Detective Mona Dew stepped onto the front lawn of 1233 Tremonton Avenue and surveyed the scene.  Not much in the front yard to report, no clues or footprints of any kind.  She was disgusted with not only the lack of material to go on, but also the facts at hand.  The first of these was that two women were missing and the blood pool in the backyard leading down the basement stairs and onto the game room carpet proved that at least one of them had lost too much blood to have survived.

From the looks of things, this was the same perpetrator that had dumped two other bodies along an old logging road in Lincoln County only three months earlier.  The problem was, Lincoln County was on the coast and this scene was in Multnomah County, in Portland.  Would the authorities on the coast share their information?  It seemed sometimes that she had to beg for even the trading of officer’s names, and they were slow in coming through.  Sighing, because she knew that this was going to be another case where favors were given by her office and never returned from the other- she walked up the steps again and entered the residence on the first floor.

“What have you got, Perkowski?” she asked the first officer she met.

“I need your mark on this bag, ma’am.  This blood was found on the handrail of the inside staircase coming up from the basement,” the red-haired, young officer reported.  She was efficient, something that Detective Dew noted and saved in her memory for later.  Some of the higher ups hadn’t showed as much drive as this one had in the first few months of her employment with her office.

She wrote her initials and her personal mark on the bag and took it from Officer Perkowski, handing it over to a CSI tech next.  The chain of evidence mustn’t be broken, especially in a case like this one.  This was a serial killer, she knew, and there was no way of knowing which direction he’d be going next.

On the backseat of a rusty copper colored Scout, Mary Riker sat with her hands clenched tightly, a zip tie holding them together.  Some of her fingers were laced in a normal pattern, but there were a few that were twisted grotesquely, having been systematically broken.  She’d been tortured and beaten.  The only thing worse than what had already happened to her was no knowing what she was going to endure next.  The unconscious body of another woman lay across the floor mats; her soft moans had stopped more than ten minutes ago, leading Mary to wonder if she really was dead now.  The thought made her instantly sick and she dry-heaved for a few moments until a gloved hand slapped her on the back of the head.