Psychoville *CURRENTLY UNDER CONSTRUCTION*

Chapter three

Detective Brian Keith was getting closer. At least, he thought he was. After realizing that the open door was just to let them in and not for her own escape, the entire Snohomish County police department searched through the thick forest behind the house.

Soon enough, they found a body.

A young man lay partially hidden behind a bush, but was completely invisible to drivers passing by on the quiet road. The man was what Brian's wife would call "ruggedly handsome" with rough features and perfectly tousled hair. Unfortunately, the large and precise cut along his throat ruined the image and Detective Keith had to look away before his dinner came back up. A cut that smooth and graceful could only be done by one person in this small town. Mary Barkley. With his large backpack and sensible boots, the kid was probably a hiker and outdoorsman, and had most likely been one trekking through the woods before he was slaughtered like an animal.

There were three strange things about this particular murder.

One, the man was an outdoorsman, he was smart with what he packed. So where was his coat? That question be easily answered. Mary took it.

Two, Mary loved to show off. She thrived off of knowing that the bodies would be found with her name at the top. So why was this one hidden? This question was not answered as easily as the first.

And three, where did she get the weapon? All of the knifes from the kitchen had been accounted for, and the only one that had been missing from the wooden block on the granite countertop was the one that was hilt deep inside Mary's fair skinned mother. Brian's guess: she took one from hiker boy.

Speaking of hiker boy, they needed to put a name to the face. Not that this would be very difficult, considering that his driver's license had been left underneath his hand. Now she was just showing off.

The blond haired rookie, whose name Brian had learned to be Daniel Walker, carefully took the license out from under the victim's hand with a latex glove.

"Jeremy Sawyer," Walker read from off the card. "Age thirty three, from Philly."

"Alright then. Let's-" Brian was cut off by his own phone ringing a simple tone. He sighed wearily before sliding his phone out of his pocket and holding it to his ear.

"What," Brian said harshly.

A masculine voice on the other line spoke briefly, only giving him an address and telling to hurry. There was a moment of silence before the same voice said, even quieter: "We found another one. And she left us something," before hanging up.
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Seven minutes later, detectives Keith and Walker stood in front of a body.

He lay in the middle of the road, his lavender button down shirt stained with his own sticky blood, turning it to a dark ruby. He wore black slacks that looked like they must have been carefully pressed before he had been left in the road, and shiny, black dress shoes with scuffed heels. His arctic blue eyes were wide in a mixture of surprise and fear still visible, even from beyond the grave. A mess of brown hair day atop his head, making him look unbelievably young for a business man.

But it wasn't his impossibly blue eyes, or even the large red line across his throat, that immediately demanded your attention.

It was the piece of yellow paper from a legal pad that lay next to him, held down with four small stones, one on each edge. Only two words were written on it, the elegant calligraphy bleeding against the wet street.

"/Mary Barkley/."

The sick bitch had taken to signing her name on her murders. If there had been any doubt before now- and there hadn't been- this bitch was psycho.

"Alright," he said. "Find this guy. Contact his family. Let's get back to the precinct and get all of our facts together." Brian watched wearily as half a dozen officers clad in white and blue uniforms scurried around to carry through his orders, repeating his words over phones and radios.

Just as Detective Keith sighed and started to feel a massive headache in desperate need of some Advil, his phone rang again. Damn. And so he took out his phone for the second time that day and put it on speaker, not even glancing at the name.

"Give me some good news," Brian said to whoever was on the other line, not caring about who they were. He needed something good to come out of today.

"Sir," said an unfamiliar voice that sounded just as tired as Brian felt. "We just got a 911 dispatch just got a call from a family. Her husband hasn't come home yet and an anonymous package has been left on her doorstep."

"Call someone else," Brian replied. "I'm busy right no-" he was cut off abruptly from Walker, who rushed over, holding the victim's license.

"Wait!" He yelled, and spoke into Brian's phone hurriedly. "What's the address?" As he asked the question, he looked down at the small card in his hand, listening intently to the man on the other side of the phone as he relayed the address to him.

When the man had finished talking, Walker held up the victim's license, allowing Brian to read the address. The same address that the man on the other line had just said.

Detective Keith gave Walker a look of approval. "Nice job, kid," he said to him. "I wouldn't have made that connection.

Keith turned around and yelled new orders to his men, who scurried around to complete them in the same manner that they had before.

The two detectives stepped back into their sleek black car, and drove off to the house of a woman much too young to be widowed.