A sledge hammer of a fist pounded into his elbow, jamming his arm against the hard countertop, wrecking his already-shaky balance, and sending him to the floor. But not without first slamming his chin against the countertop. His teeth clamped together with a loud clack that he heard both inside and outside of his head, and a bolt of spotted light erupted in his eyes.
Then the big man was on top of him, that hammer fist winding up again for a jawbreaker. Kittredge punched, clawed, and slapped at the muscular thug. The man laughed at him, baring his teeth like an animal, clearly enjoying himself. He threw a tree-trunk of a leg over Kittredge’s supine body, straddled Kittredge’s midsection, swept Kittredge’s arms out of the way with his left hand, and clamped his right hand down over Kittredge’s windpipe. “Say goodnight, Gracie,” he said with a snarl.
Kittredge was instantly starved of oxygen. He flailed, but his inebriated sissiness was no match for the burly man’s butch sobriety. Kittredge was starting to believe that he was living the last few seconds of his life.
His lungs gasped for breath, and he scratched and clawed at his assailant’s hands, but he made no headway. While the man’s right hand locked in a death grip around Kittredge’s neck, the left hand swatted away Kittredge’s feeble attempts to free himself.
Kittredge’s vision closed in. Color went first, and then the edges of his vision turned to black. He could hear the sounds of his own thrashing, and could hear the vicious, guttural laughter coming from his assailant’s lips, but the man’s face disappeared in front of him as oxygen deprivation robbed him of his sight.
There was no doubt about it. He was going to die.
But he wasn’t dead yet. He wasn’t going to go quietly. He gathered every ounce of his panicked strength and arched his back, shoving his pelvis upward into his assailant, throwing his hips to the right and rotating his torso as he did so. His heels found the edge of the kitchen counter, and he kicked with all of his might, trying to knock his attacker off balance enough to loosen the man’s vise-like grip on his throat.
It didn’t work. The attacker simply extended his left hand and used the floor to rebalance. “That all you got, Gladys?” the man hissed, derision in his voice.
Kittredge was out of time. His muscles screamed, his lungs burned, his diaphragm cramped in its desperate attempt to draw breath through his closed throat. It’s over. The words came from a strangely lucid place amidst the chaos storming inside his brain. He felt consciousness slipping away.
But he mustered the strength for one more try. Let’s at least learn from the past, that strangely coherent corner of his mind exhorted. Try going the other way.
He did. He threw his hips upward again, and twisted his torso again, but this time toward the left rather than the right. Kittredge’s hamstrings, back, and neck all cramped in agonized unison, but he felt the attacker’s weight shift, felt the man’s foot reposition, searching for leverage.
And then he felt the man’s grip weaken, felt the hand twist on his neck. The attacker was falling off. It’s working!
Kittredge threw his right arm up and around in a wide arc as he rolled his body to the left. The meat of his open hand connected with the assailant’s cheek. He could feel the stubble of the man’s beard. He pushed downward with everything he had left, still twisting his hips out from underneath the falling assassin, still fighting to hold onto consciousness, now strangely aware that he had actually shit himself, but pushing the man’s head harder, faster toward the hard tile kitchen floor.
Crack. The assailant’s head hit like a bowling ball. The man’s breath left in a sound like “Unnnhh.” His limbs fell limp, still draped across Kittredge’s body.
Kittredge gasped, his breath returning between horrific, painful heaves, the boozy smell of his stomach contents mixing with the stench of shit, his vomit splattering on the floor and on the comatose asshole who had just brought him closer to death than he had ever been in his life.
Every breath was agony to his throat but salvation to his starved lungs. He lay there in his own filth until his eyesight returned. The sight of the man’s face brought fear and loathing. The assailant was beginning to stir, waking up from his brief trauma-induced unconsciousness.
“Hoooh!” Kittredge yelled, completely lost in the panic and pain of the moment, frightened to death of what would happen when the man regained consciousness. He scrambled away from the big man’s body, his hands slipping in his vomit.
Knives, that quiet little corner of his brain whispered. Stab the bastard.
