by Unknown
I entered the living room. The stench grew stronger. The scene in front of me shocked me to the bone. I had to take a second to absorb it. I had to take a moment to return my jaw to a closed position. I was so stunned by what I saw that I allowed the red scarf to completely fall off my face. It exposed my identity to the Woodsman’s security cameras. But I didn’t care, not now.
I entered the living room expecting to see the latest work of the Woodsman. But what I saw was not the dismemberment of a female victim. That I’d expected.
No. Instead spread out in front of me in a horrid, random fashion was a dismembered body. But not one of the Woodsman’s victims.
I surveyed the mess. I saw a set of legs sprawled out over the coffee table. They were still attached at the groin, like an overgrown wishbone.
There was broken glass. It came from the center of the coffee table. The glass that used to be there had completely shattered. Glass shards covered the floor underneath. Each sliver was covered with a droplet of blood. They looked like little blood slides.
There was a bloody arm, missing most of the hand. The severed arm was thrown over the sofa. The hand was clear across the room near the light switch.
The walls and furniture were covered in blood.
There was a torso. It was severed in two pieces. The heart and lungs had spilled out over an expensive rug, which made for an interesting fashion statement.
The other arm was tossed against a fake fireplace. Someone had impaled it on the pointy end of a poker.
All of that, all of the dismembered, bloody limbs did not shocked me. None of that bothered me. None of that had made my jaw drop.
The one thing that had made me gasp, the one thing that had stunned me, the one thing that had given me the longest pause of my existence, was the head.
Resting on top of the mantle over the fake fireplace was the severed head. The eyes were wide open. They stared at me with lifeless darkness.
They were eyes that I had seen before. The head belonged to someone that I knew. It was Townsend Dry’s severed head.
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Before I got to Townsend’s apartment, before I could reach him, someone else had beaten me to him. Someone else had torn him completely asunder like a chewed-up rag doll.
I leaned over the bits and pieces that were left of the Woodsman. I studied them. I began to investigate the scene that must have taken place only an hour before.
I determined this time because the blood had barely begun the curdling process. It was mostly still damp and the smell wasn’t quite rotten enough to be old.
I gazed at each of Townsend’s limbs. The one thing that stumped me was that I couldn’t figure out what the murder weapon had been.
What had the killer used to rip him apart?
As I investigated more closely, the only conclusion that I could come up with was that whatever the instrument had been, it was a barbaric way to die. It was almost as if the killer had simply used brute strength and managed to rip each limb off one by one.
That thought was too much for me to accept. The killer must have used a crowbar or some other nasty weapon. Perhaps one of the Woodsman’s own primitive weapons had been used against him.
I considered the fact that there may have been multiple killers, but there was only one set of footprints left in the blood.
The killer had been considerably sloppy in that regard. He’d left a swarm of shoeprints: size 12. He was big.
The shoeprints trampled all the way across the rug and over the brick tiles. They vanished down the dark hallway toward the front door.
I was surprised that I hadn’t noticed them on the way in. I guessed that the darkness was just thick enough to conceal them from me or perhaps I had been too interested in avoiding detection to have noticed them. Maybe my skills weren’t quite as sharp as they used to be. No room for doubt now.
The entire murder scene was like a forensic team’s wet dream. All of the different body fluids, tissue samples, and bone fragments would provide a good time for the NYPD’s best forensic unit.
I looked over at the hidden security cameras in the living room. Now that I knew they were here, I found them easily. Townsend hadn’t been that clever in hiding them. Instead, I had been careless in not detecting them before.
The Woodsman was a voyeur by nature. He displayed all of his killings for the whole world to see, like his artwork. He wanted an audience. He strutted.
He had filleted Sandy Parks and left her in a grotesque totem pole made of dead corpses. So of course he would have video cameras in his apartment so he could watch everything over again. He probably had cameras in his secret lair too, wherever that was.
I was not a voyeur. Shane was the only one who watched my dastardly deeds. He sat back in our body while I murdered.
Studying the cameras, I followed the wires to their origin. The wires ran from behind some fixtures up and into the ceiling. His apartment must have been beneath his lair. Townsend had a room above his apartment. It was probably on the roof.
I went back to the front door and peered out into the hallway. Nothing there. I closed the door silently, leaving it unlocked, and I went back to the elevator. There was no floor button to go any higher. I looked around and found a fire escape.
The stairwell was empty and there was no fire alarm attached to the door. I walked up the next flight of stairs. There was a thick, metal door. It had a padlock on it. The lock shined like it was brand new.
