The Ripper of Blossom Valley

by S D Christopher

  Maddy posits, "And once you realized you had this unique ability, you were afraid you'd wind up like Vince. You never told a soul."

  "Fuck no. I thought my parents would lock me away in a looney bin, thinking I'd made it up because Vin disappeared. I figured as long as it didn't disrupt my life too much, I'd be ok. It seemed to serve me well for the most part, especially with getting ahead of crooks once I became a cop. It helped me earn my reputation as a super sleuth, of that I'm damn sure. The only downside is that I feed off all the emotions I feel around me, good and bad. It's why my pop and I clashed so much when I was a teenager. You know my mood swings, babe, and at times...I've been unable to keep my shit in line, let's just say. Doyle and I would have shouting matches, and I'd make bad decisions while on duty, to the point where I made enough mistakes to get suspended here and there, and it was all enough to keep me from advancing as far as I could've. I'd gotten a reputation as an arrogant prick, but rarely was I in full control of my own emotions. It was a constant fuckin' struggle. There were even times when I'd get into the head of a killer, and didn't know where I stopped and he started." He looks up, and we're all transfixed, except for Bob, who's still drooling. "In a few of my cases, I actually thought I was the killer. You have no idea how much that'll freak you the fuck out." I do, as a matter of fact.

  Maddy nods. "Well, I can certainly say it was a relief to discover that you weren't the one who was killing these women, and tearing them limb from limb. I do apologize for the cryptic letter, for what it's worth."

  Letter? "Wait...you sent me that fuckin' letter?"

  I turn to him, struggling to keep up. "What letter?"

  "Sorry, sweetheart, yet another thing I didn't tell you about. I didn't wanna worry you any more than you already were." He explains the note, and how he tried to figure out who it was from. "I gotta tell ya, doc, I never woulda guessed you. Not after meeting today."

  "Luckily, I concluded that I was wrong before anything unfortunate happened to either of us. Another reason we need to all be completely transparent and work together to bring this to an end. Each of us on our own has made mistakes, and these monsters remain several steps ahead of us."

  Completely transparent. Everyone else has been so forthcoming tonight. I guess it's time for me to share with them what I've only suspected myself, something that Frank has dismissed, but I can't. It keeps nagging at me, and the Reaper theory makes it even more likely. I won't be able to live with myself if I don't know for sure.

  "Doctor...do you and Bob believe that...he said the Reaper tracks people who are near death…I'm at least partially responsible for these women winding up dead, aren’t I?"

  "Babe, no--"

  Stop trying to protect me. "Frank, if they were only raped, and nothing else, this Reaper, or whatever he is, he'd never find them, right?. Who else would be bringing them to the point of imminent death but me?"

  "If that were true, then why the fuck just these five women? Why not any of the others before them?" This revelation seems to surprise Dr. Gibson. Gosh, we've got so many secrets we need to lay bare.

  "I don't know, Frank. Maybe I fed off these women for longer than I thought, put them on the brink, enough for him to sense them."

  "No. We know what your limits are, and we always stopped before you went too far. Besides, you heard Doc and Bob before. This guy's killed other people, maybe lots of others, who had nothing to do with you."

  Once again, you’re missing my point. "Yes, but these women, Frank, THESE are on me. They have to be." I look to Dr. Gibson, hoping she'll allay my fears. She does not.

  "We do think you...unintentionally led him to them, yes. But we suspected that you couldn't have known, and I believe that even more strongly after meeting you tonight." She turns to Frank. "We thought you might have known, though, lieutenant, and after hearing about some of your past and some of your theories here tonight, you've all but confirmed it. For that, we do hold you accountable for your part in all this."

  I shoot her a mean look, the meanest one I can muster. Even though she's speaking the truth, she can't say that about my Fudge. Only I can say that about my Fudge.

  "Well, the way I see it, if it really came down to it, it would be our word against yours and a bunch of crazies."

