I had been there for almost two hours and had just under half a mug of warm beer left in front of me, when my sights landed on a good candidate. She was one I remembered from the other night and I remembered also that she wore a wedding ring. She was a very attractive blonde, slim-figured and wearing business attire. Flat black shoes and a charcoal grey pants suit. The jacket covered a wine colored blouse which probably had one more button fastened at the top when she was actually in the workplace. At the bar it was undone enough to expose some inviting cleavage.
A man in his mid-forties, handsome and also looking like he came straight from his white-collar office job, came in and sat two stools away from her. He was there for a full 90 seconds before he struck up a conversation and then casually moved over next to the woman. He bought them both a second drink and by the time the bartender set the glasses in front of them they were already laughing and chatting like old chums.
They finished that drink and then another, during which she wrote something on a napkin and slid it over to the man who quickly shoved it into his pocket. Then, apparently thinking themselves to be high class undercover agents or something, he stood and said goodbye and left the bar and she followed 30 seconds later.
I waited about 20 seconds more but I didn’t want to take a chance on losing them, so I walked out also and got to the sidewalk just in time to see her getting into one vehicle on the lot, while a second car was in the process of backing out of another slot. It had to be him as I had witnessed no one else leaving the bar within the last few minutes. I let her get in and start her engine before I made my way to my own vehicle. As soon as she turned into the street I backed out quickly and left the lot, falling in behind her.
For a minute I wasn’t sure the man in his own car was in front of her. Perhaps I had misread what I had seen at the bar and she was going home alone. But then a vehicle two cars ahead of us turned left and I realized it was the one I had seen leave the lot. She followed so I fell in behind her again. This was a less travelled street so I had to fall back farther to avoid being spotted as a tail.
They made a couple more turns and eventually ended up in a residential area. Now I really had to be careful. Although I must say that in my experience, which at this point is vast, even when people are doing something at which they would not care to be caught they are both clueless and careless about hiding their movements or masking their actions. As I myself have followed and spied on people I have witnessed some outrageous behavior for which they would be at least mortified with embarrassment, if not arrested or killed by an angry spouse. Yet they go about their business as though they wear a cloak of invisibility, never aware that they are actually being carefully observed.
When I saw the man’s car turn into the driveway of a home on the next block up, I pulled over where I was and killed my lights. Sure enough, she parked next to him in the same driveway.
That was when the waiting game began. If no one ever came out, then I would have to abort the mission and try a different target on another day. It could be that I had misread the entire scenario and they were actually a married couple. If not, then the home was either his or hers, and I would not have my answer to that question until I saw who came out and left. I was guessing it was his house since he had led the way. On the other hand, they may have entered into a role play that required he pretend to be the husband. Only patience would bring my answer.
Two hours later I was thinking about going home and calling it a night, when I saw movement crossing the corner of the lawn from the direction of the front door and heading toward the parked cars. Once they reached the drive they were framed by the glow from a lamp further down the street. It was the man. He got into his car, backed out, and drove away in my direction. I had to lie down on the seat until he had gone by. I waited until he turned the corner before sitting back up.
Since it was a residential street I didn’t want to start my car and turn on my lights. It was almost 2am and too much activity might draw some insomniac’s attention.
I got out and closed the door as quietly as I could, and crossed to the far side of the street. Donning a pair of vinyl gloves, I walked briskly to the front of the woman’s home and tried to discern if there were any lights on inside. The curtain over the front window was heavy, but there was a tiny, frosted window in the front door and through that I could tell that there was one light coming from farther back in the house; perhaps the kitchen or a bathroom.
I knocked quietly on the door and waited. A few seconds later I could hear soft steps approaching the door. A woman’s voice asked, “Did you forget something?” as a security chain was being slid from its place and dropped. As the deadbolt turned and the door began to open, I whispered, “Forgot my wallet”.
There was no porch light on and I was silhouetted against the street lamp out at the side walk, so she hardly had time to realize I was not her lover before I punched her in the throat.
The impact served two purposes. It rendered her incapable of making any noise yelling or screaming, and it drove her back into the room and away from the door. She clapped both hands to her neck, gagging and bending at the waist. I reached out and grabbed a fistful of the hair on top of her head and pushing downward with all my weight I slammed her face into the carpeted floor. One hand was trapped under the weight of her body as I quickly spun around and knelt in the middle of her back. She was flailing with her other hand but there was nothing for her to grasp except more carpet. I took out the length of nylon clothesline I had rolled up in the pocket of my sport jacket, looped it over her head and around her neck and twisted it tight, straining so hard that the cord cut into the flesh and a trickle of blood began to ooze out around it. She kicked her feet and flailed with that one free hand for 20 seconds or so, but then she jerked twice, every muscle in her body in spasm, then she was still.
