Doom, plain and simple in many ugly forms, was written all over the place as Matt and I approached the Kwok Fai Lau Chinese Laundry. Sheriff Daniels was already onsite at the bloodbath.

Seeing the bustling scene, Matt asked with excited wonder, "What tornado hit this place?"

Although we knew better than to interfere with the inquest, that was a real good description of the environment we encountered. Immediately, I detected the Sheriff dressed in protective clothing to avoid contaminating the territory. We noticed the yellow tape that cordoned the building off limits.

"Remember those loud bangs we heard down at the lake?" I asked him.

"Yeah," Matt responded.

"They were gunshots," I replied.

"Gunshots!" Matt exclaimed, "You mean the old Chinaman got waxed?"

"Who else would be inside there?" I asked.

Matt covered his eyes with his left hand. He already had enough bad dreams. He didn't need anymore invaders of his slumber. Later, we would hear all about the murders. The town would be a-buzz concerning them for days.

Sheriff Daniels, all six feet, two hundred pounds of muscle of him, possessed a right hand as strong as Bessemer steel. I'd recently felt that unpleasantness. It was a lesson I had not forgotten. He looked back at us but did not say anything.

Later, in the privacy of our home, when I asked him why he'd worn protective gear, the Sheriff told me, "Because the crimson that covered the inside of the zhuo attached itself to whatever came in contact with it."

This incident was where my interest in criminology began to manifest and I decided what I wanted to be when I grew up. Somehow, over the course of the next eight years, I became fascinated with forensics. So much could be learned from them.

While the Sheriff probed the scene inside the laundry, Matt and I sat on our bikes observing what we could see. I noticed through the blood-stained glass doors of the laundry that Deputy Fred Taylor milled about close to the Sheriff's side, He was a sore festered on the finger of life.

"There's Taylor. He's always sticking his nose in where he doesn't belong. The buttinski," I muttered to myself and pondered the possibilities of how much better off Astatula would be without him.

Sheriff Daniels understood most killers received a visceral perverse thrill from murdering their victims. Somehow, the chaotic feeling of participating in the kill, and the choreography of death, enthralled them. He sensed the slaughter of the Chinaman and his concubine fit the modus operandi. He wondered if the slayer felt their final breaths escape their corpses?

"What a way to die," he commented to no one in particular.

He could tell by how the bodies were positioned when they fell that the attacker accessed them from behind. The gunshots were from a 9mm fired at close range. A commonly owned weapon.

Zhang Wei laid face down on the floor near the opened cash register. It still contained four twenties, three tens, five fives, and fifteen singles. Robbery did not appear to be the motive for the murders. That made the sheriff wonder what was?

Connecting the peculiarity of this fact with the murders of Johann Modero and Elias Scruggs at the Chevron a month ago his office was already working on, he instructed his deputy, "Note this, Fred. The money was not touched."

Taylor scribbled a note on his pad but said nothing. Mostly aloof, he seldom spoke.

"The Astatula Gazette would chomp at the bit to get that information," the Sheriff stated.

Upon closer examination, there were no obvious physical indications Li Na Foo had been sexually assaulted. Her autopsy would establish this certainty. However, she was missing a digit. These facts combined to make the Sheriff consider the notion a serial killer was on the loose in the small town.

"Victim Number Two's right thumb removed," Sheriff Daniels mentioned.

The Sheriff punched speed dial on his Samsung Gallery S6 smartphone. He liked the high-end calls the apparatus made. Taylor noted the missing body part. The Medical Examiner would arrive soon thereafter. Until they did, the Sheriff would position his deputy outside the laundry to prevent any unauthorized personnel from entering the crime scene and further contaminating it.

I watched the Sheriff. He surveyed the blood spatter that covered the walls and the counter. I was intrigued by his thoroughness.

"Always pay attention to the smallest details in whatever you're examining," were words he'd previously told me before.

I saw he followed his own advice. The shapes and sizes of the blood spatters varied. Overhead lighting from a clandestine bulb illuminated them. He pondered if their unique patterns would tell him anything useful?

Two pools of blood congealed about what remained of the victims' partially blown away heads. With the lack of witnesses, these droplets would be crucial in telling the story of what occurred inside the laundry. Luminal would find any fingerprints.

The putrid smell of death lingered in the air. The cooled temperatures of the deceased, and their pallor, enabled the Sheriff to approximate the time of the crime to have been somewhere within the previous couple of hours.

