Diary of a Serial Killer

by Ed Gaffney

  But right now, Zack wasn’t interested in establishing an effective dialogue with this madman. He was interested only in drawing his fire away from Justin. And so, he shouted the five words that he knew would achieve his goal: “Hey, you little psycho bitch!”

  Because his goal was simple—to get the man’s attention.

  And he did.

  Neil Heinrich

  AT 7:55 P.M. ON SEPTEMBER 19, NEIL HEINRICH answered the door for the last time in his life.

  It was only the day after his father’s death, but Neil was already putting extra hours in at work, burying himself in contract change orders, requisitions, distribution of payments to subcontractors, whatever he could find to occupy his thoughts.

  Because thinking about anything was better than dwelling on the dark emptiness that had taken up residence in his soul from the moment his father slipped away. The feelings that raced through Neil’s heart were just too much to bear—pain, loneliness, panic.

  So when he heard the knock on the front door, his concentration was so deep that it never occurred to him that it was quite unusual for anyone to come to the offices of a construction company at eight o’clock in the evening.

  But that all changed when he pulled open the door, and in complete surprise, entirely ignorant of what he was about to suffer, he looked at his visitor and said, “Ellis? Is that really you?”

  The struggle was brief, and ended with an extended and considerably vicious blast from a Taser. And if there had been anyone beside the two men in the building, they would have heard the ensuing silence broken only by the words, “Welcome to my world.”

  Monster

  EVEN THOUGH THERE WAS COMFORT AND security in doing things according to an established plan, there was an undeniable thrill in occasionally going off-script.

  And this latest kill certainly qualified.

  But as the excitement of the murder ebbed, important details pressed in on him for attention.

  Most importantly, since the discovery of the body would have to be delayed, he was going to have to move the corpse. And that would require some work.

  But hey. This was a construction company office. There were plenty of saws around.

  He’d make do.

  And if this little change in plans required him to go underground for a short while, well, frankly, it would be worth it.

  Vera would understand.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  September 20

  VERA DIDN’T UNDERSTAND.

  She didn’t understand why the officer responsible for checking alibis had decided that just because Ellis was working on the case he shouldn’t be treated like any other person on the list.

  Vera poured herself a cup of coffee from the pot in the station house kitchen area and returned to her desk to wait for Ellis.

  Jeez. It wasn’t like Ellis was the only cop they were checking for alibis—the list was full of police officers. Most of the people who knew the importance of the phrase “Welcome to my world” were cops.

  Another thing Vera didn’t understand was why Ellis was late this morning. It was already close to nine-thirty, and he was always in before nine. The state police lab had no idea where he was. They were looking for him, too.

  Rather than sit there and try to pretend that there wasn’t a tiny seedling of doubt starting to sprout in her gut, Vera called Maurice, up in personnel. And less than five minutes later, he faxed down a summary of Ellis’s data sheet to Vera.

  And then, against all of her instincts, that seedling began to take root.

  Because Vera remembered very well that Ellis had told her that his Internet use drove his wife crazy, but his personnel sheet indicated that he had been divorced five years ago.

  And come to think of it, wasn’t it a little curious he’d never mentioned that he’d attended Colton College on a part-time basis in the mid 1980s, which just happened to be the same time period Malcolm Ayers was teaching there?

  And while none of that proved anything at all, the seedling of doubt was now in full flower.

  Vera needed to talk to Ellis, and soon. It was already ten o’clock.

  She pulled out her cell phone and called his home number, only to reach the answering machine. She hesitated to go to Lieutenant Carasquillo, but she was starting to get concerned.

  And just then, the lieutenant came out of his office holding a piece of paper. “Sorry, Vera,” he said, holding up a phone message. “This came in last night from Ellis and I forgot to give it to you. I guess he had some personal thing—said he’d be in late, or he might have to take the whole day off. He said he’d give us a call as soon as he knew.”

  And then his phone rang, and the lieutenant went back into his office.

  Well, that explained why Ellis was suddenly MIA.

  But something else about Ellis’s personnel sheet had caught Vera’s eye, and was nagging at her memory. It was as if there was something important there, but hiding in plain sight. She looked at the page of information again.

  Name: Ellis Yates. Date of birth: April 11, 1964. Marital status: Divorced. Address: 43 Laughton Terrace.

  Wait a minute.

  Vera stood up, taking the information sheet with her into the conference room, where she had laid out all of the information on the Eternally Yours murders and the Springfield Shooter case. She looked down at the big map they had spread out and marked with the sites of all of the attacks, and sure enough. Laughton Terrace.

  Ellis lived on the same street as the seventh victim of the Springfield Shooter, Carrie Bernstein, at the time of Bernstein’s murder.

  Chalk up another thing Vera didn’t understand—why in the world Ellis wouldn’t mention that he just happened to live so close to one of the original victims.

  Still, it was impossible to imagine the big, friendly man intentionally doing harm to anyone.

