Free The Killing Kind by M. William Phelps

calls that law enforcement agencies receive: such as a suspect holed up in a house or hotel with an arsenal of weapons, looking to go out in a blaze of bloodshed.
    Hensley was a North Carolina transplant, yet no stranger to the South, having grown up in Chattanooga, Tennessee. His family moved to Gaston County when Hensley was in his teens. It wasn’t some sort of childhood dream to become a cop. Hensley went to college and majored in business. His first job out of school was with Lowe’s Corporation in its corporate offices near Mooresville, North Carolina. Yet, after a short stint at Lowe’s, working within that corporate environment, Hensley found the work to be rather unfulfilling.
    “I wanted to become a detective,” Hensley realized. He craved excitement and the pressure of performance. Toiling inside a cubicle farm all day, counting beans—with all due respect to his former coworkers for their chosen profession—wasn’t what Hensley realized he wanted to do. He wanted to be out in the world, solving puzzles, dealing with the public, helping people. Not to mention, within his family, Hensley had a pedigree to fall back on. Effectively, it was that law enforcement bloodline Hensley could not escape.
    While away at SWAT school, Hensley had heard how several of his GCPD colleagues were at the Heather Catterton crime scene in North Carolina. Gaston County law enforcement had been called in on that original case to support the YCSO. Hensley read about the case in the papers while away at training school and heard various insider bits of info from colleagues.
    When he returned to work, Hensley was brought into the case because of the connection both victims had to Gastonia. Hensley was deeply engrained in the Gastonia drug culture; he had informants on the street. He knew people. With Heather and Randi being Gastonia residents, the case was setting itself up to become a collaboration of agencies. The YCSO had been bringing witnesses and even a few early suspects (who were quickly ruled out) into the GCPD station house in downtown Gastonia to question. The GCPD had the facilities for videotaping and recording interviews, along with being close to Heather and Randi’s stomping grounds. It was a natural fit to use the GCPD facility and its resources.
    With a second body now found, along with early reports of the two girls running in somewhat similar circles, the YCSO was leaning toward forming a task force. Two weeks, two bodies. They did not want to see—but anxiously feared—a third body showing up soon.
    “Both Heather and the second girl, Randi, had the same sort of people they interacted with,” Hensley explained. “So the idea for York County was to form this task force, which consisted of them, us, the Gastonia Police, and even law enforcement from Charlotte. We all needed to figure out the next course of action.”
    The YCSO did have a prime suspect they liked for the crimes. However, Hensley pointed out, “There was so much information coming up on the girls and other people as possibly having motives or being seen with the girls, we needed to hunt down those leads as well.”
    As an investigation such as this begins, sometimes it can be hard for law enforcement to keep track of all the information coming in. You have two victims, two crimes scenes (and in this case, both crime scenes were secondary scenes, or dump sites, not murder scenes), two different states, all sorts of seedy drug-culture characters involved, on top of witnesses coming forward.
    None of that, of course, mattered to the families of the victims, who wanted answers. It didn’t make any difference that these women might have done things for drugs they weren’t proud of, or that they knew scuzzy people. They were human beings with loved ones, people who missed them, and their murders were being felt by everyone in the community. Law enforcement, moreover, looked at these victims as women and members of the community and did not define