Abstract Murder

Prologue

Michael

            It was a hot, sticky summer with an oppressive humidity that made the living miserable; the kind of weather that brings out the worst in people.  The suburbs of  Anne Arundel County, Maryland had been hit with rash of missing persons, all women in their early to mid-twenties.  All of the missing women had similar hair and eye color, height and body type, but there was no known connection among them. 

            About a month after the third woman went missing under identical circumstances to the two previous disappearances, County police suspected they were dealing with a serial abductor.  Then, after three additional women went missing and were feared dead, my partner, Lenie, and I were asked to take a more active role in the investigations.  A couple of days into our assignment the body of the first woman to go missing was found by two local boys hoping to pull a few catfish from the Patuxent river.   Instead what they snagged was the beginning of a journey into madness.

            What had once been a living being now lay clad in only a bra and panties 150 feet down an embankment that poured into the river.   It was hard to tell from where I was standing, but there appeared to be some kind of grayish substance covering her skin; possibly some kind of clay or plaster. Once the body was brought onto land and placed on its back we found her driver’s license inside her bra cup.  Lenie tagged and bagged the license, then gave it to me to follow up while she stayed with the body.

            I went to the address on the license to look for answers to the questions bouncing around inside my head.  I showed the landlord my ID and asked for the keys to the victim’s apartment.  Once inside, I expected to look for photos to match up with the photo on the license, but all of that melted away when I went into the living room. 

            Lenie and I have both seen our fair share of the sick and tragic aftermath of the human psyche gone bad, but what I found in that living room on that maddening day in July went far beyond the inner sanctum of human darkness--a place that bears no name.