The StoneCutter

by Scott Blade

  "Is it true that they lost the murder weapon?"

  "Mr. Verize."

  Shane backed away from the podium and faded into the crowd, like a lion fading into the brush. He allowed the media, the vultures, to have their way with Paul. It didn't matter anymore what they asked him. He was already ours. He was already free. He had been proven innocent in the eyes of the law, but not in our eyes.

  Shane lifted his briefcase and walked off, vanishing into the traffic of pedestrians. We melded into them, like a crocodile lying on the river floor, waiting for a lonely deer that wanted a simple drink of water. Instead, it found our deadly jaws.

  |||||

  Shane's penthouse was on the roof of a very expensive apartment building which suited our needs because of its central location in Washington D.C.

  The apartment was very modern. It had four bedrooms: one was a personal office, one a home gym with very expensive equipment, one was the master bedroom, and one was empty.

  Shane's penthouse was typical of a high-priced defense lawyer and bachelor. He kept up all appearances. No one suspected us of being the dark, deadly monster that we really were. Only Shane knew about me. He hid me from the public. It was imperative to our survival that he kept my face hidden in the darkest corners of his body.

  Shane's penthouse was approximately 2200 sq. feet. It was neat, tidy, and clutter-free. Abstract paintings strategically hung on the walls. It also had a yard of sorts. Two sliding glass doors opened up onto the roof. We used the space on the roof as a backyard. It had a large stainless steel barbecue grill, and some posh patio furniture, covered by a thick cloth canopy.

  Across the roof from his apartment was a smaller single-bedroom apartment. To visitors, it appeared that we shared our roof-yard with the occupant of that single bedroom apartment, but we did not. That apartment actually belonged to us. Actually, it was mine. Shane rented it under an alias. It was where he hid most of what I do.

  It was my gory workshop, my dark studio, my secret lair.

  On the roof of my lair, was a large industrial chimney. The chimney led to a moderately sized furnace, a must-have for any inner city serial killer.

  We disposed of most of our victims through the furnace. We didn't always make it though, and sometimes there were special circumstances that called for more creative ways of disposing of a corpse.

  The Green River Killer dumped his victims in the woods—amateurish. To his credit, he did throw off the police by planting cigarette butts all over the dumpsite. He picked up used butts from different public places and dropped them at his murder sites, effectively thwarting police investigations. And he didn't even smoke. His mistake was returning to the dumpsites. He would return, often with his wife. He took her too close to the decomposing bodies of his victims. He was careless. They had sex near his dumpsite, and he would imagine having sex with the dead prostitutes. He was a sick one.

  Sex with dead bodies wasn't my thing.

  Rough sex interested me. Regular sex was more of Shane's side of our brain. His side of the brain, that small 10% I mentioned, was where sexual transactions took place. I liked the animalistic, primal side of sex. Kissing and foreplay was for the sheep.

  Although, I will admit that I liked the faces that women made. Their moans and orgasms were similar to the death rattles of our victims. I liked when they screamed.

  Maybe that was what the Green River Killer liked so much. The devil within him wanted to relive the deaths of the numerous prostitutes that he strangled until their eyes turned black.

  Ted Bundy was another serial killer who had a fetish for women. He would return to their bodies and have sex with them, or so Shane learned in college. I wish I had gotten my claws around his neck, but the Florida justice system got that trophy.

  We killed serial killers. Shane convinced himself that the reason why we did what we did was for justice. He rationalized my existence by allowing me to kill murderers like I was just another part of natural selection. To him, I was nature's way of taking care of the trash—a predator of predators.

  I allowed him to believe that. It gave him the false sense that he controlled us. It gave him the delusion that he was my master; that he could resist me.

  The truth was that I killed killers because they were the most fun, the most challenging. Shane got off on casual sex with women. I got off on the casual bloodbath of a killer. Watching an unsuspecting predator fight for his life in court was only second best to taking his head clean off with a sharpened hatchet.

