A thought came to him. He lifted his head and walked over to Emily’s case. There was much more to look at with this case, due to the extent with which Isaac had clearly poured into it over the last three months. Unfortunately, his frustration was also apparent in the mess of strewn papers and coffee stains. He sat down on the floor and looked over the disaster he had left last time. Carefully, he started to organize everything. A photo of a deceased Emily fell out of a stack while he was organizing, and Isaac couldn’t help but to look upon his love. She was all tore up and brutalized from the stab wounds. A large horizontal slice spanned her belly from the emergency C-Section and her ear had been sliced off along with a vicious gash in her cheek. Isaac shoved the photo back into the stack with a trembling hand and continued cleaning up.
At last he was done. He withdrew the write-up on the evidence of the deceased. At the top was the name “Emily Caldwell Murphy.” He skimmed through the notes he’d read a thousand times and moved on to photos of the crime scene. There was blood by the kitchen from where Emily was first attacked. The trail went up the stairs as she crawled, most likely for the bedroom where the guns were. The walls were splayed with blood halfway up from when an artery in her leg was cut. Isaac skipped over the dozens of photos of Emily, unable to stomach the sight. He glanced over the photos of shell casings, his, and the bullet hole in the wall. He glanced at the bloodstain above the shattered living room window…
So damn close…
The pinky and forefinger of the suspect had been recovered from the scene. Isaac stared at the photo of the severed appendages with grim satisfaction. The finger prints off the fingers turned up negative, of course… No matching blood work either. The suspect was either a bum, a mastermind or a ghost. Finally came the police sketch. Isaac bored his eyes into the police sketch of the man who killed his wife and unborn daughter. For a moment, he was sure the sketch would burst into flames from the burning rage he cast upon it from his stare. But it didn’t, the suspect just stared back, unblinking.
The worst part was, nobody outside the office even seemed to care about Emily’s death. In the murder capital of the world, who cared if pregnant women got stabbed in her own home? It made 15 seconds on the nightly news, had to make room for the other six murders that day…
“I am going to find you. You son of a bitch!” Isaac vowed. But there were no leads. The suspect’s Modus Operandi was identical to many of the murders that happened in this city, no substantial evidence, no leads, no case. But if the ghost killers were real, perhaps this man was one of them. Isaac got to his feet and left the study, slamming the room in frustration. He went to his safe and withdrew his Glock 21. He took it out of the holster and approached the top of the stairs. He raised the pistol and aimed down the sights to the first floor. He swept the gun vertically down the stairs, imagining the moment when the suspect stabbed Emily in the thigh. If only his aim had been better. He’d spent the last three months religiously in the firing range, rectifying that mistake. Too bad it made no difference to Emily now. Isaac moved to the first floor and glanced at the bullet hole in the wall. He raised the sights of the pistol to the front door.
“If I’d just come home thirty seconds earlier…” Isaac started to squeeze the trigger at the door, imagining that dark figure pushing through the threshold, only to catch a .45 in the mouth.
Isaac sat down on the floor and looked at the Glock 21. It was austere. It was ugly. It was death.
Why couldn’t it kill that motherfucker?!
Isaac was gripping the pistol so hard that his fingers were starting to ache. He began to pull the trigger. He could see the man’s face, looking down in shock at his mangled hand. Isaac opened his eyes and took his finger off the trigger, coming back to earth with no time to spare. He locked the slide back, which sent the live bullet clattering to the ground. He ejected the magazine and then field stripped the pistol. He laid the pieces of the pistol on the ground and stared at it with a fire burning in his eyes.
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