Glimpse

by Stephen B King

  All I had had for lunch was a wafer-thin slice of polony and tomato sauce sandwich. I knew better than to ask for more, no matter how hungry I was, since asking once before made Dad’s eyes glaze over. Then he hit me. He yelled about how lucky I was to have what I’d been given.

  “When I was a prisoner of the Viet Cong army, I would have done anything, anything to have that to eat,” he screamed at me, as I cowered and cried.

  He spoke at great length, at odd times over the years, of the months he spent in a bamboo cage half suspended in muddy river water, with rats as friends, while his tormentors poked him with sticks and threw rotten scraps down for him to eat.

  I’m sorry; sometimes I digress.

  Dad and I walked down the center of sideshow alley, I had his oversized hand wrapped around my right, and something rather wonderful, called a dippy dog, in my left. For the uninitiated, a dippy dog is a hot dog sausage on a wooden skewer, dipped in batter, deep fried until golden and crispy, and then smothered in tomato sauce. It was, without doubt, the best thing I had ever eaten in my life.

  I had just watched him in the shooting gallery while he shot down small dented cans from a shelf with a cork-firing rifle. Perhaps it was his army training that came to the fore, but he won me a brown and white stuffed dog and said I should name him. For some reason, I called him Bobby, but I have no recollection why. I think it was supposed to resemble a Basset hound, but it was so poorly made it only lasted about three weeks of cuddling and the stuffing began to seep out from between the stitching. Of course, Dad blamed me for being too rough with Bobby, but I promise I never was: it was just cheap tawdry rubbish. For those three weeks, I loved that dog.

  Dad stopped quite suddenly, so I did too, to watch a group of four teenagers laughing and giggling around the strength test game. The two men went first but failed to send the ball all the way up the pole to ring the bell, and they were teased mercilessly by their girlfriends. The challenge was laid down, and one I heard named Louise agreed to have a go.

  She took the oversized hammer, stood wide legged, and appeared to struggle to lift it from the grass. She intended to bring it down onto the pad. I suppose it was her boyfriend who stepped in to help her, putting his hand under the shaft and helped yank it up. Looking back now, I think she had given up and wanted to drop it, but the man was already jerking it upward.

  The end of the hammer traveled through its arc and hit her in the face.

  She screamed as blood squirted out from her smashed nose. She lifted her hands, but there was so much it spilled through her fingers, gushing like a waterfall. She was wearing a tight, white V-necked jumper, but that soon turned deep red.

  I’ve tried to work out why, many times over the years since, and can’t come up with a valid, conclusive reason. Possibly it was because she was female, and the only woman I had known up till then was my mother who had abandoned me when she went shopping and never returned. Maybe it was because of the increasingly vivid dreams that assailed me almost nightly, ever since the conversation about death while my father cut up that sheep. I don’t know why, but that was when I first fell in love with the sight of blood.

  I knew, as an undeniable fact in my soul, I wanted to see more; lots more.

  Chapter 3: The Y2K Bug

  The body in the suitcase was sensationalized by the media, but in many ways, it was overshadowed as the year 1999 drew to its inexorable close. There was real fear that the world might come to an end when the clocks reached midnight on the thirty first of December.

  The eighties and nineties had seen the explosion in computer technology with the invention of the microchip. This wondrous piece of technology had seemed to find its way into the heart and soul of every electrical and electronic device imaginable. For years, things got smaller, faster, and more efficient as machines were being used to design faster, smaller, and more efficient computers.

  Ticking away inside the brain of all these pieces of brave new world equipment was a simple clock. For a clock to be useful it needs to have a reference point in time, and no one thought when designing these clocks, what would happen when the two-digit measurement for the year reached 00. Surely, people argued, something like a machine couldn’t understand that 00 was a year, when mathematically it meant it wasn’t that, it was nothing.

