McDonald’s drive-thru, 2712 Santa Monica Boulevard, CA 90404 – 10:25.
I was famished. I thanked the teller and roared away from the takeaway window, leaving a trail of rubber as the tires squeaked, and tucked into my Big Mac. Sheldon said, “That wasn’t very professional: you’ve just been reinstated and you’re going to be late on your first new case.”
I said, “What the hell, I’m hungry and the corpse ain’t going anywhere.”
I’d heard voices in my head for as long as I can remember. The doctors told me the trauma of my father’s suicide might have triggered them. I had a difficult adolescence, the voices were always with me and led to a fair amount of teasing which in turn led to a fair amount of fighting, until I learned to keep quiet in public. My voices had been malevolent in the past and had me in despair, I even contemplating taking my own life – must be a family trait. I was unable to cope, but that was all a long time ago. I’d distilled the voice down to two, almost like a good and bad conscience. I have one voice, which has Elvis’s swagger, with a touch of Brando’s insolence and a little bit of the Fonz from the early days. He eggs me on to acts of risk-taking, daring bravado and, of course, to be cool. I also hear a shy, timid voice, the voice of reason, who counterbalances Elvis and over the years has become Sheldon, a character of nervous disposition, from an early Woody Allen movie, I forget which. Anyhow, they are part of me, they’ve always been present, they are how I am and I wouldn’t have it any other way. Most people do not understand mental illness, and schizophrenia, especially, has them running for the hills. The very name conjures up a deranged lunatic suffering from bouts of extreme violence and they would prefer us all to be locked away on a mental ward. However, we can function normally, with the right counseling and medication; many in far more advanced stages than me have gone on to succeed in their chosen fields with remarkable results.
It’s a terrible stigma. Yet hearing voices was once revered in some cultures, thinking that the person was receiving words of wisdom from the gods. In history, many famous people have suffered with it, for example, Joan of Arc, Socrates, and Hitler, probably. I liken it to hearing a song in your head: it comes from nowhere, it bugs you all day, you cannot get rid of it and sometimes you even hate the song, but you’re stuck with it. You just wake up in the morning with it already buzzing around in your head. We all have the capacity to hear voices. The recently bereaved often hear the voice of their loved ones, and when you read a book you hear the characters’ voices inside your head without considering it strange, and we think it cute when a child plays with imaginary friends and can chatter away to them for hours. I just never grew out of it. I know most schizos have it bad. I’m one of the lucky ones. I’m quite harmless, but schizophrenics rage easily and acts of violence are never far away, bubbling away just below the surface. We tend to smoke and drink too much and excessive drug-taking is a common problem. I keep my condition a secret and most people would never know. I do on occasion forget myself and have conversations aloud with my imaginary friends, but my colleagues dismiss this as me just being ‘weird’. I don’t consider myself weird. I think I’m normal, well, normalish. Apart from my strange desire to catch rabies. Don’t ask me why, ever since I can remember, I wanted to experience rabies. The sensation of drowning, which sufferers feel, utterly fascinated me and I wanted to experience that feeling. Unsurprisingly, in my fantasy, the hottest of nurses would revive me back to health and we’d marry and live happily ever after. Not quite the American Dream, but my version of it. Therefore, I spent my childhood and teenage years approaching stray dogs on the off chance.
Okay, maybe I am weird.
A bit.
MF Movie Props storage facility, Wilshire Boulevard, CA 90036 – 10:29.
The detectives shrank back and didn’t acknowledge my arrival and gave me a wide berth. I saw an attractive slim, statuesque brunette hanging out with the captain. She was gorgeous and she held my stare and winked. Who was she?
I moved between two large Nazi flags, entering the mock-up of a wartime European town square, and wondered if the slaying was going to be another fantasist. I say fantasist because the last alleged Hangman slaying was a copycat. Yep, some depraved loser actually admired the Hangman and wanted to continue his work. It’s incredible. Think of the sickest, most twisted, depraved person alive and they’d be a whole host of wannabes, fans, if you please, to these monsters, with websites and fan clubs. Sometimes, just sometimes, after all their bragging in chat rooms, occasionally one of these jerks will have the right amount of loose wires to carry out a crime copying their heroes. It doesn’t bear thinking about. The police have enough to contend with, without a lunatic fanatic muddying up the waters. The last one was good, very good; we even thought that he might have been an apprentice, but certain facts were kept from the public. We tried to keep all the facts from the public. That was practically impossible with the advent of the internet.
I chomped on my Big Mac as I stared at the noose. It still struck fear into most people. It held terror in the collective mind. Although we’ve had years of the electric chair, gas chamber and lethal injection, the noose still seeped into the nation’s subconscious. Being slowly strangled, just dangling there. It had a grip like no other; we as a nation connect to it. From the quick and swift justice of the Wild West, to the shameful lynching prevalent in the South in not too distant history, even to the olde worlde executions of witches. A hanging done right breaks the neck instantly and is presumably pain-free. The neck breaks and you are dead before the brain has a chance to register it, but get it wrong and you’re slowly strangled while you’re thrashing about desperately trying to breathe.
