(Excerpt from “Dead End” – Clown Conspiracy Book 1)

It rained for three solid days before the murder. Maybe what the murderer wanted was an icy canvas—corn stalks frozen into thick clay where blood spreads far and pools slow.

Maybe he pictured it, saw the security guard slip in the frozen blood. Thirsty, summertime dirt would have sucked the blood into the cracks—not where he wanted to lay out his first body. Wet clay, icy clay—that’d be the place.

Maybe, if it hadn’t rained, the victim would have settled into an Autumn evening of studying instead of a silent thaw in the county morgue.

Or maybe the murderer just had his heart set on ripping someone open October 28th and would have done so in rain, snow, or the clear light of a cold moon.

Whatever his desire, the 28th dawned with wind, clouds, and ice, and ended with a laughter more cold than any of these.

Maybe that was all he wanted, at first—a laugh. One night of blood-soaked earth for one really great chuckle. One thing was, without a doubt, not a “maybe”: after that first day, that first great laugh, someone was going to have to stop him.

It was just too good a joke to stop telling.