The last time he’d come here, he was intimidated. He had to do recon, and the task appeared big because he was a long way from home, strategizing murder in a country where people spoke a different language. For this reason, Canada didn’t count as tricky.
But the job turned out to be easy. Many Americans visited Germany during this season, particularly the picturesque southern part of the country where his target, Mila, lived.
During his previous visit, he had rented a room in Munich and done his homework. He found that the woman who owned the handbag company was also the proprietor of a chain of bars, and every day, she unwound at the one closest to her mansion. From drunk, loose-tongued patrons, Tyrel learned that the thirty-year-old was known for her promiscuity. They also told him that the following month, more tourists would be pouring in for the beer festival.
With a plan forming in his brain, he had flown back to the US.
This time, on his second visit, Germany didn’t daunt him. On the contrary, he considered moving here permanently, not just because the vibe was convivial and the people were friendly, but because Berlin had been named as the vegan capital of Europe.
* * *
While nursing the tastiest beer he had ever drunk, Tyrel waited for Mila at her bar, trusting that his ripped muscles under the tight T-shirt would allure the nympho.
He’d never tried to pick someone up from a bar before, and since his knowledge came solely from the Internet, he was fazed. But high-quality beer had suffused him with confidence, and numerous English-speaking people around made him feel home.
At 10:00 p.m., Mila came in, flanked by two tough-looking beefcakes. She was a foot shorter than Tyrel. Her wavy hair was platinum blond, a stark contrast to her red dress, which accentuated her curves.
He patiently waited while she downed three Black Russians. As the waiter placed the fourth round above a fresh napkin on her table, Tyrel stood. He acted tipsy as he stumbled over to her with a half-mug of beer.
“A beautiful thing like you shouldn’t be drinking alone,” he said.
Mila raised her eyebrows, but didn’t answer. When the two honchos came toward her table to clear the buttinsky out of their boss’s way, she waved them off.
“Do you know who I am?” the billionaire said.
Tyrel adored the accent so much he wanted to eat it.
“I don’t know. But seeing those white gorillas, I guess someone important?” He slid onto the sofa next to her.
Instead of scooting over, she sat there, letting their legs rub against each other.
“Tourist? American?”
“Uh-huh.” He extended his hand. “Tyrel L. Boone.”
She shook it. “Your hand is like sandpaper.” She bit the corner of her lower lip.
“I’m a farmer, ma’am. My hands have been this way forever.”
He refrained from bragging that he also practiced a martial art six hours a day, and that he could kill her cocksure bodyguards in twenty ways, in under a minute.
“Southern cowboy,” she said. “Yokel, uh?”
“That’s kinda offensive.”
“Okay, snowflake.” Mila smiled. “I see you are enjoying Oktoberfest.”
“Very much.” Tyrel lifted the mug and emptied it.
Another beer was placed in front of him.
“I didn’t order one,” Tyrel told the waiter.
“It’s from the kind gentleman sitting over there.” The waiter pointed to the adjacent table, and Tyrel glanced that way.
A beautiful man was sitting there alone, nursing a beer of his own. He was slim but sexy, with soft eyes and blond hair. Tyrel would definitely hit on him under different circumstances, but now he was on a mission. So instead of walking over to the charming guy, he raised the beer jug in thanks, and his benefactor returned the gesture with a kind smile. Tyrel pried his eyes off from the cutie and turned his attention back to Mila.
“You like Germany so far?” she said.
“Meh. The fatherland’s too cold for my taste.” Tyrel gave her body a once over. “I take that back. I just found something hot.”
She grabbed his thigh, underneath the shorts. “What you said there was very offensive.”
“Karma’s a bitch.” Tyrel shrugged, praying she would get the implicit reason he’d used that maxim, when the time came.
She scratched his skin as her fingers traveled up like a bunch of rowdy caterpillars trespassing onto private property.
“Where are you staying?”
