On The Edge

by Daniel Cleaver

  “To quote from Pulp Fiction: ‘He’s gonna get medieval on her ass.’”

  “Meaning?”

  “It was exceedingly popular in Europe. Saved for the very worst of the criminals, high treason, and whatnot. It always drew a large crowd. Well, I guess he’ll do all his usual stuff first, the carving messages on her body, the cuts and torturing, all while she is still conscious.” I saw Milo looking queasy. I liked him, I liked him a lot, but I just don’t think he’s cut out for this sort of work. “Then he’ll hang her. But this won’t be any quick break of the neck, he’ll suspend her, so she is dangling in mid-air, slowly choking, gasping her last breath, her legs thrashing about – that’s the hanging part.” I drew lines near the hanging figure diagram, to signify movement. I paused, took a breath, I noticed that Mia was listening in rapt attention. “Then he will wait for her to regain consciousness, not forgetting that Candy knows what he threatened and she’ll know that the hanging would have been the easy part. Then he’ll slice her down the middle and remove her entrails and show them to her –”

  George McGinty clicked his fingers. “I saw this done to Mel Gibson in Braveheart.”

  “Exactly,” I said and continued, “the Hangman will cut her open and remove her innards and display them to her.”

  “She would pass out surely?” Milo said hopefully, as he turned green around the gills.

  “Not necessarily, we can hope, but. . .” I drew a line down the stomach of my second figure diagram and an approximation of a pile of entrails lying next to her. I let it hang for a moment. “Nothing the serial killer has done yet would lead us to believe he will show the victim any mercy. He’s shown us his spectacular ability to keep the victims alive, especially for the torturing parts. I can’t think Candy’s fate will be any better.” They looked at me as if it were my fault as I drew coiling intestines. Then moved to the third diagram, which showed my crudely drawn woman with arms and legs stretched out as far as possible. “Finally the quartering, which as far as I know went something like this.” I made dotted lines to show the body roughly divided into four segments. “Now in medieval times they used four horses, but I’m sure the Hangman will devise some sort of apparatus to simulate that. He’ll tie her arms and legs to some sort of pulley machine that will pull her tight so she’s like this.” I made myself stretch out like a starfish. “Then he’ll make sure she has his attention and that she’s still conscious, he’ll flip a switch or whatever and the four quarters will pull in different directions until she literally has her body ripped apart.”

  I sat down to stony silence as each person absorbed this material. I half-expected some applause for my demonstration of medieval history. Tortures and executions over the centuries had held a morbid fascination for me and no doubt were somehow responsible for me becoming a cop, joining the Robbery-Homicide Division and finally to become a serial killer expert. It went quiet as each cop internalized the information and dealt with it in their own way. The thought was sickening, let alone to someone we knew, someone we were close to even, was beyond bearable and to know that the challenge of finding her killer was going to be taken from us.

  A desk sergeant brought in a cardboard box and handed it to the captain. “Now, here’s the thing,” said the captain. “Some Chink stumbled over this package outside this morning, we sent it to the bomb squad who x-rayed it and well, the contents inside are of human origin.”

  He nodded to me to open it. I get these sorts of jobs, as I was the least squeamish. Don’t ask me why, I’m just not. I took a Snickers from my pocket and ate it wrapper and all, just to watch the others’ bemused faces, and approached the cardboard box which looked about one-foot-square. I took out my switchblade and clicked it open, making the captain roll his eyes. I sliced gently down the middle of the brown packing tape and pulled back the two larger flaps, took a bite out of my Snickers and folded back the smaller ones and snapped a latex glove onto my free hand and rummaged around inside. I felt something solid, lifted it from the packing popcorn and held it aloft like a trophy, the others groaned in horror as they saw the severed hand. I turned it over in the light as I examined it and saw the pentagon tattoo on the wrist, “It’s Doctor Ruiz’s,” I told them, “I recognize the tattoo.”

  Only Mia moved forward to get a better look, the others shied away, not wanting to be contaminated by it. “She might still be alive,” she said.

