THE HEART OF A BEAST

Part I

Sheriff Williams

Sheriff Dominique Williams sat alone in her office long after sunset. The fluorescent lights above her hummed like tired insects. A half-cold cup of coffee sat untouched on her desk as she flipped through the notes on a recently recovered body, unrelated and unresolved, already slipping toward the wrong kind of closure.

The bitterness of the coffee seemed to summarize the feeling. After all these years, it still tasted the same.

She reached into her desk drawer and pulled out a nearly empty bottle of honey. She squeezed what was left into the mug, tossed the bottle aside, then took the wooden stirrer from between her teeth and dipped it into the cup, slowly mixing the last gold ribbon into the dark.

She felt it.

Sipping from the mug, she muttered, “Bittersweet.”

Another one going cold in a town already thick with bad misfortune. A cycle she was grateful her girls had escaped.

Dominique picked up her phone, her thumb hovering over an old wallpaper. The last happy time her tribe had been unbroken. Canis, her late husband. Amber and Jacqueline, seventeen and sixteen.

Her thoughts drifted to her youngest, Jack Ann, and she wondered how military life was treating her. Her thumb paused over Jack Ann’s name in her contacts.

The scar at her neck tugged.

Flashes of that snowy night surfaced. The madman at the cabin. The blade quick across her throat. The PR nightmare of an escaped serial killer during a bad snowstorm. The Man in the Woods. She could only think of the story she used to tell her daughters, the same one her grandmother had told her.

This little slice of nowhere had nearly swallowed her in one piece.

She wouldn’t let it.

It had already taken too many innocents. Too many lost souls.

Deputy Clarkson lingered in the doorway, keys in hand.

“Hey, I got that report in your inbox,” he said. “Also, those bags of fentanyl from that chase earlier are logged and in lockup. Sheriff, you need anything before I head out?”

Clarkson was young. New. Still carrying that edge of optimism that hadn’t yet been dulled by Remington’s middle-of-rural-nowhere charm. The young man was Columbus-born and needed a change.

Unfortunately, that change came at the cost of skeleton-crew hours and too many hats. Tonight, it showed.

Dominique didn’t look up right away.

“Who’s pulling watch tonight?” she asked, setting her phone face down before returning to the file.

“Deputy Davis and Jaws. Kenny’s still recovering. I can hang around if you need it, Baws Lady.”

It always amused her how Clarkson said “Boss.” More like “Baws.” It never bothered her, so she never mentioned it.

“No,” she said after a moment. “That’ll be all.”

She knew all too well what this job did to relationships. Even from across the room, she could hear the faint buzz from Clarkson’s wrist as he checked it for the third time.

He probably didn’t even realize he was doing it.

He wasn’t checking the time.

He was checking the latest Are you coming home soon? text from his wife.

Clarkson nodded. “Alright then. Night, Baws.”

The door clicked shut behind him.

The station fell quiet.

Dominique exhaled and rubbed her temples. Her eyes returned to the scene photos. The body had been found near the old bypass, not far from Willow Bend.

The official ruling was still under review.

Maybe one of those “A Day in the Life Living in My Car” influencers chasing views.

But the photos told a different story if you stared long enough.

She made a note in the margin.

Injuries inconsistent with environmental causes.

She had worked enough wrecks on Willow Bend Road to know what the land could do to a body. Trees scraped. Glass cut. Water swelled and drowned.

Nature was cruel, but it was honest about it.

This wasn’t.

The RV sat nose-down in the embankment as if it had simply grown tired and laid itself down to drink. But the woman inside carried five small puncture wounds.

Clean.
Deliberate.
Cross-shaped.

Pressed deep where no branch or twisted metal could claim them.

While the coroner’s report was still pending, Dominique already had her suspicions.

There had been a string of bodies popping up in Columbus and across the tri-state area. Each carried five stab wounds. Ritualistic. But this wasn’t that exactly.

