Hiding Within The Betrayal

Chapter Forty Seven: Sliced up Vegetable

It felt odd to return to the office under such circumstances.

She had her key card out before we even got to the door. I allowed her to open it but pushed in front to get ahead. Not that I chose to but Tess had seen the weak side to me, I could handle the rest of the team seeing the same. I had to assert my dominance again. When I pried open the door and walked straight into their prying eyes, I could tell that not one of them expected me.

"I don't want to hear a word from anyone about my absence or about the prick that showed up this morning. Got it?"

Tess followed close behind me. She, just like the others, was in no position to argue with my terms. There was some sort of response from each of them, a nod or murmur.

Sitting myself down, I turned to see Brileigh, she had been involved in their conversation but it was obvious that she had no input into the progression of the case, "Coffee please." I asked her.

No hesitation came as she took off to the office.

Having allowed myself a way to relax, I looked over the contents of the table, the files that were laid out in a tabulated form. Understanding that I had left Tess in charge, I never cared for such an organization, as long as I knew where everything was, nothing else mattered. There was little time for me to set about reading them however as they should already know the cases they gathered information for inside and out. Since it was Tess that had worked in my place for the past day, it only made sense to direct my demand to her, "Fill me in."

Pulling across a seat for herself, she ran over the advancements, "Alright, so we have four solved Flesh Monster cases that we have looked into. We began to search for ties between them, there is some similarity to Ethel's case but we don't have enough evidence to be certain that she was one of his victims. Going through them as thoroughly as we could, we then listed every single event that took place within them from the disappearance of the child to the moment that they were found.

"What are the events that take place? The stages if you will?" I was intrigued.

Andrew, as if reading of a hymn sheet, "There are five stages to each Flesh Monster case. Some media believe that keeping to this system is a fetish of his. That he gets off on the rush of having the police close on his tail but always getting away with it in the end. He must enjoy the pain he inflicts on these children."

"Where does he put the bodies?" I challenged them.

"The bodies?" Marta asked.

I turned to her, "Well the fourth stage I imagine is when the investigators find the face of the children yeah? So if their faces have been extracted from their heads and it is separated from the bodies. In which case. Their bodies must be somewhere?"

She lifted the document in front of her on the table, "They do get found but often a while after the face gets found. It takes forensics longer to analyze a body which has no face. In this instance," she flicked through a couple of pages, "the body was buried at a building site. The crew working there only came across the body because of an irregularity in the works. The pipe system leading to the plumbing of the houses, they had to dig up the pipes to sort it. When they did, they found the child's body."

Curious, "And the other three solved cases?"

"All similar outcomes," Elliott confirmed, "The bodies seemingly get ditched in random locations but the faces are left for people to find. The Flesh Monster wants them to be found."

"Are there any solved cases of the child being found alive? With their face intact?"

"Not technically no," Tess answered, "There's a case undergoing investigation at the minute down in Reading. They are treating it as a stand alone case because everything other than the boy being found alive with his face, suggests that it was another Flesh Monster attack."

"Maybe it would have ended the same but he got interrupted?" I prompted.

By that stage, the intern had returned with my cup of coffee. Her eyes lingered over mine as I took it from her. I avoided making eye contact and instead brought the luscious Irish coffee to my lips. A drink I had deprived myself of for months while Patrick was working with us. Feeling it run down my throat quenching my thirst, I was asked what I meant in a few ways. My response was to shrug, "You said that there are stages? What leads up to the child being killed?"

Andrew answered, "I guess by stage three? The child is taken by the kidnapper to fulfill a dream or desire, stage four is when they are skinned alive and the face is placed for relatives to find."

"And stage five is when the body gets uncovered right?" Nods met my question, "Alright, so as I suggested, what if the police or detectives were onto him before he got to stage four? Why risk being caught when you could just kill the kid quickly and dump them so that you can move onto the next victim? If this killer gets off on the adrenaline of being close to getting caught then being caught would ruin his fun. Maybe that's why the boy still had his face when he was buried but everything else in that investigation lines up?"

"What do you suppose that means for Ethel then?" another member queered.

Striking the cup with my fingertips, "How long were the victims missing for before someone the Flesh Monster left his token for the relatives to find?"

The separate groups all seemed to consider an answer, some double checking notes that had been taken in the document files. Then in union I had the response, "Four weeks. A month."

I thought about Ethel.

Tess calculated it in her head cautiously, "In a day's time, Ethel will have been missing for an entire month."

I bit my lip, "In that case, it means that we have today and tomorrow before this little girl gets sliced up like a vegetable."