The Past Should Stay Buried

My name is Detective Howie Lucio McFarlane, I work as a free lance investigator for those who are willing to pay. And trust me, there are always people willing to pay me to track down their long lost cousins or missing children. About a month ago however I was approached by a man who didn't seek me out for either of the aforementioned reasons, but to hunt down the person who had taken his wife from him. The events that followed are probably related to the biggest failure in my career to date, but out of sheer idiocity I have decided to recount them here and now for personal reasons. Maybe one day I'll be able to show this to my wife and finally explain why it is I started locking the doors and windows ritualistically each night before bed.

That aside, I was packing up to head out for lunch from my office when the man approached me. By approached I mean he forced his way into my office and demanded to see me before I left, seeing the large wad of cash he pulled from his pocket I promptly decided that whatever it is he wanted was definitely worth my time. I rehung my faded brown tench coat on the coat rack in the corner of the room behind my desk and took a seat in my chair, motioning for him to do the same in one of the two chairs positioned in front of me.

His features relaxed as the stress of possibly not catching me on time melted away and he dumped himself into the barely plush fabric of my cheap office chairs. I recall looking him over once, he didn't seem to come from money at the time. His clothes were wrinkled from some sort of physical activity of which the sweat around his armpits was still drying, he was in need of a shave badly, and dark circles hung under his swollen eyes; one far more enlarged and appearing to blacken. "Rough night?" I smiled at him.

"You could say that again," he mumbled. He gave me a short recount of his night's events: the drinking, the argument, the bar fight. That explained quite a bit of why he was so disheveled, but I didn't get the answer as for why he hadn't been sleeping until he moved on to why he was there. His name was Scott Lawson, a tax accountant from a state away who'd researched me online and decided I was the best candidate for what he needed. "I need you to," he struggled with tears as he spoke, "find someone for me." I was used to this reaction from people at this point, I nodded my head in false sympathy and bade him to continue.

What he wove was the tale that follows.

A few years back he's met a girl named Lindsey Voss and over time became smitten with her. They married about a year later and had been living their happily ever after until her untimely death a few weeks prior to our meeting. The cops had determined it was a murder, but the now widowed husband was sure that they weren't doing all they could to solve the case, which is where he wanted me to come in and save the day. The pay was good so I bid the blonde a good day and put in a call with his county's police department in an attempt to get my hands on the files involved in that case.

Obtaining what I needed proved easier than I expected, apparently the force was busy with a large drug bust and was more than happy to have eager eyes working on it so they could save man power. The file arrived a few days later after going through the proper routes and soon enough I held copies of the documents and pictures taken at the scene in my hands. The images I saved for last, deciding to read the coroners cause of death first. It was simply stated as: hemorrhaging due to blunt force trauma inflicted by the femur of an old man found at the crime site. The rest of the file was full of basic information on the girl such as her name, age, weight, blood type, and other such trivial things that didn't catch my eye. I skimmed over it and moved on to the pictures as I popped a piece of gum into my mouth in boredom.

The pictures of the autopsy were normal, but the photos taken at the crime scene were what caught my eye. The young and beautiful Lindsey Lawson was folded around a wooden wheel of some sort, her hands and legs tied together on one side and her body stripped naked on the other. Her midsection and thighs were littered with deep bruises showing where the blood had gathered within her. The femur had been left next to her body as a present from her murderer. What specifically I found interesting about these photos was the wheel that she was tied to.

It looked hand crafted, as if the maker was in a rush. Bits of splinter poking out here and there with the pegs lined up haphazardly, along one side three wooden spikes pokes out from the wheel. One on either side of her arms and the other behind he head. I'd never seen something like that before, it was a real wheel turner. I decided to try Google, the 'answerer' of all my most important questions. What I got was... unsettling, more unsettling than the fact that the femur used to murder Lindsey had belong to her great grandfather.

