by Ryan Harding
He heard a sound like a washcloth being dropped in the bathtub. It was Claire’s bladder hitting the back wall as Greg tried to ditch the evidence. A bovine look of innocence plastered on his face, Greg took a heroic bite out of his contaminated sandwich, sinewy strands of meat pulling taut and snapping as he tore away, a token Mmmmmmm! as his compliment to the chef. If Von hadn’t been looking for the wince of disgust on his pal’s face, he might have missed it. Greg never missed a beat, nodding as he chewed, eyes slightly watery.
This, along with another joy-buzz, restored Von’s good mood.
He was hard again.
JOURNAL ENTRY, JANUARY 21
Where does something like this begin? You wake up every day and ask yourself how it became what it is and you always come back to fantasy. This kind of fantasizing, though . . . it doesn’t suddenly happen. It isn’t like those dreams in the womb, images from a life you haven’t even begun. Or at least it doesn’t seem that way.
So you ask yourself—why the fantasies?
You immediately think of the magazines. They were in a box in the attic, guarded by the torso of a mannequin. The attic light bulb burned out sometime after Christmas and had not been replaced by summer. You were bored enough to look around anyway. No school and all your friends were on vacation, so you got adventurous. It was early afternoon and the sun was as bright as a camera flash through the only window.
It indicated the box.
That’s what you thought years later. You were meant to find the box and the heavens conspired to make sure you did. You opened it and then sat down in the surrounding pool of light, as though the pull of gravity was greatly concentrated in that one special area.
Ironically a good deal of the magazines you found were issues of Life, although many of the images on the cover were devoted to the antithesis of its namesake.
Death triumphant.
The War to End All Wars.
You didn’t really care about this, though. School was in a few weeks, you’d hear plenty of it then. The other magazines you found, though . . . you weren’t going to hear Ms. Garza talk about them in a classroom. Not ever.
Time had not been especially kind to them. The pages were yellowed and slight water damage left waves on some of the covers. They looked like comic books at first, which might have been interesting anyway, but then you saw they were something else. They bore the title SHOCKING DETECTIVE. The covers were illustrated, united by a theme similar to the Life coverage of the War to End All Wars.
The theme was women.
Women in various stages of undress.
Women in peril.
They all looked like Hollywood starlets who lived in the same apartment building. They could have been sisters, these redheads, brunettes, and blondes. They were all beautiful, they were all voluptuous, they were all terrified—their mouths set in a silent scream that seemed to resound far beyond the barriers of the page.
They all had male visitors.
Men with masks and black gloves.
Men with knives.
You were initially disappointed when you opened these issues of Shocking Crimes and discovered they weren’t illustrated after all; only the covers were artistically rendered. You were still interested enough to read them, though, even if there was going to be plenty of that in school, too.
Who could have resisted the allure of the articles, though? Such titles! “Madman Mutilated the Missouri Mother!” “Sadist Slaughtered Six Southern Belles!” “Fiend Filleted Aunt Frieda!”
The promise didn’t stop there. Even a cursory glance of the articles revealed several highlighted captions throughout which presented the horror in bigger letters and bolder print.
For instance:
“Her husband of fifteen years couldn’t even recognize her. Several blows to her face and an aborted attempt to burn her remains resulted in damage too extensive for identification. ‘You’d never believe that twisted mass of burnt decay was ever a human being,’ said coroner Brad Zeller.”
But not to be outdone by:
“The murder weapon was obviously an axe. There were deep grooves consistent with overhead swings of said instrument in sixteen wounds on her body. There were also footprint indentations on her rib cage, as though the killer stood on her to help him withdraw the axe so that he could swing it again . . . and again . . . and again.”
They were always crimes of passion, if not necessarily in the traditional sense. This wasn’t about retribution because of a cheating wife. This was something deeper. You understood that then, even if you could never have verbalized it. This was about a sacred drama, scenes from a ritual unfolding in unremarkable corners of Everywhere.
Where does something like this begin?
It began with Shocking Crimes and a simple connection.
You then became I, and I have killed six women. He knew little about the Slave Murders and it would have stayed that way were it not for the special report on Channel Two News. Maybe he wouldn’t have even watched it had Jana been there, but of course she was not.
“Residents of Bartok vividly recall the terror of twenty-five years ago when the murderer who called himself the Slave Killer stalked these very streets.” The platinum blonde reporter, Geisha Hammond, gestured dramatically behind her to reveal the horror of Bartok pedestrians and middle class cars. “It was here in this peaceful community that the notorious serial killer took the lives of a confirmed four victims. Some experts believe the number could be as high as eighteen.”
Cut to:
A so-called expert: Dr. Julius Vincent. “Why would he stop at four? This guy liked what he was doing. Nothing short of incarceration or illness would stop him.”
Geisha Hammond returned. “Was the Slave Killer imprisoned for an unrelated crime or possibly committed to a mental institution? These questions cannot be answered definitively now, but one thing is for sure: After twenty-five years, some believe the Slave Killer has picked up where he left off.”
That got his attention.