“I just came down here from Berlin.” He gulped as his penis grew big.
Biology sometimes gave out totally wrong signals, encouraging the violators to continue the assault. The loose clothing freely accommodated the new development, and the protuberance brushed against her fingertips. She gave him a coy smile and grabbed the hump fully. While Tyrel hated her audacity and planned an excuse to move away for a minute, the traitor pulsated in her soft hand.
“I also take back what I said earlier.” Her mouth gaped a little. “You are no cowboy. You are horseman.” She gave it a final squeeze and let go.
Tyrel had no answer, except that he really was one of the Four Horsemen to her—death.
“How long you staying?” she said.
“The weekend.”
She knocked back the drink and dabbed her lips with the napkin.
“You come and stay with me, in my home.”
“Well, I could stay tonight.”
He should be in Berlin the next morning if things went as planned.
“You are staying for the weekend,” she said, annoyed.
Wealthy people, especially the entitled, petulant brats who inherited that wealth, didn’t know what no meant.
Either way, he wasn’t going to turn down the invitation. But that didn’t mean he had to stay.
* * *
Mila shooed the guards away and took Tyrel home in a Ferrari she drove carelessly. The three-minute joyride in the comfy car paused when they stopped at a pair of monstrous automatic gates.
“Sesam, öffne dich,” she said into the security unit on the wall, and the gates slowly parted.
Her home was actually a castle straight out of fairytales. Except no princess lived here. A wicked witch did. The car raced on the slanting tarmac, passing gardens, a hedge maze, a tennis court, and a swimming pool, and parked in front of a Gothic mansion.
They got out, and he followed her as she rummaged for keys in her handbag. The front door opened into a grand hall that resembled a ballroom. There were statues and large paintings, and four chandeliers spewed light on the shiny marble floor. A central staircase dominated the space.
Just as soon as Tyrel crossed the threshold, she kissed him and shoved her little but wild tongue into his mouth. Even when convicts tried to rape him in juvie, he’d never felt so abashed. On top of being disgusted and violated, he felt it unnatural, like bestiality. The things he had to endure for his steadfast purpose.
Though he stomached the perversion, reminding himself that it was all for the wronged animals, he couldn’t find it in him to kiss her back.
She looked puzzled as she slowly pulled her head away, leaving Tyrel with a tang of vodka and coffee in his mouth.
“Playing hard to get?” She shook her head and clucked.
“No. Let’s get fresh first.”
“Follow me.” She crossed the hall.
Her high heels click-clacked and echoed. Then she sashayed up the steps in a way he thought must be provocative to heteros.
This gigantesque palace, her round breasts, sharp nose, and angular jaw, they were all bought with gallons of blood from rueful crocodiles and cow fetuses. Being here in the center of them all, his goal had never been more pellucid.
The duo turned right on the second floor. He kept walking behind her swaying backside until the landing led them to a bedroom.
She pointed to a door inside. “There.”
“Ladies first.”
“Okay.” She disappeared through the doorwa
y.
“Where can I get something to drink?” he shouted, over the sound of running water.
“Walk down the steps and do an about-turn,” she shouted back.
While thinking about where she could have learned that peculiar word, he followed her directions and found the kitchen. Twenty feet in front of him, on a wall behind the stove, a dozen knives were stuck to a magnetic knife rack. He went through his choices and picked the one with the sharpest edge. Then he hid it under his T-shirt, behind his back, between the strap of his underwear and his bare skin.
When he climbed back up to the bedroom, Mila was lying on the bed, naked. Since it was the first time he had looked at a real naked woman, he did a double-take. Was that how it should be? So sinuous? Seeing him gawk, she arched her body at an awkward angle.
“You look gorgeous,” Tyrel said, hoping the pickup gurus on the Internet were correct.
“Oh, enough with foreplay.” She dragged her fingers along her inner thigh. “Let’s fuck.”
“You know what would be hotter?”
