The Graves

  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.

The Killings

   Ten years had passed since the murders, ten years in which captain McCormick had not been able to get proper sleep. She had gotten a divorce and her children preferred to be away from her, although they called her sometimes. She thought that was more out of respect than because they actually cared about what happened to her. They were living their lives far away, with their own families and jobs. Her former husband had remarried and her children seemed to like their stepmother more than they liked her.

Or maybe it was the town. Maybe it was the things that  had happened there and her youngest son had seen some of them with his own eyes. She didn’t blame him for not coming back. Oddly enough, of her three children, he was the only one who called her regularly and not only on the holidays. She knew that he called out of fear of the past, thinking that what had happened may happen again one day.

 Captain McCormick still worked with the county police and she was proud too. After those horrible days, security had been strengthened and her county became an example for many others around the state. Samantha McCormick was proud that her work had done so much good but there’s always a case that hunts a policeman. There’s always that one unsolved case that hunts you to your death.

 It had begun during the state fair, when the bodies of two schoolteachers, both women, were found one morning in the middle of the rodeo ring. The corpses had been left in perfect state except for the eyes, which had been taken out. Besides that, everything seemed to be fine with them: no signs of extreme violence, no signs of rape or torture.

 Samantha looked for the murderer for at least a month until they found three more bodies, in the forest north of town. They were all male, various ages. They appeared to have been hanged but the heavy rain had made the tree branches weak and they had broken due to the weight of the dead men. At the moment, they thought both series of murders were not related but it was very uncommon for such a small county to have two murderers on the loose.

 Besides, because of the media, everyone got scared into thinking the streets were filled with murderers waiting for them to take a wrong step on the street. Some people left town and others barricaded them inside their houses. Some time later, a family was found burned to death inside their home and it was determined someone had initiated the fire by using the gas installation. It was then when Samantha began to think the murders were all related.

 It was impossible that three people were doing so much damage. Specially here, in a community were everyone knew each other and were strange behavior was easy to spot. Samantha had seen that private eye spirit in people before and it had never failed. She had been summoned many times by people thinking that their neighbor was a killer when in reality they were hiding affairs or just happened to be stealing money from their jobs.

 But this was different and, although many of her companions did not believe her, she was sure it was a mass murderer. Then, she was personally attacked. A man had taken her son and two other boys from outside the movie theater. She put every single policeman to work, scouting through the woods and the farmland to the south. Finally, they located tow of the boys still alive.  The third one had been killed with a gun in front of them and they claimed the murderer had told them he was going to eat them.

 Samantha sent all members of her family out of town, with her mother who lived in a big city far away. Only her husband stayed because he thought she was becoming increasingly obsessed with everything around the case and she was: that man had attacked her personally and she wasn’t going to let anyone to that to her. She couldn’t shake out the memory of her son trembling like mad, his eyes filled with tears and the blood covered shack where he and a his friends had been held hostage.

 Weeks after her children left town, police found the body of two elderly women. They had been left on one side of the road leading to some hot springs, which were really popular with tourists around the region. Then, everything stopped. They checked everyone’s house, every inch of the forest and the files, of the hot springs and every single public and private building in the county. Not only they did not found one more body, but also they didn’t found any suspects they could interrogate.

 Samantha got obsessed in the search for the culprits and would often drive all night around town to check on things, believing the murder or murderers might come out late at night to escape or kill again. But nothing happened. The only real change in her life was that her husband got fed up with her obsession and left her alone in town. She didn’t really care, at least not at the moment.

 She interrogated the kid that had been rescued with her son and, although she learned some new details about the kidnapping, she happened to be extremely harsh on the poor boy that kept weeping and was about to pass out by the end of her interview. The kid’s mother chased Samantha out, telling her to look for those mad men instead of harassing the only victims that happened to be alive.

 The head of the state police came to town to check on the mass killings investigation and decided to put someone else on the case and give Samantha a leave of absence to be with her family and get away from it all, at least for a few weeks. But she just couldn’t. She visited her children at her mother’s but it was then when they all realized nothing was going to be the same again.

 Her children were scared of her as she only sat on the living room, checking every single data on the killings on her computer. She did that every single day she stayed with her children and when her mother quarreled with her, telling Samantha she was no real mother if she cared mother about dead people than about her own children. Samantha responded that her job was to see that no one’s children; no one’s relatives will never be killed again. She stated that her job was first.

 This affirmation was hard on her children who decided to stop insisting on getting their mother back. To them, it was like her mother had been one more victim of the killings. They stayed behind when she went back to town and her mother only asked of her the necessary money to take care of the three children. Samantha did not argue and for the next seven years she sent money to her mother, no argument, no questions.

