Child of Mine: a psychological thriller

by Chambers, V. J.

  The authorities might have thought it was a one-off if another body hadn’t been recovered a few months later—from the same landscaping company. The owner of the company was so horrified by this that he went out looking under trees and bushes he’d planted years and years ago, and more bodies were found. It seemed that the killer had been a bit of a fan of that landscaping company. He hadn’t buried bodies in the company’s sites exclusively. There were a few other companies he followed as well, but the bulk of the bodies were from old sites from that company.

  When she’d met the head of the landscaping company, he’d devastated. This had decimated his business. No one wanted to call him to landscape now that there was a chance that a dead body would end up in their lawn. And of course, the police desperately wanted him to continue, hoping that the murderer would be just stupid enough to continue to dump bodies in the same way, thus allowing them to catch the bastard red handed.

  But the landscaper didn’t care about his business as much as he cared about all the people who had lost their family members. He was sickened to have been used to be part of his awful scheme. He wanted the bastard caught, and when he found out that Lorelei was working on the profile which would put the guy away, he wanted to do whatever he could to help her.

  Thing was, it was baffling, that case.

  Some of the victims fell into a certain type. Young women with curly hair who were usually hitchhikers or prostitutes.

  However, there were other victims that didn’t fall into that type at all. Most of them were men. They ranged in age from young to middle-aged. They were of different heights and builds.

  It was a breakthrough when she finally realized what they all had in common. They all had criminal ties to organizations like the mob or drug cartels.

  Finally, with that missing piece, she was able to put together a profile for the killer. He was a man who liked to kill, who was good at killing, and who didn’t see a reason not to profit from killing. He was a professional hitman who killed for fun as a hobby. Pragmatic and innovative, he seemed to get gratification from the ritual way he disposed of the body, not necessarily from the murder itself.

  She could ascertain this because he didn’t get fancy with the killings. They were all done in different ways. Stranglings, stabbings, even shots to the back of the head. In some cases, she even speculated that he might be getting rid of corpses that he didn’t kill himself. Maybe he also offered his services as a cleaner, taking away bodies that other people had killed and getting rid of evidence at the scene.

  But the body disposal was done a certain way, and the mummification was clearly lovingly and painstakingly performed, as if it were a treasured hobby. Now, thinking about it, the thought gave her chills, but at the time of writing the profile, she was so close to it all, so deeply inside the killer’s psyche, that she could understand it. She saw the beauty in what he had done, as if it were a piece of art.

  A wave of nausea washed over her at the memory.

  Lorelei clutched at the wall in her apartment.

  No more thinking about that. No more dredging up the past. None of it mattered now. She had Simon. She was free of the FBI. And the Undertaker had eventually been caught. He was behind bars now, and he was never getting out.

  She didn’t have to meet Isaac for some time now, but she didn’t think she could handle staying in the apartment anymore. She’d go for a meandering drive instead. Maybe she’d put on an audiobook and drive and zone out. Anything to calm down. Sometimes these sorts of memories were even worse than the nightmares, because if she didn’t get away from them, they could imprison her, tie her down with long, spindly fingers and trap her in fear.

  She put on her jacket and headed for the door. But the keys weren’t hanging on the hook where they were supposed to be.

  Simon. He’d taken the car, and he’d forgotten to hang them up. No matter how many times she told him that he needed to remember, he couldn’t seem to do that.

  Sighing, she went back into his room.

  The keys would be on his desk.

  Except they weren’t. The desk had Simon’s laptop, closed, and a few textbooks from school. No keys.

  The dresser then.

  But the dresser was only covered in model cars that Simon had put together. He’d gone through a big intense phase with those. Model cars had been all that he cared about for nearly two years. That was before the photography phase that he was into now.

  Not on the desk. Not on the dresser.

  Hmm. Where could he have left them? When he got home, she was going to have a talk with him about hanging the damned keys up. He couldn’t take the car if he lost the keys. What if she’d needed to be somewhere and hadn’t been able to find them? He might have made her late for something important.

  Maybe in the jeans he’d been wearing last night? In the pocket?

  She went over to his hamper and pulled out the first pair of pants on top. They jingled.

  Jackpot.

  She dug out the keys and turned toward the door. As she did, she spied Simon’s camera, lying haphazardly on the bed.

  Simon was always taking pictures, but he would never share them with her. He was sensitive to criticism, and if she didn’t respond in exactly the right way to his work, he was crushed. In order to protect himself, he had taken to hiding his work from her. Often times he would show it to other people, but not her. She knew that this was because her opinion was very, very important to him, and she was flattered by that.

  But she had to admit she was curious as well.

  The few photos that she had seen that Simon had taken were gorgeous, even artful. He seemed to instinctively understand light, shadows, and angles and knew how to create arresting images that seemed to move.

  If he never knew that she’d looked at the pictures, would it hurt anything? She’d take a gander, just to satisfy her own curiosity, and she’d never let on that she’d seen them. If he did choose to show her some of them in the future, she was pretty sure she could fake surprise well enough that he’d never know.

  She snatched the camera up off the bed, turned on the screen and began to hit the arrows to go back through the previous photos.

  First photo.

