[Darkthorn 01.0] Pond Scum

by Michael Lilly

  Pond Scum

  The Darkthorn Series

  Michael Lilly

  Copyright © Michael Lilly 2017

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without prior written permission from the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any person or persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Published by Vulpine Press in the United Kingdom in 2018

  ISBN 978-1-910780-81-7

  Cover by Claire Wood

  www.vulpine-press.com

  For Mom and Dad

  Prologue

  The gloves feel different on my hands, this time. The blood dripping down the latex exterior feels, for the first time, accusatory. Aghast, even. I slosh this new feeling around in my mouth a bit, trying its flavor. Deciding that it’s too bitter, I spit it out, instead focusing on steadying my breathing.

  While I normally keep a calm mind, this night was exhilarating. Thrilling. Indulgent on a level only otherwise known to heroin addicts and adrenaline junkies hurtling toward the earth at maximum velocity. My kills, by necessity, are usually simple: a gun or a knife in the right place at the right time, with proper precautions and preparations, yield a satisfying result, including the baffling of the local detectives. Sure, they can dust for fingerprints, sample gunpowder, assess the length of the blade, ascertain a rough estimate as to the height of the assailant, (surprise: me), search and verify alibis, and regurgitate a heaping pile of possible motives and stories. This bile is most often the typical bullshit: lover’s triangle, angry significant other, some Oedipus complex that would have Freud hiding a stiffy in his grave. Gang violence, turf wars, drug deals gone sour. The common dither would get exhaustingly boring if it weren’t so goddamn useful.

  This kill, however, had layers and layers of complexity, each an obstacle that got bigger with every step. My quarry had known for some time that he was in somebody’s crosshairs. Whether he knew they were mine, I don’t know.

  They consider all of these things, as reliably as uniforms stand around with their thumbs up their asses waiting for us big boys to do our jobs. The profile workup is consistently textbook too: single male, early to mid-thirties, lives alone, doesn’t get out much, maybe a history of mental illness or a political motive, often both. So, y’know, half the county. Perfect for someone like me, really.

  The sun surrenders just a few rays over the eastern mountains, casting its golden glow over the valley. The morning is cold and damp, but not so much the kind of cold that bites at you; no, this is the kind of pleasant chill that brings the sobriety of a November morning. The kind that, if honed in on, will cast doubt on your fears of the night. This cold is the happy counterpart to October’s nocturnal shivers, leaving Halloween in its wake and carrying the sweet promise of Thanksgiving on its breeze.

  When I finish staging the body just right, I retreat into the nearby woods; early risers (trophy wives and obsessive-compulsive exercisers, mostly) will soon be populating the park, and being seen is not on the agenda. At least, not yet. I hurl the blade into the pond on my way, grateful for its depth; it will never be seen again, at least not by anyone relevant.

  My pace toward the trees quickens to a careful rate: fast enough to cut down on time, but not fast enough to draw attention. Not that I anticipate any passersby or onlookers, just yet; a Sunday morning in November will have most of Riverdell’s residents happily snoring away under duvets of blissful ignorance. Waking up is rough sometimes. But caution is my forte, and this is when it is most important.

  When I assess that the distance I’ve put between myself and my horizontal friend is sufficient, I find a small, secluded chunk of earth where an immediate rise on it shields me from view to the east, and the dense trees shield me from view to the west. I carefully remove the bloodstained gloves, followed by a small canister of gasoline and a match from my shoulder bag. I soak the gloves, which continue to glare at me, and set fire to them. When they’ve shriveled to an unrecognizable mass of charred rubbish, I stamp them into the ground, careful not to touch them, and reinforce ‘dispose of shoes’ on my mental to-do list. It won’t be enough to toss them into the first dumpster I see on my way back home—no, Beth is too good. If there are footprints, she’ll find the shoes.

  After ditching the gloves, I double back north, around the pond, opposite where I ditched the body. I walk at my steady pace, parallel to the trail and just out of sight, careful to step where the leaves are damp, to avoid making too much noise. I slip out of the woods and cross Park Street, into an alley between a bakery and a failing furniture store (Clearance! Everything must go!). Half a block down, I begin my ascent, toward my conveniently subtle third-floor entrance. The stairs are old and creaky, but I know where to step in order to navigate them silently; practice has indeed made perfect on that front.

  Riverdell’s older residents proudly proclaim that their town is a postcard town. A hidden gem, buried as a byproduct of the American race to join Europe as a prolific entity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The town was founded somewhere between 1845 and 1849; none of its founders were terribly inclined toward record-keeping, but the oldest known deeds and building licenses in the town pin it around that time.

  Indeed, the 1850s saw Riverdell from infancy to adolescence, a promising town that both attracted and produced bustling, energetic youth, but upon Portland’s explosive growth in the latter half of the nineteenth century, that of Riverdell all but ceased. Those wishing to make careers out of trading or other areas of commerce were invariably drawn to the coast, roughly seventy miles to the west, where shipping costs were low and demand was high. Those who remained in town were the craftsmen—carpenters, mostly; these days, nearly every building in town is augmented by such beautiful and abundant woodwork that we look like a snow globe-enclosed cabin community. All we’re missing is snow and happy people.