I picked it up, pulling it slightly away from the knob. I studied it in Shane’s gloved hand, steadily calculating the quality. I wasn’t picking this lock––no way.
As a serial killer, I had mastered many skills over the years, including lock picking. I was more than adequate when it came to performing stealth actions or breaking and entering without being detected, but to say that I could pick every lock would just be unrealistic.
I couldn’t pick the new padlock. Maybe I could if I played with the tumblers for hours. There were only two quick ways to get through a padlock. The second fastest way was to just cut the lock with some heavy-duty bolt cutters. The first and fastest way to get through the lock was simply to use the key.
I turned back down the stairs and headed back toward Townsend’s apartment.
I peeked into the corridor. It was empty.
In Townsend’s apartment, I searched through the pockets of his pants. Of course the pants were separated into blood-covered pieces and scattered across the room like dirty laundry.
In Townsend’s right front pocket, I found his keys. There was a padlock key on the ring next to car keys.
Back at the door, I opened it using the key.
The door creaked open. Slivers of dim light from the stairwell shined across the floor like the dim lighting on a plane flying 30,000 feet in the air. The room wasn’t much different from a plane. It started out narrow, as far as I could see into it. There was a dull, humming sound coming from some machinery.
The room was cold.
Steam fired from some unseen pipes far in the darkness.
Shane’s body shivered slightly because of the cold. I restrained him from this and his body stiffened back up.
I smelled far too many different smells to describe. Basically it was like a funeral parlor meeting an industrial chemical plant.
I touched my fingertips to the wall and searched for a switch for the lights. I found a switch and flipped it on. A booming sound came from inside the room, like a waking dragon.
An old generator cranked to life. The lights flickered on. They hung from long wires, jetting down from the ceiling like vines from a thick forest canopy.
One of the light bulbs sparked every few seconds. It flickered on and off as the tiny electrical current fought to stay alive. It was going to bust soon.
I stepped into the narrow space and walked the corridor. Eventually the hall opened up to a high-ceilinged room. There was a spiral staircase that led up to a catwalk overhead.
The ceiling wa
s covered in pipes and rusted metal parts that I couldn’t identify. Some of the pipes ran out through to the roof. I wasn’t sure what any of them were for.
The bottom floor held the most interesting-looking devices. There was a chair made of corroded steel. It was black, green, and wet, as if it had been doused in acid over and over.
Above the chair were tubes and funnels that evacuated from a large cauldron.
I looked back at the chair. I noticed that the armrests and leg rests had restraints on them.
Interesting, I thought.
It appeared that the Woodsman had restrained his victims in this chair and covered them with the wooden liquid from the cauldron above.
I looked around the room. I saw various other devices and tools neatly organized. Then I noticed the laptop.
That was what I was looking for. If the surveillance video was anywhere, it’d be on that laptop. And that was where the footage of my visits would be found.
I turned on the computer and waited for it to boot up. When it did, I went to work. Proficiently, I accessed Townsend’s video files and I found nothing. I searched every conceivable place. There was no sign of any files. They had all been erased. I checked the computer for the last known log in. It had been only an hour ago.
The person who had killed the Woodsman had been messy in his execution. He’d left too much evidence behind. He’d left the corpse behind. He’d left his bloody shoeprints behind.
The best way to avoid detection was to completely erase the existence of the crime. But this killer hadn’t cared because he had erased the security videos. Maybe he wasn’t sloppy after all. Maybe he’d worn gloves. And maybe he hadn’t left behind any evidence linking him to the brutal dismemberment from downstairs except for the shoeprints, but that wasn’t going to do me any good.
It’d help the FBI maybe, but not me.
I sat back puzzled.
I thought for a long moment and turned the laptop around. I removed the bottom cover and ripped out the hard drives and the memory cards. There was no reason to leave any of it behind just in case it somehow had traces of evidence left on it.
I returned the bottom cover back to the laptop and flipped it back over.
I slipped the hardware into my pocket and began to leave the Woodsman’s lair behind.
Before I left, I paused. I took one more glance over the room. I felt Shane stirring. He thought for a moment of Sandy Parks and the suffering that she’d endured. Then I suppressed him down to the dark bowels of our body.
Returning to the hallway and departing through the door, I reached back and flipped off the light switch. The generator rattled and returned to sleep. The dragon had rumbled and shuttered back to its hibernation and its sinister dreams of fire.
I relocked the padlock and headed down the stairwell and back to Townsend’s apartment.
At the door a sudden thought swept over me like a tidal wave.
I thought, What if the killer saw the video of me? What if he was walking around out there with that memory stick? What if he knew that I was out there too?
