I Hear They Burn for Murder

by J L Aarne

  “I would like to, but I can’t. I’ve got a date Saturday,” Rainer said.

  “So bring them,” Elijah said.

  “It’s Thomas.”

  “Well, damn it. We were so looking forward to having you there. You’re one of our favorite people and Erzsé’s never seen what you can do with a scalpel. She’ll be so disappointed.”

  “I’m sorry.” And he was. He had never been to a snuff party before and it wasn’t every day such an opportunity came along. “I can’t though. Thomas has this thing Friday—some famous director is having a get-together at the restaurant and he has to make an appearance and schmooze—so we had to reschedule our date once already. So we’re going out Halloween night.”

  “Fine,” Elijah said. He was annoyed, but he got over it quickly. “Next year though. You are coming. Mark it on the calendar or whatever you must do, but you have plans.” He stood and brushed his coat down. “Kitten will be so sad when I tell her.”

  “Next year,” Rainer said.

  “Yes, well, that’s a whole year away, isn’t it?” Elijah said.

  Rainer shrugged.

  Elijah left and Rainer took a shower. When he got out, he made a pastrami sandwich and ate it while he read some more of his students’ short stories. When it got dark, he put them away and looked outside to see if Ezekiel was there, parked in his customary spot at the curb.

  He was.

  Rainer went outside and jogged over to his car. The window rolled down as he approached and Ezekiel looked at him, a faint smile on his face.

  “I was thinking,” Rainer said. “You sit out here every evening. You’ve been doing it for a month. Would you like to come inside?”

  “No,” Ezekiel said. He was staking the place out. Rainer was a psychopathic serial killer. One did not conduct a stakeout of a psychopathic serial killer from within said serial killer’s residence.

  “I can put on a fresh pot of coffee, there’s a TV. It’s better than sitting out here in the car all damn night,” Rainer said.

  “I said no,” Ezekiel said.

  “That’s—All right. But the offer stands.” Rainer left him and went back inside. He could feel Ezekiel watching him cross the parking lot and go up the steps to his door the whole way, but he was getting used to the sensation.

  Chapter 25

  The day before Halloween, Charles DeWitt called Ezekiel at the office and told him that Henry Lee Cairn had been released. The jury had taken a whole day to decide, but they had declared him innocent and he was acquitted in the end. After hanging up the phone, Ezekiel sat at his desk for several minutes lost in thought. He was furious; they had the evidence, they had witnesses willing to take the stand, they’d done everything they could and it still wasn’t enough.

  But angry as he was about it, he was also secretly pleased by the verdict. Now Henry Lee Cairn was his.

  Ezekiel went back to work, but he finished a little earlier than usual. He went home, had dinner with Jacob, they watched a movie together and had sex before Jacob went to bed. When Jacob was sleeping, Ezekiel slipped out of the house.

  He parked his car in the lot of an all night truck stop and walked until he found an older model car parked beside the curb with the door unlocked. He hotwired it and went to find Henry Lee Cairn.

  Cairn was celebrating his good fortune with friends and a lot of beer. His front yard was lit up under the glow of the porch light and the door was open. Ezekiel rolled the car window down and he could hear music and loud, drunk laughter and conversation from the other side of the street. He sat back and waited. By midnight, everyone was thoroughly drunk. By 1:00 a.m., things started to quiet down.

  Ezekiel watched the house for a little longer, but when he detected no movement coming from the house and did not hear anyone speaking anymore, he got out of the car, crossed the street and went inside. An unconscious woman was lying on the floor just inside the door and her body slid on the linoleum when he pushed it open. She grunted, but did not wake.

  Henry Lee Cairn was in the master bedroom, naked and sleeping between two rather unattractive young women. Ezekiel stood at the foot of the bed and stared at them for a little while. Experimentally, he jostled the mattress with his knee. None of them even stirred.

  “Hey, Henry?” he said.

  Nothing.

  Ezekiel waited for the documentary narrator to pipe up with some sort of input about the mating and sleeping habits of the serial rapist after release back into the wild, but he was strangely silent on the subject.

