Free Darker Still by T. S. Worthington Page A

who had come by to pick the corpse clean of any left meat. That was really what they did; they were the scum of the earth and it didn’t matter if they were a big city organization like he was used to scaring off in Columbus or a smaller local newsgroup like the ones here in Belpre—it was disgusting.
    “Hey, Chief!”
    One of the lab techs who were combing the body for evidence suddenly called over.
    Michaels and John walked over to him ignoring the cops who appeared to be standing around, but were actually just waiting for the lab geeks to finish their sweep. Of course they should have been questioning people in the crowd about what they might have seen. It wouldn’t have amounted to much most likely, but at least it would have been something somewhat productive.
    John knew that the killer might be in that crowd. A self-obsessed narcissist like this guy was always going to be watching. He was probably twenty feet from them in the crowd of onlookers taking pictures to add to his trophy collection. He wanted so badly to just go over and start giving everybody there the third degree. It might be helpful if he just shoved a gun in their stupid faces until one of them confessed. It would be so easy.
    “What have you got?” Michaels asked the female tech.
    She held up something in a pair of tweezers. “I don’t think this belonged to the victim. It was a different color strand. The victim was blond but the hair was dark brown.
    “Shit yea! Can you get some DNA off of it?” Michaels asked.
    “Yea, I should be able to.”
    “Well, get back to the lab and get on that pronto.”
    John felt overwhelmed with excitement for a minute, but before he let himself get overjoyed he thought of something; the killer did not leave these kinds of mistakes. There was no way that was his hair. The body had been scrubbed clean of all DNA evidence except for the victims own blood. You could see it plainly; it was just like the last victim had been.
    Why this hair? It sounded like a set up to him.
    “See? I told you he would drop the ball at some point. Now we got him!” Chief Michaels exclaimed.
    “I’m not so sure,” John said.
    “What? Why?”
    “Well, assuming we can gain the DNA off the hair, I don’t think it will match our killer.”
    “You have to get some faith about something in this world John. It isn’t all pity parties and bad endings. Sometimes good things do happen to the right people.”
    “I do believe that Chief, but this doesn’t feel right. Why after all of these years would this guy suddenly make such an amateurish mistake? It doesn’t fly with me.”
    “I hear where you are coming from, but you have to remember that he has never done this but once. He has always had a controlled environment like before where he killed and disposed of the bodies on his own property. There were no bodies and no crime scenes; without this you can’t even prove a murder has been committed. Now he is bored and he is toying with us. I know it is weird, because killers typically mild out as they get older and this guy is getting bolder, but he has made the amateur mistake a lot of these guys make; he thinks he is too smart and that he is invincible so he starts playing games with the cops. Now he fucked up and we got him.”
    John dwelled on what the chief was saying. He had some valid points. The Valley Ripper, as he was being dubbed on Facebook, was stepping outside of his comfort zone. He had reached out to them because he needed to be recognized more. He wanted to take his game to another level; he was tired of playing by himself. That may have been his whole purpose for reaching out to John in the first place. It was possible that his arrogance was getting the better of him and he had left a minute clue behind that was going to get him caught. It was a sweet thought that was really hard to let go of after it was in your head.
    “Maybe you are right,” John said.
    “Well, don’t start celebrating quite yet. We don’t