Thread: A Vision In Blood (Miss Eleanora and Mr. Quixotic)

Fuck. The muttered curse escaped FBI Special Agent Lyle Carter's lips, whisking through the cool morning air. Another. The fifth. His first. He appraised the corpse in the flash of red and blue lights as a hive of activity carried on around him. A male, as had been all the others, and even through the skin of his face had caved in and flesh sagged loosely away from the bones of his blood-drained body, obviously youthful and handsome when alive. Lyle ignored the snicker that emanated from the Local Police Chief piece who stood twenty feet behind him. However the subsequent, sarcastic good luck did elicit a snap of the neck. Carter's gray eyes bored into the other man and his two Deputies, all with smirks on their faces. Fucking assholes. It wasn't only the FBI credentials that had incurred their wrath, but as much his New York accent, the men happy to pass the buck and free themselves of the burden of solving the puzzling case and the media attention it garnered. Blazing headlines that continually proclaimed their incompetence, which was now the Bureau's problem, hence Carter's problem. A broken engagement had led the thirty-three year old to transfer from the Big Apple to the New Orleans and granted him his first serial-killer case. Good fortune, or back luck? The latter, he'd thought bitterly, considering the dearth of evidence uncovered so far and the lack of assistance offered by the local authorities, forcing the Agent to virtually start from scratch. The perpetrator was obviously intelligent, leaving no DNA and very little other physical evidence behind after dumping each of the bodies in different parts of the city, and the location of the dumping grounds offered no help either. To deliberately spread the location of their victim's corpses out was an effort most killers either didn't go to or think of, instinctively preferring the comfort factor of sticking close to home or areas they knew well, thus allowing investigators to triangulate geographical areas to focus their hunt for a suspect on. But not this one, the crimes could have been committed anywhere in the city or within a hundred mile radius, potentially further away. That it was a him, Sheriff Henderson had professed no doubt, nor that it was, in his politically correct language, 'a faggot.' That struck a discordant note with Agent Carter. Each man had disappeared from varying locations, but none of them in the gay district and according to all who knew them were straight as a dye. In addition, there'd been no sign of sexual abuse, although the coroner had ascertained at least two of the men ejaculated within hours of their time of death. Nothing to link them together work, profession, place of residence, common haunts or hobbies except having encountered the same brutal fate. And that they'd been exceptionally photogenic leading to the public, thanks to the media, referring to him as 'Casanova'. Except for the Creole Community, who'd resorted to holding ceremonies and voodoo rituals to rid the City of 'The Vampire of New Orleans.' And then Carter had a third. Picasso. On every corpse, he'd left artwork. Turning his attention back to the body and kneeling next to it, Lyle silently took in the way it'd been displayed, the position it had been left in, the white pallor of the bloodless skin and all else he could, attempting to imprint the scene in his mind and capture the little details the crime-scene photo's wouldn't. The canvas stuck out like a sore thumb, a source of pride to the perpetrator or simply to mock those searching for him? With a gloved finger, he carefully unraveled it. Differing in subject and pose, it was also the same as the others - a crimson replica of what he presumed was the original painting kept by the killer as a trophy, painted in the victim's blood. This one depicted a classical hero. Tag it and bag it. He allowed the canvas to roll back in on itself, his knees creaking as he rose to his full six foot one height, snarling at the Crime Scene Tech's, And get that to the lab. Lyle indicated the artwork, hoping without hope that this time the perpetrator had made a mistake. Then send me a reproduction and I mean a reproduction, not a damn photocopy. Pronto. As he turned to walk off, his gaze once again came to rest on Henderson. Useless, arrogant prick. Of course the Sheriff's department had attempted to trace the paper, the tyre tracks left at the scene, dusted everything for prints, analysed for DNA and searched for crimes with a similar MO, all resulting in a big fat zero number of leads, but hadn't looked beyond that. Carter's initial move on been assigned the case, only three days ago, had been to forward copies of the paintings to Quantico profilers, along with a request for a full psychological evaluation. However, with the backlog of cases, that'd take weeks and he didn't have the time to wait. Not with five men dead already in six months. What's our next move? Russell Edgar, the rookie who'd been partnered with Carter, and scurried off into the bushes to wretch on witnessing the blood-let corpse, deigned to speak as he caught up when Carter reached their Bureau car, eliciting a glare from Lyle. You are going to run down the physical evidence. A case like this wouldn't be broken by concentrating on the who or what, but the why. I'm going to find myself an art aficionado. Lyle preferred working alone anyway.