by Debra Dunbar
“No.” She shook her head with regret. “This man has murdered. He killed a man in the group he used to camp with. The man slandered him, stole his belongings, and would set traps to hurt him and make him look foolish in front of the others. He planned for many weeks and killed the man, leaving his body in the woods and taking his belongings before he left. He has only killed the one man.”
I sensed the man’s alarm at this revelation of his darkest secret. I’m sure he thought he would soon be dead. I didn’t care about his crime. It wasn’t my problem. I wasn’t an angel of justice. Let someone else deal with the dude’s actions.
“Okay. Sorry about your tent buddy,” I told the man. “Boomer, let him go. Let’s try again.”
The guy collapsed against the floor and this time he did pee his pants as Boomer let him free. We walked out and headed back to the row houses, making sure we flagged down Reed, telling him that we’d hit a dead end.
“Two more to go.”
Boomer once again sniffed the ground. He’d reverted to his regular Plott hound form as we left the cannery. He was a fierce looking hellhound and very attractive, in a horrifying way, when he was in partial form, but I really admired his glossy brindle coat and lean athletic form as a dog. His thin tail swung like a whip back and forth, and his jowls puffed in and out as he inhaled the scents. I hoped he continued to choose this form now that he had the freedom to change. I rather liked it.
Boomer looked up and did the complicated head and foot movements again.
“This one killed with no emotion at all.” I translated for the others.
I didn’t tell them everything though. Boomer had indicated that this murderer somehow felt it was his right to take life at will. As if he were entitled. I remembered Kitty’s words from before and felt a chill of anticipation. This had to be our guy.
“I don’t think this is the guy,” I lied. “But we should follow it up anyway. Reed, can you stay here again?”
Reed looked suspicious. I was a terrible liar. He nodded, though, and headed back to the front of the building to make his security rounds. Kitty grinned at me.
“I thought you guys were supposed to be good at lying?”
“With all the practice I’ve had you’d think I’d be good at it. Unfortunately, I truly suck.”
We followed Boomer as he trailed along, nose to the ground, in a convoluted pattern throughout downtown and across the park. At the end of the street, Boomer indicated that the guy had gotten into a car.
“Are we at a dead end?” I asked him, frustrated.
Boomer grinned and shook his head. In a blink, a two-headed hellhound stood in front of me. Drool dangled in long threads from shiny fangs and his yellow eyes glowed. He was so beautiful with his sharp rough spikes of brindled fur and massive shoulder and hip joints. His paws were the size of dinner plates and his heads came to my shoulder. One head sniffed the air and the other sniffed the ground. It sounded like a freight train. I looked over at Kitty. She was unfazed at Boomer’s new appearance.
Boomer began trotting and I broke into a jog to follow. I wasn’t sure how Kitty managed to keep up with her voluminous layers of clothing, but she managed, almost floating above the ground as she ran. I made sure I kept Boomer on the inside of the traffic, where his interesting appearance would be partially screened, but I wasn’t terribly concerned. Internet videos of a two-headed dog jogging in the night weren’t high on my list of worries right now.
We trotted past the military base, past several new subdivisions, and outside the city limits before Boomer turned up a side road into the mountains. The road wound around the wooded properties and became gravel. Finally, the hellhound stopped and looked up an obscured path. There was an area on the side of the road where the brush had been cleared and tire tracks indicated a regular parking area. It was empty of car or truck.
“I think the guy might not be home,” I told Kitty, pointing at the tire tracks. “It is his normal hunting hour. We might have a long wait ahead of us.” She nodded and we both followed Boomer up the narrow path.
I’d expected to see an old trailer, or a tent, or some dilapidated shack. I was surprised, though, when the path opened out onto a nicely mowed lawn and an attractive brick rancher. There may have been a driveway at one point, as indicated by the small garage attached to the house, but the asphalt had been ripped out long ago and nothing marred the green lawn and woods surrounding the house. This dirt path appeared to be the only access.
Boomer did quick surveillance while Kitty and I remained out of sight at the wooded edge of the lawn. He returned and indicated that our guy wasn’t home.
“I’m going to break into his place and wait for him inside,” I told Kitty. “You may want to stay hidden. I’m not sure what we’re going to find in there, or what will happen when he gets home and finds us inside.”
Kitty nodded.
“Of course, since you’re already dead, he can’t exactly kill you.” I was taking a guess here. I’d never met a ghost before, and wasn’t exactly sure.
She grinned at me in confirmation, her teeth jagged and blackened. Then she turned and vanished into the trees, fading away to nothing at the edge of the woods. It was an impressive trick, especially for a homeless woman in a huge coat, even if she was a ghost.
