Candor

[kindaemissary]

"It's only in love and in murder that we still remain sincere" -- Friedrich Dürrenmatt

After a horrifying string of murders start to


plague a small town in the New York


countryside, two individuals (a newspaper


journalist and a detective with the town's


police department) try to do whatever


they can to figure out what's happening in


their town. While they'll start on this


journey alone and wandering, they may just


need a hand form the other to figure it out.




​

 

[kindaemissary]

October 12 -- 8:33 AM -- Cold Springs, New York

If Landon Bracy knew that it was going to be sporadically raining throughout the day and had bothered to check the forecast, he would have brought an umbrella or wore a raincoat, or at least something with a useful hood. The air was cold and misty like most autumn mornings in New England, and Landon's hair was sticking to his face with a soft layer of wet water dampening his skin. While he was chilly from the cool water permeating through the air, it wasn't as cold as he was expected when he left his house that morning. He had the thought to pull on a sweater and a coat over his loose t-shirt but nothing that protected his ears and wet hair from the cold. This weather made him want to curl into a ball and sleep on day in the nook of his couch and not come out until it was over, but that wouldn't be until late April at the least. He figured he'd manage as much as he could.

October 12 -- 8:33 AM -- Cold Springs, New York

Standing outside City Hall so early in the morning wasn't characteristically normal of him, but he had done it time before. Many times before, to be honest. Anything that could lead him to a big story was worth standing in a huddle of people frightened out of their mind at the possibility that they might be next. The crowd today was much different than the crowds he had immersed himself in before. Back in June a few years ago when the first same-sex couple got married, there were bigots holding up posters and sane people hugging their loved ones as the couple trailed down the cement stairs, two veils trailing behind them. When the town finally approved the clean water system that the old major pushed to pass, people wearing green were scattered in the streets. Two teenagers broke the latch to a fire hydrant and children danced in the water as it rained down from the sky. Now, everyone clustered at the feet of the stairs wore the same grave faces and the same drab clothes as if they were already at a funeral. There was no color. There was no optimism. There was not a single sprout of hope that whatever menace was plaguing their town was going to be taken care of like the monster they were.


Since there was nowhere to sit, Landon leaned against the side railing leading into the front of the building and pulled out a nettled notebook from his messenger bag along with a pen that he placed behind his ear. There was nothing happening - no press release, no computer generated images of the killer, no pictures of the crime. Landon needed something, and he hoped that whatever the stout man on the stairs had to say would help him create a story.


Some days Landon felt that what he did wasn't for the general welfare of anyone but himself, but his stories weren't all about murders and vigilantes striking Cold Springs in the middle of the night. He did some good. He wrote about bake sales, sometimes about the high school soccer team making it to state (for the third year in a row (go Hawks!), and once in a while he wrote for Annie's Corner (the teenage help-line where adults pretended that they knew what advice to give to people trying to get out of this godforsaken town). It just so happened that he also wrote obituaries, about the robbery two months ago where two college kids from New York City hit up a gas station in the middle of the night and set a car on fire, and now about the string of murders that so far had four people from Cold Springs dead. It made him feel better to think that the stories that he was telling were leaving people informed, even if they were becoming informed on the gruesomest and most heinous crimes that Cold Springs had ever seen.


Once the press conference finally got started and the man in charge, who he recognized as Chandler Martins, began rambling on whatever he thought he was talking about, Landon was listening. Scribbling on his notebook paper as he waited for the man to make a fucking point, already until a voice boomed from out of the crowd and strode up the stairs like he knew what he was doing. Landon was impressed, to put it bluntly. He wasn't sure what was happening or why a British man was here in the first place, but if it got him answers and made the story more interesting, then he'd take what he could get.


The woman standing next to him, Mary who owned the flower shop, nudged his arm a few times until he realized it was purposeful and looked at her. "Do you know who that is?" she asked, and Landon looked back at the British man with a shrug. "No idea," he said. "But he sure does."


