Bad Thoughts

Chapter 29

It had been raining sheets of water all night. Three in the morning Pig Dornich received the call. A couple of uniforms found the abandoned station wagon in an alleyway in Dorchester. The car was stolen. She was in the trunk. Four of her front teeth had been pulled out of her mouth. Her tongue looked a half foot longer than it should’ve been, as if someone had pulled on it. As if someone had tried to yank it out of her…

That was twenty-one years ago. They never got anywhere with the murder. The victim was a prostitute and those types of deaths happen. Maybe not as brutal and vicious as this one, but they do happen. Dornich really hadn’t thought about it in years. At least, not consciously. But once he remembered it… what was done to her tongue…

But that was all twenty-one years ago.

His office desk was now covered with a collection of faxes, newspaper clippings, and old police reports. They traced a trail of unsolved murders leading from Boston, down the Eastern seaboard, snaking through Florida and Alabama, into Texas, and Arizona. The murders appeared random. There appeared to be no rhyme or reason to any of them. Nothing outwardly that could link them together, yet they were all eerily similar. Almost as if the nature of their randomness was forced. As if they were purposely made to look unconnected.

Dornich felt a dryness in his mouth as he scanned the reports. In front of him were forty-three unsolved murders. He knew by the time he brought the trail to Sacramento there would be at least a half dozen more. Forty-three unsolved murders…

By eight o’clock he was finished. Fourteen more murders had been added to the list-the last one occurring in Los Angeles, four days before Shannon’s mother had been butchered. The total count had reached fifty-eight unsolved murders. Dornich had no doubt about who committed them. He couldn’t help feeling overwhelmed as he looked the list over. There were so many names on it.

He felt exhausted, but also somewhat exhilarated. Not bad police work for a pig. Not fucking bad at all. Before calling it a night he made a couple of more phone calls; first to North Carolina, then to book a morning flight to Raleigh.