by Hadena James
Someone asked if they were ready and David said yes, ignoring the rest of the team. If they weren’t, it would be a disaster. He had to trust that they were. After all, these were the guys that were going to be following him into the lairs of serial killers. Trust was a big deal.
A professor stepped onto the auditorium’s lecture platform and announced their names, as if they were rock stars ready for a show to begin. It sounded like a suggestion Nathan and Caleb Green would suggest. However, neither of them were here. Nathan was at work in the newly built Fortress as a prison guard and Caleb was in school on the other side of the country.
Each of them entered the auditorium as their names were given. They appeared through a door off the side of a large projection screen. The stage was wide enough to host a small production play. David was surprised by this, he had expected a small square that they would have to huddle on. As far as lecture halls went, this one was really nice.
“I’m US Marshal David Ashby, leader of the Serial Crimes Tracking Unit. You’ve already met my team.” David smiled for a moment. “As most of you know, exactly one year ago today, a sniper laid down on the rooftop of a building and began shooting prisoners inside the walls of a state prison. He claimed he was getting justice for his family, but it wasn’t justice, it was revenge. Eric Clachan killed twenty-one inmates that day and injured one. When he surrendered not more than six minutes after the shooting, he apologized for the injured man and said he just needed him to move. All twenty-one people Clachan killed were there for murder, rape, sexual assault, and molestation. They were all repeat offenders. It highlighted that our justice system needed to be overhauled a little, since none of them were serving more than a handful of years for their crimes. However, that was not the last we heard of Clachan. He was in prison exactly one week when he murdered two more inmates; one where he claimed self-defense and the other was a killer that had murdered a cop and seven civilians in a day. By the end of his first month, Eric Clachan had killed a total of eight people. It was obvious that incarceration wasn’t keeping him from killing. At least, not inside the walls of a normal prison. During his second month, he was repeatedly put in the hole, but that didn’t stop him from killing a prison guard and six more inmates. The prison guard turned out to be corrupt and the prisoners, true to Clachan’s MO, were all inmates that were in for murder or sexual assault and had light prison sentences. Despite the folk hero image of Eric Clachan and his fight for justice, he’s still a serial killer and one that the prison system isn’t designed to handle. Worse, other serial killers like Clachan exist. Those that have been caught started applying for transfers to the prison where Clachan was being held. However, it is really Eric Clachan that started the legislation that led to the SCTU and the Fortress being built. That legislation, called the Serial Killer and Mass Murder Laws, created a group of elite hunters that specialized in hunting down serial killers, spree killers, mass murderers, and serial rapists. It also required a federal prison designed to hold anyone convicted under the SK&MM Law.” David took a breath.
“Which is why we’re here,” Brock Lowman jumped in. “There is currently a serial killer in Salt Lake City. We call him a random shooter. He appears to drive around at night and shoot into crowds. He’s an excellent marksman because he has never just wounded anyone he’s shot. While he seems to be choosing victims of opportunity, meaning victims out late at night walking down the sidewalks, a large number of his victims have been college students. Your peer group is among the easiest targets because on weekends college students proliferate the streets. We are hoping you’ve noticed someone that may have seemed out of place while you were out at night. He might have stared at your group for a long time or rolled down his window but not talked to you. We are aware this happens frequently for female students and it may mean nothing, but he doesn’t have a gender preference, so it may have happened to mixed groups of genders or male pedestrians with more frequency lately.”
“So far, we have no description of him and the cars he uses have been worthless, so we are turning to college students to see if they can help us.” David added quickly.
“Couldn’t it just as easily be a woman than?” Clark asked.
“No, we do know it’s a male,” David answered without revealing any information about how they knew it was a male.
“Then you do have some part of a description,” another student in the packed auditorium asked.
“I’m not at liberty to divulge how we know he’s male. If we had a description, though, you all would have one, I assure you,” David dodged the question to the best of his ability.
“In class, we are learning about how the SCTU operates outside the codes of the law enforcement. Is it all true?” A female asked.
“Since I don’t know what you’ve heard, I can’t confirm it’s all true. I can say that we don’t need a warrant if we suspect a person has committed murder on multiple occasions. Our suspicion is enough probable cause. We cannot just go tracking down everyone we suspect of multiple murder though, we have to be invited in on cases by local law enforcement or the FBI if they have taken over jurisdiction. Once we arrive, their roles are limited and we become the team in charge of the investigation and capture. On the flip side, we can’t bust just anybody for committing a crime. You could light up a joint in this room right now and all we could do is call campus police. We do not have the ability to arrest you for violating drug laws or vandalism or a multitude of other crimes. Our purview is very narrow on what laws we can and cannot enforce. This is to keep average citizens from dealing with us as well as ensuring that we focus solely on multiple murderers and serial rapists. In your lifetime, this will be the only time you ever deal with us unless you are the family member of a victim of a murderer or serial rapist. Even then you may deal with local law enforcement or the FBI instead of dealing with us directly.” David thought for a moment. “Also, with these new powers, comes a governing body. While we are technically US Marshals, we do not have a single boss, we report to a committee made up of the US Marshals Service, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Secret Service, an advisor for the Department of Justice, and a few other agencies that I can’t name because it’s classified. The Department of Justice even has agents that investigate all of our cases to make sure that we did our jobs correctly. If we fail, we can be terminated instantly or even imprisoned if we do something illegal under our the purview of the SK&MM Laws. This system is meant to keep us balanced with what the rest of the country is doing in law enforcement. We have a few special tools to get faster and more effective results, but that’s it.”
