15 Signs Of Murder (Fifteen thrillers)

by Luis Samways

  “We don’t suspect them of anything other than knowing where their son may be. Now, if we can make one of them crack, then the other might do so as well.”

  “Optimistic,” Santiago added.

  “It may be so, but we need to do what we can,” Shaw added.

  “You want us to get on with the questioning now?” I asked.

  “Yes, please. But don’t do anything stupid. All we want is some contact with the kid. We want the parents to set him up, lull him into a false sense of security, and that’s when we will strike.”

  “What if the parents don’t want anything to do with the plan?” I asked.

  Shaw showed a few of his yellow teeth as he grinned. “We fuck them good and proper. Minimum ten stretches for the both of them,” he said.

  “I’m pretty sure we won’t get a ten-year sentence on the both of them,” Santiago said.

  “Me, neither,” Shaw interjected. “But the thought of ten years in the pen is always worse than doing the actual time.”

  I laughed. “You’ve obviously never been anybody’s bitch in prison. I’m sure they’re really enjoying their time in there,” I said.

  “Just get to work, you two,” Shaw said.

  And we did. We made our way to the interrogation room. From the double-sided mirror we could see into the room. They were sitting there, unaware that somebody was watching them, sizing them up for dinner. I was feeling hungry as well, so I was looking forward to burning them a little with my questions. Maybe get them a little charred and grilled.

  “Want to get a bagel in a bit?” I asked San as we watched them stew in the interrogation room.

  “Sure, cheese steak for me, though,” he said.

  “Suit yourself.”

  We stood there for a long while, staring at the two parents sweating in the room. We had turned the heating up in there on purpose. Little tactic that even the low-rent hick town cops use these days.

  “Shaw’s going to fire you, Frank,” Santiago said out of the blue.

  “I know,” I said, reaching for the door and turning the handle. “But first things first — we need to get this case done and dusted,” I said before both San and I entered the interrogation room.

  Forty-Five

  RANDOM RICK was driving around the city of Boston. He didn’t know exactly where he was, not because he wasn’t familiar with the streets or the city, but because he wasn’t paying attention to where he was going. His head was up in the clouds, daydreaming of his next kill. He wanted to make an impact. By his count, he had taken nine lives in three days. He thought he needed to increase that number rapidly and take many more in one final spree. He was aware that the likelihood of him walking away from his murder rampage was very sparse. He didn’t see himself surviving much longer. After he did what he was planning to do, the world would make sure that he didn’t breathe anymore. The police would arrest him and throw away the key. He was waiting for it to happen. In fact, he was salivating at the thought of being locked away.

  He was a bad man and needed to be stopped. He knew that. He relished in the fact that he was fully aware of what he was and what he wanted to accomplish.

  “I am a bad man,” he said as he caught a glimpse of himself in the rearview mirror.

  He took a left at the intersection he was on. His head was in a slight daze. He didn’t want to concentrate anymore. All he wanted to do was kill. He was fed up with driving around, looking for a place he could strike. He decided that it was time to initiate his final spree. His last rites. Their last minutes on earth were ticking down slowly and surely, until all that would be left was a bloodstained timepiece, the big hand dripping with blood as specks of human matter fell into the face of time.

  The engine went dead, and RANDOM RICK took out his smartphone. He started browsing the Internet. In his bookmarks, he had his website listed. He clicked on it. There was nothing there. Just a blank page and a crude statement that read “under construction.”

  He was furious. They had taken his website down. Everything he worked for. All those hours he’d slaved away at coding and assembling his site. Now they had it in their possession. There was nothing he could do. All he could muster to express his grief was a solid smash of his fist on the dashboard and a curse word.

  “FUCK!” he screamed.

  But his anger subsided quickly. He was like a switch, able to turn his emotions off within the blink of an eye. Suddenly, inspiration struck. His mouth felt dry. His armpits began to perspire. He had an idea.

  He quickly went to the app-selection page on his phone and clicked on an app that had a clipart-style video camera as its icon. He waited for the app to load. The tagline that the app used appeared on the seven-inch screen.

  “Broadcast yourself to the world,” it read.

  Flashing twice, the screen dulled and then burst into a swirl of color and sound. Live videos were playing on his phone. They were on the app’s front page, and were coming from other users. He smiled, realizing that views were key to getting on the front page. He knew that he would need to have a great title to draw people into what he was planning on doing.

  He quickly reached into his glove compartment and pulled out a modified belt he had made for his camera. It looked like a normal belt, but it was fitted so the camera phone he had could be chest-mounted and hands-free while he went about his business. It was built for GoPro cameras, but he modified it to fit his very own Chinese-imported smartphone. He wasn’t into western technology. You could come across some very interesting deals on Chinese websites that offered technology that nobody had in the U.S. He felt like a spy, but in actual fact he was just a pirate.

  He clicked on the “Broadcast Now” button and began entering the metadata for his video.

  Title of your video: Boston Spree Killer Live Stream!

