What Lies Beneath

by Archer, David

  Chapter 7

  That’s what they called him, the serial killer who began killing local prostitutes that week. He was named after Jack the Ripper, the famous London serial killer that had terrorized that city more than a hundred years earlier.

  Like Jack, this murderer sought out local prostitutes and took them into dark alleys and other hidden locations where they were beaten. The beatings alone were enough to kill some of them, but each one had also had her throat slashed. In some cases, the cut was so deep that the girl was nearly decapitated.

  Mike was assigned to the case, and Cassie prepared herself for the stress she knew he was going to be under, but there was something different this time. Instead of coming home stressed out, Mike seemed almost back to normal, back to his jovial, joking self. He would tell her about the case every evening, talking about this new killer as if he almost admired him.

  He was out late most nights, cruising the city to the various areas where the hookers were known to hang out, watching for any sign that the Ripper was about to strike again. He and Harry, his partner, divided the city into sections so they could each watch over certain parts. Mike said they could cover more ground that way, and have a better chance of one of them being close when the monster made his next appearance.

  It seemed like there was a new victim almost every night, and Cassie began to worry that the stressed-out version of Mike was going to show up again any time. Instead of getting overstressed, though, the more victims there were, the more excited Mike seemed to be about the chase. It was almost like the victims didn’t matter, as long as Mike got to keep pursuing this sadistic killer.

  August passed into September, and still the killings continued. Because Mike was telling her about every new victim, sometimes in graphic detail that left her feeling sick to her stomach, she became interested in the case. While he was at work throughout the day, she would sit at her computer and read the news stories about each one, and she began keeping a spreadsheet about the victims. She remembered when Letitia had been killed, how she had noticed the red light from the GoPro in the photograph, and thought that maybe she would spot a pattern in the victims that the police might overlook.

  It was mid-September when she finally saw the pattern she was looking for, but it froze her where she sat. She told herself she had to be wrong, that it wasn’t possible she was correct, so she went over everything four times to be certain.

  Finally she had to admit it to herself. There was a new victim every night that Mike was working late, but there were never any when he did not. If only one victim had been killed when Mike was at home with her, she could have brushed the whole thing off as some kind of bizarre coincidence, but something in the back of her mind was poking at her.

  The victims were beaten before they were killed. Cassie thought back over the last few weeks and realized that Mike occasionally had bruises on his hands, on his knuckles in particular. She had never asked about them, because it hadn’t occurred to her to do so, but now she wondered if there was actually a connection.

  Was it possible that Mike, her beloved Mike, was actually killing these women? What she was looking at was nothing more than circumstantial evidence, of course, but it was disturbing nonetheless. If victims only appeared when Mike was out prowling the areas where they showed up, and never when he was at home with her, that was an awfully big coincidence.

  In the most recent news stories, a new fact had come to light. In some of the cases, there was evidence that the killer was wearing gloves while beating the victims. Since that had first appeared in the news stories, Cassie could not remember seeing any bruises on Mike’s hands, and she wondered if gloves could prevent them. She did a little research online and found that some leather gloves could deliver serious impacts while still padding the knuckles.

  She began watching Mike when he got home, but he was so sweet and gentle with her that she couldn’t help but dismiss her suspicions when she was with him. She wanted to mention the strange coincidence, that the killer only struck on nights when Mike was out looking for him, but a part of her was afraid to speak it out loud. She didn’t know if he might get upset with her for even having such thoughts, but she wouldn’t be surprised if he did. After all, he was her fiancé. How could she even suspect him of such a thing?

  On the nights when he worked late, Cassie would end up going to bed before he got home. She would wake in the morning to find him beside her, often with a smile on his face as he reached to pull her close. Many of those mornings ended in lovemaking, and Cassie began to think that he was in rare form in the mornings. The sex was better than ever, and always left her smiling.

  Then, one night, her bladder roused her from sleep at one a.m. She got up and went to the bathroom, then decided she needed a drink of water before going back to bed. She had walked barefoot down the hall, her feet making no sound on the carpet, and that was when she spotted Mike sitting at the kitchen table. He had his laptop open on the table and his cell phone in his hand. His phone was equipped with a slot for an SD card, and she froze in the doorway as he popped the card out and put it into the computer, then slid a blank disc into the DVD burner slot.

  His back was to her, and she couldn’t see the monitor. He had earbuds in place, plugged into the earphone jack of the computer, and she figured he was looking at some sort of video. She started to speak, but suddenly a cold chill went down her spine and she realized she was afraid to let him know that she was standing there.

  She turned and went back to the bedroom, crawled in under the covers and pretended to be asleep. When Mike came to bed fifteen minutes later, she was careful not to let on that she was awake at all. He spooned up behind her and put an arm around her, and it was only a few moments before his breathing deepened as he drifted off to sleep.

  She woke the next morning to feel him kissing her neck, and rolled over with a smile on her face. They made love again, and Cassie didn’t remember seeing him at his computer until after he had left for the day. His laptop was back in the living room, where he usually kept it, and she looked at it for more than half an hour before she finally got up the nerve to try to see what he had been doing.

