The Rhode Incident - Ch 7

Even if it was ASAP, Eamon took his time taking the shortest route possible to Rhode. He eventually arrived at the village and drove around looking for signs of activity before spotting a large number of police vehicles at the edge of Rhode. He saw lights in the distance, through the trees and started to walk towards them when he got startled by a hand on his shoulder.

He turned his head and recognized the face grinning back at him. "Sorry." the man said. Eamon just rolled his eyes. "Just be prepared when you see it, okay?" 

"See what?"

"You'll see in a moment."

"Did they survive?"

"No, they didn't."

"How long?"

"Judging by the candles, only a few hours."

"Candles?"

"You'll see."

They carried on in silence as they rapidly found their way around with their flashlights, their feet making plopping sounds as they trudged through the boggy ground. The lights got progressively closer as the man leading him repeated "be ready."

The trees gave way to a clearing which had a protuberance that rose higher than the moisture-laden ground around it. There were other people searching the ground with flashlights, discovering more evidence of what lay before him.

In the center of the bump stood a tree that was surrounded by body parts that had been stacked around the tree like a log cabin. Because of the moisture in the atmosphere, the detective struggled to keep dinner in his belly as the smell of death and rot emanated from the "structure."

All the limbs were straightened out as heads and torsos put on sideways connected them. Fingers and toes penetrated ever so slightly into the wounds of other body parts. One of the investigators mentioned that there was a strong adhesive bonding the separate parts so that this "thing" could support itself. But why? Why did he wait so long to do this? And why didn't anyone notice this before? Where was Michael now? Already they had found several bloody knives and an axe found on the ground around the crime scene. Amazingly, they could still get fingerprints off said evidence.

As was said before, the flesh structure was self-illuminated. They said it was a grisly sight when they saw how it was illuminated: there was a head on top of each corner with the face carved out and a candle put inside the hollow. Eamon looked up at one of the heads and unsurprisingly, the candles had almost completely melted.

The detective then had a revelation. He approached one of the members of his group and asked "Did you see a blood trail or copious amounts of blood around here besides what was already coming out from that thing?"

"Actually no. In fact, come to think of it, I didn't see anything leading up to it, no footsteps or anything."

"Hmm."

By the next morning, the crime scene had been completely processed. Detective McDonagh returned to the spot, trying to figure out how one person could do... this without getting caught, without leaving behind an obvious trail of evidence which could've lead to the kill site. As he wondered this, for no particular reason, he stood under the tree and looked up. He saw something dangling.

He returned to the station and informed the other members of that something in the tree. They sent 2 people with him to check it out and took the longest ladder they could find. The 3 men weren't sure if the ladder would reach all the way though as Eamon estimated that whatever it was, was about 40 feet off the ground.

One man kept watch and the other kept the ladder from slipping as Eamon climbed the ladder rung by rung. He figured he was 2/3rds of the way there when the ladder could go no further. He climbed up the branches to get closer. Eventually, Detective McDonagh reached what was suspended from the tree; it was a pair of feet. "I think we have a body up here!" he yelled down. 

"Who's body?"

"Not sure yet, I'll check!"

He got up closer. The body was pinned to the tree by railroad spikes through the eyes, mouth agape, with dried blood having run down the cheeks, taking on the appearance of a mask. It took a couple of seconds to recognize that... it was Michael. And as Eamon stared at the sight before him, he noticed something carved into Michael's forehead. It was a symbol.

There were two ovals, one on top of the other. There were two dots on either side of the bottom one, with nothing on the top one. He had no idea what it meant and paid no further attention to it. His gaze shifted and saw that the arms wrapped around the tree. He followed them to find that both hands were impaled by a single spike against the tree.

This puzzled him, how exactly did he die? How could he have killed himself in his particular way? There was only one answer: an accomplice; he had an accomplice. "Guys?"

"Yeah?"

"There might be someone else out there?"

"How do you know?"

"You'll see."

The body was taken down albeit very carefully. Besides the body, they couldn't find anything else up there so all that was needed to be done now was to process the evidence.

However, the evidence had the capacity to undo the entire case as Michael's fingerprints were all over everything: the bodies, the knives, the axe, even the spikes had his prints on them. In fact, the spike that was pinning his hands had his palm print right in the middle of it.

During that time there was a search for a potential second suspect but nothing was ever found. All evidence suggested that everything was Michael's doing. The investigation was eventually closed and the case was labeled solved with Michael O'Higgins being the only suspect in the gruesome murders of 18 people and was responsible for taking his own life despite the way he had died.

Eamon refused to accept the story the police had made and was eventually fired from his job as he started obsessing over this. He believed that Michael was framed, the main piece being in the way he was killed. No man would be able to stick a railroad spike through both hands at once, blind or not. He also believed that the structure simply appeared there as he was told that there were no tracks, drag marks, blood trails or anything of the sort that lead to it. Furthering this, he remembered the guy also telling him that there was not a lot of blood there. Even if it had not been dragged there, there should have been splashes and pools of blood everywhere around the site, but there wasn't.

He knew the man was right because he would've seen the signs of such a clean-up process, and there was none there. They also investigated here, not at the kill site, which they would've followed. 

That symbol had a meaning and he wanted to know what that meaning was.

It was making his head spin and he needed to get down to it as deep as possible. He then remembered that he hadn't interviewed a certain someone because they no longer lived there... time to go to Thailand.