B00IZ66CZ8 EBOK

by Unknown

  “Dry’s sculptures were horrific, terrifying, and just plain obscene,” the article read.

  Shane clicked on the other link to view the images of them.

  The link opened to pictures of the sculptures. The first series that Shane saw was a group of pornographic tin men. Each was posed in a perverse sexual position. The men were missing limbs.

  A second image showed metal wires and strips fused together to form another tin man. He held the severed heads of two tin women.

  There was truly a sick mind at work in Townsend’s head.

  However, a few tasteless metal sculptures did not make him a murderer. They only proved that he was demented.

  Shane searched through more of the links beyond the posted images. After several minutes of surfing through the website, Shane discovered another link that was attached to Cornell University.

  He clicked it.

  It led to the university’s official webpage for the department of architecture. The background on the page was of the Milstein Hall, a building of famous architectural design. It was a place where students had over 20,000 square feet of open space in order to study and design different projects.

  Shane browsed through the different pictures of students and rooms in the school. After several pages, he noticed a picture of a group of students talking to one of their professors. In the background of the picture, he saw one of Townsend Dry’s sculptures.

  Shane double clicked and enlarged the image to get a better look at the sculpture. It was unmistakably one of Townsend’s pieces. The art piece had outstretched metal arms. The hands were severed at the wrists.

  It was dark and twisted.

  After further investigating the morbid piece, Shane discovered that an entire wing of the building was named after Townsend.

  After a few more pages, we discovered no more images of it.

  I smiled behind Shane’s eyes. We had to take a trip to the campus and see the pieces for ourselves.

  Shane leaned back from the computer screen and picked up the phone. He buzzed Tina.

  “Yes,” she answered.

  “Call my car around front. I have to take a drive somewhere,” he said.

  “Yes, sir.”

  Down on the street, Shane’s Mercedes Benz hummed. His driver held the driver’s door open for him.

  “Take the rest of the day off. I’ll drive myself home tonight,” Shane told him.

  “Okay,” the driver responded. He closed the door behind Shane.

  Shane buckled the seatbelt and drove off.

  Traffic turned out to be light. Still, Cornell was a long drive. It took us about four hours. After getting a visitor’s pass and parking in the visitor’s lot Shane set out on foot.

  He stopped to look at a map posted in a large glass case. He located the right building and headed toward it.

  It was well into the afternoon, so most of the students were off the campus grounds, studying in the library, hanging out in the quad, or just lingering around the local cafes.

  Most of the buildings were plain brick. Across the street, Shane saw generic downtown buildings and some storefronts.

  The stores were targeted toward the student body. They sold books, school sports gear, and other souvenirs.

  Shane walked into Milstein Architectural Building and headed in the direction of the Townsend Dry wing.

  He walked up a large staircase and around winding, elaborate corridors. He even walked over one strange-looking catwalk. Finally, he made it to the top floor. After he rounded a corner, he knew that he was in the right place.

  Townsend Dry’s wing consisted of one long corridor littered with his sculptures.

  Large sections of the walls were cut out so that the sculptures could be displayed inside them like cabinets without doors.

  Each sculpture was encased in a thin glass cover. The glass was screwed into the wall, protecting the sculptures from tampering.

  The sculptures definitely belonged to Townsend. He had no doubt of that, but something about the sculptures was different. They were different from the images on the Internet.

  As he neared the first two, I immediately noticed the difference, and my black heart sank in my chest. A fiendish grin stretched across my face.

  Then Shane realized it too. The difference between these sculptures and the images of the ones on the Internet was substantial. The sculptures online were ferrous with their twisted metal parts. The sculptures surrounding us in Townsend Dry’s collection were carved from wood.

  As he walked down the hall, taking in the sculptures that depicted so much violence, he realized that this hall was much more than a representation of the darkness that lurked inside Townsend.

  At one end of the hallway, a sculpture made of metal initiated the entire series. He followed that metal piece all the way to the end of the line, witnessing the evolution from a man into a serial killer.

  Somewhere along the corridor the pieces lost their metal components and were suddenly made up of totally wooden carvings. They grew in skill as well.

  Townsend Dry had to be the Woodsman.

  Like the illustration of the evolutionary ape that crawled and eventually became an upright-standing, civilized man, Townsend’s evolution from a talentless, disturbed freshman morphed into a diabolical, talented serial killer.

  Over the last decade, Townsend Dry had transformed into a budding and deadly serial killer. The police only knew of a couple of murders by the Woodsman, but I saw his inner devil. I would’ve bet that his skills had been honed long ago. He must have killed more than just the three victims so far.

