The Destiny Machine

by J L Aarne

  Ezekiel sat. He drank his coffee, bounced his knee and watched Jacob move around the kitchen while he cooked. He chopped half of an apple into the batter and sprinkled cinnamon into it. While the pancakes cooked on the griddle, he lit a cigarette. Before he flipped them, he reached back to offer the cigarette to Ezekiel, who took it and put it in his mouth with a smile.

  The familiar ease of being with him and the domesticity of Jacob making pancakes on Monday morning before the sun was even completely up after they talked about murder made Ezekiel feel more relaxed than he had in a couple of days. They could never be married and they would never have children, but it was what passed for domestic bliss for them. It worked and it had worked for a long time. Longer than any human lifespan and definitely longer than their marriages.

  They ate the apple-cinnamon pancakes with powdered sugar. Ezekiel ate three of them because he knew he was unlikely to eat anything else the rest of the day. He took a quick shower, changed his clothes, stole one last cigarette and a kiss from Jacob and hurried out the door.

  Chapter 4

  Alicia McKenzie hadn’t been killed at the university where she was a student, but the police had questioned her teachers and other students in the course of their investigation. A few of each had made the short list as a “person of interest” requiring a closer look.

  The cops had done their jobs well, asked all the right questions and looked for anything that might lead them to their killer, but they weren’t trained to do what Ezekiel’s people were trained to do. For most police officers, the psychology of criminals was something they picked up a little of on the street through experience, but they rarely worked cases like the Copycat Ripper serial murders. They could not be counted on to see what Ezekiel’s people would see or even be expected to look for it.

  Ezekiel divided up his team; sent Agent Gonzales with Agent Kenner and Agent Schechter with Agent Brockden to talk to Alicia’s friends and fellow students. Most of them had graduated and now lived around the city in houses and apartments with boyfriends, girlfriends, wives or husbands. He took Agent Beatrix Crewes, the newest member of his team, with him to the college.

  They spent the day reinterviewing everyone the police had talked to in the initial investigation that had, for some reason or other, made the interviewing detectives stop and take notice.

  Professor Dunbar was just a nervous guy—he knocked over his coffee cup and apologized to Crewes for it as he mopped up the mess. He undoubtedly had some sort of anxiety disorder, but that made him an unlikely candidate for their murderer. His high anxiety had set off someone’s spidey sense, but Ezekiel and Crewes scratched him off the list.

  The next teacher they spoke with, Professor Latham, had been Alicia’s algebra teacher her last semester and the only reason the woman had caught the attention of the police was that she couldn’t specifically remember the dead girl and had to look her up to be sure Alicia had even been one of her students. Professor Latham politely explained to Ezekiel and Crewes that she taught three classes a semester, plus an online class, and had upwards of a thousand students. Unless Alicia McKenzie had been extraordinarily gifted, she was unlikely to remember her name or her face.

  They scratched Professor Latham off the list. That left one more; Professor Rainer Bryssengur, who had the singular honor of being the only person of interest still on campus that had not also been one of Alicia McKenzie’s teachers at the time of her death. Though he had been teaching beginning level English courses at the time, he had still been a grad student. There was little reason to believe that he would have even known Alicia, who was a sophomore business major. There was a separate file on him like there had been on the others, but nothing from the cops who had talked to him to explain why his name was there.

  Ezekiel and Crewes were passing a grassy courtyard area on their way to find Professor Bryssengur’s office when Crewes cursed, wobbled on one three inch heel and hopped to a park bench, where she sat rubbing her instep. She removed one of her shoes and showed Ezekiel the broken heel with a sigh of irritation.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  “Nothing wounded but my pride,” Crewes said. She was a small woman, blonde and cute with an eastern Kentucky drawl she had never managed to completely quash. It got thicker when she was irritated, as she was now. “What the hell am I supposed to do now? Break off the other one?”

