A Blade Away

by Jack Wallen

  Other than that, the room was just filled with junk. There were old workout benches, broken aquarium stands, complete with doll-head-filled aquariums (I knew I’d find them here somewhere), boxes stacked upon boxes, and assorted generic nothings.

  There was, however, a small stack of books that included a few choice medical texts. Chalk another one up for the cute female detective.

  “Bingo!”

  I hadn’t seen Skip walk by the door, and when I yelled, it scared about a decade off his life. He spun around, whipped out his Glock, and trained it right between my eyes.

  “Freeze, asshole!” His voice took on an amazingly un-gay, menacing tone.

  As soon as he saw that it was me, he lowered his weapon. We both laughed, albeit a bit shakily. We needed that laugh. It melted away a tension brought on by a mortal terror of what we might find here in the trailer from hell.

  “I’m assuming that ‘bingo’ is not the name-o of some farmer’s dog?” Skip asked, trying to be cute.

  “No. Bingo, as in here’s a stack of medical textbooks which includes Metastases to the Breast: The Diagnosis and Management of Extramammary Tumors, The Mont Reid Surgical Handbook, Atlas of Human Anatomy, Obstetrics and Gynecology: An Illustrated Color Text, Traumatic and Reconstructive Urology, and few more gruesome topics. It’s not conclusive evidence, but it’s the best we’ve got so far.”

  I decided it might be best to take the books to the lab with us. I never knew where a solid bit of evidence would show up. A doodle here, a note taken there. Anything that might be incriminating would get me further than nothing at this point.

  Skip went down the hall to the next room while I continued to look through the Sanford and Son-sized pile of junk. Wading through the piles, I realized that what I was seeing was mostly things that would belong to the female sex through different ages. Dolls, little girls’ makeup kits, Tiger Beat magazine, high heels, vibrators. All of the things I either had or wished I had as I was growing up.

  What struck me as odd was that there was nothing to indicate that a male had lived here. No toy soldiers, no guns, no tools, no stripped-apart stereos, no Playboy magazines. It was as if someone had stashed the leftovers of girlhood here in this room.

  It didn’t take long to hear Skip gasp and call out my name like he had been set aflame, which wasn’t much of a stretch. I leaped out of the pile I had been wading in and into the room terrorizing Skip. I was half afraid of seeing him on a chair pointing at a mouse. I’d have to kill him, and he knew it.

  When I entered, however, I completely understood his terror. The room was a Marquis de Sade dream come true. There was everything from a shock-treatment machine to a bed of nails to a stretching rack, all sorts of means to inflict torture on the human body. And from floor to ceiling, the room was covered in mirrors. The mirrors had random spots where the glass had been shattered, and in some of these spots were bloodstains.

  As much as I liked to think of myself as being an open-minded woman, what I was seeing twisted my brain inside out. It hurt to think that a human being was capable of committing such atrocities upon himself or someone else.

  And what did this say about our killer? What I had thought of as a horribly misguided sex offender now appeared to be something much more tragic.

  “This man has issues.” Skip was holding one implement of torture that looked somewhat like an anal plug. As he held it, he was turning a knob at one end and watching the insertion end’s diameter double, triple, and quadruple in size.

  “I’ve heard of these things. They’re called anal pears. They were once used as torture devices. You insert them, turn the screw and it widens inside of you.” He set the tool down. “This man is sick.”

  Skip looked at me and instantly knew what I was thinking. “I saw it on the Learning Channel, little Miss Hateful Guts.”

  He quickly put the ‘pear’ down on the table from which it came. He wiped his hands on his trousers as if he were wiping away sin itself.

  Hanging on one wall was something that didn’t fit the decor. It was a white dress made of organza and taffeta with wires running out of the sleeves and the hem. The wires ran through a small box and into a wall socket.

  “Take a look at this.” I was trying to hold back my own morbid curiosity and fascination. Skip’s eyes looked glazed. He grabbed the hem of the dress and turned it inside out to reveal the business end of the wire; it was attached to an electrode.

  “Okay. So, this guy is either into some heavy duty BDSM, or he was punishing himself for something.” Skip let the hem of the dress fall.

