Part 2

The stone cottage stood shoulder to shoulder with similar houses on a quiet small-town street. The backdrop of giant redwoods made it appear smaller than it was. When I woke that morning I could not have known I would be here. Such is the life of a detective. I lifted the police tape and approached the front door.

My father told me that doing something right one time makes you an expert. It is advice that has proved to hold water. I’m an expert at catching killers. After solving my first homicide, more cases came my way. The latest call was an S.O.S from the Sergeant of a small mountain town. They had their first homicide on record. Nothing could have prepared me for what was to come.

I fumbled with the keys Sergeant Wood gave me at the station. He had asked if I wanted company. I shook my head. I preferred to see the scene on my own. Out on the street a set of headlights cut through the evening gloom. The car slowed and rolled by the house at a walk. News was already spreading.

I didn’t turn on the lights. I wanted to see the house as he had. The girl was taken from her bed during the night as her family slept. My knee rapped against a small table and I threw out a hand to catch a vase before it tipped. I turned on my flashlight.

Her room was in the back corner. The parents left it as they had found it in the morning. The bedding pulled back exposing a small rectangle of sheet below the pillow. A lamp and stuffed bear in place on the dresser. No sign of a struggle. When she didn’t answer their calls, her parents had searched frantically until the mother spotted something.

I flicked through the panel of switches until I found the light for the back porch. Two bikes leaned against the back wall of the cottage. The grass was neatly mowed. The redwoods rose as a black mass as night encroached. In the back corner of the backyard was the garden shed, its pitched roof set just above the fence. I directed the flashlight on the window beside the door. The stain blemished the otherwise spotless glass. A crude smiley face drawn in blood.

The mother called the police as the father investigated. He found their daughter on the floor of the shed, the lawnmower and wheelbarrow shoved aside to make room. Blood stained her white nightclothes. Her limbs bent at unnatural angles. And her face..

I pulled the photos from the folder Sergeant Wood gave me at the station. I lined up the picture with the floor in front of me. My stomach clenched in on itself. The killer had turned up both the top and bottom lips and pinned them to her face with needles. The result was a grotesque smile that exposed all her teeth. He had removed the front two teeth on the top row and with the blood that came had drawn the smiley face on the window.

It was the beating that killed her. She had several broken ribs and a crushed chest. If she screamed, no one heard.

I would need to interview the parents. The brutality of the crime, and the fact that there had been no attempt to hide the body, suggested this was not random. The teeth and the smiley face meant something.

I had quizzed Sergeant Wood at the station. There was no good reason he knew of that would make the killer target this family. The father worked at the bank. The mother taught second grade at the local school. No criminal records. No money troubles. Sergeant Wood showed me his empty palms – for the first time in his career he didn’t know what to do next.

I flicked off the flashlight and stepped out onto the grass. The first stars appeared in the sky. The mountain air was cold. A mist filtered between the trees behind the back fence. A full moon pushed up over the horizon to the east. I had hoped to find something of significance. Some small thread to pull on. I sighed, expelling a burst of vapour intermingling with the mist.

I went over the girl’s room a second time before checking my watch. Time to call it a night. I gathered up the photos and reports and turned out the lights. My best guess was still the parents. A girl that age has no mortal enemy.

I closed the front door and heard whispers from the road. A group of four bystanders gathered on the other side of the police tape. I called out a sharp ‘hey’ as if admonishing a misbehaving child. The muttering ceased and the bravest of the four asked who I was and if the rumours were true. I snapped back that they all had better things to do.

I crossed my arms and waited for them to get back in their cars and drive away. The small town telegraph was in full swing.

My phone rang. Sergeant Wood.

“There’s another one,” he said.

“Another what?”

“It’s exactly the same.”

“Text me the address. I’ll be right there.”

I set my phone in the holder on the dash and started the engine.

----

I knew where to go, I had already been there. The town has two main shopping streets that run parallel to one another. South of the town centre, those two streets form the eastern and western boundaries of the park. The police station stands across the road from the park on the western side. As the light from the police station window came into view, I saw flashlight beams flickering from within the darkness of the park.

Half a dozen officers made a semi-circle at the base of a giant steel slide. I found Sergeant Wood and tapped his arm. He waited a couple of beats before acknowledging me. The flash from a camera illuminated his pale face. He stepped back from the ring of officers and spoke in a hushed voice.

“The victim’s name is Harry McPharlin. Fifteen years old. He has guitar lessons on Tuesday nights and was riding his bike home.”

I shouldered through the throng. I trained my own flashlight on the boy. It was almost exactly the same as the night before.

The boy’s lips were curled up and skewered to his skin with needles, exposing the teeth. Two teeth were again missing, but this time the two either side of the front teeth on the top. The boy lay at the base of the slide where it flattens out. His arms and legs were broken in multiple places. And above his head was a smiley face drawn in blood, dark against the bright steel of the slide.

“Were there any witnesses?” I asked.

No one answered. I scanned the faces of the officers in the gloom. They all looked a version of dumbstruck.

“Were there any witnesses?” I repeated, my voice terse.

