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

nodded and took one of the letters from him. “I read this as a sickly lady in her late forties entering the end of her life. She knows it. She knows something bad is about to happen, but not to her; to the children.”

“I think something bad has already happened,” Harlow chimed in. “Something bad was happening. Maybe it was that one of the kids was sick.”

“Maybe abuse,” I said.

“Abuse?” Abraham asked. “What if they lived in a terrible neighborhood? What if the kids didn’t exist and this lady was going crazy or something?”

“I guess,” I said. “But, these metaphors describe objects or things…like monsters and the ground. The ground is typically something that just exists. She’s talking like the ground is hurting this person on purpose.”

“She says here that a storm is brewing.” Harlow flipped a few pages. “This is the first letter we found, I think. She’s definitely afraid of something, and it doesn’t appear to be her death. I’m on the side that this is a person she’s describing.”

Abraham sat back in his chair and took another look at the paper before him. His brows narrowed and he let out a stress-induced sigh.

“She does say to get away from whatever this is. Fly, fly, fly. She’s warning a child, perhaps?” Abraham placed the paper back on his desk.

“A couple of children,” I said. “There’s mention of a younger child…a male I think. The older child is a female. She wants her to look after him after she passes. That’s the way I read it, anyway.”

Harlow found the same passage:

Also, the other Little One needs to be protected at all cost. His potential is unfathomable. Both of you are incredible.

“He must’ve been considerably younger if the lady put the sister in charge of protecting him,” Abraham said. I’m used to hearing it the other way around.”

“Meh, she said he has great potential. Doesn’t mean he’s strong.”

I’ve been here since four-thirty this morning trying to see if any of these metaphors are anagrams, but it doesn’t look that way.”

“You are something else,” I said.

All of our emails popped up at once and it was Benjamin wanting to see us so we quickly made our way down the hall to his lab. LT Anderson was already there, and we walked in mid-sentence.

“— And that’s what I’m thinking,” Benjamin said.

“What exactly?” Abraham said.

“I was just telling our Lieutenant here what I found. The hair that I found in sink belonged to three different men. One I couldn’t find in the system at all, but another one I did. After matching his DNA profile with virtually everyone who’s been incarcerated that we have samples of, it came up with a Bradley Claxton. Pretty unique last name, so it shouldn’t be hard to find.”

“So this looks like our guy?” Harlow asked.

“Potentially,” Benjamin said. “It’s a guy. It was someone that was in the house. I just got the match a few minutes ago, so I wasn’t able to pull up any type of rap sheet yet.”

I pulled it up on a laboratory computer that was hooked up to our network and displayed an unfamiliar face. The man looked short, even in a waist-up photo. He was heavy for his height and was unshaven, disgustingly so. There was a small tattoo above each eyebrow of tiny boats rowing across water…that were his eyebrows apparently.

Stupid.

“Well, he looks like an idiot, but not a serial killer,” Abraham said out loud.

“Could this be someone keeping Kay ‘company’ while her husband was incarcerated?”

“That’s likely,” I said. “She’s mourning her daughter and probably pulled this guy from a local bar. His crimes were all drug related. It says here that he can’t read or write.”

“Just a notch on the bedpost,” Abraham added.

“Not much of one —“

“Enough,” LT Anderson interjected. “We’re not here to go over Mrs. Maise’s sex life. We don’t need to embarrass this poor woman, but we do need to know who this guy is. Trotter’s right, he doesn’t fit the M.O. of a psychopath murderer, but we need to do our due diligence.”

We all stopped conversing. It felt like a master telling us how disappointed he was that we peed on the carpet.

“Now,” LT Anderson continued. “Abraham, I want you to talk to Mrs. Maise about this Claxton guy.”

“And what about the other hairs?” I asked.

“Another one was clean and another one came up as a partial match for an ex-con who served time up in North Central Corrections. Went by the name of Samuel Ingram. I’m not sure what the findings mean exactly, but it might worth a look.”

LT Anderson looked at Benjamin. “You work on that…try to get as much information from that piece of hair as possible, the other one too. We might have three suspects to look at here. Better than the nothing we’ve had so far.”

We all left and went back to our desks. Harlow was already exhausted despite the day only being a few hours old, and the rest of us were still hanging on by a thread.

I was also tired and made my second cup of coffee in as many hours, downing it faster than it was intended. The Sparrow forced many hours to be funneled in investigating him, and it killed me slowly knowing he liked it. He loved attention…otherwise he wouldn’t make a spectacle out of his killings.

He wanted to be seen, but unknown.

He wanted to be admired, but feared.

He wanted to be viewed as a hero, but also a villain.

He was winning.

We all knew Claxton wasn’t the killer, but something had to be done. We had to turn over every stone. I wasn’t fully convinced The Sparrow made his way into the Maise bathroom…if he truly was professional, he’d make his way to the fewest rooms