Free Buried: Mystery Series (My Murder Mysteries #2) by H. B. Rae Page B

It was like it was scripted and rehearsed, everything he said. Perhaps he had prepared what he was going to say before he’d come.
    "Is there anything else you'd like to add to that one?" I asked him.
    "No, except I had to leave him in the street because I knew that someone in the houses opposite had probably been watching."
    "That's strange," I said out loud, unintentionally.
    "What is?" he asked.
    "Are you sure nobody saw you?" I asked him, quite puzzled by what he’d said.
    "I don't think so," he said. "But I don't know."
    "Was this a quiet street?"
    "Yes. It was really quiet, actually. I couldn't see anyone in their houses, so maybe it was just luck."
    "And the fourth murder?"
    "This was the final one," he said, rather enthusiastically. "And in this one, I had to set a trap for him."
    "Go on," I said, interested to discover what he had to say.
    "Well," he replied, "I had seen Richard flirting with another girl, so I wrote a fake love note asking for him to meet up in the woods,"
    "How did you get it to him?" I asked, feeling like I was on top of the case.
    "I slipped it through the vent in his locker, when no-one else was there. There was no closed-circuit TV at the time, either, so I was very lucky."
    "O.k.," I said, "and then what happened?"
    "You'll know the rest, really. After school finished, I watched him walk into the woods, where he expected to meet his crush. I then stabbed him about eight times, like the rest of them."
    "You stabbed each of them eight times?"
    "Roughly," he replied. He looked like he was being honest about the whole thing. As time went on and he spoke more and more, it was becoming less and less likely that he was making the whole thing up. I was half-expecting him at any moment to jump up and say, "Ha ha! This whole thing was just a joke!" but he didn't.
    "So, there is nothing you want to add about any of the murders?" I asked him, ready to take more notes.
    "If I think of anything else, I’ll tell you."
    "O.k. Let's move on to the motive," I said, ready to finish the interview. "Why did you choose to do this to those people?"
    "Well, Josh, Daniel, Steven and Richard were always making fun of us."
    "Us?" I asked, intrigued by the possibility that this man had friends.
    "Me and my friend, Laura. I don't see much of her now."
    "Alright. What things did they do?"
    "They used to play little pranks on us, but on me in particular. About a week before the first murder, the group of them grabbed hold of me in the woods and threw me in the river!"
    It was then when I clicked. I had established a connection between the places where three of the four bodies were found, and the motive for murder.
    "They sound very immature," I said, trying to keep him talking.
    "Yes, and I had this all of the time."
    "Well, that's about everything I have to say to you at this moment in time, but I will definitely come back to you later. What's going to happen now, is you are going to be charged, and we'll look at this in a bit more detail. Do you understand?"
    He nodded.
    "There is one more thing I would like to ask you," I said.
    "Fire away," he said, clearly trying to make light of the whole situation.
    "Do you take medication for anything?"
    "Yes," he replied, "because I am schizophrenic."
    "Alright," I said, knowing that my suspicions had been confirmed. "So does anyone look after you?"
    "My cousin. Her name is Monica."
    "Does she know you are here?"
    "No."
    This was very interesting. I now wanted to talk to Monica to see what she had to say about the whole thing. I left the room and talked to my colleagues. Graham and Patricia had returned with the news we’d all been waiting for.
    "He's not making it up!" cried Graham.
    "Right," I said, getting very excited.
    The five of us gathered round in a circle, looking at all of the evidence collected at the crime scenes. In the witness statement of the first murder, it was written that Josh Davis did a chicken dance before he left the building. That was exactly what