Twisted

by Steve Cavanagh

  Cities are not quiet. At least they’re not supposed to be.

  He waited. Another ten seconds. No sound of footsteps on the stairs. He knocked again. Waited. Stared at the peephole.

  The clank of metal on metal and the door was wrenched open fast.

  At first, Daryl thought he had imagined the door being opened. Or maybe there was another door on the inside, because only tips of light at the uppermost corners of the doorframe shone into the dark. He shielded his eyes, blinked and looked again.

  This time the image in front of him made sense.

  The door had been opened by the biggest man Daryl had ever seen. His girth extended beyond the doorframe. This man would have to walk sideways to come outside. He looked up, and readjusted his thinking. Not only would the man have to shimmy in sideways, he would also have to duck. The top of his head was shielded from view by the top of the frame. Daryl could only see a massive jaw.

  The mountain bent his knees, looked at Daryl and said, ‘You Daryl?’

  Only then did Daryl notice the man was holding something. A fist that could’ve enveloped Daryl’s entire head held a sawed-off shotgun. In this man’s hand, the shotgun looked like a kid’s toy.

  ‘Ye-yeah, I’m D-Daryl,’ he said, making sure to inject some nervous tension into the sentence, breaking up the cadence in an affected stutter. Daryl didn’t want this man to believe he was a threat of any kind.

  ‘Then get the fuck in here, you late,’ said the man.

  He stepped back and to the side, and Daryl managed to squeeze past him. As he did so, he saw the glee in the man’s eyes. The man enjoyed inspiring fear in others. Daryl played along, for now. He would pretend to be afraid. It put men like this at their ease.

  Beyond the man was a short hallway that led to a set of stairs. A bare light bulb hung high above the staircase. He heard the door slam shut as he ascended the stairs and then, moments later, he felt the vibration from every step the giant took up the stairs. The thud of each footfall shuddered the staircase and pulsed into Daryl’s body – shaking the bones in his feet.

  At the top of the stairs he found an open door on the right shielded by a curtain. He pushed it aside and stepped into a cloud of smoke. In front of him he saw somebody sitting on a couch – a man with long dirty hair wearing a dirty silk bathrobe that lay open, exposing a patch of sweat on his chest. Beneath the robe he wore canvas shorts, and flip-flops on his pale feet. The smell of weed, sweat and booze was almost too much for Daryl.

  He thought about taking a step back behind the curtain, just to get a breath, when he felt a hand the size of a hubcap on his back, pushing him further into the room. Looking around, he saw a digital camera mounted on a tripod and pointing toward an empty stool. A big-screen plasma TV had been pointed toward the man on the couch. Daryl wished that the man on the couch had pointed himself toward a shower a bit more often. The stench of sweat came again, stronger this time, as the man got up from the couch and moved to the farthest corner of the room. At this end, beside the large window overlooking the street, there was a bank of monitors and four or five computer towers. There were black cables snaking to the floor, some of which led across the room to another desk, upon which he saw half a dozen printers and two scanners.

  ‘I’m Bunny, you’re late,’ said the man in the silk bathrobe as he began to tap at the monitor screen.

  ‘I-I’m sorry I’m late,’ spluttered Daryl.

  ‘SIT DOWN!’ screamed the giant behind him. Daryl jumped, held up his hands then immediately moved toward the couch.

  ‘No, not there. On the stool,’ said Bunny.

  Daryl stopped, moved toward the stool and sat down facing the camera while Bunny and the giant exchanged a low murmur of laughter. He knew some people thought causing fear in others was funny. Something that had never amused Daryl. He never found it funny.

  ‘Take off your jacket. Sit up a little bit, don’t smile, and look at the camera,’ said Bunny.

  Daryl followed the instruction, placing his jacket at his feet. The flash on top of the camera clicked, charged and then clicked again.

  ‘That’s fine,’ said Bunny.

  While Bunny worked on the computer, Daryl looked around the room, and tried to ignore the huge, threatening stare from the giant. Every time his eyes scanned that side of the room, he saw the giant looking at him like a great white shark looks at a seal.