Kittredge twisted to face the counter and extended an exhausted arm, pulling on a drawer handle to hoist himself up onto an elbow, pushing off the floor to get to his knees.
He heard a groan behind him, and panic surged through his battered body yet again. He pulled himself upright, still gasping for breath after his near-strangulation, his feet sliding on the vomit-slicked floor tile.
An iron grip encircled his lower leg. “Hooooh!” he yelled again, senseless, throwing his right arm forward, praying that he’d reach a knife handle before the man ripped him to the floor and finished the job.
His hand slapped at the top of the knife block. He repositioned, felt the smooth shape of the knife handle against his palm, commanded his fingers to clamp shut, felt his legs ripped from beneath him, braced himself for the hard kitchen tiles as he slammed into the floor, heard the clatter of scattering kitchen knives as the knife block tumbled after him off the counter.
He squeezed his right hand. He felt the cold steel of the knife handle. He twirled his body and jabbed upward just as his assailant leapt onto Kittredge’s body.
The man impaled himself on the knife. Kittredge watched his face turn from murderous rancor to pained surprise. Kittredge twisted the knife, shoved it deeper, turned his hips for leverage, heard the wet sucking sound of steel slicing through innards.
Kittredge rolled out from beneath the man. He ripped the knife out of the man’s gut.
Then he stabbed him. Once more. And again. Something snapped inside of him, and he stabbed harder, deeper, faster, over and over again, manically and maniacally, tears streaking from his eyes, feeling bone and sinew and guts on his hands, the man’s face long since blank and empty, but Kittredge kept going, kept stabbing, kept howling and cursing and sobbing and plunging the knife into the dead man’s inert form like a man possessed.
Then he collapsed, exhausted, exhilarated to be alive, shaking and sobbing uncontrollably.
Half an hour passed. Kittredge finally rose from the gore. Rational thought slowly returned. This is a bad situation, he opined unnecessarily to himself.
One or two stabs. That would have been self-defense. Maybe three or four. But what he had done… that was something else entirely. My God, he had stabbed the living hell out of the guy. Two dozen times. Maybe three. He obviously hadn’t counted, because some animal had gotten loose, something had come unhinged deep inside of him, and he just went batshit crazy.
Would Strauss believe his self-defense claim?
Did he believe it was self-defense?
Would a jury? On top of Sergio’s bashed-in skull? Would it come to that? They could put you away forever, he thought.
And what a mess. He’d heard people talk about how much blood the body held, but until it was spread all over a kitchen floor, until you couldn’t walk anywhere without stepping in a puddle an eighth of an inch deep, you really couldn’t appreciate how much blood there was.
Get your shit together, he admonished himself. Be smart about this. He searched the guy’s pockets. Aside from a single key, there was absolutely nothing on him. No wallet, no cash, no phone, no receipts. And no weapon.
Oh, shit, there’s no weapon. Self-defense? Thirty stabs of a knife to stop an intruder who was wielding… nothing whatsoever? Sure, his neck would attest that he’d been choked. But he could have done that to himself, they might say, to make it look like self-defense.
He looked around. He saw a large bread knife, the kind with s
errated edges, perfect for ripping through flesh and cartilage and tendons, lying on the floor in the middle of the man’s blood.
He knew what he had to do.
It took him all day. It took every trash bag beneath the kitchen sink. It took every roll of paper towel stored in the closet.
It took every ounce of his gumption.
This is a terrible idea, he said to himself a thousand times throughout the day. But once he made the first incision in the dead man’s body, there was no turning back. There was no way he could play it off any longer. “He tried to kill me, so I killed him back. And then I decided to slice his arm off.” They would lock him away forever in an asylum for the criminally insane.
So once he was in, he was all in.
He made a dozen trips to the trash compactor in the basement. He had had no idea how heavy a leg was, or a damned torso, until he tried to heft them nonchalantly down the hallway, double-bagged to prevent a trail of blood from giving him away. He’d run across the same neighbor lady on two separate trips. On the second trip, he had the man’s upper leg swung over his shoulder. She’d given him the hairy eyeball like only a German lady can. “Frühjarsputz,” he explained. Spring cleaning. He wasn’t sure she bought it.