  Category: Reality

  Age Rating: Adults only

  Proposed length of stream: 120 minutes

  He finished typing in all the information he needed and then hesitated for a second or two. Looking back up at the rearview mirror, he checked his appearance. He looked fine, considering how stressed out he’d been feeling ever since he offed the wheelchair punk at the hostel. But it was back to business, and his eyes said it all. He was ready to get back on the grind.

  He pressed the “Start Stream” button. There was a millisecond delay, but then the red “Recording” button appeared. He turned the camera toward his face.

  “My name is Richard Kendrick. I have killed nine people in the past three days. I shall kill many more today. And you are all going to see it live.”

  Forty-Six

  I sat first, and Santiago soon followed. We were sitting across from the parents of Richard Kendrick, or, how he liked to be referred to on his website, RANDOM RICK. The interrogation room we were in was bare. The walls were bleached white, but the lack of light coming into the room made it dark. The heat was incredible. The heating technique seemed to work; switching off the AC had definitely made our suspects look the worse for wear. I began to sweat a little, but nothing was going to stop me from getting the answers I needed. It could have been 110 degrees in there, and I’d still tough it out. We had to. I had to. The parents were all we had. Barring the press conference we had scheduled, we didn’t have much to go on. Talking to the suspect’s parents was vital in finding out where he could possibly be.

  Sure, we knew his name, but a name is just that. It’s nothing special. It’s just letters formed into two or three neat monikers. Location….now, that was what we needed. Habits…routines…beliefs….a profile. And I was fixing to get it from my detainees, by any means necessary. Besides, we didn’t have much time. RANDOM RICK could strike again at any given moment. And we hadn’t officially charged the mom and dad with conspiracy yet, so we only had a limited amount of time before we legally had to charge them or let them go. I was hoping that they hadn’t watched any Law and Order episodes. Or The First 48. I didn’t want them to lawyer up. If they did, it would be o
ver. I needed ignorance. I needed anger. They had to be beside themselves with emotion. I wanted them to focus on their son and forget about the trouble they were in. That was the only way I’d get some sort of lead from them.

  Judging by the dad’s expression, he looked about ready to cave my face in. The fact that both Santiago and I had been quiet since entering the room was unnerving them. That’s exactly what I wanted. Whoever spoke first would lose. That’s what we were taught. In high-profile interviews, the person who speaks first is the one most likely on the defense. We obviously don’t use that tactic for every interview, or we wouldn’t get anywhere.

  “Speak, then!” the father shouted. We had our first loser. I smiled at San, who cottoned on to what I was playing at.

  “Your son is in deep shit,” I offered, tapping my fingers on the metal surface of the interview table. The heat was causing some sort of condensation that reflected our shadows on the table, making them look long and smudgy.

  “My son has done nothing!” the father spat, rattling his cuffs, which were connected to the table. We had cowboy-tied the cuffs onto a jack on the table, just underneath the seam, plus both suspects’ feet were cuffed to a prong attached to the concrete floor. It was a precaution we usually took with suspected serial killers, not doting parents. But it was also sometimes used as an interrogation tactic. People are usually at their most vulnerable when they think all is lost. Hooking them up to such an overdramatic restraint system would make them think they were going to spend a whole lot of time in prison. It was our way of attempting to extract as much information as possible from them. I wasn’t a hundred-percent sure if they knew what their son was capable of, but I did want them to think that they were complicit in the spree.

  “Your son has murdered nine people in three days,” I said, grabbing a folder from the side and placing it in the middle of the table. I opened it up, and swiveled it to face both mom and dad. The expression on their faces changed from anger to shock. I had just shown them a Polaroid of the dead little girl from the projects building. I then flicked the dead girl pic to one side, placing it right under their noses, in the middle, and placed another picture of each person who died in that house. It was a strong move, starting off with the girl, even though she was the fourth victim, but just as shocking nonetheless, because of the obvious reason that she was a child and that the manner in which she lost her life was brutal and barbaric.

  “The little girl here in this picture had her neck sliced. The next picture shows that her mommy was stabbed repeatedly. Then her daddy. And finally her brother while he was on the john. Your son went into that project building and massacred that family, without any regard for what he was doing. He went in there with every intention of destroying a life, or two, or three…or, in this case, four.”

  I turned to San and nodded my head. That was his cue to leave the room and get the laptop. He would only be a minute or so, but that was extra time that I’d be quiet and watch for their reactions.

  They hadn’t said anything, besides making a few whimpers. They were shocked; I could tell that much. Both were staring deep holes into the Polaroids I had laid out. The father wasn’t blinking. He was just staring, like he was in a daze. The mother, on the other hand, couldn’t stop blinking. It must have been some sort of defense mechanism. A nervous twitch of some sort.

  Santiago walked back in with a laptop in his grasp. He placed it in the center of the table. The sound of the plastic hitting the metal jolted both the parents out of their death stare. The father blinked four times in a row. I could see that he was nervous. And he had every right to be. What I was about to show them was damning evidence.

  “This right here,” I said, turning the laptop to face them, “is video footage that your son captured while he murdered that family. He then uploaded it to his website and watched as random people around the world got to know his work as sadistic and unprovoked.”

