by Jim Laughter
"Intelligent thrillers are hard to find, but Jim Laughter delivers big time. Exciting, suspenseful, and smart. This is the kind of book you hope will never end."
William Bernhardt
New York Times Best-Selling Author
http://williambernhardt.com
A Killer in Time, Jim Laughter’s follow-up to The Apostle Murders journeys into the seamy world of prostitution and the evil side of the supernatural. A magnetic read from start to finish. Keep your lights on.
Author Bill Wetterman
The Peacock Trilogy
A Killer in Time
Jim Laughter
Tulsa, Oklahoma
Books by Jim Laughter
From Victim to Hero:
The Untold Story of Steven Stayner
(True story of the Steven Stayner kidnapping)
Polar City Red
(Climate fiction)
Keller & Morris Thrillers
The Apostle Murders
A Killer in Time
Books of the Galactic Axia
Adventure Series
Kindle Top-10 Best Sellers
Escape to Destiny
The Horicon Experience
Space Trader
First Contact
The Wounded Warrior
Trooper Down
Young Reader Series
Ghost in the Dark
Special note: Since the closure of our original publisher, some of these titles may not be readily available. Please keep checking Amazon for new releases.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Axia Books
1547 S. 78th E. Ave.
Tulsa, OK 74112
© 2019 by Jim Laughter
All Rights Reserved.
Second edition
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
Dedication
To the memory of my mother
Nora Ellen Pennington Laughter
1914-1992
Never a more sainted woman ever lived.
When a light is extinguished on Earth, God illuminates another in heaven.
“This Greek idea of dualism is the problem deep down, this thing of having the spiritual on one side and the profane on the other. We are still grappling with this. Spirituality is a plus, sexuality a minus.”
— Father Mark Montebello
Chapter One
The killer scraped the scalpel blade against the prostitute’s throat, biting into soft skin stretched tight by his hand grasping her hair. He pulled her head back against his chest. She tried to swallow but couldn’t. Tears streamed down her face. Mascara blotched under her eyes. She couldn’t escape the powerful grip of the man holding her captive.
This was supposed to be an easy trick, a quick moment in a dark alley off Canal Street. She’d taken Johns here before, just as had most of the New Orleans working girls. She’d plied the oldest profession in the French Quarter for several years and never felt threatened or in danger. But this time was different. This John was different.
The man looked decent enough when he’d picked her up on Canal Street, not that a common street prostitute has much to say about her choice of customer. His clothes were clean and he was well groomed. He had an air of sophistication about him but she could tell he also had a primitive side, as if he’d experienced both the highs and lows of life. His cologne, an aroma she didn’t recognize, reminded her of politicians she’d serviced in the past. His skin was dark but not ebony black, creamy she called it just like in that movie, Australia, she’d seen while servicing a customer in the back row of a movie theatre a couple of years ago.
“Mister, please,” she wept. “I’ll do whatever you want.”
“Shut up!”
His voice was low and menacing, almost a growl.
He pressed his knife harder against her throat, positioning it just above her external carotid artery. He visualized the pulsating vein beginning opposite the upper border of the thyroid cartilage, taking a slightly curved course, passing upward and forward. He could see it inclining backward to the space behind the neck of the mandible where it divided into the superficial temporal and internal maxillary arteries. He visualized it diminishing in size in its course up her neck, owing to the large numbers and sizes of the branches given off from it.
“Branches.”
His voice was barely audible to the distraught woman.
“What? I… I don’t understand,” she stammered.
“I said shut up! Don’t speak.”
The killer reveled in his vision of the woman’s naked anatomy, not a sexual arousal but as a masterpiece of creativity and engineering. He wasn’t a religious man and wasn’t sure if he believed in God or not. What eternal divinity could have sculpted the human body in so exact a fashion, creating a system of life so precise that every molecule of oxygen is distributed to precisely the right organs in exactly the correct amount to sustain life? And what ethereal supremacy thought enough of its creation to fashion each human body exactly the same on the inside regardless their stature or station in life? Kings and paupers, rich and poor, people of the highest moral fiber or this loathsome purveyor of perverted sex? No difference. Identical. Are we miracles of evolutionary perfection or of creative divine design? He wasn’t sure.
He placed his lips close to the prostitute’s left ear. He could feel her trembling in his hands, and he could smell fear rising from her. The pungent aroma of urine assaulted his olfactory.
“You pissed yourself,” he whispered.
“I…I’m sorry,” she whimpered. “I didn’t mean to.”
“Do you know the branches of the external carotid artery?” he asked, not waiting for her to explain why she didn’t have the discipline to hold her water.
Of course she doesn’t know.
Her voice was strained and dry. Her words came out broken, barely understandable. “I…I don’t…don’t know what you mean.”
“The branches of the carotid artery. It’s like a tree of life spread out inside the human body.”
