by Jim Laughter
He’d had these sensations in the past, and always after being sexually abused as a child or just before releasing his inner demon, the sinister force that drove him to kill.
A yellow taxi stopped outside just within sight of his hiding place. He strained his eyes looking out through the darkened doorway and saw a woman dressed in red slide out of the front seat, not the back seat where passengers are supposed to ride. He heard the woman giggle and speak to the driver, her seductive voice a reminder from his past. He didn’t understand the exchange of words but he knew what it was. He’d heard it all before. ‘You’re the best, honey. I’ve never had a man like you.’
The woman, Liz, didn’t hand the driver any money. Instead, she opened a small handbag and placed what looked like two or three bills inside. She removed a silk handkerchief from her purse and wiped the edges of her mouth and chin.
Doesn’t surprise me. I know how the whore paid for her ride. Looks like she got a little extra bonus from the driver’s tips, money he should use to support his family.
Liz waved the driver away and blew him a kiss before turning toward the lower entrance of the hotel. She looked exactly like the cheap call girls the secret service usually consorted with. It was apparent by her decadent appearance and her long strides that she was accustomed to men ogling and pawing at her.
The killer watched Liz approach the employee access. She’s been here before. She turned and waved again at the taxi driver who only nodded before shifting the cab into gear and pulling away from the curb.
Wiping the blade against his pant leg, the killer felt the sharp tip scratch a tantalizing path along his thigh. He waited for Liz to approach his darkened alcove. Excitement rose up in him, not a sexual pleasure but one of memories long past and in need of remembrance.
Chapter Thirteen
“This is the damnedest thing I’ve ever seen!”
FBI Special Agents Duncan Morris and Lynn Keller, along with agents George Benjamin and Grundy Cooper sat around a table in the conference room at the FBI headquarters building in Washington DC.
Spread out in front of them were a dozen case file folders, each one showing the bodies of women in varying degrees of mutilation. Some of the pictures showed women whose throats had been sliced cleanly from side to side, causing them to bleed out. Others showed women whose entire bodies had been slashed to pieces as if a deranged butcher had attacked a slab of beef intent on destroying it beyond recognition.
Cooper turned from one file to the next, comparing them with each other. The pictures both sickened and excited him. Although he knew it couldn’t be true, he recognized the work of this killer. The precision cuts mixed with the apparent lunacy of the killer only pointed in one direction—Jack the Ripper.
“It’s him alright.”
Keller and Morris exchanged wary glances. These photographs had been studied for the last three years by a dozen senior agents and expert analysts. And although several had mentioned the similarities between the famed serial killer and this maniac, none of them had made this absolute conclusion. Now these two rookies compare a few files and issue a wholly impossible statement that would make J. Edgar Hoover cringe in his women’s underwear.
“That’s exactly what I’ve been saying,” Benjamin said. “I know it can’t be him, but I know it is. Does that make sense?”
“Not one itty bitty bit,” Morris answered before Cooper could acknowledge Benjamin’s question. He tossed his Parker Brothers ballpoint fine-tip pen onto the yellow legal pad he’d been using to take notes.
Oh hell, Keller thought. Here we go again!
Morris pushed away from the conference table. He wasn’t about to let two rookie agents tell him that Jack the Ripper was alive and killing hookers in the United friggin' States.
No sir, not a damn chance in hell. I’m puttin' my foot down on this one right 'bout now. He pointed his right index finger at Cooper and Benjamin. Should be my damn gun, he thought. Guess my finger’ll just have to do.
“You two knot heads ain’t got one damn shred of good evidence that these women are bein' kilt by no damn Jack the Ripper!”
“But sir…”
“Don’t but sir me, Cooper!” Morris cut him off.
“Dunc?” Keller said. “Let’s listen to what he has to say. If he doesn’t make sense, we can send him back to Nashville.”
“You can bet your lunch money he ain’t gonna make no damn sense.”
Morris cast a sidelong glance at George.
“Kunta here’s been with us for damn near three years now so he ought’a know better. And if he don’t, he can drive Woody Woodpecker there to the airport and get on the damn airplane back to Nashville with him.”
Benjamin hated Morris’ constant racial innuendo. It was just the ignorant redneck’s way in which he’d been raised. Not that Morris justified his course language. He didn’t. But neither did he apologize or try to be something he wasn’t. He’d been warned and reprimanded a number of times by the bureau about his offensive, controversial, and often racially biased attitude, but it didn’t do any good. He’d just tell the supervisor reprimanding him to shove it up his ass, that he had better things to worry about than hurting some thin-skinned bureaucrat’s feelings.
George often wondered how Morris had lasted this long in the FBI. He didn’t fit the stereotype of any agent he’d ever seen. He was unkempt and crass, his suit was always stained and wrinkled, and he often smelled of alcohol.
Guess he gets the job done.
What was the old saying, ‘We always get our man’? George assumed Morris’ solve rate was enough to justify his career.
Doesn’t mean I have to like it, but I guess I can learn to live with it if it will help me become a better agent.
