Obscure Blood

Obscure Blood

By

Christopher Leonidas

Copyright ©2015 by Christopher Leonidas. All rights reserved. SmashWords Edition

© 2015 Christopher Leonidas. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Editor
: C. A. Morgan.

Cover Design
:
SelfPubBookCovers.com/michelleleedesigns

Published by
Christopher Leonidas.

ISBN
: 978-1-4685-0201-5 (e)

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author, and the author hereby claims any responsibility for them.

At age nine, I asked my older sister about the meaning of
mafioso
, and she explained its meaning and context. Since that time, I have wanted to be a
mafioso
. I did not trust my family for the reason I was not treated fairly. I did not have equal opportunity. But, the fact that I asked her does not mean I trusted her. Plus, she did not know my heart at the moment, even though I was her little brother. I hated all of my family to the core, so much so that I wanted to leave our house at age ten.

I did not talk to anyone for two years. After all, who can read the silence of the heart if it is not your own heart? The point is, you can’t trust your blood relatives, not only them, but others too. The fact that I did not trust mine is not a reflection of convincing you to not trust yours, but my actual point is to make you aware of what drives me to write a mystery story with those attributes, while I manage to entertain you to an extent.

This mystery story is stirring and suspenseful, but its core focuses on whether someone can trust his/her family. As human beings, we are inclined to trust our family more than anyone. We share almost the same feelings with our blood relatives, but we never know their hearts. Some of us have been betrayed by our mother, our father, our sister, our brother, our son, and so on.

Blood dripped from every wall of the bungalow. There were three bodies, all bled dry. The sight was so horrific that even the toughest police officers started to feel sick. One of them had already vomited and left the scene.

“Detective, these children were murdered with the same weapon. Just like the previous ones, they were brought here and left to bleed. The stab wounds are the same,” said the forensics officer.

Detective Lawman Octa nodded his head and stood there silently, staring at the dead bodies. He had solved many cases and had even earned recognition for some of them, but this was the first time he had been assigned to such a gruesome case. This was the fifth murder of the week. All the victims were children—twelve children in six days.

The murders started six days ago, on the first day of 2000. The first two victims, a small boy and a little girl, were stabbed repeatedly and hung from a tree in a national park in Florida. The only indisputable fact was that the murders had taken place at the crime scene itself with a knife that was still missing. The only other clue Detective Octa found was a teapot, half-filled with the victims’ blood. How this teapot fit in, he wasn’t sure.

None of the dead children had yet been identified, nor had they been reported missing. Perhaps each was from a different country as there was no pattern to their race or ethnicity, which is unusually mixed. Someone might have brought them to Miami, Florida for the purpose of murdering them. Or, maybe they were abandoned children. Ten days later, another murder was reported.

Detective Octa was extremely passionate about his work. He missed meals and sleep was often only an afterthought. He had no family like to speak of as he spent every minute trying to solve this case. He lost count of the days that rolled by, and hit a dead end every day. His supervisors were beginning to panic and amped up the pressure on him, so they could report progress in the case to the curious press.

Three weeks later, when Octa was going through the case files, his boss, Scarlet Albany, called him into her office. With coffee-colored skin and gray eyes, Scarlett wore her hair loose, its length touched her lower back.

“The case has been transferred to the FBI,” his boss said. “It has become much more than we can handle.”

“I just need more time,” Octa said. “I can handle it, Ma’am, don’t give away the case.”

“No, Detective, you know very well where this is heading. You were at the crime scenes. You saw with your own eyes how ghastly they were. More time will only result in more dead bodies. Let those bodies be on them and not on us. I have been instructed to keep our numbers in check. I will follow my orders and so will you. Do not go near those files again, Detective! If you disobey my orders, the consequences will be harsh,” Octa’s boss warned.
He could be stubborn and rule-bending in these cases,
she thought.

Octa nodded reluctantly and left the office.

Octa had never given up on an unsolved case. He went back to his office, pulled out his phone, and messed with his stocks. Octa had stock portfolios, and he messed with them at lunch and on breaks.

After he checked the markets on his phone, he picked up the files and headed home. Later that night, when he sat down with the case files, his mind drifted to another unsolved case—a more personal one. He was twenty-three years old at the time, and was returning home to give his father the good news that he had passed the test and had become a policeman.

