by Jared Paul
Cory set her phone next to her as she looked to Jon. In less than half an hour, he was on his second beer. Toward the end of their marriage, Jon’s drinking had become more of a habit with him than had been comfortable. He was never drunk while he was at work, but once he’d walked through the door, he’d drink like a fish preparing to live its life on land.
“Don’t you think you should space those out some?”
Jon flicked an irritated eyebrow at his less-liquored inclined ex-wife. “I don’t think a few beers are going to do much to make matters worse.” He tilted the neck of the bottle in his hand toward his lips for emphasis. After he’d taken a sip, he added, “It helps me think.”
Cory sighed and moved from where she was perched over to Jon’s side of the couch and, without saying a word, took his beer from him.
Jon sat cock-eyed on his couch, the television in front of him set to a mindless channel for noise. His eyes were closed and it appeared to Cory as if he’d slipped into unconsciousness sometime in the last half hour of the program he’d been mildly interested in.
Cory thought that now was her chance to get away from Jon, that if she was going to make a break for her house and have a show-down with a killer that now would be the time to get her rear in gear.
Carefully, and because she knew Jon would wake up if she jostled him too much, Cory lifted herself from the couch and headed toward the back door of the house. She remembered that the front door, in the near silence, would creak when disturbed, and that the back door would be less of a risk. Over the sound of the television, the odds were that Jon would never hear the door opening.
She had a moment where she wanted to wake him up and tell him what she was planning to do, but the flash of Jon in the back of an ambulance waiting to have his day in the cold seat on her slab made the decision against it for her. Cory couldn’t risk his life any more than she would have wanted to risk someone else’s. The fact that she loved him solidified her course. Love wasn’t enough to keep them together, but it was enough to ensure that she’d not ask him to do something stupid. It didn’t mean that she couldn’t do something stupid.
Once she was outside, Cory looked to the sky. It was just past dusk, headed into that deeper blue of night, and if there was a set time for a murderer to make an appearance she couldn’t think of a better one than now. She made it to her car, slid in, and she eased the car out of Jon’s parking space before she turned the ignition. It would be perhaps ten minutes before she’d be pulling up into her apartment complex. Ten minutes and she’d be bravely sneaking into a trap in the place of someone who would have gone in guns cocked and temper blind.
CHAPTER 8
………………………………..
Jon woke after maybe perhaps an hour after he’d thought to close his eyes for a little interior eyelid study session. He hadn’t meant to nod off, though given the dragging theme of the day, the ooh’s and ahh’s, he’d been entitled to have a few winks to himself.
He smiled as he looked around the house for Cory, liking the fact that he was able to do as he had been accustomed to do while they were married, but when she didn’t answer him, he chuckled to himself thinking that she’d wandered off to the bedroom to usurp the bedher natural habitat. Again, as he’d been accustomed to.
“Cory?” Jon asked as he spider crawled down the hall, a devilish image in his head to squeeze into the bed next to her. Even if sex was something the two of them were made to do with each other, the thought of simply lying next to her was almost just as good. The sound of her heartbeat near his ears, the soft sounds of the puffs of her breath as she exhaled; it was as if he could experience for a short while what heaven was going to be like.
Jon nudged the door of his bedroom open, thought he saw her form crumpled in the sheets, and with a smile he sidled up to where he thought her head would have been nestled onto a pillow. He leaned down to peck Cory on the cheek, but as he got closer, he could see that what he thought was her body was nothing more than the clump of fabric a comforter makes when it’s been shuffled to one side.
Louder now, Jon shouted, “Cory!”
Jon waited a moment to hear her response and when it didn’t come, he ran through the house to the front door. He unlocked it and was out in the drive checking for Cory’s car. The second he realized the car was gone, he pulled his phone from his pocket and dialed her phone.
As the line rang through, Jon moved to the front door to close it behind him and he caught the sound of her ring tone, muted, coming from the inside of the house.
“Damn, Cory, what the hell?”
Jon followed the sound of Cory’s phone back to the couch and picking up her cell, he pressed the end buttons on his phone and hers. While he had the her cell in his hand, he remembered that the last thing he saw before he signed off on his career as a logger was that Cory had been checking her messages. He scrolled down through the time stamps on the messages until he came to the very last one, and as his brain caught on to what his eyes had already taken in, Cory’s phone fell from his shaking hands.
********
Cory sat in her car for a few good minutes before she could rally the courage to step out. She felt the kind of fear she’d used to have before entering into an autopsy room, and she couldn’t help but make the connection to her current situation. She closed her eyes briefly, took a deep breath and started putting one foot in front of the other.
The parking lot was quiet, almost eerie, and since it was nearing the weekend, it felt all the more disturbing. There was a quick second before her hand reached for her house key that she wished someone would come up behind her and stop her. When no intervention came, the key to her place hit home in the lock it belonged to, and she was turning the knob to go inside.
