Glimpse

by Stephen B King

  “How could you know that?”

  She stood up and walked around the desk, and perched herself on the edge, her leg almost touching his thigh, and Rick found himself wishing that it did touch. She took a long sip of her wine and savored it in her mouth before swallowing. “You must understand all this is conjecture, only what I think, not what I know. It’s not mumbo jumbo or black magic, its deductive reasoning, and an understanding of this kind of psyche.”

  “Go on.”

  “What bothers me more than anything, is why you? Yes, it could just be that you were lead cop on the high-profile suitcase murder, but, I don’t think that’s the reason. If I’m right about some other things, then this guy is a planner, and he doesn’t do things for no reason. I think it’s more likely he has selected you and I don’t know why, but I can tell you it’s not because he saw you on TV. No let me re-phrase that, he probably did see you on TV, and because of some past association, he has targeted you. He isn’t just in this for the thrill of his kill this time, he wants to engage you in his glory to make you suffer. You probably won’t remember him, but for some reason he blames you for something, and now he wants to make you pay. And, I’m sorry to say, he will not stop until you have. So, he is smart, intelligent, and capable of very clear and strategic thinking and planning. He will be at least two, possibly three moves ahead of you, if you think of this as a chess game.”

  “But why the elaborate disguise to stand out and be noticed? I don’t get it. Wouldn’t he do that to avoid being remembered?”

  She shook her head. “Yes, well, to answer that question we should think about the kind of person he is, and what is motivating him; what drives him to do things. I don’t think he will mind getting caught, when he is ready. I think he looks forward to the day when he can tell the world how clever he’s been and just how stupid you police were. In fact, he will possibly give himself up, eventually, or kill himself, but there will be a lot of dead bodies before he does. No, he has given you this gift of a witness so you go public with it. He will be laughing his head off with you on TV adamant you are hunting a blonde-haired man, when all the time he is bald, or has black hair. And even when he is caught, you will be the one who went public with the wrong description. I believe he is diminutive, because he is so ordinary and follows the pattern of being victimized. He has been abused, I would say on a regular basis for a long time. He hates the world and everyone in it who allowed that to happen to him. Why female victims? Because he’s small, so he is more able to abduct a woman than a man, and as I mentioned, this revolves around a hatred of his mother abandoning him. That said, he won’t care if he kills men, women or children, everyone is just cannon fodder. He is getting back at the people that have hurt and mistreated him all his life.”

  She finished the wine in her glass and turned to go back behind her desk for a refill, her skirt brushing his leg as she twirled.

  “What about the sunglasses?”

  “You mean how did I know he wore them, or how did I know he had something about him that was outlandish, like oversized glasses?”

  “Both, the woman thought the glasses were more like the type a woman would wear.”

  “There you go, that’s how I knew. Rick, once you accept that he wanted to be seen, but seen in such a way as it would never be a description you could fit to the real him, it becomes obvious. He did it so he would be noticed. By wearing oversized glasses, of course she noticed him on a busy street at lunchtime. It was discordant and made him stand out from the crowd. While she focused on the glasses, she didn’t take note of his face. Am I, right?”

  Rick nodded, slowly, understanding dawning on him.

  “So,” she continued, “let’s look at this another way: the witness. He knew she walked past every day, therefore he timed leaving the box when he knew she would pass by. He was watching her, for days probably to learn her habits, and he selected her to be your witness. Remember I suggested that this man plans everything to the last degree. I think he wanted someone who was a creature of habit, smart, intelligent, and believable. So, once he picked her; the perfect witness, he watched, her, followed her; he knows more about her than you do. Then on the day he wore things that he knew she would notice, he spent a lot of time planning this. I’m afraid she is a possible future victim, now that her job is done. He has used her, she followed the script he wrote, and to give her fake description more validity, I think he might kill her. By doing so, it is another thing that you can take the blame for, and he will revel in your failure.”

