Snuff

by E. L. McKenzie

  Snuff

  A Nick Lynch Thriller, Book 1

  E.L. McKenzie

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2021 by E.L. McKenzie

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any manner without written permission of the copyright owner except for the use of quotations in a book review. For more information, contact the author at gene.mckenzie@gmail.com.

  First paperback and ebook edition August 2021

  Book design by Dave Pasquantonio

  Book cover by bookcoverzone.com

  ISBN 978-1-950988-07-5 (paperback)

  ISBN 978-1-950988-08-2 (ebook)

  For Linda

  Contents

  Prologue

  1. Monday ⌁ day 1

  2. Tuesday ⌁ day 2

  3. Wednesday ⌁ day 3

  4. Thursday ⌁ day 4

  5. Friday ⌁ day 5

  6. Saturday ⌁ day 6

  7. Sunday ⌁ day 7

  8. Monday ⌁ day 8

  9. Tuesday ⌁ day 9

  10. Wednesday ⌁ day 10

  11. Thursday ⌁ day 11

  12. Friday ⌁ day 12

  13. Saturday ⌁ day 13

  14. Sunday ⌁ day 14

  15. Monday ⌁ day 15

  16. Tuesday ⌁ day 16

  17. Wednesday ⌁ day 17

  18. Thursday ⌁ day 18

  19. Friday ⌁ day 19

  20. Saturday ⌁ day 20

  21. Sunday ⌁ day 21

  22. Days 22 to 43

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Prologue

  (two years ago)

  “Where the hell am I?” asked Victor Robinson. Dulled by sleep and booze, he did not realize there was no one there to hear him.

  He felt a moist substance on his cheek. It had crept into his mouth—dried by a night of drinking too much—and mixed with the corruption of the prior day. It was gritty, tasting of rot and decay.

  Victor slowly opened his eyes, still nursing the slumber and hangover, instinctively expecting the brightness of day, the enemy of his current state. He was instead greeted with darkness.

  “Jesus, where am I?” he repeated. He rolled onto his back and tried to recreate the night before. He could not remember much. His head throbbed, and he fell back into unconsciousness.

  (nine months ago)

  Dr. Phyllis Goodwin’s office had two doors, one for those entering from her waiting room, and another for those exiting a just-completed session. In this way, the privacy of each individual was kept.

  As her prior client exited, Dr. Goodwin opened the door to her waiting room and greeted a new client. “Hi, I’m Dr. Goodwin, you must be Mr. Linn.”

  The nondescript man stood, extended his hand, and said, “Yes, I am Nicholas Linn. It’s good to meet you, Doctor.”

  “That’s funny, my husband’s name is Nicholas Lynch. Pretty coincidental. He goes by Nick. Do you, too?”

  “No, I just go by Nicholas.”

  “Sounds good, Nicholas, come on into my office. Let’s make you comfortable.”

  Dr. Phyllis Goodwin was not taking new clients. Emerging as a leader in a developing field of psychiatry, she was spending less and less time as a clinician. Her scheduler / office manager / receptionist had convinced her to take on Mr. Linn. “It’s hard to explain, but he sounded like he needed help more than most. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but something about him told me it would be good for him to see you.” Phyllis accepted this explanation grudgingly. Never overly empathetic or patient, she already regretted taking on this new patient.

  Settling in, Linn glanced at the large family picture on the wall. “Is that your family?”

  Phyllis smiled. “Yes, my husband and three teenage kids.”

  “Very nice. I’m sure they make you proud.”

  “They do. Our oldest is starting her sophomore year at Georgetown. We still can’t believe we have a kid with that level of ambition and talent.” Phyllis did not normally discuss her family, but the light beginning to the session felt good to her.

  “That’s amazing. It’s always great to see our kids’ successes.”

  After pleasantries, Phyllis started the session.

  “Tell me, Mr. Linn, what has brought you to see me? What can I do for you?” She was distracted and failed to see the intensity in his eyes or the malevolence in his demeanor.

  “I’m struggling with some issues I believe you and few others are qualified to help me with. I am experiencing unhealthy urges, if you know what I mean. They’re growing stronger.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Fifty-three.”

  “And have you in any way acted on these urges prior to today?”

  “No.”

  “In my experience, urges subside with age. My experience is that men have much stronger unhealthy urges than women, particularly in early adulthood. I believe the literature would support this. But I have also seen that, as men age, they can misinterpret their unhappiness over diminishing virility with urges like you’re talking about.”

  “Doctor, I appreciate what you said, but I believe I may be an exception to your experience here. These urges are strong. They’re really calling to me. I need help, the kind of help you can provide.”

  Phyllis continued to not listen. She did not want a new client, and she did not want to babysit some aging, pathetic man. “Mr. Linn, I assure you, these urges, as you call them, will subside. This is part of the aging process. You are going through a bit of a late-stage mid-life crisis. You have spent fifty-three years not giving into malign stimuli, whether coming from your inner voice or outside influencers. My experience tells me you simply need to do what you have always done to manage yourself and these urges.”