  Ezekiel smiled at the thought. “Why don’t you take a break?” he said. “This shouldn’t take me long and I can handle a single English professor if he puts up a fight. There’s one of those coffee shop bookstores across the way there. You can sit inside with the A/C and have a latte or something.”

  “Really?” Crewes gave him a grateful smile and took off both shoes to carry them. “I could go for an iced mocha right about now for sure, Herod, so don’t tease me.”

  “Yeah, go ahead. And if they give you any shit about no shoes, no service, you’re here on official FBI business,” Ezekiel said.

  “Heh, yeah. The Coffee Inspectors Division,” Crewes said. “All right then. If you’re sure.”

  Ezekiel watched her cross the walkway to the coffee shop before he continued on his way. Rainer Bryssengur’s office was one of many in a long hallway of small offices. A cheerful woman in the English department’s main office gave him directions without asking to see his identification. She seemed to think he was a student.

  Ezekiel let her think it. His business wasn’t with her. “Is he in his office right now?”

  “Oh, I think so,” she said. The wall and door in front of her desk were glass and looked out on the hallway. Anyone leaving had to walk by her to reach the elevators or the stairs. “He just has the one class on Monday mornings. Right now he’s got office hours scheduled until one. He sometimes goes out for lunch though, but I think he’s still in.”

  Ezekiel thanked her and walked down the hallway to the professor’s office. The door was open about six inches, but the overhead light wasn’t on. He knocked and pushed the door open a little more. “Hello?”

  “Come in.”

  Ezekiel walked in and automatically hit the wall switch to turn on the light.

  Rainer was at his desk with his head back on the cushioned headrest of his chair and his eyes closed. The floor lamp behind him was on, but the blinds were shut. When the light came on, he winced and sat up.

  “Sorry,” Ezekiel said.

  Rainer pointed at the light switch. “If you don’t mind,” he said.

  “Right. Sorry.” Ezekiel turned the light back off. There was still light, it was just dimmer, coming through the edges of the closed blinds and from the lamp. Ezekiel could see fine in the low light though, better than most people. His night vision was excellent.

  Rainer Bryssengur did not look like a professor of English and literature who taught at a respected liberal arts university. He was not pretty, for that word suggested a delicate effeminateness he did not possess, but he was attractive enough that it still fit him. He wore a plain black T-shirt and on his right bicep the bottom of a tattoo peeked out beneath his sleeve. It was difficult to tell what it was, but there was a banner curling down toward his elbow and Ezekiel could read the words “would break” there. There was another tattoo on the left side of his neck; the howling head of a coyote. He wore a bracelet on one wrist of white beads made from ox bone or shells. He had a day’s worth of beard and he smelled like tobacco and just a touch of cologne.

  Most interesting, he also smelled faintly of wolf, though Rainer was not one himself. The odor was overpowered by his own distinctly human scent.

  “Hangover?” Ezekiel asked.

  “Migraine,” Rainer said.

  He picked his head up and studied Ezekiel for a minute. His eyes were startlingly blue and penetrating. He looked at Ezekiel and noted his apparent age, his nice suit, his demeanor, the file in his hand and a small smile crept over his lips.

  “You don’t look very much like a professor,” Ezekiel remarked.

  Rainer
shrugged. “What can I do for you…?”

  “Agent,” Ezekiel said. He took out his wallet and showed him his ID. “Special Agent Ezekiel Herod.”

  Ezekiel was both too young and too handsome to be an FBI agent. He looked more like a hot young actor playing the part of an FBI agent on one of the crime shows Rainer watched at night when he couldn’t sleep. Which did not make him a liar, merely a wonder of his species.

  “You don’t look very much like an FBI agent,” Rainer said.

  Ezekiel shrugged and looked around the room. The office was small and cramped, the desk taking up a large portion of the available space. A floor-to-ceiling bookshelf stood against the wall to the right behind Rainer’s chair. Just inside the door, another bookshelf, shorter but longer than the other, started to the right of the doorway and went all the way to the join of the two walls. The books were an indiscriminate hodgepodge of popular fiction, serious and classic literature and anthologies.