 She went back to solve the case, or so she thought, but she never got really far with it. Some of the evidence suddenly pointed towards a cult, a satanic group that had decided to settle in town and kill randomly and then leave, leaving no trace. It was the theory she backed after so many years, but the killings became a cold case, and unsolvable one.

 Every year Samantha attended a remembrance of the victims of the killings and many of the family members thanked her for never letting go of it all. They knew it had all been very hard on her too but they appreciated the fact that she was still looking for the person or persons that had committed such awful crimes.

 After ten years of the killings, people had begun to forget about it all. The county had become one of the safest places in the whole country and tourists poured in often to check out the hot springs, the food and the hospitality. She knew that some small groups came to visit the places were the murders took place but she didn’t mind, although she always suspected the murder could come back.

 But if he or they did, it never became obvious. People came and went and Samantha stood there for many more years. Even after her retirement, she would still try to solve the puzzle but she was never able to. She often cried, alone in her house. Not only because she felt so frustrated, not being able to go any far into the case. She also cried because the killer had not only killed those people but because he (or they) had destroyed many families, the spirit of a place and their hopes for the future. Samantha knew this to be a fact, from personal experience.

On The Queen Victoria

All the guests and hosts in the Queen Victoria sat down to eat, just past sunset. The yacht was so big it had a decent sized dining room, enough for all twelve guests. As people sat down, they greeted Johann Ronson, the owner and part-time captain of the vessel. He was the magnate that had bought the boat and had invited his closest friends to wander the Egean Sea with him for a week.

The main course, served after a shrimp cocktail and a couple of glasses of champagne, was king crab. It was fresh and only served with a butter sauce and a special fork to eat it. Everyone enjoyed thoroughly. A lot of crab, of wine and champagne and a lot of conversation. Even millionaires would start talking a little bit too much after such a meal.

It was a certain English lady that spilled the fact that her husband had made many stupid investments over the years and now they had absolutely nothing. Those who weren’t as drunk as her had heard it perfectly and had made a mental note never to deal with the woman or her family again.

Late at night, everyone went to bed. They were all full and tired. Only the captain stayed behind in the dining room, drinking and coursing the day he had bought the boat. The reality was that he needed somewhere to go, to escape from all the responsibilities he had with his family and numerous investors in his company. He felt so much money didn’t gave him as much privilege as he would have wanted.

He felt asleep right there and, for a good time, the ship was silent, anchored near a rock formation were a large amount of seagulls nested. It wasn’t until the next day, early, when a scream woke everyone up.

It came from one of the rooms in the stern. As people got near, they could distinguish that the voice that screamed was the one of a woman. Actually, everyone knew who was screaming. They found her on the bed, looking at her side. The scene was simply too much for anyone.

The lady that had no inheritance finally fainted, just besides her husband who was covered in blood from legs to neck, where he had been cut with a knife or something.

A couple of woman, helped by the staff of the boat, took Lady Emerson, the now poor and widowed woman, out of the room and into another one, until she woke up. When she did, she looked as if she had lost her mind, babbling nonsense and trembling uncontrollably.
The men passengers check Lord Emerson’s body, as the crew had been ordered by the captain to call the police but not to move the boat from its current location. He told them that if a crime, and that seemed to be the case, had been committed on board, they should call the police and wait right there to avoid the killer to escape.

But what was done had no way to be undone. They covered the body with a large blanket and waited for the police, who had been called on the radio. Lunch was served, as normal, but no one was really in the mood for sea bass. A dead body was only rooms away and it may prove insensitive to eat, as a murder had been committed.

The police finally arrived late in the afternoon. They had sent a translator with them and the inspector that had been sent with them was half American, so he had a way to talk to everyone in the boat.

The first thing they did was to get the body out of the yacht, as the smell was beginning to take a toll on the people in the nearest rooms. A young girl had already vomited profusely overboard, leaving the Greek waters a little bit more polluted than they were before.

The room were the crime was committing was closed and checked thoroughly all night. When it got too late, two officers were left there to protect the place from been contaminated. Before leaving, the inspector said he was sure he would find the murderer as he or she was still on the boat.

When he said that, everyone realized it was true. It was silly, but everyone had treated the murder as a natural death or something of sorts. But no, Lord Emerson had been killed when one of the passengers had slit his throat from behind, assuring he would not yell and no one would hear anything.

At breakfast, the next day, the Captain had to order the kitchen staff to serve everyone in their rooms, which was exceptionally annoying as breakfast was a buffet. So now, they had to go room by room to ask what people wanted and then bring it to them. In the kitchens there was also the discussion: “What if were serving the murderer”? To answer that, a boy who cleaned the bathroom only said “We’re all working for a killer right now”. Everyone laughed but it was certainly not funny.