  It was a hand. A female hand against some grimy concrete wall.

  Huh. That was strange.

  She flipped to the next one.

  And threw the camera down on the bed, letting out a little scream.

  She fled from the room, her heart in her throat.

  CHAPTER TEN

  She stood outside Simon’s door, struggling to catch her breath. She had an urge to take off running, to push out the door, get in the car and drive and just keep driving. Drive until the road dead-ended into the ocean.

  But that wasn’t really an option for her anymore. She was a mother now, and she couldn’t just run away. She had to think about Simon. She couldn’t leave Simon. No matter what it was that he’d done.

  So, she gathered herself up, forced herself to breathe in and out, and she went back into the room.

  She picked up the camera off the bed and looked at the picture again.

  In the picture, a girl lay on a grimy concrete floor with her blond hair splayed out behind her. She was staring at the camera with a knowing half-smile on her face, the expression almost seductive.

  The girl was one of the girls that she’d seen on the news that morning. Darla or Calico, she couldn’t remember which. Why did Simon have a picture of her?

  Lorelei flipped through the pictures. There were tons of this girl, in all different poses, all in some abandoned building of some kind. The photos had an avant-garde, gritty sort of power. The juxtaposition of the vibrant, pretty girl against the broken-down background. The photos were sometimes just of parts of her body, like the first one of her hand. There were closeups of her fingers, of her shoulder, her eye.

  And there weren’t just pictures of the one blonde, either. When she was through with the pictures of the first girl, there
were more pictures of the other one.

  Both Darla and Calico in this same place.

  Simon had taken pictures of these girls. Probably last night, when he said that he was out with Jordan, he’d actually been taking these pictures. And then he’d gone by Jordan’s house later, to fall asleep during some movie. Jordan probably didn’t even know what Simon was up to. How could she? When men like this decided to deceive, no one knew, least of all the women in their lives.

  But what was she saying?

  She didn’t really think Simon had killed anyone, did she?

  She kept looking through the photos.

  There were more sets of pictures, with different girls in different locations. Pictures of a girl at school leaning over a water fountain, her hair cascading like a curtain. Pictures of a girl in the woods wearing a long, white skirt. She ran and danced and jumped, and the skirt floated with her, ghostly and bright.

  And then?

  Pictures of Brittany Lewis, in a similar setting to the place where Darla and Calico had been. Brittany was wearing something that looked like a prom gown. It was covered in purple sequins, and it brushed the floor of a dingy place. In these pictures, the juxtaposition was even more intense—glitz and ruin.

  Now, Lorelei was seized with a sense of awful calm. She turned off the camera and put it back on the bed where she’d found it.

  She drew herself up and walked out of the room, her head high.

  This wasn’t the first time life had stabbed her in the gut and twisted the knife. She’d lived through that. She could live through this.

  * * *

  “I could delete them,” Lorelei was saying. She and Isaac were sitting on a bench on a nature trail—the place where he’d asked to meet. The place was out of the way and deserted. They stared out into the depths of the forest. Birds were chirping in the distance, insects buzzing. “I could get the camera and delete all the pictures and then they’d be gone. It would be like they never existed.”

  “Don’t you think you should talk to Simon first?” said Isaac.

  “He can’t go to jail,” she said. “I can’t handle that. I can’t live that way. I can’t be the person who was tricked again, not when I’m supposed to understand this kind of pathology.”

  “Look, you’re putting the cart ahead of the horse here,” said Isaac. “And anyway, can’t we just back up a little bit here? I asked a question before you started spilling this whole story to me about the pictures. Can we get back to that?”

  “About who Simon’s father is?” she said. “Does that even matter? Really?”

  “I think you’re lying to me. I think he is my son, and you’re just saying he isn’t, because you’re trying to keep me away.”

  “I’m not lying,” she said. She took a long, deep breath. “But if I destroy the pictures, I’m destroying evidence, and I could become an accessory after the fact. Not to mention the fact that if I cover up what he’s doing, and he keeps doing it, I’ll be responsible for the deaths of—” She shook her head. “But no. I’ll get him help. I’ll have him institutionalized if I have to, but—”

  “For God’s sake, Lorelei, they’re only pictures,” said Isaac. “Maybe there’s an innocent explanation.”

  “An innocent explanation? For having taken pictures of a dead girl and two other missing girls?”

  “There were pictures of other girls, right? Are those girls dead or missing?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

  “So, maybe it’s all a coincidence.”

  “Hell of a coincidence, Isaac.”

  “Talk to him. Ask him about the pictures.”

  She shook her head. Even if he did have an explanation, she wouldn’t be able to trust it. If Simon were actually a psychopath, he’d be good at explanations. And she was his mother, so if he was a manipulator, she would have been the first person he’d practiced on. He’d be good at manipulating her.

  The hell of it was that Simon was the least manipulative child she’d ever met. He was so… straightforward. He said exactly what was on his mind, even if it offended people. That was all part of his Asperger’s.

  Maybe it was an act, though. Psychopaths often were able to use things they learned in therapy to help them better fake emotions. Maybe Simon had used his diagnosis of autism to fake the symptoms. Maybe it was his mask.

