The Ninth Life

by E. H. Reinhard

  “Gas,” I said.

  “The whole floor is soaked,” Hank said.

  “Get off of the chair, take a step backward, and get on your knees!” Collison shouted.

  She still didn’t obey. She didn’t even bother to look in our direction.

  I took two steps into the storage unit with my gun before me. “Kleeman, it’s Lieutenant Kane. Get your hands where we can see them.”

  “Lieutenant. Glad you could make it,” she said.

  “I need you off that chair and your hands where we can see them,” I said.

  She did neither. “I’ve been waiting for you, Kane.”

  She didn’t turn her head to speak to me.

  I stared at her back, just five feet in front of me. I focused on the tattoo, which was of a large pentagram with the figure of a seated woman in the center and on fire. Kleeman moved around doing something—at that point, I couldn’t tell what. I moved my head left and right, trying to see if she was holding any kind of weapon in front of herself—I still couldn’t tell, but even if she had a weapon, I was confident that I could get her to the ground and into custody.

  I took another step toward her when I saw her move again. She reached her left arm out to the side and dropped a knife to the cement. I could see blood on her hand. Kleeman pulled her bloody hand back in and reached for her face. She was doing something out of my view.

  “Bear witness,” she said. “At his power.”

  Her right arm came from the back of her chair. She held a silver Zippo lighter. She popped the cap and flicked it, lighting a flame. She turned her head toward me. I saw a nine in blood on her forehead and another on the side of her face. My eyes shot back to her right hand, which was moving with the flame toward her hair.

  “No!” I shouted.

  It was a useless command. I backpedaled out of the storage unit as quick as my feet would take me. My eyes were still locked on her—her eyes on me. The flame was a few inches from her head when it jumped to her hair. With a whoosh that thumped my chest, standing five feet outside of the storage unit, her entire body and everything inside of the garage erupted into a fireball. I brought my arm up to shield myself from the blast.

  “Son of a bitch!” I heard someone shout.

  “Someone get a fire extinguisher or something!” I yelled.

  I stared into the storage unit. After the initial burst, the flames receded. Kleeman and the immediate floor around her burned. The flames extended from the floor to just inches from the ceiling. Kleeman didn’t make a sound or movement—just sat there on fire. Through the fire engulfing Kleeman, I could see the back wall. The pair of bodies seated on the workbench were consumed by flames.

  “Fire extinguisher!” I shouted again.

  Footsteps slapping the blacktop caught my ear. Lapone ran past Hank, who was standing as if he was made of stone and staring into the garage—his face lit by the orange of the flames. Lapone started spraying before he had one foot inside of the storage unit. Another officer was right on his heels with another fire extinguisher.

  I watched as the two battled back the fire as if they were in slow motion. What seemed like minutes of them spraying couldn’t have been much more than fifteen or twenty seconds.

  “Someone call the damn paramedics!” I shouted.

  I holstered my weapon and took a couple of steps inside as soon as the smoke and the dust from the fire extinguishers began to dissipate. I covered my nose and mouth with my sleeve and walked to Kleeman, who remained seated—she didn’t move. Her chest was pressed against the back of the chair. Her head hung down. Her skin was black, charred, with patches of flesh that were still skin-toned. Her hair was gone. I took another few steps to check to see if she was alive. I couldn’t see her breathing. I pressed two fingers against the side of her neck. Her skin was hot against my gloved fingertips. I felt no pulse but leaned in for a closer look at her face. Her lips were burned away, exposing her teeth. The features of her nose and eyes were there but blackened from the flames and distorted from her flesh burning.

  I looked back over my shoulder to see Hank approaching. I shook my head, signaling that she was gone.

  We exited the storage unit.

  “What in the hell was that?” Hank asked.

  “I don’t know. Did you see the tattoo?” I asked.

  “I saw something. Looked like a big pentagram,” Hank said.

  “With her burning in the center. She had a damn tattoo of what was going to happen on her back.”