  Ted Bundy had a desire to hunt down other killers. Back in the eighties, he helped the police capture the Green River Killer. Apparently, they were at a loss in that case. So they sent someone to Ted Bundy's cell. While he sat on death row, he revealed enough about his devil to help the authorities discover the Green River Killer's demon.

  Teddy was dangerous to the rest of us. He should have never revealed our existence to the world. It was safer for me to live in a world that believed that the Son of Sam really was crazy enough to believe that his neighbor's dog told him to kill. Really his neighbor’s dog wasn’t the voice of the devil. It was a creature inside of him that he heard. It was a voice like mine. I didn't want humans to believe that I existed, that none of us did. The less that humans understood about us, the safer we were.

  Shane walked through the bowels of our lair. His briefcase rested near the front door.

  Paul's hammer rested inside.

  Shane's lair had an office. It may have looked like a normal home office, but it was for a different purpose. The office contained all the usual makings: a laptop, a desk, a leather chair, and a filing cabinet. The filing cabinet was locked. It contained files of multiple case briefs. Each was of a murderer or serial killer that had fallen victim to us.

  Shane approached a series of walls near a fake fireplace. It was really the backside of a furnace. Having a fireplace doubling as a furnace was a way of hiding the furnace and its bodily contents from the neighbors. Not that we ever needed to explain it. Anyone who entered our lair wasn't coming out alive anyway.

  The walls that Shane stared at were incorporated with these elaborate glass cabinets. The cabinets were meant to be display cases, designed for historic weapons. Instead of historic weapons, they housed our trophies. Each of these items would have been the key evidence to gain a conviction in a murder case.

  Ordinarily, we killed killers using their own weapons against them. Then, we kept the weapons as trophies. I couldn't be without them. They were my impulse. They were my trophies, my souvenirs.

  Shane was against keeping them, but I had to have them. Most serial killers kept trophies. Bundy piled bodies in the same dumpsites. Dahmer kept body parts, including genitalia in his house. I kept the murder weapon.

  Shane was against this because if we were ever caught the trophies would connect us to every murder that we committed. I didn't care. I needed to have them. I wasn't going to give them up.

  Suddenly, Shane's cell phone rang. The ringtone was from a song we knew growing up by the Smashing Pumpkins. It repeated the same song lyric over and over:

  There's a killer in me.

  There's a killer in you.

  Shane looked at the caller ID. It was Detective Sun Good.

  He grimaced.

  "Shane Lasher," he answered.

  "Good. You decided to answer me," Sun Good said.

  "Sun, how are you? Is this a social call?" Shane asked.

  "The last thing I want in my mouth is the cock of a serial killer's lawyer," Det. Sun Good retorted.

  Out of all of the ex-girlfriends that Shane made me refrain from killing, I liked Sun Good the most. Yet, I hated her too.

  Among her many talents that Shane enjoyed, my favorite was her conversational style. She had a way with words––a special way. She wielded words the way that I wielded sharp objects.

  "Colorful, Sun as always. What do you want then?"

  "Shane, shut up and listen. There has been another murder. We need to talk.
I have to locate your client. It appears that he has killed again," she said.

  Shane almost dropped the cell phone along with his jaw.

  "What?" he said while trying to quickly regain his composure.

  "Are you retarded? I said the son-of-a-bitch has struck again. You got him off and now he is killing again. What did you think would happen? He was just going to stop?"

  The only sense of shock greater than Shane's was my own. I was surprised, and nothing ever surprised me. I was a creature of ample astuteness. I'm not sure how I missed this. I thought that even a nitwit like Paul Verize would wait awhile after his verdict before he started to pulverizing kids again.

  Besides, I had his hammer. He must have bought a new one or he had a hidden one someplace, a backup weapon. Shane saw him only hours ago. He must have gone straight from the courthouse to the hardware store, back to the university campus, and then picked out another student to bash to bits.

  Shane felt guilty and saddened by this. I could sense it. Sometimes, he was far more human than I realized. I treaded lightly around that side of him. The last thing I needed was for him to refuse, fight, or disobey me.

