The Killer in Me

by Margot Harrison

  When the woman comes out, headed to her car, he doesn’t go to her. He plays a long game.

  He leans on his hood, trying to look bored and kinda cocky, and takes deep drags on his cigarette, burning his lungs and liking the pain.

  When she puts her key in the lock, he asks, not moving, “Hey, miss. Can you tell me the best route from here to Amarillo?”

  “You’re way off track,” the woman says, no give in her voice.

  “I was out visiting the family of a buddy of mine, ma’am. Friend from the service, died in an IED attack, God rest his soul. His mom and gramma, they’re all alone, so I wanted to check on ’em.”

  The angles of her face soften, and she leaves her car and comes closer to tell him about roads, turn-offs, landmarks.

  Her black hair is blowsy and overdone, and she has smoker’s wrinkles but good features. He especially likes her royal-blue tank top; it’s loose—classier that way—and made of something shiny he wants to touch. She reminds him of his mom, and he feels a pang of tenderness for her.

  (Sociopaths do feel. That’s something I’ve learned. And that it doesn’t matter.)

  He’s still confused, he says. Takes out his map, spreads it on the hood. All the time watching in the corner of his eye for someone else coming out of the bar; that would be an automatic abort.

  She asks for a light, and he gives it to her. They bend over the map together, him shining a flashlight on it, and he works her around closer to the driver’s side with her back to the woods. Feels her teased hair graze his arm.

  If anybody comes out, he’ll abort. If anybody comes out, this wasn’t meant to be.

  The Thief has power, but he doesn’t pretend to have absolute power. He listens to the signals the universe gives him.

  He swaps the flashlight for the Beretta 85F so quickly she barely has a chance to gasp. Then he’s pressing it against the silky top, whispering that he won’t hurt her, she just has to get in the car. “Open the door. It ain’t locked. Nice ’n’ easy. Don’t cry. Wouldn’t hurt a nice lady like you. Just need some…”

  He mumbles the last word (“money”? “comfort”?). It doesn’t matter because she’s inside and he’s pushing himself in after.

  He doesn’t make her suffer. He finishes it right there in the parking lot on that muggy night, quick and clean as he can make it, cinching the cord around her neck till the pencil inside the loop breaks. A method he’s been wanting to try, just out of curiosity, but he doesn’t think he’d do it again.

  Unnecessarily brutal. His eyelid twitches while he holds the cord taut, like his body’s rebelling, but he’s used to it.

  Bulging eyes, grasping hands, a broken nail. The dangerous scratches she leaves on his bare arms. The deep rattle in the throat as she fights for air. The surge of adrenaline as he realizes someone could rap on the car window right now.

  Then, when it’s over, the usual soaring, floating sensation. The sweet fever of accomplishment. He’s never been so daring before. He took her fast, clean, practically out in the open. He’ll give himself fourteen points out of twenty for this, and that’s conservative. He’s a perfectionist, according to his former CO.

  He reaches into the back for the ratty sleeping bag he keeps there, along with plastic sheeting, duct tape, and his modeling and carpentry tools. He tosses it over her still form (sacred form, he thinks) and turns the key and pulls out of the lot. It’s that easy.

  He scoped out his dump site well in advance, last time he passed through the Panhandle, though he didn’t know who he’d put there. Now he does, and that feels good, a key fitting in a lock.

  His whole life he’s been fascinated by out-of-the-way places, abandoned spots off the main roads, choked with scrub pines and brush, with nobody but coyotes to see how the full moon hits the outcroppings. Places like his desert cabin back home.

  As he follows the winding map of country roads in his head, bringing this empty shell to its final resting place, he thinks of her silky tank top. Imagines it under his hand, soothing and tickling his work-roughened skin, promising the kind of comfort Eliana gives him.

  He thrusts thoughts of his girlfriend away.

  Does he dare touch the silk now? Nah, it’s wrong. It’s disrespectful, and he respects death more than anybody.

  The silk is soft, though. Just like her still-soft skin.

  On TV, people puke their guts out when they discover a murder scene. That’s how you know they care.

