Justice Unserved

by Nadia Siddiqui

  “Have I made you uncomfortable, sheriff?”

  “Please leave my office or I will have you arrested for trespassing.”

  “Trespassing? You invited me in here! You agreed to this!”

  “I will not tell you again!”

  The sheriff pushes himself out of his chair swiftly and that’s when it hits Nathan clear as day.

  Each vision he gets is slightly different. Sometimes they are in color and sometimes they are in black and white but more often they are tinted in a sort of sepia haze. Nathan never knows beforehand just what role he will be placed into. Sometimes he’s the victim and sometimes he’s the killer. Very rarely is he a third party watching the event happen like he’s a fly on the wall.

  This time he’s the killer; it appears that today he is Sheriff Thomas Crane, standing nearly hunched over a poor woman on the ground. Her face is a mess of running mascara and her thin, wrinkled skin is all bunched around her bone structure in pinched clusters of terror. All he can feel is rage. All he can feel is a burning hate that’s a ball of fire inside of his belly. In his right hand he holds a trinket that was likely some mantelpiece decoration at some time but now has been broken and splattered with blood to the point that it’s nearly impossible to guess what it might have once been. The woman below him is crying. She keeps trying to get her arms to pull her away from the man standing over her, but her arms won’t carry the weight of her body. Her legs are either broken or they were never working in the first place.

  They are in her bedroom, the carpet is overly worn and her yellow floral-printed comforter is half off of her bed; her dentures are still floating in a jar with white tablets fizzing away on her nightstand. This was timed to have happened right after her nightly bath and when she would least have been expecting it. He can feel himself laughing. Not a mirthful sound but something dark and full of self-triumph as he advances toward her.

  The vision shifts just before he has a chance to take a fistful of her hair and drag her to where he wants her.

  Feet are hitting the worn carpet in soft thumps and his heart is racing a thousand miles a minute. He feels like he’s on drugs; he feels like he’s stuck in a runner’s high that he can’t come down from. So much better than being drunk, so much headier. Bloody, glove-covered fingers snatch a sting of freshwater pearls from where they have been hanging off of her mirror and he stuffs them into his pocket for safekeeping. He knows the rest of what he must do to make this look like just another break-in and a poor woman whose heart simply gave out over the fear of it all, though he supposes that’s not entirely inaccurate, her heart did give out all on its own. Only it was only partially from fear that she expired.

  The vision ends as quickly as it began, having been sparked by the sheriff’s sudden temper, and Nathan stands from his chair as the sheriff barks, “Get out!” once more time to emphasize that he isn’t going to tolerate his presence for a single second longer and Nathan hurries out of the building and down the front steps. He got what he needed. That last string of confirmation necessary for the company that they in fact do have the right man and that he has been the one behind all of these horrible things just as they had expected.

  “Thank you for your time, Sheriff Crane.”

  Nathan makes sure to look especially smug as he backs out of the office and starts to walk slowly down the hallway, not in the least rushed or put off by the fact that he has now likely pissed off Sheriff Crane. Nathan wants to be a target. Nathan wants Crane to be so livid by their brief interaction that he comes after Emma. While Emma might not take kindly to being put into harm’s way, Nathan is also willing to bet that she would do so happily if he told her it was going to help to save her father.

  A quick text is sent from Nathan’s phone to the company as confirmation that, yes, this is in fact exactly the man they thought they were looking for. Sheriff Thomas Crane is just as much of a monster as any of the other lowlifes that Nathan has ever been tasked with handling. Besides, Nathan never really did care much for being yelled at. Who knows how many people Sheriff Crane has killed in the course of his lifetime? There isn’t going to be any way to tell for sure and Sheriff Crane isn’t going to be given the opportunity to confess either.

  “Proceed, Doe” is the text message that he receives as he’s turning back toward the bus station where he will take a quick ride over to where he and Emma both agreed they will be meeting up this afternoon. He can feel his phone vibrating in his pocket with further files being sent to him as instructions. No doubt his location is already being tracked by the company as well as by Sheriff Crane. Is he going to be the sort of man who gets messy whenever he feels pressure? Is Crane the sort of man who has ever really been told “no” before? He comes across very much as an only child who has been given everything he’s ever wanted and it’s never been good enough for him.

  Nathan has a plan; he’s going to lure the smarmy sicko into the hospice center with both Emma and her father. Nathan will pretend to ‘leave’ for the night to head back to his hotel room and Emma will be there late visiting with her father. No doubt once the staff shifts over and Emma is forced to ‘go home’ Sheriff Crane will make his move that he thinks will hurt Emma the most … and Nathan will be waiting there with open arms. It will be difficult to make it look like the accident that it needs to be in such a place, but Nathan has the company tracking Sheriff Crane’s location too. No doubt he’s not used to being the one that’s watched either.

  5

  T homas Crane has always liked the dark. Perhaps it's some metaphor for his soul or the darkness inside of him, but really he just likes the quiet. It's not so much the shadows or how they dance in the dim lighting but something far more primal. The best hunters come out at night. He likes being a hunter and knowing that he is at the top of the food chain. He likes that secret thrill that comes from a scream piercing the stillness and the rest of the world being too frightened to bother coming to help. They don’t want to be next; they don’t want the boogeyman to come after them next, so they stay as far away as possible. It's like the night is his playground and anything is possible. He likes feeling like the alpha predator.

