By: E. Michael Mettille
Publication Date: April 27, 2026
Publisher: TMR Books
Cover Design: Mayhem Cover Creations
Genre: Thriller
Ronnie works alone. She doesn’t do partners. It’s a long story. She’s been through some stuff. It’s not a secret. Everybody knows, especially her boss, Captain French. That’s why it cuts so deep when she finds out he’s pairing her up with brand new, fresh-faced detective who’s never worked a homicide case in his life.
Rudy “Cha-Cha” Ramirez just made detective and landed his dream job at the same time. He’ll be partnering with the best homicide detective in Los Angeles. Veronica Noble is a legend, and her current case is the biggest homicide investigation in over a decade. He’s finally hit the big time. It’s too bad he probably won’t be able to shake the nickname his new co-workers gave him as soon as he walked in the door. One of those crackerjack detectives found a video of him dancing at a club when he was in the academy. It turns out Rudy’s got some moves. Cha-Cha is probably going to stick.
After the third grisly murder scene fitting the M.O. of this case, it becomes more and more apparent that it can’t be the work of one person. Multiple victims. Bodies are carved up and staged. High profile, high visibility locations. It just seems like too much work for one person to handle on their own. It starts to smell less like they’re hunting a serial killer and more like they’re tracking down terrorists. The victims being targeted only add to it. They all come from underserved communities. And don’t forget about the bible passages painted on the walls in blood. Somebody is trying to send a message.
JUST ANOTHER HOMICIDE
A cool breeze danced across grimy streets littered with the refuse of the prior night’s party. Every night was a party in L.A., and nobody cleaned up after themselves. The sky glowed with flashing reds and blues. There were no sirens, just the lights filling up the darkness like a beacon, or probably more like a warning. Flashing reds and blues never meant anything good, especially at four in the morning just before dawn.
Veronica Noble reclined in her Acapulco Blue ’69 Boss 429 across the street from the spectacle in the motel parking lot. The car was a pristine throwback to a bygone era just like her. She probably should have replaced it years ago. It was totally impractical and averaged about nine miles to the gallon. But she could never do that. Her father had helped her restore it. It was all she really had left of him besides her nickname, Ronnie. She never liked the moniker much when she was young. She thought it made her sound like a boy. Now she wore it like a badge. It was different than the one L.A.P.D. had given her. That was just a hunk of metal. This badge was personal. It had meaning.
The loud ding of her phone distracted her from fond memories of long afternoons toiling away under the hood. She’d be wearing torn jeans and a grease-smeared tank top, and her dad would be in his Dodgers cap and a T-shirt that was too tight for his thick arms and his ample gut. He was cheap when it came to taking care of himself, but Ronnie got whatever she wanted.
She absently glanced down at her phone. It was 4:02 AM, which meant Steve would be deep in his morning routine. “On a case?” the message read.
“Just heating in,” she hammered out her reply without bothering to fix the misspelling. She hated Autocorrect. Luckily, Steve knew her well enough to decipher whatever jumble of letters she threw at him.
“Be safe. Love you.” the reply came quick. Undoubtedly, he would be sitting on the back porch splitting his attention between the starry sky above, the dark mountains, and staring at his phone while he enjoyed his morning coffee. It was part of his daily ritual, soaking up the peaceful pre-dawn silence preparing himself for the madness of his day. She’d always found sitting idle like that a waste of time. Lately it began making more and more sense why Steve took that fifteen or twenty minutes at the beginning of the day to mentally recharge. Maybe she’d give it a try someday if she could ever find the time.
She sent back a heart emoji and dropped her phone in her lap. It was time to go. As much as she loved her job, every new scene took a little bit out of her, and it sounded like this one was bad. She dreaded going in and having a front row seat to gape at humanity’s depravity. She loved catching the killers but digging through their handiwork for the clues that would bring them into her crosshairs was a horrid reminder of just how brutal and uncaring people could be. The world is full of monsters.
The sigh that slowly poured from her pursed lips was part of her routine, symbolically blowing everything in her head out so she could start with a fresh slate. She needed a clear mind, empty and ready to absorb whatever grisly horror the scene showed her. Then she popped open the glove box and fished out a fifth of Tito’s. She put down about a quarter of the bottle and returned it to the glove box. That was another part of her routine. She needed to calm her nerves before stepping up to the plate. Staring up at a dark and starry sky was enough for Steve, but she needed a little more than a serene skyscape to get into the right headspace.
