Ready. Set. Psycho.

by John Griffin

  He flipped through the rest of the folder, looking for the specific attendance records of those five students and retrieved them, putting them at the top of the stack of papers. One by one, he went through and highlighted in yellow the school days in a month that each student had missed, looking for stretches of at least five consecutive days or more. Only three of the girls had stretches that long. One of those three had only one month with ten days and one stretch longer than five, and according to the records it was for a legitimate medical concern. He put her record aside. That left two girls.

  He put the two attendance records side by side and counted the instances each girl had been absent five days or more. One girl had five, the other three. He highlighted the name of the girl with five in yellow and put the other record aside.

  “Francine Goodwin,” he said, kissing her personal attendance record. “You won’t be missed, but I will make you famous.”

  Justin wrote down her address and contact information. He took the entire folder he had stolen outside and to the back of an alleyway. He emptied a trashcan, put the folder inside, and then added some lighter fluid and set it on fire with his matches. He watched as the folder burned. When it was done, he ensured the fire was dead and then returned the trash to the trashcan. He went back into the coffee shop, washed his hands, and went home.

  Once home, he went to his small office. It had walls painted grey. Hanging on one side of the office was a television with a wingback chair and ottoman in front of it. Opposite that was a small metal desk, chair, and his MacBook. He went to his desk.

  He looked up Francine’s name online. He found her Instagram account and clicked into it. He found a selfie of her and another girl with the caption, “me and my bae @bellynchic.” He saw a few more and took note of some of the places they visited together, including a Starbucks on Shuter in which they had taken four selfies. He clicked on @bellynchic’s handle and found another girl named Andrea Cruz. He searched online for Andrea’s name and found a public Facebook profile that included her email address, as well as the name of her boyfriend, Tom Grady.

  He retrieved a cell phone from a shoebox marked burners. Using one of the phones, he then went online to the Whatsapp website and clicked on to their password recovery link. He opened up his AxHack software and entered Andrea’s email address and that he wanted to get into her Whatsapp account. AxHack ran for five minutes, during which time he got a bottle of water from one of his bookshelves nearby and then sat back down at his computer, drinking while watching the spinning ax logo of AxHack at work.

  AxHack returned the answer to one of Andrea’s password reset security questions. Justin entered Andrea’s email address into the Whatsapp password recovery link and then answered the security question. He then reset Andrea’s password.

  He turned on his burner. It loaded, and he downloaded Whatsapp from the Play store. He entered Andrea’s email address and the password he had set. The app loaded her contact list. Justin found Francine’s contact and messaged her.

  OMG Tom just dumped me.

  OMFG, bae! Whhhhyyyyy? Francine replied.

  Meet at Starbucks on Shuter? Noooowwww? Justin typed.

  Shure, Francine replied.

  Justin left his house and went back to his food delivery truck. He got in and drove to the Starbucks on Shuter. Francine had already arrived and was messaging him. When he arrived, he parked on the curb precisely between two sets of lights in the direction of the nearest subway entrance. It was 11:00 p.m. and dark. Francine messaged him frantically again. Justin replied that he could not make it — Tom was coming over to apologize. Francine sent back a smiley face.

  A minute later, she walked out of the Starbucks. Justin was standing next to the open back doors of his van, unloading a few empty boxes to look busy. His heart was racing. She turned in his direction, and his heart raced faster. As she passed him, he grabbed her, and in one fluid motion he had practiced two dozen times, he injected her and rolled her onto the floor of the van. He got into the driver’s seat and drove slowly and steadily down the street.

  He arrived at an apartment building in The Bronx. He went to the back of the van and rolled Francine in a burlap carpet. He hauled her up three flights of stairs and then to the fifth apartment on the left. He took her inside and closed the door, locking it behind him. The apartment was bare except for a couch near the front door. There was a bedroom to his right, and he took Francine toward the bedroom.

