tilted as he stared over the messy remains.  The children had been gutted in near-equal ways with the rest of their bodies relatively intact.  At first, the police were ruling it an animal attack, the severity by which their insides were destroyed incomprehensible to the small town police as anything but.  Unfortunately, the forensics trained examiner knew that couldn’t be it.  They had no marks from teeth or claws anywhere on their skin.  Bruising, yes, but dogs, wolves, coyotes didn’t bruise their victims into submission.  There would have been bites to the arms or legs, and eventually the head and neck.  Puncture wounds.

    Michael understood why the police would have assumed as much, however.  Things like that just didn’t happen in Garretsville by human hands.  Michael had trained in a far larger city, however, and shadowed with crime scene investigators and participated in murder victim autopsies as part of his schooling.  It was amazing, the things humans could do to one another.

    With a clipboard, Michael wrote down that it definitely was the doing of human hands before passing the clipboard over to his intern, Monica Dupree.  She was seven years his junior, but far more stone-faced than he even in his senior years to her and his experience.  He could trust her to hold her stomach even when the Sheriff was off, retching by his squad car as he was doing that night.

    Not that they had a lot of murder scenes in Garretsville, but he did test her often with photos and weekend trips to nearby cities.  She came with high regards from nearby Millets Peak, the nearest metropolitan area where she interned last, and where he often took her to keep her adjusted to gruesome scenes.  It was an honor to find she requested an internship with his office.  They doubled to help with missing persons when forty-eight hours were up, or if it was a high stakes situation.  They helped with burglary assessments as well; Monica had the keen eye of her father, a detective up in Millets Peak.

    Michael finally squatted down with a camera in hand, lining up for a picture of the boy’s face.  Blue around the lips with eyes facing the sky, rigor mortis seemed to have kicked in perhaps an hour or two ago.  Michael was preparing to click the digital picture when he froze.  Behind him, one of the deputies flashed on a flood light that he asked for about fifteen minutes ago, and that had to be driven up by one of the volunteers.  And as it did so, lighting up the crime scene…

    …the boy’s eyes constricted.  Michael’s eyes widened and he lowered the camera slowly.  “Monica.”

    “Yeah?” she asked from his side.

    “His eyes just constricted.”

    “What?”

    “Monica, get the stretcher.”

---

    It didn’t seem possible and the doctor in charge of the ER that night thought Michael Hays was off his rocker.  Monica had tested, confirmed it.  But it was only on the word of the pale Sheriff that anyone at the hospital listened to the two young professionals.  Michael had the foresight to make the Sheriff and one of the Deputies watch it too.  The doctors around Garretsville were bitter old men and women, keen on prescribing too many drugs and charging far too much for the vast uninsured elderly population.  They didn’t see Michael or the studying Monica as threats, but just unrefined and too bright-eyed.  A funny sentiment for a town where the biggest medical threat was diabetes or high blood pressure.

    But sure enough, with proper examination, the children’s eyes were found to be responding.  They were beginning to breathe.  They had a pulse.  They’d yet to respond, aside from the girl, who had bloody tear streaks running down her temples by the time emergency helicopters arrived.  Too dangerous to move them too far, with how destroyed their insides were, the helicopters instead brought surgeons and equipment from Millets Peak for use.

    Technically, it was no longer the examiner’s place to be there.  Frustrated and panicked parents were dealt with by local doctors; the media arriving after being tipped off by excited onlookers were dealt with by the police.  But Michael and Monica stayed there, the situation disturbing and fascinating.  They would still need forensic input.  They would still need someone to do the research that the doctors and surgeons couldn’t (or wouldn’t) do.

    “I don’t understand how they could be alive after all of that,” Monica said as she accepted a cup of coffee from Michael.

    He dropped down in the hard hospital seat beside her and shook his head.  “They were well into the onset of rigor mortis.  They should be sitting in the morgue waiting for proper autopsy by now.”  Holding his own Styrofoam cup in one hand, he pressed his index finger of the other to his temple, as though it would help screw ideas from the depths of his mind.  “If shock didn’t kill them, you saw the amount of blood.”

    “It doesn’t make sense.  There’s absolutely nothing anywhere regarding this.”

    Michael rolled his head back and around his shoulders.  “I suppose it’s a waiting game, really.”

    “I’m not good with waiting.”