There was such thing in existence around the middle ages as a breaking wheel, or a Catherine's wheel. The difference being that a Catherine's wheel had blades or spikes along the outside edge, much like half of the wheel found at the crime scene. They were commonly used for torture way back when, and the idea of some sick bastard playing out dungeons and dragons fantasies on unsuspecting people chilled me a bit. This wasn't my usual kind of case, and just looking at the autopsy photos had been enough to make my insides churn.

I was exasperated, a woman beaten to death with the bone of her ancestor in the means of medieval torture. I let out a shaky sigh before I had an epiphany. I remembered reading in the papers about a week before Lindsey's death of another corpse found killed on a wheel. But that individual had been chained to a wall and beaten into the spikes with a metal pipe. I turned back to Google and put in the generics of the situation, I was surprised by what I found.

The murder from my town that I was looking for wasn't on the first page, and as I scrolled I counted two more news stories of similar deaths. All involving a wheel though all having died in somewhat different ways. It seemed too good to be true at the time, that no one else had made this sort of connection, but then again the more I dug the more I found out why.

Each of the murders happened in a place where the police forces were being pulled in as many directions as a dog walker on a week day. Mostly drugs, but there were a few where robberies and other such things were taking center stage. It was possible that they simply hadn't been able to give the cases the attention they needed. I decided then that I would call and request the files to any similar cases I came across. I received most of the ones I asked for, and word got around from task force to task force that I was on the case. Due to that the resistance I met dropped considerably and it would later lead me to seeing my first dead body in the flesh.

At first I assumed the killer picked these locations based on these crime rates as an attempt to help cover their tracks, I was wrong, very wrong. Over the course of the next two weeks I read and reread the case files, matching bits and pieces of this and that between the murders. Before long I was certain that we were dealing with a serial killer and presented my findings to the offices that I received the files from. They went over my work and within a few days most of them were on board. DNA evidence found at a few of the crime scenes got pushed to priority and soon we knew who our serial murderer was.

As it turned out we found her DNA to be a match from a willfully given sample back when a neighbor of theirs was accusing the girl for the disappearance of their German Shepard. We know now that they were right, as the owners of the property gave us permission to dig up that back yard where several animal corpses of varying sizes and decay rates were found. Rachel Margret Downs graduated high school a week before her disappearance from her meager home, over the time that she lived with her parents she apparently caused them some extreme paranoia on top of obvious trickery to make her parents believe she had some form of higher powers.

I was allowed to sit in behind the two way mirror as an officer interrogated Mrs. Downs. She told a vast ghost story about a woman who could see ghosts committing suicide and possessing her daughter and I felt a wave of anguish. Obviously this lady was crazy, and that crazy ran in the family, meaning that an insanity plea was in our near future when we caught the girl. It pained me to know that she'd get off on a lighter sentence due to it, but justice was justice and I had taken a personal interest in this case.

My wife, on the other hand, had taken up complaining about my habit of reading the case files at dinner, it was starting to irk her to levels anew but she just didn't understand how invested I was. How invested I still am. Because of my work we were hops and leaps closer to catching this son of a bitch who was going to murder god knows how many more people while she still out there. My thoughts were constantly circling around it, trying to look in every nook for some key detail I had missed.

News stations started broadcasting the story and people were put on high alert, search team after search team scoured the areas where she'd reportedly been seen. Every time they came back empty handed or having just found a camp site of hers.

I was called in to work with some investigators at the station where I got Lindsey's file when I was presented with a connection I hadn't seen coming, though it was right in front of my face. Every victim of the Wheel Running Murderer, or so the news had taken to naming her, had been the direct offspring of people who lived in a small town about twenty miles from Spearfish, South Dakota in 1920. The year Rachel's Great Grandmother had committed suicide.

When I went home that evening my mind recounted the tale Mrs. Downs had told. Apparently according to her mother the woman had been able to converse with the dead and accused the mayor of murdering a woman. A few days later she was mugged by a group of men who removed her eyes and were never caught. The woman became bed ridden with depression and an unwillingness to adapt that cause her husband to hate her. In an attempt to brighten the situation he had two glass eyes made to match her original eyes and forced them into her empty sockets when she refused them. A few days later she killed herself by slitting her own throat and her daughter was the first one to find her body.

