Payback

by T. S. Worthington

  ***

  “What do you mean you have a date with Darla?” Brian asked John standing beside his desk. John as usual was stuffing his face with donuts and downing enough coffee to kill a small farm animal. He had too much of his dad in him that way. He was apparently also a lady killer like his dear old dad.

  “Why is that so hard to believe?” John asked.

  “Because she is a witness to our case,” Brian replied. “You don’t think that is somehow unethical?”

  John wrinkled his brow and thought for a moment. “No, I don’t.” He proceeded to eat another donut. The man had four stacked up on a tiny paper plate. He truly did possess the metabolism of a God.

  “What does your dad think about this?”

  “Oh, he reminded me to wrap it up each and every time,” John said with a smile.

  “Did you tell him you don’t believe in that sort of thing?”

  “Nah, I didn’t want to hurt the old man’s feelings.”

  “You are a disgusting pig, you know that. You think that you will end up in bed with that girl on the first date? I don’t think she is like that. In fact, if you piss her off she might filet your ass,” Brian said.

  “Well, I will just have to take my chances.”

  Brian had to laugh at his friend. John had not really had a serious girlfriend in about two years. Brian was pretty sure that ending things with Michelle had messed John up something fierce. It seemed that after that happened he became a lot more of a hound dog and just kind of spent his time chasing loose women wherever he could find them.

  “So how did this come about?” Brian asked. He hated to pry that much and he usually didn’t but this had him damn curious.

  “Well, you know how she has been having cops watching her night and day. Well, I saw how cute she was and I volunteered for the job on a few nights. She invited me in for a few beers. We talked a bit and watched a few movies together. We actually hit it off really well. There is something special about this girl,” John said.

  “Well, that is awesome. I’m very happy for you, man.”

  “Thanks.”

  The chief walked in right then. He marched over to John’s desk and grabbed a donut off his plate.

  “Did he tell you about the date he has planned for that Darla girl?”

  “Yea, he was just telling me they are going out.”

  “Tell him where you guys are going,” Arnold said. He was chuckling already so it had to be something good.

  John looked sheepish as he sputtered out his response. “I’m taking her to see a chick flick.”

  “Wow, that is lame,” Brian said.

  “What? I thought it would put her in the mood,” John replied.

  Arnold and Brian laughed hard over this one, mostly just to piss John off. He shook it off easily enough though.

  “You would think that,” Arnold said.

  “What? Did they even have chick flicks when you were dating dad?”

  “Not really, but I know a thing or two about romance. Romantic movies do not work nearly as well as you might think—“

  “Hey, I got the results back!”

  Myers came running into the room.

  “Great, what did you find out?” Arnold asked.

  Myers sat a printout down on the table with a picture on the front of it. The picture looked like a man who was in his mid-twenties with medium length black hair. He looked like a man who could have been good looking if he had not used a scowl as his permanent facial expression. He looked like he was a combination of angry and totally sad at the same exact time. He looked like a victim.

  “Gentleman I give you Mike Trapp. Mike is a twenty-six year old American male who first came to our attention a few years back when a woman tried to say he had sexually assaulted her. He was questioned and cooperated fully with a DNA test and he was cleared. He was not the guy.”

  “Really?” Brian said. “That’s strange.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, knowing the kind of thing he does now, it would seem that he had at one time or another thought about sexually assaulting someone. This woman came forward with the allegations but he was innocent of the crime. I’m wondering why she fingered him for the blame and also how ironic that he is tripped up by DNA he submitted for a crime he was innocent of and it is used to nail his ass for crimes he did do.”

  “I just don’t think rape meets his profile. This guy would probably see sex as animalistic and dirty. He would liken it to animals who throw feces. It is just beneath him,” Myers said.

  “How do you know so much about profiling?”

  “I’ve taken several of Childer’s seminars at the university. You guys should check them out—they are great.”

  “So the DNA says he is our guy; let’s go get him,” Arnold said.

  “Where is he? Is that address still current?” John asked.

  “Yes, the address is. He would be at work now; he is a call center representative for a local cable internet provider. I believe he works in tech support. That kind of job meets the profile doesn’t it?”

  Brian had also memorized the psychological profile that Dr. Childers had put together. It did indeed match. Brian clicked his tongue and took a deep breath. He wanted to nail that son of a bitch so badly that he could taste it.

  “Yea, it does. Do we want to wait until he gets off work, or do we want to surprise him at home?” Brian asked.

  Arnold thought a moment before speaking. “Well normally I would say we should just nab him at work, but to barge in there with a huge room full of hundreds of call center reps, I don’t think is a good idea. We know how dangerous he is. We don’t know if he is hiding a weapon and he might just start killing his coworkers before we get to him.”

  “Right, I agree,” Brian said.

  “So we will station a few unmarked patrols on his tail and they will wait for him to leave work and then as soon as he is at home we will nab him. According to this his house is only a seven minute drive.”

  “Do we think it’s wise to apprehend him at home? Wouldn’t a neutral place be better?” Brian asked.