A cadet named Watts pointed to a dome shaped climbing structure. Two teenagers stood huddled together in the darkness.

I tapped Watts on the arm. “Close the roads. We don’t want an audience.”

The witnesses were girls around sixteen. They reeked of smoke and alcohol. Their eyes widened as I approached.

“What did you see?”

They looked at each other. The shorter of the two stammered a response. “Are we in trouble?”

I focussed my attention on her. “No. We won’t charge you with anything. I don’t care what you were doing. What did you see?”

“We saw Harry lying there.” She stifled tears.

“Was he alone?”

She shook her head.

“Who was with him?”

“I don’t know. It was too dark.”

“What did they look like?”

“He was average height I guess, I don’t know. Thin. He was dressed in a penguin suit.”

“A penguin suit?”

“Tuxedo,” her friend whispered.

“Did you see his face?”

“Only for a second.”

“Did you recognise him?”

She shook her head. “He was pale. And his mouth was all black, it was weird. He was scary looking.”

Behind me a woman screamed. She turned away from the slide and buried her face in her hands. A man in a dark jacket embraced her. It must be the parents.

An hour later I sat opposite Derek and Ellie McPharlin. Ellie searched the room with red and puffed eyes. Derek sat with arms crossed and a thousand mile stare. I slid a cup of coffee to each of them. Neither touched it.

“I’m detective Chris Hassell.”

“Do we have to do this now?” Ellie asked meekly.

“Yes, we do. Time is our enemy. Can you think of anyone who would want to harm your boy?”

Ellie shook her head. “No. He does fine at school. He plays football in the winter. He doesn’t have any enemies. Who would want to hurt him?”

“Witnesses saw a thin man in a tuxedo. Does that mean anything to you?”

Ellie shook her head.

“Derek?”

His eyes flicked to mine. He shook his head.

“What about the teeth?”

Ellie wailed and sobbed into her hands. Derek fidgeted in his seat. He avoided my gaze.

“Derek, do you know Chrissie, the girl killed last night?”

He shrugged. “Not really.”

“Your kids went to the same school.”

“The school is bigger than two kids.”

“Do you know Chrissie’s parents?”

Ellie wiped her nose. “Derek went to school with Chrissie’s father, didn’t you?”

Derek licked his lips. “I don’t see what that has to do with anything. Are you going to find this guy or what?”

I held up my palms. “We’ll do everything we can. There’s nothing you can think of? The teeth, the smiley face. It doesn’t mean anything to you?”

Derek crossed his arms and turned his eyes to the table.

“We don’t know,” Ellie said.

----

I slept a few hours and was back at the police station an hour after sunrise. The place was a hive of activity. All available officers were on deck. Sergeant Wood received a heads up that the press were on their way. Two murders in two nights in a sleepy town set in the forest was sure to play well across the country. I told Sergeant Wood to conduct a press conference that afternoon and ask for space to do our jobs.

A sweep of the park in the daylight turned up nothing of use. No fingerprints in the smiley face drawn with blood or anywhere else. No weapon used for the beating. No shoe prints in the ground. No one else had seen the man in the tuxedo. I called all the stores that sold or hired tuxedos in the area and nothing turned up. I requested to speak to Derek McPharlin again. I was sure he was hiding something. Sergeant Wood shut me down. We had to let him grieve.

By afternoon it was clear that someone had leaked information to the press. We had hoped to keep the details of the teeth and smiley faces under wraps, but the press already knew. They even had a name for the killer. The Tooth Fairy. It would catch on. It was damage control now.

Sergeant Wood instilled a town-wide curfew starting at sunset and finishing at sunrise. All events were cancelled with immediate effect. Wood put in a request to neighbouring towns and we were getting four extra cars to assist with a patrol of streets at night. Wood reckoned the killer would not strike again. I disagreed. The second killing took place opposite the police station. A few cars roaming the streets wouldn’t make much difference.

When night came I rode with Cadet Watts. He squeezed the wheel so hard that his knuckles turned white. I told him to relax. A heavy fog settled over the town and glowed eerily in the streetlights and the pale light of the moon. The town mostly obeyed the curfew, aside from an old couple out to walk their dog. We crawled the streets at not much more than walking pace. Everything was quiet.

The coroner put Chrissie’s time of death at around 11pm. Harry McPharlin was earlier still. As the night wore on, I started to think I had been wrong. The killer would not strike again, at least not tonight. And then, a little after 2am, the radio burst to life. The location meant nothing to me, but Watts knew where to go.

We raced to the outskirts of town and a parking lot at the head of a walking trail through the forest. The muffled sound of dogs barking echoed off the trees. We raced up the walking trail and came across a forlorn Sergeant Wood. He winced and put his hands on his hips.

A third kid, a blonde girl named Hannah. He had cut her face trying to pin the lips open. She must have fought back. The bottom lip was torn in two and he had used an extra needle to fix it through her chin. The two canine teeth on the front row were gone. He left her propped against the base of a redwood, a smiley face was drawn in blood on the trunk above her head.

How had this happened? Everyone in town had stayed home and locked their doors and windows.