Boomer and I walked right up to the front door. There were four locks on it. The standard handle lock, two deadbolt locks, and a sliding bar lock. Gritting my teeth, I sent tendrils of awareness in and around the door to explore further.
This summer, I’d had my hand melted and come rather close to death from touching a hex. The experience left me rather wary of sticking my personal energy into houses and doorways. Still, it was the best way to examine the entrance. I’d assumed the guy was just a human, but I wanted to make sure. No sense in stumbling in to find a witch, a sorcerer, or another demon had put unexpected traps on the entrance. I felt nothing but the physical barriers and proceeded to unlock them. It would have been quicker to just melt the locks, convert the mechanisms into putty or dust, or to blast the door open, but it would have ruined the lovely surprise I was planning.
I was so excited. Would he be like Ted Bundy? A genius killer with the soul of a poet? Would there be heads in the freezer, or bodies buried under the crawl space? What amazing things would I find behind the door?
Once inside, I carefully set the locks back in place and surveyed the house as best as I could in the dark. The guy had left no lights on at all. With the neighbors so far away, any light I turned on would shine like a beacon.
The house was unremarkable, but I kept looking, sure there would be a freakish lair somewhere. I peered at the pictures and books on the shelves beside the wood stove. Some popular mystery paperbacks and a few romances. A Bible, various magazines, and puzzle books. The pictures showed an older aged man and woman, one of a black Labrador, and a rather nice sunset on the beach. Maybe Boomer was wrong? This didn’t look like the house of a killer.
I picked up the phone and called Wyatt. “Hey, Sam,” he said. “How’s your hunt going? Is Reed ok?”
“Yeah, he’s just pissed that he’s stuck behind while I’m doing the hunting,” I told him in a hushed voice. “Any sign of Sobronoy?”
“None so far. I’ve got everything locked down tight and a camera on the road coming in.”
Good. Maybe we had some time. This back-to-back killing was starting to wear me down a bit.
“Hey, do me a favor and check out this house? Boomer says this is it, but it just looks too normal.” I gave him the address and heard him tapping in the background.
“It’s not in the city limits, is it?” Wyatt said, half to himself. “If you went out past the army base, it’s got to be closer to Yellow Springs. But there’s nothing with that house number on that road. Let me try the roads branching from there and see if maybe the name changed at one point.”
Wyatt chatted on in one part of my mind, while another looked at the dining room and the kitchen. A silk floral
arrangement was on the table, along with a decent amount of food in the cabinets. I grabbed a beer out of the fridge and tossed the cap into the trash. Might as well indulge while Wyatt was checking things for me.
“Ok, I’m looking at satellite images now, and I can see the house, but it doesn’t appear to be on the postal registry. Let me overlay the satellite images with older street maps and check the last twenty years of census and tax records and see what I can find.”
The master bedroom was a little less pristine, with the comforter hastily thrown over the bed sheets and dirty socks on the floor beside the hamper. The sheets under the comforter were reasonably clean. Nothing was under the bed or in the closet beyond dust bunnies and clothing. The bathroom was unremarkable with a blob of toothpaste in the sink and a crumpled towel on the floor. Nothing in this house stood out at all beyond the weird removal of the driveway and the excessive locks on the door. I didn’t even see the expected rifle or shotgun anywhere. What the fuck? I was so disappointed. Where was the psycho stuff? Where was the snuff porn, explosives, heads in the freezer?
“Got it. Mr and Mrs. Wratzler. They’ve owned the house since nineteen seventy. Place was built in nineteen sixty-eight. I show them as the current owners.”
The second bedroom looked untouched. The bed was carefully made, and there were knickknacks artfully arranged on the dresser and the bed stands. No dust. I pounded on the bed and didn’t see any dust rise from it. Whoever this guy was, he was a neat mother fucker.
“Mr. Wratzler was a civilian vet tech over at the base until his retirement in ’86. His wife got grand champion for needlework at the county fair in ’83. They pay their taxes regularly. Mrs. Wratzler died in ’95. Looks like cancer from the ‘in lieu of flowers’ notation on the obit. Absolutely nothing on Mr. Wratzler since then.”
“Thanks, I’ll see you soon,” I told him and hung up.
If the wife was dead, could the husband have gone crazy and begun killing homeless people? It’s not like he’d be revenging his wife’s death from cancer by killing vagrants. All this clean neatness was not what I’d expected either. He’d have to be really fucking old, too. Did he clean all day, and go chop off ears at night? He must be really fit to grab someone off the street, wrestle them to the ground, kill them, and drag the body off somewhere. None of this made sense.
