The Braille Killer (An Alice Bergman Novel Book 1)

by Daniel Kuhnley

  Sometimes he reads me better than anyone should be allowed. “Closer than you might think.” I wink at him and then walk down the hallway to a room on the left with a placard that says S1309. I enter the room.

  He follows me in. “I’ll never understand you women.”

  “Truth.”

  I walk over to Yolanda’s bed. She lies there with closed eyes. Scabs cover her eyelids and eyebrows where the stitches had held them open, and black-and-blue bruises paint her wrists and forearms.

  Stitches bind two inches of her left cheek together, just below her ear and close to the corner of her mouth. Another set of stitches runs from the corner of her right eye and down her cheek about an inch-and-a-half. The right side of her neck is also stitched together in a scribbly ‘y’ shape. I remember that part of her left breast was missing as well. I can’t imagine the physical pain she suffered, but it doesn’t compare to what that bastard made her watch.

  Seth gives me the look. “I’ll do the talking.”

  I nod.

  Seth leans against the bedrail. “Mrs. Johnson? Are you awake?”

  We both watch with bated breath as she stirs. Her eyelids flutter and then slowly open. She blinks several times.

  Her blood-shot eyes make mine water. I wonder how long they were kept open. Do they eventually stop burning once the tear ducts run dry? I doubt it.

  “I’m Detective Ryan and this is Detective Bergman. We’d like to ask you a few questions so that we have a better chance of catching the bastard who did this to you and Sarah. Are you feeling up to it?”

  She blinks and nods slightly. Her hand moves to the bed controls and she presses the button. The bed slowly rises until she’s in a semi-upright position. Seth hands her the notepad and a pen.

  Seth leans forward. “How long did he have you there, Mrs. Johnson?”

  Her hand trembles as she draws a question mark on the first line.

  “Did he take you from your house?”

  She writes “yes” on the second line.

  “Can you tell us anything about what he looks like?”

  Yolanda points to the “yes” and then flips the page over. Within a few strokes of the pen I realize that she’s drawing us a picture.

  I touch Seth’s arm. “I need to sit down for a few minutes.”

  He nods, but his eyes never leave the notepad. “Do whatever you need to do. I’m not going anywhere until she’s done.”

  I walk into the hallway, sit down on the bench, and close my eyes. When I open them again my phone tells me it’s been twenty minutes. The crick in my neck confirms it.

  I stand and enter room S1309 again. Seth’s back is toward me and he’s talking on the phone. I walk over to him and peer over his shoulder.

  In Seth’s other hand he holds a piece of paper with a man’s face drawn on it. Narrow face. Shoulder-length hair parted on the right. Dark, brooding eyes set underneath thick eyebrows. A hooked nose. Crooked mouth with crooked teeth. Goat patch on his chin. A small hoop earring in his left ear.

  I thought I knew the face of the man we’re hunting. I came face-to-face with him at Dunharrow Storage. I had no doubts about what I saw that night. However, the caricature Yolanda’s drawn looks nothing like him, except for the eyes. They both have eyes of a killer. My mind cannot process the discrepancy between the two.

  Did I hallucinate it? My shins would argue I didn’t. But the details…

  I walk over to the chair on the other side of the bed and sit down. I don’t understand at first, but then a revelation comes to me.

  My God… are there two of them?

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  I arrive at Seth’s condominium complex a little after five o’clock in the evening and sit there for a good ten minutes, reluctant to leave the comfort of my air conditioned car.

  It’s as hot a day as I can remember, the temperature teetering on 120 degrees. Radiation plumes rise from the asphalt a good three-and-a-half feet, transforming the parking lot into an undulating black sea. A red hue would be far more appropriate and a better warning to those daft enough to traipse around on the magma lake.

  I switch off the ignition and cringe as I open the door. I swear it’s like opening the Ark of the Covenant in the movie Raiders of the Lost Ark. My skin starts melting, bubbling, and burning.

  My rubber-soled shoes gum and stick with each step, and by the time I finish crossing the parking lot toward Seth’s building it feels like my skin is sloughing off in chunks and splattering on the asphalt and concrete like scoops of melted ice cream.

