He had decided long ago when he first realized the vision that would become his life’s work that it would be wise to not shit where he ate. Therefore he went ahead and found the perfect spot for his seclusion. It was a spooky looking house that no one ever wanted to come near and the old lady who had lived there had never left the house. She was a very unpleasant person and had basically already laid the ground work for him before he arrived on the scene to make sure that no one ever came to that house. Children were afraid of it and their parents had also been afraid of it since childhood. The little old bitch had lived there for almost fifty years by the time he acquired it. It was almost too easy.
But his new spot was pretty inconspicuous as well. And adding that to the fact that no one had seen the real him, and there was nothing there at his old playhouse to tie him to the crimes he had gotten away scot free. It was only a minor setback because he had to invest time and energy into securing a new work space. That had only taken a few months to find the perfect spot and to acquire it using his special skills.
That little shit John Anderson had ruined everything. If it wasn’t for him he would not have lost all of that beautiful work he had created. It was sad and it depressed him every time he thought about it. But life moved on and he realized that he had to continue on as well.
He opened the door to the basement and descended the stairs. He loved this old house. It was perfect for his special needs. He giggled a little bit as he reached the bottom of the stairs and rounded the corner to move down the long hallway. He could already smell the fear from the girl before he even got close to her.
She was still adjusting to the idea of being a prisoner. He loved it when they were fresh that way, before they started to get too used to it. It took most of them about two months before they lost the will to live and basically gave up. Then it was tough to get any sort of expression out of them. They stopped being afraid and they were just over all unresponsive. Even when you caused horrendous bodily injury to them and they had to be feeling excruciating pain they would cease to make a peep. It was as if their mind and body had been completely disconnected from one another and their conscious self was just an echo of what once was. He did not know where they went when this happened. He often wondered and if they felt anything when they died.
He had learned to spot the beginning signs of this syndrome and he began to speed up his work and his playtime with them so that they died a painful death before they reached this catatonic coma-like stage. He had perfected it for the most part. Of course there were the occasional few that went into this stage almost immediately. It was always a letdown, but you could never really predict this.
It was just the way it was.
He unlocked the door to the hallway that led to another steel door. He undid the locks and opened the door slowly.
He smiled as he saw his newest toy. She was a beautiful eighteen year old virginal flower that he had enjoyed immensely for the past four days. He had found her on a routine hunting escapade. It was so simple. He would just be out and about running typical errands when he would spot the perfect victim. He would tail them to their car and then follow them home. This was a skill he had perfected hundreds of times as a teenager, long before he had taken the next step and planned the actual abduction, although he had always thought of this with the end game in mind.
He had been fantasizing about stealing young women since he was barely thirteen. It began as a fantasy to aid in the regular masturbation he had practiced, but it soon became an obsession. Soon he was not able to get aroused or finish the act of self-love without thinking about kidnapping and hurting some sweet, beautiful girl.
His teenage girlfriends had never really satisfied him because he really wanted to tie them to a tree somewhere in the woods and beat them until blood ran down every ounce of their flesh and then he could have this way with them in any way he chose. Their screams would echo in the night forever. This was the fantasy he thought about when he was engaged in normal sex. It worked and kept them thinking he was perfectly average.
He was not average by any means. He knew it. He had figured this out at an early age when he realized that he knew more than his teachers and his parents about pretty much everything. A lot of people would consider such ideas as his being arrogant or cocky, but he had actually thought of it as a burden. As wise as he was he realized there were many things in life that he did not know, but of course he was still smarter than most people. He had yet to find someone with whom he could have a real civilized conversation with who wouldn’t judge him for being above them. Everyone was so intimidated by him, even when he tried to dumb himself down for their benefit.
He had to do that all the time in his day job years ago until he decided it was a total waste of time to try to fit into the world that did not understand him. Thanks to the advent of the amazing internet he was able to make a good living online. He often wondered how differently his life would have turned out if he had not had the internet to disconnect him from the world while at the same time keeping him connected to the world.
The girl looked up at him with crippling fear in her eyes. She was so amazingly beautiful that he beamed with pride every single time that he looked at her. She was very special and one of a kind. He had enjoyed the first several experiences with her and he was sure that there would be several more with her before her time would come.
However, he was running on an unusually high schedule. He needed to speed up the process, since he was running out of time with Detective Anderson. If he dawdled around too much then the opportunity to drive fear into the heart of the community would pass him by.
They had already seen his handy work once, but they had no idea that he was still out there and that he would continue to do this and even make more ambitious statements as time wore on. They figured the first had been some kind of a fluke. He could not believe how gullible small town people were. They were just begging to become victims.