  ****

  Tyler and police sketch artist Hugo Mann arrived at Bridget Schaeffer’s apartment and found the front door ajar. Tyler drew his revolver and pushed the door open with the barrel.

  There, on the floor in the entrance hallway laid a mutilated woman. The remnants of her blue pin stripe jacket had been slashed and hacked, and the body was surrounded by a puddle of her own blood.

  Tyler’s mobile phone rang; it was Rick calling to advise him to put Bridget into protective custody.

  ****

  Just before ten o’clock that night, June Daniels cowered up against the cold wall of her prison. The maniac had returned carrying a tray with a tea-towel covering most of the things on it. One thing that wasn’t covered was what looking like some sort of old fashioned tool, and it looked like it was red hot. He put the tray down on the concrete floor, to her side so as he lifted the cover, she couldn’t see what was underneath it.

  Her arms had long since lost any feeling in them, chained as they were above her head. She was bitterly cold and shivering, naked as she was. Every part of her body hurt, and he hadn’t even bothered to clean the blood from her where he had used his knife to cut into her skin. “Please, please let me go, I won’t tell anyone what you’ve done.”

  He smiled, except it wasn’t a smile, it was like he was trying to make her think he was smiling, when really, he wasn’t; he was grinning. He spoke in the squeaky, high-pitched monotone he possessed: “I’ve told you before, I will let you go, but you and I have to send some messages to the cops first, so they have a chance to rescue you. Now, be a good girl, and keep still, this won’t hurt too much.”

  He held up a knife, and the fluorescent light glinted off the blade. “Oh God, no, please no, don’t hurt me anymore.”

  She screamed, begged, and pleaded until she passed into unconsciousness. Once her finger had been removed, Paul Rankin seared the joint closed to stop the bleeding with the old-fashioned soldering iron. It had been sitting on a roaring gas flame on the stove until it was glowing red, though it had lost its glow by the time he used it. It took longer to stop the bleeding because of it.

  He covered her removed digit in tissue paper and packed it in a small cardboard box along with a note. He then wrapped it in brown postal paper, with stamps applied that he had purchased some weeks prior and addressed the outside to Detective Sergeant Richard McCoy. Rankin left his home, wearing a long coat and baseball cap pulled low over his face.

  He drove into the city, parked in a quiet spot, and walked to where he knew a post box was. Without breaking stride, as he passed, he dropped his parcel in through the slot.

  It was a pleasant evening, and he was in no rush. He took a long circuit back to his van. With hands thrust deep in his pockets, he whistled a tune to himself.

  Chapter 8: My Memoir Entry - Enjoying the Fear

  People think it’s about the killing, that it is the act of committing murder that is the attraction; it’s not.

  For me, it’s about the control. You could say that I had a miserable life, and I want others to share in my misery; and that would be true. But, I enjoy controlling their fear. I can give them hope, then snatch it away. I can watch their eyes and see that moment, when finally, they give up, and retreat inside themselves, and just want it all to end. And then, right there, that is the moment I live for.

  You could say I am a product of my upbringing, and I would have to agree that I am. Is evil inherently evil of its own
accord, or do circumstances cause people to become that way? Is anyone ever truly bad, or does what happen to them as they grow up, make them become something other than they would have without those influences? I often wonder if you took two different people and subjected them to the same upbringing, would they turn out the same. I have read that studies have been conducted along these lines, but there is nothing conclusive. I am writing this scrapbook so you, dear reader, can be my judge.

  My Father wasn’t naturally evil, I’m convinced of that, and I loved him. He went away to war, so far as I know a perfectly normal young man and came back deeply troubled. My mother had waited for him and tried to help him as best as she could. I believe, now, that she took to seeing other men when she went out at night, and it was that infidelity that sent my father over the precipice, to a point where he could take no more. While I believe, he loved her, he killed her, and kept his memory of her alive in the freezer.

