A Killer in Time

by Jim Laughter

  But could he tell another teacher or the principal about the attack? Was there someone in authority he could talk to? Who could he trust? Why would they believe him? They all knew who and what his mother was. How could he explain the shame and disgust he felt that ran deeper than just the rape he’d suffered today; a shame that saturated into his inner being, ending with the hatred of his mother that had allowed this dirty man and so many others like him into their lives.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Morris decided as the first leg of their investigation into the prostitute murders, they would visit the Washington DC police homicide division and take a closer look at their records. They weren’t having much luck finding any connection between the Jack the Ripper killings and the murders of a dozen prostitutes in the Washington DC metro area over the last three years. There were similarities but nothing concrete.

  He suspected the two rookie agents were reading more into the cases than the facts indicated. Still, he’d learned to trust his instincts after twenty-five years of law enforcement experience. Right now his gut told him to trust the insights of Benjamin. He didn’t know Cooper well enough to trust him too much but any kid with a double master’s degree had to have something working for him.

  “You’ve come a long way the last three years, ain’t ya?” Morris said to Cooper. “Instead of chasin' Elvis around town and bustin' up moonshine stills, here ya are swimmin' in the deep end of the pool.”

  “Yes sir, I suppose so.”

  He watched Morris watch him. What is this crazy old bastard thinking? He’s up to something.

  “I recall a day when you was just my driver. Now you’re workin' a case that could change your career. Feels purty good, don’t it?”

  Cooper wasn’t sure if Morris was just trying to get under his skin or if he was making a real effort at conversation.

  Yes, he’d come a long way since that day they’d met in October 2011 when Morris had brought his team of investigators to Nashville to question a witness in a serial killer case. He’d picked them up at the airport and driven them to their appointments. He’d also traveled with them to Ogden, Utah where they’d investigated the murder of an accountant named Matthew Barnes. After that they flew to Portland, Oregon and finally to Denver, Colorado where they tracked the serial killer before gunning him down in his son’s church. And although he was still the junior agent in the Nashville office, he’d grown in knowledge and the workings of the FBI. This assignment to Washington could further his career beyond measure if he didn’t screw it up with Morris.

  “Doesn’t make much sense, does it sir?” Cooper asked.

  “What’s that?”

  “Doesn’t make much sense all these women could be killed here in the nation’s capital and go unsolved.”

  “There’s a lot of crap don’t make no sense in this town,” Morris said. “I’ve been working here damn near twenty years and I ain’t seen enough sensible shit to fill a coffee cup.”

  Cooper marveled that Morris was carrying on a regular conversation with him. Their usual exchanges of words consisted of insults and innuendo. Was it possible the senior agent was beginning to like him?

  Dear God in heaven.

  The murders Morris and Cooper decided fit most closely to the cases they were working on included a half dozen women killed in the last three years. Although there had been a number of women killed and left alongside running paths and in public parks, they didn’t fit the pattern of this particular killer. They were heinous enough in their own right, women being stabbed to death, but they didn’t fit the Jack the Ripper killer’s particular style of brutality. Instead, they concentrated on finding cases where prostitutes had been killed in confined spaces or in places where the public had easy access, particularly government facilities such as national parks and near monuments.

  They also chose cases where the victim had been stabbed or slashed repeatedly, and particularly where the murder weapon was believed to be a scalpel. The crueler the crime the more likely they’d found another of their victims. This seemed to follow the pattern of Jack the Ripper as they’d begun to call him, if for no other reason than they couldn’t come up with a better identifier.

  “Do you really believe this maniac is Jack the Ripper?” Morris asked.

  A direct question. He’s asking me a direct question.

  Considering his answer so he wouldn’t appear stupid, Cooper figured his response would determine how Morris treated him for the rest of the investigation.

  Cooper started to answer, choosing his words carefully but Morris cut him off.

  “It’s obvious this ain’t the real Jack the Ripper cuttin' up these women. I figure it’s some nutcase with a copycat fetish tryin' to pretend he’s Jack the Ripper.”

  “Could be.”

  “So what I’m askin' is do you agree with Benjamin that the spirit of Jack the Ripper possesses this nut ball? That he’s some kind of reincarnation of a man that’s been dead in the ground for over a hundred years?”

  Cooper shook his head while still not giving Morris a firm response. After considering his answer, he said, “I’m not real big on reincarnation or spiritual possessions. Then again, I don’t walk as close to God as George does. He’s pretty clever when it comes to religion and the occult. I wouldn’t put it past him being in touch with powers regular guys like you and me can’t get close to.”

  Morris didn’t respond to the rookie calling him a regular guy, or even comparing himself to his superior officer.

  “You might have a point there, Woody. I ain’t gonna hang my hat on it, but I seen enough of the professor’s weird shit on his first case to not put anything past him.”

  “Yes sir, me either.”

  Morris told Cooper to get the files together and they’d go over them again back at the office.

  “Besides,” he said, “I need a drink.”

  ∞∞∞∞

  Pain. Fear. Dark room.