  The only picture in the room was a framed 11x14 ink drawing of a human heart hanging on the wall behind Rainer’s desk. It had the anatomical precision of a medical student’s drawing.

  Ezekiel picked up a novel by Cosra Melmoth lying on the low bookshelf and opened the front cover to find it signed on the first title page. He had signed it “with love.”

  “He was joking,” Rainer said.

  He sat with his elbows on the desk, fingers steepled before his mouth, and his headache had either abated or he had remarkable control, because he watched Ezekiel standing there with interest, but not the slightest sign of discomfort. “Forgive me, Agent Herod, but I still haven’t the faintest notion as to why you’re here.”

  “I understand the two of you are close?” Ezekiel said rather than explain himself just yet. He held up the book he’d been looking at. “You and the author?”

  Rainer stared at him for several beats. Eventually, he said, “He was my mentor, my thesis advisor, I worked as his TA for a year and yes, we remain good friends.”

  “More than friends?” Ezekiel pressed.

  “I fail to see how that is any of your business,” Rainer said. “What is this about?”

  “The murder of Alicia McKenzie,” Ezekiel said. “We’re talking to a few people. Your name came up.”

  Rainer sat back in his chair and considered this. Alicia McKenzie had been a mistake on his part; he freely admitted that, if only to himself. He had fought with himself about taking her for a while, but in the end, he had wanted her too badly to resist. He had talked with detectives after the murder two years earlier and thought it went well. He had gotten away with it.

  “My name came up in what capacity?” he asked.

  “Person of interest,” Ezekiel said.

  Rainer did not seem agitated, merely curious to know, which was in itself a little off. An FBI agent appears in your office and tells you you’re a person of interest in an ongoing murder case, maybe you don’t have an anxiety attack like Professor Dunbar, but you get a little uneasy. Rainer waited patiently for Ezekiel to say something more without even a hint of disquiet.

  Ezekiel replaced the book on the shelf. “So, you were a med student?” he asked, gesturing to the drawing on the wall.

  “Pre-med,” Rainer said. “Dropped out halfway through my third year. Switched schools the next year and took up English.”

  Ezekiel already knew that. It was one of the reasons he suspected Rainer had been a person of interest in the case in the first place.

  “And you wrote your dissertation on Jack the Ripper, didn’t you?” he asked.

  That was the other reason.

  Rainer smiled. “It was a literary study, Agent,” he said. “The paper examined the influence of fiction on the picture of Jack the Ripper in the public consciousness and how that picture influenced the evolution of the villain. The depictions of him in art and literature shaped him more than his actions ever did. There have been worse murderers; murderers who killed more people, killed children, wiped out families, but Jack the Ripper is the one that endures. Why do we still think of Jekyll and Hyde-like figures lurking in dark, misty alleyways, wearing top hats and capes? People who know nothing about him still know who you mean when you mention him a hundred and twenty-five years later, and still get a little thrill of morbid pleasure thinking about it. That picture influences villains in fiction to this day. I had the bad luck to be writing on the topic at the same time that girl died, but I assure you, it’s a coincidence.”

  It did seem like a real stretch to believe that the two things were connected or that his topic of study was indicative of murder. Rainer’s explanation was completely reasonable and Ezekiel didn’t believe a word of it. There was something deeply, fundamentally wrong about Rainer Bryssengur. It wasn’t anything he could put his finger on, nothing that would justify an arrest or even further investigation, but Ezekiel had been hunting bad men a long time and Rainer set off some of those same old internal alarm bells.

  “Why don’t you have a seat, Agent?” Rainer asked, indicating the single chair across from his desk.

  The office was cramped enough that it looked like the chair would bump the bookshelf behind Ezekiel if he didn’t turn it at an angle. He declined. “English and literature seem like an odd change from medicine,” he said. “You had already been studying to become a doctor for three years. Why’d you quit?”

