‘His strength was also his weakness’

It was a dull September evening in Wintervale, and the residence of Det. Ret. Johnson Compton was quiet, almost too quiet, he thought, for just a year ago, he had been given a handsome farewell dinner by the Wintervale Police Department. After that, he had had a few friends over every now and then, until last Christmas, when he had heard that he had lost his only son, who was on his first tour in Afghanistan. People had begun carefully avoiding him since then, as he had taken to drinking in the evenings, and had become a mess, given his state of bereavement and retirement.

He had survived two conscriptions, a full life of public service, a messy divorce, the loss of his only son to war, but retirement was not something he had planned for. Work had put everything into perspective – it had given him purpose, gumption, and just the will to go on, but retirement had hit him hard. Oh how the mighty had fallen, he thought, for retirement is something he had never given much thought to, but the day had come when he had been politely asked to leave.

He had taken a fascination to twirling his gun, his Beretta M9 standard issue pistol, each night, not really thinking of suicide, but not that he hadn’t considered it either. It was a thought that had crossed his mind a few times, but it had not stayed with him long enough for him to go through with it. He also read and reread the harsh, incriminating letter his ex-wife had written to him, a few months prior, blaming him for letting their son get conscripted.

His diligence at work had left him without a life outside, and he was bitter, at least 30 pounds overweight, addicted to alcohol and lonely. As he was reminiscing about the numerous criminals he had put behind bars, he was reminded of a certain someone he had met, only for the duration of a particularly twisted case, but he believed that that person had completely changed the way he had thought about all things mystical. This person was an expert in such things, and, well, the killer was no ordinary killer.

The killer had been a sociopath with suspected cannibalistic tendencies, and had been the one that got away for several years, until he met Monsieur Jean Claude LaValle. The corpses had been found in a large yard, not far from the killer’s property, carefully semi-buried, and semi preserved under a mat of fake grass, and used as a nutrient source for several strange exotic plants. However, upon exhuming and performing autopsies on each corpse, it was found that they had been missing organs and bones – different ones each time. Belonging to an affluent family and being a renowned professor of art history in his own right, the killer had access to the best criminal lawyers money can buy, and had also won the jury over with his charm, good looks and innocuous façade. 

Although Compton instinctually knew that this was the killer, there had always been cause for reasonable doubt, and this had both, frustrated and infuriated him. He had spent several coffee fuelled, sleepless nights poring over all of the evidence, forensic reports, the videos and transcripts of the trials, trying to find a chink in the killer’s armour, but to no avail – the bastard had thought of everything.

Fifteen years since the first trial, while the case file had still not been closed, LaValle had walked into PD, speaking of the involvement of voodoo in the killer’s modus operandus. He said that he saw a pattern, and that he suspected that the killer’s victims were carefully chosen to perform the rites and rituals to conjure evil spirits. At first, Compton had utterly dismissed the strange man’s allegations, but several sleepless nights later, he eventually decided to call him back, and to hear him out. The more LaValle explained, the more he saw that LaValle’s knowledge provided much needed context to the evidence. He finally knew where to look, how to look at the evidence, and he asked LaValle be a consultant on the case. In his forty years of service, this was the first time he had enlisted the help of someone outside of law enforcement to help him solve a case.

He had finally come upon volumes of journals the killer had kept, hidden in an underground vault, not far from the first burial site, where they had suspected him to have stored the other implements used in the voodoo rituals. They found what they were looking for, but they did not expect to find the journals, detailing his turbulent childhood, his initial, animal kills, and then his introduction to a voodoo club. He mentioned that the club was filled with pretenders, and that he wanted the real thing. Thus began his murderous pursuits, and he had practiced killing – stealthily at first, but later, emboldened by his ability to walk free, he began to roam free, killing more and more people for more darker rituals. Upon this discovery, the case was a slam dunk. The killer’s attention to detail had been his own undoing – both, his strength, and his weakness.

The Det. Ret. felt a rush, even just thinking about the day he had heard that the Professor’s death sentence had been fulfilled, just a week after he had been given a medal of honour by the Mayor for putting the Professor behind bars. Was life worth living now, that he had no such service to do, no one to protect, nothing to look forward to?

He remembered the advice he had given his friend, Jake, about an entirely different matter. He had told him to stop thinking, and to just get on with it, because we’re all not getting any younger. Everyone had laughed. Then, in a rush of emotion, he picked up his Beretta and shot himself in the temple. Then it all went black.