  In 1879 the town erected its first schoolhouse. I don’t know whether it was a desperate grasp at hope or a bold refusal to erode like so many now-ghost towns scattered throughout the western states. Perhaps both. Today, the building serves as a novelty eatery, The Riverdell Tolling Bell. Cute, but a bit much for my tastes; being served in a former schoolhouse doesn’t magically make an average burger taste like a twelve-dollar one any more than the contents flushed down a gold toilet differ from those disposed of in a porcelain one.

  What about the town that makes it a hidden gem is beyond me. Perhaps it’s the charm that unfailingly eludes my gaze, or maybe the town’s isolation. We do have pretty mountains and verdant landscapes carved by streams, but that does nothing to distinguish us from the rest of Oregon.

  Now the sun is coming up properly, and I just have enough time to get a shower before getting the text from Beth:

  “Murder, middle-aged man, at the park, south of the pond. See you there.”

  I collect my badge and gun, scarf the remainder of my protein bar, pat my German shepherd (Odin) on the head, and head back out the door. This time I don’t mask my noise.

  To my neighbors, I’m clumsy, a little obnoxious, and sometimes annoying, albeit very friendly and genuinely well-meaning. My carefully crafted façade does everything that I want it to: gives me an alibi when I need one, assuring my neighbors that they know every time I leave or return, while in reality, they only think they do. Fortunately for me, my downstairs neighbor is a recluse, and likes her quiet, so unless I’m being intentionally st
ealthy, she is aware of every time I leave or return home. Bless her heart.

  Beyond that, the neighbors would not only never suspect me of murder, they would think I was outright incapable of it. They know that I’m a detective, but to their knowledge, just the poor little nobody who’s called on for pizza runs when workload gets thick and sticky.

  “Him?” they’d probably exclaim, in italics, suppressing a laugh. “Oh please, that fucker can’t get his shoes on right without tripping around his apartment. I’ll bet he bubble wraps everything in his house as a precaution.”

  I hit the worn asphalt with a thud, making sure to leave the iron staircase reverberating from my clumsiness, and head south, to Center Street, before cutting west toward the park. I’m not sure how necessary this particular precaution is, but I figure it can’t hurt regardless. I cross Park Street after stopping at the corner café to get coffee for Beth and me. She likes hazelnut cream. I like it black.

  Now it’s show time; appearance is everything. I feign bewilderedness when I get to the park, visibly searching for the crowd that would indicate a crime scene. After I ‘spot it,’ I head off, and throw in a quick stutter in my walk for good measure. Approaching the scene, I flash my badge to the uniforms guarding the tape line. It’s just a formality, really; they know me.

  “Detective,” they say, and lift the tape to let me through.

  “’Bout time,” Beth says, intercepting me on my way to look upon my handiwork. Beth seems rough around the edges, until you know her well. She’s a hardass, and she talks a lot of shit, but she’ll only ever mean any of it if you don’t get her results. But I do. She takes her venti without thanking me, and stands blocking the line of sight between me and my last night’s date. “We only just ID’d the vic,” she says. “I don’t want you on this one.” Her eyes swim with good intentions.

  I do wounded, with just the right amount of baffled thrown in.

  She steps out of the way, and this becomes a moment that I need to play carefully. The second turn in a game of chess with no solid rules; just a world built on nuances and subtleties too scarce for ordinary eyes to see.

  She’s watching for my reaction; not like normally happens when a detective breaks the news to a family member, but just because she doesn’t suspect me doesn’t mean she’s turned off her detective instincts. When you break news to a family, you don’t phone them or send an e-mail. You don’t leave a note on the door with a plate of cookies and a pan of funeral potatoes. The detectives show up and, while it sounds heartless and a little cold, mostly they’re there to gauge the reactions of the family.

  She’s watching as a friend, a supervisor, watching for whatever shape she needs to take to make me feel better about my freshly fallen father.

  One

  Normally I’m good at throwing out whatever expression is necessitated by any given situation on the fly, but this one I’ve practiced for weeks, months. From the moment I decided to kill my father, I’ve found myself throwing together an ugly mixture of sad, shocked, and a little angry. I’ve practiced the sharp gasp that was more visible than audible, and the stuttered exhalation that followed. I learned that, if my breathing and facial expression were spot-on, I could even produce tears. All of this will be useful in this moment, the one that all detectives look for when the death of a family member is revealed.

  They watch for the husband to look at the clock every time you mention his late wife’s name. They watch for the widow to disappear into a fake, yet intense, fit of sobs when you press her for the specifics of her innocent night at home watching Netflix with her dear, rich hubby. The mental tug-of-war has begun long before most killers even think they’re a suspect. This is prime time for the detectives; the average schmuck would be amazed at the amount of blatantly untrue bullshit that spews from a killer’s mouth when he thinks he’s gotten away with it. Of course, we’re mostly watching for the one little nugget of truth to set the whole alibi unraveling.

