An impressive smell wafted through the room. It was a literature buff's wet dream . A small nation of bookshelves carefully crafted together before you or I were born. The old, important books and their leathered scent were the 300 pound gorilla in the room. It was his haven. The old man was like a timed geyser the way he headed into his office each evening, but to those outside its walls it was more like a library with its dark wood and dim lighting.
Outside of those walls, his life, a circus beneath the exaggerated glow of the ever present public with their peering eyes melting holes in his arrival. Fortunately, it didn't matter because he was the boss. His father, a 1930's businessman at the height of a new real estate boom, died young and left Mr. Charles Thorpe his life long earnings. It's rumored that Thorpe's winnings totaled up somewhere near the high millions. He had an empire. He was the type of man who would support a politician and in the same evening, take liberties with an easy woman he'd encountered at the seediest of dives where no respectable lowlife would lay his hat. An odd fellow to say the least, but Charlie, as they called him, was taught how to turn a dollar quite young. That's why it was so weird to see him being led away in cuffs.
Nobody would have ever thought that old Charlie would ever have committed murder. It wasn't just any murder. No, it was far more heinous than anything that you or I could come up with. There was so much blood it filled the cups in the cabinets. It wasn't just the endless amounts of blood that made the detectives sick, it was the smell wafting out of his hot warehouse office. It had the stench of old, rotting death. He spent a lot of time there. Alone. Reading.
The first girl he killed was named Sarah Cafferty. She was a student from Knoxville, Tennessee. She was in New York for a semester and ended up finding some work as a model. The police said that the skin of her chest was pulled off. Not in pieces, but like a sheet. As if that wasn't enough, she was found missing both hands and her tongue. That was twenty years ago...
Most recently the police found fourteen bodies buried alongside the building in various stages of decomposition.
... to be continued.
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