I left the cord where it was. There was blood on it and I couldn’t take a chance on getting any on me or my clothing. I was going to toss the jacket and pants, of course, but blood is evidence and I always tried not to carry evidence with me away from the scene of a mission.
I took time now to observe details. She was wearing a robe which she had probably just thrown on to come to the door, thinking her lover had come back for something. In the struggle it had ridden up so her nakedness was exposed from the waist down. I pulled it back down into place out of respect for the dead.
It was at this point that I realized I had broken several of my rules. I didn’t know if she had animals so it was risky of me to barge in the way I did. If she’d had a Doberman at her feet the story would have ended very differently. I made a mental note to do more homework. I should have observed, left, and come back around later to watch her movements and learn more about her.
My problem was, I had to admit to myself, I just enjoyed the thrill of the takedown so much it was difficult to restrain myself once the blood in me started to boil with the anticipation.
After that night I was much more careful and did not strike at my targets on the first night of observation. The follow up mission always came later.
Moving around as little as possible, and taking care to not touch anything, I glanced around the room. Some bookshelves next to the entertainment center held several framed photographs. One was a picture of the woman with a man who was not the one she had been with tonight.
They were posing like a husband and wife pose, and they were smiling. There was another picture of the same couple, dressed in Hawaiian shirts and shorts with leis around their necks. The happy vacationers. Well, she had proved herself unworthy. I had hopes for the poor husband, who I assumed must be out of town on business, that the next woman he found would be more loyal to him than this one.
I closed the door quietly as I left and made my way home taking as many side streets as were available. The vinyl gloves went in two separate trash cans miles from the woman’s house and miles from one another. Mission accomplished, I was scheduled to work in the morning and needed my sleep.
As I said, Sommerville was my immediate supervisor. Since we were the two oldest security men at the facility he usually scheduled me to work the front desk with him, and assigned the younger guys to patrol outside and escort visitors around the building. So Dave and I used to spend a lot of time chatting and drinking coffee.
We had been working together for well over two years, getting to know one another almost solely through these casual conversations on the job, when one day the topic of our exchange took a surprising and humorous turn.
Dave had been talking in a way that seemed out of sync with his personality. It was choppy and disjointed. I was getting a feeling that he was struggling with something he wanted to say to me, but was either having difficulty organizing his thoughts or for one reason or another was embarrassed about broaching some issue.
He stood to pour himself a cup of coffee, and while his back was to me he finally let it slip that he thought I was homosexual. He used the word ‘gay’ and said something about not having a problem with his friends being ‘gay’.
I was relieved that it happened the way it did, because when it dawned on me what he was trying to say I was taken by such surprise that I jumped a little in my chair and had to stifle a laugh. The words of correction were on my lips but I bit them off before they could come out and managed to regain my composure before he turned back around. Well, I should say I had almost regained my composure. He must have read something on my face because he quickly began to apologize and express concern that I might take what he had said as a threat to expose my sexual orientation to fellow workers or the Captain in charge of Security.
I let him go on rambling in his apologies for several minutes while I regrouped. It was fortuitous, I realized, that he had come to the conclusion he had drawn, and I saw that it would be an excellent idea to allow him to remain in his misconception of me. The man had mistaken my reclusiveness and my slowness to speak of my private life – and the fact that I was not married and he had never heard me speak of a girlfriend – as evidence that I was not interested in women at all.
It still puzzled me for some time that he would take the leap to that conclusion. However, once I knew what his presumption was, I began to pick up on little clues in his speech and his demeanor around me and one day it finally occurred to me that David Sommerville was himself, a homosexual. Since I did not deny that I was when given the opportunity, he had relaxed and begun to speak more openly about his own proclivities.
Oh, he never hit on me. He was not a crass man, nor was he a fool. He knew the best way for both of us to lose our jobs was for anyone in the building to suspect we were gay lovers.
But it served me well to have Dave laboring under that error. As a result of his wrong thinking, he never pressed me to talk about my activities on my days off. On the few occasions I came to work and was tired after being out very late and getting only a few hours sleep, he assumed things about my night that went hand in hand with his perceptions of me and not only did he not ask any questions, he would actually take more than his share of the work load that day to help cover for me.
Then one day David came to work looking pale and worried. He was so distracted about something that I took the initiative to give the security team their assignments for the day and let Dave sit behind the front desk sipping his morning coffee.
After the morning rush was over and everyone was in their office or elsewhere in the building, I sat down close to him and quietly asked if he was feeling sick.
Dave looked up at me with a look in his eye that said “You don’t know the half of it”, then that is basically what he said aloud. It turned out Dave had gotten some test results back from his doctor and he was diagnosed with cancer. As he told me about it he finally broke down and began to weep. He kept his words quiet, but his head was down and his shoulders slumped and his body shook with his sobbing. I just sat in silence with him until he was able to compose himself. Wiping his nose with a paper towel and drying his eyes on his sleeve, he explained that the condition was advanced and inoperable. He used the medical jargon that his doctor had used but I didn’t understand most of it and can’t remember it now. That didn’t matter. I got the gist.