  “So she was just sitting here and waiting on us to arrive so she could, what, take her own life in about the most horrible way possible with an audience?” Hank asked.

  I shook my head. “Who the hell knows?”

  “Koskinen,” Hank said.

  Chapter 39

  We’d spent the rest of the day at the storage facility. There was nothing more than what we’d originally found. We searched Dana Haden’s house across the street but found nothing there of interest. Just before dark, Ed had taken the burned bodies of Kleeman and the couple that we thought to be her parents, along with Dana Haden, back to the medical examiner’s office. I’d learned what Kleeman was moving around doing while she had her back to us in the storage unit—stabbing herself with the knife, before drawing the numbers on her face with her own blood. Ed said that her body had nine knife wounds in her abdomen. As far as the case was concerned, Kleeman’s death marked the end. The only thing that remained was dealing with the aftermath and getting the question of why answered—and only one person would be able to answer that question, Koskinen.

  The time crept up on ten o’clock at night. We all gathered in the station’s tech unit. Westbrook had since figured out what was up with the first phone number Koskinen had given us. The phone number was actually a code—the digits spelled the message Eve’s the 9th. I sat in front of the computer monitor. The screen said connecting, then flickered, and then I saw Koskinen seated in the chair.

  His eyes were wide, as if he was expecting news. “Lieutenant,” he said. “Did she do it? Is she dead?”

  I didn’t respond.

  “Don’t leave me in suspense,” he said. “How did it go? Did she actually do it? Stab herself and light herself on fire?”

  “What the hell was the point of all of this?” I asked.

  “You have to tell me what happened. Tell me, and I’ll give you everything. Now did she do it, or what?”

  I stared at him.

  He leaned closer to the camera. His cuffed hands fidgeted in front of him. His eyes were filled with eager anticipation—like a kid about to tear into a pile of Christmas presents under a tree. “Come on, Kane. Tell me,” he said.

  “She stabbed herself and lit herself on fire. She’s dead,” I said. “Why?”

  “Yes!” he shouted. He pumped his hands and fell back into the chair he sat upon. “Awesome!” He nodded, smiling and pleased. “Unreal.”

  “Why?” I snapped.

  He lifted his eyebrows. “Because I’m smarter than some hack mental-ward shrink. And to you, I’m a man of my word.”

  I shook my head at the camera and shrugged in question. “What?” I asked.

  Koskinen clasped his hands together at his chin. “Let me tell you a little story. We have time for a story, right?”

  I watched Koskinen look around his surroundings, seemingly waiting for an answer. No one on the end of his video call answered his question.

  “I guess that’s a yes,” he said. “Okay, so maybe five or six years ago, I’d just got done with a little session with one of the bullshit doctors in here. Older guy named Parland. This guy always rubbed me the wrong way. He had a real problem with thinking that his views were right and everyone else’s were wrong. I reminded him that I had more degrees on my cell wall than he had in his fancy office, numerous times. Anyway, he and I were going back and forth about what turned me into a killer. He was certain that it was my beliefs in those I chose to worship, or the drug use, or some childhood bullshit—not
enough mommy time or something. I told him flat out that everyone is physically capable of murder. That can’t be denied. People needed the right motivation or needed to simply not care about the repercussions. Me, I was a combination of both. My motivations were to kill for my master, and I didn’t care about any repercussions from anyone. Those were the only two reasons why the average person didn’t kill. This hack shrink scoffed at me. He asked me if I truly believed that—that anyone, under the right circumstances, could become a killer. I told him absolutely. So after our session, I was lying in my room, stewing on the topic, and like a light switch in my head flicked, I remembered saying to you that you’d see my work again. So I kicked around the thought for weeks. Finally, I came up with the idea of being able to prove it to the so-called doctor and keep my word to you at the same time. The problem was that I didn’t have a suitable subject. It took years before the perfect one dropped into my lap. Now, that quack has since retired and left this earth, but I think in his final moments, he realized that I was right and he was wrong.”

