The Closer

by Donn Cortez

  And he couldn’t tell anyone.

  Like all serial killers, he was an anonymous celebrity. He got the respect and approval of the rest of The Pack, of course, but they were just words on a screen. No one ever looked him in the eye with anything except vague disdain or blind terror, and he knew they never would.

  What he really wanted to do was howl his rage at the world, let everybody know who he was and what he’d done. It was a flaw many serial killers shared— and the reason most of them got caught.

  So Jack gave him a way to get what he wanted.

  “I’m going to distribute your methods on the web,” Jack said. “How you did it. What programs you used. Profiles you targeted. And I’ll tell everyone who was responsible.”

  “You’re—you’re lying,” Djinn-X gasped. “Doesn’t make any sense…”

  “Sure it does. No matter how clever you were, there’ll be ten thousand people on the web who’ll tear your ideas apart and design ways to beat them. Within a month of its release, your method will be useless. But look at the bright side,” Jack said. “Everyone will remember your name….”

  And after a long, silent pause, Djinn-X had whispered, “All right.”

  “Good. Let’s go back to the beginning….”

  The first step had been research. A website called the Serial Killer Tracking Bureau listed states where serial killers were known to be operating; those areas of the country got flagged on Djinn-X’s computer. Next, he compiled a list of webpages of possible interest to killers: anarchists detailing ways to make bombs, purveyors of hardcore S&M, freelance mercenary ezines with descriptions of assassinations and torture, archives devoted to mass murderers and killers throughout history. He used a search engine and fed it words that ranged from “Auschwitz” to “zealot.”

  Next, he used a program called Remora, which attached itself to those websites and kept track of email signatures that visited at least two of the sites and originated in one of the areas that might hold a serial killer. Since there were thirty-five to fifty killers operating at any given time in the United States and they often moved around, this didn’t narrow the possibilities down much.

  Next came his own webpage. He called it “Serial Killer Update,” and used a program called ChainLink to automatically link all the other sites on his list to his own; anyone scanning those webpages could jump to his with the click of a button.

  Serial Killer Update was only a stepping-stone, though. He designed it to be as grotesque as possible, knowing it would weed out the casual cybersurfer. Graphic depictions of dismembered corpses and text that mocked the victims would drive away the merely curious.

  The webpage had several sections, and only after you had visited every one would a link button pop up, inviting you to check out another webpage: The Gauntlet.

  The Gauntlet was exactly that—a test. It had one hundred questions, culled from several studies of serial killers plus Djinn-X’s own perspective, and you had to generate a score of eighty percent or higher to graduate to the next level. Some of the questions required research—what was the name of Son of Sam’s third victim?—and some were designed to be infuriating, asking for intimate and embarrassing details of the subject’s life; the angrier the response, the higher the score generated. Djinn-X offered no incentive to complete the test, just a promise of complete anonymity through an elaborate email rerouting system.

  Even so, he still got hundreds of replies. He compared these replies to the results of his Remora program, seeing which respondents fit the profile he’d worked up. He pored over the results, and struck up an email relationship with those that showed promise. He freely admitted to his own murders, and asked his correspondents if they’d ever done the same.

  Most of them said yes.

  He knew some were telling the truth—but how could he bridge that final, fatal gap?

  He already knew how to verify the real killers’ bonafides; the initiation was the first thing he’d designed. But none of them would go through with it until he had proved himself to them, first. They had no more reason to trust him than he had to trust them; they were wolves, slowly circling each other and growling. There had to be a test, something that couldn’t be faked, something that all of them could verify. A public sacrifice, performed by Djinn-X to christen the birth of his creation.

  They discussed it among themselves. They decided on a school bus.

  Djinn-X agreed. Pipe bombs were easy to make.

