The claws as well had come out better than he’d thought they would. He’d modeled them off the ones in Nightmare on Elm Street, but he had worried they would be too flimsy when it came time to use them.
But they hadn’t been.
Both had worked perfectly, like they actually became a part of him. When he wore them, he truly felt like a beast.
He couldn’t wait to put them to use once again.
3
April 17th
8:22 A.M.
“Let’s go,” Dante said as he swooped over to his desk and grabbed his jacket.
“Go where?” Milla asked, looking too peppy and full of energy for eight in the morning. The downside of having a brain that never switched off was that he didn’t usually get a lot of sleep. Most days that didn’t bother him, but it did make for a few grumpy mornings, and eventually the lack of sleep caught up with him and he would crash and get a full night’s sleep.
“Interview a suspect,” he said. Keys and jacket in hand, he was already heading for the stairs.
“Are you going to tell me who?” Milla asked, having to jog to keep up with him. The lack of sleep was quickly being erased by enthusiasm over a possible break in the case.
“It’s a man who’s big in comic cons.”
“Comic cons?”
“You know, where people who love comics and anime and all that stuff have big conventions where they all get together and dress up and stuff.”
“What do you know about comics and anime?” Milla asked with a giggle.
Ignoring her, he continued. “I was thinking last night about what you said about him being a beast. We know that he uses fake teeth and some sort of claws. If he really does love beasts, then I thought maybe he likes to hang out at those places. My brother-in-law is into that stuff and I called him as soon as the sun came up and asked if there was anyone in particular he could think of who dressed up like a beast and he gave me a name.”
“That’s great,” Milla enthused.
“I ran the name, got an address. I want to go straight there, catch him off guard.”
“Does he have an arrest history?” Milla asked as they walked out into the cool morning.
“No,” he answered. He’d been shocked to find that and not a lot shocked him. With the violent nature of the crimes, he’d been surprised that there wasn’t a single other crime in the man’s past. It wasn’t usual for someone to jump straight to abduction and murder, usually there were a litany of other charges along the way.
“That’s odd.”
“It is, but it doesn’t necessarily mean anything.”
“Agreed,” Milla nodded as they got into the car. “So give me a rundown of the man we’re going to interview.”
“Name is Trake Powell, he’s thirty-two, lives in his parents’ basement, he works as a manager at a fast food restaurant, and from what I can gather, he spends most of his time on his computer playing RPGs—that’s role—”
“Role playing games,” Milla inserted, “I know that.”
“Apparently he likes the character Beast from X-Men, that fits perfectly with our theory that he thinks of himself as some sort of beast.”
“He definitely sounds like a viable suspect; hopefully, we get something concrete when we’re talking to him.”
Dante hoped so. The killer they were looking for was already starting the downward slide and beginning to devolve. The time between kills was already shortening and would continue to until they caught him.
What he really wanted was to figure out the killer’s endgame. If they could figure out exactly what it was that he hoped to achieve, they would stand a better chance at getting ahead of him.
“Here we are,” he said as he pulled the car over to the side of the road in front of a pretty white colonial. The garden was beautifully manicured, already beginning to burst into a patchwork of spring color. It didn’t look like the kind of place that was harboring a dangerous killer.
“You said he lived in the basement, right?”
“Right.”
“We should go straight there then, bypass the parents. They look like the kind of people who probably have a lawyer on speed dial.”
That sounded smart.
The gate was unlocked, and they walked inside. A path went along the side of the house and they headed down it and found a short flight of stairs heading down to a door.
Assuming it was the basement, they rapped on the door.
It was opened a solid minute later by a groggy looking man with a big bushy beard and bloodshot eyes.
“Trake Powell?” he asked.
“Yeah,” came the sleepy reply. “Who’re you?”
“I’m Detective Delamarre, and this is my partner, Detective Lindsay. We need to ask you a few questions.”
The man shrugged but looked nervous as he let them into the apartment. The basement did not look like the outside of the house. It was a pigsty down here. There were clothes everywhere and empty soda bottles and candy wrappers; dirty dishes were piled all over the kitchenette counters. For someone as OCD about cleanliness as he was, this place made him want to take a shower immediately.
Looking through the dirtiness, his eyes zeroed in on the table where there sat at least a dozen sets of fake teeth.
“You like to dress up, Trake?” he asked.
Following his eyes, the man shrugged. “I make them for people. For comic cons.”
“You don’t have a set for yourself?” Milla asked.
The nervous shudder said he did.
“You like dressing up, Trake? You like pretending you’re a beast?” he asked.
“Sometimes I’ll dress up,” he acknowledged.
“When you make your after-hour trips to the library,” Dante pushed. He wanted a confession. If he couldn’t get one, then he would take confiscating the teeth on the table and matching them to the bite marks on the victims.
“I don’t go to the library at night,” Trake protested, fairly lamely.
