A Master's in Murder

by Katie Moon

  Randall halted, looking at Brielle with a cool, calculating stare. Finally, he shrugged nonchalantly. “I guess there’s no hurry. And I do think you deserve an explanation for Eric.” Sliding a chair noisily across the tile floor, Randall plunked down in front of her. “What do you want to know?”

  She looked over his smug face, searching through the litany of abuses she wanted to throw at him for the right words to say. There were so many things she couldn’t understand. “Why?” Brielle said simply.

  Randall pointed quickly at Brielle and nodded. “That is the million-dollar question, isn’t it? Why would I kill my best friend? To understand that, though, I have to start with Claire because honestly, I didn’t want to have to kill Eric. It was pretty unfortunate, really, but sacrifice is espoused to success,” he said, waving his hand indifferently.

  Brielle seethed inwardly as she watched his nonchalant manner. How could he sit across from her, admitting to having killed two innocent people, and just wave it away with his hand like it was merely some mildly annoying mosquito? Biting her lip, she kept her eyes locked on Randall, trying to remain unreadable as she hysterically considered how to free herself. He had done a good job securing her to the chair; her arms wouldn’t budge. Her legs weren’t tied, though. She could run at him when he turns his back, maybe. But she guessed that probably wouldn’t do anything but anger him.

  While she ran through escape strategies in her mind, Randall was leaning back comfortably in his chair. “So Claire first. She and I met in our business marketing class a little over a year ago. When I first met her, she gave off the vibe of being the innocent princess. But over time, I noticed was the little streak of rebellion in her. She was one of those girls who wasn’t afraid to break the rules under the radar. Her head was full of dreams of grandeur, but she lacked any real direction.

  I had dreams of fame and riches, too, but I didn’t have the springboard to get started. But then, Claire told me she had recently gotten a promotion at her job in the registrar’s office. With it came more responsibility handling student information. Of course, she didn’t see the potential. To her it was just a job on the long road to success.”

  Randal leaned forward, a new sense of excited eagerness entering his voice. “I was sick of taking the slow path toward a life of luxury, though. It seemed like every step I took was one step forward and two steps back. I wanted what I deserved: everything.” Randall met Brielle’s gaze, his eyes hungry. “It wasn’t hard to convince Claire. At first she was wary, but after I laid down just how simple it would be—you know, a credit card number here, a social security number there—she agreed happily. And it worked perfectly, for a while.”

  Brielle glared back, fire lashing out in her eyes. “You are a leech. That’s all you are. Nothing to actually show for yourself, just benefiting off of other people’s loss,” she hissed.

  Randall’s face hardened, and she wondered if he would hit her. Exhaling slowly, however, his expression relaxed. “You make it sound so terrible. Most of those people were being reimbursed by credit card companies for the theft, and you and I both know those big corporations have more than they will ever need. We weren’t hurting anyone,” he contended calmly.

  “Until you were,” Brielle shot back disgustedly, poison saturating every syllable.

  An amused smile flashed across Randall’s face. “Until we were,” he conceded. “Claire didn’t know that I was starting to play for higher stakes. Stolen credit cards are all well and good, but there are much bigger fish out there. I began making trades with the highest bidders on the dark web, under a false name.”

  “Brute-2-e,” Brielle inserted.

  Randall shook his head, and Brielle felt an angry shock ricochet through her body as he began to chuckle. “I actually thought once my username was uncovered, you’d know it was me. But I guess you don’t usually read in Latin,” he said, grinning. “It’s not pronounced ‘brute’, but ‘brut-eh’, as in—”

  “—et tu, Brute?” Brielle gasped in horror.

  Randall nodded approvingly. “Very good, at least you got there now. Yes, Eric definitely inspired me with that. You see, to most people, Brutus was the paragon antagonist. But I understood him. Our bonds with others are good, but in the end, it’s human nature for every man to serve himself. If Brutus hadn’t betrayed Julius Caesar, Caesar would have eventually chosen to benefit himself and burn Brutus. So Brutus just made sure he wasn’t the first to fall. And Caesar never saw it coming.