“Why?” Max asked.
“Why do we need to do our job faster and more effective?” Brock Lowman asked. “Because at any given time there are approximately seven thousand serial killers in the United States. That doesn’t include spree killers, mass murderers, or serial rapists, that’s just active serial killer cases. There could be a few hundred more that we don’t know about. Maybe a few thousand more even. A decade ago, there was only about two thousand active serial killers in the US. As the millennium approaches, we are expecting these numbers to rise, not fall. The latest report by the FBI expects there to be at least ten thousand active serial killers by 2005 and as many as fifteen thousand by 2015. Also, we are seeing a rise in the IQ of serial killers. In the sixties, the majority of serial killers had below average IQs. In the eighties, they had average IQs. Now, we are finding killers like Eric Clachan who have IQs of 150, which means he’s technically a genius and he isn’t the only one in our custody that is. Until the day he became a spree killer, he had no indicators of being a psychopath nor did he show any homicidal tendencies. Last year, when he was captured, seven other serial killers were also captured. Five of them had IQs over 140, which is well above average, and showed no indicators of psychopathology or homicidal tendencies. One of them had been killing since he was seventeen, he was active for thirty-two years before he was caught. He told us he killed over a hundred wo
men, but we believe that is a low estimate based on victimology which showed him killing one woman nearly every month for two or three years at a time, followed by suspected cooling off periods. However, he swears he never had a cooling off period and that he kept up the killings even during his down time. That would mean his numbers are way higher than the hundred or so that he remembers.”
“If he’s so smart, why can’t he do the math to figure out how many victims he has?” A girl asked.
“It’s a mind game,” Brock answered. “He knows exactly how many he killed. He probably remembers their names and faces, how he killed them, and where he disposed of their bodies. However, he’s smart and toying with the FBI about victims is one way he stays in control.”
“The real problem is that psychopathy is on the rise. Both functional and dysfunctional psychopathy are rising, meaning we are seeing larger numbers of psychopaths in every area of our life. For the most part, they aren’t a problem, despite the name. While the average psychopath is a narcissist, they are also charming and adjust well to routines. They make excellent workers in high stress situations because the stress doesn’t get to the them. But for every functional psychopath, there’s more than likely a dysfunctional psychopath. They also can be charming and adjust well to routines and do well in high stress situations. They feed off of these situations. They will turn homicidal to make sure they are in a high stress environment. Those are the dangerous ones. Those are the ones we need to catch.” David spoke again. “Someone is going to pass out cards with numbers on them as you exit. Please, if you have any suspicions about someone that may have approached you late on a weekend, but have not said or done anything about it, give us a call. Remember, this man only kills from his car, so he would have approached you in a vehicle and he doesn’t target solitary individuals, he prefers groups.”
Chapter Five
Max felt oddly calm after the SCTU outreach. They had no clue that the killer was a college student, let alone him. He was free to go about his life like nothing was amiss. Chances were good that if he varied his schedule a little, he could even continue his occasional nightly pursuit.
It was funny they thought he was a marksman. He wasn’t. He just seemed to be lucky. Plus, shooting into a crowd was different than shooting at an individual target. He’d done some practice shooting since he bought his gun. Even stationary, the targets were easy to miss. He finally understood why no one ever seemed to be able to hit anything in old westerns.
However, when people ran they were predictable. Especially, a group of people running. The herd like mentality broke apart and everyone did a strange crablike run that made their paths foreseeable. It was basic human behavior. Once you understood how people reacted during panic, you could anticipate where they would run. He didn’t aim at individuals, he aimed at the empty spaces he expected them to occupy when the herd mentality broke down and everyone panicked.
He would need to move off of weekends. That would make it harder, since he worked graveyard shifts during the week, but he could probably make it work on his dinner break. He got an hour around one a.m. He normally ran to grab fast food from some all-night place. He’d just make sure to get a few shots on the way back or something. Stealing a car would be harder, but still something he could manage. He had become quite adept at it.
Let the SCTU spin their wheels looking for a sharp shooter who didn’t like college kids. They were unremarkable. If the locals and FBI weren’t onto him, there was no way this group was. They had dressed smartly and thrown out some fancy words, but that was it. Even the profile they were relying on was wrong. They probably expected someone average to be doing it.
Max was not average. His intelligence quotient was over 160. He was a methodical planner, constantly fine-tuning and evolving his system to get better at everything he did in life. It was the only reason he’d made it this far.
