Page 32 of Sinister Legacy
The forbidden always tastes sweeter.
There’s a soft creak behind me, and a wire is dropped over my head and pulled taut around my neck before I can spin my chair around. My body jerks on the seat, and my legs kick out as I begin to struggle. I grapple desperately with the wire, my hands coming away slick with blood and my eyes bulging as I choke.
A cold mask brushes up against my ear, and then a distorted voice taunts, “So you like to fuck underage girls and sell the recordings online?”
He tightens the string with a hard yank, and it makes a wet sound when it cuts through my carotid artery.
“And now you get to die like a pig and have all of your dirty secrets exposed to the world.”
My fighting stops, and my limbs fall helplessly to my sides. The last thing I hear before the darkness takes me is the blood that drips steadily from my fingertips.
Drip. Drip. Drip.
“What are we dealing with here?” I ask as I step into the office. The school has been cornered off while the crime scene is photographed and scoured for evidence.
I’m exhausted, having barely slept a wink.
Officer Riveiro nods her head towards where Principal Byrne lies bent over the desk, his dead eyes staring in the direction of the window.
I walk closer, careful not to step in the large pool of blood on the floor. Principal Byrne’s pants and briefs have been pulled down to his ankles, and his hairy ass cheeks have the wordpigwritten in blood on each side.
“Look at this,” the crime scene investigator, Pinnegar, says, inching the ass cheeks apart with his gloved fingers.
I stare at the stapler that protrudes from his rectum. “Well, this is new. Jimmy Hill didn’t do this to any of his victims.”
Officer Riveiro speaks up. “He also didn’t kill any of his victims this way. It’s a deviation.”
“The copycat is going off script,” I mumble, bending at the waist to inspect the corpse’s neck.
“That makes him more dangerous,” Riveiro points out. “We’re back at square one.”
Pinnegar points his gloved fingers to the lacerations on the neck. “His head was almost severed in the struggle.”
“What do you think?”
“Judging by the blood, he was garroted on his desk chair, and then the killer staged the scene.”
“What about the stapler?”
“Personal,” Riveiro says, pointing a finger at a stack of tapes on the desk. “They were placed there after the murder. I bet they will have some incriminating evidence.”
I straighten up and scan my eyes around the room. “Entry point?”
Riveiro lifts her chin, and I turn to look behind me. “The killer most likely hid in the built-in cupboard.”
Walking over, I stick my head inside. The floor-to-ceiling shelving is stacked with files and books. More importantly, it’s big enough to fit a grown man. Maybe even two, if they squeezed together.
“So aside from the note on the whiteboard, which could have been a practical joke, we have nothing that suggests this is related to Jimmy or Keira Hill?”
“No,” Riveiro replies. “Unless you count good old instinct. Aside from Jimmy Hill’s murder spree, something like this is unheard of in Blackwoods. What are the odds we have two homicides and an attempted murder in less than two weeks by two different killers?”
“You’re right,” I reply, slowly walking the length of the room. “But I can’t go to the public with theories. We need proof. And until our copycat strikes again, or we find some evidence to tie this murder to that of the Jessica girl… Well… We’re fumbling in the dark. We need to treat the murders as unrelated incidents while also keeping an open mind that it’s most likely the same person.” I remove a pair of gloves from my pocket, shake them out, and then slide them on. Pinnegar hands me a small, plastic bag with a zip.
Collecting the tapes, I seal them inside. “Let’s get these looked at.”
* * *
The door behind me squeaks open, and I press pause on the screen. Never in my fucking life did I think I would get paid to watch the principal of Blackwoods High fuck underage girls in his office. It’s disturbing, and I will need a year-long holiday once the killer is behind bars.
