15 Signs Of Murder (Fifteen thrillers)

by Luis Samways

  Sandra was writing as fast she could. By her count, they were up to seven victims.

  “Holy hell,” she whispered under her breath. “Seven dead people,” she continued. Her cameraman Jimmy looked like he was going to puke. It was heavy news. News that she wasn’t all too happy to be reporting.

  “At the cyber café, we found a woman who had been murdered by our suspect. Evidence suggests that she went willingly.”

  The people sitting in the assembly hall gasped at that revelation.

  “Willingly?” Sandra asked out loud, much to the annoyance of her cameraman.

  “When we were at the cyber cafe, we were able to decipher, with expert help, the website files the killer left behind, which led to us positively identifying him. We were able to track down his mother and father, and ran them in for questioning. We were able to get a phone number for the man and had a brief conversation with him, through his parents. Unfortunately for us, that’s where we come to a brick wall.”

  Sandra wrote the words “BRICK WALL” in bold, and texted them to her boss back at headquarters. In a matter of seconds it would be the headline running across the news ticker on their channel.

  “Since the phone call, the killer has gone off the radar. We suspect that he has gone on to murder another person, a young disabled man in a hostel where he spent the night. The man we are looking for refers to himself as RANDOM RICK. His Christian name is Richard Kendrick. He is twenty-four years old and considered extremely dangerous. He’s tall, around six foot one. He is of average build and can sometimes be spotted in either a tuxedo or disguised to look like a homeless man. He is charismatic and good-looking. Beware of his ability to be charming. He likes to knock on people’s doors at random, and when they answer, that’s when he strikes. He doesn’t care how old you are, what color your skin is, or what gender you are. Chances are, if he finds your door, and knocks on it, you won’t be living to tell the tale. So please, we implore you, don’t answer your doors to any strangers. Don’t approach this man, and call immediately if you spot him or anybody who looks like him. We need to catch him before it’s too late.”

  The place was awash with photography flashes and the sound of people bursting into questions. The man on the podium pointed at Sandra, and she stood up.

  “Ms. Sandra Austin, News72, also known as Channel 72 news,” she said. There were a few sniggers from behind her. She ignored them, knowing that she had the first question and had the chance to ask one that would stick in the minds of people. Her job was to ask what everybody was too afraid to say. So she did.

  “Why is it that the Boston Police Department kept this spree killer under wraps? Is it because you didn’t think you’d be able to catch him, or is the mayor afraid of looking bad on election day with one Governor of Massachusetts candidate dead, along with his socialite, fundraising goddess of a wife?”

  There was a rumble of approval from the reporters around her as the man behind the podium struggled to answer the question, which was always a good thing for a news reporter. The guiltier the politicians look, the bigger the ratings will be.

  “We are doing everything we can to catch the spree killer. We were more concerned that if we released this information too early, it would cause public hysteria,” the man said. A sea of flashes went off as people took pictures of him sweating under the pressure of the questioning.

  “You should be more concerned for the people of Boston and their well-being with a psycho like this on the loose!” somebody heckled to a round of applause.

  It wasn’t over yet. Not by a long shot…or a nine-inch blade in the wrong hands.

  Fifty-Two

  Tony Harris had just finished watching the breaking news press conference as he carried his TV dinner to the sink. He threw it in, knowing that the nanny would sort it out when she got to work in the morning. He lived in a great big house, but he didn’t feel overly comfortable in it. His father had decorated it in a certain manner. It had a “stately English home” feel to it. The banisters were made out of copper and ivory. The floor was marble, and the front door was heavy oak. The house was what he liked to refer to as a “mini mansion.” Most people on his street had the usual “parents did well and left you money” house. Nothing too fancy. It wasn’t Hollywood, by any means, but it was nice. His parents kitted out the house with all manner of expensive art and antiques. He wasn’t fond of it, but if he ever wanted to move, the house’s value was tripled by just the interior. He hadn’t redecorated out of respect for what his mom and dad accomplished with the home. Who was he to unravel a family jewel?