  Maybe my stomach is cast iron, or I’m missing a gene. I woke that night hugging myself and gasping for breath, but I didn’t puke. Something sank to my bowels like a stone, paralyzing my limbs and freezing my tears before they fell. I knelt before the toilet bowl, imagining how it would feel to retch and hurl.

  Trying, trying, trying to get it out. But all I’d seen and known was stuck inside me, part of me now. Nothing budged. My stomach didn’t even churn.

  The next day, I went straight to Warren and re-upped. I returned to my precious schedule of sleep and pills. But I couldn’t stop myself from checking the Amarillo papers on a school computer.

  Six days later, there she was.

  A picture from her glory days, when she was a Miss Texas contender with a greasy, blinding smile and ginormous teased hair, but unmistakably her.

  Kara Ann Messinger of Hereford, 35, mother of two, has not been seen since she left Dubie’s Doghouse on Route 519 on September 12 at approximately 12:30 A.M. The state police welcome tips from anyone with leads regarding her whereabouts.

  This was a real woman, and I’d had my hands around her throat. Cinched the cord. Killed her.

  No, not me. I was an innocent bystander. Or a not-so-innocent witness, because what good is a witness who can’t lead the cops to the killer or at least a body?

  Three days passed, and Kara Ann Messinger remained unfound. I tried to remember the roads the Thief had taken from the bar to the dump site, but all I could visualize were yellow lines in headlights, blurred by his excitement and my terror. Finally, using the Sunoco pay phone, I called the state troopers’ tip line and left a message saying I’d been in the Dubie’s Doghouse parking lot that night, and I’d seen a woman who looked like Kara Ann Messinger enter a black Sequoia with New Mexico plates. A young man was with her.

  That was as far as I dared go, and I didn’t leave a number. What if they found and questioned the Thief? What if he knew somehow who I was, what I’d done?

  Nothing happened. The Thief’s life went on as usual. The story faded from the news.

  Of the five victims before the Gustafssons, Kara Ann Messinger was the only one whose image I saw outside my sleep. Maybe she was the only one ever reported missing. The old man in Oneonta wasn’t, and the other murders happened in places I can’t identify, just dark houses or bars or gas stations. Lighted islands in the night. The Thief is clever at hiding corpses, each in a different desolate place. Only one in his home state. No “hunting grounds” for him. No media limelight.

  Now, though, I knew he was real.

  After I saw Kara Ann Messinger, I made a special lunch date with Suzy Wolfsheim, my mom’s friend—and mine—the assistant prosecutor for Washington County. We sat in a vegan café drinking dairy-free lattes with dandelion extract, and I told Suzy about the “screenplay” I was writing.

  My story, I said, was about a girl who sees murders in her dreams, murders that happen in real life. Should she go to the authorities?

  “Like Medium,” Suzy said. “I loved that show!”

  “I’m wondering, though. What would happen? I mean, assuming she didn’t have a track record as a psychic.”

  Suzy practically choked on her dandelion faux latte. “Most people who claim to have a track record as a psychic…don’t. Without corroborating physical evidence,” she went on, “you’re just another wing-nut. Even with physical evidence in a single case, most of the cops and state’s attorneys I know are, shall we say, very cynical about ‘psychic visions.’”

  She explained to me po
int by point what the cops would say to my heroine, and then what the state’s attorney’s office would say. By the end of our lunch, I knew how many nuisance calls law enforcement agencies take from people who claim to be psychic or to have special insight into a crime. I knew how they treat those calls. I knew that, without hard evidence, I would be dismissed quicker than you can say hypnagogic hallucinations—the science-y term for things you see when you’re half-asleep.

  And even if I could lead the Texas state troopers down the country roads to Kara Ann Messinger’s last resting place, I knew their first question would be: How were you involved in this crime?

  So I did the only thing I could. I packed up those pills I’d bought, hid them under a bunch of hideous scarves in my closet, and started sleeping again.

