Cutting Room

by T. S. Worthington

  Max pulled out his insulin and filled the syringe up to the right dose. Then he felt his arm for the familiar vein and the same spot he always used. He was pretty sure he could have done it in his sleep if he had to. He’d done this three times a day since he was a little kid. Diabetes was no joke and it was a tough thing to live with, especially when you were four years old.

  He winced slightly as he injected the needle into his skin. It still amazed him how after all these years he felt any pinch at all in that spot. He’d stuck a needle into it three times a day for twenty years. But it still felt like a mosquito bite each and every time.

  After he finished the injection and put away the insulin and the kit he laid down to get some shut eye. He hoped that the insulin did not help keep him awake like it did sometimes. It was usually only for an hour or so where he felt that he had a rush of energy that he did not have before then. His doctor told him this happened to some people; it affected everybody differently.

  Max kept thinking about Gellar as he closed his eyes. Was he imagining it or was there a mutual attraction between the two of them? It was something kind of strange and uncanny that he just couldn’t put his finger on, but it felt genuine. He was not sure how a woman of her caliber could ever be interested in him, but it was possible he thought. She was older than him, maybe thirty which he found to be not important, although it was a bit sexy. He had never really dated an older woman. Plus she was way more beautiful and sophisticated than any woman he had ever been with.

  But he could not pursue it. It just didn’t feel right. Every time he thought about it he felt guilty and a bit sick at his stomach as the image of Lori’s beautiful, sweet face popped into his head. He cared about her so much and to think that just a few days before they’d been snuggling and holding each other, both full of excitement that their dreams were about to come true.

  Why was this happening? What was conspiring in the universe to come after them? That was the way he felt at times. It was like he had spent so many years dreaming and preparing to make his dreams come true and just when he was on the verge of it happening something tragic came along and told him that what he was doing was wrong.

  Maybe that was not the right way to look at it. He was a man who wanted to make movies and he and some of his friends had just done that. They had not hurt anyone with their movie; it was a work of fiction. It was just a damn story for entertainment only. And people were enjoying it. He could not apologize for that. They had accomplished their goal and he was damn proud of the work they had done.

  It was not right for some damn psycho to come along and wreck it because he didn’t know how to deal with his inner pain.

  The nausea swept over him suddenly in a tidal wave of sickness.

  Max felt that his entire stomach was flipping around inside out and trying to dump itself out of his mouth as an arctic circle of cold chills began to move over his whole body.

  He instantly felt cold all over as his body lurched trying to force him to move without purpose or direction. Sharp pain began to stab through his body, ripping and tearing along his veins as the pain branched out to every cell and every muscle.

  He tried to call out, but found that he was not able to speak. His voice felt as if it was paralyzed, and he had to keep trying to swallow as if he had a tennis ball lodged in his throat. His esophagus felt swollen to three times its normal size as he could imagine a small little hole just barely big enough for air to pass through.

  He had to get help.

  Max swung his legs over the edge of the bed and attempted to stand up, but his legs locked up on him and he collapsed back on the bed. His whole body felt like it was frozen in a locked position and he could not move, almost like one full body muscle cramp.

  He tried to scream again but all that he was able to manage was a small gurgling sound. His throat felt like it was swelling tighter and tighter and he was having trouble breathing now. He was in serious trouble. What the hell was happening to him?

  Max tried again to stand up, this time heaving his body forward the second his feet touched the floor. He made it about halfway before he collapsed hard on the floor with a loud thump. Surely Jay heard him fall. There had to be some way out of this. He was not going to die here.

  The insulin. It was tainted.

  The thought was gone through his mind in a flash faster than a bullet.

  The killer had tampered with the insulin. Or had he just given himself too much? He had never made that mistake in his life and he carefully measured it out, but he was human. It could have been an error.

  No. It was the killer. His insulin had been poisoned and he was going to die. He could feel his body going. Every muscle was still locked in a painful cramp, his body suspended off the floor in a lurching seizure. He was not able to even lie down completely.

  He tried repeatedly to call out, but his throat was too swollen and too locked up.

  The room began to spin around him as everything started to grow dark. He was going to die. He knew it. This was how it ended for him. Why? Why did the killer wait until now? Was he really just enjoying torturing them that much?

  He had to reach Jay. If he could just force his body to inch along the floor and make some more noise. Maybe he could open the door and slam it a few times.

  No matter how hard he tried he was unable to move a muscle. It was so defeating. He was trying with everything he had to break through this invisible barrier and free himself so that he was able to move again and get help, but something was holding him in place. It was something that he could not see.

  As the world grew darker and darker around him he felt just like he was being abducted and held in place by some sinister force.

  Would Jay find him in time? Or was this really the end?

  Chapter 5

  “A New Development”

  “There you are, you son of a bitch.”