  Some said things would simply shut down, computers, trains, planes, cars, traffic control lights, bank alarms; it seemed the list of things people had to worry about ceasing to work was endless. It was such a concern it was given an acronym Y2K. Businesses cropped up, with software solutions, which promised, for a fee they could ensure your home or business computer wouldn’t shut down, never to be able to be turned on again.

  The West Australian Police force, like all government departments, also had its concerns. IT technicians were working frantically in December to ensure that at midnight on New Year’s Eve, the entire police communications and computer network didn’t shut down, unable to be re-booted.

  For McCoy, it was just another problem in a life of continual annoyances. It seemed that every time he wanted to use his computer, the system was down for Y2K proofing. In his opinion, anyone who gave credence to such ludicrous scare-mongering conspiracy theories needed their heads read.

  The suitcase murder case had dragged on, seemingly going nowhere. He and Juliet had been separated for three months. She appeared to be in no hurry to forgive him, but more recently, he had noticed a change in her. He could sense it in the tone of voice she used on him, as if she considered him to be a human being again, rather than a rat.

  The change in her started with a relenting of her refusal for visits to see Amy at times other than every other Sunday. Rick believed that it had been her way of hitting back at him where it hurt the most in the early part of their separation.

  On a Sunday afternoon, in early December, Rick was sitting in his car, secretly watching Amy play in the park. Suddenly, his mobile phone rang, he thought it would be work, and he almost didn’t take it from his pocket, but old habits die hard. He had been under considerable pressure because his investigation had stalled.

  He answered in his usual way: “McCoy.”

  “You know, Rick, you are absolutely crap at hiding. Whatever you do, don’t go into undercover work, will you?” Juliet said.

  Oh, fuck. He sat up straight in the seat and mumbled an apology. “I’m sorry, Juliet, I didn’t think I was doing any harm, I will leave.”

  “Don’t do that. Come on over, Amy would love to see you.”

  He almost ran across the park, and when Amy saw him, she screamed “Daddy!” and clapped her hands with obvious glee.

  He squatted down and hugged her, mouthing: thank you at Juliet over her shoulder. “Hi baby,” he whispered. “I missed you, so I thought I’d come and say hello.”

  “I missed you too, daddy. Can you read me a story in bed tonight? You haven’t done that for such a long time.”

  He stared at Juliet, questioning her with his eyes, but she stayed motionless. “Well, baby, we’ll have to see about that. I may have to go back to work.” He tried not to let any disappointment show in his voice.

  As was her way, she changed tack. “Daddy—” She leaned her head back so she could look at his eyes. “—I’ve been talking to Mummy about having my own puppy, and she says I have to wait. What do you think?”

  He glanced up at Juliet, and she shook her head, mouthing the word Christmas so he knew it was to be an upcoming gift for her. “Well, sweetheart. I think maybe you need to be just a little bit older so you can take care of him.”

  She frowned. “But I am older now. All my friends have pets you know!”

  His heart melted, as it always did with her, “I promise you, baby, one day soon, you will have a puppy, when the time is right.”

  She nodded, her big brown eyes opened even wider as she smiled. “I love you, Daddy. Can you push me on the swings, really, really high?”

  While Rick could see, that Amy loved seeing her mother and
father together again, he could still feel the thick atmosphere. But, he was happy for the chance, no matter how small, to try to build a bridge with her. As he pushed Amy on the swing, Juliet stunned him by asking about the investigation.

  “I saw you on TV, doing the re-enactment. That poor woman in the suitcase. You looked tired, Rick. How is the case going?”

  At first, he didn’t want to talk about it to her, especially as the results from the press conferences had been so meagre. But in a blinding revelation he realized one of her many complaints about him from the past: He never spoke to her about his job, and that she felt excluded from his world.

