A to Z Challenge 2025 - The Ripped Blade: “Down and Out”

Percival Benson had one of those early slots, the wake-up edition of the local news broadcast. It meant his morning started early. It meant his mornings started when everyone else was convinced it was still nighttime.

His broadcasts began at 4. Percival slept until midnight, and started his routine that included things like breakfast, showering, and then showed up at the studio. The reports were already waiting for him, the outlines. It’s easy to assume a television news reporter just reads from a prompter, but the copy is something they write themselves. The best way to achieve a natural voice on camera, after all, is to write the words yourself.

Percival had been reporting on Kate Meadows all week, first as a missing person and then as a murder victim. In his coverage, and the media coverage in general, Bishop and Malkovich had been prominent all along. It was the accepted narrative that a jealous Bishop was responsible, that he had kidnapped Meadows and murdered her sometime when the coverage was just getting underway. Everyone had expected the body. The body, when it finally appeared, was practically anticlimactic. 

Percival tried to remain objective. Bishop’s guilt remained the implied focus. Meadows had been pretty, of course, so keeping the pictures of her in the segments had been enough to build up sympathy, and at the same time imply how monstrous Bishop was to take her away from the world…

That’s what Percival projected. But that’s not what he believed.

In the end it’s a job, and a pretty thankless job. A familiar face, flashes of personality (easiest to get away with so early!), the routine of being on air all the time, and…It can begin to seem a little hollow. He was constantly fighting the thought that his calling had turned into going through the motions.

Maybe that’s why he rejected the narrative. Or maybe he wished he had the chance to dig in a little deeper. But the grind was relentless. The early mornings came whether he slept well or even at all (sometimes), depending on how badly he’d wanted to catch that game last night (anchors are pillars and ambassadors of the community, after all).

But he couldn’t wallow in self-pity. There were always more stories to report.

A to Z Challenge 2025 - The Ripped Blade: “Close But No Cigar”

Tara Thompson was the detective assigned to the case. Tara was on lone from Portland. There wasn’t much demand for detectives in a small town like Berlin. They hadn’t had one in decades. Back in Portland, which in the minds of its residents was a suburb of Boston, she’d seen a thing or two, things she wished she’d never had to, but this Kate Meadows business, this was something else.

Of the working theories, whether Bishop or Malkovich, or any of the four kidnapping victims from decades earlier, as someone in the local force had been screaming about, madly…Tara just couldn’t see it. The crime scene had been bizarre, staged, exactly as reported, the “ripped blade,” pulled out of some noir novel, theatrical. She would have to cast a wide net, look beyond the area. She supposed it was just as well that she came from away.

One of the first things she did was ask about the FBI, if they were involved, and she was told, for the moment, no. So that was the first wall placed in front of her own theory. She did interview Dixon, Hargraves, Shelton, Salazar. Most of them just wanted to leave what had happened to them in the past. Salazar came off as aggressive, which made Tara suspicious enough to go digging a little deeper. He was the only one of the four who hadn’t been a local, who’d come to Berlin as a consultant for a firm intending to limit the kind of fishing operations that had been the lifeblood of the community for generations, which also accounted for the instinct to put further doubt on him.

But she found him on a fishing boat. He was retired. All he wanted was to cast his bait. 

Tara looked into the neighbor, Matt White, the mother-in-law, Priscilla Foster, who’d done much of the agitating, who kept pointing the fingers, who had been harassing Salazar for years. But Foster was serving time in Warren. The skeletons in the closet were thick. She’d been professing her innocence for years, a bit of a local legend herself, something Mainers talked about in their idle time, but there she was. But someone had killed Kate’s dad, and then someone had killed Kate, and the second one couldn’t have been Foster. And it couldn’t have been Salazar who murdered the patriarch. He hadn’t been in town yet. Or, Tara had to suppose, maybe he’d done it and settled in Berlin to keep a watchful eye.

Killers were clever, after all.

