[hider=under construction][center][hr][hr][h2]Chapter One: Enter The Lawman [/h2][img]https://ugc.kn3.net/i/760x/http://fc02.deviantart.com/fs31/f/2008/209/9/2/Crime_Scene_by_AndreeWallin.jpg[/img][hr][hr][/center]

Springton, Ohio was an ordinary town with an extraordinary body count. Per capita, more serial murderers originated from this sleepy little place than anywhere else in America. Of course, if all one paid attention to were the quaint little homes and the aging churches, that would be hard to see. The people didn't act like they lived in a serial killer's cradle. They acted like perfectly normal, inviting people- capturing well that Midwestern charm that everyone seemed so fond of.

Ignorance tends to be blissful, after all; and the Springtonians were nothing short of entirely, wholly ignorant of the bloodthirsty monsters they shared neighborhoods and park benches with.

It was hard to blame them for it with how few signs there were. Crime in Springton was just as rare as in any other town of it's size. The worst of it was rowdy, bored teenagers graffiting their names on the theater's marquee. The local cops were thankful to them, in a way. It gave them something to do aside from pick up trash and hand out speeding tickets.

When an aging local with a failing career left his wife and children behind to chop up young women in Cleveland, nobody seemed to notice. The few that did notice would gawk and point, wondering how someone from innocent little Springton could do such a thing. Without fail, however, they'd forget in a week's time and life would return to it's usual, unimpressive status quo. No one had bothered to gather the names of every man or woman born in their town that ended up leaving to commit terrible atrocities upon their fellow man. It was such an unthinkable and extraordinary thing that no one would've even thought to connect the dots.

Agent John Conrad couldn't help but raise a brow when his superior dropped the Springton file on his desk Friday afternoon. It was a packet only a few pages long, detailing the strange coincidence of Springton's murderous tendencies.

One of the sections was a research paper written by one of the FBI's own psychologists on the phenomena. She had- unsuccessfully- attempted to decode what it was about the town that drove people toward murder, and why those same people so rarely chose their hometown as the target of their psychopathic wrath. John thought it was a fascinating read, but he found himself puzzled by the conclusion: that is, there [i]was[/i] no conclusion. The doctor's half a decade of research had ended very abruptly for reasons not detailed in the packet. 

'For all intents and purposes,' she wrote, 'there is no logical reason for why Springton is the way it is. I can only assume this strange string of unconnected events is the work of coincidence and happenstance.'

It made for a poor finale, John had mused at the time; and, perhaps ironically, the whole thing was made void the moment he picked the file up.

Springton's history of shipping it's crimes out of town had come to a sudden and abrupt halt when Officer Leon O'Connell was found dead at the scene of another crime he was investigating. The FBI had jumped on the case the moment they received the call, and it was promptly given to Conrad for him to sort it all out. He was a veteran investigator with a long, successful career. In all of his days, he'd never seen anything quite as strange as what he saw when he stepped into that crime scene for the first time.

The home of one Audrey Banks sat on a quiet, inactive street. Even with over half a dozen police cruisers parked out front, they seemingly hadn't drawn the attention of more than a few curious kids that probably should've been at school given the time. John offered them a wave from the driveway, but all that did was spook them into dashing back inside their front door like cockroaches exposed to the light.

"Don't mind 'em. Kids 'round here are all a bunch'a weasels." Officer Goodman dismissively threw his shoulders up. He was a middling man that looked a few years older than actually he was. Defined by humorless laugh lines and unwashed black hair hidden underneath a tattered winter cap that looked a size too small for his head, Goodman was about the last man on earth who should've been calling anyone a weasel. "You, uh, you wanna head on in? We start losin' light early this time'a year."

Fall came in hard and fast, decimating the summer heat like a sledgehammer through a glass door. It snowed the first day of September. Thankfully it had dried out by the time John had arrived, but the wind still held a bitter frost to it that he found tiresome and obnoxious. Still, he felt a kind of...odd obligation to take it in. It reminded him of her.