  "I'm sorry, Sun. I didn't think that he was that stupid," Shane said.

  "He is a criminal, a killer, Shane. They are all stupid," she said.

  "I always thought the ones who got caught were stupid," Shane said, trying to make light of his mistake. He should have let me do what I wanted already instead of making me wait until tomorrow.

  This was his fault, and he felt it. We had to act fast. Guilt was a dangerous thing. Guilt could consume and change a man. It could corrupt his nature. It could make him turn on me. I had to stop it. I could never allow guilt to seep too far into his brain.

  "Shane the dumbest ones are the ones who haven't gotten caught. They are dumb enough to think that they will get away."

  Interesting, Shane thought. He looked up at his reflection in the glass case that displayed our kill trophies.

  Shane viewed me as the devil that he needed to feed. Sometimes, when Shane looked in the mirror, he stared at me. He could see my ghastly eyes and beastly features protruding through his own.

  "Shane, I need you to make sure that he doesn't go anywhere. I will be by your office first thing in the morning. Right now we are still at the crime scene, but I know that they are going to ask me to come see you and your client. I can't disclose any more details. I just wanted you to be aware that tomorrow you will have to assist us," Sun Good said. Abruptly, she hung the phone up.

  "Shit!" Shane said.

  I remained calm. It was a minor setback, nothing for Shane to get upset about. We had to move up the schedule. That was all.

  Shane peered out of the window. Perfect views of the city surrounded our penthouse. The sun set behind the White House. Nightfall came over the city like an invitation for me to come out and play.

  Shane would step aside. He faded back into his body so that I could rise to the surface. In a few hours the moon would be out. The time to hunt drew near.

  Moments after Shane's transformation was completed, I stepped out of his apartment building. I walked towards the metro and rode it out of the city, toward Paul Verize's neighborhood.

  "Paulverizer, I am coming for you," I whispered.

  |||||

  Shane was not here. This was the part where I took over. This was my part, my role to play. The human known as Shane Lasher was a vanishing smoke. He would return when I exhaled.

  I rode the Metro out of the city towards Paul Verize's house. After getting off I made sure to take a taxi into a nearby neighborhood, but not directly to his house. Shane represented this man for months. We knew everything about him. I knew that he lived alone. I knew that he drove a Ford Escape with plenty of cargo room in the back for garbage bags full of body parts.

  I was good at hiding bodies. I was good at a lot of things. Being a serial killer living in an urban area, such as D.C., was a challenge, but not impossible. Many of the greats survived in urban areas, like Jack the Ripper or the Zodiac.

  Urban areas posed more problems because of the lack of privacy, but it also provided more camouflage. Perhaps, someday I would retire to a small western town. It was much easier to kill with privacy in a place like that. People went missing all of the time in the old west.

  I was the creature that hid inside of Shane's body. He was a young and attractive celebrity lawyer living in a town full of celebrities with law degrees. In the whitest city in the world, lived the darkest creature—me. My home was only blocks from the White House. My home was the blackest house.

  I found numerous ways of disposing of bodies. We often had to be creative in this matter, thus employing different methods of disposal such as: the furnace, burial, or sometimes the ocean.

  In a past client's case, I cut up his body parts and drove them to the airport. I left his car in long-term parking and took Shane's car that we stashed down the street days earlier. Then I drove him to our penthouse and took him to our incinerator.

  In a city this size, witnesses were everywhere. Still, it was easy to blend in. People who lived in big cities usually ignored everyone else. I made good use of this. In D.C., everyone was so busy shuffling along in their own little lives that they rarely stopped to notice anyone else. They never stopped to notice that a serial killer lived next door.

  The cab pulled up to the curb. I slipped him a twenty and stepped onto the sidewalk. Using Shane's muscular arm, I lifted the heavy briefcase out of the cab and walked down the professor's street. The tail of Shane's black Armani half-trench coat flapped behind me. I walked to visit the Paulverizer. I walked to vengeance, to murder, to fun.

  |||||

  Dr. Paul Verize lived in a nice house on a nice street. Drunkenly, he parked his Ford Escape in the driveway and cut the engine off. He got out, forgetting the keys in the ignition. He left the cabin lights on as well. He stumbled to the front door.