  “So yes, I thought ‘Brute’ was an apt name for my situation. I started gathering contacts and discovered a particularly lucrative deal being offered by the Dolo Institute. They claimed to be a modeling agency. Honestly, I knew they were full of it, but I wasn’t particularly interested in why they wanted the names of those girls,” he continued.

  “Becca and Jenny,” Brielle whispered.

  Randall nodded. “Yeah, I felt a little guilty when I heard they went missing, but there wasn’t any use worrying about it,” he said. Suddenly, the corners of his lips turned down in a frustrated frown. “Unfortunately, Claire got a little suspicious that two of the girls she had drawn up information on had gone missing. She had started to catch on that I wasn’t making the deals we had agreed on. For a long time, she kept her mouth shut. She didn’t want to get implicated in all of it. A couple of months ago, though, she said she couldn’t do it anymore.”

  Brielle’s eyes were fixed on Randall, wide with horror. She didn’t need him to say what happened next. She already knew. Her entire body felt frozen, totally immobilized by fear.

  “She said she was going to the police to confess everything,” Randall continued grimly. “I tried to convince her not to, but she said that I deserved to pay for everything, even if that meant tarnishing her own name too. She gave me no choice. ” For a moment, Randall stared silently at a spot behind Brielle, lost in thought.

  Brielle took his moment of distraction to shift her eyes quickly to the sink next to her. Sticking out from under a crumb-dusted plate on the counter, almost completely obscured by a spoon covered in a thick white paste, was the handle of a chef’s knife. Its handle hovered carefully over the edge of the sink, held in balance by the white, porcelain plate. Brielle gently moved her feet an inch apart. Her legs had not been shackled. With the right moment of surprise, she could stand up and pounce on him. If I could just grab the knife…

  Brielle’s eyes darted quickly back to Randall as he awoke from his reverie, glancing back at her. “So I invited her over. I told her if we didn’t reach an agreement by the end of the night, I would let her go to the police,” he murmured. In the dim light, it seemed to Brielle as if his pupils had expanded behind the iris, turning his eyes dark and cold. “One swift hit to the head was all it took to render her totally defenseless. We took a short trip to the lake, and all I had to do was watch her petrified face sink under the water,” Randall said softly, almost speaking more to himself than to Brielle at that point. “There was something almost beautiful in it. It was like, for just a moment, I was the Master of Death. For just that moment, there was a sense of total peace, total control.”

  As Brielle stared repulsed at Randall, he came to himself again. “I thought I had it planned perfectly. She would disappear that night, and no one would ever be the wiser. No one was ever supposed to know she was here.”

  “But Eric saw her,” Brielle managed to mumble, recalling what she had seen through the window that night.

  “Not only saw her, but talked to her,” Randall replied. “I saw him talk to her when I was waiting for her. I had been a little antsy that night, for obvious reasons, so I kept looking out the window. When he spoke to her, I thought I might let it go, but Eric texted me the next morning, asking about ‘the girl with red hair’ who had stopped by my apartment. I knew that eventually, inevitably, she would be reported missing. And once she was, he would recognize her right away. Eric always had a knack for remembering faces, didn’t he? And that would be the end of me. I h
ad already committed myself completely. There was no going back.”

  “So you killed him? You killed your best friend because he might cost you your dirty money?” Brielle cried, her voice choking with emotion.

  “It was pretty easy, with the different connections I had built up in the past year. I always was a natural networker, though, don’t you think?” he asked her, grinning. The huge smile on his face did not quite match the bizarre madness in his eyes.

  “Except your guy turned himself in.”

  “True,” Randall conceded, brow furrowing. “Never in my wildest dreams did I think my hired hit man would turn himself in. But then I also didn’t expect for him to leave his own DNA at the crime scene. $15K was too generous, with a performance like that. Although I guess most hit men wouldn’t be too public with their resumes. It’s just further proof that the only person who won’t burn me is me,” he added.

  Brielle glared at his mocking face, hating that gleaming smile with such a deep, burning fury that she was surprised it did not catch fire. “You really are Brutus, aren’t you?”

