by Hadena James
People, lots of people, were now in the room. No doubt moving Detective Daniels who deserved every bit of his broken arm and probably a whole lot more. That was the other trick psychopaths could pull, they just understood violence in its most basic and primal forms. Daniels was a violent man. He probably had a couple of complaints. If his family was still with him, it was because they were too terrified to leave. He was lucky it had just been his arm.
“Mr. Clachan,” the female agent was tapping his arm repeatedly. Eric slowly opened his eyes and blinked at her. Her lips were moving, she was saying something, but Eric refused to listen. He tuned her out.
He went to a place that only he was allowed to visit. A palace of memories, like photographs hung on walls in galleries. Each one had significance to him. He’d been building this palace for many years. It was everything he deemed important in his life. Everyone he deemed important. A new picture was being placed in it now. Blood soaking into concrete, people frozen in time, their mouths open to let out their silent screams. Guards attempting to figure out the situation and secure their charges. So much mayhem and death. It had felt wonderful. His bloodlust had quieted, for now. Eventually, it would come back to the surface. Eventually, it would need to be slaked again. He hoped he was in a place where that would be easy. He really didn’t mind being a murderer of serial killers and mass murderers. The mass murderer title would go away when he started again. A second or third time and he’d officially be a serial killer, like his grandfather.
He wasn’t sure how Donnelly Clachan had resisted the urges so well. He would never understand. He was more like Patterson and he was fine with that. He’d even tried the happy family life routine, it had been working too. Right up until his sister and father were killed.
Most people still believed childhood trauma and abuse created monsters like him. They didn’t understand that most of them were born with the urge. Some fought it better than others. When they did go off, the specialists referred to it as a trigger or a stressor, an event that tipped the scales and drove them to cross that line. That wasn’t true. Triggers existed. Stressors existed. However, a psychopath could roll with the punches, so to speak, by not shutting down. If they were emotionally turned off, the bloodlust and darkness were the only things they felt. It was in this state that killing became easy.
It was hard to force yourself to feel all the time. Some managed better than others, it was how they maintained control. However, sleep always triggered the emotionless state, which was why they slept as if there wasn’t a single thing wrong in the world. It was in his sleep that the bloodlust had first come. He had dreamed about killing the wife of the man that had murdered his family. Not just shot her. No. In his dream, he had slowly tortured her. He had drawn out the pain. He had burned her skin with a blowtorch. He had pulled her teeth out with pliers. Each time she had passed out, he had sat and waited for her to regain consciousness and then he started again. The entire time, the jackass was sitting next to her, begging Eric to stop. Eric just kept telling him, he’d end both of their suffering if he would just tell him who paid him to kill Isabella and Donnelly. They never did.
However, he made the deaths just as painful. He slit her wrists, long lines that started almost at the elbows and ended at the wrists. He’d cut deep, severing the tendons, the ligaments, the muscles, and she had cried and screamed the entire time because he had done it slowly. Moving the blade as slowly and steadily as his hands would let him in their rage. He had forced his father’s murderer watch his beloved prison-groupie wife die. Then he had turned the blade on him. Eric removed his eyes first, so he couldn’t anticipate where or what Eric was about to do to him. Eric had forced him to hold his own removed eyeballs and he’d given him great detail about what they looked like sitting in his own hands. Just as slowly and carefully, Eric had then moved to the killing phase. He inserted the blade in the man’s chest, slicing through the skin, the incision had revealed just a hint of stained bone. Into this cut, Eric had shoved his hands, tearing the skin apart from itself, he wanted full access to the bone below it, but cutting the flesh off entirely would not have been painful enough and Eric wanted pain. Once the breast bone had been exposed, Eric stood up, got a sledgehammer and swung with all his might. The hammer had collided with the bone making a beautiful wet, cracking noise as the bone shattered beneath the weight. It was no longer just his flesh that bleed, his lungs were filling up with blood as tiny bone shards penetrated them. Eric watched the man gurgle and spit out blood. He awoke feeling euphoric, even if it had been just a dream. It was exactly what Eric had wanted to do to him.
“You know what you can do for me, agents,” Eric suddenly sprang back to life. His eyes flew open as his feet pushed his lean, runner’s body up from the chair. He wasn’t tall, under six feet, but he was still imposing because of his personality. “I’ll wrap this case up in a bright red, shiny fucking bow, if you do one simple thing for me.”
“You’ve already confessed,” the female agent told him.
“That’s true,” Eric answered. “But if you think I laid all my cards on the table, you are sadly mistaken. I might be batshit crazy, but I’m not an idiot.”
“Not happening,” the male agent said.
“You haven’t even heard the proposal yet. You figure out where a burnt-out meth head gets one hundred grand in crisp one-hundred dollar bills, and I’ll give you a serial killer I know you are going to want.” Eric smiled at them. The female took a step away from him. “It’s a good one too. Creepy guy though. He is very determined. It would really make you both look good, if you survived it.”
“Whatever,” the female agent waved the offer away.
“Need proof?” Eric asked her. “About three years ago, he took the head of a drug cartel leader and shoved it on a spike. Then he put the spike at the entrance to a hotel, in the grass.”