  Detective Roberta Gellar grabbed her panini sandwich up off her desk, took a bite, and marveled at how amazing it was before she sat it back down on the wrapper and focused her eyes on the computer on her desk once again.

  For the past three hours she had been stuck to the screen searching through everything she could possibly gather up about who had a possible motive or background to want to kill these filmmakers.

  She had not really come up with anything and was just starting to get really frustrated, which was why she went out to grab a sandwich at ten in the morning anyway, and then she stumbled across something interesting.

  Gellar had searched a bit outside the box. That was usually how most homicides were solved. If you painted yourself into a little corner and just waited for a killer to hand you something on a platter you were going to be very disappointed. They said that most crimes were solved through paperwork and that was true to an extent. But with the new age of technology the past fifteen years paperwork had taken on a whole other meaning.

  The killer had to be someone who was in that first screening at the film festival, because for them to actually plan the murder out they would have had to research the filmmakers and find out where they lived and minute details about them to pull off these twisted games that he/she was so fond of.

  Gellar called the film festival office and demanded to know who had bought tickets to that show. She had picked up a court ordered warrant and faxed it over for them to have the authority to look at all those credit cards and debit card numbers.

  It took the festival office about a day and a half to really rally all of that information together, but Gellar suspected they were just dragging their feet. They after all did not want a bunch of really bad publicity on their hands with this. The West Virginia Film Festival was a small festival that was run by the state and it had not been up and running all that long. Gellar was a film fan herself and she promised that she would be as discreet as possible.

  They still dragged their feet. She suspected they were hoping that she would just forget all about them, but
they had no idea who they were really dealing with.

  After she had the credit card details, Gellar called up a friend named Denise Ellis. Denise was a friend of hers from high school. The two had even joined the police force together before Denise decided to go on up the ladder and went to the FBI Academy. Gellar did not get to see her friend as often as she would have liked, but she was still a great friend to have around for special things. This qualified as one of those special things.

  Gellar had Denise cross reference the credit card receipts against people who had criminal records. This had taken her a few hours to run through the database, but Denise got back with her pronto.

  And there were a few hits, luckily. Gellar breathed a sigh of relief as she looked at the list of names that Denise had given her. It was a long shot and she wasn’t sure if it would pan out to anything, but knowing that her instincts were still sharp as nails helped keep her going as she drudged into her twenty eight hour with no sleep.

  This case was the most disturbing thing that her department had ever had to deal with. Most of the murders in West Virginia were fairly easy to solve. A majority of them were domestic disputes or drug related. They had never openly had any serial killers that had been apprehended in recent years that she had ever heard of and there had been very limited spree killers. Most of those crimes that happened—they were few and very far between—were committed at one time in one place where some wacko went nuts and killed several people. But something that was methodical and very formulaic like this was not something that she had ever had any training or experience with. In fact, no one that worked on the force did.

  As she rolled down the list she was seeing a lot of similarities between crimes. One man had a record for spousal abuse, another had a record for larceny, grand theft auto, breaking and entering, drug possession, and another had possession with intent to distribute.

  Gellar was a bit surprised at how many people who went to that showing—there were one hundred and eighty tickets—had criminal records. The list had twenty seven names on it. Perhaps the movie these guys made attracted those kinds of dark characters. Or it might have just been a complete coincidence as well.

  As she came to the bottom of the list she finally caught a break. The name was Declan Hamilton. Declan Hamilton was twenty-five years old and had been put in a mental hospital under extreme observation since he was eight years old and set his house on fire to kill his abusive family. He had apparently asked for help several times and had run away from home on an almost weekly basis according to the file that Denise had sent over detailing the crimes. For some reason CPS kept putting him back with his family despite the history of abuse and several concerned phone calls from his teachers at school. He would often show up to school with bruises that were unexplainable.

  “What the hell?” Gellar muttered to herself. This kid had been totally failed by the system.

  Finally he’d had enough and set fire to the house using the lawnmower gas can that was still mostly full from the last fill up. When the fire department showed up Declan was sitting on the grass in front of the house watching it burn to the ground with a strange expression on his face. He hardly spoke for over a year.

  When he was twenty years old his psychiatrist deemed that he was fit to return to society.

  “That might have been a big mistake,” Gellar said.

  Was it possible that this movie for some reason struck a chord with him? She couldn’t really find a logical correlation but with crazy people it didn’t take much. Most of their rationale was based on fiction anyway.

  After digging a bit deeper into Declan Gellar discovered that he lived on the outskirts of town in a trailer park. She decided it was the perfect time for a visit. Maybe she could trip him up with some standard interview questions, or at least get a read on whether or not he had a good alibi for any of these crimes. Odds were that he didn’t. She thought about taking backup with her, but decided that her gun was backup enough.