  I looked around the room. There were words written on post-it notes and stuck all over the bloody mirrors. ‘Dirty girl,’ ‘daddy’s little girl,’ ‘freak,’ ‘pain,’ ‘your punishment,’ and ‘thou shalt not‘ were among the bloody post-it notes. I took a close look at one of the notes. The handwriting looked like that of a child, and it was written in marker. One of the post-its, marked with ‘your punishment,’ was centered over a circular shatter pattern on one of the mirrors. Blood had soaked through the paper and dried. Using a gloved hand, I pulled the note down and bagged it for examination.

  A cold wind swept through the trailer. It creaked boards and sent a chill through my skin. I felt like I was watching a nightmare unfold before my eyes. It was like any given Marilyn Manson or Nine Inch Nails video, filled with gray, cracked imagery of Christ dying, caked dirt and blood and feces, broken glass and broken bone. I was waiting for the crunching guitars and squeals of pigs.

  I was lost, trying to justify what we were seeing. I wanted to put it away in the box in my mind that I had created as a little girl. Whenever I would come across something that threatened to question my own version of reality, I would neatly tuck the vision away in the box. Most of the time it worked, like when seeing my mother dying on a hospital bed, or hearing the shriek of my drunken father as he nearly ate me alive and threatened me with a shaking fist for absolutely no reason. Sometimes, like now, the visions were just too disturbing.

  “This shit only happens in the movies, Jamie. This can’t be real.” Skip verified that he was thinking the same things.

  “Welcome to the real Hollywood, Skip,” was all I could manage.

  Of course, the detective inside of me was still lurking around my brain somewhere, and it eventually managed to remind me that we were in the middle of an investigation. I also felt the detective inside of me rambling on about how the evidence could possibly nail this guy to the wall, if we could find him.

  “I think we’ve seen enough here.” I rattled Skip from his daze. “We’ll send someone out to identify the remains in that hole and dust the place for prints. My gut is screaming that this is our guy.” I started to leave the room.

  “My gut is screaming I’m gonna barf!” Always the clown, that Skip.

  On the way out, I grabbed the medical texts.

  When we got outside, we removed our masks and, like synchronized swimmers, wiped the sweat off our faces. “I think we have our man, Skipper. Of course—”

  “We have to find the bastard.”

  Skip had to smack me in the face with that painful reality.

  “Okay, we do have that one obstacle in the way,” I said huffily.

  Skip picked up on the attitude and was at my rescue right away.

  “Sweetie, we’ll find him. He’s leaving clues and can’t stay two steps ahead forever.” Skip had his arm around me, pulling his usual buck-up routine. It wasn’t working.

  Back in the barn, Vera Hartfield had finished with her student and was raking the shredded rubber that made up the ring floor. When she saw us enter, she waved.

  Instead of sharing all the gory details, I simply informed Mrs. Hartfield that we would have to send another unit out the following day to take samples, photos, and prints of the trailer. She promised to warn us should Chris Davies return.

  After giving up more information than we should have, Skip and I made our way to the car. Hartfield had informed us that
Davies had grown up in the trailer with his mother and father. She had actually inherited Davies from the previous owner and only knew that the handyman had grown up on the grounds and preferred to remain. The Hartfields honored the previous owner’s request and left Davies on the payroll.

  “I have to say, this is quickly becoming the most disturbing investigation we’ve ever had. And that trailer will give me more nightmares than my first date.” As usual, Skip went from zero to sarcastic in two seconds flat.

  Something was haunting me about the trailer. At first, I thought it was the torture chamber, but when I really dug deep, I realized it was the meshing of what seemed to be the child-like innocence of the dolls and clothing with the horror-like imagery of the meat hole and the implements of pain. It was as if we had just ventured into the evolution of a killer. Knowing that Davies had grown up in the trailer, it made perfect sense to me. Each room seemed to be a chunk of time from the man’s life.

  I kept these thoughts from Skip. Normally, I wouldn’t hold back on Skipper, but something was telling me that these thoughts weren’t finished cooking in my brain. So I let them stew a little longer.