  At the door, he fumbled around in his pocket for the keys.

  "Shit!" he cursed. Then he drunkenly, muttered, "I forgot'em."

  He turned back towards his car and saw that the cabin lights were still on. He stumbled about and pressed his hand against his front door to balance himself. The pressure from his hand pushed the door ajar. It was unlocked.

  Forgetting about his keys, Paul was more curious as to why his front door was unlocked. He was positive that he locked it before he went out to celebrate his victory in court. He was not the type of serial killer to be so careless.

  Suddenly, his senses sharpened and he felt less inebriated.

  Standing ready for anything, he crept into his house. The door squeaked open. Quietly, he stood in his foyer. The house was completely black. Nothing appeared to be disturbed. The atmosphere was calm.

  Still the killer inside Paul remained highly suspicious. He sensed something was wrong. He walked further into the depths of his own lair.

  Pictures of various trips to Europe hung on the walls. He crept down the hall and turned left. He entered his library. Various dead authors littered the shelves. A large, black leather sofa rested in the middle of the room. An empty, brick fireplace took up the section of room across from his bookshelves.

  Paul searched the room and noticed nothing out of place. He began to move back into the hallway, when he noticed that his desk lamp was on. He couldn't remember leaving it on.

  Then he reentered the room. He moved over to the desk. Lying underneath the dim light was a typed index card. He picked it up and began to read it. It was a filing card the size of a toe tag. It looked very official. It read:

  Exhibit A: Stainless Steel Sledge Hammer

  Property of DC Police Department

  Do Not Remove

  Paul's jaw dropped in utter shock. It was the evidence tag for his sledge hammer; the one piece of evidence that would have convicted him, but the police had misplaced it.

  As Paul's eyes adjusted to the dim light covering the desk, he noticed a plane ticket lyin
g next to the evidence tag. It was a one-way ticket out of the country. The ticket was for only one passenger. It had his name on it. It was to a South American country.

  "Going on a trip, Paul?" a dark, unrecognizable voice said from behind him.

  Paul whipped around and came face to face with a dark figure standing tall in the doorway.

  "Who are you? Where did you get this tag?"

  "I am like you, Paulverizer. I am like you," I said.

  Paul didn't know what to do. He didn't know how to react.

  "Those boys, Paul. Those boys trusted you," I said. I began circling him like a lion to its prey. This was my favorite part. It thrilled me to confront them, to toy with them.

  "They scorned me! I was their fag professor!" Paul shouted. He searched around the room for a weapon, but I had already removed all the would-be weapons out of his reach.

  "Looking for something, Paul? Maybe something to bludgeon me with?"

  "Who the hell are you? What do you want?"

  Stepping out of the shadow, I revealed myself—my true self. Paul saw it. He saw me. Then he winced in terror.

  I wore an Armani coat, blood-red tie with a sheer black suit and a white Calvin Klein shirt. Snuggled tight to my hands was a pair of black leather driving gloves. A blood-red scarf covered the lower part of my face and neck. The scarf matched my tie, perfectly. As the scarf and tie merged and ran down my neck, the two blended together like two red vipers during mating season.

  The scarf made Shane's face almost unrecognizable. One could not discern where one ended and the other began. It protected Shane's identity. The only thing that Paul could see was my hair and dark, cold eyes.

  "What do you want?" Paul asked.

  "Same thing that you want, Paul—blood!" I said.

  Suddenly, Paul's eyes shot wide open. Slow streams of tears formed out of fear and rolled out of his eyes. His fear turned into horror.

  Paul peered down the length of my arm to the dark briefcase in my hand. He recognized it. I held his lawyer's briefcase.

  "Shane?" he asked. He knew that this was Shane’s body.

  "Paul, you killed those boys. I know you did. Just admit it."