Fatally Bound

by Roger Stelljes

  “Let’s go over to the residence and have a drink and relax,” President Thomson replied, waving everyone to follow. “Mac, I want you tell me about the case. I’m getting the official line from Tom Mitchell. I want to actually know what is what.”

  For the next hour, Mac, with Sally at his side, reviewed the case with the Judge and President Thomson while sipping smooth Kentucky bourbon. Mac couldn’t help but be amused at the oddity of the president of the United States getting up out of his chair and refilling his and Sally’s glasses. President Thomson had the common touch, a man who came from humble beginnings, built a business from the ground up, worked his way up the political ladder step-by-step and through hard work, a little luck and a fair amount of political instincts, won the ultimate job. But tonight, it was obvious he wanted nothing more than to sit around with three friends, have a couple of drinks and relax, just that it was in the White House residence. Mac was sitting where Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy sat and dealt with the world’s issues. It was another bucket list experience for him. He needed to start writing these down.

  “So, Mr. President,” Mac asked, having answered questions for an hour, “how different is my version than the one you’ve been getting?”

  “It’s a blunter, more direct and less sanitized assessment of the case for sure, which I appreciate, my boy. The director tells me the case is being worked hard, which clearly from what you’re telling me, it is. They tell me they have leads and they’re following them.”

  “It isn’t a lack of effort, Mr. President, but in reality it’s actually a lack of real leads. We have an idea of what the guy looks like but as of yet, no clue as to where to look for him and we haven’t figured out what ties the women together,” Mac answered, taking a sip of his fourth drink and starting to feel the alcohol. Sally would surely be driving. “It is maybe the single most frustrating case I’ve ever worked.”

  “Is there anything you need? Are there any more resources we can apply? Is there any more that we could be doing to help?” President Thomson asked.

  Mac shook his head, “We just need that one break, Mr. President. We need luck, a mistake, a connection, something, and the case will start breaking, I think.”

  “I thought the picture you got would have led to more,” the Judge suggested.

  “Wire and I talked about that earlier, Judge. Fact of the matter is that this guy is very good at hiding. If people got a look at him, it was for a brief second and he didn’t register in any way with them. He was just a face in the crowd, a guy walking down the street, that you pass in a hallway or you see driving by in a parking lot. He’s blending, keeping his distance but he’s an ever present shadow in the lives of his victims, they just don’t sense or realize it.”

  “You will catch him though?” the president asked.

  Mac nodded. “We’ll get him, sir.”

  “You just won’t guarantee me when?”

  “Nor how many will die before we get there.”

  • • • •

  “Wallace, I got a voice mail from Helen.”

  “And?”

  “She thinks this killer, the Reaper, might be following her now. She’s seen a man meeting the general description a couple of days here now.”

  “Is she sure?”

  “No. She said it could be that she’s getting paranoid given what happened to Melissa, Janelle and Hannah. But she’s freaked. She can’t run and hiding completely is difficult with her job.”

  “What does she want from you?”

  “Protection.”

  “Protection?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you want to provide it?” Wallace asked from behind his desk, pouring himself another glass of whiskey. “I can make that happen if you want.”

  She thought for a minute, taking a sip from Wallace’s fine whiskey. “We could do that. Or,” she said as she took a long drink to finish the glass, “I have another thought.”

  “Which is?”

  “How close is the FBI to finding the Reaper?”

  “From what I understand, not very close at all. Beyond the pictures, which are pretty rough, they have no idea who he is, how he’s identifying his victims or why he’s choosing his victims. The president got the FBI to put a couple of his people on the case and what progress has occurred has developed because of them, but even with all of their work, they’re not close.”

  She considered that for a moment as Wallace filled her glass. “Logically, I’m the last target. He wants me the most so he’ll be coming for me last.”

  “Agreed.”

  “So, my thought is we can let this guy take care of the loose ends for us and when he gets to me, we let him get close and we take care of him then. We’ve got people who can do that, don’t we? People willing to do that? People willing to do more than just protect?”

  “We do.”

  “Okay then. We let him take everyone out, then we kill him and this thing will be put to rest once and for all.”

  • • • •

  He waited in his truck, an hour until showtime, and reached for his laptop. He wanted to watch the video again, to get in the proper mood, to remind him of why he was doing this. The Reaper fast forwarded to the part he needed to watch.

  He pushed play.

  There she was again, her arms bound behind her back, her legs fastened to the chair with duct tape, her mascara running down her face with the tears. The sniffling, the exhaustion apparent on her face and in the way her body drooped in the chair.

  “So what was her role in all of this?” he asked in a monotone voice.

  “No more, please no more,” the woman whimpered.

  “Answer the question,” the Reaper replied sternly. He thought back to the night he made the video and he’d slapped her three times already by this point to make her compliant. “What was Helen’s role in all of this?”

  “She said ‘we have to get out of here.’ She really pushed that.”

  Those last words, “we have to get out of here,” ran through his mind as he watched her approach her little sports car, a member of her crew following her to the car. It was clear she was wary, trying to be a little safer. It was a different guy each of the last few nights. Tonight, it would be her friend’s unlucky night.

