The Blue Ridge Project: A Dark Suspense Novel (The Project Book 1)
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Authors: Neil Rochford
The Blue Ridge Project
By
Neil Rochford
Copyright © 2016 by Neil Rochford
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Cover design by ebooklaunch.com
For my family, who have supported me in everything I do, no matter how weird.
Thanks to Lance and Margot who helped make this book possible.
Table of Contents
The Regent
The sky was clear for a change, and moonlight reached the crumpled body from its spot behind the Regent Hotel
.
Two other figures stood beside a police car nearby.
The first officer stood heavy, his considerable weight spread between his midsection and his behind. He pulled up his pants to stop them revealing the top part of his backside, a move that had the ease of practice; the top part appeared anyway as he squatted down beside the body. As he brushed a loose hair off his forehead and back onto his thinning scalp, his breath steamed in the cold air of the year’s end.
The other stood behind him, much slighter in body and an inch shorter than his partner. His clos
e-
cropped hair and tidy uniform shirt tucked into his pants contrasted with the older policeman’s appearance.
“Did you bring a camera?” he asked.
“Sure, Johnson. You wanna snap a few pictures before Homicide shows up? Maybe solve the case for the
m, too, get your ass squeezed by the mayor? Pose for photos for the paper?” the other replied. He hawked up and spat into the sewer grate nearby.
“They’re not gonna send anyone down for another half hour at least,” Johnson said. “Maybe I wanna do some police work for a change.”
Instead of watching you stuff your face and hassle minorities,
he finished in his head.
The older one waved him away without turning around.
Johnson went around to the back of the cruiser and got the camera, holding it carefully. As he took the pictures, he thought again about how he would ask for a transfer as soon they got a new set of cadets in to swell the ranks. It couldn’t come soon enough.
The older cop rolled the body over onto its back. The head was only recognizable as a head by its position on the body. The forehead and face were caved in, and there was just a bloody dent where his facial features used to be. He had on a blue shirt that was matted with blood, no pants, no shoe
s,
and no socks. His underwear was gray and stained.
Johnson stood with his camera by his side, his fingers twitching.
“Hey, Michaels, shouldn’t you wait for Homicide to get here before you touch him? You might be fucking up the crime scene.” His contempt seeped into the last sentence.
Michaels snorted, and spat across the body into the sewer grate again. “So according to your awesome investigative skill, this is a crime scene?”
Johnson’s face flushed a little, and he felt the heat rise up the back of his neck. He hoped it wouldn’t show in the low light, but Michaels had a canny eye. He hated giving him the satisfaction of knowing he got under his skin, and stared him down.
Michaels stood up and stepped over the body again. He stood in front of Johnson, reaching to grab the camera from his hand. Johnson pulled back instinctively.
Michaels got red in the face, and a vein bulged out on the side of his head. “Mind your superiors, boy. Give me the camera, or I’ll have you up on disorderly. Who do you think they’ll believe, you or me?”
“It’s evidence tampering,” Johnson replied in a small voice.
“I’ll tamper with your health shortly. There won’t be any murder police up here for another half hour at least, you said so yourself. You’ve taken the shots, and I want to see them. Give me the fucking camera.”
Hesitating for just a couple of seconds more, Johnson handed over the camera.
Michaels went through the photos Johnson had just take
n,
nodding as he did. “Mind me, you might learn something. Notice anything strange about the ground around the body?”
Johnson shook his head.
Michaels looked up to the sky, his '
Give me Grace'
look. It was in Johnson’s top ten list of hated things about him. “There’s no blood. Look at the state of that fella’s face. Look at his shirt. Lost plenty of blood, that’s for sure. So why is the ground dry?”
Johnson squatted down and ran his hand across the ground next to the victim’s head. Apart from the condensation from the fog earlier, the ground was indeed dry. His fingers were black, not red, when he looked at them in the light thrown from the cruiser’s headlights and the weak street lamps.
He looked up at Michaels. “So he was dumped here?”
“Almost definitely. What time do you have?”
Johnson checked his watch. “Just turned eleve
n-
thirty.”
