Evin's Trip

I'd like to thank Randi for her editing and my beta team for their help. This is not a long story. Please enjoy.

It was great news for Kevin Arden, senior sales engineer for Alliance Geotech. His contact at the prospect had been in a car accident, and so Kevin was going to be leaving for home two whole days early.

Obviously, he was sorry that Pat Peters had been injured, but with him on sick leave, the people on the prospect's negotiation team (sans Patrick) would not prevaricate and bloviate like Patrick. Dear lord, Patrick loved the sound of his own voice very much indeed!

The four days of negotiation was now reduced to two days, and that still included the traditional end of negotiation dinner at a swanky restaurant, paid for on the black card of Alliance Geotech.

Kevin called his wife to tell her of his good fortune, but he got no reply and left a message on her phone.

He sailed through airport security at both ends; he had only a carry-on suitcase so avoided baggage claims, quickly obtained his car from long-term parking and chuckled to himself at this unexpected series of good luck events. Of course, had one of them not happened, Kevin's life would have taken an entirely different course.

It was a late fall evening, a little after 6pm, and he was surprised to hear music and voices coming from the master bedroom.

He walked up the stairs, barged through the partially open door and was shocked and horrified to see his wife Helen tied to the bed and being double teamed by two naked hunks who he recognised as research students who worked under his wife, in more ways than one, he now realized, who was a college professor at the local university.

Enraged, he rushed forward and began swinging punches and unleashing swearwords at the two men.

"Kevin! I can explain!" Helen shrieked.

Unfortunately for Kevin, both men were fitter and far more muscular than he was, so the beating they inflicted on him was unmerciful in its severity. "Stop! Please don't hurt him!" shouted Helen. Although somewhere deep within her psyche an atavistic instinct enjoyed seeing two real men beating her husband.

Eventually, Tony and Mike realized they were beating and kicking an unconscious, unresponsive man, so they dragged him out of the room, down the stairs, carelessly banging his lolling head on every step on the way down, opened the door to the yard and deposited him unceremoniously on the lawn.

They high fived each other and returned to the bedroom where the woman of their joint desires awaited them. "How's Kevin?" she asked.

"Oh, he'll be okay. We left him outside to cool off a little," Mike said.

"Though he'll have a headache in the morning," Tony added. All three of them laughed.

They snorted some more coke, took some more ecstasy and took Helen's command, "Let's fuck up a storm!" to heart. Well, it's always advisable to follow instructions from your professor, correct?

The next morning at about 10AM, coming down from their sexual and illicit drugs high, they realised that they could well have fucked up majorly.

"Oh, God!" moaned Helen. "What the fuck did we do? What about Kevin? Where is he?"

"Kevin will be okay," Mike said. "We left him on the lawn. Let's go check on him."

They hurriedly dressed, stumbled down the stairs and went out into the yard, only to realize that Kevin was nowhere to be seen.

Helen began to scream, hysterically shouting that they had murdered her husband, Mike and Tony yelled back that she'd done nothing to stop them from beating him last night.

With neighboring CCTV systems and Ring doorbell systems, the police were soon called. They arrived in the shape of two police cruisers.

A grizzled elderly neighbor came over to them. "Officer, my name is Pete Hardisty. I was a cop with the city force for 30 years. "I just reviewed my security camera footage from last night. Would you like to see it?"

They thanked him and watched the video on his smartphone. What they saw shocked them. They watched the door of the house of Kevin and Helen open and saw the body of Kevin dragged behind some bushes. Tony and Mike high fived and went back through the door, which they slammed behind them.

"We left him in the yard on the lawn at the side of the house! You gotta believe us!" they whined.

The officers shook their heads and arrested Tony, Mike and Helen, reading them their Miranda Rights. Helen shook her head and began sobbing, screaming, "What did you two bastards do to my Kevin? Where'd you put him?"

The CSI team was called. The leader of the team, Joyce Summers, was a rotund woman of middle years. She dressed up in her protective clothing and took her small team into the house, taking photographs and videos as they walked through.

They were especially interested in the heavy trail of blood down the stairs and through to the door. "Damn! Looks like the poor fellow was probably bleeding out. I can't see how he could have survived a loss of blood like that."

"Yeah," Joyce said. "And if the silly bastards had called 911, he might have been okay. I guess we'll never know."

They worked their way through the house, bagging up a variety of powders, tablets and capsules, taking samples of liquids from the bed, blood from the bedroom, on the stairs, in the hallway and on the broken flattened grass where a body had clearly lain for a time, but which was no longer there.

Detective Harry Fort was given the task of interviewing the two students. He immediately resented them; they were both large and muscular, on the college football team, were both smart (they were research students on track for their PhDs, after all) but he realised they were both as dumb as a bag of rocks where it mattered.

Detective Fort was the head of the City Homicide Squad, and was speaking to Alice Brown, who was his co-detective from the CHS.

"I hate those two dumb jocks," he said to her.

"Why, Harry?"

"They remind me of the dumb jocks from my own time at college. They are both large and strong, on the college football team, and yeah, in theory they are smart, you don't get to be doing research for your PhD papers by being dumb, but the truth is they are both as dumb as a bag of rocks where it really matters."

"How so, Harry?"

"You'd have to be as dumb as a bag of rocks to get high on drugs, screw your supervising professor and when her poor husband turns up, beat the poor fucker to death!"

She nodded. "Yeah, that's true. However, we have no body as yet, so maybe he was able to crawl away?"

"Maybe. I guess he could have in theory, but according to the CSI report, it was likely the poor guy was bleeding out as they dragged him down the stairs. There's no way he could have awakened and walked out of the yard under his own power.

"Anyhow, you interview Mike, I'll interview Tony and we'll toss a coin to see who gets to interview Mrs. Arden."

Of course, everyone got lawyered up and each tried to blame the other, coming up with fanciful theories that Tony or Mike, Mike or Tony, or Helen by herself, or Tony with Helen, Helen with Mike and Helen, Mike and Tony had gotten up in the night and, somehow, disposed of the body of Kevin.

Tony and Mike were found guilty of reckless homicide and jailed for 25 years and Helen was found guilty of aiding and abetting and jailed for 10 years.

The house was broken into and ransacked by a local criminal gang and gutted by a fire, and the ruins were demolished by the City Council.

The story became a cause célèbre with conspiracy theory enthusiasts on the Internet. Chief was that a cryptozoid, maybe an escaped puma, had removed the corpse and eaten it, thus destroying the evidence.

Some even posited that aliens had found the corpse and removed it for experimentation.

The truth? The truth of what happened will be revealed in part 2.