  He stood there at the sink, thinking. Something about what he’d just seen on the TV didn’t sit all too well with him. His guts were aching, as if a mouse was nibbling on his midsection. He replayed the news story in his mind, grabbing a glass and filling it with water. He turned the faucet off and drank a gulp or two. The heat was sweltering outside. His fingers were slippery. The tap was leaking little droplets of water as he pondered the story on the news. And then it hit him like a ton of bricks. The glass slipped out of his grasp and smashed in the sink.

  “Richard Kendrick?” he said out loud, the name sounding familiar but distant in his memory. But that was when the distance began to disappear, and it all came flooding back to him. Richard Kendrick had gone to school with Tony in his childhood. They were classmates. Tony used to haze Richard on a daily basis. Most people these days would call it “bullying,” but that wasn’t how he saw it.

  How was he supposed to know that Richard would end up like that? If he’d known, he probably wouldn’t have….

  And then something startled him out of his deep thoughts.

  There was a knock on the front door. It echoed off his ear drums. BANG BANG. The pit of Tony’s stomach turned. He felt dizzy but steadied himself on the kitchen counter. The knocking continued. Two more heavy bangs. Tony got himself together and took a deep breath. He quickly made his way out of the kitchen and up to his big oak front door. There were another two hard knocks. He leaned into the door, and, to his dismay, he recognized the person through the peephole.

  “Richard….” he whispered under his breath.

  There was a closet next to the oak door where he kept his shoes…and something else. He thought about hiding in the closet. Maybe he’d go away. Maybe Richard didn’t know he lived here.

  “I know you’re in there,” he heard Richard say on the other side of the door. His voice sounded faint, yet menacing. Tony had to do something.

  He quickly opened the closet door and saw what he had in mind straight away. It glinted in the illuminated foyer, the sun beating in through the foggy windows over the door, just under the ceiling.

  It was his baseball bat. The sort of company he usually kept would require the use of a bat once in a while, but never in his wildest dreams did he think that he’d need to use it to stop a killer…one who was knocking on his door nonetheless.

  There was one last knock. Only one though. Tony opened it before Richard could knock a second time. The look of terror on both men’s faces would have been a picture worth a million words. Words of anger. Words of pain. Words of regret.

  But then both men’s expressions changed. Richard was holding a large knife in his right hand. He raised it without saying a single world, but before he could strike, Tony smashed him in the head with the bat.

  RANDOM RICK was knocked out cold, landing in a heap on Tony’s doorstep, leaking blood out of a wound on his head and through his nose.

  Fifty-Three

  “It couldn’t be any less shit if we covered it in the stuff!” Santiago said as he took a bite out of a donut as we sat down in the P.D. cafeteria. He was referring to how bad the case had been, not how stale and nasty the donuts were in that place.

  “I disagree — at least I managed to get a pop in at the chief,” I said, stirring three sachets of sugar into my coffee. I liked it sweet. Really sweet.

  “You seem to be forgetting, Frank, that you manage to get a
‘pop in’ at Shaw on nearly every damn case. So nothing new there!”

  We laughed a little at the realization that I do punch our boss often. It was an absolute miracle that I still had a job at the Boston P.D. I gathered that the only reason I did was because I was good at my job, and the suits overlooked my many punching incidents.

  “I’ve only ever punched Shaw twice,” I said, grinning from ear to ear.

  “No, it was three times. Remember about twelve years ago at your bachelor party, when Shaw and you got into a fight about the bowl of peanuts and how you thought it was nasty to eat from it without washing your hands?”