“We believe that you do,” Milla contradicted.
“You abduct librarians, you take them out to the woods, and you maul them like the beast you pretend to be, leaving the bodies there to be discovered by people out walking their dogs or jogging,” he hammered at the man, watching Trake shudder before him.
“I-I never killed anyone,” the man stuttered.
“Oh, no?” Milla asked.
“You didn’t kill Kim Johnson or Kelly Mac or Teresa Mateo?” Dante asked, pulling crime scene photos from the file in his hand. “You didn’t do this to them?”
Trake took one look at the photos of the mangled bodies and promptly threw up, ruining any hopes he’d had that they had finally found their man.
12:44 A.M.
All day, Sydney had been thinking about the murders.
Who was going to be next?
What if it was one of her colleagues?
What if it was her?
That thought had followed her all day at work yesterday, then gone home with her. It had been there when she’d had dinner with her parents, and was still right there in the forefront of her mind when she got into bed. It had consumed her dreams, giving her horrible nightmares where she was running from a killer, and it had been the first thing she thought about when she woke up this morning.
Now she was at work, and again, all she could think about was what if the killer wasn’t done. What if he came here next?
She’d never had anything to do with a crime before. She came from a nice family, they all worked hard. Neither she nor any of her siblings had had any troubles with the law as kids. And she worked in a library. None of her friends were criminal types. The only time she had ever spoken to a police officer was when she had returned home from picking up her little sister from a party to find her street filled with police cars and fire trucks.
The night she’d learned that her husband was dead.
It was weird; she both remembered the night as clearly as though she were watching it play
out right in front of her, and yet, at the same time, the whole night was one great big blur.
It hadn’t been until she got out of her car that she realized it was her house that was on fire. She had scanned the crowd gathered in the road, expecting to see her husband standing amongst them.
But she hadn’t.
Because he hadn’t made it out of the house alive.
Sydney remembered being held back by a firefighter as she tried to get inside the house to find her husband. She remembered the cops coming to her and sitting her down in the middle of the street and breaking the news to her. She remembered screaming and crying. She remembered the helplessness she felt and the huge gaping sense of emptiness. She remembered her family turning up, holding her, hugging her, wiping away her tears, trying to make her feel better when her heart had just died.
Time hadn’t taken away that pain, but it had dulled it a little.
Enough that she was now at the point that she wanted to find that kind of love again.
She was afraid it was a once-in-a-lifetime thing.
Could you have more than one soul mate?
Mitch was hers and she still loved him as much today as she did the day that they’d first met.
Sydney didn’t know if it was possible to love another person the way she had loved Mitch. He had been the first great love of her life. Attempting to move on was hard because it meant leaving a piece of Mitch behind, and it meant acknowledging that not only was he no longer in her life but that he was never going to be in it again.
But she was ready.
She really was.
“Hi, Sydney.”
She blinked at the voice, startled. She’d forgotten that she was at work and had been sitting with a stack of books she was supposed to be cataloguing and staring into space for who knew how long.
“Oh, hi, Ed,” she said awkwardly when she saw who was hovering beside her. Ed came to the library every single day. Every. Single. Day. She didn’t know what his job was, or really what he came here for. He spent a lot of time in the comic section, and the rest of his time hitting on her. She couldn’t explain why, but the guy creeped her out.
“How are you today?” he asked, shuffling nervously from foot to foot.
“Fine, thank you,” she replied, looking about for one of her colleagues. They knew that the guy made her uncomfortable, and one of them would usually come and rescue her, but right now, she didn’t see anyone. She was on her own.
“What are you doing?” Ed asked as he sidled a little closer, well inside her circle of personal space.
“Just cataloguing.”
“Need any help?”
“No, thank you. Only library staff are allowed to catalogue,” she added, because even though he creeped her out, she couldn’t be rude to him.
“Oh,” he said, still standing way too close for comfort. “I was wondering if, you, uh, wanted to go grab some coffee, maybe have lunch.”
This was what she’d been dreading.
While she had definitely reached a point in her life where she was ready to meet someone and embark on a new relationship, she did not want it with Ed. There was something about him that just didn’t sit right with her. It wasn’t his looks, although his beard was kind of long and scruffy. He was actually pretty attractive, and he obviously worked out a lot, but none of that was enough to wipe away the cold feeling in the pit of her stomach that she got every time he came near her.
Although she typically hated to lie, she thought that in these circumstances one teeny tiny little fib couldn’t hurt. “I’m sorry, Ed, I’m a widow.” She pulled out from under her sweater the chain that she wore around her neck every single day that had her engagement and wedding rings hanging on it. “I’m just not ready to date anyone right now. I’m sorry,” she said again.
“No, no.” He shook his head quickly, making his beard swish. “It was my fault. I, uh, I didn’t know, I’m sorry about your husband.”
