Chapter Nine
Reluctantly, sheriff Harrison had announced the second death in the small town of Carlisle. They reacted much like a scared group of people would react. They panicked, they questioned authority, they demanded answers. Harrison couldn't give them the answers they wanted to hear, not yet. All he could do was reassure the killer would be caught and brought to justice.
However, there wasn’t a single person he could even remotely accuse. He knew everyone in town and he couldn’t believe any of them were capable of the crime. Of course, it couldn’t be true. Someone had committed the murders but he hadn’t the foggiest idea who. There seemed to be nothing to link the two victims together. It was almost as if the two crimes were completely random. The only link was the upside-down crosses. They had to mean something.
There was the obvious. Satanic ritual. But Harrison had his doubts. He suspected it was nothing more than subterfuge. Classic misdirection. Which meant, the killer was trying to hide something. Harrison was meant to focus on the possibility of the occult in order to miss something important. For Harrison, being cleverer than the killer gave him credit, it caused him to pay more attention to the little details. If it were meant to be a distraction then what was it distracting from?
Planted evidence was usually to frame an innocent party and throw suspicion away from the guilty. In this case, there was no one the imposed idea of devil worship implicated. It was an odd detail for sure. There wasn’t a single person in town suspected of devil worship. It was the twenty-first century, after all. That kind of thing didn’t exactly happen anymore.
The question burned in the back of his mind like a hot iron. What were the crosses for? Then there was the bone knife found at the second scene. It had to have been left for a reason, same as the victim's heart at Sasha's home.
A full set of prints had been lifted off the knife but he had no way of matching them locally. Instead, he forwarded a request to the FBI database in hopes they could come up with a match. It would take several days to get back but it would be done right. Normally, it would be an odd request for a local sheriff to enlist the help of the FBI in a simple murder case. But, being a war veteran had its perks and he still had friends in high places.
Harrison paced in his living room recounting the few facts he had. "Let's break this down," he said. "Ms. Shepard is stabbed in the forehead, presumably with the same knife as Ms. Granger, and upside-down crosses are painted on her cheeks in blood. Then, Ms. Granger is stabbed to death in the woods and her heart cut from her chest. The knife is tossed only a few yards from the body and the heart is left in Sasha's backyard. Again, upside-down crosses are drawn on Ms. Granger's cheeks.
I have to assume the knife and heart being left behind were not accidents. They were planted there with purpose, but why? Is Sasha involved somehow?" He doubted it before the sentence even left his mouth. "Is someone trying to frame her? No, that doesn't make sense. Why leave a piece of the body outside her home if they're trying to frame her. And the crosses wouldn't make any sense." He thought for a moment.
"Someone is trying to intimidate her. Wait, why the crosses?"
Whichever angle he viewed it from it was always cloudy. If only he could figure out what they meant. He felt like something was missing but couldn’t quite put his finger on it. There had been something that stood out to him in Sasha’s home but what was it?
"The black candle!" he yelled out loud. There had been one at the scene of Ms. Shepard and an identical one at Sasha's home. But a candle wasn't enough to link anything. For all he knew, it was a coincidence. And if it wasn’t a coincidence, what could it possibly mean? What did a black candle signify?
"Witchcraft?" He wondered. Could that be the answer? Was someone trying to suggest Sasha was involved in witchcraft? It would explain the crosses, the ritualistic knife, the candles, and the removed heart. But why accuse her of witchcraft? No one in town knew her so why do anything? Maybe they wanted to isolate her from everyone, make her seem odd to the entire town? But why? Surely there’d be easier ways of going about it.
There seemed to be no answers to this case, only questions. In order to solve it, he needed to find the link between the symbolism and Sasha. He was certain the victims had been random. At the very least, a pattern had yet to be established. He hated the thought but he knew there would be no way of deciphering a pattern until another body was found. There would be more bodies before the killer was caught. Harrison was sure of it.
An idea slipped into the forefront of his mind. His next course of action should be to question the best source in town for news. Of course, he was thinking of the gossip ring which consisted of Josh Gruber- the town dentist, Betty Myer- a retired woman with too much time on her hands, Kyle Ferguson- who ran the drug store in the center of town, and Carol Leighter- who ran the local newspaper. The four of them were known about the town as the gossip group. Carol, on more than one occasion, used the Gossip Group as a source in one of her articles. They might have some insight to anyone acting strangely or out of the ordinary. Since the investigation was still open, he’d have to keep the details