Nothing like that had happened in Remington. Not in years. Remington had its own sins. Junkies. Domestics. The occasional disappearance that went quiet faster than it should.

And then there was Paul Pudi and Dante Lawton.

But nothing since.

Not ritual.
Not precision.

Not yet.

Until tonight.

Could it be connected?

Was the killer drifting south? Or was someone here learning the pattern?

This was a shitstorm she didn’t need. But she knew one thing for certain. Whoever it was would face justice all the same.

A line surfaced unbidden. Something she had carried since deployment. Scripture from Pulp Fiction, sharpened into a weapon. A promise of righteous fury learned in barracks rooms and rehearsed before raids.

She didn’t quote it aloud anymore.

She didn’t need to.

The words were etched deep enough.

All roads have stories. Especially old ones.

Willow Bend had its own.

Whatever happened to her hadn’t started with the crash.

It ended there.

No plates on the RV. No ID on the body. A Jane Doe with too many questions and not enough answers. Just one more thing making the whole scene stink.

She closed the folder.

That’s when she noticed the dog.

Outside the station, just beyond the glass doors, an American pit bull terrier sat calmly on the concrete. No leash. No pacing. Just sitting there, patient and deliberate, like he had been told to wait and had taken the order seriously.

It was late. Closing in on midnight.

“Christ, when did it get so late?” she muttered.

He had been at the accident too, barking uncontrollably and refusing to leave the scene. It wasn’t until Mr. Hatch arrived to pick up the body that the dog calmed down, even leaving with him and the body.

Walter Hatch always had a way with animals.

Walter Hatch had been the funeral director in Remington longer than most folks could remember. When someone died in Red Vista County, the sheriff called Hatch. When the hospital needed a pickup, they called Hatch. When the coroner didn’t feel like driving out to the lake at two in the morning, they called Hatch.

Walter always came.

Even after his wife died, he refused to let her go completely. He had Lola buried in a private plot not far from the well behind his house, which also served as the funeral home. Later, he got a cat and gave it the same name.

Now the dog sat beneath the streetlight like part of a stage play.

Dominique stepped closer to the window.

The dog didn’t bark. Didn’t wag his tail. Didn’t beg for attention. He watched her, head slightly tilted, as if telling her:

Figure it out already.

A plain, worn leather collar circled his neck.

Courage.

An address.

Dominique leaned in, squinting through the glass.

Johnni Lee.

A phone number. Half-faded.

It wasn’t a stray.

Or a shelter dog.

Dominique grabbed her notebook and wrote a single line.

Dog present at accident. Possible owner? Possible relationship to Jane Doe?

When she looked up again, the dog was gone.

But beneath the streetlight, something lay on the concrete.

Not dropped.

Placed.

Too square to be trash.

Dominique stepped outside.

A wallet.

She flipped it open, her breath catching.

John Lee.

Her pulse quickened.

Could this be that John Lee?

She didn’t need to check the system. She already knew the file. A chill slid down her spine.

What else was this night gonna bring?

John Lee — Missing, Presumed Deceased
Disappearance Date: October 26
Survivor: Johnni Lee, age 13 at time of incident
Incident: Single-vehicle accident near the old willow tree
Status: No body recovered

She remembered how it had made the news. Viral theories. Message boards lighting up like bonfires.

The daughter survived.

The father vanished.

A good Samaritan had dropped the girl off at the ER and never came forward. No description. No name. Just an angel who disappeared before anyone could ask questions.

Johnni Lee arrived in the back of an ambulance with no memory of how she got there.

Dominique stepped back from the window.

That was three years ago.

So why now?

It had been three years since John Lee vanished. Three years since a thirteen-year-old girl woke up in a hospital bed with no explanation for how far her life had changed.

She had been part of that search. That case.

The reports called it an act of God.

Dominique had never liked that phrase.

It made it feel like no one was to blame.

And in this world, in this work, there was always someone to blame.