  Daryl leaned forward and fixed his eyes on the floor.

  After a few minutes, one of the printers began to whirr and click and a small sheet of plastic spat out of the back.

  Bunny got up, moved to the printer and began to break the plastic. It looked to Daryl like there was a perforated break in the center of the plastic, which Bunny was pushing through. Once he’d worked the center of the pink plastic card free, he took a pair of scissors and snipped off any jagged corners. He placed the card in a black wallet and turned to face Daryl.

  ‘Pay the man,’ said Bunny, gesturing toward the giant, who stepped forward on cue and stood beside Daryl, looming over him with that sawed-off shotgun held low.

  Hesitating at first, Daryl leaned back on the stool, dove into his pocket, removed a roll of dollars wrapped in an elastic band and dropped it into the massive hand. The big man unwrapped the roll, counted and checked the bills before wrapping them up again and nodding toward Bunny.

  Bunny opened a drawer, took out a US passport and bundled it together with the wallet and handed them to Daryl. He examined Bunny’s work and could find no fault with it.

  ‘You had a lot of balls, coming here,’ said Bunny. ‘You’d best not come back. Don’t matter who you know that got you in the door. Don’t come back no more. You hear? I see you again I’m gonna kill you.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Daryl, putting the wallet and passport in his front jeans pocket and then holding his hands up, placating the men looming over him. The giant and Bunny smiled at one another. Power was intoxicating. Daryl leaned forward to stand up, as he did so he let his hands sweep low as if to pick up his jacket, but instead his right hand brushed against his ankle and then, with his weight over his feet, he stood up.

  He stared up at the giant and waited for half a second. Just long enough for the big man to meet his eyes. Soon as those huge eyeballs met his own, Daryl’s right arm flashed forward.

  The big man’s expression changed. His smile died. His eyes grew wider and the cavernous mouth opened silently. With his left hand, Daryl casually took the shotgun from the giant.

  Bunny didn’t have time to react to Daryl’s sudden movement. He didn’t know what had happened until the giant’s round stomach opened and the first roll of gray intestine emerged from the wound, and flopped out of the giant’s shirt like an alien.

  The sight was so horrific, so visceral, that Bunny was instantly paralyzed. His gaze transfixed on the big man’s stomach erupting. He didn’t even see Daryl pointing the shotgun at his head.

  ‘What are you doing?’ said Bunny, his eyes still fixed on the intestines slipping from his partner’s wound. It seemed like a stupid question.

  ‘Research,’ said Daryl. Bunny didn’t look at Daryl. Didn’t see the slab-dead expression on Daryl’s face as he pulled the trigger. Bunny’s face disappeared.

  Daryl swept the gun to his right and put the other shot into the giant’s scream.

  He dropped the shotgun, wiped the blood off his blade and replaced it in his ankle strap. There was blood on his shirt, jeans and boots. Not much, all things considered. He put on his jacket, which had survived the spatter, then stepped over Bunny’s twitching corpse.

  Two blasts from a shotgun was a sound as regular and routine as bird song in this neighborhood. No one would call the cops. Even if they did, Daryl suspected the cops probably wouldn’t show up.

  Though he probably had all the time in the world, he worked quickly, ripping off the aluminum covers of the desktop computers and removing every hard drive. Once he was finished, he found three bottles of developing fluid and other flamm
able chemicals in the bathroom and took his time soaking the entire apartment. He then found a cigarette lighter lying beside a bong in the corner. He lit some printing paper, tossed it and watched the room go up in flames.

  Last things he took before he left were the camera and the five grand he had given Bunny.

  He changed at the back of the car, putting his bloody clothes into a black garbage bag. There was a wheel brace in the trunk, which he used to destroy the hard drives. He put the remnants in the garbage bag along with the pieces of the camera that he could find. The memory card in the camera he snapped in two. It all went into the bag.

