To Catch a Killer

by Mitch Goth

  The donut shop down the street from the safe house was a bland, almost cliché affair. The building looked a lot like a stylized semi-trailer, with long, dirtied up windows and artistically corrugated fifties-style sheet metal siding. The interior wasn't much better. There was a diner counter with half a dozen stools in front of it, and many booths lining the windowed walls. It looked like the place served a lot more than donuts, but based on the large pastry cases full of their wide variety of flavors and variations, it appeared to be their main attraction.

  Kellen and Ezra sat at a booth near the door. She sipped at black coffee and ate a bear claw while he drank from a cup of ice water and indulged himself in a honey glaze donut. As they sat, she observed him. Her suspicions of him had only heightened through all his help. What made him so good at it? Was he better at catching killers than she was? How could she let her skills fall behind those of an actual killer?

  "Penny for your thoughts?" Ezra inquired, noticing her noticing him.

  Kellen took in a deep breath. "What are you?"

  "When will people stop asking that?"

  "Sorry, but it's got me in a bunch right now. How the hell are you so good at this?" Kellen asked. "And don't brush off the question. Give me a real answer."

  "Well in all honesty, and trust me this isn't brushing it off, it just took practice." Ezra shrugged. "I spent much of my childhood in book learning. In middle school I was reading dictionaries and encyclopedias, hoping to understand the word in its entirety. But all I learned from that was how to understand people. After all, they're the ones who wrote all those tomes."

  "What kind of middle school kid reads encyclopedias for fun?" Kellen was almost certain that Ezra was lying his way through the explanation.

  "The nerd kid with the giant brain, absurd chess skills, and the silvery hair."

  "You played chess? You must've been a nerd."

  "Could beat anyone in the school in ten moves or less," Ezra said with a prideful smile. "Same with high school. In college the number moved up to about twelve moves."

  "Where'd you go to college?" Kellen didn't expect to hear that a serial killer had gone to any institution of higher learning. But based on Ezra's mind and keen skill set, she was now kicking herself for not deducing that fact before.

  "I got my Masters in Public Administration from a school in California. But a degree like that mixed with past time in the military put me right next to big politicians, quite the place to be for wanting to observe the nature of human beings."

  "That just sounds hellish."

  "I suppose it was watching these political types operate that made me the cynical person I was before prison. If those people could behave so badly and lie so well to the public, wasn't everyone capable of that power? My political job lead me to the conclusion that all people are inherently bad, but it also taught me that no one deserves to be deceived or hurt by the destructive nature of others. I saw politicians all around take bribes and deals that wrecked people's homes, their jobs, their entire lives. To this day, I feel rather poor for killing the criminals tainting my neighborhood instead of the men in suits who forced them with crooked policy and corrupt bargains into that life to begin with. So what am I then? I'm a college-educated man who knows the innards of how humans operate. It is this knowledge, along with my firsthand experience as one of the crazy killers of the world, that makes me so valuable for things like this. Don't feel too bad if I disgrace you." He spoke with no ego behind his words. Ezra was speaking to Kellen in the utmost sincerity. "The only reason I'm good at this is because I am what you are hunting, and I took the time to note down how I would think, and what I would do, and why. So that's what I am, more or less, a critical thinking killer."

  Kellen pondered this response. This was no brush off. Ezra wasn't weaseling his way out of an explanation. She could tell in his voice and in his stern expression that this was the best attempt at the truth he could make towards the answer to that question. A critical thinking killer. He observed his movements, saw the wrong in them, but continued anyway. To her, that fact made him far more dangerous.

  Slowly, Kellen was forming the words to reply to him. But before she could utter a single syllable, an unfamiliar face approached their booth. A tall woman, brunette, dressed well and impeccably put together.

  "Excuse me." She tapped on Ezra's shoulder. "I'm sorry if I'm interrupting, but I love your hair. How'd you get it like that?"

  "What, the color?" he asked, puzzled.

  "Yeah, it's fantastic," the woman exclaimed.

  "Well, the color comes from genetic deficiency, nothing of my doing. But the shine and style comes from my artist."

  "Do they have a name? I'd love to go get my hair done by them."

  "It's Ron something." 

  Kellen watched this interaction cautiously. This woman had no clue who she was speaking to, and it was rather incredible. To this woman, Ezra was just a normal person with some well done hair, despite the fact his head look rather disheveled from sleep still.

  "Where does he do his work?" the brunette wondered. "Does he have a shop?"

  "No." Ezra shook his head. "He does it on our off time at the prison."

  "Wait? What prison?" The woman's complete lack of fear melted away. Kellen observed her facial expression. It was confusion, but fear was definitely in the mix.

  "The maximum security one down the road."

  "Do you work there?" 

  "Nah," Ezra shook his head and smiled. Kellen was already letting out a groaning sigh. She knew what was coming. He was about to ruin it. "I kill people."

  The woman snorted. "Funny joke."

  "It's not a joke." Kellen cut off the talk before it could go any further. She pulled out her FBI badge and flashed it, verifying her statement. "He's under control and not dangerous, but I suggest you move along."

  Without another word, the woman darted off. The lack of fear seemed so foreign now. It was a disappointment to Kellen, who took interest in seeing a natural interaction between a person and a murderer. But, she knew they had business to take care of. They had a girl that desperately needed saving, so they needed to get back on track as soon as possible.

