The unfortunately nameless. Though the chain of murders up and down the country were undoubtedly committed by the same person, the problem was, nobody knew who this person was. He left no clues as to his identity-- no aliases, no signature way to kill-- just a cigarette butt at the scene of the crime. The cigarettes weren't smoked by anyone-- just burned. The detective wasn't even sure if this nameless person was a man or a woman. Sometimes, on his more intoxicated nights, he wasn't sure the killer was a person. Perhaps a group of people, or no human at all...
He stood and dropped the cigarette butt into an evidence bag. Now to the more gruesome part of the investigation-- actually seeing they way the victim died.
***
The seventeen-year-old girl's scream echoed for miles. The neighbors called the police, who arrived within minutes-- just minutes late. They entered the home to find the teenager's body sprawled in a pool of blood on the floor. Her neck was twisted around and she had stab wounds and slashes all over her body. Between her left index finger and middle finger was the still-burning end of a cigarette.
Once again, the detective was forced to consider the possibility that this brutal killer wasn't human-- at least, not entirely. No person could escape the scene of a crime that easily-- and the part of the detective that had not been hardened by years of gory crime scenes and other glamorous aspects of the job wanted to believe no person could be so very cruel. He downed another glass of beer and tried to think of think of any possible way this killer could escape so easily. There was certainly lots of killing that occurred before the detective arrived. Stabbing that girl would have taken a long time-- the whole thing would have taken a lot more than the few minutes between the neighbors hearing the scream and the police arriving. And why--how--had none of the neighbors seen anything? Nobody in the whole neighborhood saw anyone enter the house except the teenager and saw nobody leave before the police pulled up by the house, sirens wailing.
The detective was out of beer for the night and has no desire to go out for more. He kicked off his shoes and almost immediately fell asleep. He dreamed about a ghost of a man who left cigarette butts with no DNA on them near the bodies of people whose DNA was spilling out of them.
***
There was another body the next day.
"It's a real shame," said the head detective. "He was a good man."
"You knew him?" asked the junior detective. It was her first day on the job, and she was certainly having an interesting time. At this particular moment, however, she felt a bit queasy. She hadn't though crime scenes would be quite this messy.
The head detective smiled grimly, opened one of the desk drawers, and pulled something out of it.
"What is that?" asked the junior detective.
"The worst thing you will ever see," he replied. She doubted that a bit; she was standing in a puddle of blood and could see spatters of the same blood arcing up and down the walls.
In the head detective's hand was a wallet.
"I don't understand."
He opened the wallet and out fell a detective's badge and a cigarette butt. He caught both objects with his other hand.
"This man," he said; gesturing to the body lying face-down on the floor, bottle in one hand, "was one of us."
The body of the detective was carried away in a black bag. Eventually, everyone departed and his house was left vacant. The rest of the police force tried to find the killer, but after months and months with no more murders to link together, they moved on to other things. The story of the mystery person, the ghost man who'd slaughtered the detective, became a campfire story told by teenagers to scare their friends.
All this time, nobody ever figured out it was me.
[This is a short story I wrote for my English class, entitled "Ghost?". Creepy, huh?]
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