“Thank you.” She forced a smile.
“Maybe some other time,” he said hopefully.
“Maybe,” she agreed, then mentally kicked herself. She shouldn’t have said that. She shouldn’t be worried about hurting his feelings, and she shouldn’t be leading him on. But she couldn’t make herself say that it was never going to happen between them.
“Sydney.”
She looked over to see one of her colleagues waving at her. Thank you, she thought to herself. “I have to go,” she said to Ed and quickly got to her feet and hurried off.
As she went, she felt his eyes on her.
Staring at her.
It made her hairs stand on end.
Sydney hoped that her turning him down was enough for him to get the message, but she didn’t think that it was, especially since she hadn’t been able to be blunt.
Great, now she had a librarian killer and a creepy stalker, wannabe boyfriend to worry about.
6:57 P.M.
Looking as nonchalant as it was possible to look, he stood and walked to the shelves, putting the comic book he’d been reading back, then strolling over to the bathroom.
The library was quiet. It was only a couple of minutes until closing time, and almost everyone else had already packed up their things and gone home.
But not him.
He was here, ready and waiting, for the place to close down for the night, and then he was going to make his move.
It was always a risk, of course—not that he would get caught. He never really worried about that, but there was no way to know which of the libraries in the city would have someone stay behind late or be the last to leave and lock up. He could hide out here, only to find that the staff all left in a group, leaving him to walk out of here empty-handed. Or he could wait here only to find that it was a man who was the last to leave, and that was useless to him. He’d rather walk away without making a kill than walk away with a man.
If he was lucky, there would be a woman left here alone after everyone left, then he could strike.
In the bathroom, he walked to the last toilet and went into the stall, leaving the door open. Closing it was a dead giveaway that there was someone in there. Given that it was a library and there was nothing of monetary value here to steal, no one ever gave the place a thorough check to make sure that everyone had left before they locked up, because the thought that someone would still be here had never occurred to them.
With three murders under his belt now, he wasn’t sure that he would still be able to find librarians who were willing to be alone in a library at night anymore. He knew he wouldn’t if he were a librarian and he knew someone was killing off his colleagues. But people were often stupid, and they didn’t do things that made sense, so he was fairly confident that it would take a lot more murders before people started taking their safety more seriously.
He heard footsteps and slowed his breathing so he made the minimal amount of noise possible and waited.
If he happened to be found, he would simply pretend he was just finishing in the bathroom and walk out. Someone might get suspicious and wonder if he was the man who’d been stalking librarians, but he would minimize those suspicions by pretending he’d had a sudden upset stomach, and make a quick exit.
The bathroom door whooshed open and he waited to see what would happen next. He was on pins and needles but not because he was nervous; it was because he was excited.
Footsteps came only about halfway down the bathroom, then they retreated, the light switched off, and the door closed.
Success.
People were so predictable. He was sure that the last person to leave the library was supposed to make sure that there was no one in the bathrooms, that there was no one anywhere in the building before they left.
Lucky for him, most people were complacent. They thought that nothing bad was ever going to happen to them. He had been that way, too, once upon a time.
A long time ago.
A lifetime ago.
Then he had been betrayed and wo
unded so deeply it had left scars he could never get rid of.
They had made him into this beast.
Shrugging off his backpack, he unzipped it and pulled out the small plastic container that held his beast teeth. He put them on and then slid his hands into his claw gloves, and he finally felt complete again. It was only when he was like this that he felt at peace. When he was forced to be his human self, that was when all of the anger that lived inside him bubbled back up. But his teeth and his gloves were like water to that fiery fury; they doused it, and he was finally able to get some relief. It was like being who he was supposed to be again—the person he would have been if he hadn’t been so badly hurt.
Buzzing with the knowledge of what he would soon be doing, he crept out of the toilet stall and down to the bathroom door. He edged it open and peeped out. The lights were still on, so someone was definitely still here.
Taking that as a sign that tonight would go exactly as planned, he eased through the door and crept to the small kitchen where the staff took their breaks.
Because he had done this three times before, it didn’t take more than a minute to set everything up. Once it was perfect, he went to see who was still here. He hoped he didn’t have a repeat of last time where he’d had to quickly pack up his things and sneak out the back door when he found it was a man.
There were no voices, so he assumed that meant that whoever was here was here alone. At least, they thought they were.
Gliding down the aisle, he spotted her.
A woman of around forty, she had a wild mess of brown frizzy hair and olive skin. She was standing by a row of books, one was in her hands, open, and she was flipping through it. She didn’t seem to know that he was here.
The first time he’d done this, there had been one moment of hesitation as he realized that once he took that next step there would be no going back.
Now, he didn’t want to go back.
He wanted to keep going forward until he got to where he wanted to be.
Leaping forward, he slammed his fist into the back of the woman’s head and watched with satisfaction as she dropped.
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