  “Oh, Hen-ry,” Ezekiel whispered in a sing-song, jostling the bed again. “Wake up, sleepyhead.”

  Henry did not wake up and neither did the women. Ezekiel rounded the bed and almost stepped on two syringes laying on the carpet. He kicked them aside. Henry, it seemed, had made sure he would not be waking up in the very near future.

  Ezekiel made a quick decision, grabbed his feet and yanked Henry down the bed. “In a way I suppose this is even fortuitous,” he told the unconscious man.

  He picked him up and hefted him over his shoulder, considered grabbing a sheet to throw over him and hide him, but decided it didn’t matter. Henry Lee Cairn lived in one of those neighborhoods where a hundred people could be standing around when a crime happened and no one saw a thing.

  “You’re already naked, too. I don’t even have to undress you, so thanks for that, Henry, old pal.”

  Henry wasn’t a very large man, though he was tall and he was strong according to all the evidence gathered in the rape investigations. Ezekiel was stronger than the average person, even the average person of his height and build, so Henry’s weight was nothing to him. He carried him down the hallway, stepping carefully over the drunk woman in front of the door, and out of the house. Then he put him in the back seat of the car and drove away.

  Henry slept through it all like a baby.

  There was an old butcher and meat packing shop Ezekiel had kept his eye on since it had gone out of business and he took Henry there. He tied him up then stood over him and stared for a few minutes at his sleeping face. He looked peaceful and rather harmless.

  They so often did.

  Ezekiel hunted killers because he liked the chase and the challenge. He was good at it. He could dissect the psychology behind a violent crime at a glance most of the time. There was a pattern to it and, even when committed to catching the bad guys, he had come to appreciate the beauty in some of those patterns. However, no matter how much time had passed between the day he had found Jacob living enslaved among his kidnappers and where he now stood in the dark looming above the stoned, drunk and pathetic Henry Cairn over a hundred and fifty years later, his feelings about rapists had not changed. If he lived another hundred years, he could not imagine they would change. He could not abide a rapist.

  He leaned down, elbows braced on his knees and stared. Henry didn’t stir. He was faintly snoring. Ezekiel slapped him hard. Henry groaned. He slapped him again, the sound of the blow like the crack of a whip.

  Henry’s eyes fluttered open and he stared at Ezekiel dully.

  Ezekiel struck him again. “Wake up,” he said. “Naptime’s over, Henry.”

  Henry winced and ran his tongue around inside his mouth like he was feeling his teeth, making sure they were all still there. “What the fuck’s going on?” he asked in a sleepy slur. “Who the fuck—” He picked his head up a little and looked around. “Where the fuck are we? Who the fuck are you? What the fuck—”

  Ezekiel cut that line of questioning off with another hard openhanded blow. “Let’s call it a reckoning,” he said. “Yes. I like that. It’s very fitting.”

  Henry stared at him in wide-eyed alarm. Something was starting to click in there somewhere. The cogs were turning and the alarm bells were feebly beginning to chime. “What?”

  “Come on, Henry. You know me,” Ezekiel said. “Sat right there in the courtroom smiling at me not so long ago.”

  Henry peered up at him. “Who are you?”

  E
zekiel took his ID out of the inside pocket of his coat. “FBI,” he said.

  “What? I was acquitted, numb nuts or didn’t you get the memo?” Henry said.

  “I did get the memo,” Ezekiel said. He put his ID away, stripped his coat off and tossed it over a crate then began unbuttoning his shirt. “I was sad for a little while, but then I got over it.”

  Henry pushed himself backward on the floor with his heels and tried to sit up. “You’re fucking crazy,” he said.

  Ezekiel folded his shirt in half and put it with his coat. He didn’t reply to Henry, but he opened the gym bag he’d brought with him and removed a hunting knife. When he unsheathed it and the blade caught the light, Henry let out a sound of alarm.

  “Leave me alone! Don’t touch me, you freak!”

  Ezekiel stalked over to him, caught the knotted rope binding his ankles and yanked him back across the concrete floor toward him. He leaned down and tapped the tip of the knife against Henry’s mouth. “That is really ironic coming from a bottom feeder such as yourself,” he said.