  “Final moments?” I asked.

  “Yeah. Eve killed him. She did it right before her parents and before I sent her down to you. Anyone was capable of becoming a killer. I proved it to him. I’d made someone do my work, and I had to make sure that you saw it.”

  “Anyone else that she killed that we don’t know about?” I asked.

  “She, herself, was the ninth. I told you this already. Do you know of eight more?”

  By saying that he’d told us already, he was referring to the phone code he’d given us. I wouldn’t comment on it. I ran through the bodies in my head. We were one short. “We know of seven. Eight with the doctor you just mentioned.”

  “Well, get your magnifying glass, hat, and corncob pipe. Because there’s one more out there somewhere. I’d say Macon, Georgia, would be a good place to start looking.”

  I remembered seeing that she’d made a stop there for fuel on her drive from Madison to Tampa. I could hear Bostok standing off camera a few feet away, telling Hank to make a couple of calls.

  “So all of this was so you could kill a psychiatrist that debated the thinking of his patient?” I asked. “Oh, and then making sure that I saw your work again.”

  “You make it sound so cut and dried, Lieutenant. Do you know how many versions of this that I went through? How many different ways I thought of doing this? Years of me thinking about this while I was told to take my medicine and having doctors try to poke around inside of my head? Some of the things I came up with involved me trying to get someone to kill you, but let’s be honest, if someone was going to do that, I’d rather it be me. Yet all of these ideas were dependent on the person who I could get to do it, and it was years before Eve was sent to me. And I truly believe that she was sent to me to do this. It’s the only way that I can describe it. She was far too perfect for it to be chance.”

  I didn’t respond.

  “Go ahead, ask me the details,” Koskinen said.

  I glanced back at the captain and the major. Major Danes gave me a hand motion to keep moving things along.

  “The details?” I asked.

  “Okay.” Koskinen pitter-pattered his cuffed hands on the desk before him. “This is some good stuff. I’m excited. I’ve been waiting years to have this conversation with you. All right. All right.” He let out a big breath. “About three years ago, I see this female guard walk through. A big, manly woman. Blond, not easy on the eyes to say the least. She didn’t work on my block. It was the first time that I’d seen her. But she gave me this kind of weird look like she recognized me or knew who I was or something. Then she says that she likes my tattoos as she passes by my room door. I think to myself that I might have a contender to try this out on. But then, just like that, she was gone. I didn’t see her again for probably damn near a year. Then one day she reappears and was there again the next day, and the next. She transferred over to my block. Little did I know at the time that it was solely to be near me.”

  “She knew who you were?” I asked.

  “Oh, definitely. She knew every last detail about my life.” Koskinen smiled. “I didn’t find that out for a few months, though. Anyway, about a week or two after she’s been assigned to my block, she drops a book off in my room. There was a note inside asking if I could sign it or maybe read her a passage sometime.” Koskinen laughed. “She was a damn groupie. Like I said, there was just no way that it could have been chance. The master had delivered me my subject.”

  “What was the book?” I asked.

  Koskinen waved away the question with his hand. “It’s a book without a title. You wouldn’t know of it. It doesn’t matter.”

  I figured the book to be some satanic nonsense. “And then?” I asked.

  “I signed it and wrote that I’d read for a beautiful woman anytime—I may have been pulling her chain a bit on the beautiful woman part, but she seemed to go for it. So the next week, I was doing just that, reading to her. Eve stood outside of my door between shift changes, when there wasn’t anyone around, and I read a passage. Just something short. Maybe thirty seconds. This continued for a few weeks before we moved on to conversations when they could be had. I realized something about her pretty quickly. Even more than she wanted me to share with her my beliefs, she wanted something else. She wanted to be noticed. She often spoke of being alone around the house with her thoughts. Never having anything to do. Never dating. Things like that. She was lonely, plain and simple. So I showed her interest. Gave her little compliments. I figured feigning affection for her would be the easiest way for me to attempt my experiment.”