I rubbed at the scar around my neck, remembering.
In olde England, a public holiday would be declared for a hanging and crowds of ten thousand or more arrived from hundreds of miles away. As far as the mob was concerned, the more thrashing about – the infamous Ghost dance – the better. A fair would arrive, families would have picnics, there would be entertainment the night before, merchants would service the massive throng, you could even buy Hangman dolls for your children, an early form of merchandising. Gore, for all our pretenses of sophistication and liberalism, still fascinates us: we’ve always loved a gruesome death, with its various forms of dispatching, and if there were public executions today, you’d bet the crowds would outsell any rockstar performance. Just look at the TV schedules: prime time is taken up with murder, slaughters, and deaths. It’s claimed that by the age of eighteen a child will have witnessed over two hundred thousand acts of violence and sixteen thousand homicides on TV. Some claim this has led to an increase in urban slayings, like the recent school multiple murders. In California, where we have an abundance of serial killers, they need to be more inventive if they wish to shine amongst the mass of fellow practitioners. In LA, it might be the Hollywood effect, but they want to be famous anyway; anyhow, it doesn’t matter as long as they are famous. That’s all that counts. The rise of reality TV shows proved that. I once sat with my psychiatrist, who after one episode of Big Brother could diagnose each contestant as borderline schizophrenic or bipolar, etc: reality show contestant or big-time murderer, they tread a very thin line. The victims, too, gain a certain notoriety themselves, forever linked to the killer, their names dragged through the courts and defamed by lawyers trying to defend the indefensible, but if they can help their client, by besmirching the victim and trashing their character, whether it’s true or not, it does not bother them in the slightest as long as it might help. A normal girl out on the town with her friends, full of hope and ambition, has her whole life reduced to her name, age, and occupation and then her reputation ruined by lawyers in court.
* * *
I took another bite of my Big Mac as I circled around the corpse. The rope creaked as the body twisted one way then the other. Her carcass showed all the usual signs of a hanging. This was a professional execution, not a suicide. Her bladder and bowel had emptied and congealed on the
cement floor. Her eyes protruded and mocked me and without eyelids bulged even further. Her tongue stuck out, but worst of all was her face, or more precisely the lack of it: she’d been flayed alive. Her face had been removed. Cut from the hairline, down by the ears and under the chin, all done premortem, by the looks of the amount of blood. “You showed it to her, didn’t you, ya sonofabitch? You cut off her face and taunted her with it.”
I shook my head in despair. The pain must have been excruciating, but after the cuts and burn wounds on her torso, I doubted, or at least I hope she was no longer conscious of feeling it. “You watched her, didn’t ya? You saw the hope of survival drain from her, especially at that moment when ya knew that she no longer had the desire to live. She would have known that her face, and therefore her life, would never be the same again. She would have gladly put her head in the noose, to finally end the torment and suffering ya put her through; she would’ve welcomed death but even then, even then, ya denied her a swift end. What on earth had she done to you to warrant such a depraved end? Did ya know her? Did she reject you? Is that it? Where had ya seen her?” I glanced up at the corpse, the remaining shreds of a brown uniform, like a convenience store clerk would wear. I recognized the logo and color as the same used on the corner of my block, near my duplex in Venice Beach. “Was she a wannabe movie star? Like most checkout girls and waitresses in Los Angeles, did ya act upon that? Did ya play the big producer, director, or talent scout? Did she naively fall for the old routine? How did ya trick her into trusting you?”
I remembered Sharron at the corner store near me had just landed a role, or at least thought she had and was so excited, she thought it was going to be a life-changing role. It was as if she had won the lottery, she was one of the lucky ones. I had congratulated her, but then had warned her to check out the producer before going there alone. I must go see her and find out how that went. That reminded me, she’d left her uniform at my place – we’d dated once – if you could call it that, she’d stayed the night anyhow.
The corpse twisted toward me and I stared at her dispassionately, her forever-open eyes and mouth without lips made her teeth appear to be grinning at me. “Ya saw her at the store, asked for a date, she knocked ya back and ya seethed about it. Was that it? Ya plotted your revenge; ya stalked her and bided your time to exact your reprisal?”
No, that wasn’t right. There’s too much violence and torture for a simple rejection, I’m not getting a reading. Normally I can see the murder through the perpetrator’s eyes, but today I’m not getting anything and that was a first. I lit a cigarette and took a deep puff. Why wasn’t this working? Why can’t I get a fix?
As I said earlier, I have a knack of getting under the skin of the killer, not that I want to, I just can, I can’t switch it off; I wish I could sometimes. I’m drained afterward, often feeling nauseous and wanting a hot shower after living and feeling their polluted minds. That’s how I caught the copycat. I could feel his motivation. He was a sick, twisted individual, sure, but just a loser copycat fantasist, rather than the real thing. Too pathetic to dream up his own crimes, wanted to copy his hero, his mentor. We caught him first time out, thank God. I knew straight away, my sixth sense kicked into gear, I could feel it was off right from the start. The victim had been horrifically tortured just the same, but there was none of the passion. The steps had been followed to the letter, but the burning and slicing were too exact, as if he had been following a manual, deliberated over it for a period of time, where to place the cuts and burns, rather than just inflicting in a frenzy like the real Hangman, who genuinely wanted to cause maximum pain, both physical and mental.
