by Tyler Porter
I stood up and returned to my workbench where I pick up my industrial stapler. I turned back and walked slowly toward her as I reloaded it with some rusty staples from the back of the drawer. She crawled as far away from me as possible, getting yanked back by the steel chain that was wrapped around the post in the center of the room. The chain was fixed around her neck like a leash and it choked her as I stepped on it with my boot. Looking back, I should have used my new chisel saw chain to break it in. Next time. She brought both hands to it and pulled desperately trying to free herself. I bent down, wrapped my right hand around the free end of the chain and pulled her toward me.
“No! Please don’t! I’ll be better! I promise!” I stopped and pondered her guarantee.
“You promise?” I asked calmly.
“Yes! I swear! Please just don’t!”
“You promise to respect me?” I asked.
“Yes, yes I promise.”
“Okay, fine. I’ll give you a second chance,” I told her, watching the relief appear on her face. “But I have to give you something to think about to make sure it doesn’t happen again.” I pulled her left arm away from her body and ejected two staples into her collar bone.
Chapter 3: Eyes Wide Open
She screamed long after I left the house several minutes later, but by the time I got to the garage, I could no longer hear it. I pulled out of the driveway and drove toward the city. It was time to start looking for my next kill. I only had a two more days before Norris was set to retire and the news stations had to be talking about a serial killer in Helena before then.
I had found both Melanie and Sophia at a small café of on the edge of the city, and I figured maybe I could get lucky and find my third. It might have been a dumb move for a more careless individual to find several victims at the exact same place, but not for someone like me. Although the police would eventually make the connection between the victims and the last place they were seen, there was just not enough to lead them to me, specifically.
The only one who would eventually know my true identity would be Casey Norris, and that would only be once I decided I was done playing. He would learn the truth only moments before his death. I let that sweet vision linger in my mind as I drove my pick-up truck, toward the city. It wasn’t anything flashy, and it blended in nicely. Just an old, beat-up, red Ford F-150. The bed was covered in a sea of orange rust.
I had even tossed some random junk in the back that I had picked out of the trash people had set on the curb for the garbage trucks. A broken wooden desk, an old rocking chair, a full, black trash bag and one half of a wooden ladder that had snapped in two. It was perfect. Even when it was parked, no one would notice a body wrapped up in a canvas bag. It just looked like another article of garbage.
I parked the truck in the back of the coffee shop and walked around front, but stopped when I saw it. The black Jeep Wrangler with police lights attached to the grill. The vehicle belonged to the very man I had set out to destroy. The man I would lead along until I was ready to be done with him. The man I had texted just hours earlier. Detective Casey Norris. I knew the car well.
I had spent a considerable amount of time tailing it, watching it and tracking it. Everywhere he went, I went with him, except when I was hunting or, in recent news, killing. In all the months I had been following him, he had never once come to this coffee shop. Could he be closing on me? Did he know more than I was aware of? Impossible.
These thoughts penetrated my mind, but they didn’t crack my confidence. I pulled my grey baseball cap down low so that the bill sat just above my eyes and walked around the building toward the front entrance with my head tilted toward the ground. This was the kind of thing that excited me.
Getting so close to my victim that I could literally reach out and touch them, yet they had no idea how in danger they were. They never had the slightest clue. The first one didn’t even know what was going on until I took out the knife. She thought I was some sort of love-crazed stalker. She had no idea just how disposable she was, that is, until I disposed of her without hesitation.
I walked in front of the coffee shop and saw them through the big front window. Detective Norris and a woman. A beautiful, curvy, blond woman. I had never seen her before. In fact, I had never seen him with any woman except the one female detective that he supervised. I stood there in the window wondering who she was for a split-second, before realizing what I was doing. Standing idle on the sidewalk, blankly staring in at a couple would draw attention, and that wasn’t what I wanted. Not yet. I pulled open the entrance door and walked in, joining the line of patrons waiting to give their order. I waited and I watched them.
They were quite obviously a couple. They didn’t go more than a few seconds without touching, they whispered in each other’s ear as they spoke, she had her arm around his waist for the majority of the time and he gave her a light pat on the butt when it was their turn to order. I waited and as they turned to walk toward the exit, I turned in the other direction. I was one-hundred-percent certain that he had never noticed me following him, but I was going to be careful anyways. Like it or not, he was the greatest detective Helena had ever seen, and he wasn’t to be taken for a fool.
I continued to watch him as he opened the passenger door of the Jeep for her. Then he walked around to the opposite side, got into the driver seat and drove away. I was lost in thought wondering how it was possible that I had never seen them together this whole time. I was beginning to drown in doubt and anxiety when, for the first time since I had gotten there, I noticed the woman standing in line in front of me.
Short, brunette hair, cell phone in hand, and wearing a grey suit. Suddenly it dawned on me. The realization that should have been so immediate, so incredibly obvious from the very beginning on this journey. The first two kills had been nobodies. The first was a druggie and this most recent was a solo adventurist who had come to Helena for vacation on a whim.
