First to Find

by Mark Gessner

  Now the blade slowed briefly as the motor bogged. It wasn't designed to power the blade through sternum, thick slabs of muscle, and organ meat. The engine drone dropped in pitch and the killer instinctively gunned it with a flick of his thumb, pushing the throttle lever further out. At the same time he forced the blade deeper into his victim, flexing his muscles and throwing his weight into it, leveraging the motor block with his shoulder blade, pulling the strap tight against his back, yanking down on the control yoke, and muscling the blade down and deeper into Jim's chest.

  Jim McChasney shook violently under the assault and collapsed backward onto the stairs. His feet hooked the stairs and his legs folded under him, powerless to lift, to run, to escape. The entire front of his chest was gone, in its place a tornado of blood, lungs, heart, blade, shirt, and bone. Jim's face and hair and the stairs and wall behind and above him were covered in a fine red spray.

  He made no sound. There was no time to make a sound, and even had there been time, he had no lungs with which to expel a breath. He never had any idea what hit him. Even if Jim had gotten a good look at his attacker, and even if he'd had time to recognize him (in all his years with the change of crews he'd supervised about two hundred seasonal workers) he'd never have been able to place the face, now twenty years older, bearded, and consumed with rage. And even if he had time to know the name and remember the details of the last day he saw his attacker, he still could not have understood the rage that consumed this man now twenty years later.

  When the blade started kicking up bloody splinters, some of which pierced him on the face, the killer cut the throttle and disengaged the blade clutch. The blade sailed cleanly back up and out of the body, before whickering to a stop. He pressed the kill switch and the engine stilled.

  How long had he been forcing the spinning blade down deeper into the chest of the corpse, he didn't know. Forensic examination of the crime scene in the next few days would reveal that the blade had penetrated the stairs to a depth of four inches, and had been moved back and forth, so that the entire middle third of the eleventh step down from the top had been completely chewed up by the blade. He listened in the deafening silence. No sound, no motors approaching. No footsteps. No one had heard. It was still early after all, and most people were still sleeping. The basement was underground, wrapped in ancient cinderblocks, and that had dampened the noise as well.

  He set the Brush Monster on the floor next to the staircase. He began to clean up. He still had a long list ahead of him, and he would be damned if he'd be caught on the second one, when there were so many more deserving fuckheads left to take care of.

  He was soaked in blood and flecked with bits of meat. He stripped out of his clothes and pulled the handle on the emergency shower. The mechanics down here worked on fertilizer and pesticide sprayers as well as hydraulics and small engines, and OSHA had made the club install a safety shower as protection in case of accidental exposure to the chemicals. The shower had never been used until now.

  This was, after all, an emergency.

  He carefully pulled the splinters from his thigh and face, working the cold water into the wounds. Must not allow an infection to interfere with the plan. He dried off with some of the shop towels. He pulled on a fresh set of clothes from his backpack and tossed his bloody clothes into the furnace, which eagerly consumed them. He grabbed a five-gallon tin of hydraulic oil from the solvent cabinet at the back of the shop. There were flammable agents in that cabinet. It would be so easy to just torch the place, but that, he knew, was the mark of stupidity. Arson was one of the easiest crimes to solve. Besides, a big fire made a lot of authorities show up very quickly, especially in the winter, and he needed lots of time to slip away quietly.

  He carefully checked behind the furnace and gathered his few personal items, stuffing them into his backpack, which he hefted onto his shoulders. He located a two-gallon metal spray canister, the kind used to apply pesticides and fertilizer, which was sitting empty next to the solvent cabinet. He poured a couple of gallons of the hydraulic oil into the sprayer, and tightened the lid. He pumped the handle to pressurize the canister. He knew that he'd spent too much time down here to be able to retrace his steps and get all the fingerprints off everything he'd touched.

  He knew that fingerprints form when oils from the skin are left on surfaces. The police use various methods to get the oil pattern to show up. Spray the area with oil, and the police can't tell which oil came from your fingers and which came from your sprayer, or so he hoped. The killer spent about five minutes carefully working his way out of the basement. He started at the solvent cabinet, sprayed the handles, sprayed the doors. He sprayed the floor, and the workbench, and his jar. He couldn't bring the jar with him, it'd weigh him down. He sprayed his entire bed area, after pulling the wadded towels off the concrete behind the furnace. He sprayed the pile of towels, then the furnace exterior. He wiped down then sprayed the Brush Monster carefully. Finally he worked his way to the base of the stairs, where he sprayed what remained of the handrail, and the walls on the way up. He sprayed the body too, and as he ascended each step, he sprayed the one he'd just left. By the time he'd gotten to the top, the basement glistened with hydraulic oil. His shoes had hydraulic oil on the soles, and he left identifiable footprints as he backed out. He sprayed these as well, until the oil had worn off his soles and they became covered in dust from the floor, which only took about ten feet of back-stepping. At that point he withdrew a paper towel from a folded stack of towels in his backpack, and wiped oil over all surfaces of the sprayer. He left the sprayer and the oily paper towel in the middle of the floor.