  “I didn’t do nothing! I was acquitted!”

  “Not by me.”

  Ezekiel grabbed his bottom jaw in his left hand and squeezed until the pressure on the hinges of his jaw was so painful and strong Henry’s mouth opened automatically. He screamed and Ezekiel squeezed a little harder, until there was a crackle of breaking bone and his jaw snapped wetly in his fingers.

  Henry shrieked. Ezekiel put his knee in the middle of Henry’s chest to hold him down and cut his tongue out. He held the slab of muscle up for him to see it before he tossed it aside.

  “Hush,” Ezekiel said.

  Henry wailed and sobbed, but it was muffled and garbled without his tongue.

  Ezekiel went to work then. He cut into Henry’s legs behind the ankles and above the heels and fastened thin meat hooks into the holes there. The hooks were attached to a bar made to bear the deadweight of a whole cow carcass. The whole gambrel rig was suspended by chains on a pulley from the ceiling.

  Ezekiel left Henry trussed and screaming on the floor and slowly turned the handle crank that wound the chain up and lifted Henry off the ground. Henry tried to twist and buck and jackknife, but the hooks were secure and he was effectively disabled. The more he struggled, the more tired he got, the more he realized how completely helpless he was and the more feeble his struggles became.

  “The blood should be rushing to your head right about now,” Ezekiel said.

  He had Henry as high off the ground as he wanted him so he stopped turning the crank. Henry’s arms dangled with his fingertips just barely brushing the cold floor. Ezekiel walked over to him, grabbed a fistful of his hair and pulled his head up by it. Henry moaned, tears leaking down his face, and tried to say, “Please,” with his tongueless mouth.

  “So, I think a lesson on how to properly butcher and dress an animal is in order. Doesn’t that sound interesting?” Ezekiel said. He showed Henry the knife. “I think so.”

  Henry wailed and twisted his head. Now he was trying to say, “No, no, no.” It came out sounding more like, “Wow! Wow! Wow!”

  “Now, usually with a cow or a pig or a deer, you’d slit the throat first to drain the blood, then skin it and butcher it out,” Ezekiel said. He let Henry’s hair go and he flopped at the end of the chain. “But since no one’s going to be eating you, I don’t think that’s very important, do you? A little blood in the meat, who’s gonna notice? Besides, I think you’re really going to want to pay attention to this part.”

  He started cutting the skin above Henry’s ankles. Henry screamed until it seemed inevitable that his throat would rupture. He tried to lift his bound arms to hit Ezekiel, which annoyed him. He stopped what he was doing long enough to cut the tendons in Henry’s arms at the wrist, removing his ability to lift them. Then he continued cutting around each leg, around the wrists, the groin, down each thigh, the insides of each arm, around the base of the neck, then down the middle of the torso. He explained in detail everything he was doing and why as he did it for Henry’s edification.

  Henry vomited as Ezekiel made the last cut along the torso and he quickly stepped back to miss being splattered by it. Because he was hanging upside-down, some of the vomit went up Henry’s nose and he choked and sputtered.

  “You done?” Ezekiel asked after a little while.

  Henry groaned and coughed.

  “Right,” Ezekiel said. He walked around behind Henry. “So now what you do is take the skin off. It should come off rather easily, but you’re still warm and alive and full of blood, so this might be different.”

  Ezekiel started with the skin around Henry’s ankles and used the blade of the knife to part it from the muscle. Henry screamed the entire time and Ezekiel thought about silencing him, but there was no one to hear him. There were buildings in the area, but if anyone heard him, they weren’t likely to investigate. Such places as condemned butcher shops were not playgrounds to the average person and even junkies would stay away if they heard the sounds Henry was making.

  It took longer than he remembered. Henry was still alive, hot and wriggling. It made the blood slippery on Ezekiel’s fingers. Henry was sweating, which didn’t help either. It was more like trying to skin a fish with legs than a deer or a pig.

  Eventually, Henry passed out, but it took longer than Ezekiel had expected. Once he was out, the process went pretty quickly. He pulled the skin off like a big, heavy wetsuit, revealing muscle, tendon and fat dripping with blood beneath.

