Night Auditor

Prologue (1)

Sheriff Lance Langley barely finished his fresh cup of coffee when he was tasked to abandon the comforts of Lagro Police Hall to respond to a call forty minutes east of town. Not that Langley had plenty of other jobs to do. The station would get four calls max in a day and most of it would be domestic violence reports (thanks to juveniles whose sexual maturity came way earlier than their emotional intelligence). And not that he was complaining either. His take home pay was enough to keep the wife happy, but the retirement benefits of a government job was the cherry on top. All that in exchange for sitting on his ass in the station for most of the day. It was a bargain.

The call was for a local bed and breakfast on the deep east end of town, right by the border of Lagro National Park. In this small Lagro dumpster fire only lived shy of a thousand sad souls in a town only interesting enough to warrant a single hotel. The small Central Florida town gained partial recognition for two things: beautiful hidden springs yet to be violated by immoral northern tourists, and the occasional special mention in the Tampa Bay Times for the surprisingly high rate of missing children despite the small population (only two days ago, the department had received another report of a missing girl who never came home from school. Another one for his pile of missing children that only seemed to thicken).

Locals whose parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents grew up in Lagro knew that the town once had potential. Langley's grandmother would tell him stories that her own grandmother once told her: Lagro was once a golden place for upcoming films and television. How it started was a vague story in itself but as mysteriously as the flocks of people in the entertainment industry showed up for a town full of potential, so did they mysteriously begin to slowly disappear away from Lagro until no dreamer was left behind. Yet for a moment in the early 1900s, many believed Lagro was to be the hotspot for film and television, to eventually replace the evil's nest that was Los Angeles.

Now, Lagro was a sanctuary for poor, blue collar families, runaway drug addicts, and children mysteriously missing from their firm mattresses. A quiet pit stop for tourists on their way to the sunny beaches of West Palm Beach or Key West.

So no, the station did not often get calls but it was even rarer to get a call for the quiet hotel which mostly minded its own business by the national park. He'd responded to a call at this hotel once: a businessman from Washington was found dead in his bed some years ago. Heart attack, they said.

He could only imagine what the call was for this time. Another local disturbance? It seemed unlikely. This time of year, locals were busy boarding up their doors and windows to prepare for the upcoming hurricane season. Each year like clockwork, residents would set aside the growing drug addiction problem and the boxes of folders filled with unsolved cases of missing people (though majority of the cases would be written off as deadly consequences of the hurricanes which never missed an annual visit to the small town) to protect what was left of their disparaging homes and broken down cars. Fortunately for the small Lagro police department, crime was at an even lower rate when hurricane season came.

Maybe someone had died. Lagro didn't have many tourists to welcome but the town seemed to attract folks with no intentions of going back. A vacation with a one-way ticket. Sad folks who chose, or just happened upon, Lagro to end their lives in. Lagro, truly, was a town sadder than its residents infected by the same emotional and mental turmoil as its tourists.