The police came back during breakfast to commence the sweeping of the place of the crime and they found the sheets full of blood, the seal of a bottle of wine that had slipped beneath the bed and a stain near the back side of the bed, where there was a window.

When they finished, the captain was told his ship would be escorted back to Rhodes, where they had the equipment to do a full search on the yacht. Mr. Ronson was sad and even depressed but he had to accept if he wanted all of it to end soon. So by sunset, they were already in the island. To ensure the investigation, they were all put under “house arrest” in a hotel by the police station.

All the passengers were rich and had more interesting things to do than waiting for a murder investigation to finish. They had only reserved a week to travel to Greece to spend some time with old Ronson, because he was wealthier than any of them could ever be. If they ever ran into financial distress, it would be him who could be able to save them from it.

Ronson was known worldwide because of helping people that needed him: saving companies from bankruptcy, hiring the best lawyers, paying mortgages… The man was the savior of the rich, or so he was called in many economic magazines that praised and despised him, all at the same time.

The police told Mr. Ronson, that his boat was not going to be dismantled as the crime didn’t seemed planed or that structured but that they did need to search every single inch of it, as the be sure of what the investigation was pointing to.

So all the crew and passengers had to spend one more week in Rhodes, trapped in a fancy hotel, waiting for the results of the probe. The crew was especially happy as they didn’t have to work any more and they were the ones being treated to beautiful restaurants, an elegant swimming pool and all the drinks they could handle.

The wealthier guests almost always remained in their room, already trying to book flights or boats out of the damn island for the day they had been promised to be released. To be honest, they were looking forward more holidays and sunny locations, but away from all the fuss and annoying aspect of a murder.

The truth was none of them really cared about someone being killed just doors away from their rooms. They didn’t mind at all. What made them grind their gears, was the fact they couldn’t keep behaving as they always did and as what they were: rich spoiled brats who needed to be able to do whatever they wanted, even if they had no intention of doing anything.

Happily for them, not as much for the members of the crew, the boat was released on the promised date. However, they were all summoned to be present in the press conference were the murderer would be announced, as the evidence against that person was irrefutable.

The police babbled even more than most of the rich passenger of the yacht but, when it finally got to it, it was revealed Lady Emerson had been found guilty of the crime.

According to the police, it was found that only her could have been able to enter the room and kill him, as there were no traces of anyone else doing so, not the day of the murder or before. The stain found by the bed, was left there by Lady Emerson, as she opened the window to throw the murder weapon to the ocean. Of course, the weapon was nowhere to be found.

As for the seal of the bottle of wine, the police claimed they had found the bottle on a trashcan on the kitchens. Apparently, Lady Emerson had gotten her husband drunk before killing him with a knife and then, she went insane because of what she had done.

The inspector announced Lady Emerson would pay for her crime in the Attica prison for women, near Athens, and that she would do so in the psychiatric ward of the prison, for the next twenty years. He declared they had gotten a psychiatrist to run some tests to her, all of which certified she was beyond insane, losing all grasp of reality.

The yacht went back to the sea, with only Mr. Ronson inside and a few crewmen. The rest of the passengers left for Athens or London, or other destinations in the Mediterranean.

The actual murder? He left for Cyprus and then for Israel. As it happened, an old lover of Lady Emerson had been the real killer. She thought he had married another woman to spite her but he had married her to get close to her and to his husband, who he hated for having put her through so many bad times. So he killed her with a knife and she went mad when she woke up to see his lover, arms covered in plastic, killing her husband.

Lady Emerson died, insane and in pain, in the Attica prison. She had no children or real family. Her former lover lived in Eilat for several years, until one of the many wars in the region, in which he died.

Of victims and heroes

Far be it from me to mistreat a person that has gone through something hard. But hey, that woman is a fucking bitch. And no, I'm not saying she "was looking for it" or that "she deserved it". No, I'm just saying she's a bitch. And here's why.

First of all, the woman is not a victim. That fucking simple. She was just followed by a guy at night and then the guy disappeared. For all we know, it might have been a drunk guy or someone really stoned. Nothing really happened after that. Well, not besides her boyfriend going crazy and slapping her, once, in her apartment.

Yeah, I think I have to explain that. Margie, our "victim" and "hero" had a boyfriend. They had been together for at least three years and, naturally, they were thinking of getting married. Marge has always been kind of attractive (not to me, but whatever) and she certainly loved to party. Friends of mine knew for a fact that the woman couldn't stop herself from going out at least two days on a week and drink and dance and so on, for hours and hours.