  The boy huddled alone in the closet; fearful the man in the room with his mother would find him and hurt him again. The night had been torn apart by slaps, curses, and violence. The man continued to hurt his mother even after he’d had sex with her time after time. Drunk or high on drugs, the boy couldn’t tell which, he’d turned his violence on the innocent youth.

  He’d managed to slip away after being sadistically beaten and sexually molested, secluding himself in the dark closet. For some reason he couldn’t fathom, the closet reminded him of someplace he’d hidden before. But the other place was different, far away and unfamiliar to him yet it was so close he could smell its musky odor.

  With knees pulled up to his chest in an effort to control his fear, he waited, barely breathing, certain the dirty man would find and violate him again.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  The basement employee garage of the Luxury Suites Hotel was anything but luxurious. Bare concrete walls and floors stood in stark contrast to the opulence only two floors above. Florescent tube lighting hung from the ceiling. Only every other fixture contained bulbs, and they only held one or two of the four bulbs intended. The garage was dark and dank with a scattering of vehicles, mostly common sedans and minivans, none of them new, typical of minimum wage workers in the food and hotel industries.

  Benjamin noticed there was not a designated parking spot for the hotel manager or any of the supervisory staff. He suspected they had reserved spaces in either the guest parking garage where valet attendants parked the Cadillacs and Lincolns of their upper-crust guests, or they had spots reserved near the hotel entrance. Either way, their cars were not among those belonging to the cleaning and kitchen staff.

  Another thing that caught Benjamin’s attention was the smell of death in the garage. It was obvious the hotel management had tried to clean the space by use of high pressure hoses and scrub brushes, probably bleach and other cleaning solutions. But there is just something unworldly about the stench of internal organs that cannot be washed away once the acids from the human body
settles into porous concrete. It reminded Benjamin of the time he’d witnessed an autopsy as part of an academy forensics class. He remembered his stomach churning there and feared he’d be sick here as well. He looked around the cavernous structure at the barren walls and grease-stained floor.

  Feels like a tomb.

  Keller saw the forlorn expression on Benjamin’s face, one she’d worn many times herself. There is something about being in the presence of death that makes the living cringe and draw inward as if the Grim Reaper could reach out and take them.

  “You all right, George?”

  Fearful he might vomit if he tried to speak, he nodded.

  “It doesn’t get any better,” she said. “I’ve been to a hundred of these things and that smell doesn’t change, only the victims.”

  Keller held the file containing the murder scene photographs of Elizabeth Simmons. The pictures showed the dark confines of the garage, unable to mask even on paper the deathly hollows of a place that had witnessed the brutal murder of a woman fallen victim to a monster.

  Can this really be Jack the Ripper? Can the spirit of the infamous slayer of women really have found resurrection in the persona of a modern day killer?

  The flat top of a four foot concrete retaining wall provided the perfect surface to spread out the photographs. A single florescent light fixture hung over the wall casting an eerie glow over the scenes of brutality. One of its twin tubes, dirty from years of neglect, flickered like a wind-blown candle bent on death, yet unable to turn loose of life.

  The brutality of the pictures did not diminish in the harsh light of the parking garage. Using them as guides, Keller and Benjamin marked off the murder scene, following the report submitted by the Houston Police Department.

  The dark alcove where the initial attack had taken place was easy to find near the employee elevator. Keller could imagine Elizabeth Simmons, an experienced prostitute that had frequented the hotel many times, leisurely making her way from the driveway where she’d apparently been dropped off by a taxi to the employee entrance.

  We’ll need to find that taxi, she thought, assuming it was a taxi and not the escort service that dropped her off.

  They already knew Elizabeth Simmons worked out of an escort service so her having an individual pimp was already out of the question.

  George stood in the alcove, his back to the concrete pillar blocking anyone’s view from the garage entrance.

  “He must have hidden here in this alcove.”

  Keller examined the darkened space.

  “But how did he know she was going to be here, and how did he choose this particular woman? Was she his intended victim, or was she just in the wrong place at the wrong time? Did he have foreknowledge of her arrival? If so, how did he attain that information?”

  “It might have been a trap,” Benjamin said. “Maybe she was coming to see him, lured by a promise of payment for sex.”

  “Could be.”

  “I don’t think she was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  “You think the killer was the John?”

  “Possible.”

  “Do you think there’s a link between this woman, a prostitute visiting the hotel on the same night the President and his party was staying here and someone on the presidential staff?”

  Benjamin wasn’t prepared to answer that question with any certainty. He needed more information before he’d accuse the leader of the free world or anyone connected to him of being a sadistic killer.

  “These are questions we’re going to have to dig deep into if we’re going to find the answers,” he said. “And I’m afraid they may be questions that go unanswered unless we can establish a positive connection to someone who may turn out to be untouchable.”

  Chapter Thirty

  Austin was just a blur. They’d flown to Denver, Milwaukee, and Cheyenne, Wyoming all in one day. Why they’d visited Cheyenne made absolutely no sense to him except for some Democrat running for an insignificant office that the President thought could use and appreciate his endorsement.

