Justice by Oleander - 2012 Watty Awards, Finalist

Chapter 2

© Carey MacLean, 2012

Chapter 2

Xavier backed up from his white board.  He had posted photos of each victim in the order of their deaths along with well-known facts about who they were as people.  He already knew that they were all incredibly successful and financially secure with their various employment ventures.

But what do they have in common?  He asked himself after realizing that his list of commonalities was quite thin at best in description.

They all ran in different circles with society, despite their elevated stature.

He went to his desk and sifted down the list of information that was included in the report to the first victim.

Moving onto the second victim, he did the same thing.  It wasn’t until he got to the seventh that he clued in that there was another common denominator aside from their being found naked in a bed or their social statuses.  They were all married.

Okay, so what does that tell me?  Clearly, it’s not like their wives would have banded together to swindle the system in order to cash in to the millions from their spouses life insurance policies and assets, both monetary and property.

The more he thought about these women, the more this new thought nagged at him.

The perp has to be a woman, he concluded.

Detective Ryans was pretty sure that no man would commit a crime such as these in this fashion.  They were all crimes of passion; all eleven of them.  Men are usually brutal in their violence.  Women were usually more clever, devious and obscure.

I always thought that a woman would be the better sex to get away with murder, the only problem with this line of thinking was the simple fact that he lacked evidentiary proof that this predator was indeed a woman.

“Hey Xav,” Connor stuck his head through his office door.

“Hey buddy,” Connor walked in and took a seat by Xavier’s desk.  “How goes the battle?”

“Ugh,” Connor rubbed his tired eyes.  “I love Suzie but I tell you, this pregnancy thing is really kicking my ass.  Can you believe she woke me up at three this morning for an ice cream run?”

Xavier had to laugh.

As much as getting up at three hundred hours to fetch ice cream might seem like a serious detriment to ones sleeping pattern, he couldn’t help but be envious about his best friend.

Suzie and Connor had met when he and Xavier were still in college.  They married nearly five years ago and after multiple heartbreaking miscarriages, they finally conceived with the help of in-vitro fertilization and hormone injections.  Xavier couldn’t be happier for his two best friends.  He wanted the same for himself but it had never materialized.  So he did what he knew best; he immersed himself in his career.

“Dude, you alright?”  Connor asked him.

Xavier hadn’t realized he was in a daze until his best friend snapped him out of it.

“Yeah,” he paused.  “Just thinking, it’s all.”

He rubbed the back of his neck.

“I can’t believe that the Captain handed these hopeless cases down to you.  Then again, if anyone can solve these, it’s you,” Connor got up and walked up beside his best friend and patted him on the back.  “So I heard that Castelli was your latest addition?”

“Yeah.”

“The unfortunate soul.  Sounds like a woman scorned to me.  He wasn’t shy about flaunting his indiscretions,” Connor mumbled aloud as he turned to leave.