The Story of Silence (Book 3)

Chapter 20

Dastardious Hollow flicked through the black book on his desk. The guys at Forensics had cracked the code in it -some sort of hidden ink- and had made it so that Dastardious could read what was written in it easily, and what he read in it he found to be most interesting.

It was a diary, of sorts. It didn't tell of Amerigo's day to day activities; instead it told job related things like: Who hired him, for how much, who he was to kill, how he killed them, and at the top of each list was a date of when he was hired, made the kill, and received pay. It was to Dastardious very interesting, and he wondered why Simon Finnegan had been after it. Unfortunately though, they'd had to release him as they didn't have enough solid evidence.

Frank Miller had sworn that he'd seen a light on in the house and that he had seen someone enter. Of course, it was late at night, and he couldn't identify Simon as the man. But what Dastardious could do, and had done, was identify that Amerigo was the one responsible for the two murders in the basement. On top of that he'd already sent out for an arrest warrant for the man that had last hired Amerigo. Of course he didn't have the information of why the man had hired Joseph to have the man and woman killed, but once he was arrested for whatever, being a partner to murder, he'd get the story. He always got the story.

He flipped through the book at random, puzzling in silence over why the people in there wanted other people to die. What was their motive? He didn't care that the people died, but he hated not knowing why.

He stopped flicking through the pages every time he found something that caught his eyes, a change in colour of pen; a word written differently to how it had been written before. It was small things that caught his eyes. The subtle changes, it added things to the mysteries. He stopped on a page near the beginning of the books. It seemed that sometimes Amerigo kept tabs on the families of either the people that hired him or on the other members of the people that he'd been hired to kill. He had kept tabs on one such person whose family he had killed on November 21, 1985. A young man named Jonathan Crash, who later changed his name to Silence Mourner.

It was the name 'Silence Mourner' that caught Dastardious's eye. It was an interesting name for someone to change to. Maybe that was why it had caught his eyes, because it was like Dastardious's own name, made to fit.

According to why he had changed his name to that, it was because he couldn't speak. He had lost his family when he was four, so all the kids in the orphanage had called him Silence Mourner. In the notes that Amerigo had taken of the boy, there was one that said why he was alive.

'-I am not a child killer, except for that one time when the child was too old and would most likely have remembered me. But the boy was only four. I remember nothing of when I was that young, and neither does anyone else that I know. And if he does, he will have a mark to remind him not to tell anyone-'

There were a few other things said about him, and the more Dastardious read of him the more interested he became.

'-The boy has lived his whole life... I am not sure if he remembers what has happened to him, but I do not think he remembers. Many things have happened to him that have pushed out that memory, I hope anyway. I promised him I would kill him and anyone he told if he does remember and tell, but I do not want to kill him anymore. He fascinates me-'

Dastardious put down the book, wondering if Silence Mourner knew about how his parents had died. He himself couldn't remember anything of when he was that old.

Still thinking, he got to his feet, closed the book and placed it in a drawer of his desk, and then he locked it and placed the key in his pocket. If anybody stole the book from him he wouldn't be very happy. It was evidence.