Final Cut

by T. S. Worthington

  He was loving every single second of this cat and mouse game. He was pausing now as he held the weapon close to her, getting it ready to cut her open. Was he going to do it slow or was he going to do this fast? That was the question roaring through Bill’s mind. He knew that he could not sit there and watch this poor woman being tortured and cut to pieces. He had to shut it off. He had to turn it off.

  But he had to know. He had to know what the hell was going to happen next. This girl deserved justice. And if he could use these videos to help him bring her killer down someway then he owed it to her to do that.

  Unless the killer was him. He had not allowed this insane thought to leave his mind, but it was quite possible that it was him. He could not allow his own name to be entirely cleared of the crime. He had to sit there and watch. He had no choice or otherwise he would never know the truth and the world would never know the truth.

  What if it was him? What if he uncovered irrefutable evidence that said he killed this girl and possibly others? What was he prepared to do with that knowledge? Would he force himself to go to the police or would he just pretend it never happened and hope to hell that no one ever found out what he did?

  He didn’t know. He knew that he was not a killer. Or at least he wasn’t anymore. If he was a monster and he had committed these crimes then he had been cured of whatever had made him that way. He was a good person now. He knew he was. But he felt that he always had been. He could remember everything about his life before the accident. It did not make sense for him to have amnesia when it came to this one specific thing.

  Unless he blocked it out on purpose. Or he was a multiple personality. He had read about things like this where people killed others and were completely unaware they had done so because their mind had split into several distinct personalities to cope with hardships and trauma early in life or else they would not have been able to deal otherwise. The mind was a complicated thing and it had a myriad of defenses at its disposal to protect itself from harm.

  The camera turned from the girl again and moved closer to the table of weapons. The camera panned over the collection of deadly instruments slowly until it came to the saw. There it paused and zoomed in closer. A hand grabbed the saw by the handle and lifted it off the table.

  The camera quickly whipped around at the girl who was now even more terrified as the saw was now in the killer’s hand. She knew what was about to happen and that she was powerless to do anything about it. She was as good as dead and this inhuman beast was going to make sure she suffered as much as she could before she took her last breath.

  The camera became shaky as the killer approached and began to saw the girl’s right ear off the side of her head. She trembled and shook trying to break free with every muscle and ounce of fight in her body. The pained look of terror and agony melted on her face as the shock overcame her body. She was screaming through the gag until Bill thought her voice box would rupture at any second.

  Bill felt sick. The room around him started to spin a little and he felt like he had to lay down or he was going to pass out. He turned the DVD player to stop and laid down on the couch while the tears began to stream out of his eyes. He could not ever remember crying. Not since he was maybe seven years old. He had cried over a whipping his father had given him over something stupid and the old man seemed to get such a rush and a chuckle out of seeing him in pain that he vowed to never show the man pain or fear ever again. Once he stopped being afraid and started to care none at all about the whippings they stopped. That was the only way to stop a sadist; it wasn’t fun if you didn’t care.

  But this was too much. He had never witnessed such a brutal and bizarre action committed on another human being or any living thing for that matter. This psycho made anything his father ever did seem like a love tap. This monster had to be stopped. There was no way it could be him. He refused to believe that any part of him might actually be a monster like this. Even if he was crazy he would remember doing something like that. There was no way that anyone would ever forget they had done such a horrible thing to someone else.

  What had he seen?

  As he tried desperately to get the image out of his head he remembered seeing the killer pick up the saw and something lying on the table next to the saw. It was a driver’s license. The glimpse of the picture that he had seen showed it belonged to this girl. Could he have really gotten that lucky? Perhaps there was a reason that he was pushing himself so hard and it was not just to clear his own name and preserve his own sanity.

  He turned the DVD player back on and rewound it back to that spot. He could clearly see when he paused the DVD player just right that it was that girl’s driver’s license and he could see her name—Daisy Fox. For some reason Bill noticed that the name seemed to suit her just right. Judging by the happy girl in the picture he could see that she was full of life and promise. It was so tragic to see a life like that so young and cut down for no reason in the prime. He wondered if it would have been just as sad to see anyone at any age in that video.

  As Bill focused in closer he could clearly see the address on the driver’s license. The girl lived at 1122 Greenmont Ave, in Cutler. That was only about a half hour drive from Crestwood Falls. He had to find out more about this girl and where she’d last been seen and who she had been seen with.

  He fired up the laptop and began a search for any information that he could find for Daisy Fox in Cutler, Ohio. His search instantly turned up several pages of results. Most of them from local newspapers about the mysterious disappearance and the search party that had turned up no leads. According to several new reports Daisy was last seen hanging out at Logan’s bar with a girlfriend of hers. Daisy and her friend Cara were celebrating the fact that Cara had just been dumped by her boyfriend. It was a thing that both girls did; when they ended a relationship or they were dumped by their significant others they went out drinking to celebrate—not to drown their sorrows. Cara said it was something they had secretly been doing since high school when they would raid her mom’s liquor cabinet and take a bottle of vodka down by the river banks and just hang out.