  The mother started to cry. I pressed “play.” They watched in anticipation. The video showed a man stumbling into a building from his point of view. It was as if the killer had the camera mounted to his chest. I paused it.

  “Was that your son’s voice introducing himself at the start of the video?” I asked.

  There was no reply. I pressed “play” once again, picking it up from where I’d left it. The video showed him stumbling up the stairs, acting drunk. He went onto the first floor and audibly said that he wasn’t “feeling this floor.” I paused it again.

  “Something about the first floor that he didn’t like. What could that mean?” Santiago asked. He was playing the silent detective. Only asking questions after every twenty or so that I asked. It was another tactic you were taught when trying to make the interview room as cold as possible, and as daunting as can be.

  “He obviously didn’t like the feeling he was getting from that particular set of doors. Do you know why that could be? Does he have a thing for numbers? Only liking certain types of numbers?” I asked. There was no answer from either of them. I was growing concerned that we were wasting time. I decided to amp it up a little. I fast-forwarded until he got to the third floor. I then paused it one last time for effect.

  “This is where your son, Richard, decided to inflict his murderous anger on that poor family. I will warn you, things do get a little uncomfortable from here on out. There’s a lot of blood and screaming,” I said.

  Pressing “play,” I watched as they stared in terror. Nothing had happened yet. I knew that because I could hear the killer knocking on a door. A little girl’s voice could be heard from the other side. Then the door creaked open, and seconds later, screams started bouncing off our eardrums. Bloodcurdling screams. They weren’t all coming from the murder tape. Some of them were coming from the killer’s mom and dad, who were sitting right opposite us.

  I didn’t switch it off. It was cruel to make people watch such a barbaric video. But it had to be done. Or what happened next wouldn’t have been possible.

  Forty-Seven

  RANDOM RICK found the perfect street. Twelve houses all lined up on the left. Thirteen on the right. A large road in the middle, enough to fit three or four cars across on each lane. It was one of those big streets. One with front yards and back yards that had high walls surrounding the perimeter. The gates at the front were small, though, and most were open.

  The street he was on didn’t seem like a super-rich street by any means, but it was a well-off street nonetheless. He imagined that the type of people who lived on this street were from money. Money he never had growing up. Money that could have gone toward his schooling, instead of him paying off college fees to this day, two years after leaving.

  His whole idea of murder from the start was to only kill random targets. He found it hard to locate a street for his big finale that didn’t strike some chord within the fibers of his being. So he dropped the random act for the finale. He decided that if he was going to take more lives, then he would do it on a street he knew. A street he was familiar with when growing up. The street where Tony lived.

  Tony was the school bully back in the day. Granted, it had been ten years since he’d seen Tony, but he knew that Tony still lived on the street. That was because Tony’s father, Tony Sr., had died about three years ago. He remembered somebody telling him about it. Now, that on its own wasn’t what made RANDOM RICK so angry. What made him furious was knowing that, after years of hard work, a man like the school bully’s dad could just die without warning, leaving his business to his snotty-nosed kid who use to punch RANDOM RICK in the groin every time he saw him.

  “Fuck him!” he said under his breath. A surge of anger ran through him at the thought of Tony and his millions. It wasn’t fair. RANDOM RICK was the one who worked hard after leaving high school; he went on to college and got a diploma. What did Tony do to deserve the company that his father had built? Get arrested for beating his childhood sweetheart and spend three years in jail? That was what Tony did to deserve it, while hardworking people li
ke himself got fuck-all for their efforts.

  Some men just want to watch the world burn. RANDOM RICK was one of them. He wanted to watch the whole damn world burn. Every last cretin on the face of the planet could scorch in his intense heat. He was ready to bring more of it to that street. To everybody who’d watched Tony the bully strut his stuff around the place, with his flashy cars and his expensive watches. They just watched a legacy get pissed up the wall, like beer money, or something as unimportant as pocket change.

  “It’s time I make somebody pay, somebody who deserves it. RANDOM RICK is no longer roaming these streets. Justice Rich is here. And he’s here to spill some much-needed blood,” RANDOM RICK commentated as he turned his mounted camera to face him. He then waved at it and shut it off, stopping the recording.

  “This is for my private collection,” he said, making his way out of his car and up toward the first house on the left. As luck would have it, it was Tony’s place.

  It was time to pay Tony a visit.

  Forty-Eight

  The mother was close to cracking. The father, on the other hand, would need some work. He was the type of man who would fumble under the threat of physical violence. But my newfound ways of policing prevented me from doing such a thing. A few weeks ago, I wouldn’t have had any qualms about slapping a potential witness around if I was under the impression that he was hiding something from me. But now, after all these events, I thought it was best to rein in my impatient ways. I couldn’t afford to get another case blown because of my temper. Sure, I’d usually catch the killer, but there was a couple of times where I could have gotten him faster if I hadn’t blown my lid.

  The red mist of rage always inhibits a case. If your mind is bogged down in work, you will find it harder to get the job done. Obviously, that wasn’t something I could just look past. I needed to become a better cop. Especially now that my career in Boston depended on it.