A Crime They'D See More Of, Part I

The call came in just after 2:00pm, Anton was doing office paperwork, a big part of any detective’s job, lucky he had never been bad with words. The word was that a body had been found by some children playing by the river, thinking of young minds seeing such a sight was enough to make Anton’s spine shiver. He went to the scene with uniformed men, they found the corpse by an old, low-head dam, the churning waters had tossed it up here, it was a woman, middle-aged, and tanned. Her head had been caved in by something blunt, it was quite clear she’d been bludgeoned to death, “We’re still waiting for ID,” said a cop, “Nothing on her, no missing people yet.” The process went on, forensics came by, they packed up the corpse and went to the lab, then cleaned her body, it didn’t do much, just showed the damage, and lord it was bad… The tests revealed her name, Janet Carson, age fifty-four, divorced with one daughter, though in phone and purse they found no number, no one to tell of this obscene slaughter. Anton felt awful leaving it like that, but all of their searches brought back nothing, no ‘Ellen Carson’ was in the system, could not tell if she even was living. To not tell next of kin what had happened sat cold in his gut, but what could they do? maybe the two of them had been estranged, but where Ellen had gone, nobody knew. He was tracing her name through school systems, two days had passed when a new call came in, a similar scene, just outside a school, Anton drove out and saw the scene was grim. This time a teacher, stuffed in a culvert, one Netty Lyle, had taught there for years, just like Janet her skull had been bashed hard… a serial killer? It was a real fear. They had to suspect it was the same guy, the wounds were too similar to ignore, so Anton looked into Netty’s background and found that there were connections galore. See Netty had once taught Janet’s daughter, in several classes young Ellen had sat, now many students had gone through that school, but as he dug in, he found countless facts. That Ellen had been quite close with Netty, and had worked with her in several clubs, model UN, AV, and LGB, was it conincidence? That seemed too much. So alerts went out for Ellen Carson, a person of interest she had become, but as days went by no reports came in, no A.P.B.s or sightings, not a single one... CONTINUE IN PART II.