Authors: Ryan Harding
Maybe I should indeed.
He always found it strange and somewhat desensitizing when commercials interrupted something like the special on the Slave Killer. It created a subtext along the lines of “the murders of Deborah Willis, Leslie Kinderman, and Megan Ballard are brought to you by General Motors and Burger King—Home of the Whopper.” It made it all seem like it was only a TV show; an eighteen-minute sitcom minus the canned laughter. This week’s episode: Janet Lynn decides to hitchhike on Highway 88 and gets picked up by a bloodthirsty killer, who has more in his pants for her than just a butcher knife.
Channel Two News
returned.
“But how did the Slave Killer come to be known by his chilling moniker?” Geisha Hammond asked viewers.
So-called expert Dr. Julius Vincent made another appearance. “He chose the name himself in the first of his many letters to the local newspaper, the
Bartok Daily
.”
Cut to:
The first letter, as the camera slowly panned across each word while a narrator tried to affect the murder’s clinical lack of emotion (he succeeded only in sounding bored). A disclaimer appeared at the bottom of the screen: DRAMATIZATION.
Much like car commercials, he thought.
“I am the murderer of certain young women who keep turning up in ditches, fields, and drain pipes. These are fitting places for them, don’t you agree? I stashed the scum where they wouldn’t bother anyone, and now they’re waiting to serve me when I leave this world. I would appreciate it if you would refer to me as the Slave Killer from now on, because that is what I am.”
His body became aware of it before his mind. His mouth hung open and his heart hammered rapidly against the walls of his chest.
That writing . . .
He knew that writing. No, it wasn’t because it belonged to the Slave Killer. He’d heard of the crimes before, of course, but he’d never seen the letters. He’d never read Dr. Julian Vincent’s book,
On the Trail of the Slave Killer.
Ordinary citizens didn’t go looking into things like that, he knew. No, he’d seen the writing somewhere else.
He grabbed a stack of Christmas cards he’d saved over the years and looked at the handwriting on each of them. The banal narration continued on the TV and he looked at the screen to compare as he flipped through the envelopes. He found the right one on the fourth try.
It was from his father.
JOURNAL ENTRY, MAY 3
I call it My Precious, like in those books about the ring. But My Precious is not a ring. Mine looks like a blind creature of metal, with very sharp teeth. To even put my thumb against it is to create one of those “cut here” dotted lines in my skin. That is the worst of its offenses against me, and I know of several women who probably wish they could say the same. We’ll never know.
At night I keep My Precious in the nightstand beside the bed. My wife will sometimes want me to “make a woman of her,” and I have to have it there. I have to know that at any moment I could reach into the drawer and take it out. When I stroke the handle on the nightstand, my wife becomes a woman. Those others, though . . . they were already women. I made them far less than that, not even recognizable as someone who ever might have been human.
“Well, isn’t this a surprise,” his father said. “Come on in.”
He hadn’t been here in months, even though they both lived in Bartok. He had his own life, and not one he thought really intersected with his father’s. They had even less to talk about since the cancer found his mother four years ago.
“How’s Jana?”
“About the same,” he replied neutrally, taking off his coat.
“I’ve been meaning to get back since Christmas,” his father said. “Somehow it hasn’t worked out that way.”
“I know how that goes.”
“Grab a seat.” His father settled into his favorite armchair. A talk show rerun played on the TV, the volume muted.
“How’ve you been holding up, Dad?”
“Ah. Can’t complain.”
He sighed. “Okay, we can stop with the pleasantries. I’ll tell you right upfront, I’m here for a reason. Two reasons, really.”
His father said nothing, just looked at him expectantly.
“You asked about Jana. Here’s the thing. She’s been gone a lot. All hours of the day and night, she’s at meetings or working overtime for her clients. That’s what she
says
, anyway.” He paused.
“You don’t think she’s actually at work?” his father asked.
“I know she’s not. I followed her last week. She could have made a fortune selling matchbooks if she’d taken about fifty from each hotel.” He laughed without humor. “I don’t know who it is. Maybe there’s more than one. I don’t even care.”
“If you get photographic evidence that she’s unfaithful, you can burn her ass in a divorce,” his dad informed him. “I saw it on Court TV.”
“I don’t
want
to burn her ass in a divorce. That’s why I’m here.”
That classic fatherly look of confusion. “I’m not following.”
“I know who you are, Dad. I recognized your handwriting on the Slave Killer’s letters. You murdered all those women. I don’t know how many for sure. It could have been four. Julian Vincent thinks you did eighteen. That’s not important to me.”
