Chapter III: "Liza Goldfinch"

A Chapter by Confidential

Chapter III, "Liza Goldfinch"

It was twelve o'clock a.m. As in midnight. The first of many late nights (or rather, early mornings) to come. I eased what I wish I could call my 'trusty' (and very OLD) police cruiser in to an increasingly cluttered garage. The brakes screeched as the car slowed to a stop; not before running in to the poorly constructed shelves which stood against the back wall. The car's front bumper grazed the bottom shelf, crushing it as well as several empty plastic gardening boxes. "Smooth, Saul." I mumbled to myself. Carol said to let someone 'who knew what the hell they were doing' to build the shelves, but I insisted. I backed the car up, and, of course, the entire shelf collapsed. 'Well, she told me. This should please her.' I thought.

The noise I made during this whole ordeal was enough to wake Carol up; I could see a light flick on inside through the tiny crack at the bottom of the garage door. I turned off the car and got out, and just as I was about to reach for the door handle, Carol threw it open and hit me in the nose. I grunted. She pushed me out of the way and walked to the broken shelves, which had formerly held all of her gardening supplies. She put one of her hands on her hips. "What the hell is this!?" she demanded, gesturing at the wreckage.

"Oh," I said, rubbing my nose tenderly, "I'll be alright. Thanks for the concern, though."

Carol clearly had no idea what I was talking about.

"What!?" she said, confused.

"Never mind."

"Saul, go inside."

"I was gonna!" I insisted.

She didn't say anything. That was usually bad. I hurried inside, careful to take my shoes off before going in to the kitchen. Carol came in behind me; she was wearing her light-blue robe, the one I got her that was tied in the front with a white drawstring. I opened the fridge and peered inside to pretend like I was looking for something so I could avoid making eye contact with her; it would give me a few extra seconds to come up with a good enough apology for wrecking the shelves. Win-win. After a moment of looking for absolutely nothing, I shut the refrigerator door and turned around to face Carol. Her arms were crossed, lips pursed, and eyebrows raised. She was waiting for the apology and the excuse.
"I see you're wearing that nice -expensive- robe I got you." I said, still mentally putting the finishing touches on my A&E (apology and excuse).

"It's a night gown." she said monotonously.

"Ahh."

"What were you working on so late?" she said.

"Well, there was the teensiest complication we ran into at the Department today,"

"Oh?"

"Yeah. You know those serial killings that have been all over the news lately?"

Carol shuddered.

"What about them?"

"Perkins showed me and Regge something pretty disturbing today,"

"Something related to the murders?"

"You might say so. It was a kind of scrapbook, full of pictures of all these different people. Ninety-four in all, and every person who has a picture of them in that photo album have either already been confirmed dead and were still under investigation, or had been reported as missing. There were pictures on each separate page of a different person. The whole book was laid out in the same way; on the left, there would be a collage of pictures from when the person in question was alive, and on the right, one big photo of their dead body."

"What about the twenty-two from before?"

"Every single one of them had a spot in that book."

"Jesus," Carol said, having now completely forgotten how mad at me she was. Good, this was good.

"And you think that all those people were all killed..by the same person?"

"I'm afraid so. And all seventy-two of the people in that photo album who weren't already part of the investigation had one thing in common: their dead bodies all had their eyes removed. Forensics conducted some analyses on a lot of the photographs already, and most of the results seem to indicate that the victim's eyes were removed before they were killed. The causes of death were varied, a lot of the photographs of the victims indicate that they had their necks broken based on the position of their heads relative to the rest of their bodies. There are quite a few with slit throats, as well, but the causes of death are everything from simple strangulations to having actually been lit on fire."

Carol clapped her hand up to her mouth; her eyes were shimmering.

"That's so horrible," she stammered, "and right here in Little Rock is where a lot of those poor people lived- and were killed!"

"Hey," I said softly, putting my arms around her and hugging her tightly, "there's no good reason to get all worked up about this,"

"Oh, I'm sorry Officer, but I think that even if we weren't trying to bring a child in to this world, living in the same city as an insane serial killer with an eyeball fetish and whose daily to-do list includes "kill somebody" is a very good reason to get all worked up!"

"Well damn." I thought, "I don't have a comeback for that."

"Don't you have anything to say?" Carol sobbed in to my shoulder.

"Shh," I said, "everything's going to be just fine, okay?"

"You're my husband, you have to say that!" she said.