  “Jules, I know I never talked about the job to you much when we were together, and I’m sorry for that. I suppose I was trying to protect you from all the crap I deal with day after day. Plus, to be honest, when I got home I wanted to get away from all of that, not relive it. I was wrong to exclude you. If you want to know about this case, then I’d like to talk to you about it, but not while Amy is around us. How about we go to Pizza House for dinner like we used to, then after we put Amy to bed you and I can sit on the back patio with a glass of wine, and I will tell you all about it?”

  She stared back at him, open mouthed, and nodded.

  “Pizza House for tea, yippeeee,” Amy yelled, as she swung through the air.

  A little later, she surprised him again while they watched Amy playing with another little girl’s puppy. “Are you seeing anyone, Rick?”

  He shot her a look. “Jules, I swear to you, since you kicked me out, I haven’t seen anyone.”

  “Not even your slut, little Miss Angie-fancy-pants?”

  “Especially Angie. My God, Jules, that whole thing was the biggest, most stupid mistake of my life. There isn’t a single day goes by that I don’t hate myself for it.”

  She nodded again and turned away to swipe at her face with a hand before stroking the puppy alongside her daughter.

  That evening, the Pizza House was packed with families. On Sundays, it was all the pizza, salad, and dessert you could eat, and Rick felt as if he was living as a family again, though he kept reminding himself, he wasn’t.

  He limited himself to a single beer and bought a Wine Cooler for Juliet. They talked of normal things, like cartoon shows Amy was watching on TV, her friends at play school, and the possibility of her getting her very own puppy just like the one at the park.

  Back at home, they both bathed Amy. “So, Daddy, wasn’t that puppy, Maxi, in the park so cute? That’s the sort of doggy I would like.” Rick had to bite his lip to keep from laughing at her persistence, as he shampooed her hair. He glanced up and Juliet was trying to hold in a laugh too.

  When Rick brushed her long brown hair as she stood in front of him, while he sat on the couch, Amy again talked about how lovely her life would be if they could just have a little puppy. When he put her to bed he read her a bedtime story while she cuddled her favorite teddy bear, named Pinkie. He kissed her goodnight and she hugged him and whispered that she loved him, and he replied that he loved her too. He hadn’t felt so complete in a long time.

  When he got to the kitchen, Juliet handed him a can of beer as she held a glass of white wine in the other. She tilted her head toward the rear glass sliding door, and he smiled nervously. He didn’t know or understand why Juliet wanted to spend time with him, but he was overjoyed that she did. Don’t fuck this up.

  When they were sitting down, opposite each other across the glass-topped patio table, he began. “You might call it karma, that during the worst three months of my life, I’ve also been working on the worst case of my life.”

  “How so?”

  He took a long slow drink of his Lager before putting the can down. “Well, the Forensic inspection of the suitcase showed it was a cheap brand, available through lots of shops and had been on sale for three years. We tried tracking it through the stores that sold them, but it was a dead end, far too many people bought them that couldn’t be identified.

  “The body parts fitted almost exactly inside it, except for the one piece that was missing, the right upper thigh, and we assume it was left out because it wouldn’t fit. No sense risking the case popping open, I suppose. God knows where that is, buried in his back yard, I guess.”

  Juliet shuddered and Rick noticed she picked up her wine glass to try to hide it. Yet her face glowed in a way he hadn’t seen before, which looked like barely suppressed excitement.

  He pressed on, not wanting to break the spell of closeness he felt. “The plastic he used for wrapping each body part was the type sold in hardware stores. It’s the kind used as drop sheets for painting and decorating. We did recover good, usable fingerprints, but they led nowhere as he has never been arrested before. When we catch him, we will have more than enough physical evidence to put him away. We have DNA from his semen; he had sex with her some time before death, but even his blood type is the most common, so no help there.”

  “He left his blood on the body?” she asked, incredulously

  He looked into Juliet’s eyes, wondering if he was giving her too much detail, but she looked fascinated, and she almost imperceptibly nodded her head to urge him to continue.