He’d cleaned himself up before hauling body parts around the apartment building, of course. It was an unbelievable chore in and of itself. Feces, barf, and blood were everywhere on his body. He even had small pieces of fat and gore lodged beneath his fingernails.
And, since he’d carved the man’s body up in Nora’s bathtub, he had one hell of a time cleaning that up in order to allow himself to shower. All sorts of bad-smelling stuff lives inside of a person, and it’s not shy about oozing out when you try to dismember a fresh corpse. Especially after you’ve plunged a knife through its bowels an insane number of times beforehand.
It was freezing outside, but Kittredge had all of the windows open to dissipate the smell. He’d had to run down to the corner store to buy more cleaning supplies. He was lucky — it looked like Nora shopped frequently at the corner store, because he was able to buy all the brands she used.
He mopped and scrubbed the floors all over her apartment. His hands and knees hurt like hell. His psyche hurt worse. He felt like a psychopath, an animal, a Jeffrey Dahmer.
But he did what had to be done.
He had to throw away his clothes, obviously. He’d cleaned the gore up in the nude, like some sort of serial killer, but he couldn’t very well have worn anything of Nora’s.
As it was, after he’d finished carving and cleaning, and had cleaned himself up enough to be seen in public, he’d had to borrow some clothes from Nora’s closet. Her sweats didn’t fit very well, and they earned him additional stares on his frequent trips to and from the trash compactor.
When he had finished, he inspected her apartment a dozen times, obsessively looking for any residual evidence of the atrocity. He was absolutely paranoid about leaving even a trace of evidence behind. He didn’t want to implicate Nora.
And he also didn’t want to put himself at her mercy. Not for this. It would give her the power to end his life. Nobody needed the pressure of a secret so toxic. And nobody needed the burden of instant complicity.
Once he was absolutely certain he’d cleaned up the last of the gore, and after he had cycled the building’s trash compactor to lessen the odds that someone would discover a hacked-up limb jutting from amongst the debris, he made a trip down the street in the opposite direction from the convenience store, walking quickly and nervously until he found a men’s store. He bought two new outfits, a package of underwear, and a package of socks. He wore one of the outfits out of the store.
He returned to Nora’s. He used the key he found in the dead man’s pants to open the door.
He saw Nora, standing in the kitchen, sipping a glass of wine. He was expecting her — it was her apartment, and the workday was over — but he was somehow still surprised and taken aback by her presence.
“I like your new duds,” she said with a smile. She gave him a hug and a kiss.
He felt cold and wooden beneath her touch. She noticed. “You’re tense,” she said. “I’ve had a hell of a day myself. Let’s relax.”
“What did you have in mind?” he asked, his smile a little forced, his heart pounding in his chest. What if I missed something? What if there’s blood left somewhere? It was all he could think about.
“I don’t know,” Nora said. “A bath sounds nice. Care to join me?”
27
Gunther Fleischer sat in the spacious but simple apartment above his butcher shop. He plugged the portable hard drive he’d liberated from the crime scene into his computer. The surveillance system produced a large number of movie files and saved them to the disk with labels demarcating time slices and the room under surveillance.
Fleischer assumed that the corpse wouldn’t have rotted long before discovery, and that the perpetrators wouldn’t have waited long between murdering the young man and sending the manila envelope to his father, which concentrated Fleischer’s search around the two days leading up to Friday, the twentieth of February. That was when his friend had called him for help.
It happened on Wednesday night, as it turned out. The entryway camera showed the young man entering the apartment first, reaching his hand out into the hallway, and grasping another person by the hand, fingers interlaced. Mathias had changed a great deal since last Fleischer had seen him. There were still the unmistakable Kohlhaas bones, the sharp features that were both intimidating and handsome, but Mathias had affected a femininity, a gayness, which had not been present when the youth was more directly under Viktor’s influence.
