The Man on Little Sweden

by Sam Harding

  Blake reached into his jacket pocket and removed a small jar of Vicks VapoRub. He took a gob of the substance with his index finger and stuck it up each nostril so that all he could smell was the mint-like aroma of the ointment. Taking one last breath of fresh air, Blake approached the trailer.

  As soon as he crossed the threshold, the smell hit him in the face like he was standing inside a pile of rotten guts. Even through the Vicks, the stench was nearly unbearable, and for the first time in a long time, Blake removed a dust mask from his pocket in order to prevent himself from breathing in the fumes he knew had to be toxic.

  The trailer, as with most trailers, was unremarkable. An old couch sat in the living room in front of an equally old TV, making up the majority of the space. Not even the walls were decorated, no photos or art except for a crucifix hanging above the kitchen archway.

  Ahead, Blake saw a crime scene tech photographing the kitchen, but ahead and to the right was where the party was really taking place. Blake saw the series of camera flashes from outside the room, as if a disco were going on in the master bedroom.

  Fighting a sudden urge to gag, Blake entered the room, adjusting his mask as he did in a final desperate attempt to filter the horrific odor, and then his eyes went wide.

  “Oh my God,” he whispered to himself.

  He didn’t want to look at it, but he couldn’t turn his head away. The SWAT team leader had been right, the body was about a month old. It was totally naked, and, even in its current state, Blake could tell it was obviously female. She was seated on the edge of the bed, her ankles and wrists were both shackled and splayed wide like someone on a crucifix. She had long, jagged gashes throughout her body, each of which were filled with squirming maggots. The black holes where her eyes used to be were also filled with maggots, as were her ears and mouth. The skin on her wrists and ankles where the shackles held her into place was falling off in clumps, like a pair of wet gloves and socks that didn’t fit properly, leaving behind bone and rotten meat. Strands of blonde hair still clung to the scalp, but a good portion of it had fallen off onto the floor and bed.

  Even through all the gore and decay, though, Detective Blake knew who he was looking at. It was the missing woman, the one who everyone thought ran away from her overly-religious and controlling parents. But she hadn’t ran away at all. She’d been murdered by the Christmas Eve Butcher and left to rot like some sort of trophy.

  “Mary Sue Peterson.”

  For the first time in sixteen years, Blake rushed from of the room, out of the house, and from the front porch of the trailer, he vomited until he had nothing left to throw up.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE

  A Past Like Mine

  THE BMW RACES out of town at speeds far beyond what the icy conditions allow for and, yet, Kate manages to keep control of the vehicle. I can see her grip tightening and loosening around the wheel, her face a constant mixture of anger and sadness. I pull down hard on the handle above me as she takes another hard turn, the back tires catching some black ice, but not enough her cause her to lose control.

  Not yet, anyway.

  The entire drive is done in silence, Kate watching the road, and me trying to focus on what lays ahead without being overwhelmed by the dreaded feeling of sudden high-speed death.

  “You were lied to.”

  The abruptness of the words surprises me and I look over at Kate, not sure I’d heard her correctly. “What?”

  “My father. I didn’t tell you the truth about him—and he didn’t tell the world the truth about himself.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “The story goes, he immigrated to the United States after his father died.”

  “That’s what you told me—that’s what all the papers on him said, too.”

  “Lies.”

  “Okay?”

  “Yes, he immigrated in ’57 after his father died, but his father didn’t just die. He wasn’t sick as some understood—he was murdered.”

  “Murdered? By who?”

  “By my father.”

  Silence hangs amongst us now, only the sound of the wipers and the crunching of the road underneath fills the void. I’m suddenly reminded of my own father, of how he came to his end, and shudder. When Kate speaks again, her voice is slow, as if methodically searching for the right words.