Part II

Flashback

Johnni Lee

Johnni remembered the trip because it was the first time she had been happy again.

She remembered feeling her mom with them as she and her father played on the front porch of the old yellow house, straight out of the late nineties. The Georgia night felt good against her skin as she strummed Katz, the name she’d given her Epiphone ES-335, rosewood red with purple stripes. 

Samantha Lee loved Courage the Cowardly Dog and always said she felt a kinship to it, seeing as creepy things tended to happen in their little nowhere backwoods town. She loved mysteries, horror stories, and Stephen King. Pet Sematary. The Shining. She read Johnni fables and ghost stories and sometimes sang them to her. John had the harmonica. Sam had the stories. Between them, Johnni inherited the allure of the dark and the unknown.

John and Sam loved the blues. They always said it was the blues that brought them together, two high school band geeks doing a project on Robert Johnson, the man who sold his soul to the devil, and the way his legend still echoed through music of the nineties and early two-thousands.

Sam’s last story for her had been about the Rougarou.

A thing in the woods. Red eyes. Something that started on all fours and then stood like a man.

That part stayed with her.

She played “The Thrill Is Gone” by B.B. King, listening to the evening settle around them. John Lee played backup on his custom-engraved Hohner harmonica, a birthday gift from Sam. When Johnni really started to feel it, she slipped into her own blues, fingers wandering where they wanted to go.

Her father let her lead, just like he would have if Sam had been there.

The moon hung fat and sleek overhead. To her and to John, it felt like the universe had turned its stars into a crowd just for them. Her mama front and center. Johnni could feel it.

That alone made the night stand out.

The concert they gave to the cicadas. To the moon and stars. Going to bed with a new song humming in her chest, still warm enough to ease the cold of not having Sam near her. Matter of fact, that was what she dreamed. Her mama was there, singing and telling a story.

The yellow house, the one that used to be a daycare, the one people whispered about, felt different at night. The woods crackled with cicada-song, so loud it felt like the dark itself was breathing. Her father laughed when she complained, telling her it was just another night for music before breaking out his harmonica. That was how the night began, with music accepting the unknown.

She liked being with him like that. Just the two of them. After everything they’d lost, it felt like a gift.

Until that gift was stolen.

She didn’t remember the crash.

She remembered something else.

A shape in the trees.

The way it moved wrong.

Too fast. Too quiet.

In her memory, it wore a wolf’s outline, something her mind could understand. Razor-bright edges where hands should have been. A body that went from all fours to standing like a man.

She remembered her father’s voice changing when he told her to run.

She remembered him trying to get them away. The car swerving. Tires screaming. The world tipping sideways.

Then pain.

Metal.

Noise.

Hands pulling her free.

Voices. Someone carrying her. Muffled sounds and groans.

She remembered music too. Or maybe she imagined that part.

Al Green. “Let’s Stay Together.”

Soft. Familiar. Wrong for the moment.

Later, she would wonder if her mind had stitched that last part in just to survive, patching the gaps with music and mercy the way a body seals a wound it can’t afford to feel.

She woke up in a hospital bed with a headache that never fully went away. The night stayed broken in her memory. Laughter on the porch. A wolf in the hallway. Running. Then black. Then the white ceiling and the smell of antiseptic.

They told her a Good Samaritan had dropped her off and disappeared before anyone could get a name. One of the paramedics said they only caught the tail lights as the vehicle drove away.

Johnni didn’t believe it was just some good-hearted stranger. She always believed it had been her father who brought her there. It had to be. But why he was never found was something no one could answer. Not the sheriff. The detectives. The media. Not even the people online who treated grief like something to solve from a keyboard.

No one could answer where John Lee had gone in three years.

But there were times, late at night, when the house went quiet and her thoughts got loud, that another possibility slipped in like a draft under the door.

What if he couldn’t come with her?

What if leaving wasn’t a choice?

“Why leave me?” she’d whisper into her pillow, like the question might find him if she said it soft enough.

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