  Chief Arnold thought a moment. “Yea. We will work on that. I believe there is a park and ride somewhere close to there. It’s a nice wide open space. That would be a great place to apprehend him. Meanwhile we can go to his house and gather all the evidence as soon as the warrant comes back from the judge. I’ll take it over and have him draw it up and sign it right now.”

  ***

  An hour later they had their warrant and the chief was leading a team, which included John into the Devil’s lair. Brian had opted not to go and had instead asked to be assigned to watch Mike Trapp and follow him from his job to make sure that he didn’t get spooked in some weird way. Brian had much more extensive experience in surveilling perps than most of the team did. That was the biggest part of narcotics and vice—tailing.

  He sat outside of the call center where Mike Trapp worked, pretending to be a normal guy, and waited. Brian wanted to run into that building and alert whoever was in charge that they were all sitting beside a mass murderer. Would it be ok if they talked to him? Oh, and by the way my internet is running slow.

  The whole idea that the man who skinned people alive was just sitting there in a little cubicle with a headset on answering phone calls, helping people with their internet issues, and probably drinking coffee, blew his mind. How did these people even function or pretend to function to the point that everyone figured they were perfectly normal. After doing this job for so many years he was tired of coming face to face with the evil in the next cubicle or the evil in the next car over, or the evil in line in front of you at the bank. Monsters were everywhere and he was sick and tired of dealing with them. Brian was about to help catch his biggest monster and that was going to be the end for him.

  Brian’s phone vibrated just then. The message was from Amber. She was just checking in on him and wondering how things were going. S
he had been doing that a lot lately. He typically called his wife once a day when he was having lunch just to check in and see how she was doing. He had not had as much time to call with this particular case that he was working on so Amber had been texting him more often than usual.

  And of course she was texting him always at the wrong moment. He was not able to text back at the moment as he was watching Mike Trapp leave his place of work. Seeing him in person was surreal. He was just a tall, slender, average looking guy. He seemed to be a hippy type who had decided to take an extended break from college. That was the feedback you received when you watched Mike Trapp walk across a parking lot. Brian could not help fantasizing that several of the S.W.A.T. guys were hiding behind cars just waiting for the right moment to jump out and throw the scumbag to the ground. The expression on his face would have been priceless.

  Or better yet maybe Brian could just take a kill shot from where he was. There was no reason to waste tax payer’s money to try and convict the son of a bitch. He could save them all a hell of a lot of trouble right now. That was what he should do. That would have been the perfect end to the Copycat. It would have been priceless.

  Brian placed his hand on the gun in his holster and massaged the 9mm softly. He wanted to just yank it out and just fire away at this pig. There would be no problems at all. The city would be safer and everyone around would give him a standing ovation, after they knew who it was that he had just blown away of course. The chief might be a bit pissed off at first because it would be a public relations nightmare, but Brian was going to be gone from the force soon anyway. He had not actually told anyone yet, but he was stepping off as soon as this fucker was behind bars.

  This would be the perfect send off and the perfect way to cap off his career. What a memory. Oh, he wanted to do it so bad, but he knew that he couldn’t. There were too many people around, he didn’t know for sure that Trapp was armed right then and it didn’t really matter what proof he had that the guy was a serial killer who cut people’s skins off. It was against the law to fire at an unarmed man. No matter how many times they did it on CSI.

  Mike Trapp got into his car and drove out of the parking lot like a bat out of hell. At first Brian thought the asshole had gotten spooked but as he followed behind him at a safe distance he saw that the guy just liked to drive fast. He could relate to that. Hell, most of Phoenix could relate to that.

  Brian radioed to the chief that the suspect was on the move and that the team had better be ready to nab his ass.

  Chapter 9: Trapping the Game

  Chief Jim Arnold received Brian’s radio transmission and copied back He could not help the grin that spread across his face right then. He looked around the house at the rest of the team who were all searching the place for hard evidence that they could use to put the guy away for an even longer sentence. Right now all they really had was DNA evidence that he had attacked Darla Fields. That was good to put him away for at least twenty-five years and it did appear based on what she had said that he was definitely the Copycat, but that was still not going to hold up in court. They had to find something here that would directly link him to the Copycat murders.

  Mike Trapp’s house was modest, but well-kept in a nice little suburb of Glendale, which was a suburb of Phoenix. Glendale was one of those places where on one street it was considered safe and if you moved one street over it was a drug ridden mecca of horrors. There were too many drug related arrests and murders to make Glendale a nice place to live. It had not always been like this though. Chief Arnold had actually grown up in Glendale and it had at one time been a nice community, but with the crack cocaine craze in the eighties and then the graduation to crystal meth popping up everywhere—basically all of the synthetic drugs—it had turned into a different place entirely with a completely different resident base.

  He had ordered only a handful of officers to enter the house. They had a warrant and they had the authority to break in without Mike Trapp’s permission. So they did. Five officers including himself and his son John went inside to obtain the evidence they were going to need to nail Mike Trapp for the Copycat murders.