A pot of oolong tea sat on a burner in the back room of the laundry. Two uneaten ang ku kueh laid on a plate. Filled with bean paste, the tortoiseshell-shaped pastries were commonly associated with longevity. Espied in what we witnessed, Matt and I continued our surveillance.

An odd scrape on the top of the counter caught the Sheriff's attentive eye. Was this an important clue? The gouge looked fresh to him.

Several questions raced through his mind, 'Had there been a confrontation? Peculiarly, why was the teapot turned off? Why wasn't the money removed from the cash register? If robbery wasn't the motive for the murders, what was? Was it possible that the state's Automated Fingerprint Identification System could produce the killer?'

"Make sure this abrasion gets dusted, Fred," he told his deputy, "I don't recall this scratch being here the last time I brought uniforms in to be laundered."

Again, Taylor did not respond. He simply made another entry into his notepad. It was rapidly becoming fuller by the moment.

Sheriff Daniels had witnessed maggots crawl out of dead bodies. He was no stranger to rigor mortis. Still, the brutal assassinations of Zhang Wei and Li Na Foo attacked his psyche.

"These were neighbors in a small town where brutality of this nature is not supposed to happen," he remarked.

Puzzled once more, he silently wondered, 'Who would have turned the teapot off after killing two victims? Moreover, what would be the purpose in that? And, why was there a fresh mark on the top of the counter? It wasn't there three days ago.'

Mentally, the Sheriff questioned himself, "Did he know anybody in town orderly enough to turn a teapot off in a high-stressed situation?"

He decided there was only one person he could think of, and the little dark-haired rebel rouser had better have been fishing with a certain someone. On the other hand, the blond munchkin was an altogether different matter. The Sheriff decided he would make a point to ask the two of them if the peas in a pod saw or heard anything unusual that morning. After all, they did have to ride their bikes by the laundry to get to Sullivan Lake.

His preliminary analysis completed, the Sheriff stripped out of his protective equipment. He threw the waste products in the large, rectangular, dipsty dumpster in the alley behind the laundry. He knew upon his arrival home, his uniform would soon join it because the stench from the putrefaction of the bodies permeated the material's pores.

His short list of those to talk to began with the Pepsi man. Wiry, the driver's name was Ian Brunson. He stood five-feet-ten-inches tall and weighed two-hundred-and-twelve pounds. He wore black-rimmed glasses prominently displayed on his oval face. Ian Brunson had some explaining to do.

The Sheriff found him seated in the cab of his Peterbilt, still in shock. Brunson had only been on the job seven months. Prior to that he was stationed at Fort Campbell, Kentucky as a sniper for the 101st Airborne Infantry Division. Sheriff Daniels knew the Screaming Eagles were an elite outfit of well-trained soldiers.

The more I looked at Deputy Taylor the more I recalled how he and I were not on good terms by any stretch of the imagination. On two previous occasions, Taylor had confronted me after receiving reports of shoplifting at the Chris's Rex-All Drug Store. However, much to his chagrin, I had no involvement with those candy thefts.

At least 60-years-old, Taylor was full of himself. He strutted around like a proud peacock with his plume fully displayed. He'd also cautioned me that he'd heard about my past and was keeping a very close eye on me. I knew not everybody in Astatula felt I belonged in the town.

Taylor had threatened me, "When I can prove you are the culprit behind the shoplifting, I am going to run you in! And, I'm going to make sure you get a one way ticket to the Sierra Maya Institution for Wayward Boys to boot!"

This Juvenile Detention Center was located outside of El Paso. It was a notorious and violent lockup. A place I definitely did not want to be.

In Taylor's gruffness, I had been warned that he did not allow any "Hellcat Wolverines messing up his town!"

That was what Taylor called me the first time he approached me about the "so called" shoplifting rumors he'd heard. I would have taken great pleasure in running him over with my bike full speed ahead. If I did, I would have kept right on going. The thought of leaving incriminating tire tracks up and down Taylor's steam-ironed uniform humored me.

I sat there closely monitoring the buzzing activity at the laundry. For a fleeting moment, I considered committing the act but thought better of such a vile deed. I knew the Sheriff definitely would not allow me to get away with committing the atrocity. In that regard, Taylor was a very lucky man.

Soon thereafter, Matt and I rode our bikes by the crime scene on the opposite side of Cassandra Boulevard and hurried home. There was a fish fry calling our names. He had fish to clean.

(NOTE: The previous chapter: Murder At The Chinese Laundry now also available Enjoy!)