First to Find

by Mark Gessner

  "Huh?" he said.

  "I think we'd better stop," she said, breathing heavily.

  "But..." he said. "What happened? We were getting along so well."

  "Yeah, too well. It's too fast. I'm dizzy. Here's your shirt. I'm very sorry," she said, "It's late. I think maybe you'd better go now before I change my mind."

  "Will I see you again?" he asked.

  "Yes. I mean--I want to see you again. I just think we're moving too fast." she said, slipping her shirt back on.

  Chapter 34

  March 4

  THE KILLER SLIPPED OFF his backpack, set it on the rock, and unzipped it. He checked his equipment carefully. He'd hitched a ride up state highway 183 to the new Wal-Mart out on Ranch Road 620, and there he'd found everything he needed. One stop shopping. Two hundred feet of nylon rope, several solid rubber stretch cords (Amazing! Stretches to over 3 Feet!), a small roll of heavy duty picture hanging wire (10 gage, solid), a six-inch folding serrated hunting knife, an LED keychain light, a seven ounce can of Startz brand Extra Strength Engine Starting Fluid, a butane lighter, a spray can of black automotive primer, a couple bottles of Gatorade and water, some sports energy bars, a pack of beef jerky, and a roll of high-strength black duct tape. He'd paid cash. His scarred face would stand out, but after midnight at Wal-Mart, he wouldn't be the weirdest looking dude in the store. His image would appear on the security cameras, but it was a risk he had to take. They wouldn't be looking for him anyway.

  He climbed up on the rock ledge, sat down and tried to catch his breath. The walk from his Bull Creek hideout in the old rusted car had taken him a half-hour and he needed a chance to rest before he executed his latest plan.

  The building was a cheap four-story glass office building of the type that scarred central Texas like a real-estate melanoma. By day it was impossible to see in through the heavily tinted glass, but at night, from outside with the offices lit up, it was easy to see what was going on in an entire side of the building all at once. From his vantage point in the adjacent juniper forest, The killer could see everything in the fourth floor on his side, all the way down to the ground level.

  The killer waited at the back door. Smokers had to go out the back loading dock door to smoke; it wasn't permitted up at the front of the building or inside. Even at this late hour, well past nine-thirty P.M., a couple of engineers were out at the employee picnic table smoking. The table was two hundred fifty feet away from the door, putting them just outside the two hundred feet legal smoking limit. They'd propped the normally-locked door open with a small rock, in violation of both common sense and company security policy.

  The air conditioning plant and other equipment near the loading dock made a hell of a racket, even late at night. One of the units had a compressor that was about a month past due on maintenance. When running, it sounded like one of those cheap Japanese dirt bikes with a hole in the muffler.

  The smokers were bitching about their jobs, having to work late, and fantasizing about winning the lottery. Of course neither of them actually played the lottery, so they really hadn't paid for that particular fantasy. He sneaked up to the propped door from behind the dumpster. He glanced back toward the smokers to be sure they were not looking his way, and then slipped in the door. He slipped in from the side to avoid the stare of the security camera.

  He ducked into a fire stair on the ground floor. This was the risky part. He mustn't be caught here. But it was late, there were only a few die-hards left and those that weren't smoking were in their cubicles or lab facilities, busy working and trying to get home by a decent hour (defined as before midnight). He had already made the preliminary phone calls to the receptionist to find out which office the victim was in.

  He knew from previous experience that the victim, an incurable workaholic, would be working alone late. He ducked into the fire stair, hid behind the landing and listened. The smokers would be returning and he didn't know where they would go. He heard the back door open and the smokers return, laughing and coughing. They passed right by the fire stair door and punched up the elevators.

  Chapter 35

  STALNAKER REACHED INTO THE cabinet behind his desk and pulled out his bottle of Springbank. The label looked like a cartoon, as if some bored high-school kid had printed it off on his color ink-jet printer and glued it to the bottle with Elmer's Glue. The packaging was amateurish, but the juice was good, there was no question about it. At a hundred forty bucks a bottle, it had better be. Springbank was the finest single malt Scotch whisky money could buy. Stalnaker reached into the file cabinet, pulled out a tall glass, and then poured himself a double. The light aroma of coconut filled his nostrils. He licked his lips in anticipation.