But the evidence was inconclusive. The blade used to commit the murder, Kate had found it herself, and there was still no clear explanation as to how it’d gotten there, and no plausible explanation about why Bishop would’ve gifted it to her. By all accounts he had led a thoroughly unimaginative life. Malkovich, the homebody, full of his own eccentricities, never seemed to have dabbled in things quite of that nature. No, his ties turned out to come out of the Boston mafia scene, and nobody there bothered with gimmicks like that blade. 

No, everyone in town was guilty of conspiracy, all right, just not of the kind that led to whatever had happened to Kate Meadows.

Tara had to confess she found herself stymied.

A to Z Challenge 2025 - The Ripped Blade: “Beating Around the Bush”

Shirley Stanley was the first cop on the scene, when they found the body.

Of course she’d known about the case. Everyone knew about the case. Most of the country knew about the case by that point. Being on the force, Shirley had been privy to all the efforts that had already been made, back when it was still only a missing persons problem, like all the others: Monica Dixon, Angela Hargraves, Ursula Shelton, Tyler Salazar…

Shirley hadn’t been on the force, then. These were old cases, a lifetime ago. The whole mess was over, just a scary story to tell younger generations, an endless, pointless stream of speculation about who had done it. Certainly not Bishop, not Malkovich. That’s what Shirley used to say, around the office. They were too young.

She felt too young, looking at Kate Meadows’ corpse. She’d seen dead bodies before. Came with the territory, even in a town like Berlin. You can’t be a cop otherwise. She catalogued the evidence. Privately, of course, she speculated. Someone had gone out of their way to stage this scene. But these weren’t things that resulted from swordplay.

And this hadn’t been personal. The first thing you’re supposed to assume is that a victim usually knows the perpetrator. This was too elaborate.

Shirley was too young. Suddenly she found herself reexamining every person she had ever encountered in town, everyone she’d ever heard stories about. This had to be connected, to the disappearances decades back.

So the minute she got back to the station, after logging her report, Shirley went about investigating the kidnap victims. Her supervisor caught wind. She was told to stop. Then she was given a new partner. It didn’t take much for Shirley to become suspicious. She was a cop, after all.

She became convinced she was right. But she had no way to prove it.

A to Z Challenge 2025 - The Ripped Blade: “A Fool and His Money…”

Roy Pauley hadn’t been the first to investigate the disappearance of Kate Meadows, and he wouldn’t be the last.

Meadows had vanished in the quaint seaside town of Berlin, Maine. Roy had never even visited Maine. He came from somewhere on the other side of the country. He traveled with a chip on his shoulder. It had been several years since he’d solved a mystery, and even then the results hadn’t exactly been widely accepted, not in the courts, not by the grieving family, the press, and in his darker moments, Roy himself.

But he had to keep pressing onward. The divorce had been ugly and he had bills to pay.

Roy quickly interviewed the two chief suspects, Tommy Bishop and Tom Malkovich, but he found the results unsatisfactory, even by his current standards. Bishop, who had been Meadows’ boyfriend, and Malkovich, who was the last person to see her alive.

But Berlin was a town full of secrets, and Roy quickly learned even those willing to talk were hardly likely to tell him what he needed to know. What exactly was the ripped blade? Where did the hard caffeine Malkovich had used to seduce Meadows come from? How did any of this connect to the kidnappings that had occurred decades earlier?

Roy couldn’t sleep. The noise of the docks was inescapable. He couldn’t concentrate. The Meadows family hounded him. He found them suffocating. He was just a private investigator. The local authorities seemed to have given up. He sifted through reports from a battery of colleagues, some he knew personally, others only by reputation. All inconclusive. 

Then he found the ripped blade. “Ripped,” if that was the appropriate term. The thing had already passed into legend. It had already been one, in this town. The winter lingered, here. None of it made any sense to him.

Roy gave up. Kate Meadows would have to be found by somebody else.