  Daryl found a couple of homeless guys drinking around an oil drum twenty blocks away. He gave them fifty dollars each, told them to go find another spot. They left, and Daryl dropped the garbage bag into the drum and stayed for a few minutes, making sure it burned up real good. He thought about the look on the giant’s face when he’d split open his belly. Some men would become aroused at such a sight. Others would glory in the savagery, the power of taking life. Most psychologists put it all down to sexual desire – especially the influence of violence, or pornography, or abuse during puberty.

  Daryl had never been abused, and his parents couldn’t have been nicer people. He’d been a good football player, an A-grade student and an obedient son who was popular in school. He’d dated girls, gone to parties, made memories and done everything a young man could want to do. Apart from drinking. Daryl never saw the attraction of alcohol. He did take a glass or two of wine nowadays, but never more than that. The thought of not being fully in control seemed so repellant to Daryl.

  He felt the flames on his face and tried not to breathe in too much of that odor of burning plastic and thought about the men he’d killed that evening.

  In truth, when Daryl murdered those men, he’d felt absolutely nothing at all.

  It had been the same the first time he’d killed someone. All those years ago.

  Fifteen years old. His weekly visit to the local library. His parents had brought him once a week, from a young age, and he’d fallen in love immediately. He could take out books, any books he liked, from the children’s section, read them and then bring them back two weeks later. For free. He’d read the entire children’s section by age nine. At fifteen he wandered into the non-fiction section with interest for the first time.

  He wasn’t interested in space, or science. People – that’s what he loved. He sometimes felt like Holmes did – that people’s behaviors and mannerisms could be examined, determined and predicted if you paid enough attention. He stopped at one shelf, labeled ‘True Crime’. He picked the first book off the shelf. It had a picture of a woman on the cover. She was scared. Tied to a chair. The ropes binding her were tight, stretching across her midriff, just beneath her chest.

  He opened the book and found more photographs. Men. Women. Dead. Mutilated. Shot. Stabbed. Beaten. As well as the photographs there were descriptions of the crimes. Analysis from cops and psychologists (or head doctors) as his mom called them. He didn’t like the head doctor. His mom insisted he had to go. She said he sometimes had a problem making the right choices. On Mom’s orders he’d been a few times to talk about what he’d done. Earlier that summer he’d corralled a herd of ants coming out of their nest in the back yard, and burned them in a small fire. Then he’d set fire to the nest.

  His mom had warned him not to do it. That he shouldn’t harm any creatures. And it wasn’t the fact that he had disobeyed her which had made his mom so mad. No, it was that he had felt absolutely nothing. When his dad found the neighbor’s dog buried in the back yard, that had been the catalyst for sending him to the head doctor. His name was Dr. Carson. He was easy to fool. All Daryl had to say was that he felt sorry for the ants. And he felt sorry for the dog. Remorse, Dr. Carson called it. He pretended to feel all of those things. His parents kept sending him until he left home, and he kept on pretending, and kept on lying to Dr. Carson, never revealing the truth, especially about Isabella.

  Isabella arrived at his school a week before his sixteenth birthday. She was introduced to the class by the teacher, and told them all her father was in the army. He got transferred around a lot, and this was her third school in the United States. He liked her long blonde hair and her smile. He wrote a story about her that night, his first, and kept it hidden from his parents, under his mattress. The other girls were jealous of the newcomer. A week after she arrived at school he met her, alone, by chance, in an abandoned lot down by the old hospital. He told her he was looking for a cat. There were posters all around the neighborhood from locals who had lost cats. There seemed to be an epidemic. One owner promised a reward for the safe return of her cat, a ginger Tom called Bernard. He persuaded Isabella to come with him to the old hospital, so they could look for it together. Isabella found Bernard, and a good many other cats in various states of decay, in the basement incinerator of the old hospital. She was a little older than him. She didn’t scream like he expected her to. She just stared at it, in disgust. Then turned and looked at him, and that disgusted look remained on her face.

  ‘I wrote a story about you, Isabella,’ he said.

  ‘Let’s get out of here, this place is creeping me out,’ she said.

  ‘Don’t you want to know what happened in the story?’

  She moved away from the incinerator, nervous, on the verge of panic, and said, ‘Sure, let’s just get out of here.’

