by Dave Dykema
Jennifer could see the house clearly now. The light above the stairs leading to their apartment was on. Lisa usually did that when she stayed out late, reminding her of her father and how he used to do the same thing to discourage young men from staying too long on the porch with his daughter. A pleasant smile formed on her lips. She was almost home.
He moved up behind her, cupping a hand over her mouth. With the other hand he removed the knife from his pocket. Amidst the struggle, a small audible click was heard as the blade emerged from its casing. He grabbed her harder, firmer, overcoming her. He wrestled her off the sidewalk, where he reunited with the shadows. They were swallowed whole.
The soothing chirp of crickets filled the air, while the porch light burned on and on and on…
Melissa
*1*
She arrived outside of Laura Danvers’s office sporting a new haircut and new outfit. She realized these were indulgences and felt a little self-conscious since it was her first day. She stood at the door, gathering herself, praying that Laura wouldn’t open it while she stood there, primping. She breathed into a cupped hand, waving it in front of her nose. She ran her fingers through her hair. All seemed well. Anxiously, she rapped on Laura’s door.
Laura looked up from her terminal when she walked in. “Ah…Melissa. Good to see you. What are they teaching you kids in college?”
Melissa was confused. “Excuse me?”
“I was just reading a script for an upcoming story. Atrocious. Misspellings, grammar forgotten, and the paragraphs are arranged seemingly at random.”
Unsure what to say Melissa only hemmed and hawed.
Laura threw back her head and laughed. “Don’t take me so seriously. I could feel your nervousness clear across the room! I was trying to loosen you up. I like to keep a light atmosphere in this department. Otherwise, people would go home and slit their wrists every night after the parade of obscenities they’re exposed to everyday.”
Melissa smiled politely. “I suppose.”
“Have you had a chance to see one of our newscasts yet?” Laura asked.
“Are you kidding? The TV was the first thing I unpacked! I wanted to get a sense of what kind of station I was working for.”
“And?”
“I was impressed. Good stacking, thoughtful pieces—heck, I even liked the graphics look.”
“Glad to hear that, considering how much we paid for it,” Laura laughed, and then stood. Melissa warmed to her. She once again saw the competent news director that she met during her interview. “Would you like to meet some of the people you’ll be working with?”
*2*
Dan lingered by Jerry’s desk, awaiting his replacement’s arrival. He only caught a quick glimpse of her as she went into Laura’s office.
With a yawn he started picking through what was left on Jerry’s desk after he came in over the weekend and cleaned things out. Only a few items remained: pens, a handful of paperclips, a paperweight depicting a winter scene upon a miniature church, and a Rolodex with most of the phone numbers removed. The pens would be pirated by someone before the day was over, as would the Rolodex. But the paperweight? It was so cheap and tacky looking it was no wonder Jerry left it behind.
Dan sighed. He too was starting to feel left behind. In the last few weeks his friends network was crumbling: Jerry was leaving; Janet wasn’t answering phone calls. The last time he spoke with her was three days ago. Yesterday, he didn’t even try. So he spent his time stalking, heading out into the night and following complete strangers. It was really taking a toll on his sleeping. He wondered what else it was taking a toll on…
Dan picked up the heavy paperweight, surprised it was made of glass and not plastic, and turned it topsy-turvy, watching the “snow” drift down. If the flakes were to scale the church would have been bombarded, smothered until mid-June when all the snow finally melted. How could Jerry ever have had such a thing on his desk? It was something a tourist would pick up in a motel lobby gift shop for their Great Aunt Martha on their way home after realizing they hadn’t gotten her anything. Only Great Aunt Marthas enjoyed that sort of thing. They displayed them on their mantles right between their crucifix made of crushed seashells from the Florida Keys and their vile containing an “authentic” piece of the Berlin Wall.
He pilfered the paperweight, scooping it into his breast pocket. Corny or not, it would make a memorable souvenir of his old friend.
Laura’s door opened and she came out with an attractive woman, dressed sharply, her figure flattered by the slim outfit. Shoulder length blonde hair floated about striking cheekbones. Soft blue eyes offset the sophistication the rest of her appearance suggested, offering a hint of the playful girl inside the dress. Still, her beauty was unique—not Cover Girl material. Dan suspected he could look at her face a hundred times and always find something different. They came over.
“Dan, I’d like you to meet Melissa Van Dyke,” Laura said, regarding her companion. “Melissa, this is Dan Freeman, your photographer.”
Melissa took his hand. “Nice to meet you.”
“Are you enjoying your first day with us?” he asked.
“So far, so good,” Melissa answered sheepishly to the loaded question. She became aware of the whispering voices and anxious stares of others in the newsroom and braced herself for the inevitable comparisons to Jerry Stevens to come. “I’m wondering, though, how long it’ll be before they ask me to shoot my part in the promotional piece.”
“What?” Dan asked.
“You know, the one where everyone is rushing around, yelling and shouting, tossing tapes back and forth across the newsroom like footballs, scrambling to the set seconds before air?”
Dan was befuddled, but Laura started to smirk.