Once the majority of the speaking was over, and the British man handed back the floor to the officers that were there before him, the crowd erupted into yelling and jousting, and Landon only wanted more. He wasn't going to get anything tangible from the officers, and while he knew that his voice was going to be useless in all of the shouting, he wasn't sure how to get the other man's attention. After giving the crowd a disappointed once over -- where were all these people supposed to be anyway? Did any of them have jobs? -- Landon pushed his way up the few short stairs to the top. The yelling and bickering between the crowd and the officers was enough to give way to a distraction that no one really noticed he had moved, and Landon moved again from where he was standing to an open spot near the man from before. He pushed his notebook back down into the bottom of his bag and moved forward with an open hand.


"Hey," he said, and he glanced between his hand to the man's face. He felt a raindrop land on his head. "Landon Bracy. Are you new around here? Just working on this case? No one's heard much about what's really going on and no one that actually works here seems to have a clue either." Another raindrop. And another. "People are really getting worried out here, and with people like that working on cases" - he pointed toward Martins - "it makes sense why no one feels safe anymore. Especially with what's going on."


Landon scratched at the back of his head as the rain started piling up in the sky, rumbling thunderclouds booming overhead as the earth warned them of the storm. He'd use his bag if the weather got too intense, and if anything his car wasn't too far away. He should have just brought an umbrella.


"I don't know how much you're truly allowed to say and it was capacity, but it would be a real help if you could give me something. My mother's been worried for days since the first murders. We live only about a block from the mother and child that were killed, and it's been stressing her out more than anything has in a long time. You probably can't say much, and that's fine, I just need to know if you know something. Anything. Do you have a face? A motive? A clear weapon? Or do you only know as much as you've already said?"

 

[kindaemissary]

October 12 -- 8:49 AM -- Cold Springs, New York

Before the man, Bosie, finishes introducing himself Landon hair is drenched and his coat begins to stick to his skin. He wants to stand in the rain, to feel something important trailing down his skin like an answer waiting for rebirth, but Bosie turns on his heel and heads under cover to get dry. Landon doesn't know why his love/hate relationship with rain is so bewildering to the people around him. The rain makes him anxious, agitated, annoyed. But there's another part of it that reminds him of all the new things that rain brings and the joy of new life that comes with it. Since it wasn't spring and there was nothing cleansing about this rain, he should have felt annoyed. Now that it was cascading down his face he only wanted to remain there longer and allow it to free his soul from the dirt and grim that seemed to exist under his fingernails, his clothes, and his skin.

October 12 -- 8:49 AM -- Cold Springs, New York

The weather would continue to be like this every autumn season for the rest of his life -- pummeling rain from from the clouds in a form of unadulterated hatred for the earth. Two springs ago, when Landon's mother was stuck in the hospital two towns away, the fields surrounding Cold Springs flooded along with the ditches and the lower streets. It wasn't as bad as it got in the south -- there were no canoes bringing people out of their homes, no helicopter rescue teams ready to save parents and children from the depths of water below. It was just inconvenient, and the markets always suffered those years. Landon stopped growing tomatoes after thirty or more of his were killed by over-watering and not enough sunlight.


Landon didn't know how exactly he was supposed to read the man before him. From the way he held himself, he seemed much more confident than he needed to be. Arrogant, really. There didn't seem to be a reason why Bosie Burgess needed to flaunt himself, his title, his knowledge -- the biggest thing that Landon was gathering from him was a confusing superiority complex. Whether or not the supposed intellect was supposed to make him feel stupid or was still running free from the battle between Chandler Martins, Landon didn't know, and he wasn't sure if he cared to find out.


Nodding toward the other man, Landon looked around the City Hall front lawn as people with umbrellas continued to shout questions at the officers as if anger would get them anywhere and everyone shuffled back to the parking lot in order to escape the downpour of rain. Landon turned around and followed the man to shelter, and he looked at his hand before shoving it deep inside his pocket. His fingers tingled with cold, and he wondered if it was the residual chill from the man's freezing fingertips.