  She picked up the computer and opened it, but Mike had installed a password. Her eyes narrowed, because there had never been a password on it before, but she thought she could probably figure it out. She tried her own name, both of their birthdays and several other things she thought he might use, but none of them worked.

  The prickly feeling in the back of her mind returned. She put his computer back where he had left it and got her own, and sure enough there had been another victim found early that morning. This girl had only been eighteen years old, and like all the rest she had been beaten senseless and then her throat had been cut.

  Whoever the Ripper was, he knew how to avoid leaving evidence behind. There was nothing to indicate who might have beaten or killed the girl, just like in every case. It was almost as if the Ripper knew exactly what the forensic teams would look for, and made certain there was nothing to find.

  And that was the problem. Who would know those things better than a homicide detective? And what if that homicide detective was the very one who was investigating the case?

  As much as she hated the thought that she might be right, something in Cassie’s mind was telling her there was no other explanation. Her only problem was how to prove it to anyone else.

  Other times, she told herself the whole thing was ridiculous. Mike was a homicide detective, a decorated cop. There was no way he could be a serial killer.

  Then why, she suddenly asked herself, am I having to tell myself that over and over and over?

  She was walking through the dining room when that thought struck her. It was the day after she had seen him with his computer, and she suddenly remembered the boxes he had put away and the blank disc he had put into the drive. Was it possible he was stashing some kind of videos in those boxes? They certainly weren’t lying around inside the house, but there had
to be some reason he put the disc into the computer. If he had some sort of video he was trying to keep hidden, it only made sense that he would put it in the boxes he thought she would stay out of.

  There were still a few boxes inside the house, but Mike had carried most of them out to the garage. A guilty suspicion crossed her mind that he actually knew exactly which boxes held the “naughty surprises” that he had warned her about, and so those would likely be the boxes he would hide something in. She glanced at the clock on the wall and saw that it would be at least three more hours before Mike got home, assuming he didn’t end up “working late” again.

  Surely, it couldn’t hurt to just go take a look. She was sure all she would find would be some old porn tapes or magazines he was a little ashamed about now, and that was understandable. It wasn’t like he would be hiding evidence of his secret life as a serial killer, after all. All she had to do was see what was in those boxes for herself, and then maybe she could put these worries to rest. Mike didn’t even have to know that she had looked.

  She went to the garage, through the door that led into it from the kitchen. Her little Kia was sitting inside it, taking up most of the room, but there were some workbenches and shelves on the far side. Any of the boxes he wanted to hide something in would probably be over there, so she stepped down onto the concrete floor and made her way around the car.

  Yes, there were the boxes. The space under the workbench was deep enough to shove two boxes in. One of them would be against the wall, with another one in front of it, just barely sticking out under the bench. If Mike wanted to conceal something, he would undoubtedly have made sure it was in the box that went against the wall.

  Then she noticed the dust on the floor. It was everywhere, because they didn’t use the garage very often, but right there in front of the boxes was a trail showing where the boxes had been dragged out and then pushed back into place very recently. The trail was obviously fresh, and a chill went down her spine once again.

  Carefully, she dragged out one of the boxes and took a cursory look inside. It held mostly books, and a random sampling showed her that they were almost certain to be his old science fiction novels. He had told her that he had spent his teens as a space cadet, reading everything from the old sci-fi of the fifties to every Star Wars book he could get his hands on. Sure enough, she found quite a few of each kind in that box.

  Shoving it aside, she reached in behind it and pulled out the box that was against the wall. This one wasn’t very heavy, and a moment later she had it out where she could open it and look inside. She found a few magazines, but none of them were anything she could consider pornographic. The closest she came to that was an old Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. She put everything back in the box and pushed it back into place, then replaced the one with the books.

  When that was done, she looked at the next boxes in the row. The first one on the outside held more books, but there were also some model cars and even a few old toys. She dragged it aside so that she could get back into the tight space and pull out the one behind it.

  As soon as she opened the box, she knew she had found what she was looking for. It was filled with DVDs. She had expected something like this, but none of these DVDs had labels on them like you would expect if they were porn videos. Instead, numbers had been written on them with a magic marker.

  Without even thinking about what she was doing, she picked up two of them that were on top of the stack and walked back into the house. In the bedroom, Mike had a TV that had a built-in DVD player. She sat down on the foot of the bed, turned on the television, and slid the first disc into it.

  A scene opened up on the screen, and Cassie found herself looking at a brick wall. There was a lot of trash lying around, and she got the impression of an alley. The hairs on the back of her neck stood up as she realized she was looking at a cell phone video. The phone had obviously been placed somewhere and set to record, but there were several seconds with nothing but the view of the brick wall and the surrounding area.

  There was a sound, and it took a moment for her to realize she was hearing footsteps. Then she heard a voice, a woman’s voice saying, “I really don’t know anything. Why do we need to come back here?”

  “It’s just for a moment,” said another voice, and that chill hit her spine again as she recognized it as Mike’s. “You don’t want anyone to see you talking to cops, do you?”