  “All due respect, Dr. Goodwin, I think you are misreading me. I believe if—”

  “Mr. Linn, I’m assuming you sought me out specifically because of my expertise. Is that correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “And yet, when I apply this expertise to your situation, you think I’m wrong.”

  “I’m not sure we have delved far enough into my pathology for you to fully understand what I’m trying to tell you.”

  “Here’s what I know,” Phyllis said tersely. “I have done this a long time. I am recognized as a leader in my field of expertise in psychiatry. I don’t appreciate someone coming in here, a new patient no less, and telling me I don’t know what I’m talking about.”

  Nicholas Linn remained silent. This seemed to make Dr. Goodwin mad.

  “You don’t have a response for me, Mr. Linn.”

  He continued to remain silent.

  “I’ll tell you what. Let’s go ahead and end this session. If your urges,” she emphasized the word like a taunt, “continue to grow, book another appointment, and we will continue to talk about this. I think you are going to find with a little time you will see I am right. And not to be too crass, and off the record, I would encourage a little mild pornography to help you relieve whatever stress you’re experiencing.”

  “Fine,” Linn responded. “We are fifteen minutes into this session. I’m assuming you’ll refund the $500 I’ve paid for someone to recommend I go home and watch porn.”

  “I’m certain you read our forms. But if you haven’t, I can highlight for you the section that says the appointment fee is for a session up to one hour. You have had your session. There will be no refund.”

  Nicholas Linn stood, paused momentarily as he looked around, and then walked out the wrong door.

  (twenty-three mont
hs ago)

  The video quality was clearly amateur. The lighting was too bright and poorly angled. The cameras seemed to always be in the wrong position. The shots were poorly framed, and the editing was clumsy, hopping from one shot to the next with no regard for transition or smoothness. But for twenty-three minutes, Mike Smith watched transfixed, horrified, and ready to pay almost anything to own this video.

  Mike was born to be a loser. He knew it. Hell, everyone he grew up with in his small New Jersey town knew it. He was first busted when he was twelve for stealing bikes. Soon after, bikes felt quaint. By the time he was fifteen, he had upgraded to cars. He could drive better than most state patrolmen. The problem was they outnumbered him.

  “Too smart by half,” one of his teachers said. Another called him “one of the smartest young men I ever had the privilege to teach. Unfortunately, he spends more time trying to avoid doing work rather than just putting his head down and applying himself.”

  Technology had fascinated Mike from his earliest days. He used his intelligence and high-tech savvy for schemes rather than legal commercial enterprises. Always a scammer, Mike spent more time growing up in juvenile detention and jail than at home. He told his family and friends that’s where he learned the most.

  As he aged, his crimes progressed. Never violent, he learned as he went, first with bikes, then cars, and finally on to smaller, more marketable items, predominantly digital. He became sophisticated, perpetrating one internet scam after the next.

  Five years earlier, after getting out of jail in upstate New York, Mike moved to Toronto with a new girlfriend and a new identity. Two years later, his life changed when one particularly low-life character introduced him to illegal videos. Mike had always loved pornography, but this? After viewing his first snuff video, he was hooked.

  Snuff videos were first introduced in Europe in the mid-seventies. They were more myth than fact among law enforcement, but Mike knew these films existed. He became affluent dealing in these videos, and those depicting other atrocities, such as rape and torture. He drew the line at pedophilia. Mike knew most of the videos he bought and posted on the dark web were simulations and chose to believe they all were. While of low moral character, Mike understood first-hand the horrors of sexual molestation as a child, and he refused to participate in anything that would be associated with pedophilia. As a pragmatist, he also knew if he did get caught, the law would be much harsher if they found his illicit pornography included children as well.

  The snuff video business was big. Well-made videos could sell for over $500,000 to a single wealthy purveyor (advanced encryption made it impossible to duplicate or share the files). But Mike felt no heartburn selling the same video to multiple buyers for vastly different sums. At the same time, he resisted mass distribution because he did not want to invite law enforcement scrutiny. With the dark web distribution model fully established, a top hit could yield millions in cryptocurrency.

  None compared to the jewel he now held. He was sitting on a fortune.

  (six months ago)

  “Do you know who I am?” Robert Scratch demanded.

  The clerk looked at him, puzzled. “No sir.”

  “I’ll have your job. I’ll have your head. This is unacceptable.”

  Liz Chance flinched. Born and raised in Wyoming, little shook her. She was equally comfortable butchering livestock or tending a garden. But this man’s menacing behavior disturbed her in ways she struggled to articulate. “Sir, how about I go get the manager?”

  “So he can do your job?” Scratch screamed.

  The Marble General Store had been in business since the earliest days of the community, dating back to the late nineteenth century. Everyone knew everyone in Marble, a quaint, beautiful mountain town of one hundred and thirty people. Liz Chance, a new resident, did not know anyone other than her cousin. Otherwise, she would have understood what she faced when Robert Scratch walked in.

  “I’m new here. It’s my job to make the customer happy. Please tell me what I can do to make that happen.”