The look on his father’s face must have been the equal of his own last night when he saw the handwriting—the dawning revelation. The pieces falling into place.
“They think you’re doing it again, though—” he continued.
“I didn’t kill those—” his father tried to interrupt.
“I don’t care about that either. These dead women of the past year or two or however long it’s been happening, they’re all random. They’re like needles being dropped into a stack. If you drop in one more needle, no one’s going to notice. Not as long as it seems completely random.”
His father was silent.
“Why did you stop before?” he asked. “Their theories are all wrong. You didn’t die. You weren’t imprisoned for another crime. You didn’t relocate. You didn’t get sick. But you stopped anyway.”
JOURNAL ENTRY, JUNE 6
I must become you again. I enjoy what I do, but you can’t continue the game forever. You have to appreciate the possibility, however remote, that they’ll find you. Do you remember the unremarkable endings of all those
Shocking Crimes
articles? Of course you do. You could almost recite them from memory, you reread them so often. How did it feel when the fantasy was stripped away to reveal the rather banal truth? The seemingly invincible phantoms were mere flesh and blood. Loners, outcasts, and petty criminals. They were nobodies once the chain of evidence led back to their halfway houses and shoddy apartments. The elaborate fantasy was simply dissected and filed away.
It was like
The Wizard of Oz.
Look behind the curtain and there is the architect of something that seemed so substantial, but no longer does, because there’s just a little man back there.
If they never get to see behind the curtain, though . . .
“I’m going to a bachelor party Thursday night at the Electra Complex. It’s for a colleague. Lots of people will see me. If you do it then, they might still suspect me, but they’ll know I couldn’t have actually killed her myself. There’s nothing to tie either of us to it, especially when they figure out she probably spent her last night taking it up the ass in a cheap motel. They’ll throw it in with the latest batch of serial killings. Even if they don’t, they’ll probably be more interested in who she was having an affair with. You have to watch out for those jealous lovers, you know.”
“And if I say no?” his father asked. The old man seemed rather cavalier about being discovered, like he’d merely been accused of lighting a bag of shit on somebody’s doorstep back in 1983.
We always thought it was you . . . you were such a little rapscallion in those days! Ennis had to throw his house shoes in the gosh darn trash!
“That’s obvious, isn’t it? I’ll go to the police with what I know. I don’t want to do it that way. There’s no reason for it, even if you’re still out there doing your thing. That’s your business.”
“I told you I wasn’t. You do realize it’s illegal to blackmail someone into killing your wife, don’t you?”
“Yes. It’s your word against mine, though, isn’t it? You’ll still go to jail anyway. You’ll get to look forward to dying in a prison cell. Is that what you want?”
“I’m just saying that killing her seems a bit extreme.”
He laughed again. “Look who’s talking.”
“Son, I’m almost in my seventies. Most people don’t even want me on the road, and you’re asking me to commit the perfect murder?”
“Not a perfect murder. She’s the perfect victim, according to you.
‘From now on, you’ll never know if I’m the one who butchered these hogs. All over the world, there are others like me. Our number grows every day, and soon there will be fewer and fewer of the whorish scum you call your wives and daughters on the streets, and more and more of them stuffed down drain pipes.’
You wrote those words, page 46 of Dr. Vincent’s book. I turned up a lot of other interesting similarities between you and the police profile of the Slave Killer, incidentally. Probably married, children. Some kind of security job because you weren’t good enough to be a real cop.”
“You watch that,” his father warned.
“The point is, you want ‘whorish scum.’ Well, she’ll be in my house Thursday night, practically gift-wrapped for you. Jana never misses her favorite show, even if she couldn’t ask for a better opportunity to go slutting around. Should have learned to program the VCR, right? It will still be early enough after the show for her to go out. You know how these ‘emergency staff meetings’ are.” He held up his fingers to create sarcastic quotation marks. “Follow her and take her when the opportunity presents itself. If she doesn’t leave, you’ll have no problem getting in. I brought you a spare key. I’ll take her car somewhere more appropriate and they won’t even know she vanished at the house. So you know what you have to do. Otherwise, I guarantee the police will be interested in your activities from twenty-five years ago, not to mention the past year and a half. It’ll be pretty hard for an old man who never leaves the house to come up with a good alibi on the nights in question.”
His father was silent for almost a minute, and then said, “Thursday?”