  The doctor sat on the side of the king size bed and slipped his feet into his house shoes. He refused to walk barefoot on a hotel room floor. You just never knew what kind of people had occupied the room before you, or what kind of sick debauchery they’d engaged in. He also insisted on supplying his own sheets, pillow, and bedding, not trusting any hotel to properly clean their bedding after only God knew who else had slept on them or the perversions they’d committed.

  He rubbed his eyes and looked around the room but didn’t recognize his surroundings. He hated waking up in strange places, an occurrence happening more often since he’d become the President’s personal physician. He also hated the disorientation it brought and the lack of control that overwhelmed him.

  Where am I?

  This presidential cross-country trip felt like it would never end. They’d visited a dozen cities in half as many days. He couldn’t remember his last decent night’s sleep. It was as if he’d just get to bed when the hotel wake-up call would roust him out of his slumber, only to be packed off to another city on this whirlwind tour of political chaos.

  As his eyes gained their focus and he realized where he was, his disorientation faded and he was able to gain control of his thoughts.

  “Detroit,” he muttered under his breath.

  He examined his hands in the dim light of the bedside lamp. He’d been meticulous about washing away any blood from his latest victim, Mary Jane. He realized that he didn’t know Mary Jane’s last name. He’d killed her before she could tell him.

  “Doesn’t matter,” he whispered. “None of them do.”

  Lying back on the bed, he remembered Houston, Texas. Elizabeth, he thought. He hadn’t had time to rid the world of any more duplicates of his mother there. What a shame. But he’d gotten the one he wanted.

  The bitch dressed in red hadn’t been much of a challenge. He remembered watching her approach from the employee entrance to the service elevator, those long-legged lazy strides that screamed cheap whore, the thick heels on her decadent red boots tapping out a disgusting rhythm on the concrete floor of the garage. She still dabbed at the corners of her mouth with the handkerchief she’d removed from her purse, wiping away the remaining unholy seed of the pervert taxi driver she’d just serviced.

  She was firm when he grabbed her as she passed his hidden alcove. She tried to scream but his hand over her mouth and his blade plunged deep into her kidney prevented it.

  He’d determined not to speak to the bitch. He could never talk to his mother. She wouldn’t listen anyway. What did she care about the fears and pain of her little boy? Did she care that the dirty men abusing her also abused him, often at the same time or immediately after they’d taken her?

  Did this bitch in red have any idea the stigma of shame she brought to him every time she opened her door to one of the dirty men, or even worse, met them in some filthy hotel room downtown while he sat on the floor at the foot of a creaking bed and cowered in shame and fear?

  His mind reeled with the memory of holding the bitch and driving his knife into her again and again; using the deadly blade to rip off her clothes and expose her body. Then with a ferocity even he didn’t know he possessed, he gutted her like the swine she was and spilled her intestinal organs onto the floor.

  He didn’t look into her eyes. He didn’t want to see her spirit leave her. He doubted his mother had a soul.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Keller and Benjamin spent all day Friday questioning the Luxury Suites Hotel staff about the murder of Elizabeth Simmons. They started with Henry Roberts, the hotel manager, and worked their way through the supervisory staff until they got to the cleaning and kitchen personnel. With exception to the President and his family spending the night, had they noticed anything out of the ordinary? Did anyone seem out of place? Was anyone acting strange or suspicious?

  As expected, they received the same answers over and over. Security had been so
tight that only a select few hotel employees had even been allowed on the presidential floor. The whole eighth floor had been reserved for the first family and his entourage, the White House chief of staff, his personal doctor, and two members of his cabinet traveling with him. The Secret Service occupied the seventh floor along with the White House press corps and other administrative aides. Admission to either of those floors required a security check as well as a hands-on examination of a personal nature.

  Along with questioning everyone at the Luxury Suites Hotel, Keller and Benjamin examined the suite of rooms the presidential party had occupied only a few days ago. Other than opulence neither thought necessary, the rooms weren’t anything special. The expensive paintings and furniture certainly not found in the lower-floor rooms distinguished these rooms as exclusive rights of the rich and powerful.

  Keller and Benjamin gathered carpet samples from each of the rooms the presidential party had occupied, even though they had little faith they’d match any evidence found on any of the murder victims. Whoever the killer might be, he was very careful, as if he were acquainted with forensic evidence.

  “There ain’t no way in hell anybody from the hotel killed that poor girl,” Katie from the kitchen staff told Keller. “Once we clocked in, we weren’t allowed to go back to the garage or hardly anywhere else in the hotel.”

  “Not allowed?”

  “No ma’am. Security was tight as a frog’s ass that night. A body couldn’t take a piss without tellin' a supervisor where you was goin'.”

  “I see.”

  “And there was only two ways into the garage that day, the garage door and the service elevator, and neither of them was available to us after we clocked in.”

  “Not available?”

  “No ma’am. Not goin' down anyways,” Katie said. “Once we parked our cars, we came straight to the time clock, then right to the kitchen. They even blocked off the stairwell so you couldn’t take the stairs.”