Free Night Terrors by Mark Lukens Page A

squeeze and nodded at him. “Detective Perry.”
    Jackson already had his nitrile gloves on, but he shook the sheriff’s hand anyway and smiled at him, giving him a warmer greeting than Perry. “I’m Detective Jackson.”
    The Sheriff nodded and gave them a tight smile. “Well, we got an anonymous tip about a murder here. We found the owner’s dog at the far edge of the property, near the fence. Dead.”
    Perry ignored the sheriff and he walked across the living room towards an overturned plastic bowl and a mess on the floor.
    The sheriff ambled over to Perry. “Over there’s some spilled cereal and milk.”
    Perry nodded at the sheriff. He could see what it was.
    The sheriff moved with methodical slowness around Greg’s lumpy recliner and walked to the hall where the closet door was still wide open. Jackson thought Perry was slow and methodical with his movements and speech, but this sheriff was even worse; at least Perry’s actions seemed functional and not a waste of motion.
    There were shoes and some clothing pulled out of the hall closet, but there were also some blood splatters on the wall and a big puddle of blood on the floor.
    “This is just how we found it,” the sheriff told them. “It appears that the owner of the property dragged some things out of the closet like he was looking for something. Then it looks like he was hit with this shotgun.”
    Detective Perry was growing a little impatient with the sheriff’s play-by-play of the murder scene. “Where’s the body?”
    Jackson looked down at the shotgun with the blood-stained stock.
    The sheriff noticed Jackson looking at the weapon. “That’s the homeowner’s shotgun,” the sheriff said, ignoring Perry’s question. “We checked the serial numbers and it’s registered to him. But whoever killed him used the gun to knock him out, not to kill him.” He shook his head. “Bizarre.”
    Jackson nodded as Perry sighed impatiently.
    The sheriff pointed down at the linoleum floor in the hallway where a wide streak of dried dark blood led right to the back door which was ajar. “Looks like he was dragged outside through that door. Must’ve been a strong fella to drag this big man’s body out of here.”
    Perry stared at the sheriff with his pale blue, heavy-lidded eyes and asked again: “Where’s the body?”
    “Out in the garage,” the sheriff said. “I’ve never seen anything like it. Hawkins threw up when he saw it.”
2.
    Sheriff Tully remained inside the trailer while Perry and Jackson followed the drag marks through the grass to the side door of the garage; the main garage door out front was still pulled down and locked with a padlock. Before entering, they stopped and looked down at the concrete pad outside the doorway; it was stained with blood. They let the side door close behind them after they were inside and the putrid, coppery smell hit them right away. No one else was in the garage right now and that’s how Perry wanted it.
    No one else except Greg.
    A police photographer from the sheriff’s department had taken some photos earlier and he was waiting outside by his car. But Perry would call their own photographers and forensics experts from the Tampa Police Department to take more photos and gather evidence.
    Right now he wanted to study the scene with Jackson and no one else.
    Greg hung from the rafters in the middle of the empty garage. There were no vehicles in the garage. Perry didn’t know if the killer had emptied the garage, or it just happened to be that way. At the far end of the garage was a row of counters and cabinets overflowing with tools and car parts. Along the sides of the walls were jacks, spare tires and rims, and other leftover parts and tools.
    The ropes that Greg was strung up by were tied several times around his wrists and then looped around the exposed rafters above and then tied off to the sides of the metal walls, tied tightly around exposed metal studs. His bare feet hung only a few inches from