  “No, Jules. They got the blood type from his semen. Through dental records we identified the body, Melanie Cartwright, twenty-six years old. She disappeared while shopping in a supermarket. Her husband waited for her in the car, while she went inside, and she vanished without a trace. Apparently, he was listening to the football on the radio, a decision he will regret for the rest of his life. We know that she was somehow abducted, but no one saw how or who took her. If someone did see anything unusual in the car park, they didn’t volunteer any information when we had the televised re-enactment.”

  Juliet finished the last of her wine with one large gulp and put the glass down on the table. “Go on, please,” she said almost breathlessly.

  “Staff working there did not recall seeing her, so she probably didn’t make it inside, which means she was grabbed in the car park, or the mall. It had to be random, as she didn’t usually shop there, unless they had been followed, but that didn’t make much sense.”

  He again paused and took a long sip of beer, surprised at how easy it was to talk about it to Juliet. Why did I never do this before?

  “She appeared to have been tortured, starved, and raped. The ME tells us this because the skin was drawn and shrunk, and she had lost a considerable amount of weight when they weighed everything that was left and allowed for what wasn’t. Then bizarrely, she had been hung upside down, we think, while she was bled, by having her throat cut after death. The exact cause is impossible to determine; heart failure seems the most likely. It’s not conclusive though, because there were numerous wounds to her body, mainly knife wounds. She was dismembered by someone who seemed to know what they were doing, possibly with medical training. The cuts were neat, joints separated not hacked through, the murderer took his time, this was no rushed job. For a while we looked at some sort or religious or cult related killing. Being hung upside down suggested some type of ritualism, but like everything else it didn’t lead anywhere.

  “We found no witnesses to the dumping, though, and we spoke to hundreds of people who admitted to being there on the day, along with all the staff. But whoever had been driving the white van hasn’t come forward, so maybe that’s something. But we have no idea how many other vehicle drivers didn’t come forward either because people just don’t seem to notice others at the dump. There was so much garbage, as you can imagine, left around the suitcase it’s impossible to know what’s relevant and what’s not. It’s also hard to know when the case was left, some said they thought they noticed it there, but others said they hadn’t seen it. About the only thing of note was a heap of pruning’s from a lemon tree. But whether that’s anything to do with our killer or not, who can say? A lot of people took tree trimmings that day.

  “We don’t know why Melanie was abducted and killed. We have turned her and her husband’
s life upside down trying to find why she was targeted. The best we can come up with is plain bad luck; a random killer who just was in the right place at the wrong time for her. Perhaps she reminded him of someone else, perhaps in some sick twisted way he was offended by her, but if he never kills again, I don’t think we will ever catch him.”

  “Do you think he will kill again, Rick?”

  He nodded slowly and picked up his can. “He likes it, Jules. At least that’s what I think. My boss wants to play that down, doesn’t want a panic, and rightly so. It’s a particularly brutal, horrific murder, and the victim went through seven kinds of hell before she died. You would think a woman should be safe going to the supermarket.”

  She shook her head and looked every bit as angry as Rick felt. “How could someone do that to another human being?”

  “That’s the scary part, Jules. We just don’t know. Outwardly he could seem quite normal. He is clearly intelligent and methodical. I doubt there’ll be a neon sign saying ‘killer.’ He obviously got some sort of perverted pleasure out of torturing and killing Melanie; her death didn’t appear to be frenzied. He is a cold hearted, calculating, merciless murderer. I so badly want to catch him before he does it again, but deep down, I know I won’t.” He took another long drink of beer.

  “I wish you had opened up like this to me when we were together. I always wanted to feel like I was a part of your life, and call me morbid, but I find this sort of thing frightening, but interesting. Does that make sense?”

  He nodded sadly. “I didn’t want to burden you. I deal with scum, and normal people who do hideous things to other human beings, often people they love, day after day. It gets you down, honestly it does. I wanted you to be my escape valve from all of that. I’m sorry I didn’t share with you, if I had my time over again, I would.”

  “And Angie? Was she a relief valve too?”