No one would think it odd that they were missing, and no one would be searching for them. This woman, however, was a somebody. She was dignified and, by the looks of her, she held some sort of corporate job in the city. People would miss her and her disappearance, unlike the others, could not be ignored.
She ordered her drink, paid and walked toward the exit. I let her get ten or so feet down the sidewalk before I exited the coffee shop to follow. I carefully studied as she got into a blue Chevy Cobalt and waited for the engine to warm up while checking notifications on her cell phone. I kept a close eye on her as I hurried back to the truck. As fate would have it, it was perfect timing. Just as I backed the truck up and put it into drive, she pulled away from the curb. I followed. She didn’t live far away. She drove about two miles south and turned onto Knight Street.
I saw her taillights illuminate, and I slowed as she parked in front of a small, white, two story house with green shutters. I drove past it, then slowed and watched her in the rearview mirror. She got out of the car, popped the truck, pulled out a brown briefcase, slung it over her shoulder and walked into the house.
I stopped in the middle of Knight Street, looked around in all directions to be sure there were no cars coming and pulled out my small notepad. I wrote down the address and description of the street as well as the time, 5:30pm. I felt it was safe to assume this was her routine and usually the time she arrived home from work. Generally, I would have spent much more time surveilling her, but with Norris quickly approaching retirement, I was forced to speed up the process.
I had this in mind as I pulled to the right off of Knight Street and headed back toward home. If I was going to accomplish my third murder in time to catch his attention, I would need to capture her quickly, but before I could do that I would need dispose of the one I had now. I sped home as quickly as I could and took back roads to avoid any chance being pulled over.
It was just after 6:00pm when I pulled back into the drive way and I was going t
o waste very little time. I opened the garage, pulled inside and put the truck in park. I strode into the house and moved quickly to the basement door. She had been sleeping and jolted awake as I stomped down the wooden staircase. Again, she began to plea.
“Please mister, just let me go! I haven’t done anything and I swear I won’t tell anyone! Just please let me go!” she begged.
I walked past her without even looking down at her. I approached my tool bench and picked up the industrial stapler I had set down a few hours before. I walked back toward her and saw that fear fill her eyes. She I thought I’d secure them as wide open as they would go, but as I moved toward her, she managed to get them even wider. Just like before she tried to back away until the chain prevented her from moving any further.
“No! No please! I’ll do anything you want! Just please don’t! I’ll do anything!”
“You’ll do anything?” I asked quietly stopping in front of her.
“Yes! Anything! Anything you want!”
“Anything I want? I want you to open your eyes wide.”
I bent down as I spoke and grabbed her face. She struggled to back away, but the chain was tight. She had backed herself into a trap. With my left hand I held her head in place and lifted her eyelid open as I brought the stapler to it. She screamed as I stapled her eyelids open. I did the same with the other and returned to my workbench. She looked much better now.
I took out the gutting knife I had used to hunt as a boy and began to sharpen it. I loved that knife. My father had given it to me for my twelfth birthday. Of course, that was always his first instinct whenever he was around. To buy me something to get me to shut up, go away and leave him alone. I listened to her sob and plea as I ran the sharpening stone over the blade. She bellowed some inaudible sound as I approached her again and bent down, knife in hand.
“Sophia, I can see that you’re afraid, and that is okay, but it won’t change the situation you are in. Now, to help, there is a little technique that I know to help with nerves and fear.” I softly grabbed her left hand and pulled it toward the knife as I spoke. “The first thing I want you to do is take a deep breath.”
Chapter 4: Retirement
My alarm blared from my cell phone on the bedside table to my left, but I’d already been awake for hours. I never slept well, especially after I drank, and the night before had been one of those nights. I had bought a thirty-year-old bottle of Glenfiddich single-malt scotch that cost $800, which was more than my mortgage. I got it to celebrate my retirement on Friday, which was today, but I didn’t make it that long. I was having an internal struggle, and my old Scottish friend was always there to comfort me during those times.
Clear murder cases, especially ones with details like this one, had always been hard for me to turn my head from. This time, it was even harder, for several reasons. The first was that this killer was taunting me directly, which wasn’t necessarily new, but he quoted my exact instruction to new cops in training. The second reason was that the odds of closing this case by the end of the day were non-existent, which meant I would have to leave with it unresolved.
Sure, I could push back retirement for another few months until we could get this thing taken care of, but I’d been on cases that had stretched over a span of two or three years. Some never got solved. If I didn’t leave today, I might never leave, and I wanted to quietly disappear before my aging body or mind caught up with me.
I cringed as my feet hit the cold, hardwood floor in my bedroom. I gave myself a moment to adjust my eyes and went into the bathroom to get myself cleaned up for the day. As I let the hot water gently cascade over my aching back and torso, I thought about the second body we had found the day before. Same M.O. Stab wounds, eyelids stapled open and two fingers missing from each hand.