Conrad shut his eyes, letting the air stab and brush against his gaunt cheeks. The cold tended to affect him more deeply than it did most men- his spindly form and complete lack of girth or meat brought the cold straight to his bones. It wasn't quite so bad when he was young. Even in college, he'd had a relatively neutral relationship with the colder parts of the year. Time had a habit of changing things, however. It was a bitter sweet sort of cold. He always dreaded it's arrival yet, once it had come, he wished it would never leave.

His resilience had diminished when the brown in his mane went gray, and when his hair began to thin around it's zenith; he had long since abandoned the brown and colored the rest of his hair to match the silver strands gathered about his widow's peak.

"You hard'a hearin' or somethin'?" Goodman, wanting to get the agent's attention, tried and failed to snap his fingers through the thick gloves he'd donned to keep away the cold, a rush of crimson filling his cheeks in his momentary embarrassment.

Conrad sighed, his shoulders falling as he turned around, his gaze never falling on the small town cop as he started for the door. "Forgive me, officer, I'm a little jet lagged." He wasn't- he'd managed to fall asleep quite well the night prior, in all actuality. But telling Goodman the truth involved explaining that his voice was akin to a concrete mixer, a jackhammer and a Nicki Manaj song all trying to one-up each other in both volume and obnoxiousness; and that was a conversation best saved for never.

Instead he chose to ignore him, climbing up onto the suburban home's porch. The door's white and pink paint job was likely quaint or even cute, once; but time had chipped away at it and dulled the colors until they were muted and unimpressive. He pulled it open and stepped through the threshold, his gaze running along the pictures adorning every inch of the entryway hall. Few of the frames matched in color or material, their sizes were seemingly random, and there was no discernible order about their arrangement. The pictures themselves, too, lacked much coherence. A handful of individuals were scattered throughout the display- sometimes visibly older or younger- but the majority only featured once or twice.

Conrad leaned in close, his gaze sharpening when he noticed several of the pictures had been altered at some point. Each one featured what appeared to be the same woman at various stages in her life, the earliest of them appearing to be from high school and the most recent in her early-to-mid thirties. What bothered him, however, was the alterations: her face had been cut out of each and every one of them. It wasn't a crude job, either; it looked like someone had taken their time with the removal, making sure not to damage the rest of the picture at all.

[i]'Curious.'[/i]

"Ah, yeah. Audrey was a photographer for the, uh, newspaper, I think." Goodman added from behind Conrad, stuck partly on the porch and partly inside the home. "Took photos of every little thing that she did. There're more'a these in the kitchen and livin' room." He pointed out, doing a poor job at hiding the urgency in his voice.

"Did she ever take photographs of herself?" John asked, his hand rubbing against his skeletal chin.

Goodman just shrugged. "Couldn't tell ya. She used 'ta work for the paper down the way- y'know, the Sentinel?- they might be able to tell ya more about her."

It wasn't a lot to go on, but at least it was a lead- a lead in a case that he wasn't actually assigned to. He had a feeling that finding out who killed O'Connell meant finding out what really happened to Miss Banks. Two investigations rolled into one sounded like the headache John knew he didn't need but felt obligated to take on anyway.

Blowing air out of his nose, he reluctantly moved further inside, allowing a grateful Goodman to step in after him and close the door to the elements. "Did you touch anything?" He asked quietly, almost absentmindedly, as he moved toward the first door to his left. It was ajar, revealing the brightly decorated kitchen beyond.

"Nah, nah. We waited for ya, like we were supposed'ta." The officer dismissed. "Just moved the body, took a look around, secured the place- you know the drill."

"Mm, right. The drill." John muttered, distracted by something that had caught his eye. The smoldering remains of a half-finished cigarette had been brushed up underneath the lip of the kitchen counter. He bent down at the knees, snatching up the freshly stinking embers.

Goodman shrugged his shoulders, his hands digging into his pockets as he leaned over Conrad to see what it was he looking at. "Guess she was a smoker." He concluded, shifting his weight between his feet.

John turned his head back, an incredulous look on his face. "Of course." According to the case file he'd taken from Springton PD, Audrey Banks had been reported missing a week prior. Officer O'Connell was at her home looking for leads when he failed to report back to dispatch. Judging by the stench wafting up from the cigarette between Conrad's fingers, it was lit perhaps an hour ago at most. There were no other apparent signs that Miss Banks had a smoking habit: no visible ashtrays or other remnants, and the smell of lingering nicotine only clung in this particular portion of the kitchen.