JOURNAL ENTRY: JULY 17 - JULY 22
(PAGES TORN OUT)
Jana was still there when he got home Thursday night. Most of her, anyway. For a moment, he thought he’d accidentally wandered into a slaughterhouse. He’d seen its like before, but never in such a refined setting as his own house. The kitchen looked like one of those avant garde
paintings where the artist slings paint in all directions across the canvas, except this was apparently the work of a starving artist with only deep red on the palette. The bitter reek of sticky blood and lingering death clogged up his nostrils, heavy and sickening.
“You left out a few important points of your plan,” his father said from the living room doorway. Dr. Vincent was right—evidently the Slave Killer brought a change of clothes with him to avoid leaving a crime scene splattered with blood. He was clean in spite of the carnage all around.
He had a gun.
“Like the part where you tell the police your wife was supposed to meet me the night she disappeared,” his father continued. “I’m guessing you were going to leave her car somewhere near my house. It sure wouldn’t look good for me when the police showed up, especially when you suddenly noticed an eerie similarity between my handwriting and the Slave Killer’s. Those were your exact words in your journal, weren’t they?
‘Eerie similarity?’
Then it would be your word against mine, and they’d probably believe you. They wouldn’t know that the Slave Killer has nothing to do with the new killings. They have a profile of you, too, you know. They think you take out your rage for one woman against others because you’re too damned chickenshit to kill the source. That’s why you had to get me to do Jana; to ‘share needles.’” He mimicked the sarcastic quotation marks with his free hand.
“You also thought there was a good chance I’d take the fall for this business you’ve been getting up to with all these girls. You thought you could stop cold with Jana out of the way, and get away with all the ones you’ve done. You knew she’d been cheating on you for a lot longer than a week. That’s when it started for you. This all made for fascinating reading, though for the sake of dramatic license, I had to take any page that mentioned me in your plan. It’s funny. All this time, and I didn’t know my old issues of
Shocking Crimes
were the fuel for all your little wet dreams.”
He stood rooted to the spot. Like his father earlier this week, he denied nothing. Dad saw the journal. It was all in there. “Where’s Jana?” he finally asked, noting that while the kitchen was awash with blood so thick in some places he could see his own reflection, he saw no body.
“She’s in the bedroom. And the bathroom. And the linen closet. She’s on some of the stairs, too, I think. She’s the one who found your journal, by the way. She was fretting over what to do about it when I showed up. I didn’t need your spare key. I’m her father-in-law; of course she was going to let me in. She didn’t even get to the best part about how her husband hoped to drop her in the stack with the rest of the needles. I did, though. I’m bad about that—I have to flip to the end of a mystery to find out who did it.”
“I was at the Electra Complex,” he replied calmly. “I nearly got into a fight with some guy because I almost knocked his beer over. He told me to watch what the fuck I was doing and called me a ‘dicksucker.’ A bunch of people saw this. They say he has a habit of getting in people’s faces over nothing. They’ll remember me. What happens when the time of her death doesn’t fit in with when I could have killed her? Think about it.”
It was his father’s turn to laugh. “They’ve got a written confession for eight murders in your journal, and you think they’re going to let a little discrepancy like that bother them? I even used your knife on her. Found it right where it was supposed to be. Your Precious.”
“Look, Dad,” he said, almost smiling, “I swear . . . it’ll never happen again.”
“No,” his father said. “It won’t.”
Channel Two News—Special Report on the Bartok Butcher
“How did he sound when he called you that night?” Geisha Hammond asked.
“He was hysterical. He didn’t say anything about what he’d done to Jana, but he said there was blood everywhere. He asked me to come over right away.”
“And what happened when you arrived? What did you see?”
“He opened the door, and he was just covered in blood. Like he’d been
wallowing
in it. That’s what I remember thinking when I saw him . . .
He looks like he’s been wallowing in blood.
And that’s when he started raving about all the other murders he’d done. I could see . . . I could see . . . Jana . . . I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay, sir. You take just as long as you need.”
“Thank you. Uh, okay, so I walked inside and I saw what he was talking about . . . blood
everywhere.
He
destroyed
that poor, sweet girl who never harmed a soul. I took my gun because of what he said about all the blood. I was scared . . . wouldn’t take any chances. I told him, I said, ‘Son, we have to go to the police.’ But he wouldn’t hear it. He was like a mad dog, and when that happens . . . you gotta put them down.”
The old man being interviewed wiped his eyes and repeated, “You gotta put them down.”
“And does it bother you that people consider you a hero for what you did? At the cost of the life of your own son . . . your only son?”
“Of course it bothers me . . . they couldn’t ever know the burden. And they
shouldn’t
. No one should. It’s like they say—the most tragic thing in the
world
is for a parent to outlive a child.”