Into the Woods

 

I was heading home after a trip to the mountains when a hitchhiker waved me over. It was a boy who couldn’t have been over 20. He seemed genuine, so I offered him a ride. On our way, we struck a conversation.

“Aren’t you afraid to pick up strangers?”

“I am most of the time. Why, should I be scared of you?”

“I could be a serial killer.”
 
“I doubt it. It would be rare for two serial killers to meet like this.”

I was only joking, but he seemed to be scared of me after that comment. He asked whether I could drop him off right away and I obliged. I laughed as I drove off. He shouldn’t have joked about something like that if he couldn’t handle the subject in the first place.

Three days later, I was sitting at my desk when I noticed a distraught woman pass by. My colleague Charles came over and watched her leave. He seemed tense.

“What’s the matter?”

“Her son has been missing for three days after going hiking with friends.”

Charles showed me a photograph of the boy and I was speechless for a moment. It was the same person I scared off the other day. I tried to get on with my own work that day, but the photo of that boy kept popping up in my head. Since I didn’t have any active cases, I decided to join Charles in his. My partner Henry was also on board with the idea.

We delved deeper into missing persons reports in the same area until we found a pattern. Six boys and five girls around the same age had gone missing during the past two years in similar intervals. We were most likely looking at a human-trafficking ring or a serial killer.

We formed a search party the following day and swept through the forest areas where they were last seen. About four hours later, deep in the forest, we came across a site that seemed to have been tampered with. The ground looked as if it had been dug up and closed again recently. In the back of my mind, I hoped it wasn’t what I thought it was; but my hopes were betrayed when we discovered the boy’s body in a four-foot grave.

The sight was sickening. Almost every inch of his body was mutilated. I couldn’t bear to look at it for more than a couple of seconds. The search continued for hours longer; by the end of the day, we found four more bodies. They had suffered the same fate as the recent victim. We found the rest of the victims the next day. There was similar foreign DNA on all the bodies, but it wasn’t in the system. Seeing no other card to play, I spoke to Henry and came up with a plan to go undercover as a hitchhiker to catch our guy.

The following morning, I wore a wire and stood by the side of the road near the forest and waited to see if someone were to come along to offer me a ride. Henry and a team of cops were on stand-by further away on the opposite side of the road; they were hiding behind the bushes. A guy in a pickup truck offered me a ride. He said he owned a motel nearby, and that I could freshen up there and have a meal for a small price if I wanted to before heading home. I agreed.

The man offered me some water, but I showed him my own bottle. He drove us to a secluded area and said we had to walk the rest of the way. He told me to go first and, as soon as I stepped forward, he pulled out a knife from under his shirt. I grabbed my gun immediately and pointed it at him.

“Drop the knife!”

His eyes grew colder as his face distorted with rage. Reluctantly, he dropped the weapon and got to his knees. Henry and the team arrived seconds later and cuffed him. The suspect’s DNA was a match. He was sentenced to death two weeks later.