A crossbow had been left behind and there
were four arrows on the victim’s body, which had being killed by a chilly
stream that had defrosted overnight. The body had been found far from any
settlement and, although chief Jones and her officers scouted the area for
several days, they didn’t find anything else referring to the murderer.
Somehow, he had dropped the murder weapon but nothing else. The people in the
lab found nothing on the handle of the crossbow either, which was a recent
design, almost custom made. That would maybe be useful to find the manufacturer
and, from there, the buyer.
Jennifer jones had been the chief of police
for only two years and this was her first big job. Working on an almost
desolate county, most of her days she spent her time dealing with disputes over
land and maybe a drunk driver. She had been in the force for fifty years and
she had always thought the future might hold something brighter for her but
that wasn’t the case. She lived only with her teenage son as her husband had
been killed in the war a few years ago. Jennifer thought she had been promoted
because of whom her husband had been but that didn’t matter anymore. The people
of the county liked her and she knew them all.
She supervised the work of Doctor Pike, the
medical examiner who had to be very careful not to damage the victim’s body
when extracting the arrows from his body. The dead man was kind of young, but
something felt off about him. Maybe he was older… The doctor removed the arrows
successfully and put them on a small tray on one side to check them later.
Then, he asked Jennifer to help him. She often did as he had no assistants and
it was a work that had to be done as a team. So the chief of police help him
undress the body. It was then that she realized what was wrong with the body.
On her shirt, some stains let her know that the body was wearing makeup.
Then, Doctor Pike removed the clothes, both
the shirt and the pants, and confirmed that the body appeared to be the one of
a female. But Jennifer, seeing how he washed the body, thought the girl’s
breasts were really small and then she had an idea. She left Doctor Pike for a
moment, leaving for her office to call the medical center. It wasn’t a big
hospital but it was the biggest one of the county. Then, she called every
single hospital near town, even if outside her jurisdiction and went back to
Pike’s morgue by night.
The doctor confirmed what she already knew:
the body was from a transgender person. She had been a female but had undergone
treatment to change into a male. The breasts and muscular development were
proof of that. Jennifer had called every single hospital to ask if someone had
gone hormone treatment recently or if they had any sex change surgery scheduled
for the coming months. And they did, all of that, but it was a list of at least
twenty names, which had surprised her.
This was a very remote part of the country and
people were not very welcome of differences. Maybe that had been the reason for
the assassination of this young girl. Or boy… She was con fused because this
had never happened before and she had never known anyone like this victim. She
left the doctor to finish his job and decided to go back home. On her way
there, she stared from the patrol, looking at everyone’s face, just wondering
if she had ever known someone else like the girl in the morgue. She couldn’t
stop thinking of how hard it must have been for her and what hardships she must
have undergone to end up where she now was.
When Jennifer entered her house, her son
Thomas was cooking dinner. For a sixteen-year-old boy, he was very resourceful
and always started making dinner, especially when he noticed Jennifer was going
to be late. Tonight, he had made pasta with meatballs and a very rich sauce.
Jennifer kissed her son on his forehead and hugged him. They were very close
and always tried to spent time together but that was hard because of her job.
He had learned to cope with it and never condemned her for it but always
supported her, even making small lunches for her to take to work.
She had already discussed with him that she
would do the impossible for him. The woman knew her son loved to cook so she
had already started saving to put him in the best cooking school she could
afford. Jennifer had gone online often to gather a lot of information about
schools, costs, what he would learn and so on and would then email it to him to
see what he thought of it. He was very eager to do all of it but he been very
clear he would be miserable leaving her alone.
As
she waited for dinner at the table, she remembered the young woman at the
morgue and wondered if she also had a family to worry about her. Was she alone
when she had been killed or was someone with her and then escaped the
assailant? Nothing pointed to another person ever being there but it was
comforting to think someone would have been there. Thinking of death was now
common for Jennifer but she found the concept of dying alone much more
frightening than anything else.
Thomas came with two plates and she served some
orange juice they had left. She realized she had to go to the supermarket,
probably the next weekend before there was nothing left to eat. She forgot all
about her case and asked her son for his day in school. He answered there had
been nothing special as everyone was to busy talking about the person they had
found by the stream, in the forest.
-
How do you know about that?
-
It’s true, then?
Jennifer hated speaking about work on the
house but, for the sake of trust, she decided to tell her son everything,
including the fact that the victim was a transgender person. Thomas,
surprisingly, knew a lot about the subject and corrected his mother when
referring to the victim as a girl. He told her transgender people prefer to be
called the gender that they feel they are and not the one that they have been
born into. So he said she should start talking about him and not her. But
Jennifer was confused and responded that in order to know who he was, she had
to ask for a girl. Thomas conceded in that aspect and told her that he had read
a lot about it online.
The chief of police was very curious about why
her son was reading about the subject but decided not to ask further questions
and preferred to praise him on dinner, which always made him very proud. After
dinner, they went to bed and realized she was still thinking about the girl,
who she now had to think of as a boy, which lay dead in the morgue. What did he
do to deserve two arrows to the heart and one of each leg? Was he escaping from
someone or did he do something wrong to the wrong person?
The next day, surprisingly, it all became
quite clearer. Doctor Pike had confirmed the crossbow had been custom made as
the arrows and the structure of it were made to properly kill wild animals, so
whoever used it to kill the boy had also used it for hunting. They checked the
places that would make that kind of weaponry and there was only one for the
next two hundred miles. She visited the store and the clerk, an old silent man,
showed her the books and the name of his client: Robert Graves.
Somehow, Jennifer Jones knew that name or at
least felt she did. It wasn’t the name of anyone in her county, she was sure of
that. That man didn’t leave nearby but somehow she was sure she had seen or
read the name recently and they she realized where that had been. She went back
to her office and checked the list she had made with all the hospitals, of all
the hormone treatment patients they had. Right enough, there was a Graves in
the list, under the name Pamela.
Chief Jones went to the hospital personally
and asked for the file on Pamela Graves. Apparently she was seventeen years old
and had come to the hospital accompanied by her mother. She had begun treatment
six months ago and had been scheduled for another appointment the day she had
been killed. And it all pointed to her father being the killer. The next stop
for Jennifer was the police of the county where the Graves family lived. She
joined them to raid the house and found the man dead, with a bullet in his
head. He was there, sitting on the sofa as if he was still alive but he wasn’t.
Then,
checking the house, Jennifer realized there was heavy breathing coming from the
bathroom of the main room. She opened it by force and discovered who must have
been Pamela’s mother and Robert’s wife. She was covered in blood and her eyes
were almost out of their sockets. She kept mumbling “my daughter” and staring
at her blood-covered hands.
That night, Jennifer returned to Thomas and
told him how much she loved him and how she wanted nothing more but happiness
for him. He thought it was a bit strange but accepted her words and hugs.