“Yes?” She moved her fingers upward.
“You in harness.”
“What?”
“You know, chains or ropes.”
“Oh, bondage, huh! I have just the things.”
She got up and jogged to a closet opposite the bed, her breasts jiggling. It had all types of deviant instruments conceived by people with nothing better to do. And a myriad of binds. How serendipitous!
She went back to the bed, lay again in her supposedly erotic pose, and resumed playing with herself.
Tyrel caressed the leather straps, his heart heavy. He apologized to the buffaloes whose lives were robbed for such a degrading purpose. Not willing to make the animals take part in what he was about to do, he selected two metal handcuffs and a ball gag from Mila’s collection of sex toys.
When he turned to her, she spread her arms sideways. “Bump me, bumpkin.” She laughed at her own tasteless joke.
She wasn’t making it easy on herself, was she? Then again, Tyrel wouldn’t prefer it any other way.
“Lay on your side,” Tyrel said, and she did.
He cuffed her diagonally to the bed—left hand to the top right bedpost, and left ankle to the bottom left corner. This way he could easily turn her over when he was done on one side. After a few moments of thinking, he decided he would work on her back first.
“On your stomach.”
She obeyed. “You are going to fuck me in the ass?” She tried to look at Tyrel.
“In a way.”
As he checked the cuffs’ strength one last time, she said, “I love men that hurt me.” She ran her tongue along on her lips and wet them, as they had dried in anticipation. “Don’t stop, even if I beg you to let go of me.”
He grabbed her hair, turned her head forward, and tied the ball gag across her mouth. Then he wrapped his sandpaper fingers around the back of her neck and cinched her head down.
“Trust me, you filthy demon.”
He pulled the knife out with his other hand and put the tip on her skin, just above the buttocks, and her back twitched.
“I never do.”
Chapter 24
April 9, 2019. 04:33 P.M.
Gabriel pressed a random key on his open MacBook, which had slept again. Then he leaned back on the wooden chair and yawned.
What were the odds of a detective being involved with two serial killer investigations in a period of three weeks?
Probably zero.
But Gabriel hadn’t been assigned this case. The murders hadn’t even occurred in New York, least of all under his jurisdiction. He had initiated a private investigation at his own expense—his sleep, time, job, and possibly freedom. What else could he do? He couldn’t give up on what he believed in.
Gabriel’s mind jumped to the killer’s trophies. Why did Inspector Han not report the missing heart? Not only did the German and Canadian police report the hearts of their victims taken, but they also said that was the cause of their deaths.
According to the case file, Mr. Woo’s torso had been cut three times, vertically sawn from the hips to the shoulders with a powerful circular saw. All that remained of it, other than bits of flesh and bones splattered on the walls and ceiling, was a pile of shredded meat. The coroner didn’t need to sieve through the heap of minced internal organs since the cause of death was obvious.
Their killer’s signature begot more questions than it did answers, but not one among them was why the hearts? Serial killers were intrinsically disturbing like that, and Gabriel would ask the killer in person when he caught him.
No, the real question was, how did he smuggle them into the US? He could have plopped them in glass jars filled with some preservative to prevent putrescence, but what did he do to sneak them stateside?
Canada shouldn’t have been problematic. The killer could have just lobbed the apparatus from that side of the border and picked it up this side. But how did he bring them in from Germany and South Korea? If he’d known he couldn’t possess them, he wouldn’t have taken them in the first place. Did he mail them to his address back in the US? Did he use some smuggling ring? Or blackmail some pilot into doing it for him?
No matter the effort, the answer eluded Gabriel. He diverted his deductive prowess to another question. The motive.
Serial killers had their own reasons for what they did. They were almost always sexual, while some were tougher to figure out. But this killer’s motive was ambiguous. There was no connection between any of the victims, except they all hurt animals.
And then Gabriel had a lightbulb moment.