  The morning after the horrific crash—twelve dead, twenty-two injured—half the discussion group vanished. Djinn-X immediately took down his webpage; he knew he was entering the most delicate and dangerous part of the process. He contacted the remaining members and told them about the private website he was setting up, one they could connect to but no one else could—and if they wanted to join, they would have to go through an initiation of their own. Most said yes, but only a few followed through. One sent an obviously embalmed hand whose fingerprints didn’t match.

  The ones who passed became members of The Pack. There were only four of them at first, but that was enough.

  Enough to make a family.

  DEATHKISS: I’ve been having trouble accessing your page.

  PATRON: I apologize for that. I prefer to give a guided tour to new members—after that, you’re free to look at it anytime you wish. This allows us to get to know each other on a more personal level.

  DEATHKISS: The other members spoke highly of you. They refused to give details.

  PATRON: I do have something of a reputation, though I’m afraid it’s limited to the Pack. The world at large is still unaware of my existence—I vary both my methods and my quarry to such an extent that no one has connected my various endeavors.

  DEATHKISS: I see you also claim the entire country as your territory.

  PATRON: Not in any proprietary way, I assure you; I simply travel a great deal.

  DEATHKISS: I’d be interested in seeing some of your work.

  PATRON: Certainly. I’m sending you a file I call

  “Swaying Madonna.” Let me know if you have any trouble decompressing it.

  A dead woman appeared on Jack’s screen, dangling from a hangman’s noose. It was a video clip, not a still photo, and the body was moving slowly to one side. The camera’s focus widened and Jack saw that the body was hung from a crude mobile, like the kind hung over cribs to amuse infants. Instead of Fisher-Price plastic, this one was made of rope and two-by-fours.

  It was counterbalanced by two children.

  DEATHKISS: Memorable.

  PATRON: Thank you. A young family in St. Paul. Very little blood, actually—note the pristine whiteness of the ropes.

  DEATHKISS: Were they dead when you hung them up?

  PATRON: Oh, no—that was half the fun.

  Strangulation takes a few minutes, you know; each of them was very aware of the others.

  DEATHKISS: I can see you appreciate the psychological element. So do I.

  PATRON: But of course. The actual act of killing is no more complex than turning off a switch. But the emotional landscape to be explored, before and after the fact—that’s what’s fascinating.

  Study the look on the mother’s face. What is she feeling? Terror at the imminent loss of her life?

  Horror at watching her children die? Guilt over the knowledge that it is her own weightkeeping her offspring’s feet kicking in the air—or rage because it is their weight doing the same to her?

  DEATHKISS: An interesting question. I prefer to ask such questions more directly.

  PATRON: How so?

  DEATHKISS: By punishing the wrong answers.

  PATRON: Ah, torture. It’s always seemed a bit crude to me.

  DEATHKISS: Maybe if done for its own sake. But pain is the key to unlocking many doors. You can learn just as much by which lies your subject chooses to tell as you can by his honesty.

  PATRON: “His”? I didn’t think your tastes ran that way.

  Jack’s fingers froze on the k
eyboard. All Deathkiss’s previous kills had been women. The Patron had sharp eyes….

  DEATHKISS: Seeing the work of the rest of The Pack has changed my perspective. As a matter of fact, my first male target is also my current work in progress.

  PATRON: You mean he’s still alive?

  DEATHKISS: For the moment.

  PATRON: Well, this is a first for The Pack—an online kill. Would you mind sharing?

  DEATHKISS: I was planning on it.

  He tapped a key. Djinn-X had a digital camera with him when they’d captured him, and Jack had taken some pictures of its owner with it. It had been easy to transfer those pictures to the laptop.

  It took several minutes before the Patron’s reply came back.

  PATRON: I apologize for my earlier disparaging comment. You have quite an artistic touch.

  DEATHKISS: That’s not my intention. I’m simply interested in communication.

  PATRON: All art is about communication. Art should either raise a question or attempt to answer one, don’t you think?

  “Yes,” Jack found himself whispering.

  DEATHKISS: Which one do you prefer?

  PATRON: The question, of course. Answers are endings. Questions can lead anywhere.

