By M.D. Smith
Pamela Jo Hotchkins may have died screaming while her mouth was being sewn tightly shut with surgical thread. Then, the nose held shut to die from lack of oxygen.
Police found her body in the rusted shell of an abandoned freight depot outside of Kerrville, Texas. Locals called it “The Switchyard”—a haven for squatters, addicts, and the kind of people who see too much and say too little. She’d been missing for six days.
When Detective Arlen Stone arrived, he nearly vomited. And Stone hadn’t thrown up at a crime scene in fifteen years.
Pamela Jo’s limbs and body were bound with twisted barbed wire. The blood from the punctures on her clothing and the floor showed she was alive when someone wrapped the wire around her.
Stone looked at the victim’s stitched lips. “How on earth could that be done with the woman likely screaming her head off?” he asked a nearby officer.
“Beats me,” was the reply.
An object near the body—when opened, a vintage music box, cracked and bloodstained, played a distorted lullaby. It was “Hush, Little Baby.”
Burned into the victim’s inner wrist, likely with a battery-powered wood-burning tool, carved delicately and meticulously post-mortem, was a perfect rendering of a cicada, wings outstretched. The same cicada symbol had appeared in an older cold case file from Austin—different method, same precision.
The killer left a note. Scrawled in a child’s handwriting, in charcoal on the wall:
“She promised and lied.”
Arlen Stone wasn’t new to darkness. He’d seen what men did to each other in the thick jungles of South America and in the alleys of Houston. He’d experienced another form in the wreckage of his own failed marriage and estranged kids. But this—this reeked of something personal. Something learned. Ritualistic. A desire to make this death painful.
Stone learned later there was a pinhole in the victim’s back and an animal tranquilizer in her blood, likely from a dart gun. That sedated her for the barbed wire wrap and lip stitching. Finally, it made some sense. Let the victim wake up, see her killer, try to scream, suffer—then a simple matter to hold her nose shut, effectively suffocating her. After death, the intricate cicada image burned into the wrist.
Pamela Jo was no saint. Besides three broken marriages, her past held secrets—some shameful, some hidden deep beneath the veneer of her polished political career. She had once prosecuted child abuse cases with a fire that bordered on vengeance. Some said she crossed lines—destroyed lives.
The killer’s second victim two weeks later was a priest—found in a dressing room behind the choir loft. Same pinhole in back, barbed wire, same lips sewn shut. Same cicada. On the wall. “He promised and lied.”
Stone knew it wasn’t about Pamela Jo anymore. This was a personal crusade. Twisted. Righteous. Personal.
But he never expected who the monster behind the murders would turn out to be.
Two more weeks after they found the priest, another female body, this time strung up like a grotesque marionette beneath the underpass on the south side of Corpus Christi.
Notified of similarities, including lip stitching, Detective Stone arrived. He had collected little more than hunches and coffee-fueled migraines. The killer left behind nothing usable—except their signature—the outstretched wings of a cicada burned on the inner wrist, like the others.
The killer was telling a story. Arlen just didn’t know how to read it. But the press sure did. It made gruesome headlines now, with three gruesome deaths in a month. The chief was screaming at men to find some clues and track this killer down. They just had no real clues to go on. The murder scenes had no DNA, prints, or anything. Everybody sold barbed-wire in Texas.
Until the murderer made a stupid mistake.
A woman named Mallory Gane, a registered nurse with no priors and a sterling reputation in her neighborhood, had been arrested in Harlingen for trespassing after being found behind a high school maintenance shed with what she called her ‘memory box.’ Inside were items tied to every murder: snippets of hair, scraps of clothing, a ring missing from the priest, and one picture of Pamela Jo in her prosecutor days—the photo cut clean through the eyes.
Arlen was in Harlingen within the hour. A search by local authorities discovered her work area in her garage with a roll of barbed-wire, cutters, and heavy canvas gloves with bloodstains, though they had been washed. The wood-burning craft tool was inside her house.
He confronted Mallory in the local holding cell. Her lips twitched, not quite a smile.
“I wanted to see if you’d figure it out,” she said. “But you got a stupid, lucky break. Pamela Jo was a cruel woman. You know that, right? She had my two kids taken away from me for almost no reason. I’ll never find them.” She shifted in her seat. “And you know what that priest did to one of my patient’s little boy?”
Arlen had to ask. “And the underpass woman? What’d she do?”
“A common whore on the streets. She deserved no better.”
Mallory sighed, brushing invisible dust from her lap. “She ruined lives, just like they all did. I gave them what they gave me and others: pain. Now they’re all free to spread their cicada wings in the fires and halls of hell.”
Back in Corpus Christi, escorted by Arlen with an arrest warrant in hand, Mallory, handcuffed in the front, broke free of an officer’s hands. She made it as far as behind a shuttered pawn shop and grabbed a piece of steel pipe. Arlen was there—gun drawn.
A scuffle.
A shot fired.
Mallory dropped to the ground… with a bullet clean through her thigh.
Still, she smirked. “Bad shot, asshole. You missed my heart.”
“If I’d wanted you dead, you’d be dead,” Arlen replied.
Two days in the hospital and two days in county lockup were all Mallory gave them.
She used a string from her prison-issued sweatpants and a heating vent in the corner of her cell.
No note. Just the cicada carved into her uninjured thigh with the end of a broken plastic spoon, dried blood caked around the wings.
Justice came, but not without its price.
Arlen Stone didn’t sleep the night after they pulled her body down. He sat in the interrogation room she had once smirked in, staring at the walls like they might bleed secrets.
All he could think of was the hollow pain in Pamela Jo’s mother’s voice when she talked about her daughter… and the way Mallory said “pain” like it was a hymn.
There was justice, yes.
But no peace.
And the cicada? It still chirped often in the dark corners of his dreams.
* * *
M.D. Smith lives in Huntsville, AL, and has written over 150 non-fiction short stories for Old Huntsville Magazine in the past eighteen years and over 300 short fiction stories in the past seven years. Nationally published in Good Old Days and Reminisce print magazines, Like Sunshine After Rain short story anthology, and digitally in Frontier Times, Flash Fiction Magazine, 101words.org, Bewilderingstories.com, 10x10flash.com, 365tomorrows.com, smokingpenpress.com, brightflash1000.com, suburbanwitchcraftmagazine.com, suddenlyandwithoutwarning.com, and more. He’s published three romance novels and three flash fiction collections. His hobby is Ham Radio and talking to the world on voice and digital modes. Website: https://mdsmithiv.com/