Earthbound : A gripping crime thriller full of twists and supernatural suspense Fynn Perry (if you liked this book TXT) 📖

Lazlo made his way carefully down the bank toward Cousins, passing between the decorative stacks of rock perched upon rock before crouching by the body of a female, possibly in her thirties. It was hard to judge her age as both her body and face were bloated. But what drew his attention were the deep cuts on her stomach. They were not the result of indiscriminate slashing—they formed letters: C-H-I-V-A-T-A.

“It’s Spanish for a female ‘traitor’ or ‘snitch.’ You were right to call me. Who found the body?” Lazlo asked, glancing at Cousins.

“It was an anonymous call.”

“A hundred bucks says the press has been tipped off, too. This message is a demand for loyalty and is meant to be broadcast. Nothing like this happens on El Gordito’s territory without his say-so, or at least him knowing about it,” he muttered, taking photos with his phone.

The victim’s face and body were covered with oily residue and dirt from the river. Snapping on a pair of latex gloves that he carried with him, Lazlo noticed her lips seemed tightly squeezed and stuck together with some kind of clear sealant.

At that moment, he heard tires screeching to a halt, the sound of approaching footfalls, and the growl of orders being given in a Texas drawl. Lazlo continued his investigation, regardless. He forced the lips open, breaking the seal. It was some kind of silicone gel, and her nostrils were filled with the same substance. As he opened the mouth farther, thick, putrid blood spilled out to reveal something floating in the aperture. It was her severed tongue. He recoiled.

The footsteps drew closer, accompanied by, “What the hell? Lazlo, is that you?”

Lazlo closed the victim’s mouth and slipped his gloves off, letting them drop to the ground. He put his foot over them as he stood up. He turned around to see a fellow detective and one of his biggest critics, Caleb Richards, red-faced as usual, with his thick neck sticking out of a polo shirt. Obviously, he had dressed in a hurry.

“Are you shittin’ me? What the hell are you doing at my crime scene?” he accused.

“Just happened to be driving past and saw the cruiser by the shore. Figured at this time of night it could be a body. With all the cuts in the number of patrols, figured I could help an officer out.”

“Sure, you were just passing by at two in the morning,” Caleb said, shooting a suspicious look at Officer Cousins, who couldn’t help but flinch. “Get the fuck out of here. You’re a fucking liability, Lazlo! It’s a wonder the force still has money to pay salaries after you got us sued so many times.”

Caleb Richards turned to look at Cousins. “Find out when CSU will get here,” he shouted. Then, hearing a commotion, he turned around to see a group of people coming down the grassed area toward him. “Shit! How did the press get here so quick?”

Lazlo took the opportunity to bend down and retrieve the gloves from under his foot and to slip them into his leather jacket pocket. “Have a great evening!” he said, smiling to Richards as he turned to walk back to his car.

“Watch yourself, Lazlo. If I find out you’re screwing around in El Gordito’s files, I’ll make sure the captain has your badge!” Richards shouted after him.

Lazlo responded with a rearward-facing, middle-finger salute.

Back in his hidden war room, Lazlo plugged in the pen drive containing the photos he had copied from Jennifer Miller’s portable drive and found the headshot photos of the Hispanic workers. He pulled all the ones of women into a separate file and then compared each one with the photo he’d taken on his phone of the Jane Doe from the Hudson river.

Comparing a side headshot of a living person taken at night with a full-frontal view of the pale, water-bloated face of a dead person wasn’t easy. Not only had the photos been taken at different angles, but the puffy skin made matching difficult—but not impossible. He knew what to focus on: the distances between the eyes, nose, and mouth, the so-called Golden Ratio used by plastic surgeons. These characteristics didn’t change in the early stages of decomposition. The monochrome of the night-vision photograph actually helped by doing away with facial colors. He whittled down the number of photographs to just one, and he was 95% sure he had found the immigrant woman that Paul Hamilton had followed and photographed five times. In all likelihood, her tongue had been cut out, and the word ‘CHIVATA’ carved into her chest because she had spoken to the reporter.

He sat back in his chair with no doubt remaining in his mind that El Gordito had killed both Hamilton and the woman. Remembering the photos he had taken at Hargreave Merciful Hospital, he plugged the memory card from his camera into his computer. He found the photos of the hidden loading area, then magnified and focused in on the faces that the camera had caught through gaps in the swaying branches. After cutting and pasting the images into a blank document, he moved them around until he had a patchwork image of a woman and a man both dressed in green scrubs. The man was also wearing a surgical cap with a printed pattern. He couldn’t be sure, but it looked like it had skulls on it.

As he’d suspected, he couldn’t match the faces to the bio headshots on the hospital’s website. Which was a pity because if the guy in the cap with the skull pattern on it was a surgeon at the hospital, he would have shown up for sure. Hospital websites always showed their list of surgeons with bios. Maybe the anomaly was due to some administrative error, but he thought it unlikely. He then searched the website for any mention of a privately-owned medical research center located at the hospital. When that failed to turn up anything, he expanded his search by using