  DEATHKISS: Isn’t what we do about endings?

  PATRON: What you do, perhaps. What I do is about beginnings.

  DEATHKISS: I don’t understand.

  PATRON: And you want an answer, hmmm? Well, I have those, too—not answers of my own, but the answers of others to questions I have posed.

  An icon flashed, telling Jack that the Patron was sending him a file. He waited until it had finished downloading, then opened it.

  The image that filled his screen was an oil painting. A man, barely recognizable as such, was huddled in a heap on the ground. Above him, angels with twisted, demonic faces hovered, holding lances tipped with bloody hearts. An immense, white-bearded face dominated the top half of the painting, leering cruelly. His teeth were sharpened fangs—God as a cannibal.

  Jack studied the painting, eyes narrowed. There was something familiar about the style….

  PATRON: And here’s what inspired this reinterpretation of faith.

  Another file. This one showed him horror: an elderly woman, naked except for a flowery hat, crucified in a doorway. Her wrists had been nailed to either side of the frame.

  Jack’s eyes widened. “Finally,” he whispered.

  With nothing more than that single, grotesque image and the feeling in his gut, he knew.

  He’d found his family’s killer.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Three years ago.

  A white Christmas in Vancouver was so rare that a local jeweler had promised to refund the full price of any wedding or engagement ring he sold in December if it snowed on the twenty-fifth. He’d made the promise in previous years as well, and so far his money had gone unclaimed.

  He must be awfully nervous right about now, Jack thought as he lay in bed, still not quite awake. If I weren’t already married, I’d be doing some ring shopping myself. It had snowed on the twenty-second and twenty-third, and not the slushy drizzle the West Coast usually got; every once in a while it would snow in Vancouver the way it rained, a steady barrage that went on and on and on. It came down in clumps like cottonwood fluff, big, heavy, white flakes that drifted earthward in a thick, sound-deadening curtain. Jack hadn’t gotten much work done on the twenty-second; he’d spent the whole day staring out the window of his East Side studio, just watching it fall.

  By the twenty-third his opinion had changed to match most Vancouverites: snow sucked. Beautiful as it was, the city wasn’t equipped to cope—it didn’t have enough plows, and the majority of the population wasn’t used to the driving conditions. The city’s light-rail transit system, Skytrain, didn’t like it either; elevated, exposed, and electric, it shut down and sulked. City buses ran an hour to three hours behind schedule. Cab companies refused to take any fares that weren’t emergencies.

  On the twenty-fourth, Jack did what most citizens did—he gave up, and stayed at home.

  “Ja—ack,” called Janine’s voice from downstairs. “Come on, sleepyhead. Your folks are going to be here in an hour.”

  Jack groaned, and burrowed underneath the comforter. He’d almost drifted off again when the covers were pulled away from his head.

  “Argh! Lemme sleep,” he growled, diving face-first under a pillow.

  His wife sighed, and sat down on the bed beside him. “All right. I’ll tell them you decided to hibernate for the winter.”

  “Mmmph.”

  “And they can give your presents to charity.”

  He slid an arm out from under the comforter and around her waist. “You won’t tell ’em anything, because you’re going into hibernation with me. Gotta have something to keep me warm—and I hear long women with short hair give off a lot of heat.”

  Janine laughed. She always kept her hair short, and currently had no more than an inch of blond fuzz covering her skull. “Oh, really? And what about Sam? Who’s going to take care of him?”

  “He’s smart. He can learn to forage for nuts and berries.”

  She yanked the pillow away and hit him with it. “I can’t believe you’d say that about your own son,” she said, pretending to be indignant.

  “I can’t believe I married someone who’s coherent before nine A.M.”

  “I bet you weren’t like this when you were a kid,” she said, lying down beside him. He eased an arm under her head.

  “Not at Christmas, anyway,” he chuckled. “I was a lot more like Sam—couldn’t sleep the night before, up at five-thirty Christmas morning. So hyper I swear I vibrated.”