  Cara said that she had to go home because she was opening the diner the next day, but Daisy had the day off and she had stayed behind to talk to a friend of hers that she had run into. Cara did not know this friend and no one else had really seen her talking to her.

  Bill wondered if this mystery woman was in on it somehow. Maybe there was more than one person involved here. There was no way that a woman was operating that saw and holding the camera. From what Bill had glimpsed of the hand reaching for the saw it was definitely a man’s hand. If the woman had been there then it would have been feasible that she would have been operating the camera or at least taking turns destroying this young girl’s life.

  Bill researched the stories for about an hour and most of them said the same thing and there was nothing else mentioned about Daisy. This had been five months ago and her body had never been found. Where the hell was she? Did they weigh her down and throw her in the river? If that was the case she might have been carried off downstream somewhere or she could be in the same spot, but the Ohio River was huge and you would never find a body in the thing unless you had a pretty good idea where to look and the killer could have driven her a hundred miles down the river and dumped her before anyone knew.

  Bill needed to talk to Cara and see what else she might know. He figured that she had told the police everything that she knew, but he also knew that the police had their hands tied sometimes when working on a case because of all the tiny laws that protected every citizen whether they were guilty or not. Bill was not confined to such things. If he heard something that sounded like it ought to be checked out then he was damned sure going to do it.

  Before he left he forced himself to watch the other videos. Two were blank and the other video was basically just more of the prolonged torture and agony of Daisy Fox. It was disgusting and Bill had fast forwarded through most of it so h
e didn’t have to actually watch or listen to it. He was just waiting to see if there was some mistake or slip up in the video that might have given him some more information.

  He was just about at the end and ready to shut the thing off so he could head out the door when he saw it. The killer had a pocket knife and he was carving little chunks out of Daisy Fox’s face. As he held up the blade during one of the last cuts on the barely alive Daisy Fox the camera staggered back a bit and Bill could glimpse for the briefest second the killer’s wrist.

  There on his wrist was an odd shaped burn scar.

  Bill thought he had seen it somewhere before. He racked his brain trying to come up with it but so far he was pulling up blanks.

  But he did know one thing.

  The killer’s hand did not belong to him.

  Chapter 7

  “OLD FRIENDS”

  “I told the cops everything I knew,” Cara said to Bill as she sat a cup of coffee down in front of him. He thanked her and took a sip. It was good and strong—the perfect way coffee was supposed to taste.

  “Yea, I read the articles, but there has been a few new leads opening up in the Crestwood Falls department that have steered us this way and got us thinking that we might have missed something,” Bill said.

  “Are you a cop?”

  Bill paused. He considered lying. “No, I am not a cop. I’m a liaison. I occasionally work with law enforcement on a strictly volunteer basis just to help them out since being a small force they are limited in manpower sometimes. It seems as soon as they get a few new recruits the big city boys start calling their names and they leave us high and dry. Can’t blame them of course; all the money and the action is in the big city.”

  Bill was not sure if he was exactly breaking the law by saying any of this, but it was what he was working with and he hoped that he could be convincing enough to ease the huge wall that Cara had put up in front of her. It was easy to see the girl had severe trust issues, but Bill did not think any of that should apply to him if he played it cool and just let her know that he wanted to help. That was the only reason he was there.

  “Ok, well I don’t know what questions you have, but I’ll do my best to answer them.”

  “Thank you,” Bill said. “From the information we have it says that you stated that you saw Daisy with another woman on the night she disappeared when you left her at the bar. Is that right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Have you ever seen that woman before or since?”

  “No, I have not.”

  “Can you describe her to me?” Bill asked.

  “Sure. She was pretty, a few years older than us—like three or four maybe—and she had dark hair that looked like a cross between auburn and red. I think she probably dyed her hair and it might have been naturally red. She just looked nice and normal. I figured that she and Daisy knew each other as Daisy said they did and that they were going to spend the night catching up. I had to work early and open the diner; Daisy was supposed to come in at eleven.”

  “And then of course she never came in and you didn’t hear from her after that again,” Bill said quietly. He sipped the hot coffee and wished he had paid attention to what kind of coffee it was. It tasted nice and strong and he would have loved to keep it on hand. College kids had the best damn drugs and the best damn coffee; it was true.

  “Right. I got worried when she didn’t show for work and then she didn’t respond to any of my texts. We are best friends and have been since sophomore year of high school. We talk and text every single day. So I drove by her place after I got off work and she was not home. We had walked to the bar since it was just a few blocks over and it is like the only bar on this side of town.”

