It's kind of sad. :(
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Chapter Three
Part Two
Michael
Hays wasn’t as much a rural sort as his chosen town of dwelling may have
suggested. The house he lived in was
closer to the two street blocks that constituted Garretsville’s downtown area,
and had a yard he managed fairly regularly.
If he couldn’t do it himself, he had a kid a few houses away willing to
do the work for ten dollars. It took
less than an hour to complete, the kid was thirteen, so it all worked out.
After
returning to the office (as much of an office as it was), Monica shooed him
away with the promise that she’d call after she was done processing the
evidence for him.
Michael
went off begrudgingly, and ended up standing and staring at his front lawn,
trying to debate whether he should sleep as he was ordered, or if he should
trim the lawn. He didn’t do that the
last time, so maybe…
The
sound of a fairly large truck caught his attention as it pulled to a stop next
door. That house had been uninhabited
for some time, so hearing someone pulling up to it was noticeable, to say the
least. He was surprised to see a woman
around his own age dropping out, unaccompanied, and headed for the front door
with a set of keys. He couldn’t exactly
justify why he was surprised, except that most people in Garretsville were rarely
in his and Monica’s age range. They
usually left around Jessica Kimball’s age, and returned in their forties or
fifties.
It was a
very geriatric place.
Michael
shook it off and went across his yard and into… hers, he supposed. “Hey, moving in?” he asked as a greeting.
The
brown haired woman turned, looking at Michael as she took to messing with one
particular key. “Well, trying to, but it
looks like the guy I’m renting from bent the goddamn key,” she said, followed
by a grunt. She then lifted the key to
look at it. “There we are.” She refocused on Michael then. “Neighbor?”
“Yeah. Right here.”
Michael gestured over his shoulder, then went towards her, holding out
his hand. “Michael Hays. It’s nice to meet you.”
She
hopped down the porch stairs, which bent even under her weight, mostly because
she wore heavy and well-worn boots under equally-worn jeans. She took Michael’s hand with a confident,
firm grasp. “Melaney Sykes,” she
said. “Call me Mel. Nice to meet you as well. I’d offer you to come in, but I’m sure I
don’t even have a fridge in there.” The
faintest hint of a Southern drawl was becoming apparent the longer she spoke.
Michael
grinned when he saw Mel grinning herself, and looked ready to reply when his
phone started to ring. He pulled it out
to look at the caller ID. “Ah, I’m
sorry, it’s work,” he excused himself with a step backwards.
Mel
smirked and nodded, going to key into her house to take a look around. “Come find me when you’re done, neighbor.”
After a
double take, and a smirk, Michael answered the call and placed his phone to his
ear. “What’s up?” he asked. He already knew it was Monica.
“Prints
are back. We’re definitely looking at it
being Brad Lincoln,” Monica said. “A couple
of officers ran prints on all workers, just to make sure we didn’t have an
inside job. Nothing in the placement of
their prints onsite makes sense for someone being a partner to this.”
“What?”
Michael asked, at least half rhetorically since it slipped from disbelief. He ran his free hand through his light brown
hair and shook his head. “But, Monica, I
told you what I thought of that one.”
“And I
agree with you,” Monica said in her normal, cool voice. “Based on what you know, it’s not right. But they’ve been poking around people on
nearby properties because he’s not home and hasn’t been at all, and apparently
he’s gotten very erratic. He won’t talk
to anyone most the time, even when they greet him or something directly, and
when he does speak, it’s to yell about obscure things. He yelled at a neighbor recently because his
dogs were too quiet.”
“Too
quiet?”
“Yeah. And get this: one of them went missing not
too long after. The dog’s collar was
found on Lincoln’s property. Neighbor
took a picture with his cell phone. So
they’re getting a search warrant since he’s still not there. Do you want to be in on this?”
“Jesus. Yeah.
I’ll get my kit built back up and be there shortly.”
He shook
his head and released the call with Monica.
He turned to look in the direction of his new neighbor’s door. So much for time off, which he hadn’t
actually been looking forward to until seeing he had someone who could
potentially be an age matched friend.
Again, they were rare.
He
headed to the door and leaned in to look around the empty house. “Mel?” he called.
“Yeah?”
she responded as she swung into view from the furthest end of the entry hall.
“I’m
sorry, I’d love to get to know you, but… like I said, that work. I have to go.
But look, if you need any help moving things in, I’m off tomorrow,” he
offered. “And I have a fair policy on
child labor that I can invoke for a third pair of hands.”
Mel gave
him a weird but humored look, before just laughing and nodding. “I understand, Michael. Thank you for the offer, I’ll let you know.”
Michael
nodded with a relieved smile. That was
the upside to meeting new people: while things are fresh and new, no one
questions when things were cut off short.
