Page 14 of Insidious Heart
“In a shitty motel off the highway! The body of a man, all cut up and left posed in the bathroom.”
My frown deepens. “And you somehow thought this man was me?”
“No!” she shrieks. “But there was a girl there. Sfair-skinned, dark blonde or light brunette hairedgirl. She was tied to the bed, gagged, and blindfolded—”
“Like Maci Martin?”
“Yes, but she wasdead!”
“As sad as that is, you can rest assured knowing it wasn’t me. I’m alive and well.”Mostly.
Linnie sighs. “I’m relieved to hear that, but I was terrified for a while there. Apparently, they were seen leaving some dive bar shortly after you left work, and not that I think you’re about that scene, but I thought maybe…”
I can’t help but smile a little.I guess Linnie would miss me after all.“It wasn’t me, Linnie. I went straight home after I got out. No stops or anything.”
“Thank god. They haven’t released any names or a lot of details yet, but this is a big deal. The police are asking for anyone with potential information about either of the described victims to come forward.”
“But they haven’t released names yet?”
“Rumor has it, there wasn’t anything left in the room to identify them except their fingerprints and dental records.”
With another sigh, I give my only friend, and queen of the gossip mill, my undivided attention. “What else are the rumors saying?”
“That the crime scene was a mess! Blood everywhere. Real Jack the Ripper kind of stuff. They even think there’s a possibility the woman was a sex worker.”
I listen to Linnie go on and on about all of the gory details for another twenty minutes before she gets another call and has to let me go. Something I’m both grateful for because I need to eat, and disappointed over because I’m going to be trapped and alone here all day, so that was most likely my only human interaction for hours.
Not that that’s anything new, but still. Talking to Linnie on the phone would have at least made me forget about how much I’m starting to hurt for a while.
But I instantly take that thought back.
I shouldn’t want to replace my pain with someone else’s, and those poor people that were slaughtered last night deserve more respect than that.
It doesn’t stop me from pulling upThe Rolling Gazetteon my phone, though.
Our little town—Rolling Meadows—is a tiny little thing about forty minutes from Sabine Woods. It’s ablink and you’ll miss itsort of town where everyone knows everything about everyone, or at least they think they do, anyway. But in the last few years, this area has become sort of a hotbed for the dark and twisted.
Scratch that.
Rolling Meadows hasalwaysbeen a hotbed for the dark and twisted, but the last few years it’s upped its game and jumped directly into downright insane.
The name itself is deceiving because I’ve lived here my whole life and I can’t remember a time when it resembled anything close torolling meadows,or when crime wasn’t on the front page of every newspaper or blasted in breaking news on TV. But a few years ago, maybe only one or two now that I’m thinking about it, things started to get really intense.
For example, a woman from Sabine Woods was kidnapped by two prospects in a neighboring MC. She was apparently the old lady of a member in another club—theclub from what I gathered—and while that could have started a full blown war that spilled into Demon Seed country, it seemingly diffused itself and fell off the front page. All considering that El Paso County is motorcycle gang territory, it was scary and sad but not surprising, right up until those prospects wound up murdered in their clubhouse.
They were dismembered and posed—their arms and legs were positioned into a rectangle framing their torsos, hands and feet stacked over the stomach with their decapitated heads resting on top—and at first glance everyone was horrified. Then they became even more horrified when the public learned that the killer had severed their penises and shoved them in their mouths, and apparently the left femur of both men were missing.
It was crazy and scary, and definitely made the news for a long time, but as connections were drawn and identities were discovered, things became even crazier.
Turns out, the MC they were apart of washugeinto sex trafficking, with a specialty for underaged girls and boys alike, and this led to a federal investigation that got most members of the Cobra Cons locked up for life.
So, between that and the woman they kidnapped, people felt a little less bad about their deaths.
Then, a little while later—months, but I can’t remember how many—three more bodies showed up in an abandoned church right here in Rolling Meadows.
One was some mafia king, a guy from New York that I’d never heard of, but he had a bullet between his eyes and that was it, so nothing really to write home about. The other two bodies, who were a couple of his goons I guess, were found the same way as the prospects, peens in mouth and all.
And even though we learned that these men were just as horrible as the Cobras, similarities started to be drawn between those four murders—the fifth wasn’t connected until his body disappeared from the morgue and turned up a few weeks later in pieces in New York—and a string of other ones that had popped up over the last ten to twelve years throughout the U.S.
