by Mike Ward
Jacksonville Jack was sitting in his apartment. He had two Acer netbooks. One was a normal netbook that he used everywhere and it had full internet connection. The other one had never been connected to the internet and never ever would be. There was a good reason for that. If the FBI had run a check on Jack’s private netbook they would have found the names of quite a few women who had been found dead in four cities over the last ten years. If they looked further then they would have found pictures on the netbook too and then they would have had their “Oh Christ” moment. Jack knew he was taking a risk with the netbook but sometimes he just liked to pull out some of those pictures and look at them. There were four main directories marked with the names of his four personas. He went to the directory called “Seattle Sidney”. It wasn’t a picture of a woman he was searching for this time, it was a picture of a man. That man’s name was Daniel Brody and he was in a sub directory called Linda Ryan. Daniel Brody had been Linda Ryan’s boyfriend and he had had the audacity to disturb Seattle Sidney while he was having a little party with Linda. Sidney had been much more savage than Jack would ever be and Sidney had really lost his temper with Daniel Brody. Jacksonville Jack clicked on a picture and it came up. Daniel Brody sat on an armchair, he was holding “Tent Life in Siberia” by George Kennan. Brody’s eyes were glazed over, you could see that in the picture and that might be enough to tell you that Brody was dead, especially if you were used to seeing dead bodies. However, if you missed the look in Brody’s eyes then the big fucking ice pick sticking out of Daniel Brody’s left ear would give away the fact that he was almost certainly dead. Jack could still remember doing that. Daniel Brody had been lying on the floor still stunned from the four or five massive blows Seattle Sidney had given him with a stool. As Brody lay there on his right side Sidney had rammed an ice pick through his ear and into his brain. For a moment Jack could feel Sidney’s rage and he wondered if Sidney was still in there. Jack worked always planning to be disturbed and then if it happened he was ready but Seattle Sidney had not worked that way. Sidney had been completely surprised when Daniel Brody walked through the door and he had erupted into rage. There had been nothing else Sidney could do, Linda Ryan had been lying naked on the floor when the key went into the lock and Sidney had been shaving the tiny hairs off her thighs. Daniel Brody had not been expecting that scene and he had been paralyzed when Sidney had charged him with a stool in his hands.
Sometimes when Jack thought back he was surprised that Sidney had never been caught, he was much more thorough and much more careful than Sidney had ever been. Sidney had been subject to fits of rage but that just didn’t happen with Jack. If Jack had smoked then now would have been the time to light a cigarette while he sat back and thought about things. It was inevitable that he would be caught one day but then again was it? If he walked down to his local library there was a big rack of missing person pictures. Some of those people looked a little unstable but many of them looked perfectly normal. Where did all those people disappear to? Obviously there were some serial killers who went completely undetected, there had to be. The question was, did the FBI miss just a few per cent of the serial killers in the United States or did they miss a significant percentage? Of course Jack was different, they knew he existed all right because Sidney had gotten into the habit of emailing pictures of his victims to everybody in their address books. Somehow they’d all carried that one on, St. Louis Lenny had done it, Baltimore Bertie had done it and now Jack was still doing it. However, there was a problem. When Jack had killed Janice Holden he had emailed pictures of her to everyone in her address book. That was the last thing Jack had done before leaving Janice Holden’s apartment and he had blended in with the morning rush hour, even driving past the FBI building on Gate Parkway just after he left Janice’s apartment. Before Jack was even past the FBI building one of Janice Holden’s friends had seen the pictures of Janice on her brand new Samsung phone and hey presto the cops were on the way. Jack knew that because as he was driving along Gate Parkway six cop cars had come screaming past him. Six fucking police cars and he had been gone literally five to six minutes from the apartment. There had been four people in the parking lot as he walked out of Janice Holden’s building just looking like a normal commuter. All four of them were busy tired commuters about to go for another hard day’s work and since the police took six minutes to arrive and they were all rushing to work then all four would have been gone when the cops arrived. But what if one of them hadn’t been gone? What if all the cops from the first five police cars went running up to Janice’s apartment but the other one looked around the parking lot and one of those four people was still there. What if that cop got a good description of everyone that person had seen in the parking lot and one of them was tall, dark, clean cut and good looking? That one was Jack and later that day the cops would have gone round the apartments matching descriptions with apartment occupants. They would have found everyone except the tall, dark, clean cut guy and bingo they would have just narrowed down the search.
He went to the new directories. There were twelve of them and there was a woman in each directory. The directories were named with the women’s first names and areas of the city. There was one called “Susan in Mandarin”, another called “Jennifer in Fleming Island”, a third called “Rachel in Southside” and so on. He called up Jennifer in Fleming Island and began to go through the file. Jennifer was 42 and she was a senior manager with a Fortune 100 company. She traveled to many cities and was missing from her house quite often. If she became a target then Jack would be waiting for her on a Friday night when she arrived back from Jacksonville International Airport. Jack had a problem with the word “international” in the airport name as last time he had checked you couldn’t catch an international flight from Jacksonville. They had added San Juan in Puerto Rico to the list of destinations but that was hardly international since it was an American Protectorate. It was one of two Spanish speaking destinations you could fly to from Jacksonville with Miami being the other one as sixty per cent of Miami’s population had their first language as Spanish. If Jack was going abroad he always flew from Orlando, Fort Lauderdale or Miami. The area around Miami Airport had been extremely unsafe at one time but Jack had stayed in the Hampton Inn down there and it had seemed safe enough to him. On that same trip though he had gone into a gas station nearby when a very expensive car had pulled into the garage. The man had looked like a Cuban or a South American and while he got ready to fill up his girlfriend had gone in to pay for the gas. The station attendant had asked for a credit card and the girl didn’t have one so the station attendant asked for a twenty dollar bill and she didn’t have one of those either. Jack had been interested at this point and was actively paying attention to the conversation, one reason was because the woman was hot as hell, the other reason had been that he was curious just how the girl was going to pay for the gas. Then she had opened her purse which was packed full of one hundred dollar bills, pulled one out from the stash and given it to the attendant and her boyfriend was able to fill up his tank. Although the station attendant was standing beside a sign that said there was less than twenty dollars in the safe there was actually at least four thousand dollars in cash in the store right at that moment, it just wasn’t in the till.
Jack looked out of the window, it was early November and the weather was perfect in Jacksonville. It had been a long, hot summer but the weather had flipped and they were into those halcyon days where the sun was hot but the air was cold and Jacksonville was the place to be. You could still fry if you spent the whole day on the beach but you wouldn’t fry in one hour which was what happened at the height of summer. For a moment he thought about going to the pool in the apartment complex but he was engrossed in what he was doing on his netbook and he didn’t want to take that down. Jack was friendly and always said hello and he knew quite a few people in the complex although he didn’t spend time with any of them. The last thing he needed was to be on his netbook down by the pool and have somebody come
up and ask what he was working on. For a moment an image came into his head of him looking up at one of the people down at the pool and saying “Look at these twelve names here, they’re all local women. I’m gathering data on them and then sometime later this month or early December I’ll kill one of them, probably on a Saturday night.” He was sure the guy would laugh and tell everyone what a funny guy Jack was and everything would be fine until the woman actually did turn up dead in the middle of December and then all hell would break loose.