  “My grandfather was an abusive man. He was a very cruel man. My father confided in me that my grandfather was a high-ranking officer in the SS, and had actually ran Dachau up until he was assigned elsewhere, months before the United States had liberated it from the Nazis.” Kate swallowed and then continued. “My grandfather went into hiding during the remainder of the war, and changed his name from Gunther to Shultz in order to conceal his identity. The fake name, the new ID and the endless wealth from his compensation as an SS officer, was how he managed to become the successful business man after the war. Help from Nazi sympathizing politicians also helped matters in keeping my grandfather’s true identity a secret.”

  “Your father told you this?” I ask, hardly able to believe her grandfather had ran one of the most brutal concentration camps in Nazi Germany and then had gotten away with it despite the endless hunts for men such as himself.

  “He told me this, and swore me to secrecy on the matter.” She took a slight left, putting us on the road running adjacent to Watson Lake. “As I said, you were lied to. I said I had no proof grandfather was affiliated with the Nazis, but that was a lie.”

  “Why did your father kill him?”

  “As I said, my grandfather was abusive. He tortured my father, whipped him, burned him with cigarettes, twisted his bones. He told him he was no better than the rat Jews he’d executed in the camp. And so, one day, at a young age, my father had enough. He found my grandfather’s old pistol from the war, and shot him in the back of the head while he listened to Mahler on the record player.”

  “My God,” I whisper and turn my head to look out the window, trying to find the lake in the black night.

  “That day had haunted my father, he told me, until discovering the world of psychology and learning the functions of the human brain and psyche. I just don’t—” she pauses, her voice trailing off.

  I look over at her and see tears glinting in her eyes, reflecting off of porch and street lights as they pass by. “Don’t know how he could have done what he’s done?”

  She nods. “He’s worse than his father, as far as I’m concerned. How could he have done what he did to Simon? How could he have slaughtered him like that?”

  I remember back to the crime scene, of little Simon Shultz cut up on the foyer floor in Dr. Shultz’s own home. “I don’t know, Kate. I’m sorry.”

  “I don’t understand,” she says, trying not to cry.

  “I told you about my father.”

  She looks over at me, a look of realization on her face. “You did. Oh shit, I’m sorry—”

  “The point is, the little boy you just described killing his own father—that was me Kate. I killed my own father for more or less the same reasons.” I look back out the window, the realization building in my head, like a rat trying to eat its way through my skull. He has a past like mine. Am I like him? Deep down? Could I do the things he’s done?

  “Don’t you dare compare yourself to him. You’re nothing alike. You’d never—”

  “I hope not.”

  “You wouldn’t!”

  “Your father’s theory, the one he gave me on our first meeting—he was talking about himself. He was telling me his story without me even realizing it.” I look at Kate, trying to organize my thoughts. “He said he believed the Butcher is killing these kids, but also giving them a chance to prove their capability—a chance to fight back and escape their deaths. That the Butcher was likely providing these kids with a scenario similar to one he had to endure at a young age.”

  “Shit—only my father survived his scenario by killing his father.” Kate slams the steering wheel hard with her palms. “How could I ha
ve missed this? My father told me about my grandfather—how could I have not put the pieces together? He practically confessed to me, Micah, he—”

  “You had no way to know,” I say. “He’s your father, Kate. Even knowing his past, you’re his daughter. You love him. To think he was the monster behind this –”

  “It was so obvious.”

  “We all missed it, Kate.”

  “Not this time,” she says angrily.

  “No. Not this time.”

  I sit back in my seat, my thoughts now solely on Dr. Shultz. I run scenarios in my head of what I plan to say to him, and then what I plan to do to him after that. Unless there’s another unforeseen twist in this game of madness, Dr. Heinrich Shultz, the Man on Little Sweden, is the killer I’ve been in search of for the past five years. The man who killed Dani, took my leg, and killed so many others since.

  Including his own son.

  A question still remains unanswered, the one outlier amongst a sea of mystery and deception. Why had Shultz hired me to solve the case? To find him? Was this all just one big game to him? Some kind of sick joke?