  She’d backed the car into the parking space. Helen reached the car and fiddled in her purse with her keys. She found them and pushed the key fob. It was three steps from behind the tree. He moved when the car alarm beeped. The man, a gentleman, opened the door for her when the Reaper hit him from behind with the tire iron, putting him down.

  “No!” she screamed but the “o” was barely out of her mouth before the rag was over her mouth and he was dragging her back into the woods behind the long, untrimmed branches hanging down just off the ground.

  The chloroform did its job as he pressed it to her mouth and up against her nostrils. She had no choice as she struggled but to breathe it in.

  “We have to get out of here. We have to get out of here,” he repeatedly and angrily grunted quietly into her right ear as he pressed the rag ever harder to her mouth. “That’s what you said, Helen, we have to get out of here.”

  Those would be the last words she would hear.

  In less than a minute she succumbed to the fumes and went limp in his powerful arms. He pivoted his left foot back and violently threw her down to the ground with his right arm.

  Quickly, he moved back to the parking lot and dragged the man back between the cars to the edge of the parking lot, out of the immediate eyesight of anyone who would come out to the lot.

  He ducked under the tree and looked down at her lying unconscious on the ground.

  This time there would be no interrogation.

  He ripped the knife out of the sheath, dropped to his knees and plunged the blade into her and grunted in exhilaration as he ripped violently upward from her pubic bone.

  • • • •

  A litt
le after midnight, Sally lay with her head on his chest, her naked right leg comfortably draped over him, the sweat cooling on their bodies, their breathing regular and easy now. They didn’t talk, they just let themselves be. The only ambient noise was the air conditioner fighting to cool the house from the muggy June air.

  Mac didn’t want to move. He just wanted to soak Sally in, feel her skin on his and lightly run his fingers over her back. He was totally relaxed. His mind, for the first time in a few weeks, was totally free and at ease.

  Eventually she drifted off and he fell into a deep exhausted sleep. He could go days on end without more than four or five hours a night, but tonight and into tomorrow, he was going to catch up and recharge. He was too tired to even dream.

  But the nightmare came.

  The Dragnet ringtone woke him; it was Gesch.

  He picked up his phone, 4:47 A.M.

  He answered: “Where?”

  “Baltimore.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  “Do you have something you want to share with the class?”

  Baltimore, Maryland, 6:03 A.M.

  “I think this investigation will have the media’s full and undivided attention today,” Wire said in an understatement, as Mac pulled up to the crime scene behind Baltimore television station KBLT Channel 6. Sandy Faye, the 10:00 P.M. news anchor, was victim number four.

  Mac and Wire flashed their FBI credentials to a uniform officer who gave it a quick glance and then raised the yellow tape and let them through. He pulled forward another one hundred feet and stopped directly behind Gesch’s Suburban. They slipped out of the X5 and Mac looked to the south behind his truck and took in the scene and the media gathering. In one sense, it was a morbidly amusing scene. Channel 6 was fighting for space behind the police tape, on their own property, with all of the other local television stations. The amusement was short lived, however, as he realized Dara was right, “This is going to be a shit show now,” he remarked. “The media lost one of their own tonight. They’re going to be relentless.”

  “Gesch’s problem,” Wire remarked.

  “It’ll be ours as well,” Mac warned. He saw a familiar face in the crowd of media, a face that he unfortunately made eye contact with. And with that, he knew that he and Wire’s time operating in the background would soon be coming to an end. He turned away and looked to the north towards the portable lights and small crowd standing at the edge of the tree line and made eye contact with Gesch who nodded for them to come forward. Wire handed Mac a pair of light blue rubber gloves as they walked towards the body.

  This would be a first experience for them on the case, actually seeing the fresh crime scene and body. To date everything had been well after the fact. Gesch was about to fill him in when Mac said, “Let me go take a look first. I want to see it with a clear mind.”

  Another barrier of yellow tape had been strung well around the victim. Mac and Wire ducked underneath and approached the body. This time was different, the body was outside. Sandy Faye was lying in the woods thirty feet from the edge of the parking lot in a band of thick trees and bushes. The coroner was doing her examination, taking notes. A crime scene tech hovered around and was taking pictures.

  Mac and Wire identified themselves, “Special Agent Gesch said you two were coming,” the coroner answered.

  Mac knelt down near Faye’s body. The first thing he noticed was she was pretty, petite with black hair and olive-colored skin. She was lying in the fetal position, her arms wrapped around her upper torso, her knees pulled up to her chest. Her abdomen has been sliced wide open, internal organs visible from the vicious gash once again in the shape of the Holy Cross. The cutting was getting more vicious with each victim and Sandy Faye had been savagely gutted. The blood had drained from her body and formed a large pool in the dirt and mud around her. All of the victims were killed in the same manner but the wound this time was more vicious, almost ravenous, as if he’d plunged the knife in that much deeper. The horizontal cut, usually more superficial, this time made it look as if she’d been cut in half.

