Hell's Highway: Hell's Vengeance Series Book 1

Chapter 4: A Numbers Game

Jacinta and Hawthorn had stayed behind at the rest stop. Sandoval had gone to the OPP station to use their computers and get in touch with the squad back home to look into Hasselbeck. The coroner bagged up the various parts of the man and cleared the scene, and soon all the local cops were gone, leaving just the two of them behind.

“What does your gut tell you about this one?” Jacinta asked as they watched the coroner’s van roll out with bags full of body parts in the back.

“Nothing good,” Hawthorn told her.

She couldn’t help but laugh.

“That the result of Canadian police training? Bad feelings about hacked-up corpses?” she asked.

“Well, yeah. See, off the record, I’ve been following these cases for a while. I’ve pushed for us to investigate some links, you know? But the moment anyone gets a whiff you’re thinking serial killer, they lock it down. Hard.”

“But why?” Jacinta asked. It didn’t make any sense to her that cops would actively avoid trying to find links between crimes. A serial killer was a big deal. Not to mention a public relations nightmare for any police force that wasn’t on top of one right away.

“It’s what I told you before. Three killers, at least, over a span of literally decades. Imagine you had three serial killers operating in Detroit, in your jurisdiction, for thirty years. It shakes everyone’s faith in the force. That revelation made everyone look like a grade-A moron. It’s top-down incompetence. So, sure, those guys were caught back in the eighties. But ever since then, everyone, and I mean everyone, from Windsor to Toronto has been adamant that it will not happen again.”

“But if it is happening again—” she began.

Hawthorn shook his head. “Will not. Is not. Did not. Cannot. You see what I’m saying?”

“They’re willing to overlook murders and pretend they’re not related?”

Hawthorn shook his head and leaned in closer even though no one was around to overhear.

“Not overlook murders. Overlook connections. Most of these killings go unsolved. Millions of people travel this stretch of road every year. It’s like a wasteland of lost things and lost people. So, if two people are killed on the side of the road, we’ll investigate, sure. But if we can’t find a suspect, no one is going out of their way to compare it with the last case we couldn’t solve. That’s what I think, anyway. I’ve tried to make them see links. It’s not like there’s a lot of them, we don’t have murder weapons or DNA on these unsolved deaths, but there’s some circumstantial evidence that I think binds some of them together.”

“Beyond the fact they’ve been chopped up,” Jacinta said.

“Yeah. Location, for one. There’s not a huge stretch of space between one victim and another, you know? For crimes like these, that’s a red flag to me. It’s highly unlikely two bodies get mutilated and dumped in the same part of the woods by two different perps.”

“Good point,” she agreed.

“But again, it’s not definitive either. Still circumstantial. If only I could find solid evidence. A murder weapon, a DNA sample, something, then maybe my theory can grow some legs, you know?”

She nodded her head, looking back at the crime scene behind them. If someone had told her that morning that she’d be investigating a potential serial killer that the local cops were too scared to fully investigate, she wouldn’t have believed it.

Hawthorn’s mind really would have been blown if he understood the implications of those frost burns. Maybe that was why his team had never found the concrete links he was hoping for. No fingerprints, no blood at the scene. A ghost would never leave those. It was a real Catch-22 situation as it stood. And she was getting ahead of herself. She’d need Shane’s help to know for sure if her suspect was already one of the dearly departed. She just needed to wait for him to get there.

She excused herself from Hawthorn as a call came in from work. She’d previously left a message with Detective Tony Orellio in Missing Persons just after calling Shane, playing off a hunch.

“Perez, you got a minute?” Detective Orellio asked.

“What do you have for me?”

“Well, your dead guy Hasselbeck’s wife called in last night. Not really to file a report. She just wanted to know if any accidents and such have been reported. Said he went to a concert in Toronto but didn’t come home. No text, won’t answer calls. It’s going to be a rough one when she gets the news.”