The girl began to scream and twitch beneath her restraints. She was tied tightly to a rope that was looped over a high reaching beam below the ceiling. He had installed it himself and it would hold almost 1000lbs before it would even begin to wobble. The pain that was caused by hanging from the arms like that was similar to the pain experienced by crucifixion where the blood can’t get to the extremities. The girl had tried valiantly to pull herself up as they all did and she failed as they all did. It was entertaining to watch on the video surveillance, which he did for hours from his upstairs control room. This way he was able to really watch the suffering in utmost comfort. He would often enjoy a pizza and a six pack during this time. It was part of his very special routine.
The girl’s gag muffled her screams as he entered the room. Her eyes grew wide with terror. He relished it. The power and the sweetness of her terror gave him joy like nothing else on the face of the planet ever could. It was like a drug that he just could not get enough of, but unlike most drugs it was sweeter every time he took it.
“There, there. Don’t be nervous. You look beautiful,” he said as he closed the door shut behind him and admired her sweet naked body. She was exquisite in every possible way.
He stepped closer and inhaled her scent, tasting the sweet succulence of her skin, mixed with her luscious fear. He could taste the fear, like adding sugar to a warm cup of tea. It completed the picture. He moved his finger up and down the center of her chest, laughing as she recoiled and screamed louder. She was being so overly dramatic.
“Now is that any way to treat your master?” He asked with a grin on his face but malice in his voice. Why did they have to resist him so and make him so angry? Why did they show such defiance and disrespect when they knew that he would punish them so severely? What was it about these bitches that continued to struggle against him?
He tried to remain calm for a moment, but the damage was done. His pride had been hurt and rage had risen in its place deep inside of him.
He curled up hi
s fist and drove it into the whore’s stomach. She tried to scream in pain, but the air had left her body. Maybe that would teach her some damn respect. She needed to learn. They all needed to learn and he was the one to teach them.
He grabbed her by the face and forced her close to him so he could glare into her eyes.
“You see what happens when you misbehave?”
The girl continued to try to move away from him. She was averting his gaze and he had the feeling that if she wasn’t gagged she would be trying to bite him. He knew she wanted to gnaw his face off.
He would show her who was boss. She was about to become another message to his old friend John Anderson. Detective John Anderson he was now. He had been shocked to discover that John Anderson was moving back to town and even more interested to learn that he was now a cop.
He had actually been keeping tabs on John ever since that day at the old house. John had wrecked everything for him and he’d had to start over. He hated him for that and he was damn sure not just going to let that sort of thing slide.
He knew that one day he would punish John, but it had to be when the time was right. Killing John when he was still a child would not have proved anything. As much as he hated John for what he had done he also respected the boy. He had stood up to him and had escaped his clutches. He wanted to torture him and he wanted to challenge him.
That was why he had bided his time. When he learned that John was coming back to Belpre then he knew that the time was perfect. He had been getting bored with the same old routine. He needed something to spice things up and this was just the perfect storm to do it. He had to laugh at the fun that was to come.
“Now, sweetie. You are going to try to be tough, but it won’t do you any good.”
He removed the duct tape and ball gag from her mouth. As he was doing so he gave her one last piece of advice.
“Feel free to scream as loud as you want. No one will hear you.”
He picked up the hunting knife and she began to scream.
Chapter 5: “Loose Ends”
“How could anyone do that to another human being?” Michaels asked as he held a handkerchief to his nose. He carefully moved around the crime scene trying to make sure that he didn’t step on any evidence.
John watched him with sorrow and disgust in his heart. He would never be able to get the ghastly image out of his head. It was another young woman. This time the killer had left the body to lie and rot in the middle of the park. She had been hung from the monkey bars on the playground. Her guts were hanging mostly out of her body. There were several strange symbols carved into her flesh on her face and the eyeballs were once again missing.
Her head was lying on the ground beside her.
John wanted to throw up the second he saw it. The body had been discovered by a jogger on his early morning run at sunrise. He was in total shock and had to be removed from the crime scene. John had listened to his 911 call and he could hardly speak. By the time they got there the jogger was practically catatonic.
“Ok, there is no denying it now. There is a serial on the loose and everybody knows it,” The chief said.
“Yea, so much for talking this over with the rest of the crew during morning briefing,” John added. They had received the call at six and the briefing usually occurred at eight. All John could really do at this point was to shake his head. He knew that there was nothing they were going to find here and that the killer was just taunting them now.
He looked in disgust as the crew of news reporters who were all over the scene trying to get the scoop first and get their stories out there. They reminded him of bloodthirsty vultures who had come by to pick the corpse clean of any left meat. That was really what they did; they were the scum of the earth and it didn’t matter if they were a big city organization like he was used to scaring off in Columbus or a smaller local newsgroup like the ones here in Belpre—it was disgusting.
“Hey, Chief!”