  Plastic crunched as he opened the door and then dragged her into the room. In the room were cameras in all four corners near the ceiling. It was covered in thick plastic sheeting on top of layers of foam insulation. On top of the plastic was clear, hard Plexiglas glued into place. There was a hospital gurney in the room with an IV pole attached to it and a heartbeat monitor nearby.

  Justin unrolled the carpet and took Francine, placing her gently onto the gurney. He ran a pic line into a vein on her left hand and then hooked that up to a saline solution, as well as propofol. He opened her shirt to expose just her breastbone, careful to cover her breasts, and attached the heartbeat monitor. He waited a moment and ensured the IV was running and the monitor was working, and then he left the room and closed the door.

  He sat on the couch and smiled.

  Justin sat with his computer on his lap, still sitting on the couch in the room adjacent to the one where Francine lay unconscious. He stared at his screen. His finger hovered over the touchpad with his mouse pointer positioned over the broadcast button. His heart raced, and the strength of his heart beating shook his hand with each thump. He took a deep breath, exhaled, and pressed the touchpad, publishing the feed to goregoregore.com

  The rectangle in the middle of the screen went black, with a grey circle spinning in the middle. After a minute, the video feed went live showing Francine lying unconscious on the gurney. Justin watched as the counter showed new people landing on the page and watching the video.

  The text on the page described what they were watching: a live feed of a girl suffocating slowly. Justin promised to wake her up in the last hour so that everyone could watch her die. He claimed to have done this dozens of times. His screen name was Sideshow.

  Justin smiled as messages and comments started showing up on the page. He hit refresh every few seconds. After an hour there were only fourteen comments. Mostly, the commenters derided his efforts. One asked if this was “goregoregore or boreborebore”? More than half asked Justin to get Francine naked, one plainly saying, “Tits, or it didn’t happen.” Another called the effort “clearly fake.”

  The last comment enraged Justin, causing him to close his laptop. “This is a site made for sick people to enjoy sick things, not a place to post a Disney Sleeping Beauty remake.

  “My modus operandi is so much more than a Disney movie, and they’ll see it soon enough,” he said, getting up and leaving the apartment.

  Justin took the NYCCAH van back to its garage and got into his father’s old Lexus. He drove out of the city and back up to his cottage. His friends were already there, unpacking for their stay that week. Justin helped, and when they were done he went into the basement to his den. He sat in a leather chair in front of a grand oak desk.

  He took another burner out of a box and searched for Francine’s name. The usual Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter profiles showed up, but nothing else. He searched for her name again, adding the term missing person, but it did not return significantly different results, and certainly no notices about a missing person. He tried missing teen NYC, and several stories came up, but none involving Francine.

  He sat back into his chair, relaxed. “No one has noticed,” he said to himself, smiling. He then snapped forward with his eyebrows curled in anger and his eyes shrunken. “No one has noticed,” he said again, shaking his head.

  He picked his phone back up and searched for missing persons detective nyc. One of the results was a page about the Detective Bureau for the NYPD. He opened that and read about the structure of the or
ganization. He saw that missing persons, not reported as kidnappings, would not be immediately referred to a detective.

  Justin put the phone down. “Then I guess I wait.”

  He went back upstairs to drink with his friends.

  Justin woke at 7:00 a.m. He stepped out of his room wearing only his blue pajama bottoms. He had to half-leap over a passed-out couple in the hallway to make his way down two flights of stairs to his basement. He took one of his burner phones and searched for Francine’s name. The first hit made his heart flutter: Girl, gone 5 days, only just reported missing.

  The story centered on the mother’s attempts to explain that it was simply not unusual for her daughter to disappear for days at a time. She had a long history of similar behavior. She had a history of drug use, as well. And a history of prostituting herself to older men in exchange for vacations and jewelry. But this was different, the mother insisted. Francine was never ashamed and would answer her texts. She had never gone three days without telling her mother she was alive when asked. As a result, Francine was labeled an Endangered Runaway.

  People with any information were encouraged to contact Detective Solomon Roud with more information. His contact information was included in the article. Justin scribbled it down feverishly and then got dressed and left the cottage. He drove north to a truck stop on Interstate 87.

