David Martinez
"He's ready and waiting for you." One of my colleagues quickly pointed me in the direction of a room.
I nodded as I flipped through a clipboard in my hands and headed there.
I was used to the day-to-day routine, as a police detective in a big city, many strange and chaotic things happened all the time.
People constantly face their dark side and despite resisting to the limit of what is feasible, many end up falling into a bottomless pit.
In the end, it's up to me and my colleagues to hold out a hand to stop them falling deeper and deeper into the abyss and sometimes, above all, to stop something worse from happening.
Although most of the time just the first case is more common.
The vast majority are just a bunch of desperate drunks and drug addicts or thugs stealing to feed their children. Crime is often just an escape from a sad and desperate reality.
How can you blame them? Abandoned by their friends,loved ones and family, basically everyone, society had failed with them, the government had failed.
Crime is a reflection of social problems, the criminal is just as human as the rest of us. Everyone deserves a second chance, don't they? Even after that, how much trouble a third chance or more would be?
I believed that from the bottom of my chest, being a policeman was about helping victims and they were victims too, after all.
But...
today for the first time I doubted my truth.
A chill goes from my spine and them through all my body.
At 7Am at this day, I was called to a crime scene, and now some hours later, I have to find out what the heck had happened.
Breathing as deeply as I could, I looked at the heavy metal door handle, the air seemed thin. My body went weak at the thought of what was behind it, my hands trembled and refused to obey me.
He was there.
I was going to need a good cigarette after this.
With a click, the door opened and I was finally able to take a long, painful but necessary look at the perpetrator.
He was in front of me.
It was unexpected, even after everything I couldn't believe my eyes. The pain, my heart felt was indescribable.
"Good morning detective, another hard day?"He was young, his skin was pale white and his hair black. His appearance was a little above average. Above that…
There is some scholar air around him.
There is some wisdom and tiredness behind these eyes.
And a soft smile crossed his face.
That smile scared me.
Analysing him, there is not a sign of being a drug user, not a sign of nervousness, not an unusual tic. His appearance was good and clean, and he had a smile on his face as if he didn't know where he was.
Maybe he did It unconscious? Maybe he was left there, unconscious? A fake clue?
I sight.
"You know how it is, every day is hard in this sector. There's always a drunk to bother me."I tried to acclimatize again, I needed to keep a cool head right now.
"You know very well that I honestly preferred it when the problem of the century was that nobody took their face off their cell phone or had sex."
"If these younglings had sex, I doubt they'd cause so many problems on the streets. I've never seen an idiot fuck up after good sex." He laughed listening to me, it was strange and it disconcerted me.
It wasn't the first time I'd seen him. But he wasn't in that chair last time. I never thought he'd be on this side of things.
I don't believe in this line of thought, but he has some reasons.
Pulling out the chair, which creaked as it was dragged across the floor, I sat down. Normally I used to play the bad cop and get a colleague to play the good guy.
But that wouldn't work with someone who knew us, he knew how we did things and if he played along he could predict our sentences with precision.
This only made the job more tiring.
"I need to ask you a few protocol questions, don't think too much and just answer briefly, understand Mr. Miller?" He agreed.
"Your name is Isaac Miller..." The questions were quickly answered and my chest hurt even more when I heard them.
Isaac Miller, a student in his final years of college. A genius when it came to his field and a prodigy about every other. He was the kind of person who never learned anything in college, in fact he could even teach his professors.
He came from a humble background, but his genius captivated many and opened many unique doors and opportunities in life; I had never seen anyone have such luck and brilliance in their path.
Recently, one of the biggest universities in the world was doing everything it could to have him in its graduate program.
Soon he would have a doctorate and revolutionize the world.
His plans were made and his plane would set off across our oceans and horizons in a direction that no other had ever seen.
"The file is correct, it's me." The more I talked to him, the more I suspected that we were all wrong. I had already seen this boy afraid of insects and crying over a street cat that had been run over.
The boy was an old acquaintance of mine and I liked him a lot. Originally I even thought about introducing him to my daughter and making him part of my family.
Of course, that was a long time ago and things never worked out that way. When I met him, his parents had just passed away...
In the midst of conflicting feelings, I preferred to take the easy way out by speaking my mind directly.