  I nodded. I had a smile plastered across my face. But it was a fake smile. Deep inside, way down in my core, surrounded by the emotional brick walls I’d put up to keep people from coming into my life, I was thinking about my now dead wife. Twelve years ago, the night before I got married, I slipped up and had a sexual encounter with another woman. Granted, she was a stripper, but it was cheating nonetheless. Had I known that two years later my wife would be killed in a mugging gone wrong and I would be left in tatters, half the man I used to be, then I would have done anything to stop myself from wasting time at a bachelor party. I would have raced home and embraced her until the end of time. Hugging her tightly, the smell of her hair rising up my nose. The scent of her neck penetrating my senses. The glint in her eyes as she looked up at me and broke into a smile. I missed her terribly. There wasn’t one day that went by in which I didn’t regret me not being the one who was taken on that December night. But it would have been unfair on her if I were taken. I knew how much the pain tugs at you on a daily basis, and I wouldn’t want her to feel that.

  “Are you okay, Frank?” I heard Santiago say. I looked up and saw his face. I had been staring at the grainy wooden surface of the cafeteria table. My mind was warping into my past, and I knew that was a bad thing. The deeper I went into my past, the more fucked up I became. And that was just the plain truth.

  “I’m fine…just thinking about —”

  Santiago interrupted me. “You’ll be fine, Frank. I’m sure she’s smiling down on you.”

  I found it hard to swallow. All that “looking down on you” crap that people say, as if it’s supposed to be of some comfort. Call me strange, but the idea of a deceased loved one looking down on me as I go through my eighteenth straight shot of whisky while I contemplate ringing a working girl to flatten out the kinks seems a little daunting. Who’d want their loved ones witnessing them unravel once they’re gone?

  “Excuse me,” I heard a voice say from behind us. It was a female officer. She was very pretty. I couldn’t bear to smile, so I acted my usual jerk self.

  “What is it?” I snapped.

  “Shaw wants you upstairs. Something about an anonymous tip.”

  My eyes lit up. So did San’s as I nodded at him. This was it. We had a tip from the public! The press conference had worked in some aspect, which was great, seeing that everyone in the P.D., including San and me, thought the conference was a train wreck on live TV. That News72 reporter destroyed us with that first question. Last time we do them any favors, even though she was doing us the favor originally. Broken camera…beaten cameraman…lawsuit…blah blah blah.

  “Could be what we just need!” San said. He always got like this when he was excited. He was like an oversized kid who enjoyed smoking Cubans and had a weakness for the larger lady.

  “Let’s not get overexcited, though. For all we know, it could be a hoax, and before you know it, we’re back to square one.”

  But it wasn’t a hoax. It was the beginning of the end. The question being…the end for whom?

  Fifty-Four

  “Wake up, you murdering bastard!” Richard Kendrick, once known as RANDOM RICK, heard somebody say as he attempted to open his eyes. But for some reason, he couldn’t manage to do so. His eyelids were heavy, as if they were swollen. His guess was right. He had two black eyes. They were puffed up and made it hard for him to open them. He moved his hands over his face and felt for the cause of the excruciating pain he was feeling. Bolts of pain were running up his neck, all the way to his ears and back to the base of his spine, like some sort of circuit of agony. He was wincing with every breath he took. And then his breath was sucked away after somebody smashed him in the ribs with two heavy blows, one to each side. A left hook and then a right. More agony. Then he spat some blood out of his mouth.

  “Why…why are you…doing this?” was all he could manage. It was the closest that he’d get to “begging.” He wasn’t one to grovel for his life. Whoever was responsible for detaining him like this and beating him silly wouldn’t get much out of him. He wasn’t going to give them the satisfaction.

  Suddenly he was hit on the nose with three heavy blows. He knew that whatever he just got hit with was a fist. A big fist, at that. Richard felt the blood trickling down his face. At first it escaped his nose in an orderly manner. A few droplets here and there. After the third blow to the face, that was when it stopped trickling. It was no longer orderly. It was gushing. Like a river, or a waterfall. His lips were coated in his own blood. It was making its way into his mouth. He could taste a metallic texture on his tongue. And then his breath was sucked away once again, this time by three heavy blows.

  CRACK CRACK CRACK.

