Chapter 4

                                    

                                          

                          
Smith sighed deeply, ran his hand through his tousled hair and gulped down the rest of his coffee. The events of last night played over and over again in his mind. He couldn’t forget the image of the dead husband, or the faces of the hysterical wife and daughter, who had immediately been put into counseling.
                          
He rubbed his heavy eyes and looked around the boardroom. Not everyone was here yet; Smith had been up until the early hours of morning reading over the legal documents and making notes, but didn’t let this hinder him this morning, at got to work as early as he could.
                          
He saw Kieran Hallow talking to another scientist and a police officer. Sound carried well in the boardroom, and so Smith could faintly hear what was being said, “No heart…this hasn’t happened before.” Kieran muttered, filing through notes, “I did find DNA evidence, but it doesn’t match up to anything. No released criminals or previous killings, or even close relatives. It’s like there’s a different killer each time!”
                          
“Perhaps there’s more than one,” Jason Dyll, the police officer, suggested, “Maybe there’s a whole group of them so they’ll be difficult to catch.”
                          
“I don’t think so,” Kieran counted, “Each body was dealt with in similar ways. The connections Hyde noticed are all true. Each carving was done in a very similar way, and I doubt there would be more than two people who have exact styles of murdering others…just examining the body shows that there is someone killing, and yet the DNA traces show otherwise…I don’t know. Either way, whoever he or she is, they’re falling right through our fingers.”
                          
Smith sighed again and shook his head. Everything seemed to be so confusing on this case…he felt like he didn’t know anything, but at the same time bombarded with information.
                          
In all honesty, he just wanted to go home.
                          
“Morning, Jake!” Officer Weber called and slung an arm around the lawyer’s shoulder, “You look as dead as a Dodo.”
                          
“Thanks for the compliment,” Smith growled, wincing at his splitting headache, “I feel like one too.”
                          
“You’ll get used to it,” Weber joked, pressing the Latte button on the coffee machine, “Cold morning, eh? You better go stick your head in the river, maybe that’ll wake you up!”
                          
Suddenly, the door burst open, making Smith jump and spill his coffee all over himself. He cursed and tried to wipe it away, turning towards the door to see who it was that caused him a scare like that.
                          
Detective William Hyde strode through the boardroom with several files tucked under his arm. His face was pale and drawn, looking as tired as Smith, but still had that fierce intensity in his eyes.
                          
Quickly, the team sat around the table with Hyde at the head. He opened each of the files and glanced at them before saying, “DNA traces haven’t matched up to any former suspects, released criminals or family members, nor previous DNA traces from the other victims’ bodies. This could suggest that there are a group of people out there, who kill one at a time, and who are unknown to the public.”
                          
At this, Dyll quietly nudged Kieran with a smirk on his face.
                          
“However, the nature of the murders say that the victims have all been killed by the same person in the same way. I went over my notes about each of the carvings and slits on the bodies, and this showed that the killer has acted in the same way with each murder. In simpler terms, there is only one.”
                          
Kieran nudged Dyll in response, a wider smirk plastered in his face.
                          
“Detective,” Weber said, standing up, “You said yesterday that the killer could easily be one of us. Do you still believe that? If so, why not take our DNA?” he held out his hand, “What you said made me uncomfortable. I want to be cleared of suspicion.”