The Hangman's Game - A 'Perfect' Town Murder Mystery

Chapter 9: The Hangman Gets Exposed

I bolted awake, the pain filling my body as if I got electrocuted at a high voltage. The immense pain filled my body as if I got badly hurt. 

"Andrew!! Fuck are you okay?" Matt asked as he hugged me gently. I hugged him slowly, but I was too weak to say anything. After a few minutes, I said, "W-Walter and George did have dealings, but I couldn't get a look at what they were distributing" I wiped the sudden tears that had stained my face. 

"Okay, but maybe we could go to the church and find whatever they were dealing with?" Matt suggested as I got up and nearly fell back onto the bed, but I kept my balance. 

We left the room and went to the church as we saw some people around the area gossiping about who killed the pastor; we paid them no attention since we were only there to find the product George and Walter had kept hidden. 

We went inside the pastor's office, which had been cleared by forensics. We then searched around the office to see if we could find something out of place. 

I then saw an old bookcase; I thought it would be like Scooby doo, where you'd find a secret passageway hidden in the bookshelf. 

I pulled a book out of the case and heard a soft click. The bookcase slowly opened. "Oh my god, this is like a Scooby doo episode", Matt joked as I chuckled as we took out our flashlights and walked down the steps as the door slowly closed behind us. We saw a room which looked quite large, but what we saw looked like something from breaking bad. 

It was a massive drug lab full of different drugs, science equipment, and much more. 

"What in the breaking bad is this?"

"I don't know, but are Walter White and Jesse supposed to be here?" 

"Hopefully not" 

We kept looking around as the more we found, the more we knew that this church was a drug den. We called Monty, and then a few minutes later, he was at the church and saw the opened bookcase as he went downstairs and saw the drug den with a bunch of forensic teams searching the place with other officers. 

"Holy shit", Monty muttered. "I-i had no idea this was here." 

"None of us did." 

"Yeah seems the pastor liked to keep things out of confession." 

We canvased the place as we gathered everything and took it back to the office as the forensic teams did tests on the drugs, which were found to be LSD, Cocaine, Meth, Crystal Meth, heroin and much more was very shocking to us. 

The news got out quickly, and all the devout Christians freaked out as they didn't want to go to church anymore due to the whole drug ring. 

"So the pastors pulling a fucking breaking bad", Monty said as we nodded. "I guess so, yeah", Matt said 

We decided to keep looking into the drug ring as it had been there for years, and they never got caught. 

This was a very fucked up church, as I had never seen this happen in any case. We kept looking into the case as we knew this would be a big RICO bust. 

"they must have been good at covering their tracks. I mean, this must have been going on for years," Monty said as he rubbed his forehead. "I can't believe we've been going to church and getting sermons from a drug dealer", he muttered in disbelief as we looked at him. 

"Yeah, it's tough seeing what goes on behind closed doors, but now we can make sure this never happens," I said as Matt agreed, putting a hand on Monty's shoulder. "Yeah, it's okay; we can still solve this case,"  he said hopefully as the sheriff sighed. "Yeah, I hope so." 

We kept searching the church as the forensic team took a look around the church once more as we had a drug dealing church on our hands, It was like breaking bad but for Christians. 

"Now what do we do?" Monty asked as Matt said "We need to close down the church and make this a official crime scene that no civillain should go inside" 

Monty sighed "I wish i knew about this, then I would have arrested the pastor and the therapist" 

"They would have blackmailed you monty, you wouldn't have had any say in the matter" I said as we left to Monty's office as we started to look into the drug dealings and how many people bought drugs from them, and if they dealed with high end gangs, mafia families etc. Then we saw another quote written in blood on the wall, and this quote looked familiar.

"We've all got the power in our hands to kill, but most people are afraid to use it. The ones who aren't afraid, control life itself." This quote was from Richard Ramirez who was the famous night stalker who killed during 1984 in California. The hangman must be familiar with other serial killers, I prayed we could stop them, we didn't need any copycats of famous serial killers. 

Now this had just gotten worse, I just hoped we could stop him before the whole town turns into a graveyard, I kept thinking of going home but I was determined to stop the hangman and to make sure this town was safe. Now matter how fucked up it was.