They played familiar news footage from the year before. Forensic experts and detectives got in each other’s way as they scoured an open field. Like the point of a painting from which all lines emanate, a crumpled form lay behind them under a white sheet which fluttered in the autumn wind.
“The body of Deborah Willis was discovered on October 15th,” Geisha narrated. “No one could know that it was only the beginning of a reign of terror.” News footage from an almost identical crime scene intervened. “When Leslie Kinderman turned up under similar circumstances on November 17th, however, it began to seem chillingly familiar to long-time residents of Bartok.”
The crisp picture of Leslie Kinderman’s discovery became a more washed out, shaky clip from twenty-five years ago. More cops converging on an outdoor crime scene, with thicker hairstyles and cheaper looking suits. Disco Inferno after the body clean-up.
“The death of Anita Banks was a far more puzzling crime then, seemingly without any kind of motive. The perpetrator was thought to be a drifter, but the murder of Helen Mitchell a mere month later complicated this theory. The victims had little in common, except that they both caught the eye of a dangerous killer.”
JOURNAL ENTRY, FEBRUARY 1
They were all whores. There’s no story if the papers come right out and say it, because no one cares if some slut winds up dead in a ditch somewhere. So they try to portray them as responsible citizens. They paid their taxes, they provided for their children, they filled up soup bowls so a bunch of worthless bums wouldn’t starve to death, etc.
If only everyone could see them the way I do, though. If they could hear the things I do when I notice them. Thoughts loud enough to be voices.
“That gleam in her eye—naked sexual lust. Something for you to see, but never experience. That’s her game. Maybe you should follow her and teach her your game.”
Maybe I should indeed. He always found it strange and somewhat desensitizing when commercials interrupted something like the
special on the Slave Killer. It created a subtext along the lines of “the murders of Deborah Willis, Leslie Kinderman, and Megan Ballard are brought to you by General Motors and Burger King—Home of the Whopper.” It made it all seem like it was only a TV show; an eighteen-minute sitcom minus the canned laughter. This week’s episode: Janet Lynn decides to hitchhike on Highway 88 and gets picked up by a bloodthirsty killer, who has more in his pants for her than just a butcher knife.
Channel Two News returned.
“But how did the Slave Killer come to be known by his chilling moniker?” Geisha Hammond asked viewers.
So-called expert Dr. Julius Vincent made another appearance. “He chose the name himself in the first of his many letters to the local newspaper, the Bartok Daily.”
Cut to:
The first letter, as the camera slowly panned across each word while a narrator tried to affect the murder’s clinical lack of emotion (he succeeded only in sounding bored). A disclaimer appeared at the bottom of the screen: DRAMATIZATION.
Much like car commercials, he thought.
“I am the murderer of certain young women who keep turning up in ditches, fields, and drain pipes. These are fitting places for them, don’t you agree? I stashed the scum where they wouldn’t bother anyone, and now they’re waiting to serve me when I leave this world. I would appreciate it if you would refer to me as the Slave Killer from now on, because that is what I am.”
His body became aware of it before his mind. His mouth hung open and his heart hammered rapidly against the walls of his chest.
That writing . . .
He knew that writing. No, it wasn’t because it belonged to the Slave Killer. He’d heard of the crimes before, of course, but he’d never seen the letters. He’d never read Dr. Julian Vincent’s book, On the Trail of the Slave Killer. Ordinary citizens didn’t go looking into things like that, he knew. No, he’d seen the writing somewhere else.
He grabbed a stack of Christmas cards he’d saved over the years and looked at the handwriting on each of them. The banal narration continued on the TV and he looked at the screen to compare as he flipped through the envelopes. He found the right one on the fourth try.
It was from his father.
JOURNAL ENTRY, MAY 3
I call it My Precious, like in those books about the ring. But My Precious is not a ring. Mine looks like a blind creature of metal, with very sharp teeth. To even put my thumb against it is to create one of those “cut here” dotted lines in my skin. That is the worst of its offenses against me, and I know of several women who probably wish they could say the same. We’ll never know.
At night I keep My Precious in the nightstand beside the bed. My wife will sometimes want me to “make a woman of her,” and I have to have it there. I have to know that at any moment I could reach into the drawer and take it out. When I stroke the handle on the nightstand, my wife becomes a woman. Those others, though . . . they were already women. I made them far less than that, not even recognizable as someone who ever might have been human.
“Well, isn’t this a surprise,” his father said. “Come on in.”
He hadn’t been here in months, even though they both lived in Bartok. He had his own life, and not one he thought really intersected with his father’s. They had even less to talk about since the cancer found his mother four years ago.
“How’s Jana?”
“About the same,” he replied neutrally, taking off his coat.
“I’ve been meaning to get back since Christmas,” his father said. “Somehow it hasn’t worked out that way.”
“I know how that goes.”
“Grab a seat.” His father settled into his favorite armchair. A talk show rerun played on the TV, the volume muted.
“How’ve you been holding up, Dad?”
“Ah. Can’t complain.”
He sighed. “Okay, we can stop with the pleasantries. I’ll tell you right upfront, I’m here for a reason. Two reasons, really.”
His father said nothing, just looked at him expectantly.