  “How’d you work that one out, Detective?” asked the captain.

  “See here around the wound, that’s been made by a fast-moving blade like surgeons use.”

  “Surgeons again,” George McGinty sneered.

  “The speed it was removed at and if the stump was quickly bandaged would stop the bleeding. I think he’s keeping her alive.”

  “Good work, Mia,” the captain said. “That would follow his normal pattern.” He scratched his chin. “Although he’s never sent us a bodypart before.”

  “Ya know,” I said, “The Hangman’s jumped continents and centuries.”

  “Say again?” said the captain.

  “One minute it’s pre-Columbian Inca Gods, now it’s 14th-century European torture. That just doesn’t happen. The rituals are usually important. A killer doesn’t switch. I think he’s screwing with us. All that Inca mumbo-jumbo was just to have us running around on a wild goose chase.”

  George threw his arms up in the air in despair. “We’ve been wasting all our time tracking this stuff down.”

  The captain sighed heavily and swiveled in his large leather chair, that groaned under his weight. “I agree with Spooky; he’s been having us on.” He wiped his sweating brow with a handkerchief. “Let’s forget all this historic stuff, it’s getting us nowhere. Let’s concentrate on the here and now.”

  Milo asked, “Was there a message in the box?”

  I felt around then tipped it upside down. “Nope, nothing.”

  “What does it mean?” asked Mia. “Does a severed hand have any distinct connotations in foreign countries?”

  “That’s a good question,” said the captain.

  “I’m pretty sure it’s a sign of bad luck,” said Milo.

  “It was back luck for the doctor,” George said dark-humoredly.

  Ferdy coughed and said, “Well, it was quite common to remove the hand of a felon from a gibbet alongside a highway and it would be placed on a table and lit: the fat acts as a candle, warding off evil spirits. Oddly enough, ‘A Hand of Glory’ is mentioned in one of the Harry Potter books.”

  George McGinty said, “You know a lot about this stuff, Ferdy, is it a message?”

  “Undoubtedly. What that message is, though – I don’t have a clue, but ancient deaths and myths surrounding them hold my interest. Did you know that around one in three hanged men suffered from an erection?”

  “Sure,” said George. “The Death Boner, we see it all the time on suicide victims.”

  “A character in Hannibal by Thomas Harris suffers from it, surprisingly, and in the works of the Marquis de Sade, not surprisingly. I mention it because in olden times the hanged man might, in fact, ejaculate and women would rush forward with a piece of cloth to wipe a sample, it’s said that is why the mandrake plant grew around the base of the gallows, through the spilled blood and semen,” he said with a grin.

  I said, “I don’t even wanna know how ya know that.”

  Disused warehouse, 9980 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90036 – 20:30.

  Candy awoke with a start, as some God-awful smell awoke her, and within a microsecond she remembered that she had been captured by the Hangman; she also recalled that he had promised that his next victim would be hanged, drawn and quartered. She knew it was going to be excruciating and she shook uncontrollably.

  “Ah, good, you’re awake,” said the Hangman through a metallic voice changer. He removed the smelling salts from under her nose. He wore an executioner’s hood with slits for eyes and dressed from head to toe in black.

  “Why are you wearing a hood? I
know who you are.”

  “You’re right.” The Hangman removed the executioner’s hood and Candy screamed at the horrific sight. She trembled at the face that at first appeared to be melting: the eyes didn’t look right. A tongue darted between the lips of the mouth, which didn’t seem normal, then she remembered that the Hangman said he would be wearing the face of his previous victim.

  “It’s for my – our audience. You have a starring role in my next production,” the metallic voice boomed.

  “Why are you doing this to me?”

  “Because you are a whore,” the Hangman stated simply.

  “How’d you draw that conclusion?”

  “The way you dress, the way you act around men, you throw yourself at them like a slut and they come running, sniffing around you like the dogs they are.”

  “I’m no different than anyone else.”

  “You derive pleasure from fornicating, do you not?”

  “Sure, who doesn’t?”

  “You act like a man in a man’s world, then you turn into a slut when you think it’ll suit you, you lead men astray with your offer of fornication.”