  "Come now," Ezra said. "I was having a nice conversation with someone who didn't know I was a monster."

  "I don't care." Kellen was swift to turn the conversation towards her point of interest. "We've got work to do."

  "What work would that be?"

  "Sun City."

  "What about it?"

  "How are we sure that that's the place our guy is holed up. If we're wrong, then we've lost a lot of valuable time chasing a useless lead."

  "Think about it like this: how many of these kidnappings happened in big cities, like around here?"

  Kellen thought it over for a moment. "None."

  "Precisely. When I looked over the files, I came to notice that all these disappearances happened from small towns. Not villages either though. The lowest population was five thousand while the highest was about forty thousand. This guy didn't want to be seen around a really tiny town."

  "But he didn't want the disappearance to fall through the cracks either. He wanted people to see. He wanted people to notice. Why?"

  "Hell if I know." Ezra shrugged. "There's so many reasons someone could want to see their work in the news, or want people to catch onto him. They could be crazy, they could get a real rush out of it, they could just want their ego taken care of. Until you find the guy and talk about it with him, there's no sure way to tell. But, there is one thing I can tell, this guy is a creature of severe habit. Same amount of time between kidnapping and dump every time, he makes sure the body is seen within a few hours each time, and each time he makes sure the dump site isn't more than a couple miles from the kidnapping site. He's methodical, and I assure you that will be his downfall. You just need to dig deeper into his methods. All of this stuff stays constant throughout. Why wouldn't the distance he drives each time stay the sam
e too? It would only make sense. And the only place where all of these sites connect with any equality is Sun City."

  "So you're sure this is where he'll be found?"

  "Sure enough, yes. Besides, we don't have much else to go on anyhow."

  "Okay then." Kellen got out of the booth. "Let's go."

  "Now?"

  "Yes, Ezra, now."

  "All right." He sighed and followed her out of the shop.

  As they walked down the sidewalk back towards the safe house, they didn't speak. Kellen was too deep into thought to say much, nor hear what was said  around her. She seemed to get this way every time she got close to catching a killer she was working on. So close she could taste it, it brought excitement to her mind, but it drug anxiety along for the ride. Her mind wandered deeper and wanted to run faster. What would happen? Would they get him? Would he escape? Was it too late to save Megan? So many questions sped through her head, and each one of them made her heart beat faster. She didn't want to let this become another failure in her life.

  Kellen reached into her pocket and felt at her phone. She knew she couldn't call Remi. There wasn't time. Remi wouldn't be that much help either. She was always better in person than she was over the phone. But still Kellen held onto the device.

  "Something upsetting you?" Ezra's voice came through her haze.

  "What?" She inched out of the cave of her mind.

  "You look rather distressed. Shouldn't you be happy? It appears as if we're closer to catching your sought after bad guy."

  "It's nothing," She shook her head and walked faster.

  "You think you can run some 'it's nothing' shit by me? I'm not going to let you up from this without an explanation. This should be exciting for you, so why the long, depressive face?"

  "Confronting killers, or even just the thought of confronting them, just brings me a lot of stress."

  "Why's that? And why choose this line of work if that's the case?"

  "I have a history dealing with killers."

  "And what might that be?"

  Kellen thought for a moment. She didn't want to tell him anything about her life, anything he could use against her later on. He was a dangerous man even if his only weapon was his words.

  "I don't bite," he said.

  "I've gone through some bad things in my past." Kellen was purposefully vague. She only shared the story of her parents with a few important people in her life, and Ezra would never be one of those people. "For a long time I wanted to catch killers. I've gotten a lot of them, a lot of real sick fucks. But that doesn't mean I'm not still nervous when I get up close and personal with one."

  "That seems like quite the issue in your field."

  "I'm dealing with it. It's getting better."

  "Are you positive about that?"

  "Trust me, it's getting better. When I started, I needed days off every time we caught one. Now, I don't need that. Some butterflies is all. That's what you can call them anyway,  butterflies. I'm fine, don't worry." Kellen felt uncomfortable sharing that much with Ezra.

  "You know, you remind me of myself."

  "How do you figure?" Kellen couldn't see any similarity between herself and the serial killer walking beside her.

  "When I took care of my own business, it startled me to be so close to such bad people. Mix that with actually doing the deed, well, it wasn't something even the army could prepare me for. That work was simple. It was all methodology and faceless attacks. I didn't know the people I was attacking. All I knew was if I wanted to live, they had to die. This was different. I saw them everyday in my neighborhood. They weren't faceless. I knew about them, they weren't shooting at me, they weren't harming me in any direct way. After the first time, I was so paranoid, so scared. I didn't leave my house for days afterwards. I was just waiting for a squad car to pull in front of my house and take me away. It took a lot of time to get over that. I know, you're thinking about just how wildly different our experiences were, how opposite spectrum they are. I can see why you would think that, but don't let that make the message fuzzy, it gets easier. You stop worrying. That's something I promise you. Doesn't matter what side of the law you're on or what you're doing, anxiety passes, that's the only tolerable thing about it. In no time, you will be the confident killer catcher I know you can be, and you know you can be."

  "Thanks." Kellen gave a small nod.

  She thought about what he told her. It seemed to make sense, and that scared her even more. This man was a killer. A killer. He was the kind of person she set out to stop, set out to eliminate from the outside world. Now she was identifying with him, as one normal person does to another. That thought made her skin crawl. Ezra was the last person she wanted to relate to.

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