by Lotta Smith
Without saying a word, my capturer smiled, spooking me out big time. Emotion was completely lacking in his voice and even in his eyes. When you received a harsh insult, it was only natural to react with anger, rage, or even violence, but none of which was showing. He was giving me an empty, beady stare. At this point, I recognized his eyes were a dark shade of hazel.
“You’re still sporting the good old badass bitch attitude, just like the old days,” he whispered to me. “I’m so excited.” Then I realized his eyes were shining.
“I don’t understand,” I muttered. “What’s so good about me being called a bitch? First of all, you can’t go around calling every woman a bitch on the account it’s rude. And second, on a rare occurrence that some woman is totally, truly a bitch, still, she’s not all that useful for you. Unless…,” I gulped, “you have a special interest in bitches, for example, you like to poke the eyeballs out of women that you discriminate as a bitch, and perhaps you eat her flesh.”
In my head, a scene of my capturer devouring the flesh of his prey suddenly started rolling. I felt really, really sick. Actually, I puked a little in my mouth.
“You know what?” I continued talking through the sour, bitter, and disgusting taste in my mouth. “Eating human flesh is hazardous to your health. There’s this fatal neurodegenerative disease called Kuru in Papua New Guinea. This disease is a transmissible subacute spongiform encephalopathy and guess what? It’s transmitted by the endocannibalistic funeral rituals that local people eat the brain of the deceased.”
Thanks to hanging around Michael Archangel, I got to learn big words like ‘neurodegenerative diseases,’ even though I wasn’t really getting what I was talking about.
“For your information, I’m not planning to eat the eyeballs.” Alan shook his head. “If I was an eyeball-eating monster, then it wouldn’t make sense that I’ve got so many eyeballs with me at home. Besides that, I told you I’m not a cannibal, didn’t I?”
“If that’s the case, why are you snatching eyeballs from other people?”
“You don’t understand. I hate this rude nickname Eyeball Snatcher. I’m not a petty thief, and snatching eyeballs is not what I’m trying to do.” He let out a sigh. Then he reached for the chef’s knife on the table. “Why don’t we get started? So much chatter and no work so far, that’s not good, you know.”
I froze.
He took a step toward me.
One small step for the killer, one giant leap for Kelly’s life to vanish…
Can you say “screw-up”?
Chapter 32
One step at a time, Alan—a.k.a. Eyeball Snatcher the serial killer—advanced toward me.
With a butcher knife in his hand and a blank expression on his face, he was coming straight to me. Undoubtedly, he was determined to yank out my eyeballs any minute. I prayed to God to cause lightening to suddenly strike and kill him on the spot, but nothing happened. Maybe causing lightening indoors was extremely difficult even by God’s standards. I was open to the prospect of Alan dropping dead due to a sudden heart attack, aortic dissection, stroke, or a sudden episode of narcolepsy…something, anything! But none of that happened either.
So I spoke up. “Wait a minute!”
Not that I knew what I was going to say, but I spoke anyway. My pursuit of becoming an assistant extraordinaire to a first-class detective had finally seemed to be paying off. According to the mystery novels I’d studied for my job, “Do whatever you can do to distract the killer from killing you” was rule number one in dealing with killers. Personally, I was calling this tactic Operation Sheherazade.
“What?” He tilted his head but stopped advancing.
At least, I did well on the ‘distracting the killer from killing’ part. The next step was distracting the killer for as long as possible.
I thought hard. Very hard. In fact, much harder than the time I took the SAT.
“Tell me about yourself,” was the best I could manage.
One of his eyebrows twitched, but he didn’t say anything. Obviously, my lameness had taken him aback as much as it did me.
“Why do you ask?”
“Because I don’t want to be killed by some stranger for no plausible reason.” I thought about adding, “especially when I know you’ll pluck my eyeballs out,” but I didn’t say that. I was hoping he’d forget about the eyeball-plucking part.