  I grab the metal door handle; it’s a pan straight from the oven, roasting my fingers and blistering my palm in the two seconds it takes to pull the door open. I crawl inside, little more left of me than bones and tendons. Roadkill.

  The lobby is an oasis at its cool hundred degrees and I drink it in until reality sets in. My top is heavy on my shoulders, weighted down with buckets of sweat, and I can’t keep my jeans above my waist. I look like a gangster holding up my baggy jeans as I strut across the lobby toward the bank of elevators.

  Most days I’d take the stairs, but this isn’t one of them. Today it’s all about survival. I imagine there’ll be several reported deaths by dehydration in the morning. Few people think these days, especially about how deadly the heat can be.

  By the time the elevator doors slide open on the tenth floor I’m in desperate need of a cold shower and a gallon of water or some electrolyte-filled sports drink. I’m certain Seth has none of the latter.

  I weave my way down the hallway until I reach number 1042 on my right. I press the buzzer and wait patiently while I dehydrate further. Rivulets of sweat course through my hair, run down my face and neck, and traverse every single crack and crevice on my body.

  My panties are wedged deep and pasted to me like a wetsuit, and my socks are soaked through. It wouldn’t surprise me if my shoes squish when I walk like they tend to do after fording puddles on a rainy day. What I would give for a downpour right about now. Then again, the humidity might kill us all.

  Of course I’m sniffing my armpits when Seth opens the door. What else would I be doing?

  “Dang, Alice. You jog over here?” He pinches his nose. “Ugh! You got that wet cougar smell.”

  I punch his arm and push past him. “You keep that up and you won’t be getting any of this wet cougar.” I head straight toward his bedroom.

  He shuts the door, locks it, and follows me. “Not so certain I want any of that in its current state. Not sure you qualify as a cougar unless twenty-six is the new cougar age. Is it?”

  “If it were, I wouldn’t be going for an older man like you.” I sit down on the corner of the bed and pull off my shoes.

  Seth stands in the doorway. “Suppose that’s true.”

  I peel off my socks and t-shirt.

  Seth’s eyes widen. “What are you doing, Alice? I thought you came over here so that we could go over all the reports, not to have sex.”

  I shake my head. “Trust me. This is anything but a sexual advance.”

  I unhook my bra from the back, slide my arms out of it, and toss it on top of my discarded t-shirt. I stand back up, unbutton my jeans and let them fall to the floor, and literally peel my panties off.

  Seth ogles my naked body. “You could’ve fooled me.”

  “Keep your pants on and fetch me a change of clothes. I’m gonna hop in the shower for a few minutes to try and cool off.” I walk into the attached bathroom. “And please turn the air up.”

  “I’ve got it cranked as high as it will go. Don’t think we’ll get much more relief with it so hot outside.”

  “Hell isn’t as hot as the parking lot is out there.” I walk into the glass-enclosed shower and turn the cold water on full blast, but even it doesn’t stay cold long.

  Seth stands in the doorway to the bathroom now, eying my breasts more than my face. “No kidding. You should’ve felt it in here when I got home. It’s chilly no
w compared to that.”

  I close my eyes and let the lukewarm water soak my head and shoulders. The tension and heat dissipate. When I open my eyes again, I see that Seth is still standing there like a young boy sneaking a peek at his dad’s porn magazine. “Clothes, Seth. This isn’t a peepshow.”

  He grins. “My place, my rules.”

  “You might want to refer back to what I said when I got here.”

  “You know that’s unfair. You’re asking the impossible. I’ve seen the boobs. Once the boobs are out, all recollection is null and void. Not only that, but when you talk with your shirt off, it’s equivalent to you repeating the word ‘boobs.’”

  I really don’t understand the obsession with breasts. They’re nothing more than fatty tissue and an outlet for delivering nourishment to infants. Everyone has them, some are just severely underdeveloped, especially in men—fit men that is.

  I turn off the water, cover my breasts with one arm, and reach for a towel. “Clothes, Seth.”