  Those were his ribs breaking. The gushing blood from his nose wasn’t the worst of it anymore. Nor was the pounding headache that was rattling the base of his spine. It was the blows to the ribs. Those were what was causing RANDOM RICK the worst pain. The sort of pain that was intolerable. The sort of pain that was going to get the best of him. He knew when he came to, he’d told himself he wouldn’t give in. He wouldn’t “give them the satisfaction.” But he didn’t know how much more he could take of this. The pain was too much. His tolerance was too little. The combination of the two was going to test his resolve.

  “I’m sorry!” he finally snapped after another blow to the face. The impact of this blow caused a spatter of blood to fill his mouth and coat the back of his tonsils.

  “You’re sorry?” the voice echoed. Then Richard heard a grunt, followed by another blow to the face. “You’ll be even more sorry once I’m finished with you, dweeb!”

  A light bulb went off in Richard’s head. Dweeb, his mind repeated. And then he remembered. It all came back to him. He had knocked on Tony’s door. Tony the bully. Tony the guy who needed to pay. Casting his mind back, after knocking on Tony’s door, he remembered it opening and then nothing else. Nothing but darkness and pain.

  “You hit me on the head with a baseball bat?” Richard found himself asking out loud, once his mind allowed him the luxury of memory.

  “Shut your fucking mouth!” he heard the voice say. Richard couldn’t open his eyes, so he couldn’t be too sure whether it was Tony or not, especially since he hadn’t heard his voice since school, and that was a while ago. People change. Voices deepen. Minds spoil. Rot spreads.

  “If that is you, Tony, let me just say one thing before you kill me,” Richard mumbled under a mouthful of blood and chipped teeth. There was no answer from whoever was hitting him. Just silence, and a brief pause from the constant barrage of punches. Richard seized the opportunity to make Tony mad. He wanted Tony to explode. If there was a reaction to what he was about to say, Richard knew that he’d be able to identify his captor, and once he knew who had control of him, he would be one step closer to walking out of there alive.

  After all, you need to know your enemy to stand a chance at survival.

  “If that is you, Tony, I just want to tell you that the reason I decided to kill all those people, including a little girl, was because I was visualizing them as your fat, no-good mom and dad, but they’re already dead, so I guess it was all in vain.”

  There was a silence for a long while. At least three minutes. Richard knew that somebody was standing over him. He could hear them breathe. He even heard a sniffle. Maybe Richard had touched a nerve. Maybe Tony was crying. But wit
hout opening his eyes, Richard was none the wiser. There was no way Richard could have seen what was coming. His puffed-shut eyes impaired his vision. But they didn’t stop the uneasy feeling that he was succumbing to.

  “That’s nice of you to say,” Tony finally said, kneeling down on one knee and grabbing Richard’s face. “Because now I can kill you without feeling even a little bit guilty. It’s the perfect crime. Nobody knows where you are. Nobody cares about you, and nobody will miss you.”

  Richard felt his heart doing somersaults in his chest. Tony was right. At least in the sense that it was the perfect crime. No one would question the successful businessman about his innocence. Everyone would believe him. But Richard, on the other hand, was as good as dead.

  “Why did I have to come here?” he asked himself, unaware that he’d said it out loud. Tony began to laugh hysterically.

  “Why did you come here?” he said, still laughing. “I have no idea, but I’m glad you did. Really, I am. You see Richard, ever since I met you eleven years ago, I was unaware of what an evil bastard you are. But now that the news has your face plastered across town, on the TV, front page evening newspaper, everywhere in fact, it’s helped me come to the conclusion that I should have put you out of your misery a long time ago.”

  Richard found himself curling his toes within his shoes. He was feeling nervous. Sweat was dropping down his brow. “You don’t have it in you!” he snarled.

  Tony grabbed him by the neck, squeezing his jugular. “No, I don’t,” he admitted, squeezing down even harder. “But I know people who do,” he said, letting go.

  He fished in his jacket pocket and pulled out his cell phone. He dialed a number. A man answered on the second ring.

  “Hello?” the man’s voice said, echoing off the walls. Tony had the phone on loudspeaker.

  “Hi,” Tony said. “I have a package here at my house. The package is hot. It needs to be dispatched as soon as possible.”