“Where are you from? Tell me about your childhood memories,” I said. I was hoping that talking about his childhood would bring back his inner angel. Maybe I could talk him out of his horrible plan by reminding him of his loved ones. He might remember having people who cared for him, those who loved him unconditionally under any circumstances. Perhaps he’d hate to dishearten those people with his horrendous cruelty.
“Are you playing a therapist or what?” Alan made a face. “Don’t tell me about going back to the time when I was in the mother’s uterus. I don’t want to relive the rejection anymore.”
“What makes you think your mother rejected you?”
“Kelly, you ask too many questions, don’t you?” He released a resigned sigh and sat down, placing the knife on the table.
Hell yes! It was a really good sign.
He continued. “I’ll tell you. Actually, I don’t have many memories from my early childhood. I remember moving from one house to another and having a new ‘family’ each time. Also, at that time, I didn’t know I was in a foster care program. The most memorable event in my childhood was seeing this vivid, recurring nightmare where I was shivering and suffocating in the cold. In this dream, I struggled to breathe. I sucked in hard, though cold water was all that came into my mouth and nose. Then I found myself in total darkness.”
“Sounds like a bad dream. Can you think of anything that might have caused this recurring dream?”
“Oh yes, when I was very little, I got drowned. Except it was not a pool accident. Also, I was three-minutes old when it happened. The woman who conceived me had decided she didn’t want a child at that time. She was in the third trimester of pregnancy and, of course, it was too late to seek help from an abortion doctor. So she tried to terminate the pregnancy a la DIY, by dipping her pregnant self in icy cold water over and over in the middle of February in Albany, New York. After expelling the fetus from her body, she had presumably repeated the ‘dip the baby in cold water’ process until she was convinced I was dead.”
I recalled Archangel mentioning it was odd that the killer dumped the body of Leonie Ganong in the wilderness close to a little pond, but not in the pond. Submerging the corpse in the water had its perks, such as making it difficult to ID the victim, for instance. Now that I heard about his birth, I could understand the reason why he didn’t get close to the water.
“According to the record, she visited the local ER with an unconscious, non-breathing, hypothermic, bluish newborn with a weak pulse. Carrying the baby in a cleaning bucket made of cheap plastic, she informed them, ‘I guess it’s probably dead. You can just treat it as a stillbirth.’
“The baby didn’t have anything on to cover his body, not even a cloth, much less a blanket. She told the nurse she just had a miscarriage. When asked if it was intentional, she shrugged, saying, ‘I dunno, and it’s none of your business.’
“In the meantime, the newborn was successfully resuscitated from the catastrophic condition. The doctor who was treated the woman for mild hypothermia asked her if she was 100 percent sure she didn’t want to see the baby, but she was firm, saying, ‘No, I don’t care,’ and that was it. She left the hospital totally refusing to see her own child. Back then, self-induced abortion wasn’t considered as a crime, so they didn’t bother to call the police.”
I was at a loss of words.
“When I was young, I didn’t know the meaning of the recurring nightmare, or the fact that I was actually drowned just after the birth. Anyway, I experienced the nightmare over and over and over… like I was living in it. I cried and shrieked maybe a couple of times at first, but soon
I learned to just suck in the feelings, lock it up, and act like nothing had happened. That didn’t stop me from living the nightmare, but at least that saved me from getting spanked by some of my foster family members who got fed up with the troubled kid making a fuss in the middle of night each night. But getting spanked wasn’t the worst thing that happened in the foster homes. Before turning three, I was raped. And it was not just once or twice.”
I gasped.
“Newsflash, huh? Foster care programs where adoptive agencies, facilitators, and attorneys are involved, they’re all about money. When I was five, the agency that had supposedly arranged my custody got busted for fraud and deaths of kids in foster homes, and my case was handled by a better agency. So I was placed with a very rich family who had kindly adopted me. Then again, it was not happily ever after. There were some major drawbacks, such as the adoptive father had a thing for boys and only adopted boys, and the boys had to accompany him in the bath and in his bed every night, taking turns. Not to mention, all the other boys were bigger and stronger than me, and they often abused the little, weak, naïve newbie. Again, shutting the feelings out strategy helped me survive that.”