  He has been following the intrusive duo all afternoon. He tailed them himself until they left the nursing home. He had them followed all the way back to their home and hotel room, respectively. He waited until the lights in the window of Hank Pettyfer’s room finally went off. Crane lingers for a bit longer to make sure that the man is asleep. It is his intention that the man wakes up tomorrow to hear the horrific headlines and then runs for the hills as quickly as he can. Most people, when they feel they are too close to something horrific, will prioritize their own lives. From their brief interaction, Crane has determined that Pettyfer is going to be one of these such people. Emma’s been getting too loud for a while now. He knows from one of his many sources that she’s been hanging around the caregivers' break rooms and attempting to butter them up with poorly made baked goods and pretending to be nice. None of the informants buy such behavior of course. They are all just as sick of her as he is. Poking around where she doesn’t belong and asking questions that aren’t at all her business. Crane knows this because those informants would never betray him. They know what would happen to them if they even thought about it. He knows them all personally, of course, and knows their families, and with his particular clearance within the police station can pull up all of their dirty laundry with a click of a button. In this town, Crane considers himself to be God. He can do anything he likes, go anywhere and say anything because he is the highest-ranking authority in any way that matters. At least in his opinion.

  For the past few months Emma has been trying to organize a local group that will look privately into the recent crime sprees or raise money to hire a private investigator. They have all failed of course, personally sabotaged by himself. He doesn’t like having people poking around in his private affairs. The rest of the community is happy to be scared from a distance but not her, not Emma. Sheri
ff Crane is going to put a stop to this tonight. He will put a stop to Emma personally if he has to, but he would much rather hit her where he knows it will hurt her the most. He will have to take her father. He’s a little earlier into the stages of dementia than Crane normally likes, the only ones he lets live are the ones who have to remember the horror in flashes but never be able to properly retell it. Those are his favorites.

  He gets a notification over the radio that Emma has returned home and he knows that’s when he’s supposed to make his big move. That’s when he’s supposed to head down to the hospice center. He arrives only minutes later, dressed all in black. He’s wearing a comfortable sweater and soft, quiet shoes. There're only a couple of night guards and usually they take these later hours to sleep or compete with one another on their small video games. Last he heard it was some sort of boxing match where the two of them held even chances at the title and therefore were very unlikely to care if somebody were to slip their attention and sneak into the building. The cameras are all so far out of date that they have physical tapes that he will pick up on his way out of the building. This particular building he has hit a handful of times. Three murders, one accidental death and a string of Alzheimer’s patients in their early nineties. Crane has even taken the time to have his own copies made of the keys to all of the parts of this building. He might as well be invisible.

  He doesn’t even have to guess as to the path to the room holding Emma’s father. He knows this place like the back of his hand. He can already feel the excitement starting to build inside of him. He can already feel that itching in his fingers as he adjusts the fit of the beige latex gloves covering his hands. He cannot wait to drink in the fear in that old bastard’s eyes as he wakes him by dragging him out of his warm, comfortable bed. He cannot wait to see all of the pieces slowly start to fit together. Crane wonders which version of Emma’s father he’s going to get. Is he even going to remember who he is? Is he going to know where he is or even what’s happening to him? He likes it best when they are mentally aware in that moment, thinking that they are a younger version of themselves perhaps and yet their old, frail bodies can do nothing at all to stop what’s going to happen to them. He likes the rush of it. He likes knowing that he holds their life in his hands.

  He pushes open the heavy hospital door slowly, savoring the medicated smell of the air in the room. He moves in slowly, armed with nothing but his bare hands and a heavy dose of bloodlust. This will scare little Emma to her core, she will be so heartbroken. He cannot wait to drive to her house tomorrow to deliver the news and play the dutiful sheriff delivering bad news as he watches her fall to pieces knowing the truth. He cannot wait to see her broken and falling into his arms.

  The door clicks shut behind him softly and it is the first indication that something has gone wrong.

  The door isn’t supposed to make any noise at all behind him. It’s supposed to shut whisper soft and leave him alone in this otherwise silent room with just the beeping of monitor that keeps his sleep apnea in check. Instead there is nothing. Crane looks at the mass on the bed and it appears to be in place.

  Then he starts to register the walls. They aren’t plain like they normally are. They don’t have the same family portraits framed in bulky bits of wood like they normally did when he passed. The large cross that’s hanging standard in all of the rooms is covered by something else. Curiosity gets the better of Crane and he moves closer to inspect what appears to be printed glossy photographs hanging all over the walls.

  As he gets closer he can see that they are portraits. Some are autopsy photographs and some are pictures of them from eulogies, but each picture is a face that he recognizes. Unsettling is that it’s not only his eldest round of victims. The walls are covered ceiling to floor with picture after picture as if it was makeshift wallpaper. Each body that he has buried or burned is decorating the walls. Who could have done this? Not Emma, she lacks the brains to pull this off. She couldn’t have hired somebody without his knowing. This is too specific for just anybody to have done it.