  Seth frowns and then his expression turns to concern. “What did you do to your shins?”

  I look down at my shins for several moments while I try to come up with an answer he’ll believe. “Tripped in a parking lot earlier today and came down on the curb right across my shins. Hurt like hell for about fifteen minutes, but they’re okay now.”

  “How can you claim to be a ninja and be so clumsy?” He shakes his head, smiles, and walks away.

  I towel off, but the sweat is already surfacing again. At least I’m not immersed in it like before though. I hang the towel back up, comb through my hair a few times, and roll on some deodorant.

  “Clothes are on the bed,” yells Seth.

  I throw on the fresh, over-sized clothes. Even washed, they smell like Seth. I slip my shoes back on and head out of the bedroom and into the living room. Seth sits on the edge of a tan, leather couch, rifling through stacks of papers and folders spread across the top of a rectangular coffee table.

  I plop down on the couch next to him. A bottle of light beer sits on the coaster in front of me. It’s sweating as bad as I was earlier. My mouth waters at the thought of having something to cool it down. I take the bottle and drain it three-quarters of the way down before returning it to the coaster. Water would’ve been better, but I’m not complaining.

  I grab one of the folders and slide back on the couch. I adjust my new pair of glasses on my nose and open the folder. Inside the folder is the coroner’s report on Sarah Johnson. I flip directly to the external examination and skim through it. Everything noted is consistent with the last moments I experienced as Sarah. Ligature marks on the neck indicate strangulation of the victim. Bruising of the abdomen. Fourteen burns on the inside of the left thigh consistent with those left by a cigarette. Forced, sexual penetration is evident, but there is no indication of foreign fluids.

  I’m reliving her fear and pain with each detail in the report, and I can’t read through any more of it. I close the folder and toss it back on the coffee table.

  Seth broods over the CSI report from the Johnson residence. “I just don’t get it. The victim is sexually abused, but there’s no semen, pubic hairs, or anything else from the perp at the scene. Not a single fingerprint other than those of the victim and her mother. How is that possible? Was she raped by a ghost?”

  My thoughts return to the mirror in storage unit 109 and it makes me imagine things I know to be impossible. The experiences I had with the mirror and with Sarah Johnson are also impossible, yet I’m certain they happened. I don’t believe in ghosts, but perhaps a demon?

  “I don’t know about the fingerprints, but perhaps he used some sort of tool to rape her.”

  “The guy can’t get it up? That might explain some of the evident frustration he displayed in hurting her.”

  The idea of him being impotent resonates with Sarah’s story and my own. I’d never contemplated it before, and now I feel adequately dense. What else have I missed in the last ten years?

  “You see those wounds on her thigh?”

  See them? I felt them! “Yeah, cigarette burns.”

  “Right. The report says there’s a pattern to them. Braille letters.” He looks at me and I nod. He sets the paper down. “You already knew that though, didn’t you?”

  I’m not gonna lie to him about it, but I won’t elaborate on what or how I know either. “Yes.”

  I can see the tension building in Seth’s jaw. “Why would you keep something like that from me? Why didn’t you report it?”

  I don’t blame him for being upset with me. The lies keep stacking up and it’s making me sick.

  I shrug. “Honestly, it slipped my mind. You saw the state I was in on Tuesday. I wasn’t my usual self. Besides, I didn’t report any of it. I went home right after we found Yolanda, remember?”

  The tension eases in Seth’s jaw. He sweeps his hand through his hair. “Yeah, okay. Sorry. All this evidence, or rather lack of, frustrates me. We’ve got nothing to go on but Yolanda’s drawing, and even that’s questionable.”

  I touch his leg. “I’m right there with you, but there must be something in here that we missed.”

  “The word burned onto the victim’s leg is ‘amerce.’ Any idea what that means?”

  I nod. “Only because I looked it up on Tuesday. It means to punish with an arbitrary penalty.”

  “So he punished her? For what? What the hell could she have done to deserve what he did to her?”

