Software fREE

A cache of bones is found in a shallow grave in local woods...

Meanwhile missing persons cases in Portland seem to be on the increase.
As more bones are discovered, Portland homicide Detective Nick Burkhardt and his partner Hank Griffin investigate - but there seems to be no connection between the victims...

A brand-new original story set in the Grimm universe.

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An Excerpt from Grimm: the Chopping Block by John Passarella Ebook

Brian Mathis wondered if he’d made a mistake bringing Tyler, his twelve-year-old son, to Claremont Park. Their little adventure had been fun and cheerful and full of father-son-bonding promise until they left behind the paved path and picnic tables, and wandered into the woods on a course prescribed by the virtual compass in the GPS app on Brian’s smartphone. The overnight rainfall had turned what would have been a reasonable hiking path into a treacherous endeavor. Lagging behind his father, Tyler had already fallen twice on gentle inclines slick with mud. And now the boy was coated with the stuff?hands, knees, shoes, and a caked spot on his chin he’d rubbed the same moment his patience had expired.
Victim of his own clumsy misadventure, Brian proceeded on a twisted ankle?which continued to throb in counterpoint to his heartbeat?and reminded himself to take his eyes off the compass now and then to pay attention to his footing. Minutes later, head down and cursing under his breath, he walked right into a low-hanging branch. Hell of an example he was setting for his kid.
“You said we were close, Dad,” Tyler groaned, prefacing that indictment with a prolonged sigh.
“We are close,” Brian said. “But I told you before. The coordinates aren’t exact.”
“So what’s the point?” Tyler hurled a rock the size of a ping-pong ball at the nearest tree trunk. The thwock of the impact startled a squirrel, which scampered along one branch, jumped to another nearby and scurried out of sight.
“Don’t throw rocks.”
“Nothing else to do.”
Ignoring the boy’s complaint, Brian explained, “The coordinates take us to the general vicinity, then we look around until we find it.”
“Why?”
“Because… it’s like searching for buried treasure.”
“I’m keeping it.”
“No,” Brian said. “We sign the logbook and leave the container where we found it. The honor system. If we take it, the next person will go through all this trouble for nothing.”
“You said I could take something,” Tyler reminded him.
“Swap something,” Brian said. This particular geocache supposedly contained small toys. If you took something, you were supposed to leave behind an object of equal value. “You brought a soldier?”
“Yeah,” Tyler said, rolling his eyes at his father.
It had been years since Tyler played with toy soldiers, which was why he had no qualms about leaving one behind. Tyler hoped for an upgrade, maybe a used video game or something equally unlikely. So his father had spent most of the car ride to the park trying to quash those expectations.
“The search is the fun part, not the prize at the end.”
“Some fun,” Tyler grumbled loud enough for his father to hear.
Secretly, Brian regretted not selecting a cache with the lowest level of difficulty for their first attempt. Instead, he’d chosen a cache closer to home, but with the next highest level of difficulty. A cache with toys, even cheap toys, he’d thought, would appeal to the boy. Brian’s second mistake was misjudging the rapid pace of Tyler’s maturity. At his current age, things transitioned from “cool” to “lame” in a hurry. Since the divorce, Brian saw his son less than he would have liked. The boy’s growth spurts took place in the uncompromising strobe light of his meager custody schedule.
As a bank of rain clouds passed overhead, the woods became prematurely dark. Shadows deepened like an ink spill soaking the ground around them. The odor of moist earth rose like a clinging mist, enveloping them.
Brian stopped, rubbed the back of his forearm across his damp forehead and said, “We’re here.”
Tyler stood beside him, turned in a circle and shrugged. “Nothing.”
“It’s here somewhere,” Brian assured him, but worried somebody before them might have removed the cache in violation of the honor system. If they left the park without finding anything, his son would never let him forget it. “Remember that time you dragged me through the woods in waist-deep mud for nothing?” Because exaggeration would become a key component in this particular trip down memory lane.
“What about the clue?” Tyler asked.
“Oh?right! The clue.” In his growing paternal anxiety, Brian had almost forgotten about the clue associated with the cache. He checked his phone. “It says, ‘Fall up the hill.’”
They both cast expectant gazes around, as if expecting a hillside to magically rise from the surrounding forest, crowned with a glowing treasure chest like a reward in one of Tyler’s video games.
“That hill?” Tyler finally asked, pointing straight ahead. Brian looked behind them, then straight ahead. They had been following an incline for a bit, something he might have noticed if he hadn’t been mesmerized by the compass on his cell phone. Ahead of them marked the top of the rise, surrounded by an irregular ring of deciduous trees in various states of decay.
“Must be it,” Brian acknowledged. “So how do we ‘fall up’?”
We both figured out the falling down part easily enough, he thought, with a chagrined shake of his head.
Tyler scrambled up the slope, littered with broken branches, twigs, and clumps of dead leaves well on their way to mulch that nevertheless rustled underfoot. He slipped once and caught himself on both hands before his knees touched the muddy ground again.
“Careful,” Brian said, making his own way upward, mindful of his tender ankle.
Tyler picked up a stout branch the length of a cane and swung it around to disperse the leaf mounds. When he reached down to flip over a football-sized rock, Brian caught his shoulder.
“Watch out for snakes,” he cautioned.
The possibility of encountering a snake, poisonous or otherwise, seemed to excite the boy’s imagination, but he took extra care as he grabbed the edge of the rock and flipped it over, poised to spring away to avoid the threat of fangs. Instead, he grunted in obvious disappointment as several freshly exposed worms coiled in the dirt.
Tyler circled to the left, poking and sweeping with his branch, while Brian wandered into a tangle of dried brush and broken tree limbs at the edge of the clearing. Brushing away twigs and dried leaves, he discovered a jagged tree stump and, angling away from it, on the far side of the rise, the decaying length of the entire tree trunk, which retained only a few scattered branches.
“A deadfall,” Brian whispered, then again, louder. “A deadfall.”
“What?” Tyler called, glancing briefly over his shoulder.
“This downed tree,” Brian called to his son. “It’s a deadfall.”
“So?” Tyler replied, more preoccupied with a section of tangled underbrush and loose mounds of dirt?excavated, no doubt, by some burrowing woodland creature?than his father’s pronouncement.
“Don’t you get it?” Brian asked. “The clue: ‘Fall up the hill.’ It’s a deadfall?on this hill.”
“You found it?”
“Not yet…” Brian pocketed his phone and swept both hands across the brittle and decaying debris piled around the deadfall. He omitted telling Tyler that this was a more likely spot for a hidden snake than the underside of a rock. Besides, if Brian had unraveled the clue to the cache’s location, he wanted to find it before leading the boy to yet another disappointment. Once he unearthed it, he’d call Tyler over to claim the prize. He might just salvage the day after all.
Crouching, Brian caught a glint of color in the natural pocket formed between the tree stump and its fallen trunk; something metallic, painted bright red. Gotcha! he thought in an unexpectedly strong moment of satisfaction.
Before calling his son over to claim the small square tin, he leaned forward to examine the shadowy depression. He swept the ground with the beam of his keychain flashlight. Though he doubted he’d find broken glass or rusty nails or even an irritable snake, he wanted to be sure, lest their excursion end on a sour note?or a trip to the emergency room.
“Tyler, come here,” Brian said. “Think I found something.”