Chapter 5
It wasn’t until the next morning that Jake’s grizzly work on Jacobs’s face was discovered. It was in fact Matthew Brown who discovered the body as he pulled into his parking spot. At first he didn’t know that it was a dead body, let alone Mr. Jacobs, until he was nearly standing over the corpse. Disbelief was the first reaction, and then utter disgust at the way the face had been pummeled. One eye stared at him with flies and other assorted bugs feasting upon the delicacy. He held back the gorge rising in his throat, tried to hold it back but couldn’t. He doubled over and contaminated the body with his morning breakfast of eggs and bacon, and probably last night’s dinner as well considering the amount of vomit that he spewed forth.
He felt weak in the knees, but after a moment or two he recovered enough to call 911 on his cell phone.
It was maybe 10 minutes later that the area had been cordoned off by police barricades. News crews also circled like vultures, determined to get the most vivid photos of the gore that had now been covered with a blanket.
A chief inspector O’Reilly of the Cleveland Police Department was heading up the investigation. He had been on the force for 22 years and this was the most vicious assault he had seen in a long time. He questioned Matthew Brown as to what he did when he arrived, other than throw up all over the place, and Brown told him what had happened.
Upon further questioning by O’Reilly, Brown related the incident with Jake the day before, but he didn’t think that Jake could do something this heinous, even though both he and Jacobs had been assaulted by Caulder. O’Reilly disagreed and said that that was just the way a man like Caulder would probably react to a firing and humiliation in front of his peers.
And so, maybe 12 hours after Jacobs was murdered, Jake Caulder became the prime suspect in a murder that was the most violent that Cleveland had seen in a very long time.
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