  “Yeah, good point,” the woman said. “Might not be good for business. So, what’s this all about? I told you I don’t know anything about the Ripper.”

  “That’s okay,” said another male voice. “We know a lot about him. We just wanted to see if you might have noticed anything strange around here lately, anything that might mean he’s getting ready to go after another victim.”

  “Do you think I would be out here if I did?” she asked. It was at that moment that the woman came into view of the camera, and then she was joined by Mike and another man. The second man stepped a little further and was lost from the view, leaving Mike and the woman on the screen.

  “Well, with somebody killing girls like you,” Mike said, “I’d think you might want to be off the street completely. Why do you keep coming out here, knowing the Ripper is doing his thing?”

  “Honey, a girl has got to pay her bills,” she said. “I got two kids, and they like to eat. Ain’t no regular jobs around here for a girl with no education, so the only way I can make enough money is to use what nature gave me.” She grinned at Mike. “And I’m very, very good at using it. You want to give it a try? Special cop discount.”

  Cassie gasped as Mike suddenly swung a roundhouse fist into the woman’s face. The punch was so strong that her feet left the ground, and she fell onto her back. She groaned once, and then Mike grabbed the front of her dress and lifted her up again, punching her over and over in the face.

  Tears streaming down her own cheeks and her mouth hanging wide open, Cassie watched as her beloved Mike beat this poor young woman. She realized that he was wearing leather gloves, and then she saw that they had metal studs on the knuckles. He hit her over and over, until she was obviously senseless, with blood coming out of her nose, her mouth and even her eyes.

  Finally he stopped. “Damn, Mike,” said the voice of the other man from off camera. “Is she still breathing?”

  “Yeah,” Mike said. “Go ahead, let’s get this one over with.”

  Cassie stared, unable to take her eyes away from the television as the second man came back into view. He leaned down and grabbed the woman by her hair, lifting her up and tilting her head back. She let out a groan at that moment, and he jumped as if he was startled, but then he held up his other hand and Cassie saw the switchblade he was holding. He pushed the button and the blade popped out, and then Cassie began to sob as she watched this man slice the girl’s throat almost from ear to ear.

  The scene shook as someone picked up the phone, and then it ended. The TV screen went blank, and Cassie sat there sobbing for several seconds, but then it lit up again.

  This was a different scene, a different location, but once again the phone had been placed somewhere to record what happened in front of it. This time, Mike and a thin young girl—Cassie figured she couldn’t be over sixteen—appeared only seconds later. They were not talking, but the girl turned to look at him as if she expected him to say something.

  Just like the other woman, she never saw the punch coming. It happened so quickly that she didn’t react at all, and then she was down on the muddy ground. Just like the other one, Mike lifted her up and began beating her in the face. The beating went on for more than a minute, one blow after another, and then it stopped suddenly. Cassie could hear Mike breathing hard, and then he dropped her into the mud.

  He took off the gloves he was wearing and then pulled a plastic bag out of his pocket. The gloves went into it, and then he sealed the bag and put it back into the same pocket. When his hand appeared again, it was holding a large folding knife. He pulled out th
e blade, then leaned over and dragged it across the girl’s throat. He stood there and watched for a moment, then wiped the knife off on her clothing, folded it and put it back into his pocket. He turned and looked directly into the camera as he reached out to pick up the phone and turn it off.

  Cassie sat on the bed, her hand over her mouth as she wept. Mike was not only the St. Louis Ripper, he was actually taking video of his crimes and saving them as souvenirs. Obviously, this was what he was doing on his computer; copying the video from his phone and burning it to DVD so he could hide it away to watch some other time.

  She picked up the remote and scanned forward. The disc had four videos on it, altogether, and she watched just enough of each one to be sure it was the same sort of thing. She stopped the player and popped the disc out, then held it with the other one. She thought about putting the second one in, but she really couldn’t bear the thought of seeing any more.

  She had to put them back, and she needed to do it before Mike got home. As horrible as the videos had been, she was so shocked that she couldn’t think of what to do. She just knew that she had to put them back before he found out she had them, so she carried them quickly back out to the garage.

  It was the work of a few minutes to put them back into the box they had come from and shove it under the workbench, back against the wall where it had been. She pushed the other box into place in front of it, the one with the model cars and books that seemed so normal, so innocuous.

  And then her strength finally failed her. She collapsed, sitting on the concrete floor. Her back was against her car, but that left the workbench and the boxes in plain sight, and just the knowledge of their existence brought a question to her mind.

  What kind of man was she engaged to marry?

  Chapter 8

  As a psychology student, Cassie was fully aware of the mind’s ability to refuse to accept or believe that which it found inconvenient or unacceptable, but that didn’t prevent her from being amazed at her own subconscious insistence that what she had seen had not been real. She offered herself every possible explanation, tried to tell herself that what she had seen was just some sort of role-play, some kind of homemade porn film, but it had just been too real. There was no doubt in her mind that she had watched her fiancé beat those women into unconsciousness, and then he or the other man with him had cut their throats to ensure that they died.