Fifteen Times a Killer Page 5

  “People might say ‘specially,’ but they would never write it that way unless their IQ was in the toilet.” Hank held up the police report. “And if he planned the abduction to the point where the police had no suspects and no physical evidence—which is what it says here—he’s not the small-town hick he’s pretending to be.”

  Once again, Hank had shown his worth. Corrina already suspected that the killer was smarter than he let on, but having Hank confirm it was all the validation she needed.

  “So, we don’t expect him to make many mistakes, unless they’re deliberate. Where does that leave us?” Corrina asked them.

  “Playing catch-up,” Hank deadpanned.

  “I’ll flag all postmasters in the LA area and tell them to be on the lookout for packages addressed to you,” Josh said. “Serial killers are usually creatures of habit, so hopefully he’ll send the next chapters the same way.”

  “Great idea. Get on it right away.”

  Josh, buoyed by the praise, got up to leave, but Hank burst his bubble.

  “What if he just drops it in a mailbox next time?”

  Josh hesitated, unsure how to respond.

  Corrina came to his rescue. “Go on, get it organized.”

  Josh left, looking a little dejected.

  “Why’d you have to do that?” Corrina asked Hank when the kid was out of the room.

  “What? I was just throwing a legitimate question out there. Besides, it’s standard procedure to alert the post office when we get things like this. You don’t have to praise him for doing his job right. That’s what he’s paid to do.”

  “I’m talking about denting his confidence. He’s new to the game, and you shooting him down means next time he has an idea he might not share it with us, and that could be the one that leads us to the killer.”

  “Aw, come on, the kid’s full of himself. It’ll take more than that to shake him.”

  “I don’t care,” Corrina glared at Hank. “I want you to play nice.”

  Hank looked like he was about to say something, but then he sighed. “Okay, I’ll go easy on him.”

  Corrina hated treating Hank like this, especially as he had many years seniority on her, but she knew the importance of team cohesion. “Thanks. We need to work together on this. Now, what other thoughts do you have?”

  Hank leaned forward in his chair. “Why now?” he asked. “Why is this guy telling us now?”

  It was a damn fine question, one that hadn’t occurred to Corrina.

  “Is he done killing?” Hank continued. “Has he had enough and wants us to catch him?”

  Corrina considered both possibilities, then dismissed them. “If he wanted to get caught, he could just hand himself in.”

  “So you think he’ll kill again?”

  “I do,” Corrina said, “and for the same reason. He could walk into the nearest police station, but he won’t, because he isn’t finished.”

  Which meant they weren’t just dealing with cold cases, but an active serial killer.

  “So back to my original question: why is he telling us now?”

  Corrina didn’t have an answer. “Hopefully he’ll make that clear soon.”

  Hank appeared to chew over her response, then asked, “Who are they? He said ‘they’ had to feel it, ‘they’ had to know. Who is he referring to?”

  Corrina picked up her notes. She’d highlighted a section at the beginning of chapter one. “I wondered that, too. It says here ‘They had to suffer, to know the pain their actions caused. They had to feel it for themselves.’”

  “Do you think he means his victims?” Hank asked. “If so, what did Kerry do that made him want to kill her?”

  “That’s something we need to find out.”

  Corrina made a note on her pad to get the Scranton agent to ask Kerry’s father when they went to break the news to him. That would happen only after the remains had been positively identified.

  Josh returned. He sat down in his chair, studiously avoiding eye contact with Hank. “What are we discussing now?” he asked Corrina.

  “We’re trying to work out who he’s referring to when he said, ‘They had to suffer. They had to feel it for themselves.’”

  “He said it was payback. Kerry must have done something to piss him off big time.”

  Hank looked ready to stamp all over Josh’s theory, but one look from Corrina and he held his tongue.

  “Continue,” she said.

  “Maybe she spurned him at some point,” Josh suggested. “We could ask her friends if she mentioned anything like that before she died. You know how girls that age share everything, right down to the smallest detail.”

  Corrina remembered her college days well, and Josh made a good point. “I’ll get Vegas to work that up,” she said. “In the meantime—”

  Her phone beeped. She checked the locked screen and saw that an email had hit her FBI inbox. The subject made the breath catch in her throat.

  15 times a killer—chapter two

  “It’s from him,” she said, and dashed out of the room.

  Corrina ran to her desk and logged into her computer. Her mail client was already open, the killer’s email sitting at the top of the pile. A Word document was attached to the brief email text:

  Hi, Corrina. Here’s the second chapter. I’d love to be able to tell you that it isn’t as gruesome as chapter one, but that would be a lie. It’s graphic, and necessarily so. They have to know. They have to suffer, like I did.

  You can find her at ///await.sugar.groom.

  Corrina called the tech department, asking Larry Unger to come to her desk immediately. He promised to be right up, and Corrina entered the three words into the app to find the location of the body. It was in Topanga State Park, about two miles from where Kerry was found.