  FORTY-SIX

  It was late. My eyes were dry and heavy. All I wanted to do was sleep. I returned Skip to his car downtown and stopped at the precinct to add some updates to the board in the War Room.

  The halls were silent. There were people working, but they were very quiet. I was glad; after what we had seen, I needed some peace.

  It’s not like we’re LAPD or the FBI. We’re officers in only the sixteenth-largest metro city in the U.S. Twisted, violent, psychopathic criminals didn’t hang out in smaller cities. Those types haunted New York and Los Angeles. Didn’t they? I mean, the worst we should be dealing with in Louisville, Kentucky, were racial crimes, petty theft, and vandalism. Sure murders happen here, but they weren’t serial, and they sure as hell weren’t supposed to be like this.

  I rubbed my eyes and started writing on the board. Under ‘Suspect’ I wrote ‘BDSM, self-inflicted punishment, daddy’s little girl, electroshock.’

  Under ‘Victims,’ I wrote ‘Evan Caprini.’ Sometimes I hated my job. While looking at the name, I remembered the clues. “Oh, no!” The words came out of me as soon as the thought occurred. The killer had been placing the clues inside of the victims’ genital areas. Caprini’s transformation was incomplete, so the clue was almost certainly not in the body. Where would the clue be? In the office?

  I remembered the doctor’s bag. The killer had left his doctor’s bag at the crime scene! I tore out of my office and ran down to the lab. Fortunately, there was always a ghoul or two hanging out in the lab, so I could get to the evidence. Unfortunately, the ghoul du nuit was Igor, who gave me the creeps. It was like he purposely tried to be strange.

  “Can I help you, Officer?” His voice was breathy and ragged. I didn’t want to talk to him, but I had to see that bag right away.

  “I need to see the evidence taken from the Caprini killing today,” I said, after I had cleared my throat of all the ick that seeing Igor had brought up.

  He knew he creeped me out. “One moment, please.” His voice contained an overdose of B-movie horror.

  I leaned against a table and put both hands over my face. It was bad for the skin, I knew that. My face still had its youth with very few wrinkles and no spots or blemishes. Unless I caught this psycho soon, that would certainly change.

  Igor quickly returned with the box containing the evidence belonging to the Evan Caprini murder scene. He set the box down on the table with a careless thud and gave me a nod. “Enjoy,” was all he said as he turned back to whatever he had been doing.

  Inside the box silently rested the fragments that had witnessed the last vestiges of Evan Caprini’s life. Among those fragments was a doctor’s bag, which had been carried by the killer himself. Prime evidence. I gloved myself and pulled out the black leather bag. It was heavy and smelled of urine.

  I carefully set the bag down and, holding my breath in frightful anticipation, opened it. Inside were what looked to be standard surgical instruments: scalpel, scissors, suture, clamps, vials, etc. But there were also a few not-so-standard elements. There was a stained white bra and a pair of old, stained panties. The stains on both the bra and panties were not readily identifiable but looked as if they were blood splatters. The next out-of-the-ordinary item was a leather ball-gag, more evidence to back up our BDSM theory. The last item was a small plastic baggie. When I saw the contents of the baggie, my heart skipped twelve beats. I felt the corners of my mouth sag, my brow furrow, and my fist reflexively hit the table.

  Inside the baggie were the remaining clues the killer would have inserted into the bodies of the victims. They contained the only way we could possibly save the next victim. Then again, it didn’t really matter. I could reach my hand in the baggie and pull out a random clue. Then what? Tell that person that at some point a psycho was going to attempt to force them through a sexual reassignment surgery and they would die?

  My head dropped. My heart ached. I wanted this bastard locked up so badly it hurt. “Fuck!”

  I was too tired to think. I was staring at the jumble of words in the baggie, and they were making no sense. I had to go home and get some sleep. I looked at the clock; it was after midnight.

  “Mother of God, it’s late,” I said to no one. I replaced the contents of the doctor’s bag, put it back in the box, and walked it back to Igor.

  “Find anything interesting?” Igor said with his best ‘Dracula’s little helper’ grin. I wanted to think he was being sincere, but the creep factor kept me from believing it.