“That was on the news.”
“The fact that he used a scimitar wasn’t.”
“We’re supposed to believe that you have information on a serial killer that doesn’t exist? Because you guessed he used a sword to behead someone and stick their head on a spike?” The male asked.
“No, you’re supposed to believe me because I know that as of ten this morning, you found another headless body in a hotel. Again the head was cut off with a scimitar. We’re talking about a guy that has over fifty kills all over the world and you guys haven’t connected the dots because the only thing that ties them all together is that stupid scimitar.” Eric sat back down. “I’ll wait here while you check on my information. Call Interpol, they’ll be the ones that will be able to verify it happened. It is a very nice, very posh, Parisian hotel.” Eric drew out the word posh as if it were the most significant thing he had ever said.
The female left the room. The male sat down across from him, trying to pry information from him. He was good. He knew all sorts of interrogation techniques, but Eric just smiled at him. The smile didn’t touch any part of his face except his lips, and then it looked like one side was slightly curled in disgust. Eric knew lots of techniques too; the big one, though, was how to give the FBI just enough rope to hang themselves with The Turk case.
Erik and The Turk had trained together a few times. He wasn’t Turkish or Middle Eastern, he was from New Jersey and his name was Lee. However, Lee just wasn’t a scary name for a serial killer. The Turk sounded so much better. He didn’t talk much because he had a terrible stutter, but the man was magic with a blade or a gun. He’d found the scimitar in his grandfather’s things, a relic from WWI. He didn’t know how his grandfather had acquired it, he’d just learned to master it. Now, he roamed the world, killing bad people for fun. When he needed money, he took a job working as a bounty hunter. The world of good serial killers was full of irony.
He had reached an agreement with Lee the night before to give them just enough to make a case file in exchange for checking out the money. That’s how he knew Lee was in Paris and had killed someone named Ferelli who h
ad something to do with money laundering for a drug cartel in Colombia. The two shared a common bond, they were now both rogues. There was a purpose to the reason they killed. While they enjoyed it, they killed to get justice which made the killing that much sweeter. Lee had been the one to suggest that if the bloodlust ever became too much to control that Eric start killing serial killers. He was sure the smaller man had it in him, and Eric had been surprised at how good it had felt, proving that Lee was right. He did have it in him.
The female agent returned, her brows drawn together, wrinkles in her forehead, the corners of her mouth turned down. She tapped her partner and they both left the room. Eric could only imagine what they were discussing. He hung his head and waited. It didn’t take long.
The male agent came in and slammed his palms on the table. The female leaned against a wall.
“You knew it was going to happen and you did nothing,” the male agent yelled at him.
“One less drug cartel connection in the world, seems hardly worth turning someone in for. Besides, I didn’t say I’d help you catch him. I said I would make you aware of him. You look into the money and I’ll give you a goddamn list of every person The Turk has ever killed.” Eric didn’t look up.
“Listen here you son-of-a-bitch, not doing anything makes you just as responsible for it as him.” The male agent was still shouting.
“And so what? You’re going to tack on a few hundred years for being an accessory to murder? I shot and killed twenty of the same sort of people today. Go ahead and add those years. Want to turn me over to Interpol? What are they going to do with me? Put me in a cell somewhere with a few hundred years more of time needed to be served? You fail to grasp the situation. I do not care about my prison stay. I do not care about you. It makes me no difference. The absolute only thing I care about is finding out who hired that meth head to kill my sister and father. That is it. Everything else is inconsequential. If you don’t want the list, I’m sure I know others who do. Maybe I’ll send it to the media. Maybe I’ll send it to Interpol. Maybe I’ll just hold onto it until someone smarter than you comes around to figure out who The Turk is. Because without knowing everyone he’s killed, you will never know who he is. And I’m actually fine with that too. The only reason I’m even offering this deal is because he told me I could.” Eric finally looked up. “Take a moment and let that set in.”
“He agreed to let you give us that list for looking into the mythical hit on your family?” The female agent pushed off the wall. “How close are you two?”
“Not that close,” Eric sneered at her. “You aren’t going to find pictures of me and him in my house. My wife doesn’t know who he is. You won’t find a call log between us or a chat transcript hidden somewhere for you to find. I’ll tell you the same thing I told the detectives, I’m above your pay grade. But The Turk and I both see the writing on the wall. We can’t house, patrol, or even capture most of our own serial killers anymore. They are smarter. They are better hidden. They are more brutal. It is only going to get worse, because the reason a hit was put out on my father was that he was among the group of officers, local and federal, that believed somehow the serial killers were becoming part of an organized network. The ones being caught are the freelancers or the ones that want to get caught. Of the sixty or so founding officers of the Ahead Movement, seventeen have now died, most of them in ‘on the job accidents.’ But most is not all, and sometimes, it hasn’t been them who were directly targeted. Look up the case of Jerry McMichaels’ drowning. The autopsy found tetrodotoxin in his system. It’s a fast acting paralytic in the correct doses. He didn’t get it by stubbing his toe on a puffer fish on the shores of a recreational lake in Colorado. Somehow, that teenager was hit with the toxin as he went into the water and there aren’t any animals in Colorado carrying it. It worked too, his dad disappeared and his mother fell apart. His younger brother, Lucas, had to move in with a family friend. The family that took Lucas McMichaels in, are also in law enforcement. They have a son named Xavier, next week, both men finish basic training and will be coming home before they ship out for destinations still unknown. There are concerns about their safety while they visit.”