“And you survived,” I muttered. A part of me wished he didn’t. It was mean to think of it that way, but I couldn’t help it. Now I remembered one of my faux-dads, the orthopedic surgeon, mentioning the trickiness of helping people’s lives as a doctor. It was wonderful to save a dying person’s life, but sometimes, not saving that person’s life was in their best interest. Gosh, he was right. If it were not for the brilliant medical professionals at the hospital, Alan the Eyeball Snatcher would have been dead decades ago, which would have, ironically, helped the murder victims live much longer, probably as healthy people.
“Yeah. As much as I was a survivor, I was a fast learner. In no time, I learned to say the right things and act just the right ways so that I could take control and get the most of the situation,” he said, as if he treasured the memory. “As I grew up, I got better and better. Fortunately, I’d managed to become the only adopted son in the household when I was thirteen.”
“What happened to other boys?” I couldn’t help asking the question, but I wasn’t real sure if I wanted to know the answer.
“Some died from unexplained illnesses, some from freak accidents, and others just disappeared.”
“Did you, like…off them?” I asked. Half of me wished I’d just shut up, and the rest of me was driven by this little monster called curiosity.
“Maybe, maybe not.” He shrugged. “Who cares? Things happen.”
He continued. “When I went to college, I was pretty wealthy. My adoptive parents passed away; they were both killed in a freak golf cart accident in Florida. Again, things happen. As the only heir, I inherited their money.”
And I was positive he had something to do with the freak accident.
“Kelly,” he said abruptly, “can you imagine how I felt back then?”
“Happy?” I guessed. “Blissful, delighted, euphoric… maybe, victorious?”
“Wrong answers. On the contrary, I felt miserable. Indeed, I felt much worse than the hard times back in the old days. When I was struggling to outsmart others to survive, I used to imagine the future of living happily ever after. I believed I’d be happy if I could manage to get by all on my own, but when my dream was finally realized, I felt empty. Maybe it was post-victory blues. After all, throughout all those years, I’d been in a fight-or-flight state 24/7. When I was busy surviving, I often told myself I’d be a happy person without a care in the world if I could make it on my own—even though I couldn’t picture happiness, since I had no idea what it was all about. You can imagine things or situation only based on your past experiences and feelings, and you just can’t go beyond who you are. So, I was clueless.”
“Maybe it might have helped if you had kept some of your family members alive,” I suggested. I had my share of having dramatic stepsiblings, but in my case, as much as they gave me headaches and tears, they provided me with moral support, entertainment, and friendship.
Naturally, it had never occurred to me to hate my stepsiblings, much less offing them. After all, I knew deep down that step-family arrangements were just temporary affairs.
“Fortunately, the college I enrolled in was one of those hard-partying schools, so I had access to easy distractions,” he continued without acknowledging my remark. “I used booze, drugs, and sex, but none of which filled the emptiness. I got self-destructive and took on playing the stock market, which only worked to boost my wealth. So I did everything somewhat successfully, but the feelings of misery just got worse. I even went to therapy; it was so worthless. I quit college, stopped partying, broke up with one girlfriend, then another, and I ended up alone.”
Even though his story sounded like a hard-partying college dropout’s cliché, I knew he was no ordinary freak. Still, I was happy to keep listening to him. As long as he was talking, I could keep my eyeballs attached to myself.
Unlike Mom, who used to be an actress when she met my biological father, I’d had no experience or aspiration for a career on the big screen, playing the role of this poor girl who, by the end of the movie, gets slashed and axed—as in literally—splattering Mr. Yoshida’s Gourmet Sauce all over the camera lens. Personally, I wanted to keep my gourmet sauce inside myself, where it belonged, thank you very much.
So I nodded encouragingly to show him I was listening.