  Randall laughed. “I didn’t realize when I adopted that persona just how well I would fill it,” he said, smirking. He leaned toward Brielle, looking at her as though she had missed a very obvious point. “But you don’t get it, Brielle. It was him or me. And when given that choice, I will always choose me,” he said roughly. Shrugging, he relaxed back into his chair. “I was sad about it, but that passed. Guilt always does.”

  “You’re psychotic,” Brielle hissed.

  “Wrong again, Brielle,” he replied swiftly. “I’m just a survivor.”

  She gaped helplessly at the man she had come to consider a close friend, now sneering cruelly at her aching, bound body. In spite of herself, she begrudgingly asked, “Why leave Eric’s fingerprints on the mallet, though? If you were planning to kill him?”

  Randall nodded at her, tapping his chin reflectively with his gloved hand. “Yes, I was wondering when you were going to get to that,” he said condescendingly. “I initially left his prints on the weapon that night to redirect the blame to him if she were found. But then, when I decided to kill him, I ruined that excuse. It’s too convenient that her killer would be murdered just days later in a separate incident. But luckily, I’m always good for coming up with out-of-the-box ideas.

  “See, ‘cause that’s an important detail of how this case will finally close. It’s a very sad but satisfying ending. Do you want to hear it?” Randall asked, standing up slowly.

  Brielle’s eyes widened as she watched Randall reach into his large sweatshirt pocket to pull out a thick, braided rope rolled into a tight circle. She felt as if she could not stretch her chest wide enough to suck in a full breath. Gasping rapidly, her eyes darted back up to Randall’s face, round with dread.

  Randall took a small step forward, stroking the rope gently with his gloved fingers. “When someone comes looking for you, they will open your apartment door to find a lifeless Brielle hanging from the ceiling like a sorry sack of potatoes. They’ll find a note in which you’ll come clean about everything you did. You were beyond heartbroken when you found out that Eric, the love of your life, was cheating on you with a girl named Claire Kunis. Overcome with anger and betrayal, you were determined to make them pay for ruining your perfect life. You had to punish the man who had crushed everything you held dear in the palm of his hand.

  “First, you killed Claire with Eric’s mallet, making sure to avoid getting your own prints on the weapon. Then, you hired Theo Walters to kill Eric. You wanted him to die painfully for what he had done to you. It’s only too easy to frame Jared for it, since you already know Jared is jealous of Eric. With a little investigating, the police will even find that Jared’s name was added to the account from your computer.” Randall smiled wickedly as Brielle felt her heart drop into her stomach.

  I let him frame me, Brielle realized, the memory of Randall clicking away on her computer filling her mind. Right in front of my eyes.

  Randall took another careful step forward, now only a foot away from Brielle. “Even with all your anger though, you couldn’t let go of the fact that you truly loved Eric. It was eating you alive that you had killed him. When the police accused you of the murders, you hit your breaking point. You finally decided that you didn’t want to live in this world of guilt anymore. The only way out was to kill yourself,” he finished softly.

  Staring avidly at her petrified expression, Randall reached his hand out slowly. Brielle felt the rubbery tip of his finger graze her cheek softly, and her stomach twisted uncomfortably at the openly hungry expression on Randall’s face. “You’ll make for quite a beautiful corpse, Brielle, just like Claire. Your face will be a vision in purple and blue,” he murmured.

  Time seemed to come within an inch of freezing. Brielle watched two white gloved hands grasp the tan rope tightly, unrolling a foot of it into a taut line. I have to move now. Gripped between two fists, the rope was inches from her neck. I can’t do it, I can’t move. She could see every individual thread woven into the rope. C’mon, it’s now or never! The soft tickle of frayed threads gently rubbed against her throat. NOW!

  Jumping forward, Brielle swung the chair around, gripping the back tightly with her fettered hands. She heard a loud crack as the leg of the chair collided with Randall’s knee cap, and he dropped to the floor, howling loudly. Brielle whipped around to the sink and bounced up onto her toes as she reached for the glinting knife handle. Her fingers snatched in the air frantically, half an inch short of their target. She pressed painfully against her restraints, stretching desperately towards the long, sharp blade. She gasped in excitement as her finger grazed the handle.

