Killer Among Us

by Adriana Hunter

  He knew it would just be a matter of time before the FBI got called in and he knew that the only reason Captain Ross was putting it off was because he was hoping his detectives could solve it, and that he could take the credit.

  Kane doubted that they would be able to. The Creeper’s kill rates were accelerating. He had killed three women in two weeks and Kane knew one thing about serial killers, once they started accelerating they rarely slowed down.

  He closed his eyes but their faces remained. Seven women, all of them killed violently and without reason. He shut his mind off deliberately and went to sleep.

  ***

  There were seven heads. He counted them and blinked. He knew five of the women, only five. He counted them again and scratched his head. The oddly desperate feeling that seemed to always be right below the surface returned, swarming under his skin like a horde of angry bees.

  Where had the other women come from? That was a ridiculous question, he had killed them. But why? He poured milk onto his cereal and stared at the heads. The latest had a deep dimple in her chin that would have elevated her face from merely pretty to incredibly striking by virtue of its being so unusual.

  The milk tasted sour and the cereal was dried out and flavorless. It crunched grittily between his teeth, but he didn’t notice. The one his eyes kept being drawn back to stared at him with a seeming reproach, he could almost feel the contempt coming from her.

  Appetite gone he dumped the bowl into the sink, making sure to clean it out afterward. He had become obsessive about neatness the year before and he was simultaneously aroused and sickened by the frozen patches of maroon colored blood that clumped around the ragged stumps of their necks.

  His hand crept toward his crotch but his body refused to respond. Anger swelled instead of his member and he clenched his fists in rage as he stared at the face of the first of his victims.

  Her hair had been shining and soft in life, but in death it hung in a limp straw textured clump around her cheeks, her face was patched with frost and ice crystals and her blue eyes had developed a film over them, giving her the appearance of someone who was aging and developing cataracts.

  His eyes closed but the red streaked darkness behind his eyelids offered him no answers.

  Sighing he turned and left the comfort of his home, like any regular guy on his way to work.

  ***

  Sophie was beyond grateful that she had a couple of days off from work for she was thoroughly exhausted. Sassy’s small heavy weight rested near her right hip and she relaxed as she picked up one of the thin novels that sat in the cardboard box under her coffee table.

  The cover showed a woman with eyes too big for her face and a thin gown standing on a snow bank. Wolves circled around her slight figure while a dark haired man seated on a large black horse were featured in the background. Everything about the book screamed cheesy romance and she gave a happy sigh as she opened the pages and began to read.

  Barbara Cartland had been a name she had known as soon as Geoff had said it. Her mother had had shelves filled with those books, at twelve she had still been too young to read them and when she had been taken in by the system she had not been allowed to keep her parent’s possessions, they had owed money and creditors had swooped down to claim their home and belongings to offset those debts. Besides, the foster system only allowed her so many possessions. The worker had packed all of her things into black trash bags rather than the suitcases that had been in her parent’s closet.

  The books made her feel close to her mother again but they also made her wonder what it would be like to be so in love that there was no risk not worth taking.

  She closed the book, suddenly restless. Her mind kept going back to the scene she had witnessed at the club that she had been in with Kane. Was that love? How could that woman have trusted someone so much that she would allow herself to be tied up and used so openly? That memory brought heat to her face and between her thighs.

  She had never known lust, never known the throb of excitement that accompanied sex until she had seen that couple and she wasn’t sure how to handle it. Sex, in her experience, was painful and frightening. Susan had traded sex for money and drugs and so she had also seen it as a commodity, something fast and cheap and easily forgotten. None of that appealed to her.

  But what she had seen in the club had excited her; she couldn’t deny it. She turned the thoughts off as best as she could and buried herself back in the book but the memory kept seeping back in, as did the heat.

  Frustrated, she decided what she really needed was some exercise. Sassy gave a low hopeful whine as Sophie put on her shoes but she gave her a little hug and a promise to walk her when she returned and left the apartment alone.

  The sun hung low in the sky, barely visible above the tall buildings on Fifth Avenue, bathing the people walking with a soft golden glow. Lines of people waiting for food at the carts clogged foot traffic and taxis clashed their gears while their drivers shouted curses at each other and impatient drivers flipped each other off and beeped their horns despite the signs declaring horn honkers would be fined three hundred dollars.

  Sophie felt immediately better. She walked fast, having learned that to walk slowly was to risk being run over by other people, slowing only occasionally to peek into shop windows. A thrift store window’s merchandise beckoned and she went in, coming out with a bag that held a small print for her living room wall and a set of fanciful coffee mugs that had colorful fish swirling around the rims.

  Her mood had lightened considerably by the time she bounded back into the apartment. She took Sassy back out for a few minutes and then she put herself back into her little nest on the sofa, the book once more in her hands.

  It slipped from her fingers as she fell asleep, landing on the floor with a small thud. She rolled over, her face nuzzling into the back of the sofa as she dreamed.

  ***

  The DNA matched. Kane gave the results a grim once-over, before leaning back in the creaking chair that sat at his desk. Forrester lounged over his own chair; his suit had rucked up around his back, causing large and bulky creases in the jacket.