  The amber liquid warmed his tongue and throat. When he had swallowed and exhaled through pursed lips, the scotch hinted bitter chocolate. Ah, the finish. Long and pleasant. That was what you bought an expensive single malt for, he thought, though Stalnaker hadn't actually purchased this bottle. He'd swindled it off his company's assistant controller, a deliciously sexy thirty-something blonde named Jennifer. Jennifer's husband worked in field sales, and unlike most salesmen, he wasn't a drinker. Never touched the stuff. A customer had presented him with the bottle as a thank-you gift for arranging a deal with particularly favorable terms. Stalnaker had been down in finance rapping Jennifer up, trying to finagle a particularly challenging piece of inter-office ass, when he spied the bottle in a shopping bag under her desk. Her husband had given it to her to get rid of. Jennifer knew at least two people in the office who would appreciate a free bottle of scotch, though she'd been deceived by the cheesy label and thought it was some cheap brand. Stalnaker had offered her sexual favors in exchange for it, which she flatly declined, but gave him the bottle anyway, happy to be rid of the lecherous bully and the bottle alike.

  His chest and head warmed by the scotch, and with his crotch still tingling from his marketing assistant Darlene's expert servicing, he clicked his mouse and brought up last quarter's marketing report.

  Stalnaker was a vindictive sonofabitch. Many in the company would say sociopathic, though no one would dare say it out loud, even off premise. He had bullied his way to the position of CEO in a short five years, serving for three years as Director of Marketing before he blackmailed a board member into demanding the previous CEO step down. The old bastard didn't even know what hit him.

  At last the bitch had gone home. Darlene was a great fuck, a real desktop bucking bronco, but lousy company. She had a shrill voice and though she had been beautiful (actually stunning) years ago, her face was now leathery. Ten years beyond her prime.

  Stalnaker's rule on inter-company sexual relations was simple. Fuck him when he wanted you to, then leave quietly, and you might keep your job. He'd tease you with a token promotion (but you'd never see it). Refuse any advance, no matter how perverted, and you were history. You'd never see the knife coming. In short, he maintained prison rules. It didn't matter if you were good looking or not, and it didn't even matter if you weren't female. He wasn't gay, he just used any means possible to dominate, to intimidate. Everyone in the company knew about his sexual harassment, but it was never called that. In a big corporation it would have been difficult (but not impossible) to operate this way, but in a small company a sociopath like Stalnaker could rape and pillage with impunity. In a better economy, he might have had some difficulty retaining people, but in this economy, it was either take some harassment from the top dog every once in awhile, or lose your gig.

  Darlene was no fool. She knew that Stalnaker was just using her, but she'd been secretly working a trap to blackmail him, which would take another few months to pull off. Another few months of sucking his smelly little pecker under the desk, another few months of letting him grab her ass. A small price to pay to become Director of Marketing within a year. The position would more than triple her salary. She'd finally live in six-figure territory, with stock options, a corner office, and all this without an MBA. She hated Stalnaker. Despis
ed him. Detested him. Wanted to kill him. It was all she could do to keep from biting his crooked pencil-dick off each time he shoved it in her mouth. Watch him bleed to death right there in his overstuffed executive leather chair. But in the end it would be more satisfying to have him promote her, then later force him to resign in disgrace. He'd be ruined. She'd want him to be around to experience that, knowing that she (a mere woman, one of his many corporate fuck-toys) had stuck the knife in his back and twisted it hard.