“You asked about Jana. Here’s the thing. She’s been gone a lot. All hours of the day and night, she’s at meetings or working overtime for her clients. That’s what she says, anyway.” He paused.
“You don’t think she’s actually at work?” his father asked.
“I know she’s not. I followed her last week. She could have made a fortune selling matchbooks if she’d taken about fifty from each hotel.” He laughed without humor. “I don’t know who it is. Maybe there’s more than one. I don’t even care.”
“If you get photographic evidence that she’s unfaithful, you can burn her ass in a divorce,” his dad informed him. “I saw it on Court TV.”
“I don’t want to burn her ass in a divorce. That’s why I’m here.”
That classic fatherly look of confusion. “I’m not following.”
“I know who you are, Dad. I recognized your handwriting on the Slave Killer’s letters. You murdered all those women. I don’t know how many for sure. It could have been four. Julian Vincent thinks you did eighteen. That’s not important to me.”
The look on his father’s face must have been the equal of his own last night when he saw the handwriting—the dawning revelation. The pieces falling into place.
“They think you’re doing it again, though—” he continued.
“I didn’t kill those—” his father tried to interrupt.
“I don’t care about that either. These dead women of the past year or two or however long it’s been happening, they’re all random. They’re like needles being dropped into a stack. If you drop in one more needle, no one’s going to notice. Not as long as it seems completely random.”
His father was silent.
“Why did you stop before?” he asked. “Their theories are all wrong. You didn’t die. You weren’t imprisoned for another crime. You didn’t relocate. You didn’t get sick. But you stopped anyway.”
JOURNAL ENTRY, JUNE 6
I must become you again. I enjoy what I do, but you can’t continue the game forever. You have to appreciate the possibility, however remote, that they’ll find you. Do you remember the unremarkable endings of all those Shocking Crimes articles? Of course you do. You could almost recite them from memory, you reread them so often. How did it feel when the fantasy was stripped away to reveal the rather banal truth? The seemingly invincible phantoms were mere flesh and blood. Loners, outcasts, and petty criminals. They were nobodies once the chain of evidence led back to their halfway houses and shoddy apartments. The elaborate fantasy was simply dissected and filed away.
It was like The Wizard of Oz. Look behind the curtain and there is the architect of something that seemed so substantial, but no longer does, because there’s just a little man back there.
If they never get to see behind the curtain, though . . .
“I’m going to a bachelor party Thursday night at the Electra Complex. It’s for a colleague. Lots of people will see me. If you do it then, they might still suspect me, but they’ll know I couldn’t have actually killed her myself. There’s nothing to tie either of us to it, especially when they figure out she probably spent her last night taking it up the ass in a cheap motel. They’ll throw it in with the latest batch of serial killings. Even if they don’t, they’ll probably be more interested in who she was having an affair with. You have to watch out for those jealous lovers, you know.”
“And if I say no?” his father asked. The old man seemed rather cavalier about being discovered, like he’d merely been accused of lighting a bag of shit on somebody’s doorstep back in 1983. We always thought it was you . . . you were such a little rapscallion in those days! Ennis had to throw his house shoes in the gosh darn trash!
“That’s obvious, isn’t it? I’ll go to the police with what I know. I don’t want to do it that way. There’s no reason for it, even if you’re still out there doing your thing. That’s your business.”
“I told you I wasn’t. You do realize
it’s illegal to blackmail someone into killing your wife, don’t you?”
“Yes. It’s your word against mine, though, isn’t it? You’ll still go to jail anyway. You’ll get to look forward to dying in a prison cell. Is that what you want?”
“I’m just saying that killing her seems a bit extreme.”
He laughed again. “Look who’s talking.”
“Son, I’m almost in my seventies. Most people don’t even want me on the road, and you’re asking me to commit the perfect murder?”
“Not a perfect murder. She’s the perfect victim, according to you. ‘From now on, you’ll never know if I’m the one who butchered these hogs. All over the world, there are others like me. Our number grows every day, and soon there will be fewer and fewer of the whorish scum you call your wives and daughters on the streets, and more and more of them stuffed down drain pipes.’ You wrote those words, page 46 of Dr. Vincent’s book. I turned up a lot of other interesting similarities between you and the police profile of the Slave Killer, incidentally. Probably married, children. Some kind of security job because you weren’t good enough to be a real cop.”
“You watch that,” his father warned.
“The point is, you want ‘whorish scum.’ Well, she’ll be in my house Thursday night, practically gift-wrapped for you. Jana never misses her favorite show, even if she couldn’t ask for a better opportunity to go slutting around. Should have learned to program the VCR, right? It will still be early enough after the show for her to go out. You know how these ‘emergency staff meetings’ are.” He held up his fingers to create sarcastic quotation marks. “Follow her and take her when the opportunity presents itself. If she doesn’t leave, you’ll have no problem getting in. I brought you a spare key. I’ll take her car somewhere more appropriate and they won’t even know she vanished at the house. So you know what you have to do. Otherwise, I guarantee the police will be interested in your activities from twenty-five years ago, not to mention the past year and a half. It’ll be pretty hard for an old man who never leaves the house to come up with a good alibi on the nights in question.”