  I’m torn from my thoughts as Kate makes a slight left and I look out the windshield, briefly catching the road sign as the BMW kicks up snow during its transition from asphalt to the primitive road leading up the steep hill. A chill jolts up my spine as I mouth the words on the sign.

  Little Sweden Rd.

  CHAPTER SIXTY

  The Monster On Little Sweden

  I grab the above handle again, bracing myself as Kate narrowly misses the statue in the middle of the driveway in front of Dr. Shultz’s mansion. The black ice caught the front end of the luxury car, throwing it towards the concrete angel, but somehow Kate corrects it and half steers, half drifts around the obstacle, coming to a stop directly in front of the mansion’s double doors.

  I don’t know how she’d done it, but before coming through the front gate of the estate, Kate had managed to turn her angry and saddened tone into a cheery one, talking to the guard on the intercom as if she were here to meet her father for board games or to catch the Tonight Show as they’d often done in the past.

  “I believe the Doctor is on his way to bed—” the guard had started, a voice I didn’t recognize.

  “Nonsense! Tell him to keep the fire hot, I just need to see him before bed.”

  Apparently, the guard had got the go-ahead, because the wrought iron gate opened a split second later, allowing us passage onto the property.

  Kate gets out of the vehicle before I do, and once I’m out, I grab her arm as she storms past me to get to the front doors. She pulls, but I hold firm, locking eyes with her until she finally stops resisting.

  “Let me go.”

  “You need to cool it.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Be the same Kate you were on the intercom,” I say in a low voice. “At least until we get up to see your father. You act like this, and the guards might get suspicious and relay to your dad that we’re coming in hot.”

  She stares at me with her fiery eyes for a few seconds, and then her face softens. She nods and I feel the muscles in her arms relax. I give her a nod of my own and allow her to continue forward, noticing her gait and demeanor is drastically different, the “daddy’s girl” act back on display.

  I don’t recognize the guard in the foyer, a short muscular man with South Pacific features. He carries an MP5 submachine gun across his chest, but his expression towards Kate and I looks nothing like the smug look Rick was so fond of showing off.

  I give the guard a polite nod, and follow Kate up the staircase along the right side of the foyer. The big old house is warm, even this late at night, making me wonder if the guards are also tasked with keeping fires going in all the fireplaces.

  Kate picks up her pace as we get closer to Shultz’s quarters, and from behind her, I can see her body go rigid again, her left hand holding her purse tightly to her hip as she walks, as if she’s afraid whatever’s inside of it is going to fall out and be lost forever.

  She roughly pushes through the doors at the top of the last set of stairs, letting them bang against the walls on the other side as she storms into the room like an angry storm cloud.

  I follow closely behind her, immediately noticing the Doctor seated at the same chair as before, hunched forward with his hands clasped over the top of a cane. I wouldn’t have thought it possible, but he looks even weaker than he had before, a mere skeleton with thin white flesh barely clinging on.

  “Kate, what’s so important this late at night?” His surprisingly booming voice asks, looking up at us from the couch. “Ah, you’ve brought the detective.”

  Without saying a word, Kate reaches into her pocket, pulls out a crumpled piece of paper and throws it at her father. The paper bounces off his bony shoulder and rolls onto the floor at his slippers.

  “What’s the meaning of this?” He asks, looking from the wad of paper to his daughter.

  “Pick it up,” Kate demands.

  “How dare you talk to me in such—”

  “Pick it up, Doctor,” I say, my tone lighter than Kate’s but my stare far colder.

  “This is preposterous,” the Man on Little Sweden says, reaching down slowly with long fingers to grab the paper. “You both look as if I’ve just murdered somebody.”

  I think about what he said, the subtle joke hanging in the air like thick smoke as he unfolds the paper and looks it over. He tries to keep his expression neural, but I can see the brief flutter of his eyelashes, a microexpression giving away the recognition of his own handwriting.

  “This is indeed peculiar,” he says, looking up with an innocent expression. “What is it?”

  “You know what it is,” Kate says sharply.

  “I do not.”