  Darlene might have been lousy company but Stalnaker had to hand it to her, she was a damn good marketer. She had an aggressive take-no-prisoners guerrilla edge. Her forecasts were always right on the money. He couldn't find fault, and he tried. Her strategy was top-notch, and she could work a trade show floor like a cheap hooker outside a plumbing convention. She'd get out on the floor, outside the booth, smiling and greeting customers like they were her best friends. She wouldn't sit on her hands and chitchat like the other marketing managers. She was sharp on the technology too, and the customers couldn't stump her, though many tried. As a result, she brought in the leads, and good qualified leads, not the usual tire kicker shit his other marketing fuckups brought in.

  Still, he'd consistently seen to it that her employee performance reviews were never more than satisfactory. Rate your people too high, and you'd lose them. You had to keep them working harder. One way to do that was to bully them, and a really good way to bully them was to give them merely satisfactory reviews. Give a top-performing employee a bad review and she'll look for work elsewhere. Give her a satisfactory review, and she'll work twice as hard next quarter to try to ratchet the review up a notch. Which of course never happened. If you ever let the mule actually eat the carrot, he'll stop pulling the cart.

  Chapter 36

  AFTER A FEW MINUTES of quiet, the killer ascended the stairs to the next landing. Still quiet. His initial recon of the building indicated that there was no one on the first and second floors in this end of the building. The third floor had two offices lit up on this side and you never knew who would take the stairs instead of the elevator down to take a smoke. People were crazy about their health sometimes. He knew some assholes who would go to McDonald's and order a Big Mac, fries and a Diet Coke, thinking that they were eating light. Some of the smokers might have the same idea, keep smoking like a fiend, but then take the stairs and you won't die. Stupid shits. You always gotta watch out for stupid shits. The killer kept himself in good physical condition, and except for an occasional swig of Old Granddad and a recently developed taste for murder, he had no vices.

  He stopped at the landing to the fourth floor. Digital Fabrication Systems Inc. What a crock of shit. He knew that Stalnaker would be in the fifth office down, and that the other offices on this end of the hall were dark. He'd assume they were empty. This was the hard part. He did not know where his victim was. It had been twenty minutes since he'd seen him through the window in his office. Now he took the chance. He pushed open the fire door.

  The killer knew from long experience that most people before leaving work for home will hit the can, just to reset their pee-clock for the road. He knew that Stalnaker lived way out in Lakeway, a good twenty mile drive, and that he'd want to stop off to drain the main vein before bailing. He also knew from having worked with the guy before that Stalnaker would probably knock off no later than eleven P.M. So that gave him some time to set up. He pushed into the hallway, and then crept a few feet past the first darkened office. The door was open, and no one was in there. He noticed the lights on in the office down the hall to the left. That was Stalnaker's office. He could hear clicking and some light country music coming from the office. It was so late that even the cleaning crew had gone home for the night. He pushed past the janitor's closet and into the door marked MEN.

  The lights were off in the men's room, a lame attempt at corporate cost savings, even though anyone with a high school education knew that it cost more to switch a fluorescent light on than it consumed all day if just left running. He left the lights off so as not to draw attention, and slipped into the handicap stall. He clutched his LED key light in his left hand, and slung his backpack over the right shoulder. By the ghostly circle of LED light, he could see that the bathroom had been meticulously cleaned, but that some shithead had used the stall and hadn't flushed. Probably that bully Stalnaker, asserting his dominance over the place, marking his territory. His victim's office was only two doors away; he dared not chance a flush. He'd have to deal with the smell, and the loss of a prime place to sit. He hung his backpack on the hook, then sat on the floor furthest from the commode, pulled out the bottle of Startz engine starter and one of the tube socks, loosened the cap from the bottle, and waited.

  In the total darkness he waited, ether at the ready. He checked his watch, and the little glowing face said 10:37. Wouldn't be long now. He went over the plan in his head, step by step. There were only a few places where it would be tricky, but he felt he had a good grip on what needed to be done. The motherfucker would pay, that was for sure. And this one would be done right. The killer would enjoy every agonizing minute of it, and Stalnaker would suffer a long, long time.