She could have pulled into the lot like everybody else, but the slow stroll across the street was the final part of her routine. Something about the cool air blowing against her cheeks and slithering through her long curls helped her focus. Focus was critical. There was also something about approaching the scene on foot. It was a thing she couldn’t explain, but somehow walking up helped her see things more clearly. Her steps were slow, methodical. It gave her time to take it all in and finish getting her head where it needed to be to fully absorb the things she needed to process.
The fresh face leaning up against the wrought iron railing bolted to the staircase leading up to the second floor looked like he couldn’t be more than a few months out of the academy. The fresh puddle of puke at his feet and splashed onto his boots was evidence he hadn’t seen much up to this point in his life. Ronnie read his nametag, Rourke.
“Pretty bad in there, Rourke?” she asked as she avoided the vomit and leaned up against the railing next to him.
His dead stare betrayed the fact that his mind was far from that parking lot when he quietly replied, “Never seen anything like it.”
Ronnie glanced up the stairwell. It led to a walkway that stretched along the length of the building. The second door in was open. Suits walked in and out of the room while uniforms kept a handful of rubber neckers from getting close enough to catch a glimpse of the gruesome scene inside.
Then she dropped her gaze back to Rourke, who looked like he might puke again, and asked, “First time?”
Rourke’s blank stare remained distant as he replied, “No, but it’s definitely the worst.”
Ronnie remembered her first time. It was a domestic dispute. Some drunk was knocking around his old lady. Her five-year-old son didn’t want to watch his daddy hitting his mommy anymore, so he went and grabbed daddy’s gun out of his nightstand. Blew the back of his head off. She remembered looking into the hole surrounded by cracked and splintering cranium. It was like staring into a dark abyss where all the horrors of mankind lie waiting to terrorize any soul foolish enough to step inside. She didn’t throw up, but she remembered staring off into nothing just like Rourke was doing. It was a strange place to be. Your body remained where it was, but your mind was gone. Questions about humanity and good and evil and concepts most minds aren’t wired properly to process shouted like some kind of loud silence. It was like a void. She knew exactly what Rourke was feeling, because she’d spent plenty of time in that same nowhere place.
“It gets easier,” she finally said before patting his shoulder and continuing, “Come on. Pull it together and walk me in.”
Ronnie kept her eyes on Rourke as they climbed the stairway. It looked like he was walking up to the hangman’s noose or the executioner’s guillotine. It was never like that for her. To her, the approach was like moving down a dark corridor that seemed to stretch further and further into the distance. It didn’t matter that she was physically going up. Her mind was on its own journey. All she could see was that open door that wasn’t even in her line of sight from where she was on the stairway. All that mattered was the goal, a twisted gateway to some kind of hell.
“Four bodies,” Rourke’s voice sounded far away as she focused on her destination. He continued droning on quietly beside her, “All with various levels of…”
The pause dragged her attention away from the door. They were at the top of the stairway when she looked over at him again. Rourke’s body heaved as he covered his mouth. He managed to keep it together.
“No more of that,” she gently rubbed his back until he didn’t look like he wanted to puke all over the floor. Then she looked back at the open door and asked, “Any IDs?”
“Nothing,” Rourke replied as he gazed up toward the sky. It was like looking at the open door was more than he could handle, like that horrid place where the doorway led had sliced off a little strip of his soul, a piece of his humanity he’d never get back. Still, he kept it together enough to finish his report, “All clothing was removed. Just bodies…” he paused long enough that Ronnie thought he was finished. Then he finally added, “And parts.”
“Okay,” she finally took pity on him. “Good work, Rourke. Why don’t you get out of here. I can walk myself in.”
Rourke’s puddle of vomit made sense when Ronnie finally stepped into the room. The smell hit her first. The nauseating odor of rotting flesh mingled with a sickly-sweet mix of feces, rotten spinach, and some kind of foul gas. Blood spattered the walls in patterns that looked too precise to be natural. There were two beds in the room. Both were equally drenched in blood. That seemed equally intentional. It almost looked like someone just dumped a bucket of blood on both beds. A woman’s body was face down on the bed closest to the door. Her arms were raised above her head and leaning against the headboard. The fingers were missing from both of her hands, and a pentagram had been carved into her back. She looked too skinny and small, lying there covered in blood that may or may not have been her own.
Ronnie just stared at the young woman who seemed too small. It was her process. She logged every detail of the condition of the body in her mind, and she didn’t look away until the picture was clear.