He had made the decision to leave his job and move back to his home state. He said he had saved up a pretty good nest egg for retirement, which he was now not going to get much of, and he didn’t want to spend his remaining months working a security job.
I couldn’t blame him for that. I asked him if he was going back to be around family and he said he had no family any longer. He just wanted to be in familiar surroundings and maybe get in some fishing and spend his days in peace.
David gave a month’s notice and then he was gone. They hired another security officer and put one of the guys with longevity up front with me. He was a mouthy little prick named Bob, who already had a higher opinion of himself than he deserved. When they put him at the front desk he saw that as a promotion and that only made him worse. He was one of the reasons I stopped enjoying that job and I left before the next year was out and moved to Louisiana.
In the meantime though, there’s more to tell about my Alexandria adventures.
Over a two year period I spotted so many potential targets that I lost count of them. However, I could not complete operations on many of them due to circumstances which prevented me, so my total of fulfilled missions during that time was 17. Four of those were in Alexandria, 2 in Herndon, 2 in Tyson’s Corner, 1 in Falls Church, 4 in Arlington, 3 in Springfield and 1 in a little place named Groveton.
Now if you were to look at a map of Virginia, you would see that I just listed the towns in order as they lie along a few of the major highways running east and west, south of the D.C. area. But I did not perform my missions in that order. You may remember that I had determined to avoid patterns. Therefore although I did my work in those communities, I never did two in a row in any of those towns, nor did I do them in order. The one mission I accomplished in Groveton was actually the next one following the mission I described to you a few minutes ago. I never returned to Groveton after that. It is a small town with around 14 thousand people and not enough activity for a person to move around in with the expectation of anonymity. So I got the job finished that I had set out to do, and never went back there. I don’t know how long it took for someone to discover the package stuffed in that culvert, but it never hit the news in Alexandria; or if it did it wasn’t mentioned more than once and I just missed it. The same applies with Falls Church. Small town, only one mission and I never stopped there again. What happens in small towns like that doesn’t usually get much attention in the larger cities. They’re too busy dealing with their own day to day messes.
I won’t bother you with details of every mission I accomplished in those other cities, but I suppose one or two might interest you as a student of high crime and the so-called criminal mind.
One of the more interesting missions was my third target in Arlington…
Monica was finished reading for a while before Sam came back to the room. He had said to call him but she wanted time to digest what she had read and think it through.
Everman had painstakingly recorded the details of three more of his murders before winding down and each one had been more gruesome than the last; each one seemingly making less sense than the last. Not that any of them really made sense – but a characteristic of his exploits that jumped out from the page was that he had stopped attempting to justify his actions to whomever would read his journal and seemed to be obsessed with recording the shock of his victims and the gore at the scenes, and his cleverness in continuing to get away unscathed and un-captured.
There was the black woman in Groveton who, according to Everman, had stolen from a white family’s house in the upper middle class part of town. Monica surmised the poor lady had probably just finished cleaning the residence
and was on her way home to her own family.
Then there was the sixteen year old girl in Arlington. Everman had watched her behavior in a sandwich shop, being what the murderer called ‘bitchy’ to her boyfriend. He had stalked her for almost a week before catching her on a walking trail and cutting her to pieces in the woods. He had done it nude. Not for sex, but so that he could put his clean clothes on over the blood and get home safely to dispose of the old clothing and shower.
Monica wondered why she didn’t remember a dispatch about a missing person that age. The victim being a minor, it would have gone out to every FBI office in the country. The girl might have been a runaway. There was no way of knowing, if she hadn’t been reported as missing.
The one he bragged up the most was the ‘Potomac-sucking fifty something’ he had already mentioned twice. His narrative made it clear that he took great pride in the fact that he waxed poetic and deposited her bit by bit into that river in various secluded spots along highway 400.
Everman’s final words in this particular file were, “Now I will go back in time, as it were, and tell you an interesting story about my early High School days in central California.” He had saved for last, that which had come to the Agents’ attention first.
By the time Monica was finished reading she was emotionally exhausted. If it wasn’t her job to do so, she wouldn’t have read the entire file. She was done long before she was finished.
She was still on the sofa with her head back and feet on the hassock when she heard Sam’s card slide in the lock. As he stepped in the door he paused, thinking for a moment that she had fallen asleep, until her head turned and her eyes opened to look at him.
“Oh, I’m awake”, she assured him as she pushed herself up to a more upright position and put her feet on the floor.
Sam let the door close behind him and moved to one of the comfortable chairs in the sitting area. He still had a hotel towel draped around his neck and his shirt was damp with sweat.
The Everman Journal Page 19