“That gleam in her eye—naked sexual lust. Something for you to see, but never experience. That’s her game. Maybe you should follow her and teach her your game.”
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.”