Plus, they would be looking for the usual serial killer indicators; bedwetters in their teens, torturing small animals, a history of child abuse, and arson. They would be looking for someone who was already a criminal, someone who had a past with homicidal tendencies.
Max didn’t have that kind of history. He could be impulsive, but he fought that part of his nature. He could be a narcissist, but again, he had retrained his personality to make it more caring. He wasn’t sure when he realized he was a sociopath, he’d been young, it was part of the reason he was studying in this field. He had always questioned where sociopaths fit into the grand scheme of things.
He was learning they got shit done. They were the ones that did the things no one else wanted to do because it was contrary to human nature. Everything could boil down to a single principle; the greater good. He would become a social worker or some other job dealing with the throwaways of society, because he wouldn’t empathize with their plight, and therefore, could make the sound, logical judgments that were required for their own well-being.
His newest venture was just a matter of thinning the herd. There were so many sheep in this world already. Culling a few was making the herd stronger in several ways. The weak went down, the survivors learned to thrive. They became better versions of themselves. After all, the worst thing that would ever happen to the majority of them was surviving a random shooting attack. From here, they could rebuild their lives with a different perspective.
His hobby wasn’t about death, it was about rebirth. Rebirth that he could give people by making them suffer. A powerful position that could only be attained by understanding true suffering. It was hard moving forward when a person had never even experienced something tragic or painful. This was his gift.
It wasn’t something everyone would understand, but it was something that needed to be done. It was no different than him becoming a social worker. He’d be helping people be the strongest version of themselves at that job too.
His work was too important not to do and the SCTU was working off outdated data. The group probably thought he did it because it sexually aroused him. They’d claim he was antisocial too. Let them spin their wheels, he’d make the world a better place while they did.
Chapter Six
David was staring at information on a board and leaning back in his chair. There was something very wrong with their current situation. He could feel it in his gut, but voicing it, trying to find words to explain it, was beyond his ability. Brock Lowman was with him. Everyone else was out talking to survivors again.
Brock was also staring at the board full of information. He had been doing so for over an hour now, quietly tapping an ink pen against his leg. At first, the tapping had been annoying, now David found it oddly soothing. It was as if Brock had his doubts about the profile too.
They thought they were looking for a guy in his early to mid-thirties, white, organized, average, forgettable, with a touch of charm. He was a sadist who derived sexual pleasure from the mass killings he was perpetrating. He probably did something menial, like a janitor. It didn’t tax him mentally, just physically.
It was the same profile the FBI had come up with. They’d been using it for about three weeks before calling in the SCTU. It had gotten them nowhere.
Brock stopped tapping his pen and stood up. He walked to the board and hastily drew a giant chalk line down it. He erased everything on the left of the chalk line. Everything that was in the profile was suddenly gone from the board. He began to write, his indecipherable scrawl hard to read, even to David.
By the time Brock finished, David was standing next to him. The only thing left from the original profile was that he was white. Instead, Brock seemed to think they were looking for an overachiever, young, probably college aged. He would be outgoing, friendly, and memorable. In all capitals at the very bottom of the board was the sentence, Sociopath playing God.
“Sorry, it’s been bugging me since we got here. He isn’t a sexual sadist or getting a sexual thrill from his killings. He’s playing God.” Brock put down the chalk.
“Why college aged?” D
avid asked.
“Because that’s his favorite target. I think it’s because he lives near college students. There’s no one that lives closer to college students than college students. A highly intelligent overachiever would have the ability to be this organized. Also, he kills only a few people when he targets large groups and he is using every bullet in his gun to do it. He can’t be that great of a shot. So, he stops the car in the middle of the road, rolls down a window, opens fire on a crowd, and kills a few people. If he was a good shot, he’d be killing more. If he was a great shot, or a marksman, we wouldn’t have survivors.”
“I can agree with that. So you’re thinking more Zodiac than Son of Sam?”
“Zodiac targeted couples though.”
“Right, but it is unlikely they were sexually motivated crimes.”
“One could argue they were. This guy, there’s no way. He’s on a full power trip, I’ve seen a few sociopaths on power trips before. They do it for the euphoria of doing it, it makes them feel important and feeds their ego. Who needs an orgasm when your brain is already flooded with dopamine, adrenaline, and norepinephrine? This is one of the changes that Nathan has been talking about during training. What we used to know about sociopaths and psychopaths, might not be holding true anymore. Even though it goes against all of my psychological training, I think he’s right.”
“So we have an intelligent college student killing people. Aren’t most serial killers of average or lower IQ?”
“That’s the theory we’ve built based on the ones we’ve captured. But there have been exceptions and there are a lot of killers that were never caught. Just go with me for a few minutes on this; we catch the average serial killers because they are average. It could be possible that serial killers with higher IQs are rarely identified because they are smart enough to make their kills seem like they are just random incidents of violence. A person who is repeatedly killing his mother is going to have a pattern, but a serial killer that is doing it for fun probably wouldn’t, because they wouldn’t need one. No pattern, no discernable victimology, no realization that it’s the work of a serial killer. This guy has a pattern, but I think it’s accidental and probably based on age.”