Sophia Johnson had been found in the middle of a playground. This time, it was like the killer wanted everyone to see. There was no attempt at creating a scapegoat like the first murder, the body had not been hidden away in some warehouse, and her cell phone was not left at the scene. I was still going over it in my mind as I dried off and dressed myself. Twelve minutes later I was in the Jeep and cruising toward headquarters, while I continued to go over the case in my head.
This day, even being my last, was going to be no different than any other. I was going to make certain of that. No matter how low the chances were, there was a case on my desk, and I wanted it gone. First thing on the agenda, hook up with the I.T. department and see if they had made any progress tracking the phone that had texted Melanie Green’s when I’d been holding it. I knew before I got there that they had found nothing. Technology had come a long way, but so had the skills of the people who hid behind it.
I talked through the different theories that they had for a half-hour, but in the end, we were accomplishing nothing. I scrapped it from their to-do list and sent them into a different project. They were going to get nowhere with this cell phone assignment. I walked toward my office, but stopped in the common room where I found my team of detectives congregating. Detectives Perez, Simmons, Cooper and Hall. I had selected each one personally.
That wasn’t typical, but I was very clear with Captain Connors that if I was going to lead a team it was going to be a team I knew I could trust. Simmons was a short, bald man in his early forties. He’d been on the job a good long while and it showed in his aging face. Ugly or not, I trusted and respected him, but he was the guy who, if you engaged him in a conversation, you couldn’t get him to leave you alone.
Hall was a little younger and was the quiet one of the bunch. You’d be lucky if you could get him into a conversation at all, but he was like a damn pit-bull when a case got hot. Good looking kid with a full head of jet-black hair and a cleanly trimmed beard of the same pigment. He had some percentage of Latino in him. Perez and Cooper were the youngest and had always had a spirited competition between them. They were in a heated debate as I walked in.
“Listen, it doesn’t matter if someone can fight on the ground if the fight never goes to the ground. You need to drop your jiu-jitsu crap and get some skills standing up, otherwise you’re gonna lose eventually,” Perez said.
He was a young gun, driven, aggressive and had a long performance history in a short career to prove his worth. He had also been a karate instructor during his high school years, which would explain his stance on the conversation. The problem with Perez was that he knew how good he was in his post and he wasn’t going to let anyone forget it.
I listened as Cooper rebutted.
“The fight doesn’t need to be standing up if you are able to take it to the ground where 99% of people don’t know what to do,” Cooper responded. “And I have stand up skills if I need them, I could take you on any day of the week standing or grappling.”
His comment received a unanimous chuckle from the rest of the team who knew she spoke the truth.
Hailey Cooper was probably the one of the group who impressed me the most, aside from Hunt. She was a firecracker and she wasn’t afraid to blow up in the blink of an eye if someone lit her fuse. I had pulled her through the ranks quickly after meeting her and reading her record. She had the least experience on the team, but had the most arrests under her belt and had been part of more solved cases than the rest.
The thing I loved about her the most was happening in front of me. She did not fear any man, woman or child and she sure as hell wasn’t going to back down from anyone who challenged her. Alex Perez was not so enthused by her response.
“That’s cute honey. Do yourself a favor and stick to what you know. You don’t want to find yourself having to play with the big dogs,” he responded.
“I wouldn’t be so certain about that,” I interrupted. The whole group quickly looked up. They hadn’t seen me standing in the doorway listening to the conversation.
“Wouldn’t be so certain about what boss?” Perez asked.
“I�
�ve seen her skills Perez and I’ve seen yours. If you ever make the mistake of letting her play with the ‘big dogs,’ my money says she sends your ass home looking like a scared puppy.”
He didn’t say another word on the subject, and Cooper looked satisfied with the compliment. I had them all fill me in on the respective cases they were working on and gave some instruction on each. They began to file out of the common area, until the only two left were Hunt and I. He’d sauntered in while the rest of the team were filling me in and was now sitting alone at a round table, leaning back in the chair and staring into space. I don’t think he even realized I was there. I sat down next to him and shared the silence for a moment.
“How ‘bout you kid?” I said breaking into his consciousness.
“Huh?”
“How ‘bout you? How are you holding up with our case?”
“I’m doin’ alright.”
“Okay…then what’s bothering you?”
“Nothing.” His tone was sharp.
“Come on Jimmy, I’ve known you a long time. I probably know you better than anyone else, and I damn well know when something is bothering you. Now any other day, I’d let you have an off day, but we have a hot case and I need your full, undistracted attention. So, let’s go. Out with it.”
“It has nothing to do with the case,” he said.
“Something at home? Girl troubles? What?” I asked.
“Captain wants me to take over when you leave. He said you personally recommended me.”
I almost laughed when he said that. “I did, and maybe you’re confused…that’s a promotion Hunt.”
“I know it is.”
“Okay, then why are you sitting here like someone just castrated you?”
“I’m never going to be good enough Casey. The first thing Captain said was that I have some big shoes to fill. I’m never going to be able to fill the shoes of the great Casey Norris, so why even try.”