“I’ll have to shoot an insert to cover Jerry Stevens’s scene,” she continued. “Which do you think would be better, Dan: me hurdling over a desk carrying a camera or running out of a burning house with an armful of kittens?”
Laura’s smirk grew to laughter, while Dan started to chuckle.
“Very astute. Very observant,” Laura said. “The Promotion Department is always available for mocking. I’m going to like you, Melissa.”
Dan felt awkward. Jerry’s replacement stood in the flesh before him. She certainly wasn’t what he’d expected. He was prepared to dislike her simply on principle. Instead, he found that he liked her—very much.
*3*
They drove toward their first assignment together. It wasn’t a feature, but a serious accident that tied up the highway.
“Does it bother you that they’ve just sent us on a standard news story?” Dan asked.
“Not really,” Melissa said. “In Fort Wayne they used me for all sorts of stuff when people were spread thin.”
Dan perked up. “Are you from Indiana?”
“No. WKBC is my third station, following Fort Wayne and a brief stint in Green Bay as a part-time reporter straight out of college. I seem to be slowly working my way back eastward to my hometown of Baltimore.”
“That’s the nature of this business,” Dan said, thinking of Jerry. “People are always moving around.”
She nodded. “Green Bay was also where I learned the cruel economic truths about TV: there’s not much money in it, unless you’re an anchor.”
“Well the anchors make more because they’re the real draw to a newscast, not the content or how well it’s put together. With all the crap that we put up with, it takes a real love of the medium to stay in it.”
Melissa nodded agreement again. She thought she possessed the love required, but it made for a hard life. It seemed that every time she made a friend, that person would move on to a different station, or get fed up with the weekends, holidays, and long hours and remove themselves from the business altogether. She did the same thing, moving every other year. It was difficult to form lasting friendships in or outside of work. She hoped to have a friend in Dan.
“How much farther?” she asked.
“Normally a minute or two, but with this traffic…”
They were ensnared in a bottleneck of stopped cars. Flares lined the road, channeling everyone into a single file line. It appeared to snake on for miles. Impatient, Dan went around the cars and onto the shoulder, approaching slowly.
“We’re media,” he told Melissa. “We can do anything.”
She laughed and realized for the first time how handsome he was, albeit a little haggard looking. She liked talking to him. Perhaps it was his roguish boyishness. When she saw him before, his blue eyes looked tired, but now they sparkled with the urgency of the job at hand. She liked that too.
*4*
Five minutes later they were at the scene and Dan had his camera out, taping, while Melissa sought someone to interview. Through the zoom lens he saw an overturned gasoline tanker on top of a small compact car a hundred yards down the road. The car was tin foil.
In the distance Dan heard sirens approaching. He whirled around, focusing on the ambulance as it sped past the crawling traffic. He widened out the shot as the ambulance loomed closer.
He felt an adrenaline rush shooting this. He shuddered, and noticed he had goose bumps. This wasn’t his usual type of story. Ghosts from the train wreck haunted him.
Melissa found an official willing to talk. Dan rolled on it.
“Approximately fifteen minutes ago,” he paused, looking at his watch, adopting an official-speak tone, “at 10:10 am, a gasoline tanker full of fuel en route to a delivery overturned, shutting down 475. It landed on a small car that was trying to pass it. Miraculously, the driver of the car wasn’t crushed upon impact. However, she is trapped inside the car with severe trauma to the spinal cord. We also think she broke an arm and both legs. The driver of the truck escaped unharmed.”
“Any idea how the tanker turned over?”
“At this time I would only be speculating.”
“How go the rescue efforts?”
“Slowly, cautiously. We think the tanker’s leaking gas. We’re withholding any major efforts to get the woman out until the fire units arrive, which should be any second. We don’t want our machinery to cause a spark.” He looked away from the camera, far off, distant, worried. “That thing could blow at any time…”
“Jesus Christ…” whispered Dan.
Suddenly he heard a scream. The camera became a dead weight in his hands. Melissa saw him start to fumble out of the corner of her eye. But no one here was screaming. The sound of the scream echoed in his brain, spanning the eight-month gap effortlessly, sounding as urgent and pained now as it did then.
Get a grip on yourself, thought Dan, gritting his teeth. This isn’t then; this is now.
But blotting out those impressions proved to be difficult. The past and present overlapped. Meanwhile, he was missing vital footage. He closed his eyes tighter and thought of the only thing in recent memory in which he felt strong, sure of himself, in control.
Stalking.
When he headed out over the past couple weeks the cool evening breezes felt great against his hot skin, and the time alone gave him a chance to think. Although he usually thought of Janet and how his relationship with her was going down the toilet, his mind always detoured and it wasn’t long before he would be looking for someone to follow. He would stay back at first, assessing the situation, before he would stalk in earnest, seeing how close he could get before being detected.
(heel to toe, heel to toe…keep a light, rolling motion…)
He was getting quite good at it—good enough to get close enough to kill—a realization that caused gooseflesh to rise on his skin whenever he thought of it.
He reshouldered the camera with a renewed strength. He saw that the fire truck had already reached the scene, and men were jumping off, connecting hoses, fearing the worse. Another group of men prepared the Jaws of Life.