Apparently they'd managed to collect the knife and eyes from the police department way back when, buried one with the husband, and had had both the knife and other eye in a box in the attic before they awoke to Rachel's screams. They had ventured into that same storage area to find their daughter had taken them both, ripped out her right eye, and put her Great Grandmother's glass eye in its place.

The picture was becoming clearer with every step we took, and as far as I was concerned little miss 'Alice in Wonderland' was going to go away for a long, long time.

A few days later I was invited to come to a recently discovered crime scene left behind by that same little miss. It was in the midst of some forest not too far from the town where her Great Grandmother had lived. On the way there I was briefed on how all the graves around that area had recently been dug up and desecrated, aside for one from which the femur that killed Lindsey Lawson had been taken. Turns out that man had been the mayor of the town that the deceased old lady had accused of murder.

By this point I had adjusted to looking at the photographs of dead bodies that had unsettled me when the case first began, I was in no way ready for the horror that awaited me in the forest. Beyond the police tape, the shuffling bodies, and camera flashes there laid a river. It was shallow, about knee deep, but that was apparently all our mischievous Rachel had needed to do her deed. I arrived with the medical researchers and was one of the first to know the assumed cause of death for the unfortunate teenager that they'd found.

They'd dragged the body out of the river by the time we walked up, and I had to stop and catch my breath so I didn't forsake possible evidence with my own stomach bile. The thing about corpses left in water is that they bloat, and when they bloat everything goes down hill. The stench was so overwhelming that I was supplied with a surgical mask to allow me to get closer to the remains. What was left hardly looked like a person to me.

Every inch was swollen and pale, bits here and there darkened by the still blood that no longer coursed through her veins. Like a few other victims this one was fully clothed, which saved me from quite a few nightmares. As the medical team gathered around I peered over the shoulder of one of them in an attempt to get a look at the girls face. However it was covered by a thick, soaking wet burlap sack that appeared to be tied tightly around the water swollen neck of the body. They cut carefully at the bag, not wanting to rupture the skin underneath, for it would burst if cut. When they removed it we were greeted by two bulging, wide spread eyes.

I had to step away at that point, it was all just a little too real for me. Obviously the cause of death ended up being drowning. Apparently Rachel had covered her head and rolled her downstream till she died and then left her there. It still sounds like an awful way to go to me.

I stepped away from the crime scene and into the deeper section of the forest. I don't know how far I walked, but I remember that the shadows grew long around me as the sound of people faded far beyond screaming distance.

I feel the need to mention at this point that I have never been one for the supernatural. I never believed in ghosts or goblins or even the tooth fairy, but I can honestly say that what happened after that changed my mind.

As I walked a pair of black boots registered in my peripheral vision, then tan pants, then a black leather jacket, and finally the face of none other than Rachel Downs. I panicked as she smiled at me, not innocently and yet not malevolently at the same time. It wasn't her I was truly scared of however, but what.. who was standing behind her. He had to be at least three times her height, unbelievably thin, wearing some kind of suit. That was just the beginning however, because as my eyes traced his form skyward they didn't settle on a face, but a distinct lack of one.

Before I knew it I was backed into a tree with a knife being pulled out of my left shoulder. I don't quite recall what happened after that. My head just.. stopped. It was filled with pain so intense that I blacked out, and when I came to I was being loaded into an ambulance and rushed off to the nearest hospital. My colleagues assumed that I simply came face to face with her and was bested, but something bigger is going on here.

I promptly pulled out after that, I gave Scott his money back, went home to my wife. I was going to get as far away from what happened as I could... Except there is no running from what I know. I've been religiously locking all the doors and windows before bed for weeks now, but when I woke up this morning I found a sheet of paper on my bedside table.

Its simple, like a children's drawing.

No eyes, always watching.