English school work

Criminal

The cold blue eyes stared out across the bleak horizon, brushing the grains of sand from his thick lashes with each slow, feline blink. He took a lazy drag from the cigarette that lay between chapped lips, the smoke rising from his nostrils and swirling higher into the cloudless blue sky as the harsh sun beat down on the barren desert, and silence hung over the scene, a thick blanket, covering all the faults that occurred below.

He was perplexed by the facts that faced him, they just didn't add up, it was as though he was missing a vital piece of information, something so glaringly obvious that he would kick himself when he found it. He ran his thoughts over the clues that he had, they seemed so random.

The body was always found at the bottom of a flight of blood-stained stairs, painted with an obscure pattern of crimson, teal and olive green, and gruesomely their heart removed, seemingly with some kind of stone tool.

He cursed this heartless land, the heat was irritating him, it had forced him to discard his customary leather jacket and dark wash jeans, and replace them with light cargo shorts and a plain white T-shirt.

He wracked his brains, struggling to find anything that could connect the murders. while emptying the contents of his deep pockets onto the hood of the beat up Mustang Shelby, absentmindedly scraping his pen across the chipped maroon paintwork, he reminded himself of the seemingly unrelated murders; the 2 young girls, Ava Ramos and Tallulah Nuka played on his mind more so than the three young men and several middle aged men and women, almost equal with the resentment he had felt as he uncovered the body of 7 year old Samuel Graham, snatched from the yard of the orphanage he had resided in.The killer seemed to be selecting his victims at random, there was no direct link, and multiple ethnicities were represented in the hospital morgue, so that ruled out a racially aggravated attack, nor was age or their state of residence a presiding factor. He was baffled, such an intricate method of slaughter, yet such a random selection of victims, both human, and unusually animals. There had been an increase in animal carcasses found littering the streets of Monclova, the small Mexican town nestled amongst the harsh desert.

He pulled the wrecked car up the potholed tarmac of 'Harold Río Pape' and up to the shiny wood and glass edifice that held his frequented coffee joint, Kókoro, nodding his head in greeting to the few patrons who littered the leather sofas and high bar stools, he took up residence in his customary perch, in the far corner of the bar, away from the fluorescent strip lights and the unblinking stare of the many mamas. "Un café y la tarta brownie" he gruffly muttered at the beautiful, spirited young woman that twirled behind the mahogany division. Carlotta, she had sharply turned him down on his first day in this wretched 'pueblo', his ego had taken a beating that day; dark hair and tanned skin combined with his brooding nature meant Jackson was unaccustomed to rejection, as back home in Florida, since his freshman year, girls worshipped the ground he walked on.

As he chewed the chocolatey heaven that sated his yearnings, he mused over the newspaper that was spread over his lap, the front page bore him nothing he wasn't already aware of, it was a description of the case he painstakingly toiled over, followed by an in depth feature on some beauty pageant taking place one town over, an exhibition in a nearby museum on Aztec practices, more specifically the tradition of sacrifice. Wait? Could it be? So simple. He was certain of it now, it was so glaringly obvious, he cursed the fact he had not paid more attention in his history lessons at grade school. He was looking for an Aztec enthusiast, and where better to look than the opening event for a museum of Aztec sacrifice.