I remembered opening the apartment door of the copycat’s victim and finding her hanging from the rafters, the slashes and burns on the torso, the stupid cryptic message carved into her stomach, but I could feel at a glance that there was none of the anger. He was just a mere disciple at his master’s feet. Homage, taken directly from the internet, where many surprisingly accurate details had found their way onto the wonderful worldwide web. I caught sight of a jagged scar on her ankle and froze to the spot.
Goddamnit! It was Sharron.
I remembered the scar and her telling me how she had done it surfing when she was younger. If I informed the captain that I knew the victim, then he’d remove me from the case, but if the Hangman’s back, I want to be in the thick of it, front and center. So I’d keep quiet about my acquaintance, for now; it was hardly a love affair.
“Well?” asked the captain.
I shrugged as I saw the crime tech team arriving, led by ‘Ferd the nerd’. He truly was a geek. Puny and timid. He wore glasses and had a stammer. He was a nerd, but a useful one: he had a sharp mind and helped solve many a crime with his precise attention to detail. I liked him and, for some reason, he seemed to hero-worship me. He scooted over with the medical examiner’s squad. “Let Ferdy and the crime scene geeks do their stuff,” I said.
Ferdy stopped dead in his tracks at the slur. The captain cringed.
I said, “What?” I held my arms out, pleading.
“You’ve got people issues, Spooky, real bad people issues,” the captain said.
“Hey, Ferdy, new glasses?” I asked.
He looked pleased that I had noticed and bounced over like an excitable puppy.
“Do you like them?” he asked and fiddled with the frame.
Now, my mom always said, ‘If you can’t say something nice don’t say anything at all.’ However, those goggles he wore, man. He looked even more like Brains the Thunderbird puppet and he was just asking for it.
“It wasn’t your momma,” Elvis said.
“Huh?”
“It wasn’t your momma who said that it was Bambi’s.”
“Oh, yah, I think ya right, well then, no wonder I don’t observe that rule, I ain’t gonna take advice from a talking doe,” I said inwardly.
“Like them?” I said to Ferdy. They looked like transparent trash can lids. “Those are thick lens, man. Ya must be able to see into the future with those babies.” He reacted, but I continued, knowing that I can tease him without him being upset. “At least ya can answer the age-old question, ‘Is there life on Mars?’”
Ferdy sniggered and joined the others crowded in the threshold of the warehouse, not wanting to enter the building. Milo crossed himself and muttered a simple prayer – far too late for that, I felt. The captain looked at me, one shoulder raised, asking, ‘So, is it him?’
I shook my head. I wasn’t getting my usual reading. That left the final signature that only the captain, me and a very few chosen people knew about. I trotted past the geeks back to the hanging corpse, took out my switchblade and used it to lift the hem of her uniform and I peered up her skirt.
CHAPTER 2
Homicide Special Section, 100 W 1st St 5th, Los Angeles, CA 90012 – 12:30.
We assembled in the squad room. It was a hive of activity and a buzz of excitement had electrified all present at the thought that the Hangman was back. The large whiteboard had photos of the historic victims pinned upon it and our latest faceless victim projected onto a giant TV screen that dominated one wall of the room. George said, “Did you see that freak looking up her skirt?”
“What a pervert,” agreed Milo. I coughed and at least they had the good grace to look embarrassed as they mumbled an apology.
The captain called the meeting to order. “Listen up, people, this is where we’re at. It’s been confirmed, it’s not a copycat. The Hangman is back.”
Milo crossed himself and George mouthed ‘damnit’.
The captain continued. “We’d hoped he’d gone away.”
“Or killed himself,” said George.
The captain said, “I’ll hand you over to our serial killer expert, Spooky?”
I stood and wandered over to my laptop, where it opened on a PowerPoint presentation. I clicked a few buttons and the Hangman doodle carved into Sharron’s stomach projected onto the screen. I noted that a few of the yo
unger cops looked away. I fiddled with the image until we had a nice, clean version of the Hangman drawing, with the spaces underneath for the letters.
“This is what the message says,” I said as I filled in the letters. I read them out loud, “I.V.F.I.V.F.U.F.P.U.M.”
“Ivfivfufpum?” George said, trying his best to pronounce the word. “What the hell is that meant to mean?”
“I ain’t gotta clue,” I replied. “We’ve run it through our computers, but it ain’t a known word in any language. It’s too impenetrable for us. We’d already sent it out to the best cryptologists, they’ve run it through their computers but come up with diddly-squat.”
Candy held up her hand as if she were still at school: it looked sweet and she was sweet, as her name implied. “We know who she is now, but do we know where or how she was taken?”
“Good question, as far as we can ascertain the victim was taken from outside her place of work. The store has a security camera trained on the door, but it did not capture the Hangman or his vehicle. Uniform had canvassed the area and no one saw anyone acting strangely, no one saw anything, period. We must assume that the Hangman has a vehicle, yet no one saw that either.”
On The Edge Page 2