The interior of her apartment was dark, as it would be if she were coming home from an ordinary day at work, though as soon as she thought everything seemed to be in its place, the smell of blood hit her senses, coppery like a million pennies.
The lights turned on.
Sitting at her table as if he belonged there, rested the shredded corpse of Dr. Willis. The only way Cory was able to tell that it was her sneering, misogynistic boss was the fact that he was still dressed in what remained of his lab coat, his name tag hanging precariously from his tattered lapel. His head was bent forward due to a deep laceration from one edge of his jaw to the other that had torn through the supporting muscles in his neck and that left a grin similar to the one he’d sported while he was alive.
Cory let her eyes drift mechanically to Willis’ feet where a trail of dirt led to what appeared to be a gravestone. Willis’ blood had spattered onto it, nearly obscuring the name engraved onto it, but it was legible enough for Cory to realize that she was seeing her son’s tombstone for the first time. Whoever had murdered Willis had taken the time to defile David’s resting place.
The floor rushed up to greet Cory’s knees, the pain of the connection taking her breath away. Everything that she had been avoiding by not visiting her son came rushing up like a possessed tidal wave into her senses. David was dead, her husband was gone and all that was left in the wake of so much loss was a grave stone covered in cooling blood.
The epitaph that had been carved into the stone, an event she didn’t have a part in, read simply: A beautiful soul now at peace in heaven. Cory knew that Jon had done his best by their son, that even though his heart had shattered along with hers, he’d had the presence of mind to do something extraordinary. How was it possible that such a small gesture could patch her heart with the first Band-Aid that might begin to heal the hole in her soul?
“Like your present, Dr. Lance?”
Cory’s breath caught in her chest. She’d thought that the worst was over, that seeing Willis inside of her apartment, left as he was, had to be the thing she was meant to see. Her head, ever so slightly, turned so that she could see behind her. She saw a pair of feet in tennis shoes leading up to a pair of legs dressed in khaki pants, a f
loral pattered blouse and then the shaded faces of someone smiling at her.
“Drew?”
“Why the hell didn’t you call me when you headed back to your place with Cory? For that matter, why did you leave me with that old geezer? I must have wasted an hour just trying to get him to give me that frickin’ video footage, which by the way, hasn’t got a thing worth spit on it.”
Jon would have added to his view on Louis‘ self-indulged rant, but as his eyes drifted back out to the window, the man was rounding a corner and he could see the police station clearly from across the road. Lights lit up the parking lot like it was Christmas and people were milling around out front as if they were handing out wads of hundred dollar bills.
“The mayor invited the press down from Hadley to the police station to get the scoop on Collie’s first serial killer. If I didn’t know any better, I’d swear the whole town is out there with torches and pitch forks gearing up to slay the caged monster.”
Jon absorbed what Louis was telling him, and it hurt his heart that Travis was being run through a witch hunt, but the panic in his heart was telling him that Travis, while life sucked for him, was not the one who needed him.
He felt his hand squeeze the arm rest of the passenger’s side door. “Do me a favor and shut the hell up.” He looked over at the vehicle’s speedometer and made an irritated sound through his teeth. “You need to make with the speed, Louis.”
Louis kept his eyes on the road as he replied, resisting the urge to shoot an annoyed look in Jon’s direction. “You still haven’t told me what I’m doing driving out to your ex-wife’s apartment at night.”
“If I told you, would you believe me? Right now, I just want to get to her before someone else does. Louis, she’s in danger. I think she’s taken off to meet with a serial killer with no more sense to her than an outhouse with an elevator.”
“What!?”
Louis pulled the police cruiser to a complete stop. “We’re rushing off to prevent Cory from being murdered by a psychotic, and you didn’t think we’d need backup? Are you insane?” Louis’ hand went for the cruiser’s radio.
Jon registered that the vehicle had stopped and he pulled his gun from its holster. He’d had the presence of mind to snatch his secondary weapon from the gun safe in his house before he’d patched in a call to Louis. There wasn’t another man besides Travis that he trusted at his side, and in the five minutes it took Louis to get to him, Jon made up his mind to keep what they were about to do to themselves.
He aimed his sidearm between Louis’ bewildered eyes. “Get this car moving, or I’ll shoot you and kick your corpse out onto the pavement.”
Louis pressed his foot to the gas pedal and the car lurched into motion. “You’re being a damned idiot, Harper. Instead of one body, in the morning, the boys for Hadley are going to find three; mine, yours and Cory’s.”
********
Cory had to blink so that her brain could come up with a logical explanation for what she was seeing. There had to be some kind of mistake, some kind of explanation for why her quiet-natured intern was pointing a pistol at her.
“Drew, whatever that’s happened, we can work it out, we can”
“Stop calling me Drew, you insignificant moron!” The gun in Drew’s hand twitched, her forefinger resting on the trigger as if it couldn’t wait to pull it. “My name is Fran. Fran Fritz.”