One could easily imagine that Michael had to call off a lot with his
job. Well, not as much as if he worked
in a larger city, but since he helped with a wide variety of things from
robberies, animal death, abuse situations, and of course the required
autopsies, he was pretty busy, even with Monica at his side. He was getting the next day off, one way or
another. He was tired, and he needed to
make nice with the new neighbor.
Garrettsville was far too small to fight with people if one could help
it.
***
Brad
Lincoln’s place was not something Michael would expect from the son of a
prosecuting attorney. Normally kids of
high ranking officials were determined to make their parent in power look
good. But the property and home both
were a disaster of abandoned cars, rotting side buildings and sheds, and debris
scattered all over the place. There was
even what looked to be half a cigar shop ‘Indian’ statue leaning on the wall of
his brittle patio.
Vince
Castillo stepped up first, waving his backup and the two then-investigators to
the crime scene to step back. The patio
squeaked painfully under his weight and he looked to the three accompanying
him. “Just… stay put. Stay right there. I don’t feel like crashing into a possible
lunatic’s under-porch or crawlspace.”
The
three nodded, and he went to knock on the door.
Two knocks, and then he listened.
He heard something he would later describe as tableware knocking against
itself. Castillo lifted an eyebrow and
looked back at his partner, Officer Eric Samson. He gestured with his hands to have him go
find the back door, pistol drawn. Samson
nodded and jogged that way. Castillo
turned back to the door, just in time to see a figure dart past, causing him to
jerk a bit from the unexpected sight.
He swung
his fist up to the door’s glass and banged on it, his other hand over his
gun. “Brad Lincoln! It’s the Sheriff’s Department! We need to ask you a few questions!”
He
looked back to Michael and Monica, nod-gesturing for them to return to the
car. It was all rather eerie, and
feeling increasingly dangerous. Neither
Monica nor Michael were known for their skills in high stress and high
endurance situations, so they obeyed the head nod. They would only get in the way if the
situation got out of hand in a confrontation between Lincoln and the police.
When
observing the house itself, a small thing that was once lovely, there were
security bars formed with floral printing on every window. Clearly a woman’s touch, since apparently
Lincoln living there cause the place to look like a riot streamed through and
trashed the whole area. And it was
because of those bars that Castillo believed the doors were the only problem
areas. He’d looked around for a
crawlspace escape, and it was bolted shut.
Unfortunately,
the Deputy was very wrong in believing that to be the case. A large sound of something ripping out of the
house was followed by the sound of metal slamming into rocks and concrete. Somehow, Lincoln had literally shoved all his
strength into the bars of the master bedroom and caused the heavy, industrial
bolts to strip clean out of their holes.
It was followed with him clamoring out and going at a dead run at Monica
and Michael.
Michael attempted
to get in front of Monica, something he figured she would punish him for at a
later, lighter date as he did it, but Lincoln had other ideas. His hands wildly slapped Michael to the side
with such an unusual force that he lost his balance with his temple and ears
being stuck several times and his arm being hit hard enough, it almost felt
dislocated. The force overall was too
great, and he just hit the ground.
Monica
shrieked out as Brad Lincoln grabbed her with hands that were crusted over with
blood, and he ran back to slam her into the car. Castillo was already there, gun trained and
shrieking threats Michael couldn’t make out much of. Something of drop the woman, don’t let things
get worse than they are, the like. He
was joined soon enough by Samson.
What
Michael could absolutely not hear were the things Lincoln was saying and doing
to Monica. He looked at the woman with a
look most crazed, only amplified by the hemorrhaging of his eyes. Normally a green-brown, the colors blurred in
the midst of that deep and solid red to look gold. “I needed you for the collection,” he seethed
out. “Perfect dish.” His eyes ran over her eyes, and then down to
her collar bones.
“Wh-What?”
Monica stammered. She knew damn well
that the police had to round to a position that was safe to shoot him at, and
they continued to hurl demands to let her go.
If they could just get around to see that he had no weapons… “Collection?
Dish?”
Lincoln
either knew exactly what Monica was doing, or he was so deranged at that point
that he didn’t care. Either way, he
reeled back a bit and then slammed forward, throwing her hard into the car at
her legs. He shoved his body into it,
and caused Monica to scream. Shriek,
actually, because the force was so great that she swore she felt her knees
break.
That was
enough. The officers ran for Lincoln,
not wanting to risk anything, and Samson threw his arm around Lincoln’s back
while Castillo worked on trying to wrench his arms back and work him off of
Monica. He was ridiculously strong.
Lincoln
tilted his head at Monica at the two men pulling on him, before snapping his
mouth open wide. Snapping described it
perfectly, as his mouth appeared to unhinge like a snake’s. His teeth, while normal in shape, appeared
enlarged. Swollen. That, on top of his tongue appearing to have
layers like one observed when zooming in on a hummingbird’s with a microscope,
caused Monica to scream again in sheer terror.
