Love is Murder Story 01 - Grave Danger

lying everywhere. Some were missing limbs. Most had decaying flesh, and bone jutted from torn shirts and worn pants.
    They weren’t real. They had been set two days ago for the scheduled shoot in the graveyard. The graveyard, of course, wasn’t real, either. It had been put together by the wizards of Fantasmic Effects. Thing is, filmmakers never planned for a real corpse showing up in the middle of their zombie shoot. It was understandable that Tony was spooked by the fake graveyard. He wasn’t as familiar with special effects as Greg. And, of course, Greg was familiar. He had lived with Ali for a year; he had loved to see the flash of emerald in her eyes when she’d had an idea for a superhero costume, or an evil elf, or some other being of fantasy or horror.
    He winced, looking back at the studio building where she worked. Well, she’d be off for a few days now. There would definitely be no filming here by tomorrow’s light.
    He felt the same dull ache he always felt when he thought about Ali, and he winced, and forced the pain down. He was working.
    “Do you think it might be the work of the Slasher?” Tony asked. Over the past year, four women had been found in a similar position, torsos bent over on top of their beds, as if they’d died saying their nightly prayers, throats cut ear to ear.
    “This is a man. So far, the Slasher only kills women. And intheir homes,” Greg said. “I’m not saying that it might not be, but we can’t come to any real conclusions right now.”
    Was it the Slasher? He’d been following clues. They’d questioned dozens of suspects, but the killer used gloves, and he seemed to know exactly what he was doing, studying police procedure, evidence…hell, he didn’t leave a hair, a drop of fluid—anything.
    Greg hunkered down by the real corpse. The man lay half in and half out of a hole that had been dug in the ground—not a true six-foot depth, but maybe three and half or four feet. He’d been wearing a pair of jeans and a T-shirt sporting a ravenous shark on the back. That seemed an irony now, because the slashes just lower than the gaping jaws made it appear that a shark had taken a bite out of the man. But Greg doubted the slashes on the back had killed him; it was the fact that his head had nearly been severed by a ragged blade and lay at an odd twisted angle on the ground, along with his torso, while his legs dangled over the dark pit of the grave. He could so easily have been a part of the set!
    Greg slipped a gloved hand into the man’s pocket and found his wallet. His California driver’s license identified him as Victor Brill of Topanga Canyon. In his wallet, Victor also carried nearly two hundred dollars, an ATM card and a Platinum American Express. Robbery didn’t seem to be the motive. But then, overkill was seldom in play when the motive was robbery.
    Overkill was usually the work of a psycho.
    Still hunched down, Greg looked around the area again. He shook his head. The crime scene units were going to groan aloud when they arrived on the scene what with the body parts everywhere, and fake blood spattered across the “zombie” areas where the creatures had apparently just dined on unwary mourners. He’d checked the ground for impressions in the fake landscape himself; footprints, telltale signs indicating the killer’s path. There was sucha hodgepodge of horror on the set that it was almost impossible to tell anything.
    Greg motioned to the police photographer hovering back at the edge of the fake graveyard. “Come on over. M.E. will be here soon, and I want a good photo record before we move anything else.”
    The police photographer, a grim young woman, started snapping even as she made her way over.
    Overkill.
    It was actually not an easy feat to nearly sever a man’s head. The throat and neck were vulnerable, of course, but to slice through all the flesh, muscle and ligaments down to the bone, well, that took some effort. And anger.
    What had Victor Brill done to have received such wrath? Or had he done anything at all? Was this the work of the Slasher?
    Greg stood; old Doc Mabry was carefully maneuvering his way to the site.
    “That’s the real goner?” Mabry asked him.
    Greg nodded. “Old” Doc Mabry wasn’t that old. But, recently, a series of retirements had left him, at fifty, the oldest M.E. working in the area. He was tall, straight, fit, and could have easily passed for an aging character actor.
    “Well?” Greg asked.
    “I may