Watch Me

Watch Me

A Jefferson Winter Thriller

James Carol

Table of Contents

Title Page
Table of Contents
Dedication
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
Acknowledgements
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About The Author
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Copyright

For Cam,

co-conspirator and partner in crime.

1

Sam Galloway died slow, and he died hard. His death was completely at odds with the way he’d lived his life, and completely at odds with the sort of death he should have had. Men like Sam slipped away peacefully in their sleep, or they were felled by a heart attack on the back nine of the golf course, they did not die because they’d been doused in gasoline and set alight. And they sure as hell didn’t die screaming their final breaths into a filthy rag while the flesh melted from their bones.

It would be easy to categorise Sam as a victim of circumstance, to file him away under ‘wrong place, wrong time’. This was a common mistake in these situations, one that was rooted in fear. Saying that Sam had been in the wrong place at the wrong time meant his murder could be blamed on fate, or chance, or the whims of the gods.

Alternatively if this murder wasn’t random, then it became much easier to believe that what had happened to Sam could happen to anyone. Follow the logic, and it wasn’t that huge a leap to believe that you might be next.

But Sam hadn’t been in the wrong place at the wrong time. There was nothing random about his murder. Whoever had done this had targeted him. They’d fantasised about what they wanted to do, then they’d worked out a way to turn fantasy into reality. Most importantly, they’d looked long and hard at how they could burn Sam up and get away with it.

That last detail was crucial.
Getting away with it
. That’s what separates the amateurs from the pros. Committing a crime is relatively easy. Any fool can do that. Committing a crime and getting away with it, now that’s tough.

So far the plan was working just fine. Sam was dead and the guy responsible was out there somewhere, free to go on living his life as though nothing had ever happened. Right now, he was probably enjoying a celebratory breakfast in a diner somewhere. Eggs sunny side up, a tower of pancakes drenched in maple syrup, bacon crisped to perfection, and a gallon of coffee to wash it all down.

Or maybe he was at work, doing the nine-to-five thing. Handshakes and backslaps and a post-mortem of last night’s ball game around the water cooler, a game he hadn’t seen because he’d been busy elsewhere. A game whose details he’d picked up from the sports pages.

Until the email dropped into my inbox ten minutes ago, I’d never heard of Sam Galloway. Now all I could think about was Sam, and what had happened to him, and who might be responsible. Particularly that last one.

I glanced at the laptop screen, glanced at the suitcase on the bed. I’d been in South Carolina for the past two weeks hunting down a killer called Carl Tindle, and now Carl was in custody it was time to move on to the next case.

Up until five minutes ago that had been a serial rapist who was targeting prostitutes in Honolulu. These weren’t your high-end girls, these were your nickel-and-dime whores, the lowest of the low, girls that the world had all but given up on. That didn’t mean they shouldn’t have justice. As far as I’m concerned every victim matters. You could be royalty or a junkie whore‚ it makes no difference to me.

The flights and hotel were booked, my suitcase packed, and I was more than ready to get out of Charleston. Not because there was anything wrong with Charleston. There wasn’t. It’s just that I’d been here for two weeks, and two weeks is pretty much my limit for staying anywhere these days.

I glanced at the laptop again. One thing I’d had to learn fast during my FBI days was how to prioritise. Resources were always stretched to breaking point because there were too many bad guys out there. The latest victim had just been found in Hawaii so time was on our side there. It would be a while before that guy struck again. But with this Sam Galloway thing‚ the clock was ticking loud and fast. The way I figured it‚ I could postpone going to Hawaii for a few days and it wouldn’t make that much of a difference to what was happening over there.

The email had come from Sheriff Peter Fortier of the Dayton Parish Sheriff’s Department, down in Eagle Creek‚ Louisiana. I’d never heard of Dayton or Eagle Creek or Sheriff Fortier, which wasn’t surprising considering the US has a land mass of 3.8 million square miles and a population in the region of a third of a billion.

The video clip attached to the email was interesting because I rarely got to see killers at work. Usually all I saw was the end result. Sometimes there was a corpse, sometimes not. Sometimes there wasn’t even a crime scene. During my time with the FBI I’d interviewed dozens of serial criminals, so I had plenty of first-hand accounts stored away, albeit biased ones. But it didn’t matter how fresh the body was, or how detailed the account, there was no substitute for witnessing something with your own two eyes, even if you were only witnessing it through the lens of someone else’s camera.

This guy wasn’t the first killer to film his work, and he wouldn’t be the last. However, this was the exception rather than the rule. It’s common knowledge that serial killers often keep trophies to fuel their fantasies, but these tended to be obscure, innocent-looking mementos that hold significance only for the killer: an article of clothing, a lock of hair, maybe an earring. Filming was rare because it was risky. If the wrong person saw it, how the hell did you explain that one away?

I played the film clip a second time. The picture quality was good, sharp and defined. No shake, which meant the camera had been mounted on a tripod. It also meant that Sheriff Fortier was dealing with a single unsub here. If there had been two unknown subjects, one of them would have wanted to play with the camera and I’d now be watching something that resembled a badly shot home movie. There was no sound. In some ways it would have been less unsettling if there had been. My imagination had gone into overdrive, filling the silence, and what it was coming up with was probably way worse than the reality.

Most of the screen was taken up with Sam Galloway. He was lying on the floor, hog-tied and gagged and scared out of his mind. His face had turned bright red from the exertion, eyes popping. His suit was crumpled and dirty, the collar of his white shirt smeared with grime.

It was difficult to tell exactly where he was being held. The floor was dirt-streaked concrete, and the one wall I could see was constructed from cinderblock. I had a sense of an industrial, utilitarian space, and I also had a sense of confinement, which made me think this was some sort of garage or bunker rather than a warehouse. According to the numbers in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen, the video had been filmed at a little after eleven o’clock yesterday evening.

The clock on the screen jumped forward a minute to 23:04, and a short while later a second man appeared on the screen. The new guy was thin, slightly built, somewhere around five-nine.

And he was carrying a jerry can.

The thin guy walked up to Sam, careful to keep his back to the camera. Sam saw him and froze. He stared at the guy, stared at the can, then he started thrashing around again, more desperate than ever to get free.

The guy unscrewed the jerry can’s lid and tipped the contents over Sam. Gasoline sloshed everywhere. It got into Sam’s eyes, his nose. He was drowning in the stuff. His clothes were drenched. His hair was dripping. The thin guy shook the last drops from the can and placed it on the concrete floor. Then he took out a matchbook. The cover was white and blank. No restaurant logos, no bar names. He lit a match, tossed it casually onto Sam, then disappeared from the screen.

It took Sam more than two minutes to die‚ which was two minutes longer than anyone should have to suffer. The pain would have been excruciating. Nobody should have to die like that.

The hyperlink in Sheriff Fortier’s email took me to a crude webpage. Large white numbers on a black background. 13:29:23. To the right of the numbers was a stick-figure diagram straight from a game of hangman. This particular game was almost at an end. All that was missing were the limbs.