*5*
Cindy Warner was pinned tightly inside her car. The steering wheel pressed into her ribs; her seatbelt bit into her waist; the passenger seat smothered her, lying across her frail body, the smell of vinyl oppressive, twisting her neck at a canted angle.
It happened so fast. The dog came out of nowhere, the truck swerved to miss it, lost control, and landed on top of her, smashing her car and legs to pulp.
Cindy Warner knew the end was near. She heard a babble of voices, sounding distant to her, although they were right outside her window. She paid them no attention—she had something more important to do. With her one free arm, she desperately felt for her purse by her legs, whimpering as her fingers trailed through the warm slickness that had to be her own blood. A wave of nausea washed over her as her hand brushed a jagged piece of bone sticking through the torn skin of her thigh. She almost gave up, despairing, thinking of the people she would never see again—her husband, her friends, and especially Reverend Stone, who had helped her so much in recent months—when her fingers found the leather strap of her purse. With difficulty, she crossed her fingers around the strap and pulled it a little closer so that she could reach inside. Probing through her belongings, she breathed a sigh of relief when her fingers landed upon the object of her search. She clenched her hand tightly around the crystal in a fist, smearing it with her own blood, gathering strength from the object.
Cindy Warner closed her eyes, knowing everything would be all right.
Cindy Warner didn’t smell the gas…
*6*
There was a loud fwhooosh! followed by a rush of incredible heat. Dan closed his eyes and turned his head away, all the while keeping the camera aimed at the explosion. The shockwave ruffled his hair. The heat singed his eyebrows and scorched his lungs. He staggered back a few steps, losing his balance. Thank God Melissa was farther away.
When the initial blast ended, Dan once again looked through the lens. He saw a scene of carnage. Any hope of the woman surviving was dashed when the tanker went up in flames. The trapped car was now a raging inferno. Thick plumes of black, oily smoke rose into the air. Scattered about were pieces of burning debris, charred metal scraps, smoking bits of vinyl already blowing away in the wind.
It was pure chance that nobody else went up with her when it all exploded. The policemen trying to comfort her were asked to move when the firemen arrived so they could apply the Jaws of Life. Most of the firemen were shielded on the other side of the truck when everything went up. The one who wasn’t protected caught fire, but dropped to the ground and quickly extinguished himself.
Dan captured all of this on videotape. As they were driving back to the station, Melissa flushed with excitement.
“That was quite a first story!” she exclaimed.
Dan nodded, but kept quiet.
“Something wrong?”
“No,” he mumbled.
“Did it shake you up? You seemed a little out of it for a second back there.”
He shrugged. “I’d rather not get into it.”
“Why not?”
“Look, I said I didn’t want to talk about it!” he exploded.
Melissa saw the rage and conflict inside of Dan. Instead of dropping the subject, she pressed on, leaning closer, placing her hands over Dan’s as he drove.
“Sometimes it helps to talk about it, to get it out in the open,” she said soothingly.
“We just met a couple hours ago. You barely know me. How can you possibly understand?”
She felt him trembling in her hands. She stroked along his fingers with her thumb, calming him. “An objective listener may be just what you need. Sometimes people find that they can tell their problems to strangers a lot easier than they can to their loved ones.”
“It’s just something that happened last year,” he conceded, wondering why he was saying this much. Then he looked into her soft blue eyes, brimming with sincerity, felt her squeezing his hand softly, and knew the answer.
By the time he finished, pouring out his soul as he spoke, she knew more about the train incident than Janet did. Dan couldn’t help but feel guilty.
*7*
Dan and Melissa returned to a newsroom buzzing with commotion. They could hear it from down the hall when they entered the building. You didn’t have to be a reporter to know that something had happened—something big.
The call came over the police scanner only moments ago. Laura assumed command, giving the various news teams their destinations. She conferred with the assignment editor and the producer about possible angles they could cover, hopefully fresh ones that the competition hadn’t thought of yet.
“What’s going on?” Dan asked another photographer.
“They’ve just found the body of a girl in a Dumpster. She’s in pretty bad shape.”
“That makes the second this week!” Dan said. “They finally found that girl that was missing a few weeks back. She was in a Dumpster too, wasn’t she?”
The photographer nodded, understanding the implications.
Melissa approached the small group that was huddled around Laura, eager to get involved, but wishing her first day hadn’t brought such a grisly topic. The accident was bad enough. She joined Laura in mid-briefing.
“…completely naked, except that her clothes were found with her. There was a purse there, and a driver’s license identifying her as Jennifer Cook. The coroner won’t confirm her identity while the Dumpster is dusted for prints. Since the purse has a substantial amount of money in it the police are guessing it’s hers, and that robbery wasn’t a motive. It was probably tossed in there at the same time the killer dumped the body.”
“Can’t they just look at the picture on the license and see if it’s the girl?” someone asked.
Laura frowned. “From what I understand, she’s been dead a while. Also, the corpse is heavily mutilated. Both wrists and ankles were cut, allowing for an incredible amount of blood loss. And this wasn’t over the police band, but it’s rumored that she was slashed repeatedly, even after she was dead, resulting in hundreds of lacerations over her body. Her face is supposedly cut up so badly that visual identification is impossible.”
