| Subject: Little Details - Prologue |
Author:
fananicfan
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Date Posted: 23:09:16 07/08/07 Sun
In reply to:
fananicfan
's message, "Little Details" on 11:25:09 07/08/07 Sun
Prologue to Little Details
It was just after two in the morning. Ken and Mark were closing up the Wild Waves Club, located not too far from the Naval base in Norfolk, Virginia. It had been a busy Friday night, and they were just getting a chance to take the trash out to the alley dumpster that they’d let pile up by the backdoor. Ken opened the door and didn’t see anything unusual at first. He pushed the door open, and Mark and Ben hauled several garbage bags passed him.
Ken watched the two men take the first couple of steps towards the dumpster before looking down the alley past the dumpster to see if anyone was coming into the alley or watching them. There was a dim light in the alley, but only from the service door of the building next to the dumpster. The alley went on about another fifty feet past the dumpster before reaching the street. As the two men threw the bags into the dumpster, Ken saw the flicker of light on glass. The headlights from a car passing the alley on the street had reflected off the glass in a car at the end of the alley. Ken saw the car with the driver’s door open, but that isn’t what caught the attention of Mark and Ben. As Mark and Ben were releasing the bags of garbage into the dumpster, the headlights shed light on the normally dark half of the alley, revealing a woman lying in a pool of blood.
Mark had seen a lot during his time in the service, so the woman in a pool blood a few feet from them didn’t faze him, or at least not as much as it did Ben. Ben turned pale and looked faint. His youth and skills on the football field hadn’t prepared him for the harshness of death that he’d just seen.
The flash of light from the passing car hadn’t lasted long. Mark had a gut feeling that she was dead, but he couldn’t be sure.
Mark hollered, “Ken, call the police. There’s a woman lying in the alley.”
Ken yelled back. “Is she dead?”
“I can’t be sure until I get some light on the situation, but from the amount of blood I saw, I’d say she’s gone.” Mark’s voice softened. He felt badly for Ben, who'd remained pale and still staring in the direction of the body that had vanished from their sight when the alley had become dark again. “Ben, hurry to the storage room and bring me back a flashlight.”
Ben turned to follow his orders, still unable to wrap his mind around what he’d just seen.
Once the patrol unit had arrived on the scene, they knew that their job was simple: start taking down names and addresses of anyone in or around the area as potential witnesses, establish a perimeter around the site, and call in a crimes scenes unit and the detectives.
When the detectives who responded saw the woman's body, they were pretty sure that they’d be turning this case over to the detectives who were working the stripper killings. Her throat had been cut and her body had been found within a few miles of the other bodies. There was no purse or wallet found with her body, and her attire of a mini skirt, a leather jacket over a silk and lace camisole top and at least three inch heels led them to the conclusion that she was a stripper like the other three victims, especially since her body had been found in an alley adjacent to a strip club.
If this were another stripper murder as they thought, this made number four, and they needed to go over this crime scene with a fine toothed comb because, unlike the other bodies, this one seemed to have been found within a couple of hours of her death and, at the other sites, there'd been no car, just a body. Perhaps this was the one where they’d get a real break as to the killer’s identity. The seasoned detectives who'd responded that night were already forming theories. They decided that it never hurt to look at a crime from more than one angle whether they got to keep the case or not, so they moved from the site of the body to the car.
Since the car parked at the end of the alley had had the driver’s door open and a flat tire, their first theory was that it was the victim's. Scenarios of the victim pulling the car just inside the alley to be off the main road to change the tire started to come together in the detectives' minds as they looked around the vehicle. The location of the car was close to the main road, so it was lit by the streetlamp on the corner. Therefore, she probably felt that it would be safer to pull in there and off the main roadway so she wouldn't be in danger of being hit by a car while trying to change the tire. If that were the case, they believed this to be unrelated to the other murders. Either that or the stripper killer had been in the area looking for his next victim and stumbled upon this woman, resulting in a spur of the moment killing. They were leaning towards the latter, given the similarities between this murder and the other three. Somehow, they just didn’t think that it was unrelated. A spur of the moment killing made slightly more sense because that would explain the bruises on her face that the previous women didn't have, indicating that this victim either wasn’t caught completely off guard by her attacker and had put up a fight, or the killer was becoming more hostile and his need to kill was escalating to the point that he hadn’t taken the time to plan this last murder.
A run of the car’s license plate and the registration of the vehicle found in the glove compartment gave them the name of Bradford Rodgers as the registered owner. This gave detectives another possible theory or two. The car might belong to someone who ran away after they'd witnessed the murder or, if the police were lucky, it belonged to the murderer, and he’d had a flat with no spare when he attempted to leave the scene of the crime. There were no personal items such as a purse or wallet in the vehicle to suggest that the victim had been in this vehicle, or any information that gave them any clue as to who this victim was. The club’s owner and bartender both said that they didn’t know who she was. She didn’t or hadn’t worked for them. So the body was sent to the morgue without any identification, simply tagged as Jane Doe and zipped into a body bag before being taken to the morgue.
Before the car was towed to the police crime lab for a full forensics work up, the detectives' hope of being lucky ran out. They found a spare tire in the trunk, so they were back to the theories of the car either belonging to a witness or being used by the victim.
The police were reluctant to say that they had a serial killer on their hands at the scene, but if the findings of the medical examiner came back the way the detectives thought it would, they’d have four dead brunette women in four weeks and, if they didn’t warn the public of the possibility of a serial killer being out there, the media would.
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