Their guy was someone who loved animals. He targeted people whose livelihoods depended on slaughtering them, and dished out what he thought were ironic punishments.
If Gabriel’s hypothesis turned out to be accurate, their killer must believe himself to be a good person. A hero, even. And he would never stop with these ghastly murders. Out of the four types of serial killers, the most dangerous were mission-oriented ones. These lunatics thought they were ridding the world of a particular class of people, for the greater good. Mikhail Popkov, nicknamed The Werewolf of Angarsk, belonged to this division of serial killers. Caught back in 2012, he was an ex-cop who called himself a cleaner who purged his metropolis of prostitutes.
This killer was similar, except his motto gave him a more extensive choice of people to select his victims from. As a psychopathic zealot, he wouldn’t feel guilty and would never quit until caught.
And Gabriel had to stop him, whatever the cost.
His laptop chimed, signifying a new email. He couldn’t have opened it faster. As expected, it was from Ethan. Gabriel downloaded the attachments—the case reports from Germany and Canada—and started reading.
Mila Ledermann was a billionaire who’d taken over her father’s business in 2014, when he passed away. The company had been one of the most popular brands that sold over-expensive leather products. On a September night in 2017, she was brutally murdered, and their empire went belly-up. A lone man had destroyed a conglomerate.
Mila had been flayed alive, and the killer had taken the skin with him. He left her face, crotch, and extremities untouched, probably because they were harder to cut and peel off. There was no sexual element to the murder. Then again, most serial killers didn’t derive pleasure from somatosensory stimulation, but from the sadistic acts themselves.
German police didn’t get any leads. The businesswoman was apparently a sex addict, and she hadn’t installed CCTVs at her bar, fearing some employee might take photos of her socializing with a man and sell them to the tabloids.
One of Mila’s bodyguards, raised as a Protestant, said he saw her talking to an American with an accent like Billy Graham. The sketch showed a Caucasian male with long hair and a thick beard.
More than one hundred thousand American expatriates resided in Germany, and a quarter of them lived in the state of Bavaria, where Munich was located. Around two and a half million Americ
ans visited Germany in 2017, and more than half of them had gone to the southern scenic state in September, the peak tourist period.
Bavaria, in the midst of the beer festival, was swarmed with drunk foreigners and natives when Mila was killed. The police didn’t get much from other witnesses in the bar, who were either hammered or in terrible blackouts—the Volksfest happened for more than two weeks—and hence couldn’t have known how best to handle this mess. So they pushed the responsibility onto the FBI, and then nothing. That was the summary of Mila’s murder report.
Gabriel called Ethan. “What happened with the investigation? It’s a high-profile case.”
“Was. An FBI agent stationed in Munich looked into it, but was later transferred.”
“His replacement?”
“From what I’ve heard, the new guy is an idiot who’s wasted months denying it was even an American. A good politician on his way up the food chain, but a terrible cop. He gave it enough time, and people have eventually moved on.”
“Could you get me something?”
“Sure. What do you need?”
“The names of every white American male who entered Germany on the date of Mila’s murder, and the week before it.”
“Let me see what I can do.” Ethan hung up.
Gabriel opened the folder named Canada, from Ethan’s email.
Gerald Tremblay was a bullfighter who had a humongous fandom in Spain, but was unknown in his country. Apart from suffering deep puncture wounds from six javelins driven into the back of his body, his ear was torn, his eyelids stuffed with wet newspapers and Vaseline, and his nostrils with cotton. To top it all off, seven hot pins were inserted into his testicles.
An old Buick Regal, a vehicle of interest, was recorded on a security camera on Gerald’s street. But its plates were stolen from a Toyota in Albany, New York.
As Gabriel read the report, his trained eyes skipped lines of text and settled on three upper case letters at the bottom of the page. These letters always stood out in reports and always pulled Gabriel’s attention, boosting his heart rate.
DNA.
Inhuman: Detective Chase hunts an animal who protects his own Page 14