  Once he’d entered Cornell University as a naive young man, he’d studied architecture and molded himself into a successful business owner, but he’d acquired an education beyond that of his trade. He also developed the tools necessary for murder and mayhem.

  Townsend’s hall reminded me of the Bodies exhibit that had come to D.C. several years ago. In the exhibit, a hundred real corpses were pieced together to perform everyday tasks.

  The twist was that most of the bodies were missing their skin. Skinless corpses of athletes were posed playing football and soccer. Skinless cheerleaders danced with pompoms. Even lawyers stood in a fake courtroom without their skin.

  Shane pulled out his iPhone and began snapping several pictures of each sculpture. This was our evidence. It was not concrete, but it was good enough to know that Townsend was the Woodsman.

  According to Detective Sandy Parks, the Woodsman’s kills were similar to the sculptures before Shane.

  Even though the pieces seemed to fit, I needed a closer look at Townsend Dry in order to be sure that he was the Woodsman. After all, we had been wrong before and I killed the wrong man. I didn’t want to risk killing another innocent man. Shane couldn’t live with another mistake like that.

  My mouth slowly opened and my snakelike tongue emerged, licking my scaly lips.

  I imagined tasting the Woodsman’s blood and I salivated.

  |||||

  Back in the apartment, Shane sat on the floor under the windowsill. His back was straight against the wall. He reviewed the known Woodsman’s murders on his laptop.

  So far the media were only linking the murder in Central Park to one other murder from last month, involving two women, a couple from Long Island.

  No way had the Woodsman only started to kill three months ago. He had honed his abilities over many years. What I saw in that hall was the evidence of a mad man, a killer who had evolved over many years.

  Abducting a woman, skinning her alive, and rigorously placing her body in the middle of Central Park without being detected required tremendous skill and practice.

  He’d killed before.

  With a little research and patience, Shane would discover more killings. Then he could link the Woodsman to Townsend.

  Suddenly, his cell phone rang.

  He peered down at the screen. Sun Good was calling.

  He pressed the green answer button and sa
id, “Hello?”

  “Shane, why are you so quiet? I haven’t heard from you in months,” Sun Good said.

  “Sorry. I’ve been busy here. You know I’m running a multimillion-dollar law firm,” Shane lied.

  “Whatever. I bet you’re doing nothing but idling in your office all day doing pushups.”

  Shane snickered.

  “What do you want? I really am busy,” he said. He stared at images on his laptop of Townsend’s sculptures. He’d downloaded them earlier from his iPhone.

  “Fine. I don’t miss you either,” Sun said.

  Shane smiled. It was his reaction, not mine. He really did miss her.

  “Actually, I’m calling for business reasons. The FBI wants to see you,” she said.

  “Why?”

  FBI? he thought.

  I hadn’t longed to hear that.

  I shuffled positions in Shane’s head, twisting and slithering around. I needed to stretch out. I slid my long tail down his spine and into his chest cavity. I stretched out my tentacles and neck into his skull.

  “Agent Cutter is asking specifically to meet with you,” Sun said.

  “When? I’m very busy,” Shane said.

  “He’s already in New York City. He’ll try to see you tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow is no good. I’ve got meetings all day,” Shane lied again.

  “I’m not your secretary. Work it out,” she said.

  Shane said nothing in response.

  Dead silence hung between them for a moment.

  Then Sun said, “Listen, I want to talk with you later, but right now I have to go.

  “Call me after you speak with Cutter. Tell me what he says. Okay?” Sun said.

  “Yeah. Okay,” Shane answered. He paused a beat, waiting to see if she had anything else to say, then hung up.

  Now we had to deal with Cutter and the FBI.

  Agent Cutter had killed Miguel Crown in cold blood, according to my vision, so he fit the right profile for Shane’s victims. He was a killer.

  However, he was FBI. That made him very dangerous. I wasn’t sure if we could take on him, the Woodsman, and the FBI all at the same time. But it looked like Special Agent Cutter was not going to give us much of a choice.

  Shane had to juggle his nightlife and the law firm at the same time. At least he wasn’t on an important case right now.

  And we had the element of surprise. Neither Cutter nor the Woodsman knew that we were coming for him.

  I smiled.

  |||||

  Later that day Shane went to court. He wanted the FBI to think that he was working hard in order to appear like he had been busy running the firm. So he asked Tina about any trials that were going on today and he ended up sitting in on one.

  The trial was of little importance to the firm. It was a simple case of armed robbery and assault with a deadly weapon.

  Teri Givens had held a bank teller at gunpoint for all of $400. Nothing stellar, but she’d shot the teller in frustration when she’d found out there was so little money in the cash till.

  Teri, a twenty-year-old single mom on welfare, faced life in prison and her two children faced a childhood as wards of the state.