  For the longest time, I thought she had run off. Even when I discovered that she hadn’t, I still hated her as if she had. In my mind, she was unfaithful – which is a hideous thing. Because she was unfaithful, she also abandoned me. Logic does not, after all, overcome emotion. And though I know she didn’t run off, I’m sure she was unfaithful, so in the final analysis, she deserved what Dad gave her. Am I, right?

  I remember the evening it happened like it was last week. Mum was dressed up to go out; it was a Thursday evening, she wore a new red shirt, she had make up on and her best perfume. As she and Dad put me to bed I asked where she was going, and she said she was off to the shops. Once they had left my room, they stopped outside my door, and I heard dad say, “Please don’t go out again, stay home with me.”

  I never heard mum’s reply, but a little later I heard the door slam and then silence. I thought I heard him crying, but it could have been the TV, the mind sometimes plays tricks on us, doesn’t it? But he did plead with her to stay home, and she refused.

  ****

  When Uncle Phil died, I expected them to put me back in Harkerville. I dreaded the thought of Stubsy, and his cronies, beating me up on a regular basis all over again. If I’d been thinking clearly, I would have realized that couldn’t have happened, because he would have been too old by then to still be a resident. By the time I realized that, it was no longer an issue. Maybe it seems incongruous with what the last few years had been like for me, and the only way I can try to explain it is that with my uncle, things were predictable. As unpleasant as it was, I knew what to expect. With Stubsie, I never did. The violence, was ultra-violence; if that makes sense

  Either way, for some reason, they didn’t. A social worker named Norma came around and spent a few days helping me sort out his affairs. She made sure I was coping by visiting from time to time, and I suppose she could see I was perfectly capable of looking after myself.

  He had not left a will, but I inherited the house, as he had no other living relatives. The same Trustee helped with that paperwork. I suppose, as I only had three months to go before I became an adult legally, they decided to leave me there under Norma’s supervision. She had given me her phone number with the instruction I was to call her any time; day or night, if I thought I wasn’t coping. Little did she know; I was overjoyed with my new life, and not troubled one little bit.

  I had had the presence of mind to destroy his pornography collection. He had an old fashioned concrete cinder block incinerator in the back garden and I took great delight in destroying the magazines in it. I even found it, therapeutic to burn everything. Even now, dear reader, I shudder at the thought of those obscene homosexual images.

  The other thing I destroyed were all the Polaroid photos he had taken of me, and things he had made me do. They had been taken with a camera which I put to good use later in life to record my own triumphs. Uncle Phil was a disgusting perverted man who had deserved to die, and the only regret I had over the whole affair, was that it hadn’t been me that killed him. I even had a fantasy of digging up his coffin and taking his body home so I could mutilate him, hung from the chain in the cool room, though of course that was unreasonable.

  The day following my eighteenth birthday I had an appointment with Mr. Bridges at the Public Trustees office. He was a very nice man, or so I thought at the time. Stupid me; what I thought of as kindness he showed me, was, once again, something else.

  My dad’s small estate had grown under his management. The shop and house had been leased out, which, while being pragmatic, because it had made money, was now an issue because I had to wait for the lease to expire before I could move back in. Luckily, I had uncle’s house to use until that time. Once I had got rid of all the reminders of his sexual deviations, I didn’t mind being in the house at all, whereas before Id expunged it all I felt nervous and skittish all the time.

  I suppose, looking back now, it was all rather inevitable. Mr. Bridges offered to bring all the paperwork to the house for me to sign after our initial meeting. That was because by the time I finished work at the Carousel Meat Market, I couldn’t get into town during his office hours, having used up my quota of leave with the funeral. Once there he took off his jacket and said: “It’s quite warm today, isn’t it?”

  I expected him to sit at the dining table, but instead he made himself comfortable on the couch. He patted alongside him for me to sit there. I’ve wondered since if Uncle Phil had let on what he did to me to Mr. Bridges. I will never know. Probably not, I suppose, it’s more likely that me being the small stature, and slim build that I was, he mistook me for being gay.