  “I don’t know what you are on about.”

  “Oh, you know.”

  “Please explain.” She thought it would be good to engage with him, maybe give her colleagues time to rescue her. “What have I done to you?”

  “Not to me, to women the world over: your promiscuity has reduced their worth. Women used to be mothers and homemakers.”

  “They still had sex.”

  “Only enduring the nastiness as part of their duty to their husbands who demand such beastliness.”

  Candy scoffed, “Nastiness? Beastliness? What century do you live in?”

  The Hangman struck her across the face. “You’ve proved to me that you are unworthy: you mock the saintliness of a woman? The female used to be something special, something to be cherished, admired and put on a pedestal –”

  “What planet are you from?”

  “Silence!” the Hangman screeched.

  “Boy, you are really out there!” scoffed Candy.

  “You will find out how far ‘out there’ I am.”

  Candy laughed and tugged against her restraints: she knew she was going to die, but some defense mechanism in her just turned it all into a joke and she thought if she could taunt back, the Hangman might, just might, make a mistake. “You’re crazy, you know that, right?”

  “Because I think women are special: wasn’t your mother precious? Someone to look up to?”

  “Yes . . . but everyone thinks that about their mother, you’re seeing it from a child’s perspective. She can’t have been perfect, it’s not logical.”

  “Was she a slut?” the Hangman asked.

  “No, don’t be ridiculous.”

  “Are you a slut?”

  “No, I’m not,” Candy fired back indignantly.

  “Did your mother sleep around?”

  “No, she was married to my dad, but –”

  “Do you sleep around?”

  “No more than anyone else.”

  “Do you sleep around?”

  “I’m a single woman,” Candy said.

  “Do you sleep around?”

  “I have normal appetites.”

  “Do you sleep around?”

  “I’m not a virgin if that’s what you’re getting at.”

  “Precisely, you go around offering your gift to all and sundry.”

  “My gift!?” she chuckled.

  “It devalues you: don’t you get that no man wants a slut? You should have saved yourself until your wedding night, then you could have given your husband your most precious gift.”

  Candy laughed uncontrollably. “You really are one crazy sonofabitch. You know that, right? You’re a sick, twisted individual, with a messed-up outlook on life and on women.”

  “Silence!”

  “Don’t you think your mother slept around?”

  The Hangman struck her across the face.

  Candy felt blood trickling from her nose and smiled: she knew she was pushing the right buttons. “How dare you!?” the Hangman yelled.

  “She must have slept with your father. How else could you be here?”

  “My mother was not like that, she was pure, virginal, but I let her down, I had lustful thoughts, all the time. I was always thinking of sex, I was impure, I deserved to be punished.”

  “Now we’re getting somewhere,” said Candy. “Your mother was a nutcase.”

  “How dare you mention my mother?!”

  The Hangman struck Candy so hard across the face that he knocked her out. He stormed across the room, screaming in a rage, and kicked over the nearby table.

  Union Station, 800 N Alameda St, Los Angeles, CA 90012 – 21:00.

  We’d hit dead ends in the search for Candy and went back over our leads and thought back to the pimps, who not only gave up Bruce Matherson but let slip that the pedos scoured the fresh-faced girls straight off the train or bus. We’d had a quick scout of the Greyhound depot but not much doing there, so we’d gone around to the train station where we hoped to spot the hillbilly. We saw a group of four young men, huddled together smoking what looked like a joint; that was all we needed and we screeched to a halt by them before they could escape. Mia was out and covering them with her gun. I raised my shirt to show them my badge on my belt and they groaned. I had the feeling that this was a normal part of their working week.

  “Up against the wall,” Mia instructed the foursome.

  I lit a Marlboro then went through my routine and sniffed the first guy, a Latino with slicked-back hair. “This one didn’t do it,” I said. “Ya free to go.”

  Mia looked surprised but didn’t argue. He couldn’t believe his luck and sauntered off quickly before I changed my mind. I sniffed the next one. “Hmm, not sure about this one.” I passed along to the next guy in the line, a young, spotty, buck-toothed kid, and sniffed all around him, making him nervous, which was the point.