One of the lab techs who were combing the body for evidence suddenly called over.
Michaels and John walked over to him ignoring the cops who appeared to be standing around, but were actually just waiting for the lab geeks to finish their sweep. Of course they should have been questioning people in the crowd about what they might have seen. It wouldn’t have amounted to much most likely, but at least it would have been something somewhat productive.
John knew that the killer might be in that crowd. A self-obsessed narcissist like this guy was always going to be watching. He was probably twenty feet from them in the crowd of onlookers taking pictures to add to his trophy collection. He wanted so badly to just go over and start giving everybody there the third degree. It might be helpful if he just shoved a gun in their stupid faces until one of them confessed. It would be so easy.
“What have you got?” Michaels asked the female tech.
She held up something in a pair of tweezers. “I don’t think this belonged to the victim. It was a different color strand. The victim was blond but the hair was dark brown.
“Shit yea! Can you get some DNA off of it?” Michaels asked.
“Yea, I should be able to.”
“Well, get back to the lab and get on that pronto.”
John felt overwhelmed with excitement for a minute, but before he let himself get overjoyed he thought of something; the killer did not leave these kinds of mistakes. There was no way that was his hair. The body had been scrubbed clean of all DNA evidence except for the victims own blood. You could see it plainly; it was just like the last victim had been.
Why this hair? It sounded like a set up to him.
“See? I told you he would drop the ball at some point. Now we got him!” Chief Michaels exclaimed.
“I’m not so sure,” John said.
“What? Why?”
“Well, assuming we can gain the DNA off the hair, I don’t think it will match our killer.”
“You have to get some faith about something in this world John. It isn’t all pity parties and bad endings. Sometimes good things do happen to the right people.”
“I do believe that Chief, but this doesn’t feel right. Why after all of these years would this guy suddenly make such an amateurish mistake? It doesn’t fly with me.”
“I hear where you are coming from, but you have to remember that he has never done this but once. He has always had a controlled environment like before where he killed and disposed of the bodies on his own property. There were no bodies and no crime scenes; without this you can’t even prove a murder has been committed. Now he is bored and he is toying with us. I know it is weird, because killers typically mild out as they get older and this guy is getting bolder, but he has made the amateur mistake a lot of these guys make; he thinks he is too smart and that he is invincible so he starts playing games with the cops. Now he fucked up and we got him.”
John dwelled on what the chief was saying. He had some valid points. The Valley Ripper, as he was being dubbed on Facebook, was stepping outside of his comfort zone. He had reached out to them because he needed to be recognized more. He wanted to take his game to another level; he was tired of playing by himself. That may have been his whole purpose for reaching out to John in the first place. It was possible that his arrogance was getting the better of him and he had left a minute clue behind that was going to get him caught. It was a sweet thought that was really hard to let go of after it was in your head.
“Maybe you are right,” John said.
“Well, don’t start celebrating quite yet. We don’t know if it will bring back anything yet, but we will just keep our fingers crossed in the meantime. No one breathe a word of this to the cops. I’ll tell the others.”
Chief Michaels went around the unit whispering in ears trying to keep things on the down low and away from the prying eyes of the media vultures that were buzzing and circulating around their heads.
He hoped the bastard was watching and that he was enjoying his last few ni
ghts of freedom.
*
Holly Janson slammed her car door shut and started walking down the street. This was the fourth time that damn car had left her stranded in the middle of nowhere since her asshole step father had given it to her for her eighteenth birthday. It was supposed to be a reliable car that would get her to and from college in Marietta every day. So far it had forced her to walk more often than not. And today of all times it had happened in the dead zone between the two towns where the cell phone signal was very touchy on a good day. She was getting no bars at all. Her phone was useless right now.
There was hardly any traffic this late at night out this way, not that she would have hitchhiked anyway. With the murders that had happened so close together, there was no telling what kind of psycho might be behind the wheel of any one of the cars that might happen by. She would take her chances with the dark, thank you very much.
She kept looking at her phone as she walked hoping that she would hit a sweet spot and get some signal so she could call triple A. But as of yet she was not getting anything.
She hated the summer semester at school. The classes were always so long and grueling. Four hours three times a week for most of them because they had to cram in ten weeks what a normal semester did in sixteen. But some of the classes she needed for her major were only offered at this time. It was pathetic and it had angered her severely. They liked to split the summer sessions up into two sessions, so they could pump more money out of you. And it made things so much harder than they needed to be. How anyone retained any information from their summer classes was beyond her; it couldn’t be done.
But she only had to complete about six more classes in the fall to be finished with her degree. Then who knows what life would throw at her. She still wasn’t sure what she wanted to be when she grew up. Even after four years of college it was all still pretty much touch and go. It was a tough decision to wonder what you were going to do with your life for the next forty years.
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