  Declan’s trailer was on the edge of the park and it looked as if it was about a hundred years old. It appeared to be teetering on some bricks that looked mostly to be crumbly and not the least bit sturdy. How anyone actually lived in that thing was a miracle and Gellar felt very strange about being there. She actually feared that if she stepped onto the small porch in front of the trailer that she would fall through the rotten boards and break her leg.

  As she stood there looking at the mess of a trailer she couldn’t help but feel completely alone. She was in a trailer park, but somehow Declan’s trailer was set away from the other trailers towards the end of the loop close to the woods. He might as well have been on his own whole block. It was creepy to say the least and Gellar was not someone who was easily frightened.

  She was frightened a lot as a child. She was frail and bullied at school and she was abused and bullied at home. Her mother was an alcoholic who somehow managed to work two jobs just to put food on the table and then passed out drunk at home when she wasn’t working. Gellar’s father had ran off with another woman when she was only five. It had been a hard upbringing, and most people who knew her fairly well would have had no idea about it. She hated to put her problems off on other people or even share her problems and feelings with others. It opened up vulnerabilities deep inside of her that she would rather keep hidden from the world; it would have made her job much harder otherwise.

  In high school she joined a few sports teams and hit the weight room determined to change her image. By the time she graduated she was the star of both the track team and the volleyball team, which paid for her education at West Virginia University. She always wanted to get the education under her belt because one thing Gellar hated was being told she could not do something or that she could not go somewhere. She knew from an early age that with a college degree she could basically open up a door anywhere she wanted in the world and do what she wanted whenever she decided to.

  But she’d always wanted to be a cop. She had toyed briefly with taking her criminal justice degree and going to law school, but by the time she finished her bachelor’s degree she was more determined than ever to be a cop. With the degree she could have gone to a big metro area like Miami, or Los Angeles—the weather would have been a lot nicer—but she wanted to stay close to home. She felt that there were a lot more people in her home state that she could help this way. So she took her degree and went to the police academy, which did not require a degree. Nope in West Virginia you just had to be twenty one years old and a high school graduate. They sent you to a four month paid training program and then you were all set.

  But Gellar knew that her degree was invaluable. It was an unspoken rule that those with degrees and good stats moved up the ranks a lot faster than those without.

  Gellar took a deep breath and stepped up on the platform, setting her feet down carefully to anticipate the boards breaking under step. Luckily they held on as she rang the doorbell.

  She waited a few seconds and after not getting an answer she rang again. She was pretty sure that Declan was home. From what she could gather he was a solitary loner type and his beat up ’93 Grand Am with probably three hundred thousand miles on it was parked in the driveway doing its part to make eyes sore.

  A moment later she heard the familiar shuffling of feet of someone who really did not want to answer the door but wanted you to be gone as fast as possible so they were going to see what you wanted.

  The door opened just then to reveal a stringy looking guy with a dopey expression on his face. He looked like someone who was still half asleep, even though it was almost noon. And he was stinking of booze enough that the stench alone might cause a small calf to drop dead.

  “Yea?” The voice was groggy and dazed sounding. He acted as if he had to keep focusing his eyes. Gellar wondered how much of her he could actually see. Maybe she was a mirage to him and he kept trying to make sense of why she was appearing and disappearing in front of him. It sounded like the start of a
n amusing game, but she didn’t really have time to mess with Sasquatch.

  “Declan Hamilton?” Gellar asked in her business as usual voice.

  “Yea. What’s going on?”

  “I’m Detective Gellar with Charleston PD. I was hoping I could ask you a few questions.”

  “About what? Am I in trouble?”

  “Not that I’m aware of. I just want to ask you a few questions about a case we are working on.”

  “What sort of questions?”

  “I understand that you attended the film festival on Friday night?”

  Declan seemed confused as if he could not remember a few days ago. His eyes darted up and over then back up and to the upper right as if he was having an imaginary conversation with himself to determine how to answer this big question.

  “Yea, that’s right,” Declan said.

  “Ok, what movie did you see?” Gellar asked.

  “That scary one. What was it called—oh, yea! Ripper. It was cool.”

  “I’m sure it was. Can you tell me what you did after the movie?”

  “Oh, I just came home. I had to get some sleep. I started my new job the next morning,” Declan said.

  “What job is that?”

  “I’m a new stock boy at Watson’s department store. You know, it’s on Eighth Avenue.”

  “Right. I’m familiar. How’s that working out for you?”

  “Oh, it’s ok. It’s a job.”

  “Well, that’s nice,” Gellar said trying not to sound patronizing, but Declan was a really odd individual and he was making her nervous the more that she stood there and spoke to him.

  “Do the names Lori Thomas or Joanie Michaels mean anything to you?”

  Declan thought a moment.

  “No.”

  “Do you watch the news Mr. Hamilton?” Gellar asked.

  “No, I mostly watch Netflix. Sons of Anarchy is my favorite,” Declan said with a goofy grin.