  But instincts never trumped facts. And the facts were that Ellis was familiar with firearms and Tasers. And as a cop, he would have easy access to victims’ houses—all he had to do was flash his shield, and he’d be allowed in with no questions. Even locked doors might not pose much of an obstacle for the son of a man who owned a hardware store.

  And then there was Ellis’s mysterious comment about his non-existent wife.

  Vera couldn’t wait any more. She grabbed her purse and headed for the door.

  Luckily, there was a driveway which led to a parking spot behind Ellis’s house at 43 Laughton Terrace, so Vera pulled in off the street, trying to keep out of the view of any neighbors who might be home. Ellis’s car was not in the driveway.

  She took out her cell phone, and called Ellis again. She heard the phone ringing inside the house, and then the answering machine picked up. She closed her cell phone and returned it to her purse. He wasn’t home.

  The day was unusually dark—thick, smoky-gray clouds hung low in the sky. The breeze promised rain soon. Grandma called it “look-out weather.”

  It was a single-story house—a ranch—with a three-step concrete stoop leading to a back door into what looked like a small kitchen.

  A few feet away, there was a bulkhead leading down to the basement.

  Although the house must have been at least fifty years old, the hardware on the door and the bulkhead looked new.

  And both were securely locked.

  There were hedges separating the driveway from the front yard and a little flagstone pathway along that side of the house. Vera walked to the front door, and tried that. No luck.

  She approached the two basement windows flanking the bulkhead, to see if she could open either. Both were securely locked.

  There were several reasons Vera did not want to break into the house. In her heart she still believed that her partner was completely innocent of anything, and she certainly didn’t want to invade the home and privacy of a fellow officer.

  But even if she had thought that Ellis was a serial killer, to justify breaking into a home without a warrant, a police officer has to have a reasona
ble belief that there is an imminent threat, and that such action would address the threat.

  And the penalty for an illegal search was for the courts to forbid the prosecution from using any evidence found in the search, as well as any evidence found as a result of the search. Not exactly incentive for cops to willy-nilly bust into houses where they had only a hunch or a fear that something illegal might be going on.

  But hadn’t Ellis given her an open invitation back when they first started working together? Stop by any time. Mi casa es su casa. Key’s under the mat.

  A gust of wind kicked up a little dust. Vera shut her eyes against the grit which stung her cheeks, and spun around to put her back to the wind. When she opened her eyes, she was facing the little garage.

  She could check out what was in there. Why not?

  As she approached the tiny structure, it was clear that although it had been built around the same time as the house, it had not been maintained with the same amount of diligence. Paint was peeling over most of it, much of the wood looked rotten, and the roof was missing several shingles.

  She peered through a cracked window in the main door, and all she could establish was that Ellis wasn’t using the garage for his car. There was too much clutter.

  She walked back around the side, and found the door that faced the house.

  It was ajar.

  Vera put her hand on the old, rusty doorknob, and pushed.

  The small, dirty windows in the main door admitted little light into the tiny space, and Vera felt along the wall for a light switch.

  She got nothing but a handful of spiderwebs. Gross.

  As a kid, Vera had hated spiders, spiderwebs, cobwebs, anything sticky or creepy that was associated with the dark. But as a cop, she had learned that in addition to sending shivers up her spine, cobwebs generally meant that no one had been in the area for a while.

  So, while one part of her shuddered, the other part was relieved.

  Ellis had not been coming in here regularly with the corpses of his victims and performing God knows what macabre ritual with them.

  She peered into the darkness toward the wall on the other side of the door, but there was no light switch there, either.

  Then, as her eyes adjusted to the darkness, she saw a bulb hanging from a beam. A string tied to a short chain dangled from the screw-in fixture, and Vera walked over and pulled it.

  Nothing happened. The garage was as dark as ever.

  Another creepy but encouraging sign. No one would regularly use a garage if you couldn’t see what you were doing.

  Still, Vera’s instincts led her to return to her car for a flashlight. She didn’t expect to find anything nefarious lurking in the corners of the old garage, but part of being a cop was being thorough. Until she could talk to Ellis, she had to assume the worst, even if she didn’t believe it.

  She got out the oversized flashlight she kept in the trunk of her car, switched it on, and started back toward the garage.

  But as she swung around to head away from the house, the flashlight’s beam shone briefly onto one of the small basement windows next to the bulkhead. Vera turned back. Maybe she could use it to see into Ellis’s house…

  To have a chance at spotting anything, Vera had to squat down, hold the light right up to the window, and bring her face close to the glass.

  At first, the beam hit a bare concrete floor, but then Vera noticed just to the left of the illuminated area a card table with a chair in front of it. She redirected the light onto the table, and gasped.

  Open on the table was a high school yearbook, which seemed odd, but innocent enough. But the volume next to it was far more sinister. Vera made herself blink, and look again, just to be sure.