  This time, I vowed, would be different. I would not be a passive witness. The Thief was my enemy, and I needed intel, evidence, ammunition to put him away. I could only track him by watching him at night, by letting him in. I’d get inside him and hunt my prey like he was hunting his.

  Being in his head is my secret weapon. I know how cautious he is, how little it takes to make him abort a “mission.” If we ever met, I’d never overpower him physically, but I just might have the advantage of surprise.

  I started logging the Thief’s movements, plotting his course on the U.S. map above my bed. I got the idea from the giant map he keeps on the wall of his workshop. He’s too careful to mark his kills there, of course, but he likes to trace the routes with his finger.

  After a few weeks, I got lucky and caught him driving to his favorite spot in the desert, the abandoned mine north of Albuquerque. I mapped the whole thing and drew rough pictures of the site, including the entrance to the cave where I think he buried the homeless man.

  Now, if only I could go there, maybe I’d find something.

  But that was the same week my mom went looking in my room for a scarf to wear to an awards dinner, and promptly discovered my hideous-scarf stash and the pill stash within. And my life got more complicated.

  “I stopped taking them. I don’t need them anymore,” I told everybody—Mom, the therapist, the guidance counselor. The first was true; the second, not entirely. Once I started going to the support group, I realized I actually could use support, though I got more from Kirby than from the twelve steps.

  And I couldn’t ever relapse. I had to sleep. Next time he dumped a body, I told myself, I’d memorize the turns in the road. I’d call the troopers and lead them straight to the site.

  Instead, I got Ruth and Gary Gustafsson’s address. My one chance to prevent a murder, and I blew it.

  Doubts? I’ve been through them all. What if the lady I saw die in Texas wasn’t actually Kara Ann Messinger? What if my mind tacked her real face to a dream? What if there is no Thief?

  Crazy? I wish. That possibility rocks me like a boat on a tranquil lake, swaddles me like a comforter. Please, let me be crazy. Let it all end and start with me.

  Yes, maybe there is no Thief, just a twisted, wayward fantasy in a sick brain. Neurons misfiring, connections out of whack. If only I had proof positive, I’d take meds, do electro-shock therapy. Anything to stop this ache, this helplessness: You have to do something. You can’t stand by and watch.

  But now the Gustafssons are gone. I knew it before it happened. He isn’t going to stop.

  I have just one lead: that possible burial site in the desert. And anyone who stops me from going after him is my enemy.

  When I drive up to Nina’s house on Tuesday, she’s sitting on the porch in the tepid spring sun reading In Cold Blood. It’s on our AP English schedule for the end of the semester, so maybe she’s getting a head start.

  It’s not like she doesn’t already know how it feels inside a killer’s head. Or think she does. The whole time she was telling me the story of her life with the Thief, she wouldn’t look at me. I just kept nodding and holding her hand. No judgment, no questions—not yet.

  I lay awake for hours last night, everything she’d told me swirling in my brain. There were so many possible explanations: hallucinations, repressed memories of childhood trauma, plain old guilt and complicity. Nothing was resolved when I drifted off. But when the birds nesting in the gable woke me, I had just one thought: I have to help her.

  So I get right to it, my words coming out in a rush. “You want to go find Dylan Shadwell. In Albuquerque. And do what?”

  Nina sways in the porch swing, making the ropes creak. The wind chases fluffy clouds. “You don’t have to pretend you believe me.”

  “I’m not pretending.” I try to find the right word, one that won’t be a lie. “I’m…giving you the benefit of the doubt. I’m suspending disbelief, because I want to know what happened to the Gustafssons, too. So will you tell me your plan, or not?”

  After a long moment, she says, “I’m not going to knock on his door and ask where he buried them. I know how dangerous he is. Better than you ever will.”

  So she’s not going to thrust a shotgun in a stranger’s face. Good. Her tone still makes something tingle on the back of my neck, and I want to swat it like a blackfly.

  “What are you going to do? Show up and try to sell him Girl Scout cookies?”

  Nina grabs her backpack. Out comes a notebook. “I’ve been weighing different plans. Will you promise not to have me committed if I tell you?”