  “Too much, Igor. Too much,” I said as I handed him the bag.

  “I didn’t think you could ever have too much evidence.” His grin was replaced with a deadpan look. Maybe he was trying to be kind. I was almost touched.

  “I guess we were just witness to a first, Igor.” I responded, and then walked away.

  I would return in the morning with some sleep under my eyes and some caffeine in my blood. Maybe an idea would smack me across the face in the morning.

  I went back to my office and dropped off the books I had taken from the killer’s trailer. When I turned around to leave, Craig Wayne was standing in the doorway. He smiled, and instantly, my heart dropped into my stomach.

  I suddenly realized that I had it bad for that man. How could I not? He was perfect.

  “How are you holding up? I’ve been worried about you.”

  Yes, he was perfect.

  “I’m doing okay. I mean, considering my first homicide case happened to be a serial killer, and I am getting no closer to nailing his ass to the boards than I was before I had even heard of the case.” I slowly slid into a seated position on my desk. “Sometimes I feel like I have no idea what I’m doing.”

  Craig stepped into my office. I could smell his cologne; I thought it might be Pi. “Jamie, this would be a tough case for anyone. But you nail this one, and that promotion is in the bag. You’re good, Jamie…”

  I wasn’t sure if he was saying that just to try to get me in bed, not that I was complaining, of course.

  “Please, continue,” I joked.

  He smiled.

  I melted.

  “You need a break.” He came over and gently took my hand. We were both victims of high school nerves, as was apparent by our sweaty palms.

  “Let’s go grab a drink.”

  Hello, heart? Are you there somewhere in my feet? If so, I need you now!

  “I would love to, but I’m beat. Can I have a raincheck on that? I promise the next time you ask, I’ll say yes.”

  I was afraid he was going to take offense at my semi-rejection. He was looking at the ground but still holding my hand. My heart was pounding as if it was about leap into arrhythmia any minute. I wanted to pull him to me and feast on him, make supper out of his body and his soul, drink his every drop, and have him in every way I could possibly think of.

  But instead
, I had asked for a raincheck. Fortunately, he smiled and agreed. It must have been obvious I wasn’t lying about being beat.

  He left my office with a wink and a smile. I nearly grabbed my purse and screamed, “What the hell.” Instead, I just loped to my car with a little more spring in my step when I realized that Craig Wayne, aka The Man Of My Dreams, had just asked me out on a date.

  I put myself on autopilot, and before I knew it, I was in my bed with Raja Kitty curled up next to me. With the loving sounds of Raja Kitty’s purr in my ears and warm thoughts of Craig Wayne filling my libido, the images from the trailer slowly faded away.

  FORTY-SEVEN

  I was awakened by cat whiskers tickling my face. Raja Kitty had a wonderful way of saying it was time to feed her. I opened my eyes to see her adorable black-and-white face staring at me.

  “Extreme kitty!” I giggled because her face looked enormous so close to mine. I sat up and scooped up the ball of fur. “Raja, I have to say that if it weren’t for you and Skippers, I’d probably have lost my mind by now.” I gave her a kiss and got out of bed.

  As we neared the kitchen, Raja Kitty’s purr picked up a few decibels. She knew what was in store. At least one of us did. I envied the routine and monotony of her life. I wanted that for myself. To be able to predict the few things that could possibly happen within the course of a day, to know exactly where the boundaries were, that would be the perfect life for me.

  I scooped out some kibble and set the purr-beast down so she could enjoy her breakfast.

  A hot shower was definitely in order for me. After the sweatbox we went through last night, I was ripe for the picking. I was also covered in stubble since I hadn’t shaved in a couple of days. My legs were starting to look like they belonged on the Lilith Fair tour.

  As the warm water was falling like summer rain over my head, I couldn’t help but drift off thinking of Shannon. What was up with that? Why was I suddenly having such overwhelming feelings for our friendship? I’d never doubted my own sexuality, and I really didn’t have reason to doubt it now. Could it be a case of some repressed need to be taken care of? Without a mother alive, it was certainly possible that I would need that type of caring, nurturing love, the love I couldn’t get from a man in my life.