Hello, Little Sparrow by Jordan Jones (the reading list .TXT) 📕

only way out was to kill herself. I was looking into why she did it.”

“But, that’s not our job, John. You know that,” he answered, matching my calmness. “Leave that stuff up to the scholars who write the college textbooks. You’re here to solve cases.”

I looked over his shoulder to the picture of him and my father in Kuwait. Dad’s grin was infectious. I wished he still smiled like that.

“Captain Trotter would’ve saw this one through,” I said. “I know that much.”

I gently tossed the envelope on Anderson’s desk and walked out. The calamity inside caused a stir on the outside, forcing everyone to immediately continue doing whatever it was they were doing when I entered.

Walking past Abraham’s desk, I motioned for him to follow me to the lab. He didn’t say a word, but put his hand on my back and gave me three small pats on our way.

Benjamin was looking through a microscope at a piece of fabric taken from Henson’s house. He looked up after hearing his automatic door slide open.

“Gentlemen,” he said. “I have a little bit of news regarding The Sparrow case.”

“Really?” Abraham asked. “We’re giving this psycho a name now?”

He shrugged. “We need something to call him. The ‘Lincolnshire Lurker’ doesn’t have a ring to it.”

“What did you find?” I asked, ignoring the quarrel.

He turned and pulled an imaging sheet from out of a drawer and clipped it to the light board on the wall. The ridges from the fingerprint told the story of a man who struggled at the end of his life.

“This was taken from the letter…or note you found in Henson’s mailbox. You can see the slit right through the center. His finger was cut and left this wonky print.”

“So, our guy probably has a scar on one of his thumbs?” Abraham asked.

“That’s what I thought, too. But, I checked the coroner’s report and he said Henson had a cut on his thumb. It’s a match.”

“Wait — are you saying Henson put this in his own mailbox, or at least touched it before he died?”

“I don’t think so. I think the killer put Henson’s thumbprint on it. For what reason? I don’t know.”

“Seems like a lot of work just to add to an already enthralling calling-card,” Abraham added.

“It does,” I said. “There has to be some meaning behind it. After seeing this, I have no doubt we’re looking at a killer who’s going to strike again.”

Chapter Twelve

As the main detective on the Henson case, it was a surprise when LT Anderson gave me the next day off. He did it as subtly as he could, likely feeling awful about how he embarrassed me in front of the other officers.

I wasn’t holding grudges. If it were up to me, I would’ve added disciplinary action, but he saw the hurt in my eyes.

I felt like I was crying out, but all that answered were echoes. My own voice…that’s all that answered in the darkness.

The newspaper already ran articles on the killing on Pinewood Avenue. Certain parts of the article were wrong, and others were strangely right. Somehow the name Sparrow leaked in the local media, and I wasn’t so concerned about the name itself, but more so how it leaked.

The letter…or note was left in the lab for fingerprinting and DNA extraction, so no one had much access to it.

The Sparrow.

Not the most menacing of names, but it had a ring to it. The psychopath would probably be interested in reading about his handiwork, so he would probably begin to mock us from the shadows.

That’s what Alvin Dugger did.

Dugger was a man who slaughtered three postal workers on the same day in consecutive years. He wasn’t right, but no identifiable mental illness other than anti-social personality disorder.

No trauma in his background.

He just hated postal workers, or so that’s what the media thought.

I was just a uniform back then, working my beat on the west side of Lincolnshire when I pulled him over. Unknowing to me at the time, he was waiting for me inside his car with a sawed-off shotgun.

When I approached from the passenger side, I left my fingerprint on his taillight and checked my Glock 19 as I always did.

In nervous anticipation, his finger must’ve slipped on the trigger and shot prematurely, blowing out the passenger side window and knocking me on the ground.

The concussion of the blast dazed me for several seconds as he sped off, and I reached my squad car and radioed it in.

The rest was a blur, but it ended with Dugger riddled with bullets and me standing over him near a busy supermarket.

After it was all said and done, I got my accommodation medal for valor in the line of duty and was promptly promoted to homicide. We took care of a lot of vice work and anything that caused death.

Initially, I thought I deserved it for catching Dugger, but Captain Trotter needed someone with experience and a degree in criminology — and I had both.

I was also his son, which only helped. Of course, I dealt with a variety of groans on my first few weeks of work, with people saying, “Treger should have gotten that promotion.”

Treger soon retired from the force and went on to sell insurance in a rural New York farming town. And, sometimes I thought maybe he would’ve been better at it than I was. He certainly had the heart.

An accidental catch and having your dad serve as Captain will help your career move in an upwards direction, but I wasn’t always sure it was the right direction.

Dad always had the knack for finding the strengths in everyone; he learned it from years in the service prior to joining the police force, but, as ironic