“How do you know that?” The male agent asked.
“My father kept files on the members of the Ahead Movement. He had brought them to a judge he knew the week before he was gunned down responding to a call about a domestic dispute where a guy had a fully-automatic assault rifle and a hundred grand in cash. Everything went underground after that.” Eric lost his sneer. “You are not very informed. Maybe I’ll take it up with someone above you.”
“That would be me,” the female agent answered. Eric turned his glare to her and she stepped back again. “Mr. Clachan, I am aware of your family history. My first case with the FBI was as a trainee under Special Agent McMichaels and Special Agent Reece when they worked the kidnapping of Aislinn Clachan. We never had a chance to meet, but I will never forget it. If what you say is true, I will look into it regardless of whether you give me that list or not. The death of SSA McMichaels son was tragic and as you rightly said, suspicious. His disappearance is even more unsettling. Most of us think he was killed by the same person that killed his son.”
“I missed your name, agent,” Eric cocked his head to the side.
“SSA Mary Virgil,” she answered.
“Already a supervisory agent, that’s impressive.” Eric took stock of her again. “You were the one that put five bullets into The Tallahassee Terror last year and then stabbed him with his own sword.”
“When he just kept coming, I grabbed a rock and slammed it against the side of his head until it knocked him out. We both got skull fractures in the process, but I stopped him.”
“Consider me impressed, SSA Virgil.”
Chapter Six
SSA Virgil told him to keep the list until she had some news for him. He did. He also signed a full confession and admitted that he acted alone. He requested that he be put into a SuperMax prison, like the one in Kansas City that they had nicknamed The Pit.
The court agreed to all of Eric Clachan’s conditions. He’d been an inmate for nearly two months. It had not gone well for the first few weeks. Not because it posed any problems for him, but because his body count kept climbing. There were certain things he couldn’t ignore, even in prison.
He was in solitary for killing another inmate when the first transfer request came through. A serial killer was moved into The Pit; by the end of the week, they were sharing cell walls in solitary. They didn’t shout through the walls to each other, they didn’t need to. They could tell by how the guards reacted that a serial killer was next door.
Time out of solitary confinement passed quicker than inside. Every week, Elle shipped him a new set of puzzle books. He did them on notebook paper that he bought from the prison commissary. By the end of the second month, he was trading out puzzle books with two other serial killers. By the end of the third, the prison commissary was carrying them and they were no longer allowed to be brought in. The puzzle books were a huge hit with the serial killers.
Of course, they weren’t average serial killers. Eric had made sure that he made a few allies. All of them had requested the transfer because Eric was inside The Pit. All of them had gone after bad guys and gotten caught. They all had above average intelligence and had been productive members of society, even though they were also killers. Now the State of Missouri was getting transfer requests from inmates in other states. Chaos was happening again and Eric thrived off it.
During his sixth month at The Pit, a riot broke out in one of the wings. It didn’t include Eric’s cell block, but that didn’t really matter to any of them. They sat on their hands and waited. The wait didn’t take long. A group of thugs chased two guards into their cell block. Eric offered assistance and since he had earned a reputation as being a protector of police, the guards let him loose.
Eric, Hank Leonard, who had taken to killing drug dealers in St. Louis because he
could, and Mitch Anderson, who searched out sex offenders and made them obsolete, were let loose on the inmates within The Pit. It took them less than an hour to get their own cell block back in order. When they finished, almost a hundred inmates were dead, and the lives of seven prison guards had been saved. Two hours later, they had accumulated more guards and killed a few dozen more inmates and taken back another cell block. The guards were able to let the US Marshals into The Pit.
The Marshals took the rest of the prison. Eric, Hank, and Mitch all returned to their cells as if they were going to their rooms for the night. The Marshals hung around, helping out the guards and letting the FBI investigate for about a month. Something had gone very wrong and everyone could see it.
On the last day, a US Marshal named Nathan Green walked into Eric’s cell. He motioned for him to stand up. Eric did, without any resistance, and the two of them walked down to solitary confinement. The place was silent. Eric, used to being able to hear his fellow inmates breathe in these subterranean quarters, heard absolutely nothing.
“It was an organized hit that got out of control.” Marshal Green looked at Eric. “One guard armed six inmates just before your lunch shift.”
“I eat with four dozen inmates,” Eric pointed out.
“Yeah, but they all had your picture.” Marshal Green dropped his gaze. “SSA Mary Virgil sent me a letter a couple of months ago and told me she was looking into the Ahead Movement deaths. The same day the riot took place, she was found murdered in her car. There was no evidence that she had ever touched a single case file regarding the deaths of those involved in the Ahead Movement.