  Ezekiel carried the heavy skin over to a big, deep trough sink and threw it in.

  The epidermis is the largest organ of the human body, the narrator piped up.

  “Wondered where you got off to,” Ezekiel muttered.

  The epidermis is the thin outermost layer of the skin, itself made up of several layers, which cover and protect the underlying dermis, the narrator continued. The dermis is a thick sensitive layer of skin or connective tissue beneath the epidermis that contains blood, lymph vessels, sweat glands and nerve endings.

  “I had no idea I knew so much about skin,” Ezekiel said. He walked back over to Henry’s hanging, unconscious form. “Henry, you awake?”

  He was not, but he groaned.

  Ezekiel put his hand flat to Henry’s flayed chest. Henry woke with a jerk and screamed at the contact of Ezekiel’s salty skin on his open wound body. Ezekiel pushed and sent Henry swinging on the end of his chain like a pendulum.

  “I think this concludes our lesson, Henry,” he said.

  Henry shook his head rapidly back and forth.

  “Oh, I think so. I think we’re done here. Got to get home before Jakey misses me after all,” Ezekiel said. Instead of killing him though, Ezekiel pulled a crate over and sat on it near Henry’s head. “You know, the first time I ever did anything like this was because he asked me to. I’ve never told anyone that before. You know why I’m telling you, Henry?”

  Henry wasn’t listening, he was crying. He tried to talk, but all he could manage were inarticulate moaning sounds.

  “There’s absolutely no way you can ever tell anyone else,” Ezekiel said. “When you get to Hell, you won’t even be able to tell the devil without a tongue.”

  Ezekiel turned Henry’s head to the side, baring the artery along his throat. Then he cut it and quickly stepped back to avoid the initial blood spray. Henry flopped briefly, but then he was still. Most of the fight was gone from him at the end and Ezekiel had cut his throat the way an animal’s was cut for slaughter to quickly drain the blood.

  He watched the body swing slowly back and forth for a minute at the end of the chain. Then he left it hanging there and went to start cleaning up.

  It took a couple of hours before things were cleaned to Ezekiel’s satisfaction. Leaving Henry hanging there on display like a slaughtered animal made him anxious, but it felt necessary. He didn’t often feel the need to get attention for his kills and was satisfied with merely eradicating them from the world. Attention-seeking
behavior was often how killers were apprehended. He had apprehended enough of them that way to know it very well. But Henry Lee Cairn needed to be seen. It would not be right otherwise.

  Ezekiel was still floating on the high of the kill as he left the butcher shop, walked a mile south and caught a cab back to his car. He was still running it on a loop through his mind as he drove out toward Rainer’s place. He didn’t park there, though he did think about it. He slowed down, to the annoyance of the motorists behind him, and crawled by while looking up at his window. The light was on. He was home.

  Ezekiel drove home and parked in the driveway, but then he just sat there thinking about Henry Cairn. His flayed body swinging at the end of that chain, the weight of his skin as Ezekiel lifted it into the trash. The metallic, salty swamp scent of the blood filling his nose and mouth and lungs.

  He opened his belt, unzipped his fly and slipped his hand inside his pants to touch himself. He closed his eyes and remembered the slick-tacky wet heat of the blood on his hands as he cut. The give of flesh on the sharp blade of his knife. Henry tried to say no and did nothing but moan and Ezekiel’s breath came quicker. Rainer’s face surfaced in his mind’s eye, his bright eyes, his teasing, knowing smile, the way he gasped and said, “I love you,” filtered through a closed door.

  Which one of us is the liar?

  Which one of us isn’t? That’s the real question.

  Ezekiel bit down on his bottom lip and a purr rumbled in his throat. The creak of the chain was in his ears and he thought, If you had a heart, this is how it would break. His heart was thundering. Ezekiel moaned with his head tipped back on the seat and came.

  He gasped as it faded away. Then he opened the glove box, took out a napkin and wiped off his hand. He laughed softly as he got out of the car and went up the walk.