For a brief moment he considered confronting the officer for contaminating a crime scene, but John ultimately decided it wasn't worth the wasted breath. He rolled the bud up between his fingers to dose the embers and tossed it into a nearby trash can as he moved deeper into the kitchen. More photographs sat above a small table pressed against the far wall. Another two of them with that same woman and her missing face. There were only three chairs around the table, and John noted that a layer of dust had gathered over two of them- they hadn't been moved in quite awhile.

[i]'Must not have gotten much company.'[/i] He mused.

The kitchen opened up on the right into the living room, where the faint odors of excrement and blood mingled. It was old enough now that the scent wasn't an assault against his nostrils, but it was still less than pleasant as he stepped inside. They'd moved poor Leon's body the day he had died, leaving behind only a chalk outline of the position he had fallen in when he lost his life as a ghostly reminder of what had happened here. The carpet was still stained a deep, ugly red around the chalk where Leon had presumably bled out. "Tell me again what it looked like when you found him." Conrad asked, his hands shoved deep into the pockets of his winter jacket as he cast his gaze around the room.

"Well, uh...He was lyin' there, I guess-" Goodman motioned toward the only spot on the floor he could be talking about. "Shirt was drenched in blood, and the murder weapon was still lodged in his chest. There were these three big gashes runnin' up his body from his, uh, from his hip to 'bout his throat. Gnarly stuff. Definitely dead when we got here."

[i]'Excellent deduction. It's a wonder you haven't made detective already.'[/i] Conrad held his tongue, glancing around the room. Most of the furniture was either upturned, damaged or outright destroyed. The couch had been practically gutted, it's white, fluffy contents spread about the floor alongside various springs and chunks of wood. A cabinet pressed up against the wall had large pieces cut out of it and tossed about, the doors torn from their hinges in what John could only assume was a chaotic brawl or a mindless, violent rampage. The level of destruction was almost daunting. All of the windows were shattered, and there didn't appear to be a single place in the room that hadn't suffered some form of attack. It was almost as if the killer had made a [i]point[/i] of breaking everything.

"And the murder weapon...it was an ax, correct?" He turned his gaze toward the largest and most perplexing piece of the puzzle. It spanned nearly from one end of the room to the other, covering the surface of almost an entire face of the living room from floor to ceiling and wall to wall.

Goodman ran his poorly trimmed fingernails through the day old excuse for stubble that marked his neck, his head craned upward as he joined Agent Conrad in staring at the strange state of the living room wall. He didn't say anything for several seconds, seemingly lost in thought- if that was even possible for him- but he managed to snap back to reality in time. "Oh! Uh, yeah. Yeah. We got it back at...back at lock-up."

John nodded, taking a step forward. "This may sound a little unconventional, Officer Goodman, but I'd like you to ride back to the station and get that for me." He didn't need to turn around to confirm that Goodman was on his way with how loudly the other man walked. Once he heard the sound of the front door opening and then closing promptly again, he took in a deep breath and ran his hand along the wall. The other man had left without a word, leaving Conrad a moment to think without being interrupted by his constant ramblings.

He was thankful for the silence; he'd need it to help make sense of whatever it was he was looking at.

Six deep indents had been seemingly carved into the wall from one end of the room to the other, like the murderer had dragged the ax head through the drywall all the way along six times over, starting from the ceiling and working his way down to almost at the floor. The cuts looked to be several inches thick, growing thinner the deeper in the weapon was forced. Conrad couldn't imagine what had happened for the attacker to do this, unless he just went berserk on the room after killing Leon in cold blood. Even then, with how high up the top slash was, he would've needed a ladder to properly make that cut. And the angle he would've needed to go at the bottom slash looked horrifically uncomfortable.

It didn't make any sense. Why go to all the trouble just to do this?

John Conrad was left with a number of other questions as well. Namely: what was this person doing in Audrey Banks's home in the first place? Why had they targeted Officer O'Connell? And what had driven them to cause such destruction? 

He sighed, moving his hand into his pocket to feel the cool metal of his pocket watch. "Hell of a Monday morning."
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