  “If I was gonna do that, you’d already be in a straitjacket.”

  That almost gets me a smile. More importantly, she opens the notebook and starts talking.

  Plan One: We go to the Schenectady PD, both of us, and lie. We say we happened to drive past the lot where the Gustafssons’ car was found at the very instant Dylan Shadwell stumbled out of it, bleeding and carrying a suspicious package. We trailed him to his car and got the plate number.

  I shake my head. “I won’t commit perjury.” Or accuse someone I don’t even know. “It would make more sense to go back there and search wherever you think he hid the bodies.”

  “There are about ten square miles where they could be. Even if we could dig them up, there might be no forensic traces of him, so it wouldn’t do any good.”

  Finding the Gustafssons’ remains would do their relatives some good, I almost say. But she’s not thinking about the victims anymore, just the killer. “Why don’t you just call in an anonymous tip and make them search his place?”

  “I tried that once before, remember? With the Texas murder. He’s got a clean record, and he’s careful. He always dumps his tools somewhere different from the—you know.”

  “The remains?”

  She nods. “Anyway, who’s going to believe he drove out of his way just to kill those people? You don’t, even.”

  Nina calls Plan Two “the voice of God.” “It’s dumbass. But I wrote it down anyway.”

  “Tell me this dumbass plan.” When we’re just tossing around ideas, being with her is almost like it used to be.

  She’ll send untraceable letters to Dylan Shadwell in which she describes his career of terror with details only he could know. She’ll warn him to stop.

  Nervous, pent-up laughter bursts out of me. “Are you going to say you’re his guardian angel?”

  “It’s not as stupid as you think. He believes he’s sort of…on a mission. Not from God, but from the universe or fate. He brings people death, and they never see it coming.”

  I can’t help saying the first thing that comes into my head. “If you think you can scare him into not impersonating the Grim Reaper, you know nothing about criminals, Nina, let alone psychopaths.”

  “What do you know about them?”

  Plenty—about garden-variety criminals, anyway. When I was little, I used to watch my brother Gray steal from the collection plate, my mom’s purse, pretty much any source of loose cash. After nights lying awake imagining my brother in prison orange, I wrote him a letter pretending to be an angel who was sad to witness his life of crime.

  My three brothers spent the next nin
e years calling me “our little angel” and making limp-wristed harping motions. After I agreed to start selling their pharma overflow, they elevated their mockery to Oscar-winning levels, swooning sarcastically at my virtuousness. I was terrified my mom would grasp their meaning and realize I wasn’t the Good Kid after all.

  “Criminals,” I tell Nina, “always think they’re right and the world is wrong. You can’t guilt them out of crime. That’s true of a two-bit thief—or a drug dealer like yours truly—and I’m guessing it’s true of a serial killer.”

  Her face is red. “I don’t think of you as a criminal. Anyway, how do you…change them, then?”

  Change a criminal? With me, shame and the fear of getting caught kicked in. With small-timers like my brothers, repeated applications of the stick (jail) and the carrot (honest paycheck) seem to work.

  But the person who stalked and killed the Gustafssons, if there is such a person? “Some people can’t be changed,” I say.

  Nina nods, but not vigorously. Like she’s wishing there was another solution to all the sickos out there, a humane trap-and-release system.

  I don’t believe there is, so I jump to the next plan.

  Plan Three is another digging-up-evidence scheme. Nina is pretty sure this guy buried at least one body in New Mexico, way out in the desert, and she thinks she can find it.

  “It’s underground,” she says, “a kind of cave—an abandoned mine. Linking the remains to him would be the problem, but this other killing happened back when he was sloppier. So there’s a chance.”

  I’m already reading over her shoulder, checking out Plan Four. Bait a trap. Become a potential victim.

  “No way,” I say.

  “You’re right. It would never work. He doesn’t let victims just come to him, not anymore—he chooses them. It’s important to him.”

  “That’s not the point.” I want to say that if this guy is a psycho, she shouldn’t get within twenty feet of him. But that might imply that I no longer have disbelief to suspend.