  “So what happened?”

  “I discovered masturbation. Calmed me down a lot.”

  “Well, Sam’s only six—I think he’s got a few hyper years left.” Janine sat up and swung her legs off the bed. “Come on. I’ve got coffee made.”

  “Caffeine? Why didn’t you say so…”

  He got up and had a quick shower, whistling an old Devo song while he shampooed. He threw on some black sweat pants and a white T-shirt when he was done and padded downstairs in his bare feet.

  “Dad! Just one more sleep!” his son announced from the living room. Sam had his mother’s narrow face and upturned nose, but his father’s wavy brown hair. He’d made a point of counting down the days for the last two weeks.

  “You got it, Sam,” Jack said as he headed for the kitchen. His son followed him, waving a comic book in one hand.

  “Look! Marshall gave me a Spawn number one for Christmas! Know why?”

  “Uh—because he bought seven copies when it came out?” Jack poured coffee into a black mug with a green alien head emblazoned on it.

  “No,” Sam said in exaggerated exasperation. “It’s ’cause I’m his best friend.”

  “I thought I was your best friend, buddy,” he said, getting cream from the fridge. The fridge was covered with magnets Janine had collected from tourist traps. The one that caught his eye every day when he grabbed the door handle was from a ghost town in Arizona: a skull wearing a cowboy hat grinned at him, with “Yahoo, Buckeroo!” printed underneath.

  “Yahoo,” Jack said, pointing a finger and cocked thumb at the skull and firing an imaginary shot.

  “Dad?”

  “Yeah, buddy?” He pulled a chair away from the kitchen table and sat down.

  “How come you’re always shooting the fridge?”

  Jack laughed. “It’s just a thing I do when I’m in a good mood. A ritual, I guess.”

  “What’s a rich-yule?”

  “It’s what you’re gonna have, once Grandma and Grandpa get here.”

  “Oh. Okay.” He grinned in that completely accepting little-boy way he had, and ran back into the living room. Jack shook his head and grinned himself; he couldn’t remember a time when he’d had that kind of complete confidence in his father. It was heartwarming and a little scary, all at once.
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br />   Janine came into the kitchen and sat down at the table with him. “Well, the guest room is ready. All we need now is your folks.”

  A double honk sounded from outside, the greeting Jack’s father always gave when he arrived. “And there they are,” Jack said.

  Mr. and Mrs. Salter walked through the front door with their arms full of packages. “Merry Christmas!” his mother shouted. She was a tall woman, with curly hair dyed aggressively red. “Look what Santa dropped off at our house by mistake!”

  “Wow!” Sam said, running up and hugging his grandma around the waist. “Are there some for me?”

  “Oh, I think there might be a few in there,” Jack’s father said. He was a short, bullish man, with a square jaw and gray hair he kept cropped short. “Hey, there’s my twin!” he said with a laugh, getting a hug from Janine.

  “Merry Christmas,” Jack said, accepting an armload of packages while Janine got their coats. “Oof. You buy out Toys-R-Us again this year?”

  “Ixnay on the Oystay,” his father said. “Antasay, got me?”

  “Huh?” Sam said.

  “Never mind,” Jack said. “Your grandfather slips into an old Swedish dialect now and then.”

  Jack ushered them into the living room. An eight-foot Douglas fir dominated one corner, decorated in a lavish and somewhat eclectic manner: action figures from Sam’s collection waged war in the tree’s branches over the fate of baby Jesus in a manger, illuminated by glowing chili peppers—patio lanterns strung up in lieu of Christmas lights—the tableau made even more surreal by Jack’s handcrafted ornaments. They were all composed of found objects, often silverware; Jack had discovered you could make a quite serviceable angel out of two forks, a spoon and a bit of wire, especially if you spread the tines out for the wings.

  “Good Lord,” his father said, examining the fir. “Well, at least the tree is real.”

  “I thought you’d be late,” Jack said, depositing the presents under the tree. “Considering the roads.”