  Bill remembered reading that both girls were part time students at State Community College in the nearby town of Hocking. Hocking was a typical college town because it had State Community and it also had Hocking Tech college as well. But it was about twenty five miles away and for two girls who did not live in the dorms getting blitzed in the local watering hole was probably a more typical type of thing.

  “Did you happen to talk to the bartender when Daisy didn’t come home? Maybe they saw something or might have seen her leaving with that woman?”

  “No. I called in and spoke to the same bartender that was on duty—Pat her name is—and she said she did not notice anything. It had been a pretty busy night and it was tough to keep track of people.”

  “I understand that. That was pretty much the same story she gave us when we talked to her,” Bill said trying to sound convincing like the cops on television always did. It was more difficult trying to act natural than he thought it was going to be. He wondered how the cops always managed to pull off such a good job.

  “And Daisy did not mention the other woman’s name to you when you were there? Did she introduce you to her?”

  “She did but we bumped into her as we were leaving and I did not register hearing that woman’s name. I just kind of smiled and nodded because I was getting a bit drunk and I just wanted to lie down and pass out. I have tried and tried to remember what name she gave me an honestly I just can’t do it.”

  “Ok, that is understandable in that situation.”

  “Do you think this woman could have had anything to do with it? I got the feeling that Daisy and she knew each other really well. They were all hugging and squealing when they bumped into each other and it took them like five minutes to remember that I was even alive.”

  “So it was someone she had not seen in a long time? Were there any other identifiable marks or anything at all that might help us pinpoint who this other woman might be?” Bill asked.

  “No, nothing that I can think of. You really think she is involved somehow? But they knew each other,” Cara said.

  “Yea, but you would be surprised how often these types of things turn bad.”

  “That’s just hard to imagine,” Cara said sipping her own coffee.

  “Now, have you noticed anything strange on Daisy’s social media accounts or anything else that might be fishy with the way some of your common contacts and friends are acting?” Bill asked.

  Cara thought for a moment and at first Bill was not sure she had even understood the question. “No, not that I’m aware of. I haven’t noticed anything.”

  “At the time of her disappearance was she dating anyone or did she just finish a relationship with anyone?” Bill asked.

  “No. Her last relationship ended about six months prior and they had left on good terms where they just wanted different things at different times.”

  “How so?”

  “Well, I know that Daisy wanted to stay put for a while and finish school and get some low level job at some place of business in the area. Everyone told her that she was crazy. With her brains and her beauty she could have gone and done just about anything that she really set her mind to. We all believed in her.”

  “Why didn’t she want to leave? I know most kids can’t wait to get out of this shithole, even though most eventually come back with their tail between their legs after being beat up by the cruel, harsh, world.”

  “Well, she has always been so close to her family and she was the type of person who was really uncomfortable with change. She was a fearful person and she was cautious to the point of being overcautious. It was weird actually how meticulous and careful she was about everything. She always referred to it as being efficient, but the rest of us just thought it was weird.

  “So she would never have gone anywhere with someone she did not know and perfectly trust?” Bill asked.

  “Right. She would not have gone off with anyone she did not know.”

  Cara’s eyes flashed just then as if a lightbulb had went on in her head. Bill wondered how the poor girl had never really thought that the attractive young, but slightly older friend might not have been so innocent and minor mannered after all. Bill felt a bit strange; surely the police would have asked her all o
f the same questions, but maybe they phrased them differently.

  “Ok, well I appreciate your time and your hospitality,” Bill said.

  “Sure, no problem,” Cara said as Bill started for the door. He was just about through the doorway when Cara posed one last question. For a girl who was so reluctant to open up and to now discuss it with him was quite the miracle and quite the change. Bill found it odd and it triggered something inside of him that brought forth the vacant idea that perhaps Cara was involved somehow. Maybe two women had done this together. But what motivation would they have? They didn’t even take any money from the victim. It would have to be an extremely personal attack. The way that Daisy was killed was obviously very personal but tearing her up and killing her by torture was beyond personal. That was something that someone with a deep seated psychological need to possess and dominate other people felt compelled to do. This might have been the first murder, but Bill did not believe for a second that it was the last.

  Bill left Cara’s house feeling like he got some information, but it was information that he didn’t know was going to be the least bit useful to him. Somehow he felt as if he was right back at square one. Was it possible that Cara had a reason to get rid of Daisy? Was there something that her friend might have done to make Cara go completely insane with rage and want to exact the horrid revenge scenario he had seen taking place in front of him on the video?

  Somehow his gut instinct said no; Cara had nothing to do with it. But he wasn’t sure how much faith he wanted to put in his gut instinct right now. He was not a cool, collected, experienced gumshoe. He was just some schmuck who had ended up in the pit of hell and was clinging desperately to the walls to climb his way out.

  He had to find out who the hell that other woman was that Daisy was talking to. Of course they only person who could verify that Daisy was talking to anyone was Cara and she just raised a few wrinkles of suspicion on herself.