  At that, Robert Scratch dropped the forty-pound bag of quick-setting concrete on the floor, the bag breaking open and spilling contents liberally. “Can you carry that out to the car for me?”

  Liz was lost. “Let me get the manager for you.”

  As she walked away, Scratch screamed at her, “The other thing you can do for me is grow a brain before you get back.”

  When she returned from the back of the store with the manager, Scratch was gone. But before he left, he further scattered the powder from the bag throughout the front of the store.

  “Don’t worry about it, Liz,” Andrea Simpson, the store manager, said to her. “That’s going to be Robert Scratch. He’s just a rich, arrogant, entitled jerk. I’ll go get a couple of brooms, and we can clean this up real quick.”

  (nine months ago)

  “Mr. Hill?” the bartender said louder to get his attention

  Dan Hill woke from his drunken slumber at the bar. “What?”

  “Mr. Hill, can I get someone to drive you home?”

  Hill looked around, clearly confused as to his whereabouts. The Whetstone Inn, housed in the mansion built by industrialist John David Williams as he made his fortune in coal mining, had recently reopened as a resort inn. The bartender, a long-time resident of Whetstone, knew Dan Hill and everyone else in the area.

  “What?” he asked again.

  “Dan, you’re at the Whetstone Inn, remember? You have probably had one too many. How about I find somebody to drive you home?” Whetstone was not of a size to accommodate taxis or Uber drivers. The community simply helped people in this situation.

  “I gotta go to the bathroom,” Hill said, as he stood unevenly and began to stumble his way down the hall. Unbeknownst to the bartender, he worked his way out a back door, stumbled through the parking lot to his lifted, tricked-out, heavy duty, four-wheel-drive truck, struggled to put his keys in the ignition, started it, backed into a pole, and drove away.

  Within minutes, Hill heard the siren, looked in his rear-view mirror and saw the flashing lights. He pulled over, narrowly missing a road sign as he did so.

  Newly minted Sheriff’s deputy Ronald Kinman approached the vehicle cautiously, following protocol scrupulously. Dan Hill was less inhibited, throwing the door open and stepping out before the deputy could tell him not to do so.

  “What’s up?” Hill slurred.

  Kinman had his right hand on his still-holstered gun. “Sir, you were not supposed to step out of the vehicle. Please get back in your truck and put your hands on the steering wheel.”

  Dan Hill did just that. He also threw the truck into gear and sped away, turning quickly onto a narrow road used primarily by those accustomed to four-wheeling in remote Colorado.

  Deputy Kinman exercised caution rather than youthful exuberance. He returned to his vehicle, drove to the narrow road, pulled over, and radioed the sheriff, explaining to her what had happened. “I ran the plates. It’s Dan Hill.”

  Sheriff Munson sighed. “That’s a Dan Hill MO. He knows those roads, and his truck can handle them. Let him go.”

  “Okay, we’ll get him next time.”

  “Or the time after that, or the time after that,” the sheriff said. “He’s a bad guy up to some bad things. But mainly he’s just a worthless drunk.”

  Monday ⌁ day 1

  Denver Homicide Detective Nicholas Lynch sat in his car looking at the single-wide trailer that had fallen into disrepair many years earlier. How does someone live in that? What had happened to Jimmy Swindell that he was reduced to this level of poverty? Once an up-and-coming home builder, Swindell clearly had fallen on hard times. Nick got out, walked up the two rotting steps, knocked on the door, and then stepped back down to the ground.

  In short order, the door opened slightly.

  “Jimmy Swindell?” Nick asked.

  The door opened fully, revealing a disheveled, drunken, aging man with bloodshot, vacant eyes, and body odor
that could not be hidden. “Yep.”

  Nick showed him his badge and said, “Mr. Swindell, my name is Nicholas Lynch, and I am a homicide detective with the Denver Police Department. Can I come in and talk to you for a few minutes?”

  Swindell looked over his shoulder. “Detective, I will talk to you. But I think it’s in both our interests if we do so outside or in your car. My place is a bit of a mess.” Nick could see around Swindell and observed this was probably a good idea. He could not imagine the smells he might encounter. Given the cold weather, they climbed into Nick’s police-issued Chevrolet with Swindell sitting up front in the passenger’s seat.

  Within moments, Swindell began to convulse. Nick recognized the signs. “No, no, no, not in here. Open the door. You can’t…”

  It was too late. Jimmy Swindell disgorged voluminous amounts of vomit all over Nick’s dash and floorboard. He opened the door during the process, turned, and managed to get no small amount of material between the seat and the door frame.

  Nick barely controlled his own gag reflex as he instinctively bailed out of the car.

  Jimmy Swindell exited the vehicle and sat in a lawn chair, dazed and pale. Nick used the half roll of paper towels he kept in the trunk to clean up as best he could. He pitched each in Swindell’s yard as it became full. Irritated and repulsed, Nick said, “Okay, Mr. Swindell, I think that’s going to be enough for today. How about I come back tomorrow or the next day and we continue this conversation?”