CHAPTER TWO
Alison drove alone in her car. Derek had wanted to come with her to the crime scene after having to leave the Reno case early, but Alison beseeched him not to do that for the very same reason.
She would find out what was going on and whether she was being targeted once again, but she needed him to get to work on the Sands case on the chance it was connected to her sister’s murder.
As she drew up to the community center, Alison didn't yawn with tiredness, but she felt the fatigue run through her. It had been a trying week, and she needed to rest her mind, but that couldn’t happen just yet.
Alison stopped at the entrance to the parking lot and rolled down the window to show the officer her ID.
"Go on in," he said, pulling back the police tape to let the car through. "Detective Moore is expecting you."
"Thank you," Alison said.
She drove through before the tape was replaced.
The community center stood alone, surrounded by a parking lot on two sides and green spaces on the other two.
Multiple small groups of teens and preteens stood on the grassy areas near the community center, all glancing toward the building occasionally, as if they needed to know what was happening but didn't want to make it obvious they were looking.
As Alison got out of her car, she locked eyes briefly with one of the teens, who looked at her as if he was in a state of shock. The boy quickly looked away. Alison studied him for a second before carrying on to the front door.
She entered the building, passing an officer who nodded at her—he had seen her being allowed into the parking lot and didn't ask to see her ID.
A woman with long blond hair tied up into a high ponytail immediately tilted her head and headed her way.
"Detective Moore," the woman introduced. "Thank you for getting here so quickly. Dr. Payne."
"Of course," Alison said. "What are we looking at?"
"Thomas Warren," Moore said.
"I remember him," Alison said sadly. He was one of the good ones. She remembered working on his case, and even though he had a turbulent history, he had found redemption. At least, she believed he had when he was released from prison.
"He was working late last night," Moore told her as they walked down the long hallway toward the open double doors that looked like they led into a gymnasium.
"The last person to talk to him before he was killed was a teen called Mark Farrow.
Mark told us that he was in here late last night practicing basketball, and that Thomas was hanging back to clean up before going home. That was around ten."
"Seeing as we are inside the community center, I assume the place wasn’t locked up?" Alison asked.
"No," the detective replied. "Unless there was a lot to clean up before leaving, it gives us a close approximation for the death." She gestured into the large room that turned out to be a basketball court. "There was supposed to be a basketball tournament today, but that's obviously been canceled."
The large gym felt eerily empty and silent when they entered. The body was presented to Alison in the middle of the basketball court, almost right on the halfway line.
She took a breath and made her way toward the center circle, where the photographer was still taking photos.
The cause of death was immediately obvious. There was a knife sticking out of the back of his neck.
Thomas lay face down on the court, a pool of blood around him. A forensic tech stood off to the side as the photographer captured the body from every angle. They had not yet flipped the body.
Alison tried to imagine what had happened. Had someone snuck up behind him while he was cleaning and stabbed him in the back of the neck? Did Thomas know his attacker was there? Did he know his attacker?
Alison looked around the room, hoping to find a security camera up high, trained on the scene. That would have given them everything they needed, but there was no such camera. At the far end of the room, there was a window on the second floor that looked like it led to an office.
"Anything else other than the knife in the back of his neck?" Alison asked the tech.
"We haven’t found anything yet," the tech replied. "I’ve had a chance to look at the body, and there are no other obvious wounds. We’ll be able to tell more when we remove the knife and turn the body."
Alison was not squeamish, and she crouched down right beside the body, making sure not to disturb the crime scene in any way or get too close to the dried blood.
She looked at Thomas’s hands, his fingernails.
Nothing. It almost didn't feel real. With Thomas face down, she didn’t have to look him in his dead eyes.
Alison made her way around the body, crouching at points to view the body more closely. There wasn’t any other blood apart from what had come from the neck wound. At least, at first glance. Unless there was more to see on the front of his person, the killer had killed him quickly.
Had the lead-up to that been quick?
Alison stood back up and looked around the gym. Everything looked in order. If he had hung back to clean up, that would have been accomplished before he died. Unless that was more she hadn't seen yet. Perhaps there was work to do in the upstairs office.
Alison left the body and made her way back over to Detective Moore. She scanned the area on the way back. The court was clean and clear. No scuff marks that indicated an altercation. No objects on the wooden floor unless they had been collected by the killer.
"Do you have any idea who might have wanted to kill him?" Alison asked.
"Not yet," Moore admitted. "What are your initial thoughts?"
"My initial thought is that this looks like an execution," she said, glancing back at the body and the knife sticking out of the back of the neck.
"The killer obviously brought the knife with them. First impression is that we’re looking at the one wound that killed him, with no fight leading up to that.
It was quick and effective, and the killer knew what they were doing.
We can't get fully inside the mind of the killer just yet, but I can assume the killer came here to kill Thomas, and they completed that. "
The forensic tech hurried over while the photographer kept snapping photos.
"You mentioned that you think it could have been an execution," she said.
"Possibly," Alison confirmed.
"You might be right," the tech said with a shudder.
"We can't confirm anything until we do a full autopsy, but looking at the angle of the knife, there is a slight downward tilt. That meant it came from above, and the person would have had to be unusually tall to stick it in at that angle. It’s more likely the victim was kneeling. "
"Okay, so an execution," Alison agreed. She breathed out through her nose and grimaced.
