That night, Daniel couldn’t hold his sleep, he drove down to the Police Department of Hollow Creek, set up his cubicle, and started going through the whole paperwork of his last case. He was convinced that he had stepped into a rabbit hole.
It had been on his desk across the last week since a call was made from a peasant the night of July 28th, the security cameras from Hollow Creek's Playgrounds, a recreative area, had recorded the whole incident. The boy had entered the complex at midnight, trespassed the security fences, and planted himself in the middle of the Starlight baseball field. After about an hour, he alone had managed to go from one corner of the playgrounds to the other, leaving a track of destruction, all the way through the stands, to a total of 200.000 dollars in property damage. But the true problem wasn’t that, but the fact that it was impossible to prove that he had been responsible for it.
That same night, Daniel went through the whole evidence of the case, including the security recordings provided by the Playgrounds manager that morning. Alone in the hall, he went part by part for the whole eighteen minutes of footage they had available, barely visible on the green-shaded screen of his PC. Oliver was a regular seventeen-year-old teenager, almost skinny, average height, with blonde messy hair cut in an old-fashioned way. Standing right in front of the locker room entrance, where the camera was placed, Daniel watched him jumping over the fence, walking into the diamond, and, planting himself there for a couple of minutes quiet, like nothing.
One of the reasons why Daniel's peers called Oliver’s case Strange, apart from being this the very last name of the boy, was how the damages for which he was accused were caused.
As the damages reported, the medium through which machinery, pipelines, wiring, lighting, all the walls in between, and even long areas of the ground were damaged, could only be described as an excessive use of strength or pressure, from the type only heavy machinery could do.
After many reviews, however, without finding any proof that this machinery ever existed, nor witnesses to provide more evidence, they only had what was inside the recording. And Daniel couldn’t believe it as he watched it.
Suddenly, the boy had started to move from one place to another, like dancing, or rather fighting with something invisible to the eyes, for moments so fast that he couldn’t even see him. Clouds of dust altogether with piles of dirt and fresh-cut grass jumped at his movement, like reacting to an invisible force, much like in the way you would expect in a science-fiction film or a fantasy book. Right there, at that moment, Daniel saw how the fence got twisted in the strange way he saw it when visiting the scene for the first time; how the mount of the diamond was replaced for a hole, the same hole he had thought seemed made by a meteor; how the walls bent themselves like a truck had crashed into them. And for a moment, he believed in what his eyes were watching, unlike most of his peers.
— Strange isn’t it? it almost seemed like he did it —
Voiced Barne’s from his cubicle. It was already in the morning, and as usual, the old detective had arrived hours before the rest of the personnel were even getting out of their houses.
— For God’s sake Barnes, you almost scare the shit out of me… asshole —
Holding a little headache, Daniel saw the old man laughing with his scrappy voice, darkened by many years of smoking cigarettes.
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— Well that’s what happens if you spend the night urging inside a crap box —
After ten years of knowing him while working in the force, plus another three in which Daniel had him as a teacher in the Academy, the thirty-four-year-old detective had learned two things about Barnes. First, that usually the bulldog-looking old man would be right with his assumptions, two, that even if he was he would often avoid the workload that came with acting upon those assumptions, something that Daniel always accused to the age. As partners then, he found himself usually carrying both to that place where they neither neglect their job nor crash their noses against the wall, or he liked to think about it that way.
The thing was, that Barnes surely had right, Oliver’s case was filled with things that no one would like to put their noses on, and Daniel wasn’t sure if there was something truly worthy of even trying in it.
A couple of minutes later, Barnes walked side by Daniel’s desk with a taunting look, he was reviewing a list of reports gathered during the last week.
— Have you found something? — Barnes asked, Daniel was so deep on it that it seemed to ignore him for a couple of minutes.
— Well, nothing that we haven’t asked before — he answered.
— So, what’s your point? — Daniel buffed as if he had heard a joke.
— That we have a headless body matching Oliver’s DNA in the morgue while the boy is comfortably sleeping in his bed right now —
On the morning of 31st July, the decapitated body of a teenage boy was found in the wooden area near Hollow Park, just about two miles from Oliver’s house. Barely two days after the incident. It wasn’t really hard to link the cases from there, the Playgrounds responsible were already looking for a suspect in the body’s description, and research of the nearby area led them quickly to Oliver. After requesting Oliver’s DNA under the weight of evidence coincidently found one after another, the samples matched with Oliver in both, the body found in the woods and those collected in the Playgrounds scene. Just a week took them to have a suspect, a victim, and a potential witness, all of them being Oliver, in a seemingly impossible case.
When they interrogated the boy, his testimony broke the whole thing down. He admitted everything that night but gave an explanation that made everyone get out of the case as oil to water. He said as it was stated in the report.
“Something was following me, and tried to kill me that night, I lost it in the woods, I hope it never comes back”
For one side, it had been a relief for Hollow Creek’s Police department, the case had no logic in which their resources could extract a certain truth, which instantly made them rely on other possible solutions. Money would be given from the Local Administration to repair the damages, they would assume the DNA tests had fallen into the 0,01% chance to be wrong, cause a person couldn’t be death while walking freely in the streets. And Oliver’s explanations about a fantastic being trying to hunt him while causing all the destruction shown in the video couldn’t be true… shouldn’t be true… they hoped it wasn’t true.
So when Daniel came in and found the case dismissed, apparently by the Department Chief himself, his gut told him that something was still off. That they were leaving something behind and under the carpet.
— Well, that’s a problem buddy, 'cause we cannot investigate that kid neither as a victim nor suspect anymore — said Barnes while trying to light a cigarette.
Then Daniel realized what he was searching from the start, as annoying as that statement could be, it had given him a way through it.
— Exactly, and that’s why we’re gonna investigate him as a witness —
Said Daniel with wide eyes, making Barnes's expression turn into absurd disbelief.
— You must be kidding —
Said Barnes, gaping as Daniel jumped out of his seat, grabbing his coat.
— I’m certainly not —
Said the young detective, taking Barnes's cigarette from his mouth, and turning it off against the ashtray as he led to the entrance.
— Where are you even going? —
— I need to take a shower and make sure Eveline doesn’t kill me, then I may pass by Oliver’s neighborhood —
— Are you mad kiddo? do you think I’m gonna let you go after hearing that? —
Barnes seemed concerned.
— Well, are you coming with me? —
said Daniel with a relaxed expression. And as much as Barnes hated the idea of looking into that crap box again, he stood blankly in the hallway with his hand grabbing the half of the crap his word couldn’t chew at that moment.