  ‘But the story happens in here. You can’t leave. Not ever.’

  The whole neighborhood searched for Isabella for weeks. Most of the search took place on the highway and the swampland surrounding it, because that’s where he told the police he last saw her, talking to a long-haired man in a red truck parked by the side of the road.

  They never found her, and the cats stopped going missing in the neighborhood. For a while, at least.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  The station house was finally empty past midnight. Dole told the dispatch clerk, Sherry, to leave him in peace and that he should not be disturbed under any circumstances. After he’d said this, he felt bad about it, went back to the desk and talked to Sherry again, telling her that if the building was under attack, or on fire, maybe she should come and disturb him for that, but pretty much everything else could wait and preferably could be dealt with by the night shift, currently out on patrol.

  The investigation had yielded a lot of new information in the last twelve hours. And Dole had not yet assimilated all of it. It would take a while to percolate in his brain. If anything, he had more questions now than answers.

  A yawn pulled his jaw open, closed his eyes, and when it was done he kept his eyes closed and leaned back in his chair. He could sleep there, no problem. It wouldn’t be the first time a cleaning lady had woken him at six a.m. with a vacuum cleaner.

  ‘Go home,’ he told himself.

  Nodding his agreement, he got up and made his way out of the building to his personal vehicle – a seventeen-year-old Toyota pick-up with two hundred thousand miles on the clock and no intention of giving up.

  If only he could be more like his Toyota, he thought.

  By the time he pulled in to his driveway his right knee was really barking. Slowly, he worked it free of the pedals and got out of the vehicle. The little house in Spring Hills, a working man’s suburb of Port Lonely, lay dark and neglected. The house could do with a new paint job, a new boiler and if it wasn’t for his neighbors mowing his lawn he would have to fight his way to the front door with a machete.

  His key slid into the lock, and he put his shoulder to the door to open it. The wood had swollen in the summer heat. Taking a quarter-inch off one side of the door with a sander was still on his list of priorities, just like last summer and the summer before.

  He tossed his keys on the kitchen table, turned on the lights and made himself a sandwich with pastrami, pickle and mayo. A bottle of beer helped it go down that bit faster. Too tired to switch on the TV, or read a book, he went
straight upstairs, brushed his teeth, stripped and got into his cold bed.

  A half-hour later he was still tired, and still unable to sleep.

  He reached out an arm and found his cell phone on the nightstand. Disconnecting the charging cable he turned over in bed and brought up the image that Deputy Bloch had taken from Paul Cooper’s laptop. The two exhibits she’d talked to Bloch about earlier. The messages.

  He read them through, let the phone fall on the bed and ran every piece of evidence through his mind.

  The messages from Linzi were chilling. Here was his Jane Doe, chatting to Paul Cooper, arranging for the meeting that would kill her and send her body over the ridge, into the water where he’d found her all those years ago. He still didn’t know anything about Linzi. Bloch had spent the rest of the evening with him, running database searches on missing persons. Each database had a different search function. Some you could search under ‘Linzi,’ some you had to search under the initial ‘L’. None of them looked like the woman he’d found dead. They would keep looking.

  Tomorrow Bloch said she would search Facebook. Linzi and LeBeau had met through a Facebook group, maybe some kind of creative writing thing. The second message to LeBeau had been from someone who knew Linzi was missing, and knew LeBeau’s real name was Paul Cooper. Why didn’t this person report Linzi missing? Were they still alive?

  And why did Paul Cooper feel the need to hide behind a pen name?

  It felt like he was close to something. He just needed to make a little leap forward, and he was there.

  Deputy Bloch had searched the laptop and apart from the images, she’d found no evidence of any files relating to LeBeau, no manuscripts, no social media, nothing to suggest he was about to try and murder his wife, nothing incriminating and certainly nothing illegal, but the internet history did make interesting reading.

  Paul Cooper did a lot of research on sociopaths, and psychopaths. He regularly checked out the FBI’s Most Wanted list, and read a lot about the Bureau’s Behavioral Analysis Unit – the department that tracked and hunted serial killers.