"You know who did it?" Moore asked. "You know something, I can see it in your face."
"I’ve presided over a lot of assessments in my time," Alison said.
"I don't claim to remember all of them, but there are some that stick in the mind. Thomas Warren was one of them. He had a history, a real bad history, and that was both in and out of jail. Still, I remember talking to him face to face, and I didn’t wonder. "
"Wonder what?" Moore asked.
Alison glanced at the lifeless body again as the camera flashed around him.
"I knew he’d changed," Alison asserted. "There are some criminals who you know are playing you, and then there are the worst ones, where you can't be sure if you’re being played or not. Warren was neither of those. I was sure he had turned a corner."
Moore sighed. "From what I’ve been told so far, it sounds like he had. He was well-liked here by the staff and the kids. He didn't take any crap, and he was genuinely caring about them. He was really helping."
"He wanted to make amends," Alison admitted. "I remember that from him, so I’m not surprised that he’s doing that.
Still, I remember the things he was caught up in before going to jail, and I remember that he almost killed a man in San Quentin.
Word on the street back then was that it was an attempted gang hit.
That the order had come from someone outside.
The guy he put in the hospital was in a rival gang. "
"And you’re wondering if that came back to haunt him?" Moore asked.
"Five years is a long time," Alison admitted. "Yeah, I’m wondering if someone from his past caught back up with him, and I can't help but wonder if he was back in with a bad crowd. I fully believed he was a changed man, but that doesn’t mean that I wasn’t wrong about him."
"Which does lead into the report that was found on the body," Moore said. "Come on."
She led Alison back out of the gym and away from the dead body.
They walked to a small room attached to the large hallway, where Detective Moore had set up a makeshift office while they investigated the crime scene.
The detective walked over to a large black bag and took out a pair of latex gloves, handing them to Alison.
Alison donned the gloves and was given charge of an evidence bag containing the reports left on the body. From the lack of blood on the documents, they had obviously been placed with care.
Before Alison looked at them, she considered what that meant. She had just come from a case where she was the reason for the murders, and she was loath to think that might happen again. There was obviously a reason for the report to be left on the body.
Alison carefully opened the bag and removed the documents.
There were two separate documents. The first was the psychological report that Alison had written about the mental state of Thomas Warren.
The report was comprehensive, spanning three pages.
The details came from her face-to-face meetings with Thomas, as well as observations and interviews with the prison guards.
The report had been amended with a red pen, like a schoolteacher correcting a student’s work.
Sentences and paragraphs had been crossed out, question marks had been added in multiple places, words were underlined, and multiple notes were written in the margins.
If Alison were looking at a student’s work that had been corrected by a teacher, she would assume that the work was terrible.
Alison set the report on top of the evidence bag, then set both on the desk for now. She turned her attention to the second report, which looked much like the first without the red pen.
The layout and formatting were the same, but the content was in opposition to Alison’s reports.
This is a direct response to the report provided by Dr. Alison Payne on the 4th of March, 2021. In this report, I aim to correct the misgivings and implausible findings that Dr. Payne so eloquently captured…
The report was then written like a psychological evaluation, and much of the style mimicked Alison’s.
However, while that might be classed as copying in some way, Alison didn't believe the report was written by a layperson.
She did not agree with the report's findings, but they obviously came from a place of education, and the reasoning within was sound in its own way.
A lot of psychology was open to interpretation, and doctors often disagreed in their assessments.
Still, the author took that a step further and disagreed with almost everything in Alison's psychological assessment.
"What do you see?" Moore asked. "Help me to understand."
"The evaluation style is similar to my own, the terminology is professional, and the approach is analytical.
Whoever wrote this is educated. I don't believe anyone could write this without formal training in psychology.
The main thing to take away from the report is that the author reaches the opposite conclusion from mine.
I can only assume they killed Thomas to make a point. "
"So, this is not a gang killing?" Moore asked.
"I don't know," Alison complained. "The way he was killed makes me think it could be a gangland execution, but the inclusion of the report doesn't make any sense.
Why write the report unless they wanted to target me in some way?
And why kill him? To prove a point? Perhaps a gang could have killed him and then made the report to throw us off?
Or if it's retaliation for Thomas almost killing someone, then it brings his rehabilitation into question.
If one small thing had changed, Thomas could have killed the man, and we wouldn't be here talking about this right now. He'd still be in prison."
"If it’s not a gang execution, what else could it be?" Moore asked.
"This is not the first time it would have happened, and not the first time in the last month, but someone could be targeting me," Alison said.
"Perhaps my mind is only going there because I worked a case like that last week in Reno, but I’m faced with another document at a crime scene with my name on it.
It could be that, or it could be a critique of the justice system and early releases in general. "
"And who would be motivated to do that?" Moore asked.
"Yeah, that’s the question," Alison said. "We need to look into Thomas more. If he wasn’t rehabilitated, then maybe he did get involved in something else, and that could lead to the killer. Either way, I’ve stood at crime scenes like this before.
I really hope that I’m wrong, but this feels like the beginning.
I don’t think our killer is done, which means there are more dead bodies coming. "