  He walked from the basement entrance at the back of the barn diagonally across to the man-door by the office. He peered out through the dirty glass, saw that no one was parked there. He went into the office, where he found a dirty old army surplus field jacket, probably one of Dalton's that he wore for working around the place. The one he'd worn in hadn't been beefy enough to handle the winter storm. He stuffed the old one in his backpack. He wanted to ditch the extra weight, but he mustn't leave behind any clues.

  He hadn't seen the outside world in a day. He noticed, just barely from his vantage point in the office, that the highway had been freshly plowed. He could get away on foot if necessary, without leaving a telltale trail of footprints. He must be careful to cover his tracks in this snow.

  It was a long way to Chicago, and it was going to be one cold fucking ride.

  Chapter 18

  Saturday, March 1

  THE CLOCK FLASHED 2:32 AM in red electronic numerals. Kurt had gone to bed more than an hour ago, but sleep was nowhere coming. The date was over hours ago but he still felt Judi’s warmth. She wouldn't let him go. He couldn't think of anything else. His mind raced. He kept going back to that kiss, those eyes that demagnetized his brain. Back to that kiss, back to those eyes. He had to have her. This isn't working. I'll never get to sleep thinking about her.

  He slid out of bed, grabbed his robe, and padded his way barefoot into the second bedroom office. He jiggled the mouse to wake up the screen saver, then logged on to the cache-finders.com website, and began tapping the keyboard. Anything to take his mind off her. Her lips, her kiss, her eyes.

  Stop.

  He thought about the dog those cachers found on the St. Edward's cache, maybe he'd see if he could read about that.

  At the SEARCH PHRASE prompt, he typed "St. Edwards."

  The computer came back with a single result:

  1) The Original St. Edwards Cache - Austin TX - Last Found - 2 days ago

  He clicked up the cache description page and read the comment that the Kragers had posted about finding the dead dog. It was a pretty rare occurrence to find a dead animal near a cache. He was worried that Judi would think there were dead dogs scattered all over the sport. He wanted her to like geocaching, not be afraid of it. He thought about how she'd be fun to go caching with, hiking behind her, watching her ass stretching those tight jeans. Maybe they'd
steal a kiss or two out in the forest, maybe go on a camping/caching trip out to Colorado Bend. Maybe make love for hours out under the stars or in the back of his Expedition --Oh great. Got to concentrate.

  Just for grins, I wonder how many other cachers have found dead dogs out there?

  He hit NEW to clear the search page.

  SEARCH PHRASE: "dead dog"

  Kurt's jaw dropped. He rubbed his eyes. There were almost two dozen hits in the search results. He began working down the list. He eliminated about ten that were just colloquialisms written by finders who were "tired as a dead dog," one semi-literate couple who meant to write "beating a dead horse" but wrote "beating a dead dog" by mistake, that sort of thing. About ten were reports of people who found dead dogs on or near caches. This was interesting. He found the comment that Martello had written out in California, some park called Mt. Tam. Looked like a fun cache (except for the dead dog on it). That one also had Martello's account of finding the jar of urine. Kurt found a comment describing some cachers who found a dead dog in a parking lot in Cheyenne, Wyoming, apparently a stray who had died of starvation. There were cache comments about dead dogs in Pennsylvania, Chicago, and New York, as well as Florida, South Dakota, another two in California, and Maine.

  He was as awake now as when he began. He worked down the list, reading each comment. Most were strays or accidents, where the carcass happened to be discovered on or near a cache site. Not surprising, when you consider that in some areas there is a cache every five hundred feet.

  He got halfway into the Chicago comment when he saw the phrase "jar of piss." What the hell? A coincidence? He saved off the original search results list, then refined the search, using every synonym he could think of for urine.

  This resulted in a shorter list, refined down from the original list. Now his list included the original Mt. Tam post, plus the Chicago post. When he re-read the Mt. Tam post, he noticed that there was some kind of police action at the nearby ranger station involving crime scene tape. What the hell is up with that? he thought. They wouldn't put up crime scene tape for a dead dog. A murder? Robbery? Who the hell'd rob a ranger station? Wouldn't be anything in there valuable enough to make it worth driving all the way out to the sticks. He saved the search results list.

  He opened up a new search window, on an internet search engine outside of the cache finders website. This search engine could search cache-finders.com, as well as other websites including the news media. He ran a search for pages containing the words murder, police, killing, death, body, dead dog. This returned about two hundred thousand hits, including a fair number of Grateful Dead fan sites. Don't even want to know about that, he thought. He was going to be up for awhile.

  He paged through the list of hits. There were way too many to read them all, so he just scanned page titles, mostly because it was late and his mind was starting to fade. He came across this item on the third page of results: VALLEY MAN MURDERED WITH BRUSH TRIMMER. Someone was murdered with a weed whacker? Holy shit. Sounds like a tabloid, gotta check that out. He clicked on the link and was immediately asked to register online with the Pittsburgh Post Gazette before they'd show him the article, which was in their archives from last December. He backed up to the search list. He wondered why he had to register (even if it was free) just to read the paper. They'd probably sell his email address to a spam marketer. No thanks.

