Detective Reverty Walker in Adventure in Action

Chaper Seven: Prompt from MysterythrillerIN

Detective Reverty Walker was standing on the road with his hands shoved into his pockets, shoulders hunched against the biting wind. He was staring at the shadowed body on the ground in front of him, impervious to the commotion around him, the noise, the shouting of police trying to rope off the scene, or the chaos of the crowd gathering in the glow of the nearest street lamp.

I was wrong...but I was so sure...so bloody sure of it...

Rev had been working undercover at the public library, researching and investigating a serial killer. The killer left a note on each body with the name of a different book. The books referenced had all been checked out by only one man...the one lying dead on the pavement in front of him.

He had been stabbed directly in the heart. Rev squatted and looked closer at the handle sticking out of his chest.

Letter opener...same as the rest.

Old fashioned, heavy duty, expensive. Even with the high quality, and by being sharpened, it would still take a strong person to jam it into the chest hard enough to pierce the heart. Rev's gut told him they were looking for a man.

The lead detective stepped over to Rev with a baggie containing the newest letter. Rev was a liaison assisting the investigation as a favor for a friend.

The tall, lithe, dark skinned man passed the baggie to Rev.

He read, "Better Luck Next Time. Try Dante's Inferno".

This is a bloody game, Rev thought, his pulse increasing along with his scowl.

There was seemingly no rhyme or reason to the books picked. They had different authors, time periods, genres, subject matter, and locations. Little Women, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, The Lord of the Rings, The Iliad, Vanity Fair, and now- Dante's Inferno. The only connection now was that they were all considered classics.

"This is bloody infuriating", Rev muttered. "I gotta get back to the library. Let me know if you find any other evidence, yeah?"

"Sure thing, Rev. I'll call".

Rev racked his brain for any possible connection as his powerful legs strode him quickly back to the library. He dashed up the steps and logged into a computer. In minutes he had looked up the newest book's location and found both copies of it. He brought it back to his desk where the others were already piled. All of the books had multiple copies on hand due to their popularity, and Rev had every single copy out of circulation at the moment. The only connection so far was that one man had borrowed all of them. Rev looked up the history of both the Dante books but his dead suspect wasn't on either of those lists.

"Bollocks", he hissed.

He picked up one of the Dante's Inferno copies and started paging through it. As he was mindlessly flipping through, something caught his eye. He stopped, backtracked, and peered closer.

G.

On the bottom right-hand corner of one of the pages was a little letter G, clear as day, scratched in with a black pen, gone over a few times to make it darker.

A tingly sensation on his back told him he had found a clue, a piece in the killer's game. He started at the beginning of the book and turned all of the pages more carefully, searching for more letters.

None. He tried the other copy. None. He grabbed a copy of Vanity Fair. Nothing. His instinct told him it was something so he kept turning pages. In the Lord of the Rings he found a letter D. After searching through every copy of every book, he had the following letters: G, D, I, R, A, N, E.

After several failed rearrangements, he compiled a word.

R E A D I N G.

"This bloke is bloody bonkers, ain't he?", Rev asked himself.

The killed had been in here, wrote in each of these books, but...he hadn't necessarily checked them out to do so. He could have sat at a table and quickly jotted down the letter before replacing it on the shelf.

Rev had no idea how to find this person. One letter wasn't enough to identify handwriting, and too many people had touched the books to dust for prints.

If the clue is reading, I'm searching for someone who's read all these books, ain't I?

A teacher or a professor of English might be a suspect, but how to narrow it down?

Rev called the lead investigator and ran everything past him. He, in turn, had every English teacher from the local college and high school investigated. Turns out one of the two professors on staff had a history of domestic violence from about twenty years ago, before his wife divorced him and when he was still teaching high school English.

When Rev and the other detective confronted him on campus to ask him some questions, he bolted. Rev caught him within ten paces and they hauled him in but they couldn't get him to say anything.

Days later, after the professor's lawyer and the D.A. had reached an agreement, he confessed that this was some sick plot to get people to read classic literature again. He intended to keep killing until he was found out or his message was completed- whichever came first. The whole message was intended to be:

READING IS FUN.

"That's a whole lotta killing for some bloody books. He's a nutter, that one", Rev mused in disbelief.

"Crazy smart...but crazy just the same", the lead detective agreed.

#adventureinaction