She wept, unable to express any understanding of her captor’s intent.
“The branches of the external carotid artery are divided into four sets,” he continued, paying no attention to the woman’s tears, broken voice, or apparent fear. Her discomfort meant nothing to him. As far as he cared, she was another cadaver, one of many intended for the perfection of his skills.
“There’s the anterior, the posterior, the ascending, and the terminal branches,” he said. “Did you know that?”
She shook her head, unable to move it but a few centimeters.
“Of course you don’t,” he whispered. “How could you?”
Ignorant bitch.
A new bout of panic overtook the woman. Tears poured from her eyes, spilling down her face onto the hand of this maniac that was about to take her life.
“And the branches are also subdivided,” he said. “Did you know that?”
Again, she shook her head.
Stupid, stupid slut. People like this don’t deserve to live.
“Oh sure,” he said. “There’s the superior thyroid, the lingual, the external maxillary, not to mention the occipital and posterior auricular. Large and small blood vessels designed to do one thing, and one thing alone; to supply life-giving oxygen to the brain.”
&
nbsp; The killer placed the point of his knife at the base of the woman’s throat and with practiced ease scratched a line with the razor-sharp blade up the right side of her neck.
“My favorite is the superior thyroid artery,” he whispered, his voice distant and barely audible as if he wasn’t speaking to a real person at all.
“It rises from the external carotid artery just below the level of the greater comu to the hyoid bone and ends in the thyroid gland.”
Again, the woman cried, every fiber of her being tortured with the knowledge she was about to die. This crazy son of a bitch is going to kill me! She knew that now. But why? What have I done to deserve this? Who is he, and why has he chosen me from the dozens of other girls working Canal Street and the New Orleans French Quarter? She remembered that he’d asked her name before she escorted him to this darkened alley.
Anita Chapman. The killer looked into her eyes again. There was a familiarity about them that he just couldn’t place. It was as if he’d seen them before. But where? Why is her name and these eyes so familiar? He couldn’t put his finger on it. He remembered asking several of the girls their names before selecting this one. He didn’t know why. It was as if a dark, sinister force inside compelled him to Anita Chapman.
“You’re not familiar with the superior thyroid artery?” he asked again. She tried to shake her head but his firm grip negated her effort.
“That’s a shame, because it’s the one you should be concerned with,” the killer whispered into the Anita Chapman’s ear. “It’s the last bit of medical education you’re ever going to receive.”
Fear caused Chapman to gasp a desperate breath of air and struggle against the killer’s strong grip. But he was too strong and she was so weak, her energy spent in the fight to survive what she now knew was the last minutes of her life.
Placing the point of the sharp blade halfway up the right side of her neck, the killer plunged the knife deep into her throat. She tried to scream but couldn’t. Her cry caught in her throat as the blade severed her larynx and superior laryngeal artery. Bright red ribbons of arterial blood gushed from the wound and covered the knife and the hand that wielded it. The killer turned her head so he could see her eyes. He wanted to watch her life fade away. He had to know if there really was a divine spark, a soul that defined humanity’s passing from one reality to the next.
Life is in the eyes. Maybe I’ll see it this time.
While Anita Chapman’s legs still kicked and twitched, the killer drew the knife with practiced ease down and forward, piercing her carotid triangle and severing the carotid artery. With surgical precision, he drew the blade out through the front of her throat and watched her body twitch a final time. As a last act of violence, he stabbed his knife into her just below her naval, the sharp edge of the blade toward him. He drew the weapon up her abdomen, filling the air with the sickening, acrid stench of human intestines and bodily fluids. He watched the last of her meaningless existence spill onto the cobblestone surface of a New Orleans back alley.
He’d seen this all before. He didn’t know when, and he didn’t know where. He only knew he’d been here before. He didn’t understand the driving force that compelled him to seek out and kill these wretched women. He only knew he had no choice.
He watched the light fade from her eyes, unsatisfied.
Chapter Two
Seventy-two year old Walter Hutchins made his slow way up the slope from the reflecting pool on the National Mall toward the Lincoln Memorial at 23rd Street NW and West Potomac Park, Washington, D.C. He’d been a groundskeeper for the National Park Service for over fifty years and looked forward to his retirement in only another month.
“People sho gets trashier ever year.” Picking up a soda can, he tossed it into his trash bag as he grumbled further along. He’d mown the grass around all of the national monuments more times than he cared to remember but he planned to retire before the spring season started. He’d even helped cut the grass and trim the bushes at the White House from time to time during ten presidencies beginning with John F. Kennedy.
He was proud that a man of his own racial heritage had been elected President of the United States and then reelected for a historic second term. It really didn’t matter that his promises of hope and change had fallen short and he would surely go down as one of the most failed and hated Presidents in America’s history.
Only matters that our people have risen from the ashes of obscurity to the highest office in the land.