  He added the synonyms for urine to the search phrase, and this cut the number of hits down to only forty thousand. He added the term cache and cut the number down to just under three thousand. Still, he was going to be here for a while. The tingling in his lips had subsided. He was on to something here, and it had completely wiped Judi from his mind for the time being. Was someone killing dogs and leaving bottles of urine behind? Was this dog killer also killing people, as the Mt. Tam comment seemed to hint?

  He found a page describing a murder in Schaumburg Illinois, on a Motorola corporate newsletter website. He compared this against the comment for the cache from Illinois and found that they were for the same day, the same place. A dead dog, a murder, a bottle of urine, near (or on) a geocache.

  What the hell was going on?

  Part II

  Second to Find

  Chapter 19

  www.cache-finders.com Geocache Listing

  Back to Nature! - Normal Sized Cache

  by MotorHed [email this user]

  Illinois, USA

  [click to download geographic coordinates and hints]

  A fine little hike in the Spring Valley Nature Preserve in Schaumburg. An oasis of nature in the middle of the big city. Cache is a clear Tupperware container with a blue lid. Initial contents: a whole bunch of cheap trinkets i bought at the mall next door, and some Motorola pens & badge retractors.

  Cache Visitor Comments:

  (78 comments total)

  [click to see previous comments]

  [77] January 17 by RebelJamesDeen [218 caches found]

  Jesus Christ there are some SICK individuals in this world. I brought my family to this place expecting a nice wholesome walk in the park. My kid literally puked when we left the trail and got within 400 feet of the cache. I don't know what the f*** is going on, but there was a dead dog, and blood everywhere! Needless to say, we didn't find the cache, because after Taylor barfed all over his new boots we turned tail and got the hell out of there. We stopped at the rest room on the way out to clean Taylor up a bit. The restrooms were locked but the lock was broken off one, and inside we found signs that the homeless were living there, including (we didn't get close enough to verify this) a jar of piss! It almost makes me retch to write this. I called 911 on my cell. They said they'd send someone out to investigate. Yeah right like I believe that's gonna freaking happen. Probably should unlist this cache until someone cleans up that god-awful mess. I think poor Taylor's probably searched for his last cache, and I know it will be some time before I go out in the woods again.

  [email this user]

  [78] January 18 by IL_Admin [1048 caches found]

  THIS CACHE HAS BEEN TAKEN OFFLINE UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE. Can the cache owner please go out there and check on this in a few weeks to make sure it's been cleaned up by the authorities? Then just email IL_Admin and I'll re-list the cache. Geez, be careful out there folks!

  [email this user]

  Did you Find the Cache? Add your own comment! [click here]

  Chapter 20

  Spring Valley Nature Preserve - Schaumburg, Illinois

  Wednesday, January 15

  THE TRIP FROM PITTSBURGH had taken far too long. The biggest problem with hopping a freight was that you never really knew where you were going to end up. Sure the train might look like it was headed west, but you could end up north, south, or east without realizing it. And that's just what had happened. He'd been sleeping for a couple hours when he realized the train had taken him north toward Erie instead of west toward Chicago. He'd hopped off the slow moving train near Sharon, Pennsylvania. Damn near busted his knee in the fall. He'd hiked through that town toward Youngstown, Ohio, then boarded what he hoped was a westbound train there. He suffered through two or three more detours, including a lengthy stop somewhere in the middle of rural Ohio for several days, during which he was certain he was either going to freeze to death or get thrown off the train. He'd finally made it to Chicago. Considering that it took him nearly a week to travel what should have been a twelve-hour drive, it might have been faster to walk.

  He'd spent the last week completing his research on his next victim. He was beginning to relish each murder. He had expected to feel some satisfaction at dealing a long-deserved vengeance to these pricks, but he hadn't expected to enjoy it so much. Maybe he'd missed his life's calling. He'd never before considered making a career of crime. Perhaps a genius can make a living at this. Evade the police indefinitely; kill at will. He'd have to consider expanding his list. But for now, there was the plan; there was Zinny. Mister Corporate Human Resources Executive Kiss-Ass Zinny Chorzempa.
The killer had plenty of time on the ride over to complete his plan. Plenty of time to relive the injustice, to dwell on it, to pick the scab, let it fester, let it ooze until his rage was unbearable.

  Zinny was too easy to find. He had a set routine every weekday. Each day after work, he'd take his dog for a walk in the Spring Valley Nature Center. The route varied slightly, but always started and ended at the same trailhead.

  The killer would have to get the dog first. That was the easy part. He'd picked up some rat poison from one of those industrial size plastic outdoor rodent baits they had deployed behind the switch house in Youngstown. He'd spent ten minutes carefully extracting the poison from the inside of the trap.