  Crane’s mind snaps to the only new addition to the town in weeks. The reporter, but how? What would he stand to gain from putting this together? He can’t possibly know. How could this have happened? The people on this wall shouldn’t have been able to be traced back to him no matter how hard they looked. It was the basic rules, if there isn’t a body then there is no crime. If you have no evidence then there can’t be a crime and Crane has made sure to handle every aspect like this that he possibly could. He knows this.

  He can’t remember the last time he felt frightened. His mother used to like to say that he was a strange child because not once did he come crawling into their bed at night. She would remark to anybody for a time that he was just such a good baby because he was never startled and didn’t have any problem walking right up to a hornets’ nest and pushing at it. For a while she thought her son was fearless and brave. Then, over the years, she started to shift that narrative until she was calling him impulsive and reckless.

  There in the corner, there is her face. The portrait is the same as the one that used to hang on his father’s side of the bed in their farmhouse. Crane hasn’t bothered to think about his mother for some time … and he certainly doesn’t like thinking about her now.

  Crane is so focused on the faces in front of him that he misses the body on the bed behind him starting to sit upright and pull the covers from his face.

  It isn’t the body he is expecting and Thomas Crane is in for a shock when he slowly turns around the room. He doesn’t notice right away that he isn’t alone like he thought that he was and that the man on the bed isn’t at all somebody who won’t put up a fight. Nathan Doe is every bit the killer that Crane is, but Nathan Doe only kills when no other justice will possibly be served in the situation. His career is a unique one and one that he doesn’t mind doing. It’s what he’s conditioned for, and he likes to ensure that his victims truly suffer for their crimes.

  The surprise on Crane’s face when he spins around is priceless.

  “We need to have a little talk, Sheriff Crane.” Nathan’s deep voice is softer now, quieter, because he knows that even though Crane likely has taken precautions not to be caught, he doesn’t want to risk it.

  “You?”

  Nathan nods. He likes that he has played his role well enough to have caught him off guard.

  “But you’re a reporter!”

  Nathan shakes his head no slowly, though his answer doesn’t seem to really matter to Crane as Crane then tries to launch himself over the bed and toward where Nathan is now standing on the other side with a surprising amount of agility. Nathan is ready for him. A small needle filled with a powerful sedative has been at the ready in his hand. He ducks to the side of Crane’s angry form and jams the needle straight into the meat of Crane’s thigh, eliciting a hiss of pain before the sheriff crashes down onto the plastic-wrapped mattress in an effort to get the intrusion out of his leg.

  The sedative works quickly, the darkened room quickly blinking out of Crane’s field of vision until he is consumed by nothingness.

  ***

  Sometime later, Thomas Crane wakes to find himself seated in a wheelchair. He cannot feel the lower parts of his body. He cannot lift his arms even so much as to struggle against the bonds that secure him in place. All he can do is sit and stare at the man who has finally bested him as he sits gagged and secured to this chair. Crane almost wishes he had known about the real purpose of the interview when he had met this bastard in his office; he would have handled this issue then. He should have looked into him as a person more, he should have connected the dots, and now he needs to find a way to get out of this. “Who are you? Let me go right now, you cannot detain an officer!” Crane is nearly shouting.

  “Well, you’re so much more than an officer, aren’t you?”

  “Let me loose!”

  The man says nothing for a long time before finally pointing to a face on the wall. “This lady had
seven children. Seven. Can you imagine that?” The man laughs. “No, I don’t suppose you can because you can’t think of anything beyond yourself.” The man chuckles to himself, clearly not needing a response from Crane whatsoever. The man pulls a mask up over the lower half of his face and Crane can’t help but wonder why the man would bother, he already knows what he looks like. Then it dawns on him that perhaps it doesn’t matter that he knows what this man looks like because this man doesn’t intend to let him leave.

  “What did you inject me with?”

  “A fast-acting sedative; the faster your heart beats the better it works, so the fact that you’re frightened right now is really working well for me.”

  “I’m not scared of you!”

  The man doesn’t answer, simply walks over to where Crane is seated and places two fingers against the jugular vein in his neck and measures his pulse.

  “It appears that you are, I wouldn’t be surprised if you wet yourself soon. You won’t be able to control it; you won’t ever be moving any of your disgusting limbs ever again.”

  Crane can’t accept that, he cannot accept that as a possibility and mentally his body is thrashing around against his bonds, but physically he’s hardly moving his mouth well enough to form his words properly. “You won’t get away with this.”

  The man smiles under his mask, Crane can see the crinkling around the corners of his eyes. “I don’t have to get away with anything. You’re the only person who will be in here. Emma will have paperwork showing that a facility transfer was processed for her father today and he has been moved safely, which will clear her. You, however, will be found in this room come morning, alive but fully lobotomized, surrounded by your victims. A journal is going to be found at your house detailing each and every one of your crimes as well as the location for every body you have buried out on that farm. You will never move again, but you will see and hear and be tried for your crimes and there won’t be a single thing you will ever be able to do about it. You will never harm anyone again; you are effectively going to be neutered. How does that sound to you?”