  “So you lied to her? Made her think that you cared for her so she’d do your bidding?”

  “It was what was necessary. But again, you miss all the little intricacies and nuances. You make everything sound so ham-fisted. It was so much more than just making her think that I cared for her. It was done to perfection. And she fell hard. After about four months, this chick was so damn in love with me it was sickening. She’d talk about how she longed to see me every day. How she’d never felt that way about another person. I had the bitch,” Koskinen said. He grinned at his triumph. “But that was just step one.” Koskinen scratched at his chin. “After I had her so wrapped up with me, it was time to really teach her—to mold her. I’d had enough of reading passages to her, so I turned her on to some of the darker teachings. I’d give her books to read at home, websites to visit, things to memorize, and then I’d test her on the subject matter. As soon as we’d finish with the assigned material, I’d go back to doling out the affection. I told her how much I loved her and would whisper sweet nothings in her ear. Man, did she gobble it up. She told me she’d do anything for me. So it was time to test her.”

  His description of what he’d done to her, all under a false pretense, was appalling. My anger was building. “What was the test?” I asked.

  “I asked her to tattoo my name on her body. Something simple but someplace where everyone would be able to see it. Sure as shit if she didn’t come back the next day with it on her hand. So she passed a little test. I gave her a couple of weeks while I continued filling her head before I gave her a larger test.”

  “And that was?” I asked.

  “Another tattoo. Basically her whole back. It took her a week or so of late-night trips to the tattoo parlor. I think it turned out pretty good, though. Did you see it?”

  “The tattoo of her burning?” I said.

  “Yeah,” he chuckled. “I had her tattoo the end of her life on her back. Even when she figured out what it was, she never even questioned it. Like never even a you want me to light myself on fire, nothing.”

  “She just went along with that, when you told her that she’d have to light herself on fire?”

  “Of course she did. I told you, she’d literally do anything I say. Lighting herself on fire was her sacrificing herself to our master. I planned to do the same if you would have let me fulfill what I’d originally had planned.”


  He went quiet for a moment, I assumed to let me think about the alternate possibility of him having taken his own life in years prior and not being involved with what had transpired in the last few days.

  I didn’t respond.

  “But now we’re jumping ahead, Lieutenant. Back to Eve. So after the tattoos, I continued to test her. To test her loyalty to me and the beliefs I was trying to ingrain into her. The next one was bigger than just getting a little ink. I told her that she needed to make an offering of a life to our master. Okay, so she had this dog—fluffy little white thing that I’m sure yapped constantly. At least it looked like a yapper. She’d shown me pictures of the thing a couple of times.”

  “Are you about to tell me that you had her kill her dog?” I asked.

  Koskinen cocked his head. “Kill might be a pretty tame term for what she did to it.”

  “We can move past that. So you had her kill her dog. I get it,” I said.

  “Sure,” he said. “The next test was the big one—to see if she could take a human life.”

  Koskinen, filled with pride and describing everything in detail, must have been having the same effect on someone in the room with him as he was with me—I heard someone call him a sick piece of shit. Koskinen looked off camera and sneered. “You only wish you had the power that I possess,” he said. He turned his head back to look at me. “Where was I? Oh yeah, after the dog. We progressed pretty rapidly after that. I asked her if she thought that she could take a human life, disguised it in the name of our master. She said that she could, one hundred percent. I asked her to prove it. That night, she killed the shrink. She showed me photos the next day. She glowed when she spoke of how it made her feel. I knew the feeling. I also knew that I had to keep her in my grasp, and she kept talking about some annual getaway that she was about to take with her sisters. I couldn’t risk it throwing a wrench in my experiment. I mean, I’d been working on her for months. The ten days she’d be gone was enough of a cooling-off period where she could come back and literally anything could happen. She could get an attack of conscience, she could turn herself in, or she could decide to never come back for fear of being caught. Hell, she would probably just get herself caught from being careless. It just left too many options. So I asked her not to go, instructed her to kill her parents, and then I sent her down to you.”