  "Frank!" I know he must be feeling vulnerable right now, but I see what he’s doing. "You forget yourself. She accuses, you get defensive. Sound familiar? It's just like some of our conversations, when I press you about topics which shall not be named." We've shared a lot with these new friends of ours, but I'd prefer not to air our dirty laundry about marriage and kids in front of them. It's bad enough I've let his pet name slip a few times.

  Frank seems dejected, conflicted. "You're right. I'm sorry." He looks me deep in the eyes, then turns to Maddy. "But I'll be damned if I'm going down without taking those fuckers with me. If this is my last case before I go behind bars for the rest of my days, I at least wanna do one last good deed."

  "Alright, then, it's settled...except for one small matter." Dr. Gibson looks at Frank, hesitant to broach the next subject. "Your partner. Can he be trusted?"

  "Troy? Yeah, he's got my back, any day. The kid's got talent, and unlike me, he's straight as an arrow."

  "That's...not what I mean." What does she mean?

  Izzy interjects. "She means, can Officer Troy keep a secret?" Oh, that.

  "Right...would he keep our talents under wraps? Good question. I'd like to think he would, but that's a whole shit can of worms I don't know we want to open right now."

  Maddy thinks on it for a moment. "I wonder if it would be best to rely on the utmost discretion...for now." Huh. So much for complete transparency, then.

  "But wait, isn't he one of the good guys? Frank, you've always raved about Troy. Don't we need someone else like that on our side?" From the nervous looks I'm getting from Frank, Izzy, and Madison, I realize I'm alone in that thought. I must seem so naive to them all.

  "He will be, babe. I'll have him follow up on some of these other cases outside of San Jose, see if he can get anything useful from them. Meanwhile, we should figure out how we can use our...talents...to track down and stop these fuckers."

  "Hey, would anyone like to know how we can actually track down these guys and stop them?!" Bob must've literally just come out of his stupor.

  "Oh look, drooling man's back from the dead. Can someone remind him he's like a bullhorn in my head?" Poor Izzy. I can't imagine living like that.

  Bob looks sheepish, returning his voice to a whisper. "Sorry, Izzy. But I have a plan I think might work."

  When he explains his plan, which isn't bad, actually, I ask why Izzy can't just listen for the killer.

  "Are you kidding? Do you know how many voices are in my head? And how many of them are threatening to kill someone? People say all kinds of loco shit when they think no one's listening." She explains that the loud things stand out. The screams, the yelling. "So many men yelling at their wives or kids. Guys are real assholes." She looks at Bob and shrugs. "You seem nice, though."

  We agree to Bob's plan, which involves Izzy and Frank keeping an ear out, and a feel out, as a kind of early warning system. We all exchange our mobile numbers, so we can get everyone in motion quickly once one of them has a lock on him or his next victim. The rest of the plan relies on me, and while I'm not loving the idea, at least I can put my gift to better use than I have been. My conscience will be much clearer, for one thing. I don't really want to hurt anyone, but if it has to be done, at least it'll be done to people who kinda deserve it, maybe. You know…jerks.

  ----------

  Troy

  Frank, where the hell are ya, man? First he sticks me with the crazy Latin lady with a hearing problem and a serious case of paranoia and delusion. Then he disappears on me and won't answer his phone or call me back. I waited around that hospital room for over an hour, but Ms. Watson seemed like she was gonna sleep through the night. At least she's stable, and safe.

  I'm bac
k at the station doing some research on her. I need to see if she, Donna Bowers, and Katherine Fisk, our three rape survivors, share any common circles with each other, or any of our five deceased women. We know that these three share the same attacker, and we're thinking he's the same guy who hit our other five, who can't speak for themselves anymore. I'm really wishing Fitch was here helping me. She was more of a partner to me than Frank has been these last few months. Jesus, listen to me, poor lil' Troy, not getting the attention he wants from his mentor. It's like my parents all over again. It's not as if he doesn't have anything else going on in his life. Man up, dude. He probably just had to take Maiko home, and they turned in for the night. She seemed well enough at the hospital, but from the way he tells it, she can swing one way or the other pretty quickly.

  "Hey, Troy boy. I was hoping you'd still be here." Well, speak of the devil. "Don't look so surprised."