    “Neither am I.”  The result of their jobs.  They worked with the dead.  There was no need to wait, and in fact there was an importance in not waiting to do what they needed to do.  It was far more high paced than what it was portrayed as on television and in movies.  Their minds were working constantly, to provide answers that would result in the quickest conclusion of matters for the police.

    “Do you suppose they’ll start talking?”

    “I can’t imagine so, Monica.”  He replied honestly, shaking his head.  “If this is some miraculous reviving of life, they’re likely to be brain dead.  Their hearts were stopped and their body lacked blood to keep the brain alive.”  The coffee was all but forgotten, although he still rocked it in a slow, fidgeting motion.  “The scene is still locked tight.  Let’s go back there and finish reporting on what we can, and start a listing of events.”

    “Sounds good.”

---

    Michael was pretty close to just quitting out of rage by the time 4am rolled around.  He’d been working for going on thirty hours, and at around midnight, a nurse stopped by to deliver photos and video taken of the injuries the two children endured.  Since that was about when Monica and he had returned from their second analysis of the actual crime scene, he had his own digital pictures to work with.

    Monica was sent home at 1am, with the agreement that she’d be back at 9am so he could get a few hours of sleep and she’d hold down the fort.  He appreciated being able to trust the young woman enough to do exactly that.

    But it was 4am and Michael was just frustrated.  Exhaustion was likely to blame, but none of it made a bit of sense.  For all intents and purposes, those children were dead.  They were far past the point of possible resuscitation.  Recalling their stiff little limbs when he got there, and looking at the pictures, they’d been there and clinically dead for at least three hours, but no more than six.  The eggs of flies were found in the girl’s wounds, but they’d yet to hatch, definitely setting it well before eight hours.

    Beyond all that, his and Monica’s deduction of cause of death had to be right.  They guessed shock and blood loss played a perfect storm, long before their insides had a chance to be tampered with.  It was May, so while the nights in Garretsville got to be in the high 40s Fahrenheit, that wasn’t enough to significantly slow the blood.  Their bodies would have needed to cool with it, and that just would not have happened in the midst of adrenaline and shock.

    Michael groaned and put his hands over his face as he dropped forward against the desk.  “What is going on?” he whined behind his hands.

    “That’s what I’m hoping you can help us with,” a familiar voice said.

    Despite the familiarity, Michael still jolted up straight.  The Sheriff, John Thomas, was across the way, resting against the door frame leading into Michael’s and Monica’s office.  “Hey, John,” Michael said, offering a shake of the head and a bemused smile.

    “Got any ideas on what happened here?” John asked, walking in and gesturing at all the pictures Michael had printed out from memory sticks on his specialized printer.

    “Yeah, a few, but they’re not really realistic answers,” Michael replied with a sigh.

    “Well, can you do an Autopsy Summary Report for me, for both of them?”

    Michael blinked, feeling as though he was just slapped in the face with a sledgehammer.  “Wait, I… I didn’t perform an autopsy, John.  I barely even got to touch the kids.  I can’t do a report like that.  Why don’t I just fill out an Incident Report?”

    The ghost of a sad smile crossed over John’s face.  “I want an Autopsy Summary Report for both of them,” he reiterated.  “By mid-morning.  It’ll be good to have on file.”

    Oh.

    Michael got it then.  John wanted to have partially written reports to set Michael and Monica ahead if they ended up with the kids in their morgue anyway.  “Alright, John.  I guess the outcome is looking predictably bleak according to the surgeons?”

    “I don’t know, I barely understood them,” John replied honestly.  “They don’t know how to speak stupid like you.”

    “Thanks,” Michael said with a small smirk.

    “How long can someone live like that though?”

    Michael pursed his lips, reviewing the notes of the noted damage done to the two.  “Not long,” he said quietly.  “Even we took out the damage to their bodies, what was taken out of them could kill them in a few weeks to a few months.  But you add in all the internal and external damage, the blood loss, and whatever other abuse they suffered...”  Michael trailed off, finishing his sentence by shaking his head.

    John sighed and shook his head.  He reached out to rap the edge of Michael’s chaotic desk twice with his knuckles.  “Get to work on those reports, alright?  Tina can get you the case numbers we’re using and file numbers of Grand Mercy’s records so you can record them.”

    Michael nodded.  “Yeah, no problem.  Thanks, John.”