Michaels closed his eyes and tilted his head up slightly, then opened them again. “Well, judging by the flexibility of the body, it wasn’t too long ag
o,
either. So I’ll tell you what we’re going to do: You’re going to go into that hotel there and have a word with whoever you can find, and you’ll keep your mouth shut about the photos before I touched the body. I’ll take a few more now, and you can tell the big detectives when they decide to grace us with their presence that you figured out the body was dumped here and this is not a murder scene. You’ll get a gold star, and your transfer request will be”—Michaels snapped his fingers a few times—“expedited.”
Johnson stared with his mouth slightly open. “How—”
Michaels grinned on one side of his mouth, and turned back around to look at the body. “I’m police, and don’t you ever tell me again what police work is. Now get yourself right and go in there, and I don’t want to hear another word from you that isn’t to do with food for the rest of the shift.”
Johnson looked down at his shoes, then back up at Michaels whose back was still turned to him. “Yes, sir,” he mumbled.
“‘Yes, sir’ is right, eejit,” Michaels said to himself.
He squatted down again, his knees popping, and held up the man’s right hand. The fingers had been burned and resembled charred and blackened sausages with pieces of fingernail on one side. The other hand was the same, with a crumpled note resting on the palm. Michaels could make out the letters ‘BR’ and ‘L.Kal
e
.
’
There was also a tiny circle with a cross through it beside the B
R
.
*****
Laurence Kale looked out the thirteenth floor street-side window of his room in the Regent. He sat at the window with the curtain draped behind him and over the back of the hardwood chair he had pulled up to the window.
The bed behind him was quee
n-
sized, with a red floral theme on the covers and pillowcases. Kale liked it, the colors and shapes reminding him of blood. The wallpaper was a maroon color, with tiny spearhead designs in vertical lines every eight inches. There was no TV, and the phone was off the hook. The room smelled of air freshener and copper.
Kale looked down at what he guessed was the older policeman for a few more seconds. He thought maybe that one would see that he hadn’t killed the man in front of the hotel. That he drove with the body and parked nearby afterward. That he dragged it through alleys and quiet streets on a tarp to place it across the street where he could keep an eye on his handiwork. He thought the fat cop wouldn’t figure it out for a whil
e,
though, and pushed back from the window and let the curtain flap down. The game he was playing with the note in the dead man’s hand would keep them busy.
He went into the bathroom and turned on the faucet in the bath. For an old hotel that looked so rundown from the outside, the bathrooms were in a pretty good condition. Nice attention to detail. He especially enjoyed the ful
l-
length mirror beside the bath. He removed his long, clean overcoat and revealed his bloo
d-
soaked clothes.
He stripped them off and dumped them on the floor. Standing close to the mirror he looked himself over, starting with his feet and coming all the way up to his face. He pulled on his eyelids and looked at each of his eyes, the pupils dilating and shrinking in quick succession. He pinched his nose, and pulled his ears out to the side. He pulled his bottom lip down and looked at his gums and bared his teeth. He smiled, frowne
d,
and pulled face
s,
and then giggled, a hig
h-
pitched sound on the edge of glee. Water splashed out of the tub, and he turned off the tap.
It was the perfect temperature, just shy of scalding. He sank slowly into the water and began to massage his shoulders and arms. It felt like he had maybe pulled a muscle in his shoulder when he’d been dealing with the body downstairs. The warm bath was doing wonders.
Doesn’t matter. It’s not like the damage is permanent.
He laughed again, cackling, and let himself go completely under the water for a few seconds.
He came up, blowing water out of his nose. He sighed, and decided that it was time. Leaning out of the bath he rummaged around in the pockets of his jeans until he found the razor blade in the back pocket.
He ran the blunt edge of the blade over his chest, then suddenly flipped the metal between his fingers and started to carve lines into it. The blood ran down into the bath water and red clouds started to appear. He then held out his left wrist and dug into it, severing the arteries, before doing the right. It was harder to use his left hand, especially now that he had cut deep, and sliced the tendons. He managed to burrow the point of the blade into the skin and hit a vital point just underneath.
Just then, he sat forward in the bath, splashing red-tinted water onto the floor of the bathroom. He looked around the bathroom with the look of confusion that appears on the faces of the freshly awoken and the dying. He cried out, his voice weak and low. His last sight was that of his open wrists, leaking his lifeblood into the water.