A male’s body lay next to her, but it was hanging off the foot of the bed. The back of his head rested on the floor. His genitals had been removed. Those were sitting on the nightstand between the two beds. The gaping hole in his crotch was worse than the lump of flesh on the table. Ronnie stared at him too. His arms lay flat against the floor next to his head. His wrists were bruised and scraped up pretty good. The fingers had been removed from both of his hands, and his eyes had been plucked out. The pink flesh lining the empty sockets as they stared at the ceiling looked mangled like the extraction hadn’t been clean. As Ronnie continued to examine the mangled body, she noticed his throat had been slit. It was difficult to tell the way his neck was tilted, but there appeared to be a deep cut peeking out from each side of his jawline. She was just about to turn away when she noticed his feet. The tops of his toes resembled tenderized meat, as the nails had been removed from all of them. It was all a bit too familiar.
Ronnie moved along taking it all in, logging the images in her memory banks so she could review them later. Everything from the position of the bodies to the blood splattered on the walls to the jagged condition of all the wounds. Forensics would figure out what kinds of weapons were used and at what angles the cuts were made. None of that was what Ronnie needed to figure out. What kind of monster did these horrible things to the poor souls who once inhabited these bodies, and what motivated them to do something so heinous? There was always some reason that didn’t make sense to anybody else. She needed to understand it to develop the picture of who this particular monster was. They don’t wear nametags, and they usually don’t look like the beasts they are. You could sit right next to one at some random bar, share a drink, and never know about the demons creeping around in their minds.
She continued past the beds toward two more bodies propped up on a chair in the far corner of the room. One was female, and the other male. The bodies were positioned in such a way that it looked like the female was riding the male. From where Ronnie was standing, she couldn’t see the female’s hands, but it was clear the male’s fingers had been removed. Her eyes followed down his body to his toes. The nails had been torn from them. She walked around to the back of the chair and confirmed the female’s fingers and toenails had been removed just like the other victims. Her eyes had been ripped out too. She couldn’t see the male’s face the way the bodies were positioned, but she was willing to bet his eyes had also been plucked out. A man clad in protective gear worked over the deceased couple patiently taking samples from the bodies.
Ronnie cleared her throat to get the lab coat’s attention. He was too deep in his work to notice. She took a step closer and said, “This scene has been carefully staged. Already dead when they got here?”
The lab coat remained distracted when he replied, “It seems likely. They were definitely staged. All the bodies have ligature marks on their wrists and ankles, and they’ve all had their throats slit.”
The report lined up with Ronnie’s observations. She continued, “And the missing parts?”
“The eyes were postmortem. The male on the bed, his genitals might have been too. Not certain on that yet. It looks like the fingers, toenails, and tongues were removed while the victims still lived,” the lab coat absently replied.
“Tongues too? This is just like West Hollywood,” Ronnie sighed and glanced around the room again before adding, “Somebody wants to send a message.”
The lab coat finally turned to look at her. He had nice eyes. They were bright and hazel. She wondered how he kept that light shining when he spent his life working over grisly corpses scattered about bloody pits as he said, “Not sure what that might be. The male on the bed is obvious but look at this.”
He gently pulled the female’s head away from the male’s head. Two glistening skulls stared back at Ronnie. Both victims intertwined on the chair had their faces removed. It didn’t fit with the rest of the scene. Ronnie’s wheels were spinning. It was like somebody researched a bunch of random serial killers and copied everything in one epic act.
The lab coat’s voice pulled Ronnie away from her thoughts as he pointed across the room and said, “And that.”
Ronnie followed the lab coat’s gesture as her gaze settled on the wall above the other bed. There was a phrase written in blood there. Walk in the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfill the lust of the flesh. For the flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh.
“That’s quite a message, and they used a brush,” Ronnie shook her head as she examined the thing. None of it made any sense.
“It looks that way,” the lab coat agreed. “I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s a lot of work.”
“It is. Way more work than finger painting Pig on a door,” she nodded as she continued examining the message. Then she glanced back down at the lab coat and asked, “Anything else consistent between the victims?”
“Besides the ligature marks, slit throats, missing eyeballs, tongues, fingers, and toenails? Nope. That about sums it up. Is there something specific you’re looking for?” he replied without looking back up at her. He had already jumped back into his examination.
“No,” Ronnie shook her head, “I just want to make sure I have the facts straight. It reminds me of another case, but there’s no way one person did this.”
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