The Bodies Of Missing Girls Have Been Showing Up In Our Small Town, And The Locals Are Starting To Fear A ‘Time Traveling Serial Killer’

The further my investigation took me into Miss August and her death, the stranger things became. It got to the point where I started pinching myself on the arm to remind myself that what was happening was real and not some kind of morbid dream.

I didn’t believe what I saw, but a pinch reminded me it was reality. A six-digit number was scrawled in black ink across the outside of Miss August’s forearm. I had done enough historical research to know exactly what the tattoo was. It was an identification tattoo from The Holocaust. So either this woman survived The Holocaust, but somehow looked like she was in her 30s in 2016, or she was a woman in her 30s who decided to pay homage to something, or someone, by getting a concentration camp ID tattooed onto her arm.

Finding the body, calling in the proper authorities and going back to my office should have been the end of it for me, but that wouldn’t be the case in a place as small as Riverbound County. The local sheriff had a lot more to do than pull over speeders and harass underage kids drinking beer on logging roads, I was dragged full on into a murder investigation which got weirder by the minute.

My department was me and one inexperienced officer named Tray (I thought it was spelled Trey first too, but he kept correcting me that it was in fact “Tray”) who was tragically stupid, but the only person without a record who applied to the junior deputy position we opened up a year before. So, it was up to me, and Tray, to do most of the legwork on the first murder case in Riverbend County in more than 30 years.

Unfortunately, it was Tray who informed of the next bombshell detail in the case of Miss August which forced me to pin some skin between my fingernails and pinch. The smell of nervous sweat which always announced Tray’s presence tickled my nose before he even walked through the door of my office with a clueless look on his face.

“I was down at the coroner’s office getting that report you asked for and they told me to tell you that the woman was born in 1931.”

I ended my pinch. It was real, even the look on Tray’s face which looked like what a dog would give you when you pretended to throw a ball and instead hid it behind your back, was sadly real.

I thought Tray must have been confused, but the coroner confirmed the details he blurted out when I met with her. Miss August was born in 1931 in Poland and it was suspected that Georgia Marie August was a made up name, her real name was likely something much more ethnic and harder to pronounce. That was the end of the information stream.

I didn’t even know where to start other than to self loathe. It had been a long journey to Riverbend County and it was supposed to serve as my semi-retirement, not remind me of the pain which choked the path that took me that desolate patch of dying land in the wheat fields of southeast Washington.

I got into law enforcement because my mother was murdered. A sex worker who raised me by herself in San Francisco before gentrification was even a word, my mother was taken out by a monster of the night not long after I graduated high school and hit the high seas with the U.S. Navy. She had promised me she got out of the line of work before I left, moved down to LA, but that must have been a lie. Regardless, she was left cold and empty the same was Miss August was on the shores of a sad body of cold water.

What should have been the best years of my life were spent on the Southside of Chicago doing everything I possibly could to solve as many violent crimes as I could. I knew I couldn’t bring the victims back to their families, but I at least could do my best to bring them closure and a little bit of the dignity my mother and I were not afforded.

It was 25 years of pain, hard work and sights which still haunt me in the night. I can’t help but laugh when I hear cubicle jockeys talk about the torture of nine to five life whenever the sight of some macabre crime scene I called my office flashed before my eyes. They have no idea.

Living in the city, I hadn’t been able to save the way I wanted to, so I wasn’t able to retire with the speed I had hoped. Instead, I figured I would get a sheriff job in a small county with little to no police action to wind away the last five years or so my career and save up some money where inflation wasn’t the new crack epidemic.

My landing spot ending up being Riverbend County. The least-populated county in the entire state of Washington, Riverbend County was tucked in the corner of the state next to the borders of Idaho and Oregon. Up until Miss August’s body washed ashore, it had been a dream. My most serious case in four years had been a scandal involving local football players being allowed to buy beer for parties at the market.