"Seriously?" I thought, ”There's no pleasing her. Ever."

"Why don't we just go to bed and get some rest, okay honey? We both need it."

Carol sniffed. "Okay," she said, "I hope you aren't hungry, I was mad at you so I gave your dinner to Rufus."

I raised my eyebrows, "Our dog?"

"No, our rhino. Yes, our dog!" Carol snapped.

"That's okay," I said.

"B***h." I thought.

"What was for dinner, anyway?" I asked.

"Tofu and fruit salad."

I resisted the automatic urge to gag at hearing the word 'tofu'.

"And Rufus ate it?"

"Rufus is a damn dog, of course he ate it."

I sighed, checking my watch.

12:26.

I had to get up to go to work in less than six hours.

"Come on," Carol said, yawning, "let's go to bed."

She slinked her way in to the bedroom, already half asleep by the time she reached the bed. I followed her, switching the kitchen light back off as I went, and lied down on our bed, which, whether because of how long I had been awake, or because of everything I had to go through while I was awake, seemed unusually comfortable. Carol was asleep in a matter of seconds; the silence was short lived, however. The phone rang. I answered it quickly and without looking at the caller ID as to not wake up Carol. "Hello?" I whispered.

"Saul," said Lt. Perkins' voice on the other end of the line,

"Lieutenant? What are you still doing at the station?"

"What? I'm at home, Sergeant."

This confused me momentarily, but I soon remembered that I hadn't in fact looked at the caller ID.

"What is it?" I asked, afraid of the answer I would get.

"Before I left the station, we got a call."

"A call from?"

"Liza Goldfinch or some s**t. Older woman."

"What'd she want?" I said, rubbing my eyes.

"Filed a missing persons report. Apparently nobody's heard from her daughter Amy lately."

"Why are you talking to me about this, ma'am? It's 12:30 in the morning."

"She lives in your neighborhood; you know the area, so I want you to be the one to stop by and take an official statement, she'll identify with someone who lives near her better than someone who doesn't."

"This couldn't have waited until the morning?"

"Morning is when you'll be seeing her. You pass right by on your way to the station, anyway. Just do it. We have enough piling up with all this scrapbook killer crap, and our guy from the FBI's NCAVC Major Case Management Division is going to be here in less than twelve hours."

"Well, I have to be awake and on my way to work again in less than six. Goodbye, Lt. Perkins."

I hung up the phone and fell back; my head hitting the cool, soft pillow and slowly sinking in to it felt better than anything in recent memory. I closed my eyes and let sleep take me.

Minutes later, I didn't know it, but a car drove by my house. The man behind the wheel drove the car through several miles of labyrinthine neighborhoods, finally coming to the end of a street still under development. The man got out of the car, and looked around him in all directions. He was a large man, at least 6 ft. tall. He popped open the trunk of his car and stuck both arms inside, firmly grabbing on to something heavy. He carefully hauled out Amy Goldsmith's three day old corpse and slung it over his shoulder.

He headed off the side of the street and towards a plot of land where a house had just begun construction. The foundation was almost all the way finished, but one small section of the ground remained bare and earthen, in the far corner of the plot. the man dropped the body down on to a section of the foundation which had already been finished; it landed head-first, a cracking noise could clearly be heard as Amy's head hit the concrete. Jumping down next to her, the man scooped Amy's body back up and strode over to the unfinished section of the house's foundation. He set her down next to it and went looking for a shovel. He found one that had been abandoned leaning against a bulldozer a little further off the road, and grabbed it. When he got back to where he had left the body, he began digging. It didn't take long for him to finish; he rolled Amy's body in to a 5 1/2 foot long, 3 foot deep grave, and promptly covered it back up with dirt. He patted the area of ground where he had buried her with the shovel, evening it out as much as he could. He pulled himself up and out of the giant hole which would soon be a family basement, and put the shovel back where he found it, taking care to leave it exactly positioned as it was.

The next day, the construction crew would be back with a cement truck; they would be eager to move on with the project, and wouldn't waste any time covering the last patch of earth with a nice, thick layer of cement. Once it dried, the rest of the house would go up in little time, and soon enough a happy family would move in. Nobody would ever find Amy there, her body would rot and decompose under 3 feet of dirt and 4 inches of solid concrete. Eventually, it would break down completely, until not even her skeleton remained identifiable as her own. It would be as if she was never even there.

But of course, that was the whole idea.

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