Or, Fleischer thought, when Mathias was more subject to Viktor’s oppression. Not all societies were as openly accepting of homosexuality as the Germans. The Danes, Fleischer didn’t know much about, but Viktor was undoubtedly a man’s man, and Fleischer had felt compelled to hide his own sexual orientation from Kohlhaas in order not to stunt the relationship. Fleischer had, when conversations with Viktor arose on the subject, which was a rare occurrence anyway, casually attributed his longstanding bachelorhood to his occupation. It wasn’t an implausible assertion, as Fleischer’s profession was decidedly antisocial, and would have been a lot for anyone to deal with. Butchering animals wasn’t savory to begin with, but butchering men was a different matter altogether.
Fleischer watched the scene unfold. He didn’t advance the video through the sex. Rather, he watched the entire encounter between the two young men, Mathias strong but sensitive, and his thin, slight, brown-skinned consort pliable, eager, and responsive.
The voyeurism wasn’t entirely disagreeable to Fleischer, and he found his apparatus functioning as it had in his younger days. He felt an urge to reacquaint himself with an old lover, a man who had shared a similar litheness and understated athleticism to the brown-skinned man who now slumbered on-camera beside Mathias Kohlhaas.
The young man didn’t slumber long. He arose, gathered his clothes from the various spots they’d gotten to during the impassioned undressing, and dressed silently in the entryway.
Had the brown-skinned man donned Mathias’ shirt? Fleischer rewound the video to make sure. Unmistakably, yes. He’d retained a souvenir. It revealed both an amateurism and a psychological proclivity that could prove useful in the future, Fleischer noted.
The slight man opened the door quietly.
A monster of a man entered. He dwarfed the brown-skinned access agent. Clearly, this was the wet man. He wore a brimmed hat of popular German style, which hid his eyes, but a scar was clearly visible on the giant’s cheek, right below one eye. The big man’s jawline appeared to have been chiseled from granite, and a gigantic pair of gloves hid a gigantic pair of powerful hands.
The giant raised a scarf from his neck and tied it around his own mouth, undoubtedly to mitigate the chance of depositing his own DNA on the scene. Fleischer noted that the large man’s pant legs had been tied and tucked into
his boots, again to lessen the chances of leaving his own cells or body hair at the scene. On top of that, he pulled what people in the business called a bunny suit from a pack on his shoulder. It was a paper overall that covered a person’s clothing to prevent stains. It served the additional purpose of an added layer of protection against leaving evidence behind.
Mathias’ lover slipped into the hallway, disappearing from the entryway camera’s view. A nice feature of the surveillance system was that it was motion-activated, which meant that the cameras themselves filmed in the relevant timeline for the events leading up to the murder. The kitchen camera came up next, and clearly showed the large assassin quietly searching the kitchen until he found a mid-sized knife in a drawer adjacent to the oven.
The man wasted no time. He walked confidently into Mathias’ bedroom, turned on the light, clamped a huge paw over Mathias’ startled mouth, and with a single, expert motion that Fleischer couldn’t help but admire, severed Mathias’ carotid artery.
The man anticipated and expertly avoided the pressurized spray of blood from Mathias’ neck. Very few people could slit a man’s throat without getting any blood on themselves. It was a skill that required practice. One had to kill a lot of people to get good at it. This man had obviously killed a lot of people.
Mathias thrashed and flailed, but the assassin held him fast to the bed. Viktor Kohlhaas’ scion lost consciousness in a matter of seconds, and Mathias’ eyes settled to a permanently vacant stare inside of two minutes.
And then the carving. It was all for shock value. It made no difference to Mathias, who was long gone before the giant of a man began going to work on his body. It was all for the message.
The giant didn’t stop there. He carved a single word into the bare, exposed flesh of Mathias’ chest. “Comply,” the message said. Pretty unambiguous, Fleischer decided.
Semi-pro plus pro, Fleischer thought. It was an interesting combination. The access agent had left a ton of evidence behind at the scene, and he had absconded with an item of the victim’s clothing. By any standard, that was messy.
The Essential Sam Jameson / Peter Kittredge Box Set: SEVEN bestsellers from international sensation Lars Emmerich Page 97