6° Of Separation: Cold Killer (PREVIEW)

Chapter 2

They had ended up needing to airlift the body out of the forest, due to the fact that traversing their way into the forest to the crime scene was hard enough; doing the trip with a body would be downright impossible. They had all decided that they would walk back to the car, seeing as they could hardly leave the government van full of hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of equipment behind for someone to break in and steal or get towed away. The drive back was absent of the chatter of before, each of them contemplating on what they had seen back in the forest. The images were sure to stain their minds for years to come and to haunt their dreams when they closed their eyes.

Peretti had been with them for six months, but he had only been out to a crime scene a total of three times, since he had been cleared for field work after finishing FLETC; one of those was the kidnapping of a US Armed Forces General's son, and the other was a drugs bust on a Marine base after three Marines from the same base displayed symptoms of drug-induced psychosis. It had turned out that they were being given steroids unknowingly by their CO, the man admitting that he had only wanted to help his men become the best they could be.

As an ex-cop that worked primarily in the drugs department, despite doing other cases as well, Peretti could handle the drugs, he had seen the same situation happen with a high school football coach when he worked in Peoria, and he had dealt with kidnappings before when he wasn't busting druggies. He had seen a lot of drugs, a lot of kidnappings, so the first two cases didn't phase him. He even had the occasional murder, but not very often, since his captain had liked to keep him doing what he was best at, in his opinion, but most of those were just simple shootings; very little mess, other than some blood, and of course, a grieving family to console and a body to clean up.

But it was the third case, today's case, that phased him;

The gruesome, sickening scene that awaited them in that small clearing was not something the young Italian had ever expected to see. Of course, he knew he would eventually be working on a murder, he worked as a federal agent for a division of the FBI, one that specialized in military cases, Army, Marine, and Navy. All war-like, mostly violent occupations. But the very sight of the horrifying scene in that forest caused his brain to stutter, and his mouth to dry into something resembling the Sahara desert. What a serial killer would consider art, Enzo saw as a disturbing display of the sickest reaches of a monster's mind and soul, a glimpse into the thoughts of a person greatly deranged, but not unstable; there was nothing unstable about the meticulousness of the Cold Killers 'Art'. It was extremely precise and well thought out and planned.

~~~~ 6° ~~~~

Breena Mercer had been working for the FBI's Military Crimes Unit for six years now. She was an ex-cop, working as a detective in more than a few cities, LA, New York, and DC when she was first scooped up by the FBI after working a joint case, then she was finally scooped up by Special Agent Alexis Lane, the Bureau's best and most well-known Agent. Breena had been sceptical at first, when she had been offered the Job to work at the FBI's MCU, even though 'offer' may have been too strong of a word, considering that Agent Lane didn't so much as offer, as sign the transfer papers herself and glare at Breena until the young Spanish woman had signed them.

She was told in no uncertain terms by many of her colleagues that she must be very good at what she did, because Agent Lane was known to only hire the best, and to go through Probie agents like a hedonist would go through body oil. The first few months on the job were not that bad; she found Agent Lane to be a fair, if stern boss and that Lane was, indeed, just as good as the rumors spoke of. Their case closure rate was the best in the country, and their cold cases were few and far between. Over the years of working for the MCU, Mercer had seen plenty of gruesome, disgusting scenes and acts that would have her reaching for her toilet in the dead of night, in later years only comforted by her husky, Gypsy, a puppy that was a gift from her parents five years after joining MCU. She, like most people in her profession, had a hard time keeping a relationship with someone when most conversations were either 'It's classified' or when she was called in at all hours of the day, not to mention that her dedication to her job had her bringing work home at night, and she tended to only fall asleep once she couldn't physically be awake any longer.