  I’m convinced that Beth bought it, and she’s as sharp as any we’ve ever had on the force. She’d call out a priest pocketing collections in the middle of a Sunday congregation and be right ten out of ten times. She speaks like the crack of a whip, but can choose to omit the sting of it. That’s what she’s doing now; her mouth soft rather than thin and fierce. Oddly, I find myself admiring how much better she looks when she’s doing sympathy. Her green laser eyes turn to a calming, shimmering aqua, and her messy brown bun looks more casual than rushed.

  More than anything, though, the way she carries herself transformed. On a regular day, working a regular case, she’s a tower that zips from detective to floater to uniform to witness to witness to floater, clearing a path in front of her through sheer intimidation, whether or not intentional. If she looks you in the eye, either you’re in trouble or she needs something from you, and in either case you promise yourself thirty times over that you will never fuck up again.

  But her lasers have disengaged, and she’s human, and I feel a knot that I didn’t know I had unfold in my shoulder.

  “You’re not working this case,” she repeats after I clean the tears and snot off of my face, “or any other case, at least for a couple of weeks. Take some time off. Collect yourself. And I’m sorry for your loss.”

  “Thanks, Beth,” I say, doing pitiful. “I’ll take things one day at a time.” I need to appear wounded enough to make it convincing, but not so much that it’ll keep me out of the office for long; that’s where the real work takes place. I start my walk home, going back the way I came.

  You’re probably thinking that I’m an atrocity of a human being. You’re probably right. I’ve painted the picture for you, I know: vicious serial killer who uses his hand in law enforcement to cover his tracks and conceal or corrupt evidence. Well, you’re not wrong. Except for maybe the ‘vicious’ part.

  My world is one of balance. One of rights and wrongs, and wrongs being offset by rights, and wrongdoers being offset by prison time. But sometimes they don’t end up going to prison. Or sometimes they’ve afflicted the world with such heinous displays of primal perversity that prison would not set the world right. In these rare cases, I find myself in the unique position of setting the world right. See, if another person wasted these guys, they’d do the world the favor that it needs, but they’d likely get caught and sent to prison, spinning the world out of balance once more.

  The world is chaotic, the limbs of the universe flailing wildly through the lives of its inhabitants, ripping and upending and overturning indiscriminately. Children starve. Corrupt politicians get elected for their nth term. Bad parents parent badly. The umbral lashing of the universe does not stop to pay its respects for the victims of these circumstances.

  But, with a subtle, nay, invisible hand, I can manipulate these scenarios so that the bad guy gets got and the good guy (that’s me!) gets away, and can continue monitoring the balance of the world. Or, at least, Riverdell. I’m not a superhero. I can’t solve Japan’s problems. But I can sure solve the problems of rural Oregon.

  My name is Jeremy Thorn, and I’m a serial killer.

  As with the rest of the arbitrary rules that I’ve applied to my life, I’m not certain when outright murder became okay on my list. I can recall the date and time of my first kill, but the conscious decision to remove him from the planet was a gradual one, as far as I can remember. There was no one That fucker needs to die, and I’m the one who’s going to make it happen moment. Maybe it happened in a dream, casting upon me its dark deed, my waking up ready to obey. In any case, the law only reaches so far. Where it fails, I do not.

  I considered being invisible for a while. Letting the cold case files pile up on some poor floater’s desk to be thumbed through when things were slow. But it’s too much work to manipulate things behind the scenes for that long, to pay attention to every person who ends up picking up the file.

  Don’t get me wrong; I cover my tracks well. But regardless, it’s unnerving to think that there’s a possibility of s
omeone noting a link to me, one that even I overlooked in my borderline compulsive covering of my tracks. This was more anxiety than I like to deal with, which is what landed me in my working system of today.

  My dad. Donald Thorn. Child molester. Rapist. Child abuser. Alcoholic. Had a hobby of supplying the local child porn ring. Had. He had a contact in Portland Metro who would circulate the filth using his contacts from his previous work in undercover, and they split the earnings seventy-thirty. Dad wasn’t shy about having these conversations out loud; he had everyone in the house, including me, so mortally petrified of him that he knew we would never talk.

  Eventually I could sense that he was going to kill me, sooner or later, drunk or sober, suspecting that I was going to squeal as a show of my independence. But I wasn’t independent, not yet.

  So I pretended that I couldn’t remember what he’d done to me. I pretended that beating me senseless as an eight-year-old was the worst that he’d ever done to me. Suppressed or some bullshit like that. The asshole even took me to a therapist and told the shrink that I’d been having nightmares, delusions, hallucinations. His Get out of Jail Free card, should it come to it, would be a small stack of medical records from a therapist out of Portland.

  I told the therapist exactly what my dad was hoping I’d tell him: We had a loving relationship. The bruises were from rough games of baseball, football with my friends. He had a drink or two in the evening to take the edge off, but never more. And he provided for our family. He put a roof over our heads, and I always felt safer when he was home.

  For whatever reason, I found myself driving my right thumbnail into my left index finger’s knuckle for every lie I told the therapist about him, every time I saw the therapist. It went unnoticed by the shrink, as he had his head buried in notes and was also around three hundred years old. This habit continued with the school counselor, peers, and peers’ parents throughout my upbringing, and now I have five shiny scars, neat and parallel, on the knuckle above my left index finger.