Title: Alice

Genre: Mystery/Horror

Rating: R

Summary: James Layne has just moved to a small, rural town from New York City. Unfortunatly for him, he came right around the time that the town has it’s first case of murders. Now he gets assigned to figure out who did them. It gets harder, when the only people able to help are the last people he wants to.

Notes: The characters for this story turned out pretty normal people. And then one went crazy. So, now, we have a mystery ^_^! Have fun reading my goryness, and please review!

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{{Alice opened the door of the small house. Her face was unreadable, as she stared at the four bodies lying motionless on the floor. She looked at her feet to see blood from the carpet staining her shoes. She slowly stepped over the bodies, and walked into her room, putting her books on the floor. She then walked back out to the living room. She picked up the phone, and started to dial for the police. She stopped, though, and put the phone back on the hook. There was no point. She would simply have them buried. The police couldn’t help now. They were dead. There was no bringing them back.

This was beside the fact that the police wouldn’t catch the people who did this. This was the work of a professional. Alice would get her revenge on her own.}}

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

You could feel the tension in the office. The officers all had their hands on their guns, and the detectives all jumped at little sounds. It wasn’t as if they were in immediate danger. However, this was the first time the town had to deal with a murder. And though there weren’t many people in the town, or around it, they had no clues at all to who might have committed the murders.

James Layne was getting annoyed. This was not the way a real department should be working, he knew. He had moved from New York, hoping to get his younger sister out of the way of the large cities. But he didn’t think he could stand any more of this amateur behavior. He was put on the case, but the chief had yet to let him visit the murder scene.

And so, he had come to a conclusion: rich people should not live in small, rural towns. They were willing to pay for these agencies to be set up for their protection, where things of this sort shouldn’t be happening, anyway. They should leave it to the agencies in large cities to come down, where they were used to this and knew what to do.

He stood up suddenly, causing more people to jump, and stomped off to try again to bug a visit to the scene off the chief again.

&***&

James took it back. He regretted it. A little.

The manager of the grocery store had his entire head and kneck crushed, his tongue lolling out of his mouth at a grotesque angle. They had him lying on the floor of aisle five, a mass of blood and bones. A small crowd hung around, mostly of police officers.

“So he was found crushed under the shelf?” James asked.

“Yes,” said one officer.

“Then it could have been an accident, even,” James said. “A shelf falling on somebody?”

“This was found in his head,” the officer said, holding out a cleaver.

“Overkill………”said a quiet, male voice behind them.

“You moved the body?” James asked.

“Yes.”

“You never move the body!” he yelled at them.

“Why?” another officer asked.

“Because everything about how this was done could be a clue!” James said exasperatedly, turning around and rolling his eyes. “Who are these people?”

A group stood off to the side.

“These are the people that were around the store when he was found,” the same officer said.

“Okay, just…….take some the names,” James said, sighing.

“We already did.”

Oh good. You people aren’t completely imbeciles.

“Rubber gloves?” James said, holding out his hand. A few moments later, an officer came with a box of gloves from the store.

James put them on, and gave a soft poke to the crushed head. Upon closer inspection, he saw that the eyes were missing. He carefully opened the mouth, and looked. After a few more moments, he stood up again.

“Where are the eyes?” he asked. Nobody answered. “Well, then, aside from the eyes being taken and tongue being pretty much ripped off—that’s why it’s falling out of the mouth—it seems to be whole. I want this body sent in for an autopsy, to check for cause of death.”

“I believe that might have been the knife in his head, or maybe even the shelf knocked over,” a dark-haired, young man said.

“I want to check,” James said, crossly. “It’s not often there are psychos, but when there are it’s nice to know. I also want pictures taken of the entire store, and the trash bins checked. Fingerprints you find, you need taken in, and the trash bins need to be checked. Make an inventory.”

James took off the gloves on the way out. He would throw them out at home. He was just glad that he had a strong stomach. But it was nearly eleven at night, and he needed his sleep. If he could.