Instead of finding his father in the drawing room, however, he found his mother’s body in the kitchen, murdered. His father was nowhere to be found, and after ten years, was still missing. Since then, he had never learned what happened that day. A murder and a dead-cold trail all in a day. There was no evidence, no letters, and no hint of anything wrong, and his world changed forever. In his spare time, he still searched for his father.

As Octa’s car merged onto the freeway heading home, his phone rang, repeatedly. He looked at it multiple times before he decided to answer. It was his wife, Lucinda.

“Octa, I’ve been calling to check on you,” she said.

“I was away from my phone,” he answered. She did not utter another word to him. There was a silence between them. It was always this way, her checking up, him busy, and the awkward silences that grew more frequent between them.

“Is your mother going to make it from the kidney cancer?”

“She’s having surgery at the North Carolina Surgery Center. I should be home next week.”

“Don’t worry. Everything will be okay,” he said, attempting a bit of comfort. Lucinda coughed and said she would see him later. They hung up.

When Octa made it home, he sat in the living room looking at the files. He’d been dreaming of Christina and it startled him awake. Octa and Lucinda had lost their only daughter Christina six months ago.

Christina had been gunned down in a restroom at her high school. The supervisors at the North Miami Senior High School closed the school for three days. The suspect was gunned down in a fire fight with police officers. No one knew his motive. Their daughter’s mouth had been bound with an electric cord, and her head was blown off from behind. There had been no evidence of sexual assault. Since then, they had not dared to talk about their loss. They only shared their love and pain through their daughter’s dog: Maisey. Lucinda never left Maisey behind. She even traveled with her.

Just then, Octa heard a sound in the next room. “Bob, is that you?” he said. Bob Arkansas is Octa’s partner. Bob was an ambitious man who had been diagnosed with PTSD, lives in Octa’s house. Bob had been to Iraq, when he was in the Marine Corps, and had lost his battle buddies from an Intrusion Detection System (IDS). He hit his head on a slab of cement during the blast as hadn’t been the same since.

Octa didn’t hear Bob’s voice back. He got up to check the noise out. As soon as he walked into his home office, someone rushed him and started punching him.

Octa pulled free himself of the man’s hold and landed a solid punch on the intruder’s chest...Octa went for his gun, but before he could draw, something hard hit his head. His strength vanished and he fainted.

Octa came to his senses a few minutes later. Still feeling weak, he looked around in his house. All of his valuables had been stolen. He also found the case files in his trash can, shredded to pieces. Still in a lot of pain, he lay on the floor, feeling helpless.

My boss is going to blow a few fuses when she finds out,
Octa thought. Feeling disturbed, out of sorts, and his head still pounded, he went to visit the house he grew up in. On his way, he thought about his mother’s murder. His eyes filled with sparkles again when he remembered the teapot that had been found on his mother’s tomb.
This seems very unlikely, that he would just remember this odd fact now, sometimes after he has discovered the blood-filled teapot at the crime scene of the murdered children.
When he reached the house, he felt a bit dizzy. To his surprise, the front door was unlocked.

As soon as Octa entered, he saw a teapot placed on the floor. He stopped to investigate. When he lifted the lid, he saw that the teapot was filled with blood.

He moved past the teapot. “I’ve been waiting for you,” a voice said. “Come into the kitchen.”

Octa, anxious and angered, moved toward the kitchen with his gun in hand. When he saw the suspect in the kitchen, he stood still at the doorway, shocked.

“I’ve always wondered if a father and son can hunt each other,” the suspect said as he brandished his knife.

Octa slightly lowered his firearm. “Father,” he said. His father was short and thin, to the point of gauntness. His neck was bony and veins popped up on his skin. His hair was grayish white and long. His eyes had yellow tints.

Octa appeared to be well built, at 175 pounds, 73 inches tall. He had the eyes of his father.

Octa was filled with a hollow depression. He must not have expected his father to welcome him heartlessly. He went back in full defense mode, suspecting the old man of doing the murders.

“Why are you ready to attack me, after I spent a decade searching for you?” said Octa.

“Do I look like I’m here to answer your pathetic question?”

“You must be the one killing those children, too.”

“What if I were? Would that make a difference?”

“I guess not.”

Octa’s father took a few steps forward. “Do not move,” Octa said. “Drop your weapon.” His father kept on walking toward him. “Don’t you push me to shoot.”