  God. Her little boy couldn’t be so devious, could he?

  Why had he taken those pictures?

  “Lorelei?” said Isaac. “Who is Simon’s father if it isn’t me?”

  She gave him a withering look. “Why even ask this? You know.”

  “I don’t.”

  “You know why we broke up,” she said. “You should be able to put two and two together.”

  “Look, I may have made a lot of boundless accusations at the time, but I was angry, and…” He furrowed his brow. “You can’t mean that…”

  Her stomach turned over.

  “You slept with him?”

  “I didn’t know at the time,” she said quietly.

  Isaac sat up straight on the park bench, looking vaguely ill. “No, that’s ridiculous. You wouldn’t have done that. You don’t have an unfaithful bone in your body, and Simon is mine. You’re just trying to make me so horrified of the boy that I don’t try to be part of his life. You’ve always wanted rid of me, because I remind you of your old life, of the old cases, and you have trauma, and that’s why you’re making this up now.”

  “No, Isaac, that’s not it.”

  “It is,” he said. “And I know that I should have been here earlier and been a part of his life from a young age. I should have fought you for that. But I didn’t, because I wasn’t convinced that I’d be any good to a child. I never thought I wanted one, and you didn’t seem to think I should be involved, and I figured, ‘Why rock the boat?’ But maybe I made a big mistake leaving him with you. I mean, you’re a drunk, and you clearly don’t have any problems jumping to conclusions that he’s a serial murderer, so you’ve obviously been more scarred by that trauma I was talking about than I’d ever believed.”

  Her jaw dropped. She stared at him, appalled. “You don’t think that I suspect Simon because I used to be a profiler?”

  “What self-respecting parent would believe such a thing about their child? I don’t even know Simon, and I’m sure that there’s a perfectly good explanation for the pictures. Do you always believe the worst in him? For heaven’s sake, maybe you’ve done irreparable damage to him by now.”

  Lorelei’s nostrils flared. “Keep that up, and I’ll slap you. I’m a good mother. I do the best I can, anyway.”

  “And you’ve been there for him, whereas I haven’t. So, I shouldn’t accuse you, it’s true. I’m not in the running for father of the year.”

  “You’re not his father.”

  “Oh, please, would you stop insisting anything otherwise?”

  She got her phone out of her pocket and scrolled around a bit until she found a recent picture of Simon. She thrust it at Isaac. “I’m telling the truth, you asshole. Look at the resemblance. He’s not your son.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The next day was Sunday. Lorelei thought long and hard about confronting Simon about the pictures. Maybe Isaac was right and she wasn’t giving Simon the benefit of the doubt.

  But when it came down to it, she wasn’t even sure how to talk about the pictures. They were so… unlike Simon. She couldn’t even imagine how he’d managed to get them in the first place. Some of the pictures did look as though they’d been snapped from afar, as if he’d been taking photos of people who were unaware. But most of them were posed. The girls were staring right at the camera, and they were obviously aware they were being photographed.

  But Simon was shy and blundering. He wasn’t the kind of kid who could go out and ask girls to pose for him. She couldn’t see that at all. Simon got nervous talking to girls his own age, and he simply wasn’t capable of this.

  But then she thought of th
e girl at the chess club saying that Simon was outgoing, and she had a gnawing feeling of dread in the pit of her stomach.

  Maybe it was all an act.

  So, instead of confronting Simon, she followed him instead.

  He told her he was going to the library with Jordan to study for a test that they both had in chemistry the next day.

  She said that was fine, but that he couldn’t take the car.

  No problem, said Simon.

  She followed him. He did go to Jordan’s place, and Jordan drove them in her car. Mia had given the girl a car as a present when Jordan got her driver’s license.

  Lorelei almost went home. If he was with Jordan, he certainly wasn’t going to do anything out of character. After all, Jordan was likely in the dark about everything.

  Or was she? What if Jordan was somehow involved? The two did do everything together. Maybe Jordan was talking the girls into having their pictures taken. But if so, Jordan couldn’t know anything about the murders, could she?

  As Lorelei settled in at the computer lab of the library, where she could hide behind a monitor and peek around to watch Simon and Jordan studying together at a table in the resource section, she considered what she knew about serial killing teams. It wasn’t unheard of, and it was often comprised of a man and woman in a romantic relationship. Usually the man was the aggressor, and he was abusive towards the woman, who had to do whatever he said for fear of retribution. The woman might be involved in the killings, but she was also a victim. Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate were a good example of that.

  Of course, there was always Karla Homolka and Paul Bernardo to consider as well. They were a husband-and-wife killing team who had killed three women, including Karla’s own sister. Though Homolka had argued that she was an abuse victim of Bernardo, and even been acquitted of the crimes, the facts of the cases didn’t really bear that out. It seemed that her husband had raped and tortured the victims, but that she had been the one to actually murder them. Not that there was hard evidence to that fact.

  She came off as clearly psychopathic, though, especially if you read some of her letters complaining about how persecuted she was because her parents wouldn’t spend a fortune on her wedding. She sounded like a whining three-year-old, and the lack of emotional maturity was a sure sign of psychopathy. There was something off about the woman.