  The only reason why this case was remotely on the docket of Lasher & Associates was because Teri’s estranged father owned a chain of grocery stores across Manhattan and New Jersey. He was rich. He had the money and the firm needed the business.

  Apparently having a rich daddy didn’t mean that his children wouldn’t resort to criminal activities. And since he had cut her off when she turned eighteen, it wasn’t a surprise to him that she had kids that he hadn’t known about. Neither did it surprise him that she had turned to a life of crime.

  Shane sat in this tedious trial for most of the day. He was so bored with the proceedings that he kept checking his iPhone to see if Agent Cutter had called. Better to be interrogated by the FBI then to sit in this courtroom any longer.

  He longed to leave, even if it was to talk to a deranged FBI serial killer hunter.

  The courtroom was crowded. Most of the crowd was related to the victim somehow: aunts, cousins, and even some distant cousins. Seemed like a tight bunch.

  Shane’s iPhone buzzed in his jacket pocket. He reached in and pulled the phone out. He had a text message. It read:

  This is Special Agent Kirk Cutter.

  I need to see you now.

  Go to Central Park.

  Find a uniform cop. Tell him who you are.

  I’ll be waiting.

  Shane leaned toward the paralegal next to him and told her that he was leaving.

  He quietly exited the courtroom.

  Shane took a taxi back to the apartment. He got out on the corner of W 96th St and Central Park West and 72nd St. then he walked to the police barricade that surrounded the entrance to Central Park.

  “Officer,” he said, waving at a uniformed cop.

  “What is it?” the officer said. He spoke with a heavy Brooklyn accent.

  “FBI Agent Cutter asked me to meet him here,” Shane said.

  “Okay. Wait here,” the officer ordered. He turned and stepped ten yards away. He turned to look at Shane from that distance and then got on his radio.

  Shane couldn’t hear what the officer said; there was a moment of radio static before someone responded.

  “Sir, are you Mr. Lasher?” the officer called out.

  “That’s me,” Shane said.

  The officer spouted something back into his radio and then waved to Shane to pass through the barricade.

  Shane followed the instructions and walked over to the officer. The cop pointed him to the entrance to the park and said, “Take a right and follow the path.”

  Being near cops was becoming so normal for us that I barely noticed anymore. Even Shane wasn’t nervous around them. During the StoneCutter case we’d had several interactions with the Secret Service and the MPD. I remembered the fear that they would discover us, but so far no one had. Our camouflage worked flawlessly. Not even other killers saw me hiding in Shane’s head.

  In the park Shane followed the path that the officer had said. He walked along and after a couple of minutes we saw Cutter standing with two other agents.

  He saw Shane and signaled for the other two to leave.

  “Lasher the slasher,” Cutter said.

  Shane shook his head and said, “Don’t call me that.”

  “How often do people call you that?” Cutter asked as he approached Shane. His suit fit him like a second skin.

  “Not as often as you would think,” Shane replied.

  I slithered around and coiled up. I wanted to remain undetected while I tried to study Cutter. I wanted to see his demon without him seeing me. He was not like Townsend Dry. Cutter had hunted numerous serial killers in the past. If anyone would be able to spot me hiding inside of Shane, it was he.

  “Follow me, Shane. We need to talk,” Cutter said.

  Kirk Cutter led Shane deeper into the park. They left the other agents and police behind them. Cutter zigzagged in and out of bushes and walkways.

  Finally, we arrived in a clearing.

  Cutter looked directly at Shane’s face as they stepped into the clearing. He didn’t blink, but merely watched the expressionless face of my vessel as we saw what he was trying to show us.

  In the clearing, just up ahead, Shane stared at a tree stump that was covered in a foreign, stranger-looking wood. The wood had been brought it from somewhere else.

  As Shane looked up, he saw three tall poles erected around the stump. Thin, metal wires dangled from each pole. The wind blew across the park and whipped the wires around like the tentacles of some amphibious, demented creature––like me.

  “The Woodsman used these wires to prop up his victim, twenty-one-year-old Jessica Long,” Cutter said.

  Then Cutter said, “I have been hunting serial killers for a decade. Longer even. And I have never seen anything like this. How did he get all of this in here and then set it up
? And no one claims to have seen him or them. The only eye witness accounts that we have so far is of a white, generic pesticide truck and a brown tent. All of this took place at around 4 in the morning. One homeless guy said he saw the driver, but the man wore a mask.”

  “Mask?” Shane asked.

  “Yeah like a gas mask for the insecticide spray. That’s what we figure,” Cutter said. Then he stopped talking like he realized that Shane was not one of his fellow investigators for the first time.