“One day, I had a bad cocktail of cocaine and some mysterious substance after binge drinking. I started running around, laughing, shrieking, and puking. Then I lost consciousness and dropped down on the sidewalk. The next thing I knew, I was lying on a hospital bed. An assistant nurse told me that, technically, I had been dead for more than a couple of minutes. A good Samaritan found me unmoving and unconscious on the pavement and called 911, and when the ambulance came, my heart had already stopped beating and I was not breathing. According to this assistant nurse, the paramedics successfully resuscitated me at the scene, but that doesn’t happen all the time. After being rushed to the hospital, I stayed unconscious for three days.”
“That’s dramatic,” I commented with the enthusiasm of an ex-cheerleader turned a perky reporter covering the NFL.
“The event was mind-blowing, seriously. The near death experience made me see the perspectives of dying, and it also gave me a craving to learn about my living perspectives as well. For the first time, I found myself desperately wanting to uncover my background, my roots, and the real history of me.”
He closed his eyes and took a deep breath, as if going through the pain.
“So I found out about my birth. It was an easy task, you know, especially since I used a private investigator. In no time, I got information, such as the name of the hospital where I was born, the description of my birth, and the name of the woman who tried to kill me when I didn’t even exist in this world. Maybe I should have let it go. After all, I survived as a rich guy. But I couldn’t. I had to find her, and I had to meet her…I needed to ask her why she tried to get rid of me. I received a report from the PI that said she had left the U.S. and moved to Paris. So I immediately took a flight to Paris and started looking for her on my own, only to find out she had moved from France years before. I continued searching for her, trailing after her footsteps for years. Maybe I was a bit sentimental, but as much as I wanted to find her, I wanted to see what she saw and feel what she felt on my way. So I went from one place to another in Europe—Paris, Nancy, Antwerp, and Amsterdam.”
He sighed. “Indeed, it was a long way. Still, it was worth the time, money, and effort. By following her trail, I got to meet the people who had known her, and they shared with me about the times they had spent with her. So my expedition was not just a wild goose chase. It was preparation to see her by getting to know her life.”
“So, did you find her?” I asked.
Without admitting or denying my question, he said, “I reached London after five years of searching
. When I came across reliable information, I felt heavenly, like my dreams were coming true, as if all those years of struggling with a broken heart were finally coming to an end and being replaced by joy and happiness. But noooo! It didn’t go that way,” he spat angrily.
I was no longer so sure if my ‘keep the killer talkin’ strategy was a good one or just a prelude to a total disaster.
“It was a cold, snowy afternoon in the bad area of the city. The streets were narrow and dark. Ancient gray buildings were covered with gang graffiti all over. It was a typical ghetto, I guess. She was a tenant at one of the worn-out apartments. I was full of hope and anticipation to see the woman who made it happen for me to exist in this world. Even now I can still feel the dump air and smell the stench in the alley. For a while, I stood there, holding my breath—as much as I was dying to see her, my nerves was crushing my heart. Finally, I gathered my grits and knocked on the door, only to rattle the cheap plywood crap and wake up the cranky lady living right next door. She stormed out, yelled to me that the door should be unlocked, ‘coz no unit came with a working lock, and went back to her room. So I turned the door knob and went inside—Kelly, can you imagine the situation?”
“I believe so,” I said, honestly. “As a person who’s gone through childhood and adult life without knowing their biological father, I can imagine it.” I didn’t mention having many faux-dads who were mostly okay to great.
“There was no life in the room,” he continued. “She was gone.”
“I’m sorry, but you could have continued searching for her. After all, you’d been seeking her for more than five years. Maybe she was not that far away?”
“No, she was far, far, far away—in a place I couldn’t reach. Her flesh was still remaining in the room, but her soul was no longer there. It was obvious she wasn’t there anymore. Her body was sitting on a chair completely motionless. I knew she had spewed lots of blood. Brown blood was beginning to dry and cake. I couldn’t… I couldn’t believe it!” he spat. “She had abandoned me before I was even born, and when I found her after all those years of intensive searching, there she was, without a word, without a hug, not even breathing. Dead! She was dead!” He demanded, “You can’t imagine it, can you?”