  Wire pushed in for a little closer look and gasped, “Oh my God,” she croaked, and let out a big exhale, “Oh my God. It’s one thing to look at the pictures …”

  “And another to see it like this,” Mac finished flatly. Seeing the body up close and personal was far more shocking than anything you would see in a crime scene photo. Mac was a homicide detective and would always think of himself that way. Over the years, he’d seen many forms of man’s inhumanity to man. The Reaper’s handiwork was simply another display, exceedingly horrific as it was. It was vicious, animalistic and inhumane. Yet, sadly, he thought to himself, he was unfazed by the blood and gore, desensitized and simply analytical.

  Wire, on the other hand, was not a murder police in that sense. While she’d seen dead bodies before, this was something entirely different, being this up close and personal. He took a quick measure of her. She was struggling a little bit but she kept it together. She wasn’t going to be sick. Not right now at least.

  Mac turned back to the coroner. “Do you have an approximate time of death?”

  “Body temperature says sometime between 11:00 P.M. and midnight,” the coroner answered.

  “Do we have a biblical verse?” Wire asked, having stepped back and away from the body.

  The coroner nodded and handed a plastic bag to Wire: “A proud look, a lying tongue and hands that shed innocent blood.” The note was typed onto a three-by-five note card.

  “Proverbs 6:17,” Mac replied. He’d looked up biblical verses about reaping what you sow and this was one he remembered. However, this particular choice of verse and its language struck him as having more of a message to it, or at least that was his initial gut reaction to it. From his crouched position he looked back to the parking lot and the crowd. “Is her car one of the ones on the edge of the parking lot?”

  “Yes,” the crime scene tech answered. “The sporty white Mercedes, the one backed into the parking spot. She was being careful yet she was killed anyway.”

  “Careful how?” Wire asked.

  “She had a coworker escort her out here. They found him lying near the edge of the weeds here, unconscious. He was hit in the back of the head with a tire iron. He’s at the hospital now in surgery.”

  “So the Reaper stood at the edge of the tree line in wait for her,” Wire remarked, hands on hips with her back to the body, still getting her breathing right from the sight of the victim.

  “And he doesn’t care that she has someone escorting her,” Mac continued, moving back to the parking lot and to the car door for the Mercedes. “He has the tire iron. When his back and Faye’s back are to him, he jumps from the trees there, hits him from behind right here, puts him down and is on her instantly. He might even be dragging her out of the car.” Mac slowly walked backwards, “He has the rag to her mouth and drags her back into the woods to here.”

  “He drops her where she’s lying now, goes back and drags the guy who escorted her to the edge of the tree line.”

  “So nobody would see him, at least not for a little while. At least long enough until he could finish the job on Faye and … get away.”

  Mac looked away from Wire and to the north into the woods. With the early morning sun shining, he peered straight ahead through another twenty yards of trees and could see a soccer field and farther in the distance a larger soccer stadium with a large seating pavilion and lights. Turning a little more to his left, with his back now to the body of Faye, looking more to the west, he could see a bare area with random gravel, sand and dirt piles. Wire saw where he was looking and walked around behind him and looked into the woods towards the piles. She kneeled down with her flashlight.

  Mac came up behind her. “Pretty big print,” he remarked.

  “Size thirteen or fourteen, I’d say, and there’s another one,” she pointed five feet ahead. It led towards the direction of the piles. Mac led them out, their flashlights scanning ahead, seeing a general p
ath towards the opening and the piles. Mac picked his way through the woods to the left of the path. He could see three more of the same sized prints in dirt patches, two going towards the piles, and one print towards Faye’s body. They were large prints with a boot tread of some kind.

  At the edge of the tree line they came to an opening of grass for ten yards to a dirt road. On the other side of the dirt road were additional grassy areas surrounding bare patches of the sand, gravel and black dirt piles. In addition to the soccer fields there were also baseball and softball diamonds available as part of a larger athletic complex. Also now visible to them, another hundred feet away to the northwest, was a maintenance shed which was likely for the athletic fields they could now fully see.

  By now Gesch and Delmonico had noticed where the two of them were going and were following. “What are you two seeing?” Delmonico asked.

  Mac and Wire were crouching down, looking at indentations in a section of grass just off the dirt road. He looked at Wire, “Pickup truck or SUV?”

  “Based on width of the tires and how far the tracks are apart, yeah.”

  “What?” Gesch asked.

  “He parked here,” Mac said, pointing to the indentation and then the fresh tracks on the dirt road. “A truck or SUV. He walked into the woods from here to the edge of the trees at the parking lot.” Mac stood up and walked to one of the large footprints. “These prints are fresh and go back and forth into the trees. So he parked here, went into the trees and waited for her and for her friend.”

  “Her car is backed into her parking spot,” Wire added, picking up on Mac’s thread. “Those huge trees are practically hanging over the edge of the lot. All he had to do was stand behind the trunk of one of those large trees along the edge. In the dark, dressed in all black, he was invisible. I bet he stood here a few nights first, just to get a feel for things.”

  “Right,” Mac agreed. “And he knew she had someone escorting her at night.”

  “So he knew that when she or her friend opened the door to the car, with their backs to him, he could attack.”