Hannah lived alone with her mother, Meredith. Officers found Meredith asleep in a recliner with the television still on. An empty bottle of whiskey stood on the coffee table beside an upturned ashtray. She hadn’t heard the lock on the back door break. She hadn’t heard her daughter as he dragged her away.

The dogs sniffed at the base of the tree and pulled at their leashes and bound into the forest. If we were lucky they would find something. I didn’t feel lucky.

“It’s someone local,” I said to Sergeant Wood.

“No one knows anything.”

“Someone has to know. And we have to find out or kids are going to keep dying.”

His shoulders fell. Sergeant Wood knew what was coming. Three murders in three consecutive nights was borderline unheard of. The families, the town, the press, and the country would all want answers. Whatever blame there might be would be lumped at his feet. This was now his legacy. Not the thirty years’ service before this week, but this alone. It would be his to carry for the rest of his life.

Sergeant Wood was at a loss, and so was I. On a typical murder case the killer strikes and a methodical investigation leads to the culprit. We had no time for process. We were in the middle of the storm and had to think on our feet. The whole situation was unfolding at breakneck speed. There was something unnatural about it. I had no idea then how right that hunch would prove to be.

We needed answers and we needed them now. There was one place I had in mind to start.

I hammered on the door of the McPharlin home for the fifth time and checked the windows. Still dark. The porch light of the house next door flicked on and an old woman stepped out. I snapped at her to get back inside. A light flicked on above my head. Derek McPharlin rubbed his eyes behind the protection of the screen door. I demanded he let me in. Another kid was dead.

Derek ushered me to a small round table beside the kitchen.

Ellie called out from the bedroom. “Who was it?”

“No one dear. Go back to sleep.”

Derek pushed and pulled at his fingers. His eyes were on the table in front of him. His skin turned pale.

I propped my elbows on the table. “Tell me what you know.”

“It wasn’t our fault. We were kids.”

“Ok, you were kids. Tell me what you know.”

Tears welled in his eyes and he blinked them away. “I can’t believe it’s even possible. But it has to be. It’s Jack Lassiter.”

“Who is that?”

“We called him Smiling Jack. He went to school with us. He had this deformity. His gums and his teeth grew outwards, so much that he could barely close his lips. You could always see his teeth. So we called him Smiling Jack.”

“You bullied him?”

“We teased him. It wasn’t anything dramatic. He was a weird kid anyway. Even without the teeth I doubt he would have made many friends.”

“And you think Jack is behind this? Where is he now?”

“That’s the thing. Jack died thirty years ago. It happened at school, the one down the road here. Someone said something to him, I can’t remember what or who, but it set Jack off. He ran into the building where they teach shop class, and he grabbed a set of pliers and started yanking out his teeth one by one. When the first couple came out we egged him on, telling him how handsome he would be. But he kept going. Blood poured from his mouth and pooled at his feet. A couple of kids ran outside and almost fainted. By the end we weren’t cheering anymore. We were in shock. How he stood the pain I’ll never know.”

Derek ran an index finger over his top teeth and then his bottom.

“He got all the front ones out, top and bottom. There was a waterfall of blood pouring down his chin. He spat and then pulled his lips shut. He smiled, a grotesque blood soaked smile. His eyes turned up in his head and, either from the pain or the blood loss, he fainted. As he fell he smashed his head on the corner of a work bench. We called the nurse and then an ambulance, but he died right there on the floor.”

“Did Jack have any family?”

“A father. Ivan Lassiter. After he buried Jack he showed up to a football game, drunk as anyone I’ve ever seen. In the middle of the game he strolled onto the field and looked up at the crowd and told us we were all to blame for Jack’s death. That we would never be forgiven for it. That our time would come. Then he went to the church over on Olive Street and hung himself from the balcony above the pulpit. And that was the end of it.”

“What about other family? Mother, brothers or sisters?”

“No. Nothing. They lived alone up in the forest. As far as I know Ivan and Father Moore were the only people at Jack’s funeral. And Father Moore buried Ivan. No one else went.”

“No one?”

“We all wanted to move on.”

“And now thirty years later, what? The ghost of Ivan is killing kids?”

“Not Ivan. He was a fat man. The kids said the killer was thin. Jack was thin. They said he wore a tuxedo. Ivan buried Jack in the tuxedo meant for his prom.”

I replayed the statement of the witnesses in my head. A thin man wearing a tuxedo, pale face and a dark mouth. If he had no teeth his mouth would appear dark. It couldn’t be true. But what if it was? A bolt of fear ran up my spine. I had dealt with the worst of mortal killers, but an undead one? I pictured the battered bodies of the victims, their lips and the missing teeth. The blood. I shivered. My investigation would put me right in the path of whatever storm terrorised this town and I didn’t know if I could stop it.

I rubbed my eyes. They hurt. I needed sleep, but it would have to wait. I pushed down the fear. This was a lead. I had a thread to pull. I pushed aside the thought that a dead boy was terrorising the town, I wouldn’t let myself believe it – at least not yet.

“Where can I find Father Moore?”

Me