Once they were out of the rain and protected from the onslaught of storm that would appear in the next five minutes, from what Landon understood about storms, he turned toward Bosie with an expectation of being told exactly what he wanted to hear. There was a slim chance that the detective would offer anything of actual use, and until Landon had any of it on record, he couldn't use it anyway. There wasn't much need to write anything soon about the murders aside from the fact that the police were working on the case. Everything that was said at City Hall was fair game to publish anyway, and Burgess and the others had already said enough. If he was lucky, though he often didn't feel lucky, Burgess would spew out factoid after factoid of information and consent to being "interviewed" for the local newspaper, Putnam County News. Landon knew that there was hardly a chance of that happening, but he'd rather strike out than not try at all.


After wringing his hair together between his hands, Landon wiped the palms of his hands on his jeans and used his finger tips to smooth out the twisted hair strands. "Is there anything you're allowed to say?" he asked, and bunched his hair together again to get out the rest of the excess rain water. Landon pulled at his jacket to put some air between his skin and the material as it grasped at his damp skin. "Or am I picking at a corpse trying to get information from you?"

 

[kindaemissary]

October 12 -- 8:57 AM -- Cold Springs, New York

Landon snorted to himself before he could stop it and cleared his throat quickly, hand in front of his face. "I wouldn't publish anything without prior consent from a willing party," he offered in retribution. "I wasn't planning on writing a story about what you told me, anyway. This is mostly for personal knowledge. Everything that I needed to write a story was said outside City Hall, and I don't need permission to reiterate public knowledge."

October 12 -- 8:57 AM -- Cold Springs, New York

The fact that a man that he hardly knew, one that he had never seen before this very day, would call him out for not knowing his own working protocol was discourteous at best, and ill-timed due to the mood that the weather had placed Landon in. He was weary and tired, sick to his bones with impatience, and this coarse man wanted to show that somehow he knew more about what Landon did for a living than Landon himself? The latter wasn't one to play games, and he didn't want this to turn into one. There was already the existence of a serial killer in his peaceful little town, and Landon didn't want to put himself more on the edge than he already was. So what it had been over two weeks since he had written anything approved by the paper -- he knew that, and he needed to keep pushing newsworthy stories fast and strong if he wanted to keep his job, and the attitude and ambiance given off by this man only made him want to quit more than he already did. If it wasn't for the money he'd be out of there by now.


For the past two years, Landon had struggled making ends meet around his own home and his mother's. His brother helped out from time to time with medical bills and the extensive tax collections that IRS agents came to assemble. He wasn't sure if he could do it alone even though he was mostly figuring it out for himself at the time being. He needed the job to keep both of them off the streets and out of his brother's tiny studio apartment because without it they'd both be without medical insurance and any kind of aid from the government. After the car wreck, as terrible as that was, Landon had no idea how he was going to manage paying the expenses of one accident, let alone two. Even though it wasn't a physical form of an accident -- no cars or trucks involved -- the MRIs from the first time his mother was in the hospital lead to the discovery of the second: stage-three Chondrosarcoma, bone cancer. With all the problems that just seemed insurmountable, the only thing that Landon needed was money. And something to keep his mind off what was happening at home.


I.e.: Putnam County Newspaper.


Walking into the cafe, Landon rolled his eyes at the shit spewing out of Burgess's mouth. "I'm afraid that unless your position grants you special information, what I am to tell you won't even begin to scrape the surface of such heinous criminal activity." For a moment, Landon dared to question himself in correspondence to the man. Was he wasting his time here trying to get milk from a cow that wouldn't give? Was Burgess going to give him anything or just lead him out of the rain to waste a few dollars on deplorable espresso?