  “So this woman didn’t see anything huh?” He asked.

  “Just a guy with a head in a bag.”

  Forrester riffled through the report in front of him, “Susan Hammond,” he said, “Lives at Thirty-Third and Eighth.”

  Kane wondered what report the other man was looking into but didn’t ask, he had learned long ago that to ask what was going on in Forrester’s cases somehow translated to him agreeing to take them on. He didn’t need any more cases on his plate.

  The DNA matched, the rush results proved it. The man Sophie had seen had been the same man who had murdered the latest victim. He stood up, rubbing his eyes and lower back. The precinct hummed with activity, below the long staircase various petty thieves and junkies were hustled in and out of the pens, all of them screaming for lawyers or that they were being railroaded. Half of them were in so often they knew most of the cops by name.

  Hookers laughed and joked in the lock up space that was referred to as the kitty crawl by the women who frequented it. The Homicide Division’s home building was undergoing major remodeling so the detectives were all crammed into a sprawling open space on the top floor, all the noise drifted upward to them. For some it was a distraction, Kane never noticed it.

  The FBI was going to be in by the end of the week and he knew that while the help would be needed he also dreaded it. The news reports were full of the killings: the latest had been a bit different however; the woman who had been killed had not been almost famous, she had been famous. Or, at least, in some circles.

  Jenny Fox had been known for her eccentric and flamboyant behavior, she claimed to be a gypsie, to be possessed by the goddess Inanna, and that she was able to speak to the dead. The woman had made a living by holding séances and channeling spirits. She was known for showing up on television shows while being ‘used by the Lady’ as she put it, an
d even though many people shot her rather ridiculous claims down with logic, she seemed to stay popular with those desperate to talk to their dead until the year before, when her ex-partner had announced to the world that Jenny was a fraud and a liar who had been born in the mountains of North Carolina and that she had left a husband and a warrant for her arrest behind, as well as a past marked by mental illness and drug use, when she moved to the city.

  Kane could not figure out where she fit into the serial killer’s pattern, Jenny was older and not at all thin. She was in her forties and she had short hair, all of the other women had been possessed of long hair.

  Could there be a copycat? Or was she killed by a person who had taken her head in an attempt to throw them off the trail? His every instinct said she had been a victim of the Creeper but there was no pattern.

  He stared down at the photographs, his mouth thinning down to a hard line. Jenny had been killed far more savagely than the last victim, further proof that the killer was accelerating. His neck ached and his mood was black as he decided to call it a night.

  Walking home he felt tension draining away from his shoulders. His back muscles loosened and his long legs ate the distance but the movement could not help shut off his mind.

  His thoughts drifted away from the case and back to Sophie. He had not realized how much he longed for a new submissive, how much he had missed the rough and intense sex and the trust that made a scene really work for him until he saw the look of yearning wonder on her gorgeous face.

  His crotch ached at the memory of her parted lips, widened eyes and flushed cheeks. He walked faster, hoping that that sudden burst of lust would subside but it didn’t, if anything it intensified. It was late, after midnight and he had to curb the urge to go and knock on her door.

  “What would you say to her?” he asked himself, “Hi, remember me? The cop you met at a kink club? I was just checking to make sure you were still alive and, hey, by the way, would you mind if I took you to dinner then spanked you and fucked you senseless?”

  The image that conjured up: Sophie on her belly with her firm and pale ass bared to him, made his cock grow harder. He growled out an expletive, startling the woman who was walking in front of him.

  I want her, he admitted as he opened the door to his apartment. After all these years I want to take a new submissive under hand and, go figure, she does not even know what that means…yet.

  The yet startled him. “Am I planning on training her? I would have to…” realizing where his thoughts had wandered he closed them off and forced himself to go to sleep.

  ***

  The Creeper stood in the small living room of the apartment he had broken into earlier. There was something wrong, and he felt it. His gut tightened and his eyes scanned the gloom, looking at the pictures on the wall. A woman smiled at him from one frame, her arms around a small child. In another she posed beside a man, both of them in wedding finery.

  He did not have to check to know he was in the right place, it was the people were wrong. A wave of dizziness swept over him, he had gotten something wrong; he had made a mistake somewhere. But, how?

  He could hear her mocking laughter; it gusted through his mind like poisoned wind. “You are so stupid,” she jeered, “You are a fool! Everyone knew but you…”

  He clapped his hands to his ears, hoping to drown her out but her voice remained, cutting through him like a chainsaw. He ground his teeth together and crept toward the door. A small squeak caught his attention; he turned his head to see a shadow gather and coalesce in the hallway. Curious eyes peeked at him from a solemn little face.

  “Are you lost? “

  “Yeah,” the Creeper said gruffly, “Very lost.”

  “You should get a phone like my dad’s; it tells you where you are and where you’re going too.”

  “I’ll remember that.” How old was the kid, ten? Twelve? What had he been doing when he was that age? He could recall the fourth grade vaguely: the smell of chalk and the taste of the paste he had liked to eat, the bicycle that had dumped him in the driveway and led to two chipped front teeth. His old man had beaten his ass good for that stunt, teeth were expensive to fix, after all.