Morris had been warned and cautioned by the agency many times about his politically incorrect language and attitude but he didn’t care. He was what he was and nothing was going to change that.
“Sir,” Cooper said. “I’m just saying…”
“Boy, I know what the hell you’re sayin',” Morris cut him off again. “You’re sittin' there on your shave-tail ass tellin' me that some yeh-who that’s been dead in the ground for a hundred friggin' years in England is livin' here the capital of the United friggin' States killin' prostitutes. Ain’t that what you’re fixin' to say?”
Cooper nodded his head.
“Then you’re the dumbest sum'bitch to ever come out’ta…”
Morris paused. He placed both fists on the conference table and leaned in toward the rookie agent.
“Just where the hell are you from, Cooper?”
“California, sir.” Now what? Cooper thought. “Sacramento.”
“California. That figures.” Morris pushed away from the table and pursed his lips together like a cowboy sizing up a horse at auction.
“California,” he repeated. “Only fruit loops, daisy chains, and Arnold Swartzenigger wannabes come out'ta California.”
Cooper bit his lower lip. He’s setting me up for something. He’s setting me up and I’m going to step right into his trap.
“That’s Schwarzenegger, sir.”
“What? What’s that?”
“You said Swartzenigger, sir,” Cooper said. “It’s Schwarzenegger, not Swartzen…”
“What the hell are you talkin' about, Cooper?”
“Sir I…”
“Do you really think I give a flyin' flip 'bout that crap?”
“Sir…”
“Did I ever tell you that you’re 'bout as worthless as tits on a boar hog, Cooper?”
“Yes sir, once or twice. In Portland as I recall.”
I don’t believe it, Benjamin thought. The old bastard likes Cooper. Good Lord in heaven!
“You wanna get back to work, Cooper, and try to help me figure out who the hell is killin' these women?”
Cooper looked away from Morris and toward George who’d sat through their verbal exchange. Benjamin knew it wouldn’t do any good to disagree with Morris. He a
lso knew he had to stand his ground and make his case so Morris would see the viability of his assumption that Jack the Ripper was killing women in the United States. He pushed a file folder across the table to Morris. It was opened to a long list of names attached to the folder by an over-sized paperclip.
A quick calculation told Morris that there were more names on the list than there were file folders on the table. He scanned through the names but didn’t recognize any of them. He shrugged his shoulders and passed the file to Keller.
“You tryin' to make point, rook?”
Keller looked at the heading at the top of the page and saw where George had printed out a Google search for the victims of Jack the Ripper. Aside from the five known victims of the killer, the list pictured over a dozen other victims that might have been attributed to him.
“Are you suggesting that Jack the Ripper killed more than the five women attributed to him, George?”
Benjamin nodded but didn’t say anything. He’d learned Morris’ tactic of letting him speak then pouncing on him. He knew what he suspected but didn’t want to express it without at least some confirmation from Cooper.
Keller examined the names and still photos of a dozen other women killed between 1888 and 1891, the timeframe when Jack the Ripper hunted the streets of Whitechapel in London, England.
“Fairy Fay, Annie Millwood, Ada Wilson, Emma Smith, Martha Tabram, Alice McKenzie.”
Keller read the names off the list, each one accompanied by the picture of a butchered woman. She’d heard the theory that Jack the Ripper had probably killed a number of other women during his murder spree, but the authorities at that time hadn’t been able to form a definite link between his five known victims and any of the other murder victims.
“Speculation,” Morris said. “Plain and simple.”
Benjamin didn’t reply. No need.
“There’s not one shred of good evidence those murders were linked to Jack the Ripper’s known kills. Just plain old speculation.”
“Speculation, sir?” Cooper asked.
Morris turned on the rookie agent, ready to rip him a new asshole if he got out of line. He wasn’t going to put up with any crazy idea that might spew out of Cooper’s mouth.
“Isn’t speculation the first step in finding evidence?”
Morris paused.
“Don’t we first form an idea of a killer’s motives so we can profile his actions, identify him, and figure out the next step he’ll take?”
“You’re a smart ass, Cooper.”
“But he’s right, sir,” Benjamin said before Cooper could say anything that would get him into deeper trouble. “You know it, LK knows it, Cooper knows it, and I know it.”
Morris didn’t answer. He just sipped his coffee that had already gone cold. Benjamin could see in the special agent’s eyes that he’d accepted the viability of their theory, ridiculous as it was.
“You rookies are gonna be the death of me yet. If you think for one minute…”
“Accept it, sir,” Benjamin cut him off, tapping the list of names and pictures in the file. “Jack the Ripper is alive and well, and he’s living in Washington DC.”
Chapter Fourteen
Remembering the kill was never as gratifying as the deed itself. The thrill was holding a trembling woman in his arms, feeling fear overtake her. It came with knowing he held her future in his hands, that he was the only thing standing between light and eternal darkness. And even though the women he selected were soiled doves whose profession should have aroused him sexually, they never did. He couldn’t find it within himself to release any lustful pleasure in his acts of vengeance against the memory of his tarnished youth.