"Are you going to get anything?" he asked, and walked toward the front counter and away from Bosie to order. The barista was younger than the man he often saw cleaning off tables when he walked by, and he didn't recognize his face. He supposed he was too young to see high-schoolers and know who they were at this point of his life. "Can I get a tall vanilla latte with two shots of espresso, no whipped cream? And one of the cinnamon rolls in the display case, no icing." He paid the teenager and muttered thanks before glancing over at Burgess. It might have been the lighting, but the man looked much colder inside the he did outdoors. He seemed just as on edge as he did before, though. The same fierce demeanor that deemed him ready to attack at a single second, and Landon wasn't sure what set him off so much about the man. Was it the bad attitude? The petulant "I know what you don't know" being waved in front of his face? He wasn't sure.


Landon cleared his throat and grabbed his drink and pastry from the counter with another thanks and moved around to face Bosie again. "I'm not in the business for begging for information, and I'm not stupid enough to think that I can just write whatever I want. If you're going to tell me anything, I'd rather you'd be upfront with it instead of acting like you're doing me a favor. In a couple of days the public will know more, and in a couple of days I'll write a new article." He raised one of his eyebrows and took a quick sip. Too hot. "People do all sorts of irresponsible shit for a good story, and if you think that anyone's gonna ask you a couple of questions and get half-assed answered and be satisfied, you're gravely mistaken. If people want to know they'll look. You are only a starting point."

 

[kindaemissary]

October 12 -- 9:12 AM -- Cold Springs, New York

The more the two of them interacted the less that Landon had any sort of respect for the detective before him. While he had probably worked his way through ranks to head a serial-killing case like this in the States, there was no need for the bitterness in each and every one of his responses. Landon considered himself a reasonable man, and he was pretty laid back until provoked otherwise, and Bosie was

October 12 -- 9:12 AM -- Cold Springs, New York

provoking him otherwise. He came out of the rain for answers. He didn't leave City Hall for a pop-quiz on his job responsibilities or a general attacking from someone he barely knew. With seconds ticking by, Landon wanted to be there less and less, and now that he had his drink he felt the want increasing even more.


But he'd stay.


"I don't have any idea about your relationship with Martins and his team, but I know my town. People are going to look until there's nothing left to find, and when that happens there's not going to be a case anymore. The only reason I think that we'll know more in a couple of days is because in a couple of days there'll be another body with another gruesome story for you to tell." Landon sighed and grabbed a stirring straw from the counter and pushed it around in his drink before sipping. The liquid was hot and scalded the back of his throat, but he swallowed down another gulp. "The way this is going is that before a week has past someone else will be dead, and I'll already have something new to write about. It isn't anything against you or what you have to say. It's just a fact. There's always going to be a story more interesting and intriguing than the one the week before. That's why our town has seemed to forget that just over a week ago a teenage girl crashed into two other cars because she was texting and driving and crossed into the median. And this morning, where was everyone? Her funeral was at the Lutheran church across down, but the public that seemed to care about her then were onto new and better things and trying to get their hands onto any new bit of information."


Pushing one hand into the front pocket of his jeans, Landon tried to level Bosie with a look. Whether it worked or not, he wasn't sure. "Like I said, I don't know jack about the complicated relationship you're apparently having with the town's police force, but it sounds like this case is going to advance whether you start working together or not." He wasn't sure if he was actually attacking Burgess or if the man was just easily offended. There wasn't much coming out of his mouth that didn't feel like the outright truth, so he hoped that what he was gathering from Burgess wasn't entirely true and the man was acting out for reasons he himself deemed acceptable.


"I just want to know something."


Burgess seemed to lower himself as he lowered his voice to speak. "I tell you, what I am allowed to tell you, or you get out of my sight and look to bloody fucking Martins for a source. If you want me to waste my time telling you a story that has no purpose, you best get on your way." Landon couldn't tell if he was adding the intense aggravation for dramatics or if his own logic had offended the man, and he was tired of trying to figure it out. Burgess was going to remain hostile and angry no matter what he did or said, Landon believed, and he didn't care to be around to find out if he was right or not. "What kind of bloody job did you manage to land yourself in anyways?"