  He sent two texts to Solomon using a newly unwrapped phone that he activated at the truck stop. The first said, I’m so glad someone is finally looking for Francine. The second was the link to the video feed on goregoregore.com. He then ran his Autowipe app, wiping the data from his phone. He pulled the battery out of the phone. He got out of the car and put the battery in the trash and then put the phone under the back wheel of his car. He reversed over it, crushing it, and then drove back toward his cottage.

  He stopped at a grocery store en route. He went in and picked up pancake mix, syrup, and eggs and then continued on to the cottage. When he arrived his friends were beginning to awaken. He mixed the pancake batter and heated his large cast-iron griddle on one half of the stove and a non-stick frying pan on the other. He began making pancakes and scrambled eggs simultaneously. One of his friends helped herself to making the coffee. Soon enough the dozen or so people staying in the cottage were awake enjoying coffee, pancakes, and eggs.

  Someone joked that Justin forgot bacon. Everyone laughed.

  Chapter Seventeen:

  Greg

  Solomon and Greg were staring at his phone, looking for subtext and clues in the message Solomon had received. “I got nothing,” Solomon said.

  They angled Greg’s computer screen upward so they could read it while they paced. The video feed was clear enough, and they recognized Francine. There was a timer in the bottom right with a countdown that ended in just over two days.

  “We’ve got a serial killer in the making,” Greg said.

  Solomon nodded.

  The two walked his phone down to the tech department. A kid named Kevin took the phone and asked a few questions. He made some calls, read out the return number for the phone that had sent Solomon messages, and came back. “It’s a burner. Bought with cash out of state. Only this morning.”

  “Can you tell us where this suspect was when they sent the text? Can we trace the phone?” Solomon asked.

  “Not right now. We’re working on it,” Kevin responded. “Phone went dead as soon as the second text was sent.”

  “And the website? Can we trace the source of the video?” Greg asked.

  “Not soon enough,” Kevin replied. “Not today, not tomorrow. There will be layers of security we can’t crack soon enough. Not before the countdown is done.”

  “What’s our move?” Greg asked.

  “We don’t sit on this,” Solomon said. “The link has a few dozen hits. People have seen it. People also think it is fake. Eventually, someone’s going to make the connection to the missing persons report.”

  “Or he’s going to leak it,” Greg said.

  “We need to tell the captain, and we need to narrow down where we are looking right now. And someone needs to shut that fucking site down before any of this happens.”

  “You’re with us, kid,” Solomon said.

  “But, the lieutenant. I’ve got a pile.”

  “You’ve got nothing,” Solomon said, walking away. “Bring your laptop.”

  Kevin stood and followed, awkwardly carrying his open laptop.

  Greg and the two went up the three floors to the captain’s office. Her door was closed. Solomon peeked through the mostly opaque glass door and saw that she was speaking with Lisa. Solomon opened the door.

  “Excuse me, Detective Kellogg?” Captain Bell said, standing. “I’m in the middle of something.”

  “Show her,” Greg said, pointing at Kevin. Kevin put his computer on the captain’s desk.

  “We found Francine,” Solomon said. “And we have a problem.”

  The captain was silent as she read through the page. After a pause, she spoke. “Oh, fuck. Who knows?”

  “Just us. I don’t think anyone who has viewed the site has made the connection. The perp sent me a text with the link.”

  “Has he sent it to anyone else?” Captain Bell asked.

  “No,” Greg responded. “Not that we know of. Used a burner. Can’t trace him. Kevin is going to need help tracing the video feed.”

  “Who’s Kevin?” Captain Bell asked.

  “Oh, hi,” Kevin said, waving. “I’m your point person on the eJusticeNY platform.”

  “Don’t wave,” Greg said, shaking his head. Kevin put his hand down. “He’s a kid with a computer, and now he works for us.”

  “Does he even work for the department?” Captain Bell asked.