  I swallow hard and focus my attention on the beer bottle. “I don’t know. Perhaps killing her is punishment for someone else.” For me.

  Seth scratches his head. “Someone else?”

  I pick up the bottle, suck it dry, and spring off the couch. “Gonna grab another one. You need another?”

  “Sure… Someone else… You think the killing has something to do with Yolanda?”

  I know the truth behind the Braille Killer’s motivation, but perhaps he has something against Yolanda as well. I can’t be the only one who has ever pissed him off. “Sure. It might be the reason he made her watch. If that’s true, then we need to dive deeper into Yolanda’s life. What did she do to this guy? How do they know each other? This kind of killing is personal and takes a lot of planning.”

  “No kidding. I looked through the CSI report for the mill earlier, and you won’t believe what they discovered there.”

  I return to the couch with two fresh bottles of beer and hand one to Seth. “Try me.”

  Seth pops the cap on his beer and leans back. “Remember that cat you shot to death?”

  Echoes of the tool falling off the workbench ring in my mind. “Psycho cat more like.”

  “Well, that bastard made a freaking video of what he did.”

  “A video?” My interest piques.

  Seth sips on his beer. “Yeah, turns out the cat belonged to the Johnsons. It’d been missing for almost two weeks. Sarah and Yolanda had put up fliers for the missing cat all around their neighborhood.”

  I frown. “And the damned cat just happens upon the mill where Yolanda’s held captive and decides to snack on her?”

  “No.” His expression turns grim. “The bastard set up a cage for the cat inside the mill and kept it caged for those two weeks. He starved it to the brink of death. Then, after he’d abducted Yolanda and taken her to the mill, he cut off part of her breast and fed it to the cat.”

  I gasp. “My God, that’s on the video?”

  “Yes.” Seth exhales. “He must’ve turned the cat loose right before he went to kill Sarah. The poor thing was starved mad, smelled the fresh blood on Yolanda, and did what it needed to in order to survive.”

  I sigh. “And then I killed it.”

  Seth snorts and shakes his head slowly. “And then you killed it.”

  My stomach roils. “Did they find anything else? Was the killer on the video?”

  “Nope. This guy’s too careful. No fingerprints anywhere in that mill other than
yours and Yolanda’s.”

  “What about the footprints I discovered down the back stairway?”

  Seth peels back part of the label on his beer. “All destroyed by the medic team. Not sure how helpful they would’ve been anyway.”

  “Damn.” I take a swig of my beer, swish it around a bit, and swallow it down. “This guy is a ghost.”

  Seth sets his bottle down. “Yup, a damned ghost. There were a couple of noteworthy items that came up in the interviews though.”

  I straighten. “Oh? Like what?”

  Seth leans over the table, rummages through the papers, and picks one up. “This is from the neighborhood interviews around the Johnson’s house. Tell me what you notice.”

  He hands me the report and I look it over several times. Nothing stands out other than nobody saw anything. We already knew that would be the case though in that neighborhood.

  “What am I supposed to be finding?”

  He takes the report back. “That’s just it. Remember the house you stormed into Tuesday morning?”

  “Vaguely. I remember there was an old man in a wheelchair. I was so pissed at the time that I don’t recall much else.”

  “Well, that house isn’t on the list.”

  I snatch the report from his hands and scan it again. “What the hell? Why didn’t they go back over there?”

  “That’s just the thing. They did. Officers Brex and Spalding said that the house was abandoned. Absolutely nothing inside. They also asked the neighbors about the house and confirmed that it hasn’t been occupied in over six years.”

  “And the old man?”

  “A ghost as well.”

  “How does an old man in a wheelchair just up and disappear?”

  “Good question. I have another mystery for you.”

  I groan and toss the interview report on the table. This case is nothing but mysteries. “Might as well hit me with it. The first building you toppled over didn’t kill me.”

  “Yolanda insists the killer left a note in her hand.”

  My heart stops beating. The room shrinks around me and the temperature skyrockets. My chest tightens to a point where I believe my ribs will crack if I make a sudden move. I cannot breathe. Don’t want to.