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

be able to watch you glide and dance around the green sea once more, finding your way through life while you were at it. I know I surely haven’t found mine.

Maybe I’ll find it in death.

I can only hope.

I know my days are numbered…probably single digits now. The chemo sure did take a toll on my already destroyed body. I can barely feel my hands and feet now. That monster refuses to feed me per doctor’s orders.

If you wouldn’t be so scared to look at my shriveled face, I would tell you to secretly bring me something.

Peach cobbler…such a dish.

When you finally read this, I will have passed on. I can barely write this.

The pen is slipping from my fingers.

Until next time My Sparrow.

The writing trailed off at the end, with the last few words nearly impossible to make out. The bloodstained sheet of paper was collected and placed in a bag. No prints or DNA have been collected from them yet, but we needed every piece of evidence we could get.

My mind raced again.

Another crime scene.

Sadistic in every way.

I looked around the bloody mess of a room and wondered how I was still the lead investigator on this case. A quiet breakthrough here and there, but still little tangible evidence.

“What are we thinking boys,” LT Anderson said to Benjamin and me. Harlow nudged herself between us. “And girl.”

Harlow shook it off. “It’s a woman’s writing. My nana used to write like that. It matches the handwriting from the others. Some of the letters are easily identifiable. It has an elegance to it that men can’t portray.”

“Ingram…” I said. “This page is also yellowed, so it’s older like the rest. It reads like she’s dying still, but now she’s getting closer. Some parts make a lot of sense, but others are fading fast. I’m still thinking the writer is related to the killer. Last name Ingram. She was receiving some chemotherapy from somewhere. I’m thinking 1990s or early 2000s. We need to start there and assume it’s local.”

“I’m on it,” Harlow said. “I’ll meet you at the office.” She said, packing up her laptop and leaving.

The smell was almost unbearable. His wife finding him this way had to cause psychological distress. He was a mess and was purposefully placed in a vulnerable position.

The Sparrow was sick.

“He was an important guy, Trotter,” LT Anderson said, with a certain urgency to his voice. “I’d hate to do this, but the commissioner is soliciting help from the feds.”

“No…wait a minute, sir,” I said, panicking.

“It’s already done, John.” He lit up a cigar and put his hat back on. “This was a prestigious surgeon from one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in all of Maine. They want this guy caught and they’re bringing out the big guns to do it. The Commissioner is holding a presser later today.”

“We can do this in our department, Lieutenant. We’re getting closer.” I was trying to convince myself as well as him.

“They’ll be in this afternoon and expect you to hand over everything we have on this case,” he said, stopping before he left the room. “I’m sorry John. You can run a parallel investigation with them. That’s fine with me, but let them do their job.”

The room grew dark and cold as the forensic team started bagging up the body. The DVD player also went as evidence along with the DVD that was in the open tray. We would scour over the footage back at the office. I wanted to get to it before the FBI came in.

This was his sixth victim.

Five were sex offenders of some kind.

Dr. James Montgomery didn’t have much of a record that I could see with my field investigation software, but it has missed things before.

I doubted a well-respected member of society had such sinister secrets that The Sparrow would make an example out of him by spreading him across his desk like that…disemboweled for his wife to walk in on.

The house got colder as I walked out the door and down the stairs. The wind was picking up again as the other officers were starting their squad cars and pulling away from the residents. It was after 8:00 a.m.

I only had a few hours before the FBI arrived to seize what little evidence we had.

The DNA was all I had.

Ingram.

Relatives of Samuel Ingram…the sex offender.

I knew that I had to follow up with this.

I started the Charger and let it idle for a moment. The light from the second floor window where Dr. James Montgomery was gutted turned off.

Just like the doors to the house, my part in this investigation was coming to a close.

I needed to pry my way back in.

Chapter Forty-Five

It was nearly 8:30 a.m. when I reached the precinct. The place was bustling again. People from different departments were bringing in evidence from the crime scene, and their eyes nervously focused on me.

They knew I was on a time limit before the federal government came in and took away my responsibilities. I would be seen as a failure in another aspect of my life.

I couldn’t.

My computer booted up quickly and I typed away, looking up information on Dr. James Montgomery that we might have stored away in our database.

His legal history included a few parking tickets when he was younger…but there was another tab, an encrypted tab that I’d seen before on other files.

Chaplan in cyber-crimes helped me decode the lock on the file over the phone.

“They put those on there sometimes when a big shot lawyer comes to town and tries to negotiate dropped charges for a heinous crime,” he told me over the phone. “The encryption is just there so