  The title of the book, printed in large, bold red letters, was Famous Quotations from Shakespeare.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  KEY’S UNDER THE MAT.

  She was going in.

  Vera ran around to the front of the house, lifted the welcome mat, found the key, and put it in the lock. But before she turned it, she rang the doorbell, just to be sure no one was home.

  Five seconds passed. Then another five. There was no sound from inside the house.

  She turned the key, unlocked the door, and went in.

  Almost against her will, little snippets from conversations with Ellis started to march through her brain.

  Serial killers love to jerk people around. They get off knowing that they’re smarter than everybody else. They especially like it when cops run around in circles chasing them. He’s probably right under our noses.

  Vera resisted the tug of logic pulling her away from the feeling that Ellis was a trustworthy man. She would just look through his house, assure herself that there was nothing to worry about, and then get back to the station. Ellis was probably there already, waiting for her, working on the latest message from the killer.

  She reached for the light switch beside the door.

  An overhead fixture came to life—one of its two bulbs shining plenty of light throughout the small room.

  It was very cluttered, remarkable only for its almost stereotypical resemblance to any other living room you might expect to find in a single man’s home. A remote control, a pizza box, two beer cans, and magazines and newspapers stacked on the coffee table in front of the small, overused couch, which faced the centerpiece of the room—a large television sitting on a metal stand against the far wall.

  The walls were bare, except for an old, signed poster of the Boston Celtics, which hung in a cheap frame above the television. Three chairs and a floor lamp were the only other furniture in the room.

  There were no bloody fingerprints smeared on the door frames, no hacked-off limbs of murder victims piled in a corner, no biographies of famous serial killers.

  Vera began to relax. What she had seen through the basement window was probably perfectly innocent.

  She made her way through the living room into the kitchen, which was also small, but tidier than she’d expected. Sure, there were a few dirty dishes in the sink, but the food in the refrigerator was edible.

  The freezer held no container of severed fingers.

  A dark, narrow hallway led to the other end of the house. Vera flipped on the light, and headed down the hall, and into the first room on the right.

  It was a tiny bathroom. A shower/tub, a toilet, a sink, and a medicine cabinet. It could have used a little cleaning, but Vera had four brothers, and was well aware of the minimal hygiene human males seemed to need. In a contest for most disgusting man she’d ever known, Ellis wouldn’t even make the semifinals.

  The room at the end of the hall was Ellis’s bedroom. He slept in a full-size bed, kept his clothes in a closet and a single, modest dresser, except for the pile of laundry heaped in the corner, under a Boston Red Sox poster. On top of the dresser sat three pictures. Ellis’s parents and siblings, she decided.

  But it was the photo on the bedside table that drew her attention. It was a wedding portrait of a relatively trim Ellis in a tuxedo, holding hands with a very pretty young woman in a veil and satiny wedding gown. It looked like it had been taken in a field somewhere.

  I’m usually more of an Internet research guy. Drives my wife crazy. I spend way too much time on-line.

  Why would a man who had been divorced for years say something like that? And why would he keep his wedding photo as the only picture by his bed?

  Not easy questions to answer, but that didn’t mean that Ellis was a sociopath. It was much more likely that he was someone who just couldn’t accept the fact that he was no longer married. It wasn’t a sign of terrific mental health, but it wasn’t a crime, either.

  Vera left the room and walked through the last door off the hallway. It was a spare bedroom, furnished only with a daybed and an inexpensive desk and chair. A computer that must have been four or five years old sat amidst messy piles of papers and books. It was connected by a phone line to a jack in the wall.

  Vera sat down in
the chair and faced the monitor. Here was where Ellis must spend all that time on the Internet.

  She wanted to turn the machine on and sift through the files on Ellis’s hard drive, but somehow, that seemed more invasive than anything she had done so far. “The key’s under the mat” was something much less than “The password to all of my secured computer files is ‘psycho.’”

  The shelves contained only some software manuals and computer disks. There was no printer at all.

  Her relief was short-lived, though, when she realized that there was nothing left to do but to go down to the basement, where she had seen the Shakespeare quotation book sitting next to the yearbook.

  Vera was going to feel a whole lot better when she was able to talk to Ellis and assure herself that there was nothing to worry about.

  She left the spare bedroom, returned back down the hallway, and went into the kitchen. The first doorway in it led to a broom closet; the second led to the cellar.

  There was a light switch at the top of the stairs, and Vera flipped it to the on position, brightly illuminating the way down. Unlike the garage, here there was no sign of spiders or cobwebs. That made it physically more comfortable for Vera, but it meant that Ellis probably spent a good deal of time coming and going from the basement. Yet another in the growing list of things that weren’t crimes but still made her unhappy. She would have preferred to find a dark place that no one would ever voluntarily visit.

  What she really wanted to find was a nicely bound book with a bow on it, entitled Ellis’s Unshakeable Alibis.