  “You gave it to me, you liar,” she says, taking a step forward. “You wanted me to deliver this to David Meltzer! You said he was just a patient—”

  “He is.”

  “Spare us the bullshit, Doc,” I say, feeling my hands start to shake. “David told me everything.”

  “He did, did he?” Shultz says sarcastically.

  “He did. Right before I shot him four times in the woods behind his house.”

  Shultz looks at me with a blank stare, and then he looks at Kate and back to me again. “David’s dead?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You killed him?”

  “I did.”

  Slowly, a smile starts to form across Shultz’s lips, cutting from one side to the other like a flap being unzipped. He leans back from the cane, sits up a little straighter, his sickly demeanor suddenly transformed into something less fragile, something stronger. The cancer is still evident, but the empathetic, world-famous psychiatrist is gone.

  “It was a matter of time,” Shultz says. “I’m surprised it didn’t happen sooner. David was always an irrational one.”

  I hear Kate choke back a cry next to me, the horror of the confession almost too much for her to bear. I want to reach out to her, but I don’t. I don’t dare look away from Shultz—from the monster who I know is capable of a lot more than he looks.

  “You controlled him,” I say. “David answered to you.”

  “When his sickness allowed for it, yes.” His smile somehow broadens and he turns his eyes onto Kate. “Brought down by my own daughter, my trusty delivery girl, eh? I was wondering when this day would come, when you’d wise up to the truth. I’ve got to say, I’m disappointed it’s taken this long, dear Kathryn.”

  “Go to hell,” she snaps, and takes another step forward, but I grab her by the arm again, preventing her from doing the unthinkable.

  Shultz raises his eyebrows. “Dear, as you can see, I’m well on my way.”

  “Why?” Kathryn asks, tears streaking down her face.

  “I already told you why. I told you both why.”

  “To make children suffer as you had?” I say.

  Shultz looks back and forth between us and then locks onto Kate
and clucks his tongue. “I see we’ve told the detective my little secret. The tale of the Man on Little Sweden’s Nazi daddy.”

  “I killed my father too,” I spit. “I didn’t turn out like you.”

  “No? You just told me you shot David four times in the woods behind his house.”

  “I killed him, I didn’t murder him. There’s a difference.”

  “Is there?”

  “Danielle, my wife, was murdered. You murdered her. You sawed off my fucking leg. You murdered your own son as well as other innocent sons. That’s murder, not killing, Shultz. Don’t you even fucking try comparing me to you.”

  “Calm down, son.”

  “I’m not your fucking son.”

  “And neither was Simon.”

  “How fucking dare you?” Kathryn nearly screamed, and I have to hold her back even harder now.

  “How dare me? How dare he?” Shultz was nearly shouting now. “I escaped my father. I got away. I won. Simon had the same chances I did, don’t you see? I even turned away from him to listen to Mahler for long, long minutes in order to give him a chance, as my father had done before I killed him, but did he do anything about it? No. He just sat there, crying, begging for me to stop hitting him. Just as all the other little boys had done. No, Simon was no son of mine. If he was, I wouldn’t be here and he would.”

  “You’re a fucking monster,” Kate cried. “He was your son—he loved you!”

  “Love has no place in nature, Kathryn. Love is weakness. There is only supremacy. Without supremacy, there is only death, and boys raised without the will to fight don’t deserve to be amongst real men.” He looks at me with wild eyes. “That is why you’re here, Mr. Donovan.”

  “The fuck are you talking about?”

  “I killed your wife. I took your leg. I was so disappointed when you quit the police force after your recovery—and for the longest time, I thought that maybe you weren’t a real man after all, that you were a coward, a fake. But then I got sick and learned I was dying. That changes a man’s perspective, you see? I had a change of heart, and asked myself, why not give the man who’d come the closest to stopping me another chance? I knew West would refer me to you once I asked him to take the case first. I played him just as I’ve played everyone else. And so, he sent you to me, and I offered you the chance of revenger, and you—well, you didn’t disappoint.”