  Fifteen minutes later, the door opened and startled him. A pie-wedge of yellow light from the hall expanded into the room. The overheads blinked on with a click and a buzz, and he heard the slick shuffle and click of fine shoe leather on industrial bathroom tile. He was fortunate that the victim wasn't expecting a murderer to be hiding in the bathroom. He was fortunate that the handicap stall was the furthest from the door, and the furthest from the urinals.

  The footsteps stopped at the urinal, and his victim unzipped, tooted out a small fart, and cut loose a stream.

  The killer stood up slowly. He shouldered his way out of the stall, simultaneously dumping some of the Startz into the balled-up sock. He swept up to the unsuspecting Stalnaker at the urinal, and with his right arm, nutcrackered him into a tight hold. He pressed the ether-laden sock firmly up against Stalnaker's nostrils and mouth. Urine splattered onto the floor, soaking the victim's pants as he let go of his penis to pull the sudden arm from his throat.

  After a couple minutes of struggle, the victim fell limp, and the stream pouring onto the floor subsided to a trickle. The killer jumped up to lock the door, then duct-taped the sock onto his victim's face. Mustn't use too much ether, wouldn't want to kill the bastard by accident. This one needed to be hurt bad first.

  He used a paper towel to wipe his fingerprints off each surface he'd touched. He balled up wads of paper towels into the commodes and flushed each one to overflowing. He did the same for the sinks, opening the taps and letting the water flow. This began to coat the floors with water to wipe all traces of his footprints in the urine.

  He was calm. Time was on his side now.

  He lifted the limp Trent Stalnaker onto his shoulders, over the top of his own backpack. He poked his head out into the hall, and lumbered toward the fire stairs.

  Everyone would be gone from the building, if the pattern of the previous few days held. Out the back door, and into the woods. No one in the parking lot. The security camera would just miss him if he took a sharp left along the building.

  He headed down the path to the ledge under the Pennybacker bridge. It was a steep, torturous path, even when not carrying a man on your shoulders, and the killer twice nearly slipped off the edge into the water a hundred-fifty feet below. Halfway down the path he just dropped the man and dragged him the rest of the way by his feet.

  A few minutes before midnight they arrived at the ledge under the Pennybacker. The ledge was difficult to get to, and most homeless people wouldn't bother, though there was good cover under here. You couldn't just walk up to this ledge, like you could on most other highway bridges in Texas, because the Pennybacker was a suspension bridge that spanned Lake Austin from the lakeshore on the south up to a hundred-foot cliff on the north.

  They were under the northernmost edge, out of the sight of any witness, not that t
here would be any witnesses at this time of night, not on the muddy lake below.

  He had been checking the papers. The Lower Colorado River Authority (LCRA) had drained Lake Austin to rid it of Hydrilla, an imported aquarium plant that occasionally choked the waterway. Draining the water from the lake killed off most of the plants. The water level was too low for boating, but the LCRA was scheduled to raise the water level in a few days. No one would be boating underneath while he tortured and killed Stalnaker.

  The victim stirred, and the killer placed the ether-soaked sock back over his nose and mouth. He'd set Stalnaker down on the ledge, and was now preparing him for his demise.

  He bound Stalnaker's hands and feet tightly with a length of the rope. Now came the hard part. He had to get Stalnaker twenty feet out and up three vertical feet into the expansion joint. This was not going to be easy. He gagged Stalnaker with a strip of the black duct tape.

  He dragged Stalnaker out along a support beam fixed into the cliff. The beam went about twenty feet toward the point where one of the huge arches met the span. The beam was just wide enough for a man to rest on it, but unfortunately the space above the beam was only tall enough for a crawl. He inched backward along the beam, dragging his unconscious victim behind him. When his feet hit the arch, he crawled back over the top of his victim and pushed. When the victim's feet touched the arch, the killer crawled back over him and onto a crossbeam that was at right angles to the reddish steel arch. He took one of the ropes that was tied to the victim's feet, and tied it off to the crossbeam. He had gotten this far and did not want his victim to end up falling to his doom while unconscious. That would not satisfy the plan.