"The kind that puts food on the table, all right?" Landon spat back. The petulant attitude was adding to his growing irritation. "I honestly don't give a fuck what you think about me and what I do for a living, because it seems to me there's nothing about you deserving of respect or the smallest tidbit of admiration. I can see why now that the police in this town don't get along with you: they're people's people, and you're doing all of this for yourself. Aren't you? You don't care about this town. You don't even care about working with our officers to solve a case. You want them to believe everything you say and change their process for you, but you're the outsider. You have to prove yourself. Not the other way around."


Landon grabbed a lid from the counter and pushed it down against his to-go cup. "I think I'd much rather drink this alone than with you talking about this case." He pushed the unglazed cinnamon roll into his messenger bag and returned his eyes back to Burgess. "I can figure out what I want from someone else or I'll do it on my own."

 

[kindaemissary]

October 12 -- 9:23 AM -- Cold Springs, New York

For a moment, Landon stood at the counter with his hand on the lid of his to-go cup as if he was waiting for something to hit him. The long moment passed and he shook his head to himself, wondering what in this man's mind tricked him into thinking that he was better than anyone else around him and how he got to working on a case for a small town like Cold Springs in the first place. Cold Springs was full of nice people -- aside from the serial killer lurking around at night -- of all different races and creeds that wanted to build lives in a loving community with their families and friends, and for a second, Landon could allow himself to be swayed that Bosie Burgess fit into that same category, but he was mistaken. Burgess wasn't kind. He didn't give a solitary fuck about protecting the people of Cold Springs from and capturing the killer to prevent further murders and upheaval. He was here because he was the best and wanted that same kind of power he'd get from the people of Cold Springs as he solved the troubling case. He didn't seem to care about the lives that were lost as long as the number wasn't too high at the end.

October 12 -- 9:23 AM -- Cold Springs, New York

Landon knew that he didn't like Bosie now more than he did in the beginning. At first, back at City Hall, he was intrigued. A man out of nowhere with a blistering accent took over for police at a press conference, made them look like fools, and then stepped aside so that they were swallowed by questions. It wasn't exactly productive and would only hinder their abilities to work together moving forward, but Landon was struck with a kind of awe he hadn't felt in a while. People around here, in his town, didn't do anything outside of what was expected from them. They lived day after day just performing the same actions as if they had read a manual or something. Landon didn't do that, and he didn't want to. Everyday was a new experience, and for a moment he had believed that Bosie was someone that he could confide with while he was here.


Now he was sure that he was wrong and they had barely spent an hour together.


As Bosie pulled away with a swoosh, Landon snorted to himself at it all. The moment after he says he's going to leave, the other sways away like letting the conversation die out was his idea. Landon gave the barista a look and nodded down toward his pastry. "Can I get this to go?" he asked, and he looked down the display case. "And can I also get a snicker doodle scone and a bar of that banana bread?"


At the same time the barista nodded a boom echoed overhead and Landon peered toward the front of the store where Bosie had pressed himself against the wall. What the fuck is he doing? Landon thinks to himself, and he shakes it off as he turns back to the barista with a ten and tells him to keep the change. With his bag in one hand and his drink in the other, Landon walked to the front of the store, still curious as to what was happening with Burgess. He wasn't sure if he was more interested or annoyed at this point, but they were getting to be pretty synonymous when he thought about Bosie. He could still care about knowing something without really caring about it at all. Couldn't he?