Ok, that doesn't really make anyone a "bad person". But may I remind you that she didn't only had a few too many drinks, the girl was kinda loose and had more guys in a year than an army barracks. The girl was a bit too "free" and the worst was that her boyfriends, a fairly nice guy, had no idea she had been spending some much of her time with others.

Well, he finally realized it, about a week before they got married, when everything had already been bought, the venue was decided, the flowers chosen and the dress was resting on a hanger wearing to be worn.
He went to her house to drop the seating arrangements and found her going at it with a guy from her pilates class. So the marriage was cancelled but not before the guy beat the hell out of the lover of his bride to be (or not to be) and slapped her in the obvious rage.

So, no. She is not a victim in that sense. It wasn't gender violence or anything like that. It was a man deep in love hurt by a woman he should have never trusted. That was it.

Now, for seconds, let's talk about that guy that followed her. Working in the organization to defend the rights of women and others, I was there when her case was exposed and used in the media as one more act of harassment and violence against women and so on.

Of course, I was interested in knowing what had really happened. It was around that time when I decided to leave the organization, as I noticed they wanted to use anything to make their demands valid. They had greatly exaggerated what had happened with her boyfriend. Mutual friends told me he had to leave the country, as people began to harass him.

So I left that place but kept asking here and there about what had happened with the guy that followed her. As it turns out, it wasn't harassment, not a crazy stalker obsessed with the woman, as it had been said on the news and in numerous reports. Nothing close to that.

Albert Foch was around thirty years of age and had been consuming heroine and other drugs for around ten of those years. His body was not that strong and the drugs help him go through the cold nights, as food was pricier and less satisfying.

The night of the events, Albert had not consumed any drugs for some hours and was really hungry. He really wanted something hot, chocolate or coffee. He hadn't tasted any of those for quite some time and no drug could replace that need right now. He was walking through a neighborhood, shaking from the cold when he saw a young woman, that happened to be Margie. She had stepped out of a bus and dropped a wallet when she got down from it.

Albert waited for a moment and then went closer to grab the wallet. He checked it out and saw it had money and papers. So what he did was taking one of the bills, to buy some food, and decided to follow to woman to give the wallet to her. Maybe if she received it, she would give more money to him. So he followed her.

He did it for several streets and even yelled at her for the woman to stop but nothing worked. She just walked faster and yelled "Don't rob me, I have nothing". The man, exhausted from running after a crazy woman, yelled back: "You have nothing. I have your wallet". And maybe that was misinterpreted because she ran even faster and finally entered a building where a security guard warned him not to go near and threaten with calling the police. Albert explained to him that the woman had dropped her wallet and gave it to the guard. He left immediately and finally had a decent dinner, for once in many months.

All of this, I heard it from various sources, mainly the security guard but also, after scouting the neighborhood, I found Albert himself who told me the whole story and said he was actually thankful that he had the opportunity to grab the bill. I asked him why he didn't take it all and he answered he wasn't a thief and only took what he needed. He told me all when I invited him to have something to eat and he was grateful and, of course, surprised when he heard what she had said about what happened that night.

 - Bitches be crazy.

Well, this time Albert was absolutely right. Marge had judged a little bit too fast and never gave him a second chance.

Anyhow, she had one last surprise. She filed a lawsuit against her boss, because he had apparently harassed her in the office and cited as an accomplice a women that worked as a secretary in the office. As she announced a book in which she would tell her "courageous story", I decided to investigate this last event in her life.

I worked in an NGO called Human Rights for All and I had even more resources so it wasn't difficult to find out the man that had been Marge's boss, now unemployed, had never really come on to her. The truth was he was in love with the secretary she accused as an accomplice. And Marge was jealous of her and that was said by several of their coworkers. Apparently Marge wanted the boss to pay attention to her to get a raise but he only had eyes for the secretary, who also happened to be a skilled woman, dedicated to her work. Marge envied her for that. She considered her a "smart-ass", as many said she had called her.

So that was their story.

Well, I know there two sides to every story and the truth is always a mix of both. But Marge's life has not been an exemplary one and she has proven in numerous times, many more than the ones I tell here, that she is a prejudiced human being, only capable to achieve her goals by scheming and telling lies even to the people that decide to love her.

Even if it isn't all like that, I personally don't think that woman can be called a "hero" and, not at all, "a victim". She has used that status to make people feel bad for her and somehow that has made her superior to others, as if that made her a better person, which she actually thinks she is having released two books and becoming a model and spokesperson.

But that's our world, where real victims and heroes are ignored in favor of the fabricated dreams of others.