  The house was surprisingly nice. It was small, but excessively clean. As soon as you entered the place it almost made you want to take off your shoes as if someone’s sweet little grandmother lived there and she was going to be making you remove them while she baked cookies or something. Except this place belonged to some psycho killer.

  There was nothing obvious lying around that they could use in any of the main component of the house. It was all just basic and boring stuff. The guy had pictures of himself and his family. There were pictures of himself growing up in frames and several photo albums that Arnold had briefly perused through. It was astounding how normal this guy looked and seemed. There was nothing in the pictures of the young Mike Trapp that would suggest or even remotely hint at the monster he would eventually become.

  They eventually made their way to the basement of the house. Arnold was shocked to discover that this place had a full basement, but it was pretty nice. As soon as they stepped into the basement you could feel how much cooler it was than the rest of the house. When they had checked the thermostat upstairs it had read eighty degrees. Apparently the guy saved money any way he could and didn’t believe in running air conditioning.

  The basement was a pretty typical man cave at first glance. There was a foosball table, a small pool table, a mini bar, and a big screen TV. Arnold had to admit he was a bit jealous of this guy’s setup. There was nothing here to suggest that the man was a killer. Maybe he was smart enough to not shit where he ate and maybe he was not going to be so easy to nail after all. Arnold bit his lip to stifle a cursing rant. He wanted this guy to be behind bars and he wanted this case to be over with.

  There had to be something here. He didn’t care if they had to tear the place apart.

  “Well, what now?” John asked.

  Arnold thought for a moment. “There. That is what now,” he said pointing to the computer sitting in the corner.

  Myers and Alex Webb were brought in to check the computer for anything that might show suspicious activity or anything related to the murders. Alex Webb was one of their computer gurus. The guy was able to bypass Mike Trapp’s password and get into his computer within ten minutes. It was kind of fun to watch. But while Arnold was having this done he and the rest of the team continued to search around.

  He knew there had to be something here that tied Trapp to the murders. He had skinned these people and it had always begged the question of what did he do with the skins. Were the skins trophies? Were they something that he used in some perverted fashion? Or was it purely the means to an end and just the thing he liked to do to torture innocent people to death? It might have been all three or none of those things. Arnold had only tracked a few bona fide serial killers in his time—when it came to serial murder Phoenix had always been one of the least likely cities to find it—but he had studied the creatures extensively throughout his career. As much as someone like Trapp disgusted him to his very core he also had to admit that he was a bit intrigued to find out exactly what made someone like that tick.

  “We aren’t finding dick here,” John said. He was getting frustrated as was Arnold. The chief looked at his son and hated that he was showing frustration in front of the other officers. He was hoping that his own son might take his place as chief one day and he could not be showing any doubt or weakness in front of the other men. That was the opposite of what a strong leader needed to be, but Arnold still thought that his boy would eventually make a great team leader and a great chief. But he was still a young cop who had a lot to learn.

  What about Brian? The thought had always been at the forefront of his brain. As much as he loved his son and wanted him to follow in his footsteps he often thought that Brian would make a better successor. The guy just had the goods when it came to police work. If pressed he would have to say that Brian might have been a better cop th
an he had ever been, but Brian’s heart was no longer in it. He could see how burnt out the kid was and he would be surprised if he wanted to stay in the game much longer.

  “Just have patience. We will find something. He is our guy. We have him dead to right for at least an attempted murder. He is going away for a long time so the city will be safe in the meantime and I’m sure we can find the other evidence we need in that time. If we don’t find it here we will find it in some other place that he owns or frequents. There has to be something tying him to it all. Just keep looking.”

  John nodded and continued the search alongside the rest of the team. Arnold knew that Trapp would be arriving any minute and as soon as he stepped out of his car the S.W.A.T. team was going to nab him. He radioed the information to Brian earlier. They had scoped out the area and found that the open space of the park and ride a few blocks away would be the ideal place to apprehend this guy. Arnold wanted to be there when they arrested him. He wanted to see the look on his face when he knew that he was going down. It was going to be priceless to say the least and he had to be there for it.

  Arnold grabbed his son and a few officers to head out to the meeting place. The rest of the team continued searching. Arnold was becoming more despondent that they would never find anything and that was ok for now. They might just have to get the information from the man himself. He knew that the guy would never say anything to incriminate himself without the proper interrogation, and even then it was going to be difficult to get anything out of him.

  But he was hoping for a surprise on this. Maybe Trapp was not as tough as he wanted the world to think he was. There was a reason he was copycatting crimes anyway. From what Dr. Childers had said in the psychological profile that he created the man had a huge inferiority complex that had probably begun in childhood.

  The second that Arnold stepped out of the house and trotted down the steps towards his car it happened. Nothing ever could have prepared him for what happened at that moment. One second he was walking and the next instance he was flying through the air, sailing over the car with a fireball close to his back propelling him and defying gravity.