  Suddenly, she saw a white hand lash out, and with a harsh tug, Brielle was jettisoned across the room. She heard an ominous cracking in her shoulder as she crashed painfully against the opposite wall. Moaning softly, she fell flat on her side, still tightly chained to the chair behind her.

  Brielle whimpered in agony as Randall towered over her, still rubbing his injured knee irritably. She wasn’t going to get away. He was going to kill her. And what’s that in his hand? Something flashed at her from his fist. She drew in a sharp breath as she recognized the long, silver instrument clutched in his hand with the room; he had picked up the knife. Flailing desperately, Brielle rocked back and forth, trying to roll back to her feet. She could see one of the chair’s legs hanging limply in the air, attached only by a splintered twig. Her shoulder screamed underneath her weight as she tossed and turned, and she could see angry, red welts forming around her wrists as she pressed them agonizingly against their thin but rigid restraints. It was no use; no amount of squirming could upend the crippled chair. With every thunderous stomp Randall took toward her, Brielle could feel her heart slamming against her ribs, as if trying to escape its bony prison before meeting a grisly end at Randall’s hands.

  She was trapped. Only one hope remained, one unlikely, impossible, Hail Mary chance. Widening her jaws, Brielle let out a jarring scream, causing Randall to freeze as he winced, grimacing as the noise ricocheted off his eardrums. Brielle’s ear splitting voice rebounded noisily off the white tile to create the illusion of several tortured souls crying out. Maybe, just maybe, if someone was passing nearby, they might hear the screaming and call the police. Brielle could feel her lungs deflating quickly as her screech echoed around the kitchen. Please, let there be someone walking by, she pleaded silently. Let someone hear me. She could feel her scream dying in her chest as her lungs collapsed into airless sacks. She sucked in a deep, rattling breath, ready to unleash another piercing cry.

  She just saw a flash of silver before her head was flung to the side. A terrible stinging sensation burned across her right cheek and nose, and she could feel something warm oozing down her chin. It felt like someone was searing her face with a thin, flaming iron. Waves of scorching throbs rippled out from where she had been struck. Sobbing, Brielle spat pitifully on the ground in front of her as the w
arm liquid crept in between her trembling lips. Splotches of blood instantly decorated the cold floor. Weakly, her eyes rolled up to see Randall’s looming figure positioned over her, brandishing the chef’s knife. Heavy drops of blood slid down the sharp silver blade, spilling slowly onto the handle in Randall’s tense grasp.

  He flung the blade away, and Brielle heard it clatter to the floor out of sight. Like a terrible bird of prey, Randall swooped down and clamped his talon-like fingers around her neck, wrapping the rope around her thin throat.

  “You’re a fighter, Brielle. I like that,” Randall breathed. “Claire was so quick, so defenseless. This is more invigorating. But like I said, I’m a survivor. And unfortunately in your case, that doesn’t hold true. So fighting is useless.” She could feel the rope digging into her skin, scratching her soft neck painfully. “But look on the bright side: at least you can die knowing you served an important purpose and gave closure to Eric’s family with your confession and death.”

  Brielle opened and closed her mouth, fighting to suck in the air that was being so brutally withheld from her. Was she really about to die? She had spent all of her life living like there would be another tomorrow, unable to grasp that there would be a tomorrow that never came. Did I make any difference? Is my only legacy really going to be as Eric’s killer? She had wanted to do so much, to give so much. The blissfully ignorant person she had been only weeks ago had imagined that there were still decades ahead. She had spent her time dreaming and assuming the doing came later. But life was never meant to be postponed, was it? she realized distantly. I should’ve lived.

  The frayed cord was squeezing tightly around her throat, stabbing her like a million piercing needles. I am dying, she thought in hazy shock. A black curtain of shadows was closing in front of her eyes, and Randall’s demonic face began to fade from view. In her mind, she could see Eric smiling up at her, brushing his curls idly off his forehead, like he always did. At least Eric and I lived. And soon, I’ll be back with him. Brielle heard a faint crash somewhere in the recesses of her mind as she took a final, shaking breath. I can’t fight it anymore.