  “Technically I am a contractor. I work for the vendor.” Kevin ran his hand awkwardly through his hair. “Technically, I am the vendor. I was doing an onsite today.”

  “You are the vendor?” Solomon said.

  “Yeah. I made the software,” Kevin said.

  “Didn’t we pay forty million dollars for that?” Lisa asked.

  “Yeah,” Kevin said. “Thanks?”

  “Whatever. He’s got clearance. If he can help, great,” Captain Bell said.

  “I can help,” Kevin said. “I want to.”

  “What do you need to find the source of this video?” Captain Bell asked.

  “I can almost assure you that we won’t, not in time. If you can get a warrant to force goregoregore.com to open up their user list, we can get the IP address for the source of the video. We probably won’t be able to trace it in two days, but I may be able to knock it out. So that nobody watches her…”

  “I’ll get the court order,” Captain Bell said.

  Greg grabbed Solomon by the arm. “That’s good enough. Keep up the work, kid.” Greg and Solomon left the room, Kevin followed behind them but went back to his desk rather than follow the detectives.

  “Listen,” Greg said when they were alone. “Sol, this is a first for you, yeah?”

  “First murder? No.”

  “Serial killer.”

  “Oh,” Solomon said. “Yeah. First one.”

  Greg led Solomon down the stairs and out into the street. “This stuff changes you,” he said, looking both ways as they crossed the street to the deli. “You’re about to look evil right in the face.”

  “I’m ready.”

  “There’s no ready for this,” Greg said. “There’s just this. There’s just the job. There’s just me and you, Kevin and the captain, and it is us trying to make sure that girl does not die.”

  “I get it,” Solomon said.

  They reached the deli, and Greg took a seat in a booth in the corner, flipping their coffee cups over. Solomon did the same, and within seconds both were filled with coffee. “I’m not asking you to get it. Not asking you to understand. I’m asking you to take this one lead at a time, one step at a time, one person at a time. I’m telling you that we might fail.”

&n
bsp; “It’s the job,” Solomon said.

  “Not this, it isn’t,” Greg said, sipping his coffee after adding three creams and three sugars. “This isn’t anyone’s job. This is the stuff, you walk away from it before it is done, no one judges you. You leave homicide and end up on vice, or on white-collar crime, or pushing a fucking pencil or writing parking tickets and directing traffic, normally, they bust your balls. But then someone asks why you got busted down or you left, you say serial killer, they don’t bust your balls. They don’t judge. They nod their heads and go on with their fucking lives. This is the real shit. This is not something you process with logic at your own pace. This you can walk away from at any fucking time.”

  “I’m not going anywhere,” Solomon said, sipping his own coffee, black.

  “Say it now, sure. Don’t feel like you need to say it forever. If this isn’t for you, it isn’t for you.”

  “Is it for you?”

  Greg put his right hand to his mouth and then ran it through his hair. “Five years back, after six years as a detective in homicide, we get called in to a stabbing. A kid in an apartment. Second kid in the building in three weeks. So that’s suspicious. But it looks like one of the parents did the first, and the same thing for the next — the parents do the second. Both were on meth, so they don’t even know what is happening, can barely defend themselves. Before we knew it there was a third dead kid and a fourth in that building, and then it stops. A month later, another druggie’s dead kid in a building four blocks north. And another the same building two days later. We go in. Same MO: kid, druggie parents, stops after the third in the building, this time.”

  Greg emptied his cup and put it to the edge of the table, waiting for it to get refilled. “Next month, another building, another dead kid. So we get a list of everyone that just moved in that month. Find one guy who lived there and the previous address. Obviously, that’s our guy. We catch him. We ask him about it. Doesn’t flinch. Doesn’t deny. Insisted he did those kids a favor. Should not be raised by druggies, he says. Eight fucking kids, Sol. Eight fucking kids. Three before we saw there was a pattern, and then we had to keep watching, keep our fucking hands in our pants watching this happen until the pattern tightened around a single fucking unsub. And there he was. Just waiting to get caught.”