Softening my expression, I spoke frankly to him.
"You face a very serious charge, my boy. You were caught at a violent crime scene holding a knife and are now the prime suspect in a series of murders, as well as the torture of the victims."
"Luckily for you, we still have a few suspects open and most of them are missing. Our main theory is their escape followed by an attempt to frame you. After all, you look out of self when we meet."
He was sleeping in a chair with a cross in his neck and a knife in hands. Some bruises around the body and head. As far as we know, he was in church before getting in there.
Without any suspicious move before finding him.
He could have been kidnapped.
"Until then I ask you to hang in there, we'll soon clean up your image and you'll be back to your usual routine. So if you know anything that could help us, let us know, so we can get this over with as quickly as possible."
He pondered momentarily, shocked by my sincere words. I knew it wasn't him, it couldn't be him.
"Sure, I'll tell you what I know to help you. I know a few things after all." I was happy once again, he was innocent at least it seemed and so more people would be saved from that cruel fate.
He was that type of person with a cold head all the time. He sure will have some clues to us.
I couldn't forget what I had seen this morning.
I had been to the scene of the crime, several young people and teenagers were strapped to stretchers. We found several cut marks on them, as well as fractures caused by some hard hit.
After some analysis,We find it was probably a sign of a confrontation.
The same was found in him.
But that was only the beginning.
Deeper in the room, the worse it gets.
That was not a confrontation anymore.
The last ones couldn't even scream, they didn't seem alive. But they somehow are!
I had a strong stomach, as did my colleagues, but that... that was scary, insane, megalomaniacal.
I was so disgusted by what I saw that I could barely fill out reports, it seemed impossible to me that anyone would even think of doing that, especially my friend.
Forensics came to the conclusion that it was either a drug problem, or worse, a hate crime.
A vendetta against those people, a very cruel and distasteful one.
If this was the case, the fugitives might not have been fugitives but were being held elsewhere.
"They said to me they wanna go to a church to repent their sins, that they wanna meet my god. They are kinda… in fear or maybe…utter terror of going to hell…so I take them there, I take them nearest a human can go to god. In holy soil, six feet below the ground."
He quickly looked deeply at me.
"Is quite simple David, your missing suspects must be happy to almost finally meet god, right now.Being buried alive with some starving rats until death…I don't even need to see it to imagine what they must be going through right now. And you know what? That's very good to know."
A shiver went down my spine at that moment, he was basically confessing. "What? Why? Why would you say something like that?"
"Please spare me that David, you know why I did what I did as well as who they are. Did you really think I'd just sit back knowing that they're free? Just because I'm a young man with a promising future? How naive."
"And I'm the young? Not you?"
What was he saying?
"Yeah... of course I know who they are, they're the same ones who did that to your parents… and then to…them" I sigh deeply.
"But why would you give up your whole future for that? It was already a closed case, we did our best and punished them."
It had been a few months since the second case, their violent death had been terrible. It was done by a scumbag group and as far as I know they were caught for it…
But they were released afterwards... after all, one of them was the son of a big shot...
Their defense was impeccable, they claimed all sorts of things and only one of them was actually arrested and accused of being the mastermind of the crime.
He was the head of some kind of misogyny sect.
An extreme one.
It was at this time that I met him, we were neighbors but had never met before. I ended up sympathizing with him and we got closer. It never seemed to me that he would do this kind of thing.
You never expect the IT nerd to become a serial killer.
"You mean the rest of my family. The rest after the first incident, this is the second.It's getting hard to trust you guys lately, a small amount of money is enough to sweeten your hands."
"I don't need to explain why, I didn't have much to start with. And they took from me the little I had, they took from me who I swore to protect. They desecrated what was most sacred to me."
"I'm different from the others David. Others could be sad but moving forward sighing or go on and take their own lives afterwards.But not me..."
"I chose the opposite David, I chose to fuck it up in retaliation for everything they took from me…"
"...So I think I'd better start investigating my house, before you regret it even more. Not that you can do something, not anymore."
"I didn't finish my act, they were only released because someone helped, Aren't It? Lawyers, politicians, family… many helped, didn't they? If I can lose everything, they can too."