Chapter 1: A Murder

“Emergency operator, how can I help?”

“There’s been a murder,”

“Can you tell me your name m’am?”

“Daniel Lachlan is… was the priest of our Catholic church. I think it’s a hate crime,”

“Ma’am, I cannot help you unless you tell me your name,”

“I’m Mary Lachlan. Daniel’s sister,”

“What’s your address?”

“Mercer. I’m in Mercer. I’m quite easy to find. I own the general store,”

“Where’s Mercer?”

A sigh. “It’s a farming village. About two hours on the north bound highway and take the exit to the Weday Mines. Keep going along that road and there’s a dirt road just before you hit the Mines. Turn down the dirt road and you’ll find Mercer,”

“Thank you, m’am. I’ll send someone to you as soon as possible.”

The phone call had taken place two weeks ago.

And, fifteen minutes after Detective Andrea Turner had turned down that dirt road in her burgundy Mitsubishi, she passed a rusted sign saying “Welcome to Mercer.”

Mercer consisted of a church, a general store with fuel pumps, and a hall. Around the village sprawled green and brown farmlands. Barns stood on hills beside farmhouses, and there was no one to be seen.

Andrea pulled up at the general store and filled her petrol tank, before going inside to pay.

“Welcome stranger,” a kind, middle aged woman said from behind the counter, smiling at Andrea. She had a strong Southern accent. “Just passing through?”

“Actually I’m looking for someone,” Andrea said, passing the correct amount of money to the woman.She noticed the woman had abnormally long fingernails.“Do you know Mary Lachlan?”

“This is she,” Mary replied, pointing to the name tag on her shirt.

“I’m Detective Andrea Turner,” she said, flashing her badge at the woman.

“They finally sent someone!” Mary said exasperatedly, throwing her hands in the air. “It’s about time!”

“I’m sorry about the wait ma’am,” Andrea said. “Things have been busy. Can you tell me what happened?”

“Well when I called the police I had just found my brother’s body,” Mary explained. “I found him in his bedroom in the back of the church. I took some photos of the scene and then I had Robert Bedford and Craig Ford move Daniel to the refrigerator in the back.” She gestured to a door behind her, labelled Staff Only.

“Mercer is a small, unimportant village, Detective,” Mary said, seeing Andrea’s questioning look. “I converted the cab of a refrigerated truck into a sort of makeshift morgue. People die here too. Not very often but it’s always wise to be prepared. Especially when the emergency services don’t come for two weeks. My brother’s body is quite well preserved at the moment.”

“You’ve done well m’am,” Andrea said, impressed.

“CSI is my favourite TV programme,” Mary replied with a half smile. “You can see my brother now, if you’d like.”

“Thank you ma’am,”

“Call me Mary,”

Mary flipped the open sign on the door so that closed was shown to the road. She led Andrea through the Staff Only door behind the counter, through the staff room and out into the hot sun through the back door. To the right stretched the dirt road off into the farmland and to the left was a metal grate over the toilet doorway.

Further beyond the toilet, near the far corner of the store was a white, medium sized box that looked like the back of a freight truck. The doors were bound with a thick chain and padlock.

“You can never be too careful,” Mary said as she unlocked the padlock and drew the chain away from the door.

As Andrea stepped inside the cab, she was bombarded with the incessant hum of a generator, a wave of welcoming cool washing away the heat outside, and the strong odour of ammonia.

The cab was quite large, about ten feet wide and fifteen long. A sterile metal rack lined part of the right hand side walls but had nothing on them except for a pile of neatly folded clothes and two envelopes, and two steel tables at the far end, on opposite sides of the cab. One was empty, the other was not.

Andrea went to the occupied table and carefully drew back the sheet to the man’s waist.

He was an overweight, middle aged man with a balding head and a look of intense terror fixed in his small, staring, glassy grey eyes.

“He must have been scared shitless before he died,” Andrea muttered to herself.

“Yes, he must have,” Mary said irritably. Andrea made a mental note not to swear in front of this clearly religious woman.

“I’m not a CSI, so I’ll have to call the station. Could I take a look at the pictures?”

Mary went to the rack on the wall and picked up one of the envelopes.

“I took all of these photos immediately when I found him, and I touched nothing. I opened the door to his bedroom but that was it, and I left it open,” Mary said as she handed Andrea the envelope.

“You’ve done well,” Andrea replied, secretly thinking that either Mary was just showing off at how efficient she was, or trying to stop herself from becoming the prime suspect. “You should have become an officer.”

“I wanted to, when I was young,” Mary said, smiling. “But my father forbade it. He said that women shouldn’t become police officers. But look where you are.”

Andrea returned the smile and placed the sheet back over Daniel Lachlan’s head.

“Let’s take a look at the crime scene then,”

The church was a small, dingy thing that tried vainly to look medieval, without success. Inside there were only seven pews on each side of the red carpeted aisle and at the front of the church was a high, table with two brass candle holders on either end of the table. Behind the altar was a huge wooden cross suspended from chains and a heavy wooden door in a corner

“Daniel’s bedroom is through there,” Mary said, pointing to the door.

The door opened to a hallway, with what seemed like a whole house sprouting from it. Andrea passed a kitchen, bathroom complete with shower and toilet, a living room and finally came to the bedroom. The door was open, and Andrea gestured for Mary to stay out as she put some latex gloves on.

The room was the by-product of a tornado. The queen sized mattress had been overturned and now leaned against the wall over a window and two legs were missing from the bed base. Paper was strewn all over the floor, some dyed with blood from a large, sticky pool in the middle of the floor. The shape of a body was marked in the blood, and was consistent with the photos.

Given that Mary had already taken photos of the room, Andrea turned to leave, taking her cell phone out in the process, and almost slipped on something in the doorway.

She looked down and saw a puddle of blood. There were little droplets of blood in a trail to the door and then disappeared. Andrea carefully closed the door in a confused Mary’s face and frowned.

“What the fuck...”