She had seen a dead body with a broken jaw before, but it didn’t look at
all like that.
Her
scream didn’t perform much of an alarm, as he tilted his head down and bit into
Samson’s arm. With that jaw as wide as
it was, and those teeth so big, his mouth almost entirely wrapped over Samson’s
forearm. Samson yelled out in pain, his
knees buckling as he tried to get free.
He used his free hand to reach overhead and start digging into Lincoln’s
eyes as a means of getting free. There
were three witnesses and the dashboard cams to speak for him if the massive
wound on his arm didn’t.
As the
fight went on, Michael was frantically digging in his kit (albeit a bit
dazedly, so he was pulling things out and just throwing them to the ground). Most the things he had in there were proper
for what they thought they were going to see: trace evidence, photographic
evidence, possibly shoe prints, clothes collection for DNA, the like. But he carried sedatives in his case after
the children from a while back, Sandy and Bobby. They were strong sedatives, and he carried
them to help if they ran into that situation ever again in order to protect the
victim from trauma.
Though
that situation haunted him, he didn’t want to forget it, and he hoped it was
about to pay off. Hands trembling as he
got the syringe and bottle out to dispense into the syringe, he heard Samson
screaming for help while Castillo yelled, “Why isn’t that stopping him?!”
Monica’s
legs gave out on her once Lincoln was no longer fully supporting her, so her
assistance was out. Michael shot up to
his feet and stumbled around to take position in front of her again. By that point, Lincoln’s face was a mass of
blood and gore. Samson’s arm was in
shreds. Lincoln’s eyes were gouged
downward from the bottom, likely ripping them free even though they hadn’t
fallen out. At the very least, they were
crushed to a point that they had little effect.
Who
could do that much damage and take that damage?
Judging from Castillo’s side of things, Lincoln’s arms were twisting in
ways they shouldn’t as he held them together under his one arm, his other hand
busy grabbing at Lincoln’s lower jaw and attempting to wrench it free. “He’s—like a damn dog with lockjaw!” he
strained out.
Michael
hurried around to Lincoln’s back, once assured he was too busy right then for
Monica, and slammed the syringe into the back of his neck, squeezing it
in. He wasn’t concerned with getting it
right, other than missing the spinal cord and brainstem. He just wanted to get it in and pray that it’d
work where physical violence failed.
After a
moment of sheer dread watching Samson scream and fight, Castillo desperately
try to help while radioing for an ambulance, and Monica on the ground but
trying to stand with the help of the car, Lincoln’s body went slack and he
toppled to the ground. He wasn’t fully
unconscious, but at least he was stopped. Unfortunately, he took Samson with
him. His mouth had released Samson, but
the weight and Samson’s body breaking into shock had him getting dragged down with
Lincoln.
Michael
was thankful for the devolving violence, stepping around to stoop down and look
at Samson’s arm. “Let me see!” he
ordered, pulling Samson to the side so Castillo could handle his attacker.
Samson
sort of rolled with Michael’s goading, flopping onto his back and fixing his
eyes up at the sky. Looking at his arm was
driving him to a panicked sickness, so he just opted to look skyward as Michael
tended to him.
“Jesus,”
breathed Michael as he looked over the damage to his arm. It was like the primary biting was done
strictly by Lincoln’s molars, causing the damage to primarily crushing and
spreading across bone and harder muscles.
There were obvious signs of damage from the canines and incisors, but
the level at which Lincoln opened his mouth…
Castillo
was radioing for emergency services.
Michael looked to Monica, who was stumbling around on her jolted
legs. “Monica! Pictures!”
She was a strong woman, so he knew better than to ask her if she was
alright until everything had settled down.
“Right,”
she rambled out, fishing the camera bag on her shoulder to her front.
Pictures
needed to be taken of Samson’s arm, then Lincoln’s mouth. Neither one of them wanted to hear that it
was impossible because the dashboard cameras on the police car was in the wrong
place and couldn’t see the actual injury get delivered. Lincoln’s father could easily try to deflect
the case. The man was a beast at his
job, but also very keen on favoritism. A
good man, but he had those flaws like anyone else, only they impacted people
more when it came to legal issues. The
District Attorney, repeatedly appointed Elizabeth Marks, wasn’t nearly as
invested in her position as a leader in her older years, so she went off the advice
of her two attorneys more often than not.
Evidence would be key.
They
just had no idea what they were about to find inside the house once Samson and
Lincoln were taken by emergency care services.
Lincoln would be subject to blood tests, to a rabies test, and to drug
and psychological tests before he’d be admitted to jail.
As he
played the role of first responder to Samson’s wounds, Michael had all but
forgotten about his so sought for day off.
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