It was an All Points Bulletin, to all media outlets.
He hopped around the desk and snatched the paper off the press, just as it finished printing.
Across the top in big, bold letters were the words ‘Midnight Massacres Return’.
He stared at it for a long moment, his face moving from horror to shock... and finally to something resembling glee. He walked back into his office, paper in hand, and opened up the file folder that had been collecting dust on his desk for almost a month now. Inside was the profile he’d printed. If the killer was back... so was the profile.
Don couldn’t hide his smile.
This was it.
He could feel it.
He was going to break this story wide open.
Lance Berkshire felt a chill that had nothing to do with the air conditioners as he entered the basement level of the Coral Beach Police Department.
The metallic room shone a dull blue, its sad sterility making him feel sad and emotionally impotent. The walls of the room were lined with drawers and cabinets, some large and some small. Roughly half the drawers on the wall still had names taped lazily to them from when they had been the final home to so many people weeks ago. In the center of the room were two identical steel tables, each standing at waist height and bolted down to the floor. He walked over to them in a daze, his head swimmy with thoughts he kept trying to force out. There was a body on each table, their mulched flesh ruining the otherwise clean environment. Their skin was white and powdery and even though he had seen it a million times before, he felt his gloved hand move up to touch it. His fingers shook violently, the nervous quakes felt all the way up to his shoulder.
“Coral Beach Precinct Morgue. My name is Harry Ford. I’ll be your mortician for this evening.”
Lance Berkshire looked up from the two corpses lined on the tables. He hadn’t even noticed that Harry was there. Snapping out of the trance he’d slipped into, he lowered his hand and swallowed hard to try and get his bearings.
“Lance? You all right?” Harry asked. It was moments like this that Harry wondered if his job had desensitized him to gore and death. Looking down at the bodies laid not two feet away, fighting off vomiting, he was almost glad. Glad that he wasn’t desensitized. “You up for this tonight, pal? We can reschedule...”
“Naw, Harry. I’ll be fine,” he lied, staring at the slain people once more before turning his attention to Harry again. “Besides, the papers are already on our backs to release statements about the deceased…”
It was obscene, referring to them as merely ‘deceased.’ It made it sound like a heart attack, or maybe some word some grieving widow might use to calm he children. These people were dead, plain and simple. You don’t see people with holes in them that big that are alive.
“Which one do we start with?” Harry asked, breaking the silence.
“Um, the male, I guess,” Lance replied, lifting the cloth over the body’s head, revealing its torn face. He turned on his recorder. “Name: John Davis. Weight: 170 lbs. Height: 5 feet 11’’. Cause of death:… stab wound through the trunk.” He clicked off the recorder for a moment, then continued. “Subject’s blood was found throughout the scene of the murder, indicating it came from behind as he was sitting at the time. To add to this theory, we have found traces of leather from the recliner he was sitting on, embedded into his body cavity next to his left lung and kidneys…”
CHAPTER THREE:
POWERLESS
Warm red light shone in through Xander’s eyelids as his mind slowly seeped back to reality, the soft fuzzy feeling of sleep slowly fading from him. Even though the sunlight on his face was warm and bright, he still shivered from head to toe, making the springs of his mattress cry out from the sudden effort. Moaning, he turned over and opened his eyes. It took considerable effort, the lids feeling like they were swollen and fused shut with gook. Grumbling, he reached up and rubbed them with the knuckle of his right hand. It stung fiercely. When he opened his eyes and looked at it, the skin across all four knuckles had been ripped off.
Across the room his curtain billowed and flailed in the midmorning draft, the cold fall breeze taking away some of the rank stench left by the whiskey and the fire. The odd scent of burnt air still lingered though, refusing to go away like the last guest of a party that went dreadfully wrong.
He rose up and sat on the edge of his bed for a moment, stretching both of his arms back until he felt the stiff vertebra in the center of his back pop, releasing the pressure that the night’s activities had stored there. It radiated over his entire backside for a second before shimmering away in a hail of gooseflesh encouraged by the chill on the air, the wind feeling good against his naked skin.
It stared at the gaping black rectangle that had been a door a moment ago, watching the shadows inside dance about like puppets in a play. They excited it wonderfully; their movements could not have been more perfect if they’d been planned.
Xander stopped, his eyes growing wide as his head jutted forward in shock as though he had lunged forward but was held back by invisible seatbelts. He tried hard to hold onto the flash of dream or memory, but it was gone. Locked away deep inside a subconscious that