  “I ain’t got no drugs,” he said, his voice trembling. “I’m here doing favors for discerning gentlemen, y’know?”

  I didn’t and gestured for him to spell it out, but instead he did a mime. A mime of performing a blow job. If that was his career choice, then I think I’d prefer that he’d dealt in drugs.

  I shook my head in despair and moved on to the next kid, who acted jumpily, a crystal meth user, no doubt about it. He’d be the easiest to crack: he was already twitchy. I blew a cloud of cigarette smoke in his face, making him cough. I sniffed around him. “He’s the one. I can smell it.”

  “Smell what?” he asked nervously.

  “Ya smell guilty.”

  “Oh, dude,” he whined. “You can’t arrest me for smelling funny, that ain’t right.”

  “What’s ya star sign?” I glared at him.

  He couldn’t look me in the eye and flinched. “My what? Star sign?”

  “Just answer the goddamned question!”

  “Taurus?”

  “Taurus the Bull? As in bullshit, take him in.”

  Interrogation room 2, H.S.S., 100 W 1st St 5th, Los Angeles, 90012 – 21:15.

  “Tell me how ya get the girls?” I asked the tweaker.

  “What girls?”

  “The underage girls for the parties.”

  “I don’t know nothing, I swear.” He twitched and scratched as he gazed at me. I glared back at him without saying anything, knowing the silent routine would get to him, make him talk. He would be needing his drugs soon, so he’d talk so he could get back on the street. “You can’t arrest me for being a Taurus, I know that. It ain’t constitutional, I’m sure of that.”

  I gave him the dead eye and sniffed in deeply. “I can smell you’re guilty. Those young girls are being killed and that makes ya an accessory to murder.” I slammed my fist on the table for emphasis. “You are going down for life.”

  Mia joined in. “You help us now and we’ll go easy on you, but we need details of how yo
u obtain the girls and where you take them.”

  “I don’t know. I keep telling you. I’m strictly drugs. I ain’t doing that underage girls’ stuff. You want Hillbilly Willy.” He sniffed back tears.

  “Hillbilly Willy?” I said.

  “Yes, his name’s Bill and he’s a Hill –”

  “Yah, I think I’ve cracked that code. I know all about that numbnuts. Tell me something I don’t know. So, you two are in on it together, huh? Is that it? Man, you’re going down for life. Can ya imagine what they’ll do to a pretty boy like you?” I made a face at Mia. “They are gonna love your little ass.”

  “I’m innocent, I swear! I can’t go to jail. Please, help me. I ain’t done nothing. Try Hillbilly Willy, or the dude in the white Rolls-Royce, he still cruises around.” He sobbed and laid his head on the metal table.

  I whispered to Mia, “Marcus Eglin again.” I nodded for her to join me outside.

  Out in the corridor she said, “I believe him. I think he’s innocent.”

  “Yah, me, too,” I agreed. “Let’s cut him loose.”

  Disused warehouse, 9980 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90036 – 21:30.

  “Wake up, you little whore,” the Hangman said, waving the smelling salts beneath Candy’s nose. She awoke with a shudder, then remembered where she was and screamed.

  The Hangman was pleased with the reaction and said, “We’ll be hearing more of that before we’re through. Do you remember my promise for the next scarlet woman?” Candy nodded her head slowly. “Good. Do you know what it means to be hanged, drawn and quartered?”

  She nodded again. “Please, please let me go, I’m sorry I disrespected your mom, but you frighten me.”

  “Good.”

  “You know the police will be here soon.”

  “We both know that isn’t true. The police aren’t coming. They have no idea where we are. You’re not about to be rescued. You will have to face the fact that you are going to die in agony.”

  “No, no, no . . .” Candy’s bravery left her and she broke down.

  “Crying won’t wash with me. No, sir, you brought this on yourself.”

  “I did? How?”

  “By acting wantonly, giving yourself freely with no respect for yourself.”