Free The Midtown Murderer by David Carlisle

bed.”
    Trent ordered a second latte, then opened his backpack and pulled out a copy of the GID report he’d made on a Xerox machine at Office Max. He found his Spiral notebook and a ball-point pen and took notes.
    The introductory paragraph stated the propriety nature of the report. ANY OFFICER CAUGHT DIVULGING ANY PART OF THIS SENSITIVE REPORT WILL BE SUBJECT TO CRIMINAL CHARGES UP TO AND INCLUDING IMPRISO NMENT, it read.
    His eyes fell to the beautifully colored diagrams and easy-to-read figures, and he idly wondered if the officers at the Midtown Police Plaza had the same level of expertise as their art department. Probably not.
    The pie chart on the first page broke down the annual Atlanta murders by district and substantiated what Radcliff had told him.
    What the sergeant hadn’t revealed was that ten of the thirteen Midtown victims-from three different gangs-had been shot with nine-millimeter hollow-point slugs fired at close range. Ballistics confirmed that the slugs collected from the ten murders had all been fired from the same gun.
    Someone had penciled a chain of little circles down the margin of the page. Dates and tiny descriptions of the murder victims had been marked in each circle. The largest one was at the bottom and a comment had been penciled in: NO STRUGGLE HAS TAKEN PLACE. HOW DOES HE DO IT?
    Quite a mouthful, Trent thought, as he resumed reading. Seven of the Midtown hits were individual, but last Wednesday three thugs were murdered in a crime-infested neighborhood across from the Atlanta Botanical Gardens. Ahhh, Trent thought, recalling the picture on the front-page of last Sunday’s paper.
    The Midtown killings had taken place over the last four months, and the majority of GI D officers believed that a vigilante killer was roaming the area.
    “That’s a bright group,” Trent said, as the same thought kept whirling around his head: for no one to hear the shots, the shooter had to be performing some kind of a magician’s trick.
    Of the remaining Midtown murders, one had been committed with a knife, one with a shotgun, and the other was a hit-and-run.
    Trent nibbled his tart and read the second chapter. It examined the success and failure of illegal drug laboratory busts in Atlanta over a twelve-month period.
    A vertical bar graph compared the local drug cartels and substantiated that Triple’s operation had the highest percentage of failed meth lab busts.
    The general consensus was that Triple had been one step ahead of the police, clearing the toxic chemicals from a targeted site before the drug interdiction team arrived. An internal investigation had been launched to find the source of the leak, but thus far they had been unable to locate the department spy.
    Another chapter detailed the individual meth lab busts. Each page was dedicated to a site and included the date, time, ground and aerial photos, and text discussing the outcome of that specific bust.
    An entire chapter was dedicated to a fatal meth lab explosion that occurred last August. The lab, which had been hidden in an abandoned pump shed, had belonged to the Outlaws.
    Four Midtown officers were killed in the fire, and the investigative board believed that the department spy tipped the Outlaws to the raid. The lab basement had been flooded with accelerants, and the fire was so intense that a positive ID of the remains could not be carried out.
    Trent studied t he accompanying photographs. A police helicopter pilot had taken pictures of the lab a week before the fatal fire. From those photos, he could see a small concrete-block shed situated next to a stand of Pecan trees. Subsequent photos shot at ground level showed the burned-out structure from various angles.
    The text that followed discussed rewriting the SOP’s for entering a suspected meth lab so as to ensure the safety of future drug interdiction teams.
    The last page of the report discussed the near-epidemic levels of meth overdoses inside the Atlanta Beltway. The