Now I had a serious problem. It was very likely that somewhere out there was a killer who knew who I was. And I knew nothing of him.
Then like an unsettled tiger, something leapt out at me. A cold thought stabbed through me. I realized the killer had removed a high tech anklet off Townsend without setting it off––no easy feat. This killer was someone knowledgeable. And knowledge was more than power; it was dangerous.
I stared over the remains of the Woodsman. I realized that I couldn’t leave him behind. Someone would find him. And then there would be an investigation. Questions would be asked. The cops wouldn’t care so much because Townsend had murdered one of their own, but the Feds would.
The last thing that I wanted was them snooping around, looking for a vigilante killer. In their hunt, they might find me.
So I took off Shane’s jacket and folded it neatly by the front door. I went into the kitchen, carefully avoiding the pools of blood and the shoeprints. Then I took out some cleaning materials, along with all of Townsend’s garbage bags.
I pulled out two garbage bags. I cut holes into two of them and pulled them over my shirt and clothes so as to avoid getting more blood on Shane’s clothing.
Then I took all of the paper towels and dishtowels that I could find. I began by picking up the clumps of body parts and tossing them all into garbage bags. Next I picked up the smaller parts and the clothes. Finally the last thing left to do was clean up all of the blood, shoeprints, and stains. I used Windex and some other cleaners.
I scrubbed. I swept. And I mopped.
After I was done, I tossed the body parts down the trash shoot. I could recover them from the alley afterward. I could place them into the trunk of Shane’s car and dispose of them properly in my furnace back in D.C.
Before I left the apartment, I slipped off the garbage bags and put my coat back on. Then I turned back, peered into the blackness of the apartment, and whispered, “Good night, Woodsman!”
I used Townsend’s keys and locked the door from the outside. Then I left the building.
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One item that every serial killer had to have around in case of emergency was a cooler. Master serial killers usually had several. Jeffrey Dahmer had two shelves full of them in the back of his pantry.
Shane grabbed as many as he needed from his apartment. He filled them with ice from the freezer. Then he placed all the garbage bags into the coolers in order to keep them from smelling up the trunk of his car.
After he had loaded the car with the remains of the Woodsman, he started the engine. It hummed to life like a faithful, mechanical beast.
The next stop was D.C. He was going home. It was time to fire up the furnace in my lair and dispose of the Woodsman forever.
6
Monstrous Discovery
“I am a monster. I love to hunt.”
––David Berkowitz, Son of Sam
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The freeway was dark. Slivers of illumination fell across the blacktop like stars reflecting off the top of a lake.
The moon was out. It lit up the horizon like a blue fireball catapulting across the sky.
As Shane drove his black Mercedes Benz back to our lair in D.C., to our furnace, I thought of someone else. I envisioned someone else.
A dark man stood tall as he studied the outside of the Woodsman’s building. A breeze swept up beneath his knees and brushed the bottom of his coat to one side.
A Glock 22 was perched in a shoulder holster underneath his left arm. His jacket concealed the weapon.
The man walked up to the building after realizing that the outside of it had no security. He crept up to the front door with ease and peered in. A doorman sat behind a high counter.
The dark man entered the building as if he belonged. He walked directly up to the guard. He said something. I leaned in closer to Shane’s brain, but I still couldn’t make out any of the man’s words. Moments later he was at the elevators. He rode the elevator up to the penthouse floor.
Before he exited, he stretched out his gloved hand and caught the door before it closed.
He waited. Then he peeked out into the hall. There was no one around. He entered the hallway and walked to Townsend’s apartment.
He stared at the door for a moment. He leaned in close and listened. All he heard was a faint rustling sound somewhere inside the apartment. Townsend was home.
The dark man looked up at the ceiling over Townsend’s door. He peered closely at a tiny wire that was painted the same off-white color as the walls. It ran from outside the frame of the door and up to the ceiling. I couldn’t believe that I hadn’t noticed the wire before.
Damn! I thought.
How was he this good? Who was this guy?
Darkness surrounded the intruder like a filter. The intruder walked to the stairwell. He opened the door and entered. He walked up two flights of stairs until he was directly over the Woodsman’s
apartment. He stopped at the door to the Woodsman’s lair. The funny thing was there was no padlock on it. It was just an old door lock.
The dark man slipped out a lock-pick and picked the lock. Within moments he was in the apartment. He was fast and skilled.
With my eyes shut, I felt my tail slither around in Shane’s head, scraping the side of his brain. He winced in pain and accidentally pulled the steering wheel. The Mercedes jetted quickly to the next lane.
A car horn blared. My eyes shot open. I narrowed them. Then I closed them again and returned to my vision.