Recognition lit up Cory’s mind as if it had first been doused in gasoline and then set ablaze with a fired cigarette. She blinked several times, trying to recognize the girl she’d known back in high school. Nothing remained except for the mousy brown color of the hair on top of her head.
Fran had been a ghost in school, wafting into classes as if she barely knew she was alive let alone anyone else. She had been picked on because she was awkward, because she’d had the body of a boy at sixteen. Glasses had taken up the majority of her face, rounding out her features to magnify her teeth with were too big for her mouth. With a flush of guilt, Cory remembered that she had been to bat in defense of Fran, though after failing time after time, she gave up and left Fran to be torn to shreds by the majority of her peers.
“Fran? God, Fran, why are you doing this? What happened to you that you needed to kill people? Why”
The safety to Fran’s gun clicked and Cory visibly flinched. She closed her mouth, thinking that if she continued to talk Fran down that she was going to end up like Willis or worse.
“You don’t get it? Not after everything? I thought you were supposed to be this smart person, the kind of person that has an answer for everything and always succeeds.”
Cory watched Fran’s eyes flit to David’s gravestone.
Fran smiled, “Wait, that’s right, you don’t have the answers do you? You couldn’t even stop your son from dying like some kind of diseased rat in a sewer. You know what you are? Nothing.”
Fran pointed the barrel of her gun toward a chair that had been set off to one side. “Sit down in the chair, or I’ll fire a bullet into your left leg. After you stop screaming, if you still don’t do as I ask, I’ll shoot your right leg. Follow me?”
Cory nodded, and as her whole body fought against the command her brain had given it to move, she found her way to the chair and sat down.
“I wanted to be like you, Cory. I tried to be like you. I even went after that dog Travis, thought maybe I could marry a Harper like you did. After all, everyone in school wanted to marry a Harper.” Fran paused, her eyes finding Cory’s. A gleam had settled into her expression, and Cory recognized it as madness. There was nothing she was going to be able to say that was going to dissuade Fran from her agenda, whatever that happened to be.
“I must say, I’m far more clever that you ever dreamed of being. I came up with the idea to kill those women, put them in places you’d been. At first I thought it would be enough to frame Travis, to land him in jail for the rest of his miserable life, but then I knew that the real person I was after was you. You’re the killer, congratulations, Cory.”
CHAPTER 9
………………………………..
“You went around town, grief stricken because you couldn’t save your little boy, killing the women that came across your path. I knew you saw that chain-smoking irritating bimbo Amber every time you went to the grocery store, that you were friendly with her, and I thought she’d be the best person to get everyone’s attention with. I’d already murdered Heather and that fat weirdo sister of hers, knowing that since you’d already lived there, that someone would eventually think that you’d gone back to your roots and lost it with a pistol. How easy it was to shoot them in the chest! Like they wanted it!
“I left those messages for you to keep you busy and to keep you away from Willis long enough for me to lure him off by himself. He’d been trying to sleep with me since I started working there, and I’m sure that’s why he was kinder to you than he was to me. You slept with him, right? Sure you did. Killing him was like drinking a cup of coffee, good till the last drop.”
Cory tried to block out the things Fran was saying to her, but it found its way inside of her senses as her words had a roadmap. The kind of sick mind it took to conjure up something this elaborate must have been dreamt up from years of abuse by other people, that or some kind of psychotic break. Why Fran was so fixated on her, was anyone’s guess.
Cory looked to her right, thought she saw the baseball bat she’d leaned against the wall cattycorner to couch in a blind corner, but it was at least a few feet away from her and she probably wouldn’t have enough time to get to the bat and swing it before Fran could fire her gun. The psycho had proven that she was perfectly capable of shooting someone.
Fran walked over to where Willis was positioned, where the last drops of his blood were still making wet smacks against David’s tombstone. Cory felt tears blurring her vision, but she couldn’t force herself to take her eyes off of Fran.
“Do you know why I’m doing this? I bet you haven’t the slightest
clue. People like you never think to understand the people beneath you.” Fran smacked the back of Willis’ head so that it rocked back and forth, the gaping maw of his wound opening and closing as if it was trying to get one last acerbic word out.
“Killing Willis is obvious, I think. The other three were meant to get rid of you, pin you for murder and get you out of my way. With you gone, I can take your place and then become Chief Medical Examiner. I’ll finally have everything you have and more. Maybe even Sheriff Harper will want to be with me. You certainly never deserved him.”
Cory swallowed. She was trying to think of a plan, some kind of way to distract Fran long enough so that she could jump up off of the chair and make a dash for the bat, or better yet charge head on straight at Fran herself. She was slight, probably weighed no less than a buck ten, and because she was taller and had more to her, Cory thought she could take Fran out without breaking a sweat. The only power Fran had was that she was the one with a gun.