  When she called McCrae, he answered on the second ring. “We’ve got another one.” Corrina gave him the code to enter into the app.

  “I’ll pick you up in ten,” he said.

  They have to know. They have to suffer, like I did.

  Unger arrived four minutes later. He was young, in his early twenties, like Josh, but built like a man who lived on lettuce and water. Corrina vacated her seat so that he could get to her terminal.

  “I need to know if it’s safe to open that attachment, and where the email came from.”

  “One second,” Unger said. His fingers blurred on the keys. His actions were too quick for Corrina to follow, but a minute later, the document was open.

  “All yours,” Unger told her. “I’ll get the original email from the exchange server and check the headers, see if I can trace it.”

  He left abruptly, and Corrina retook her seat and printed off three copies of chapter two. She took them back to the task force office and handed them out.

  “Looks like we’ve got a second victim,” she said, speed-reading her own printout. “Here we go. Joanne Perry from San Diego. Hank, contact the police department that handled the initial case. If they identified any suspects, I want you two to create extensive profiles and see if we can track their movements on the day Kerry went missing.”

  “Not a problem,” Hank assured her, and Josh nodded, too.

  “Good. I’m gonna take a look at the scene.”

  Corrina took her own copy to read on the way.

  Chapter 7

  Chapter Two

  By now you’ll have realized that I’m not the dumbass I pretended to be in the last chapter. That’s a relief, to be honest. Do you know how hard it is to write in such a vulgar manner? It’s not that easy, let me tell you. It’s like a concert pianist trying to get the notes wrong on purpose. Sounds easy, but it isn’t.

  I only did it to throw them a little, because I have some unfinished business and I don’t want anyone to stop me before I’m ready. Who’s them? I hear you ask. Well, they would be the psychologists and psychiatrists from all across the country who’ll be reading this. No doubt many will flock to the news stations to vent their opinions abo
ut what ails me. They’ll tell the watching world that I suffer from one delusion or another, that my IQ is within a certain range, that I was abused as a child and probably wet the bed until I was in my late teens.

  They will all be wrong.

  I am not writing this to shed light on my personality; I’m writing it so that everyone knows that the people I’m hurting did the wrong thing, and they have to pay for it. They have to know, and they have to suffer, just like I did.

  After Kerry, things got a bit easier. There was no trepidation as I stalked my next victim.

  Her name was Joanne Perry, from Ashley Falls, San Diego.

  Joanne wasn’t the prettiest woman in the world, but someone sure loved her. Loved her enough that she didn’t have to work. Truth be told, her husband was no catch, either. They must have met before he made his fortune. Joanne just spent her days at the nail clinic or the country club, shopping or having lunch with other rich wives.

  Her routine was all too predictable, so much so that it was only two weeks after I started following her that I was able to choose the time and place to make my move.

  Wednesday afternoons were spa day. She would roll up at the Renaissance Club at two on the dot and leave at three-thirty to go to her four o’clock hair appointment three miles away. On October 21st, 2012, she wouldn’t be getting her highlights touched up.

  The Ketamine worked well enough the first time, but it wasn’t as fast-acting as I would have liked, and Joanne was considerably bigger than Kerry. That’s why I took some extra insurance along.

  Just like before, I parked next to her car. This time it was a silver Mercedes convertible. It was unusually cold that day, and the top was up. I remember, because I got to thinking that it would be nice to drive one of those, but I’d never be able to afford one. I’d have had the top down all the time, even when the temperature dipped below forty.

  Joanne finished her waxing, or massage, whatever it was, right on time. As she got near her car, I got into position. The needle with the Ketamine was between my teeth, the stun gun in my left hand and my right hand on the door handle. The moment she bent to unlock the Mercedes, I jumped out and gave her fifty thousand volts in her back. Joanne collapsed to the ground and I stuck the needle in her leg while I clamped my other hand over her mouth. I expected her to struggle, but she was rigid, frozen. I think she was in shock. That made it hard to get her into the van because she was a dead weight. I knew I would have to rig something up for the next one, but I’ll tell you about that another time.

  I was sweating by the time fat, ugly Joanne was on board. I tied her up and drove to my special place.

  I won’t bore you with the details of how I got her into the basement and secured her to my operating table. You’ve heard all that before. What I will do is tell you what I did to her.

  I made her suffer.

  Big time.

  First, I waited until she was fully awake. Screaming-her-heart-out awake. I let her do it for about half an hour while I drank a couple of glasses of whiskey. When she was done, and her screams had subsided to whiney sobbing, I went down to the basement once more.

  “Please,” she begged when she saw me. “Please, let me go. I’ll give you anything.”

  That’s the trouble with her kind. They think money is everything. I’ll tell you one thing, though, she wasn’t so free with it when she wasn’t strapped to my table. When I was following her I saw her walk by a homeless guy—two, actually—and she veered away from them as they held out their cups, looking for a few cents to help them make it through the day. She almost left the sidewalk, that’s how intent she was on avoiding them. She couldn’t give a couple of bucks to two guys who had nothing, but now she would give me anything I wanted.