  He went on about how he had helped me and worked long and hard to grow the twenty-six-thousand-dollar nest egg into sixty-two thousand, and how I should be grateful to him. He also said he was going to continue to help me with selling my uncles house when the time was right, and that he would take me under his wing. Silly me, I believed he was genuine. That was when he undid his trousers, pulled them and his underpants down, and said it was now my turn to do something for him.

  I wanted to kill him there and then, and could have, quite easily. I had made a conscious decision after Uncle Phil died not to be anyone else’s victim any more. But there was a dilemma. My rapid-fire brain worked out the consequences within seconds. If I murdered him there would be a body to dispose of, and no doubt people knew he had come to see me. I would be jailed, and life would end. Killing the pig, Mr. Bridges, didn’t bother me, but I had to be smart about it if I wanted to live my life on my terms. I had only had the freedom I was feeling for such a short time; I was unwilling to throw it all away.

  I could have said, no. Accused him of misconduct, called his employer, the police, done one of a dozen things. Why didn’t I? The explanation is quite simple. I knew I wanted to kill him, yet if I did it out of anger, I would be the prime suspect. What he wanted me to do, was disgusting, but no worse than I had been performing with my uncle. The turn-around for me, was to let him think he was using me, but I was leading him along, all the way to his death.

  ****

  It took five months, but I got even with him. The final icing on the cake, and the last nail in his coffin, was that good old Mr. Bridges was married, and had children. He justified it by saying he had always been bi-sexual. His wife was aware of his predilection, apparently, and they had an ‘open’ marriage. I didn’t believe a word of it. My thoughts were that he shouldn’t have married and brought two kids into the world if he wanted to have his cake and eat it too.

  I had to wait until the tenants had vacated the shop where I grew up, my uncle’s house had been sold, and all the money had left the Trustee’s bank account and taken up residence in mine. During this time, I had to show my gratitude to him at odd times when he demanded it. As the day drew near for my revenge, I told Mr. Bridges I wanted to take him out for dinner to say thank you, but he told me not to be silly; that he couldn’t afford to be seen with me in public.

  What an insult that was! That inspired me even more. I told him that I still wanted to show him how tru
ly grateful I was for all he had done for me, and that I had a ‘friend’ who wanted to join us in a threesome, at his house. I was a very good actor, and he had no idea how much I hated what we did. He thought I was enjoying it. You should have seen his face when I described this imaginary person whom I based on my recollections of Stubsy. I described him as being well endowed, and that he was very keen to meet Mr. Bridges; and that his name was Jeremy.

  I set him up beautifully. I told him that on the arranged Tuesday night, Jeremy’s parents were going out to a movie so we could have the promised threesome as soon as they left. I said he lived close to a small park, and we should meet there in the car park at seven pm.

  He asked me all sorts of questions about what we would be doing, and he was like a panting dog as I laid on the depictions of the vilest acts I could imagine. I asked, discreetly, what he would tell his wife he would be doing.

  “Like I always tell her, work, work and more work.” He grinned, reminiscent of the famed ‘Cheshire Cat.’ I grinned back, knowing his wife wouldn’t know he was meeting me.

  I got there early, my adrenalin high, wearing dark clothing and a beanie woolen cap, and gloves. I had planned meticulously. The cap was to ensure I didn’t leave any stray hairs for DNA testing, and of course the gloves were so I didn’t leave fingerprints. The long-bladed boning knife I had concealed up the sleeve of my jacket was razor sharp, honed to within an inch of its life, earlier that afternoon.

  I grinned to myself as I watched his silver station wagon glide into the car park and park under a light, four minutes before the appointed time. Like a lamb to the slaughter.

  After one meticulous last look, around, to make sure we weren’t being watched, I left the shadow of the tree, walked over to the car, and tapped on the passenger side window. He opened the door and I got inside. No sooner had the interior light gone off, he kissed me; he was like an octopus with eight hands all over me.