  "Your phone die or somethin'? I called you like twelve times." He apologizes and confirms my suspicions that Maiko had taken another turn. "Sorry, man. Why didn't you just stay there with her?"

  "I did for a bit, but she eventually fell asleep. Then as I was sitting there, I was thinking...maybe we’ve been too focused on Blossom Valley."

  "Whaddaya mean?"

  He explains how it's curious that all our victims were contained within this one quiet neighborhood of San Jose. What if, he wonders, our perps are responsible for other unsolved murders all around the Bay Area? "We already looked into some of them months ago, Frank, and didn't see many similarities. So what, then, the dismemberment in a few cases in town is meant to throw everyone off the others? Does that even make sense as a profile?"

  "Maybe not if they were solo jobs. With a team, though, sure. If there's a so-called mastermind trying to keep us off their scent, he could be holding his minions in line enough to only unleash them in certain cases."

  "That's a pretty short leash."

  "He's a pretty crafty fucker, being able to elude us all this time." He's blunt, but he's got a point. "If they're close, either family or lifelong friends, it wouldn't be too hard to convince them to follow orders and stick to the plan."

  "Okay, so let's start pulling all the unsolveds from the area again." Not only are we looking into similar rape cases from all over the Bay Area, now it’s all the murders, too. So long sleep, my old friend.

  "Yeah, and we still need to chat with Donna Bowers," he looks at his watch, "in the morning. Last thing we wanna do is show up on her doorstep this late at night."

  We pull an all-nighter, the first of many to follow, digging through hundreds of unsolved murders in the entire Bay Area over the past ten years. None jump out at us as exactly matching our cases, which we already knew from previous sweeps. But one pattern does begin to emerge. About a dozen crime scenes over the last two years were as clean as ours, and a handful of more recent cases were mostly spotless except for a hair or two or some clothing fibers that didn't belong to the victim. None of the DNA from any of the scenes matched any known criminals in the database, but after some follow up, we were able to piece together that all the samples matched each other. Either we had a second serial killer who was striking all over the Bay Area, or the Cleaner wasn’t always cleaning.

  In the meantime, our chat with Ms. Bowers doesn't tell us anything new, but confirms her attacker was the same man who raped Katherine Fisk and Kerry Watson, and might be the same guy who raped our other victims, since they're all successful single women living alone in Blossom Valley.

  "You said that when you stumbled upon Kerry Watson's house, you saw someone down the street run to a car and drive off." Frank raises an eyebrow. "Why was he in such a hurry, so much so that he left the door to the house open? You found her incapacitated, like Bowers and Fisk were, and presumably our five victims as well. What happened that made him panic?"

  Frank ponders this for a moment. "Yeah, I wondered that, too. There was no one else in the house, which was my first thought. I searched it as soon as Maiko and I went in. Maybe he heard a dog barking, or something else spooked him. Who knows?" I guess, but something about that just doesn't add up.

  A couple weeks later, we’re discussing a cold case from Sunnyvale, when he looks away for a minute, seeming startled, distracted.

  "Hey, you ok?"

  "Yeah, I just thought I heard..." His voice trails off as his phone starts buzzing. "It's Maiko. I gotta take this." I nod, and after a quick exchange of whispered "yeah"s and "uh-huh"s and a "me too," Frank hangs up and turns back to me.

  "Sorry to do this again, but she needs me." I wave him off and tell him I can keep digging. "Thanks. I'll see ya in the morning. Nice work these past couple weeks, Sergeant." A rare compliment from the man. I feel like I just won the lottery.

  After he leaves, I notice that in a few of these cases we’ve set aside, the victims had a high level of either drugs or alcohol in their systems when they were killed. I ponder making a phone call I've been wanting to make ever since we widened our search, and now I have a good reason to make it.

  "Hi...yeah, it's good to hear you too. Listen, we came across a couple things you might be interested in."

  Chapter 26

  Isabel

  I'm pacing around my Fortress of Solitude, waiting for Officer Frank and his lady friend to show up. I needed a break from all the noise after I heard the scream, but now I'm getting antsy. We need to get there before we're too late and he's gone again.