  No thanks, bitch!

  And I told her so. I told her that her money was a curse, one that had come to bite her on her big fat ass!

  Still, Joanne begged and begged some more. While I was trying to decide where to start, she began bawling again. So I stabbed her in the thigh. Sunk the knife right up to the hilt, a full four inches of blade stuck inside her. That made her change her tone. It was now a high-pitched shriek.

  You might think I’d wear noise-cancelling headphones or something like that, but to be honest I needed to hear their pain. I wish you could, too. I should have recorded it, now that I think about it. Maybe I’ll do that for the next one.

  Anyway, I waited a while for the pain to really hit her. It’s strange how pain does that, don’t you think? You hit your thumb with a hammer and feel the initial crunch of metal on bone, then your body says, “Whoa! Time out!” and you feel nothing as you watch your digit turn black before your eyes. It’s only later that the real pain comes. It’s something to do with adrenaline or some shit like that, giving your body time to deal with the danger before BHAM! here’s how much it really hurts, motherfucker!

  So she’s screaming in pain and trying to beg for her life but her mouth’s too full of mucus to be anything but incoherent. I pretend she wants more of the same.

  “Oh, you liked that? Want some more?”

  And as she’s wildly hysterical and trying to jerk herself free from the constraints, I take a blowtorch to her other thigh. Man, cooking flesh stinks, let me tell you. Anyone who says it’s just like cooking pork on a barbecue is lying. Not only that, it hurts like hell. Joanne thought so, anyway.

  “Do you want to know why I’m doing this?” I asked her.

  Through her tears, she managed to nod her head. At least, I think it was a nod.

  So I told her. I explained why she was going to die, and why the last thing she’d ever remember would be the pain. I told her that it wouldn’t be quick, either. This was going to go on all day and all night if possible. Kerry had died too early for my liking, but I explained to Joanne that I’d revised my methods so that there wouldn’t be a huge loss of blood.

  Just pain.

  And lots of it.

  That didn’t go down well.

  She called me every motherfucker under the sun. Cursed my family, my dog, my mailman, everyone I knew. Joanne sure had a mouth on her.

  I broke her ankle next. Hit it with a hammer, just like Kathy Bates did in that film. You know the one.

  After that, I got real creative.

  Ever fallen over and skinned your knees? Now imagine that happening with an industrial sander. It ain’t pretty. Joanne certainly didn’t like it.

  She doesn’t like anyone touching the soles of her feet, either. I found that out when I beat them with a leather belt. I heard it’s sore as hell, and Joanne confirmed it.

  Then it was back to the script, taking off her toes one by one, then her fingers and thumbs. All the while she’s going batshit crazy, one minute cursing, the next babbling like a child.

  Eventually she asked me to kill her. She was the first to do that. Kerry must have held out hope that maybe Jack Bauer was going to break into the basement and rescue her, but not Joanne. She knew she was going to die, and by this time she welcomed it. She just wanted the pain to stop.

  I didn’t.

  Every time I hurt her from that point on, I reminded her why I was doing it. When I sliced her belly open with a scalpel and put salt in the wound, I reminded her. When I slammed the hammer down on her shin bones, I told her why. For the next two hours, all she heard was the reason she was going to die so horribly. No amount of begging or pleading was going to change that.

  I’d hoped to take her through the night, but she passed away just before ten. Cause of death: every fucking thing I could think of.

  Joanne is now in the ground. Gone. A pile of bones.

  She died a horrible death.

  She won’t be the last.

  Chapter 8

  Jess wished she’d brought suitable footwear. Trying to navigate her way through the scrub in two-inch heels hadn’t been her smartest move. On the drive over, she’d been thinking about the headline for the piece she was going to write. All she could picture now was, “Thi
rd-rate hack twists ankle and dies alone in State park.”

  Jess slipped her shoes off and cursed herself for wanting to look taller. As if being five-ten was going to change peoples’ perception of her. She’d still be geeky, frumpy Jess, crazy-cat-lady-in-waiting, destined to die alone from a Haagen-Dazs overdose.

  She checked her phone again to see where she was in relation to the marker, then looked where the app directed her.

  Her heart sank.

  Why did you have to bury her on a hill, you sonofabitch?

  She was already sweating from the short walk from her car. By the time she was done, she’d be soaked through.

  At least I’ll lose a couple of pounds.

  Then a thought struck her: what if there was no body, no serial killer? What if her colleagues had fabricated the whole thing just to force her into doing some exercise? They’d be in the office now, congratulating themselves on such a great prank. They might even be waiting back at the road when she returned from her trek, panting like an imbecile and stinking like a jock’s locker.

  Jess shrugged the idea off. No one at the office was that callous, not even the vacuous Claire McMillan. Though many would have done something similar in school, the work environment was a different matter. For one, the litigation culture meant such shenanigans were career-ending, and none of her colleagues would risk their livelihoods just to see her humiliated.