The lifeless corpse of a street-walker was just a piece of meat, an inanimate object lying still on a floor or the cold pavement of a back alley. Life is in the eyes. Is there really a divine spark revealed only through the eyes? Of the dozens of women he’d killed, he’d failed to capture that one special moment when a flesh and blood human changed into an eternal being.
Is there a soul that defines mankind? Is there a heaven and a hell where the essence of a person goes to spend eternity either in or out of the presence of God? Is there really a place of eternal bliss where the souls of the righteous bask in the glorious presence of their creator while the unrighteous and evil spend eternity suffering in a hell of torment and torturous flames? Does God or some other supernatural being really exist as an eternal creator? Or is God just an idea fabricated by the human race to justify our own existence?
Years of higher education and medical training hadn’t provided the answer to his questions. Experiments on laboratory chimpanzees and humans alike failed to verify a significant difference between them. Their evolutionary physical makeup was close enough to be made up of the same genetic material. Only a few minor chromosomes separated the two species. But mankind claims a divine spark, a moment when his creator, God, breathed life into him and declared him an eternal being. But where is the soul? Where is the essence of man?
These were questions that haunted him after each kill. Every time he plunged his knife into the body of a woman, or slit her throat with his scalpel, or ripped open her abdomen to expose her heart, the place where the soul is said to live, did something escape from her that he couldn’t see or feel? Is the soul a mysterious vapor that passes into eternity without notice of the people around it? Or is the soul only a matter of awareness passing from one reality to another? He had to know. He had to learn. He had to kill.
He thought about Liz. The police found her body after the presidential party had already left for Austin. He heard it on the news after the motorcade had been formed in the Texas capital. He’d left her naked, butchered body behind a pylon in the hotel basement garage. Liz was the first woman he’d ever stripped completely nude, depriving even her corpse of the decadent red mini-skirt, vest, and those damn gaudy boots. He’d taken particular pleasure out of her final moments of life when he’d gutted her while she still writhed in his arms, spilling her essence onto the concrete floor.
Rumors and innuendo circulated that the brutal murder had taken place in the same hotel where the President and his family spent the night. The news media wanted to know what kind of security precautions were in place to protect the first family in light of the murder. The White House chief of staff assured them the President and his family had been completely safe, that no killer could have gotten within a hundred yards of them, and that the Secret Service detail protecting the President had stood their posts with diligence and professionalism.
They stood their posts alright.
While the first family slept peacefully in their beds, their Secret Service agents were engaged in scandal and deceit, pretending to serve the nation while instead serving their own lustful habits. But there was one agent that hadn’t satisfied his lust. And there was one less prostitute to tempt them.
Chapter Fifteen
“Alright, smart ass,” Morris said to Cooper. “The professor here thinks you’re the man that can shed some light on this case. Since you’ve got a double-master’s degree in criminology and criminal psychology, you must think you’re smarter’n the rest of us. Educate this old redneck about Jack the Ripper and why we should believe he’s cuttin' up these hookers.”
Cooper wasn’t about to be goaded into a confrontation with Morris. Nor did he intend to make a fool of himself in front of Keller and Benjamin, much less be called on the carpet to present an unproven theory to Lewellen Truck and Carson Wheeling. Then again, he wasn’t a turnip freshly fallen off the back of a farm truck either. If someone imitating Jack the Ripper was indeed killing prostitutes around the country, he was the man to identify him.
He knew the killer could not be the resurrection of the infamous Whitechapel killer as George suspected but there was something eerily familiar connecting all of the murders they’d selected as part of their case. After examining almost two-dozen case files, he wondered if this string of murders might go back any n
umber of years and include many more victims.
“Well sir,” he began, “we all know it’s been over 125-years since the pseudonymous, unidentified serial murderer Jack the Ripper killed at least five prostitutes in London, so it’s obviously not the physical man. But the mystery surrounding the case still lingers.”
“Uh-huh.”
“And although no one was ever charged in the murders that plagued London's East End in 1888, a former supervisory special agent right here in the Washington bureau of the FBI developed a detailed criminal profile in 1988.”
Morris turned to Keller.
“You know anything about a 1988 profile of Jack the Ripper?”
Keller shook her head. “I’m surprised you’re not aware of it.”
Morris returned his attention to Cooper. He didn’t like that a rookie agent knew about a profile that he should have been aware of. He assumed Cooper had discovered the profile while researching his academy thesis on the infamous killer.
“So what does this mysterious profile say?”
“It describes Jack the Ripper as a loner who fantasized about domination, cruelty and mutilation of women."
Cooper faced his laptop screen toward the other agents so they could see the report from 1988 that profiled Jack the Ripper. It described him as an unmarried white male between the ages of 28 and 36, a man that would fit into any crowd and not look out of place. It said the killer was most likely raised by a domineering, abusive, or neglectful mother and a weak, passive and/or absent father. It said his mother probably drank heavily and may have enjoyed the company of many men or been a prostitute herself. As a result, he lacked a childhood filled with consistent care and contact with stable adult role models.