  The kid watched him leave. He closed the door softly then tugged the hat down lower. His hand stayed on the doorknob for a few moments while he weighed the pros and cons of going back in and killing the kid; he had seen him after all. But what had he seen really, a man in dark clothes with a mustache a totally different color from his hair and tufts of the same colored wig sticking out from under a ball cap; that was all. No need to slaughter the whole family.

  The rage that always simmered below the surface had grown quiet, leaving just the anxiety. His nerve seemed to be failing him and that alone made a small bud of that anger unfold but luckily for the family on the other side of the door it was not enough to make him reenter the apartment.

  He turned and went down the hall, taking the stairs instead of the elevator to keep his face off of the cameras inside of that small steel coffin.

  Out on the streets he walked slowly, deliberately pacing himself to appear as if he had no reason to be away from the streetlights and the hot white glow of the headlights. Something she had said to him, years before, about tigers walking in a concrete jungle came back to him and he could feel that same confusion that had haunted him for the last several years bleeding back in.

  How had it all gone wrong? The city had changed, or maybe he had grown weary. Their life had somehow gone downhill and she had begun to hate him, to hold him in contempt. The Creeper stared at his face in a dark window for long moments, trying to capture the face of the man he had once been but all he saw reflected back at him was a wavering face whose lines looked indistinct and blurred, he looked like a ghost imprinted on a dead television screen.

  The thought of being a ghost frightened him; he turned and fled back toward the subway, running for home and its illusion of safety.

  ***

  Three days had passed and the city lay sweltering under an unexpected and unseasonable blanket of heat. The temperatures rose and the Creeper remained silent. Trucks parked along the curbs served up dripping cones and the tourists huddled on the double decker buses that ran the sightseeing circuits, too tired and hot to walk the steaming streets.

  Sophie still had yet to purchase a television but she had learned a great deal about the Creeper since the night she had seen him, and all of it made her very nervous, as did the newly awakened sexual longing inside her. The night before she had lain in bed, surprised to find her crotch slick and wet. She had never masturbated, yet she somehow had known by instinct where and how to touch, and when it had been too hard and when it was too light. The strange and desperate feeling that had come up in her when her fingers had grazed her clit had made her gasp, shame had made her stop before she could find release so as a consequence she had woken up cranky and a little sore.

  The bookstore was very busy, the usual customers culled the dollar shelves and the tourists drooped in the aisles, loudly comparing the store to the large chain bookstores. Sophie had to smile each time she heard the word quaint used just to keep from swearing out loud. Geoff had long since tired of what he deemed the necessary evils of business ownership and vanished into his office. His door sat decidedly closed and she knew he would not come out until closing time, which was two hours away.

  She could understand his feelings; he loved books, old, rare, new and used. He loved classics and trashy novels both and the hunt associated with finding them. He did not, however, like people. He hated seeing his books going out of the shop, even though he understood it was the nature of the business.

  The day dragged, a little boy threw a screaming fit and spilled sticky egg cream on a pile of children’s books. While she ran for paper towels the parents scooped him up and left, not even asking if anything was damaged. Three books were soaked with the gooey mess and she knew one was wrecked; the words were smeared across the page too badly to read. She lef
t it open to dry anyway just in case and rang up the old man with a love for Westerns written in the nineteen fifties and the young woman who liked Ayn Rand and self-help books.

  When she left for the evening she was thoroughly exhausted and a bit irritated. A strange hush hung over the streets as she trudged home, she could feel it. It felt like everyone and everything was holding its breath, waiting for something to happen.

  Sassy greeted her with a long lick and an even longer whine. “Oh you poor thing,” Sophie said, cuddling her pet close, “You need to go out, don’t you?”

  She took her to the closest park, allowing her to run until the twilight cast dark indigo and purple mantles over the statues in the park and the quiet faces of the buildings. They stopped at a cart for dinner, Sassy barking excitedly when Sophie ordered hot dogs and French fries for dinner.

  When she opened her wallet to pay her eyes fell on the slickly laminated card she had been handed at the club. It read, quite simply, Sophie and had a number printed below it. The card seemed to blare up at her, she looked over at the other cart patrons guiltily, wondering if they had seen it and knew where she had been. She found herself wanting to say, “I was there by accident, I was running from a killer,” but that bizarre urge passed almost as soon as it made itself known.

  Dinner in hand, she and Sassy strolled back to the apartment. Sassy gulped hers down and then gave her owner’s meal a hopeful look, yipping excitedly when she was given a few extra fries. With dinner over Sophie tried to read but she put the book back down after scanning a few pages without interest. Loneliness set in, bringing depression with it and her eyes drifted back to the picture of Susan.

  Three weeks before her suicide Susan had come home again. She had spent four days in bed, drying out. When she had gotten up she had been a mess, pasty and exhausted. Her hair had been snarled and oily, her eyes circled by yellow and brown bruises, the remnants of black eyes.