Walter looked up the slope at the 19-foot high statue of the man that had set his people free from the bonds of slavery and wondered what Honest Abe would think of the direction their country had taken since his historic Emancipation Proclamation in 1863.
“Damn!”
He bent down and rubbed his arthritic knees. He was getting too old to enjoy his work anymore. He couldn’t bend over to pick up dead limbs the way he did as a young man, and his old back prevented him from lifting heavy bags of fertilizer when he’d work in the park flower gardens.
No, it was time to retire. He had a little money stashed away and his house was paid for. Just one final season of picking up trash and litter after the tourists dispose of their empty water bottles and coffee cups on the sacred grounds of our national monuments. He wondered if he’d miss the daily grind of mowing, hedging, weed-eating, leaf-blowing, and the hundreds of other chores that occupied his day.
Walter cast his gaze eastward down the mall toward the Washington Monument, a magnificent granite, marble, and bluestone spire stretching five-hundred and fifty-five feet into the bright October sky. It was still early morning so the obelisk cast a shadow like a giant sundial down the common slope and over the WW-II Memorial.
The monument had been damaged during the Virginia earthquake of August 23, 2011 and Hurricane Irene in the same year. It remained closed to the public for thirty-two months while the structure underwent extensive repairs and only recently reopened on May 12, 2014
Walter always enjoyed sitting on a bench on the north side at noontime, eating his lunch in relative peace and quiet while looking out over the green toward the White House and praying for the man that had brought hope to his people. But that was later in the day. He had more immediate chores to attend to now.
Walter approached the Lincoln Memorial, his Sears Craftsman 25cc gas-powered leaf blower and mulcher idling at his side. He planned to clean the dead leaves from behind a stand of shrubs beside the stem wall that circled the structure.
A pile of leaves trapped behind the shrubbery looked odd and misshapen as if they’d been purposely thrown there instead of blown in by the wind. Walter attached the mulching bag and nozzle to his machine and ambled toward the helter-skelter stack of leaves, intent on vacuuming the colorful remnants of early fall into his bag. He’d use them as mulch in another flower bed later in the day.
Walter pushed the limbs of the shrubbery out of his way and slipped in behind the bushes. With practiced ease the way he’d done thousands of times before, he worked his way from the outside edge of the pile to the middle.
Halfway through the pile, his machine jerked violently in his hand and sputtered to silence as if it had trapped something inside. He tried to pull the machine away from the pile but couldn’t. He figured he’d captured a hardened branch so he reached down to see if he could free the vacuum nozzle from whatever had jammed it. When he pushed away the leaves, his hand brushed against what felt like the hair of a woman. He pulled his hand away. It was covered in blood.
Walter dropped his machine. Crumpled there on the soft dirt was the bloodied and butchered body of a woman. She was naked from the waist up. Her throat had been slashed from side to side and her once beautiful facial features had been cut away. A piece of her nose was missing and there were hash marks across her cheeks and forehead. Her long blond hair had been vacuumed up inside his mulcher.
“Sweet Jesus,” Walter stammered. He stumbled backward against the retaining wall, trapped in the corner like old Br�
��er Rabbit trying to escape Br’er Fox.
“My God in heaven!” he whispered, his voice a breaking prayer.
Leaving his Craftsman blower and vacuum on the ground, Hutchins backed around the stem wall, never taking his eyes off the gristly scene. With his heart beating so loud he thought someone would surely hear it, he ran as fast as his old legs would carry him down the steps of the Lincoln Memorial to the reflecting pool where he’d left his cell phone in his utility cart.
Chapter Three
FBI Special Agent Duncan Morris slumped at his cluttered desk on the third floor of the FBI building in Washington D.C. His head pounded that familiar throb he often felt on Monday mornings after a weekend alone in his small apartment in Triangle Park.
He cursed himself for his weakness, knowing full well he shouldn’t abuse himself like this. The empty bottle of Weller’s Special Reserve whiskey that he’d broken on his kitchen tile still lay as a shattered reminder of his life.
Twice divorced and estranged from his children, he was a train wreck looking for a place to happen. His own grandchildren didn’t know him well enough to call him grandpa. The only love he had in this world was his job and he often feared he’d even outgrown his usefulness to it.
Morris wasn’t the stereotypical FBI agent. Anyone seeing him for the first time would label him tacky and out of sorts. His desk was always cluttered with stacks of paper and other junk, his suit wrinkled like he’d worn it for a week. The sleeves and lapels of his jacket were stained with coffee and whatever else he’d come in contact with. He wore a bushy long-handled mustache that drooped at the ends, and he was completely bald headed. He reminded the people around him of Keenan Wynn, the actor from old Disney movies. Even his voice was gruff and graveled like Keenan Wynn’s. His attitude was that people should leave him alone and stay the hell out of his way.
