Jude’s Blog

I love providing my readers some escapism. I want my readers to feel what my characters are feeling, to really imagine their worlds. This is something magical to me, and why I personally love reading so much.

The rookie police officer darted outside, and moments later, she heard his retching. Josie shook her head in empathy as the smell boiled up into her nostrils, forcing her to take shallow breaths. The heavy curtains on the bedroom windows were drawn, leaving a fitting, somber ambience and obscuring what was surely an even more horrendous sight in broad daylight.

Jotting notes into a small notepad, she nodded toward the coroner who’d just arrived.

“Hey, Josie, how’s little league going?” the coroner, Dr. Katherine Walsh, asked. She was a petite woman, barely five-foot-one, with a touch of grey laced in her curly black hair.

The coroner surveyed the bloody scene. Her soft, flowery perfume wafted to Josie, and she sucked in a greedy sniff of the jasmine bergamot mixture that momentarily overrode the smell of death.

“Pretty good,” Josie said. “My nephew is first base this year. How’s Caroline’s new job?”

Dr. Walsh was kneeling next to the body looking it over, lifting it this way and that. “She loves it. She’s worked so hard for her doctrine in psychology, the position at the children’s hospital is a dream come true. I’d say this poor woman has been dead for three days.” Dr. Walsh sighed and brushed a strand of curly hair from her forehead with the back of her hand. “Caroline and I are having a barbeque next week. You need to come over and see the new décor.”

“Sounds great,” Josie said. “Cause of death?”

“Looks like she bled out from the laceration on her neck. Odd though. I’d expect more blood than this.” Dr. Walsh looked around the horrific scene. “I’ll let Caroline know.”

“More blood than this?” Josie cocked her brows.

Shrugging, the coroner stood and removed her latex gloves. “We’ll see after an autopsy. Crime scene can come in now.” She nodded toward several individuals standing just within the doorway, and they entered carrying large black cases.

Dr. Walsh wrinkled her nose. “If you ever get used to this smell, it’s time to leave the business.”

Standing outside the home, Josie ignored the flashes from cameras and news reporters who shouted for comments as she thought about the scene inside. Jolene Gomez had been a fifty-seven year old divorced mother of two. Her youngest had just married, and Jolene would have had her second grandchild in six months. The woman now lay face down on her bedroom floor with her throat torn out. Blood smeared the wall above the bed as if someone had run bloody hands over them.

Who would do this?

Franklin, Illinois was a moderate-sized city an hour and a half south of Chicago. They weren’t used to crimes this horrific.

What side of hell would you live in to be used to this?

She lifted her gaze from the notepad as a fellow detective approached.

“Hey, Lewis,” Detective Jones said, crossing thick arms over his chest. “What are we looking at here?”

“God only knows,” she replied, tapping her pen against the pad of paper. “Go take a look.”

Jones walked into the home. He soon reappeared, shaking his head and looking a little ashen.

“Holy hell,” he said, eyeing the reporters who were like hungry dogs hot on a trail. They strained to hear the conversation, and Jones lowered his voice.

“Drugs? I saw some cases like this in St. Louis that involved Meth,” Jones said. “Maybe not quite as bloody, though.”

“The friend…” Josie glanced at her notepad. “…a Mrs. Susan Wells, said the victim lived a clean life.”

Jones ran a beefy hand over his shaved head. A man in his mid forties, he was what some women would consider attractive with his deep-set green eyes and tall, solid build. Josie had never noticed him in that way. She could never be involved with a fellow cop, or any officer of the law for that matter. She typically went for the blond playboy jock types who knew how to love ’em and leave ’em. Having grown up in a home where male role models came and went depending on her mother’s whims, she shied away from permanency.

Jones scribbled on a notepad of his own, a sloppy chicken scratch that left Josie curious if he’d be able to decipher it later. Her gaze roamed over the crowd that had assembled along the street. She studied each individual from behind her dark, aviator-style sunglasses, looking for anything that might catch her interest. Mostly middle-aged, middle-class neighbors, but one figure stood out to her. He was a tall man, late-thirtyish with a muscular, athletic build, sandy brown hair, and eyes hidden behind his own aviator shades. His skin looked tanned against the crisp, white polo shirt he wore.

It’s fifty degrees out here, and he’s at ease in a short-sleeved shirt?