  There, the screech of brakes, someone in a hurry. They're here. I grab my jacket and race downstairs, booming footsteps be damned!

  I hop into the back seat and Officer Frank peels out. Dr. Mousey turns around from the front passenger seat. "Hi, Izzy. How are you?" Whispered gently, so considerate, and always with a smile. Officer Frank's right. He doesn't deserve her.

  "I was fine until I heard her scream. I was about to try to unwind with Neil DeGrasse Tyson's latest book. Now I have to wait to read my boyfriend's latest musings."

  "Don't let his wife hear you say that." Dr. Mousey giggles, but I get just a quick glance from Officer Frank in the rearview mirror. So serious, as always.

  "Doc and Drool on their way, too?"

  "Yes, Officer Frank. Dr. Maddy and Drooling Man might already be there waiting for us. She doesn't drive as slow as you." I've found in our brief time as friends that I really enjoy needling him, and it usually has the desired effect. He pushes the pedal down ever so slightly, as though I won't notice that I got him again.

  We pull up to the shopping center parking lot where I told them to meet us, and sure enough, the others are sitting there, though Drooling Man says they just arrived. Too bad, I wanted to rib Officer Frank some more. "How close are we, do you think?" Dr. Maddy asks. "I'm picking up a few Sensitives, but I can't tell yet if one of them is him. I don’t think I’ve sensed the rapist before."

  "One of them has to be him. I can hear him talking to her, still. We should hurry." Of course, as soon as I say that, he stops talking, making it harder for me to home in on him. I turn to Officer Frank. "Gas Man clammed up. Your turn." I could listen to her neighbors to narrow down the house, like I have before, but without Gas Man talking, it'd take longer. Officer Frank has a better shot at finding his victim, through her terror. Yay for teamwork.

  Officer Frank concentrates for a moment. "This way, c'mon, she's close, and he's still there. I feel his cold, dead heart, the fuck." We follow him one block east, then turn right and down a few blocks to a quiet street. There are a few cars and a van parked on the street, but no one walking around, and only some of the houses have lights on inside. He holds up his hand for us to slow down, then points to an unassuming beige house across the street, before turning to us. "That's the one. You freaks stay here, I'm gonna go check it out."

  Everyone else tries to protest all at once, and it's too much for my ears, bringing me to my knees. They all apologize profusely, but quietly. I just give them all a snarly stare.

  "That wasn't the plan, Lieutenant,”
Dr. Maddy warns. “We still don't know exactly how he immobilizes his victims. You'd be putting yourself at a distinct disadvantage. We go in together."

  "I'm altering the plan. I'm the only cop here, and I'm not putting the Scooby Gang at risk. Plus, I've got this." He pats his holster. Little do they know, he's not the only one carrying a gun tonight.

  Suddenly, I hear a rustling of leaves and whip my head around, looking for the source.

  Dr. Maddy notices my distraction and looks down the street as well. "Lieutenant, do you feel that?"

  "Yeah, shit, we're being watched. We don’t need any complications; why don't you, Izzy, and Drool check it out? Maiko and I'll go in and take care of this asshole."

  Dr. Maddy tells them to be careful, then Drooling Man and I follow her further down the street. Whoever's here must be getting nervous, because now I hear more movement in the bushes a few houses down. I point to the others. "There."

  She looks at me and whispers, "...In the bushes?" I nod, and we slowly approach. Oddly, the largest among us keeps to the rear. This one's not an alpha male like Officer Frank. I bet he spends most of his time watching sports and playing video games.

  We approach the bush slowly, as Drool whispers, "Careful, we don't know what he or she is capable of." Dr. Maddy motions for me to pull the branches near me to one side, and she'll do the same on her side. I nod, and Drooling Man puts up his fists for some reason.

  We pull the branches apart, and...huh. What's a blind girl doing just sitting there in the bushes?

  ----------

  Takehiko

  I must hurry. I have spent far too much time with this one already. I could not help it. She is one of the finest specimens I have ever come upon. She was...most satisfying.