"Not going to leave yet?" Landon asked, and he cast a look outside before his eye caught a body laying in an alley across the street. He was confused for a second before another bout of thunder boomed overhead and he caught the glimpse of blood on the blacktop with the lightning. "Is that... is that a body?" he asked, more to himself than anything. He turned to Bosie quickly and stared at his body pressed against the wallpaper. "Is it?" he pressed. "Are you even going to call it in or are you going to wait for someone else to find it first?" He looked back outside and frowned. "What if a child walked up to that alley next and saw the body before anyone had taken care of it? How would you feel about that?"


Landon adjusted his shoulders and took a deep breath as he walked forward a step. He pushed his drink into his other hand and pulled out his phone. "If you're not going to do anything, I'll call someone who will." He unlocked the screen and prepared to dial 9-1-1. "Or are you going to pull yourself together and do your job?"

 

[kindaemissary]

October 12 -- 9:37 AM -- Cold Springs, New York

While Landon believed that he was starting to pull this case together in his head -- at least a MO for the killer at large -- this incident through his for a loop. If this was the same person that had committed the other crimes, they were much more spur-of-the-moment than Landon had previously believed, and if they weren't... Well, if they weren't the original killer in Cold Springs was creating enough of a scene to inspire others to join him or put enough fear in the people that they were beginning to flip shit. There wan't much to go off of for getting information, and Landon knew that his best source was going to end up being Bosie no matter what he wanted to think. If he was going to get anything good to write about he was to going to have stick around for much longer than he wanted, and he hoped that it would be worth the stress and panic in the end.

October 12 -- 9:37 AM -- Cold Springs, New York

Even though he had written many articles in the past about violence inside and outside of Cold Springs, seeing it splayed out in front of him was much different than reading cold case files and talking to victim's families. He wanted to vomit and felt the need deep inside himself as he continued to stare at the bloody body in the street. Whether or not the attacker was the same as the main case he was following, murder was still murder and he didn't know how much more of it Cold Springs could take, let alone himself.


Landon turned his head to look at Bosie with an annoyed eye roll accompanied with a raised eyebrow. "You don't have to act like an asshole," he said, and he looked back at the street. "I know we're going to have to go in and do all that shit, okay? You don't need to continuously patronize me." With the way that Bosie put up a front and retreated away with a facade that he was a horrible human people -- Landon was beginning to question if it was really an act or if he was actually just a dick -- Landon had a feeling that he barely had positive relationships with the people in his lives. The air that he gave off was angry and arrogant, and Landon doubted that all of that intensity accumulated over a couple of years. Burgess seemed young -- not young enough to be a detective, but young enough -- so the obvious thought was that he had familial problems growing up. Dad wasn't around, Mom didn't care -- that kind of shit. Not to say that Landon had his entire life pulled together and knew where he was going, but he had a support system. A father that raised him to be himself and a mother than continued to care when she couldn't do anything else. Sullivan did enough for a younger brother, and he only hoped that the two of them would continue to have a similar relationship in their older years, and he believed that if they had accomplished a loving one now it wouldn't be too hard to maintain that in the future.


But Bosie didn't seem to give a fuck about anyone or anything around him. He looked at everything like it was a step in a process and didn't matter once the job was done. Which was probably true. Landon wasn't the best at reading people, but he wasn't normally wrong with first impressions. Either Bosie was really as horrible and cocky as he proposed himself to be or he was as lonely and hesitant as Landon wanted to believe. The more they interacted, Landon was sure it was the prior, but he wasn't willing to let it go just yet.


"I never said a thing about going out there and patching this together yourself. You were watching like it was the first ounce of television you viewed in years and weren't doing a thing. Do detectives wait around all days until hours have passed before the move? Because, as much as you hate it here and think that everyone around you is an imbecile, that's not how things work. We call in crimes. We report crimes. We do what needs to be done to protect others, not ourselves. Isn't that what being a cop is like? Willing to put your life on the line to protect the people around you from evil and darkness like this? And if that's what cops do, what's the point of having a detective here if you're only going to sit around waiting for something 'more interesting' to happen?"