  “I was going to be a gynecologist, but then the thought of spending my days gazing into the face of Cthulu started giving me nightmares.”

  Ezekiel laughed before he could help himself. Rainer watched him, an amused smile playing around his mouth, and Ezekiel realized two things: Rainer was his killer and Ezekiel still kind of liked him.

  It would not stop him from nailing his ass to the wall if he could though.

  “Did you know Alicia McKenzie?” he asked.

  “No,” Rainer said. “I didn’t live in student housing, didn’t have time for recreational activities—or for maintaining a lot of friendships, for that matter—so if I wasn’t in class or grading Professor Melmoth’s papers, I wasn’t around. I was unbelievably busy and I don’t think there’s any reason why we would have come into contact with one another. She wasn’t a student of mine and I believe she was quite a lot younger than me.”

  Ezekiel couldn’t tell if he was lying or not. He displayed none of the signs Ezekiel had learned to look for. He sounded sincere and, as before, made very believable and reasonable points as to why he would not have been acquainted with the victim, but Ezekiel’s instincts were telling him the guy was full of shit. Unfortunately, Ezekiel’s instincts, preternaturally acute as they were, were evidence of nothing and would not stand up in court.

  Rainer rolled his chair back and reached around for a book on the shelf behind him. It was a plain volume of approximately 200 pages bound in simple, inexpensive black binding. He held it out to Ezekiel. “My dissertation,” he said. “Borrow it if you like. It’s likely dull reading if you’re not an academic, but you can skim through it. You’ll see what I mean.”

  Ezekiel took the book from him. “Thanks. I’ll have a look,” he said. “I guess I’ll let you get back to what you were doing. I might have a few more questions later. Just follow-up.”

  He held out his hand and Rainer stood to shake it. His fingers were slightly calloused, his handshake was firm. Ezekiel held on a little too long. “One more question,” he said, holding his hand.

  Rainer made no move to extricate his hand from Ezekiel’s grasp. “Yes, Agent Herod?”

  “What did you do with the kidney?”

  Rainer frowned. “Excuse me?”

  He pretended surprise, but Rainer knew exactly what he meant and, by his question, that Ezekiel suspected him. Rainer had fed Kathy Conway’s left kidney to the coyotes after he murdered her and left her to be found wearing her own intestines like a necklace.

  Rainer held Ezekiel’s gaze and a certain knowledge passed between them: Ezekiel knew and Rainer knew that he knew. His pulse didn’t spik
e, his pupils didn’t dilate, his mouth did not go dry with fear at the idea. Rather, he had to suppress the urge to grin as he experienced an exhilarating thrill of anticipation and thought, This is going to be fun.

  Ezekiel took his hand back. “Thanks for this,” he said about the book. “I’ll get it back to you.”

  “No rush,” Rainer said. “Good luck.”

  He sat back down at his desk and watched Ezekiel leave. Only when he was gone did Rainer allow himself a brief, pleased smile. He hadn’t killed anyone in a way that received any attention in several months because his interest had been waning. Perhaps what he needed was an opponent to play with. Ezekiel Herod seemed like a formidable adversary; a wrathful god to be tempted by the devil.

  To purchase a copy and continue reading:

  http://www.amazon.com/dp/B01BN6JXAC

  About the Author

  J.L. Aarne currently lives in the Northwest United States. Aarne studied English at the University of New Orleans, but like so many people these days, could not afford to finish. Someday, perhaps. J.L. Aarne currently lives in the Northwest United States. Aarne studied English at the University of New Orleans, but like so many people these days, could not afford to finish. Someday, perhaps. This book and others by J.L. Aarne are also available in paperback.

  Aarne blogs from time to time at http://jlaarne.tumblr.com/

  J.L. Aarne can be reached by email at jlaarne [@] outlook [dot] com

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