A more likely scenario was that a younger man knocked off Mr. Wratzler, who would have been easy pickings as a reclusive widow. Then he’d have a home base to organize his killings. I motioned for Boomer to come with me and headed down to the basement. It was either the garage or the basement, and I was banking on the basement.
I flicked on the light and headed down the stairs. There was a nice finished section with carpet, a TV, comfy chairs, and a table. There was even a mini kitchen set up. On the dining room table was a sculpture of what were clearly human ears. After the sterile weirdness of the upstairs, this area was a breath of fresh air. I could feel his personality down here. I envisioned him watching TV in the recliner, dozing off late at night, comforted by the presence of his trophies, knowing that the house upstairs would shield him from a hostile and misunderstanding world. Finally, something interesting about this guy.
Ears. It was an odd choice.
Usually it was eyes. Eyes were the organ of perception, of vision, and awareness. Taking a victim’s eyes meant their judgment couldn’t be reflected back. The judgment of God, condemning a killer for an act beyond the scope of humanity. It robbed their power of perception and stole it for a killer’s own use. Tongues were also popular. The dead could not accuse without their tongues.
Ears were weird though. It was a theft of spiritual perception. They had once been a common Egyptian and Far Eastern theme, but not one seen much in the modern world. Ears connected a person to the soft, subtle sounds of life, of death, to the sound of the divine word. I looked at the sculpture carefully. It was composed of both right and left ears. This guy at least was balanced in his duality, preserving both that which hears the whisper of birth and the whisper of death. Personally, I would have made a hanging mobile from the ears, so they could move in the air and freely receive sounds on the wind. It would have been more artistic, more poetic than this odd, lumpy collage.
The ears had been dried in a relatively professional manner to preserve them from decay. I reached out and felt one. They were fairly leathery. Not dried to the point of jerky. It was a fine line. Not enough drying and they’d still be soft, but mold and mildew over time. Too much drying and they’d be difficult to work with and susceptible to crumbling.
He’d taken armature wire and pierced the ears, probably using a bead reamer from a craft store. It would have gone through the dried ear easily. The lowest ears were wired to a wooden base, and other ears joined in an attempt to make it appear as if they were attached seamlessly. He’d done a good job of hiding the wire. And the wire was a good choice, too. Glue would have damaged the flesh of the ear and made it difficult to fine tune his sculpture. Not that fine tuning would do much for it. Basically it was a pile of ears. Nothing inspirational at all in this thing. It was very disappointing. It made me want to kill him even more.
The basement had its own entrance out to the back of the house. I’d left Boomer upstairs on alert, but now I called softly to him. He padded down the basement steps, still huge with the two massive drooling heads.
“Do you think he uses the upstairs door or this one down here?” I asked him. He looked around the room with obvious interest. “If he comes in upstairs, I may move his ear sculpture up there and wait to greet him, but I’ll just stay here if he comes in through the basement.”
I wanted to provide maximum impact when the guy came home. Sort of like a surprise party of death. If he came in upstairs, moving his sculpture up there would most likely send him into a screaming rage. The fact that I’d touched it, moved his sculpture from his personal area to the foreign part of the house, would be a violation on the level of rape. I would have laid my hands on, ripped from its safe place, the most private part of him. If he came in down here, though, and I was upstairs, he’d see the missing sculpture first and I would lose element of surprise. If he came in down here, I’d need to think of something to do that would have the same emotional punch.
While Boomer checked the doors, I went through another interior door that presumably led from the finished area of the basement to a utility side that should hold a washer and dryer. No surprise, this was the guy’s staging area. I hadn’t been sure if he brought the bodies back here or dumped them close to where he killed them. I’d assumed from the lack of front page news that he’d been disposing the bodies in a discrete fashion. No one would notice missing homeless people, but a rash of earless bodies would definitely spur an investigation. The room was clean and smelled of bleach. A variety of useful tools hung on a pegboard over a stainless steel table. Saws, axes, picks, drills. Rolls of poly and boxes of biodegradable garbage bags stood neatly by the table along with several bags of lime and various shovels. I assumed if I looked around the wooded area, I’d find graves. Boomer could locate them easily, but I really had no interest in digging up dead bodies. The most interesting thing in the room was a food dehydrator by the innocuous washer and dryer. This was the tool to preserve his precious ears.
Boomer indicated to me that this guy used the basement entrance the majority of the time. Patting one of his heads in appreciation, I sent him off to the side of the door where he’d be less likely to be noticed as the guy entered the room. Then I turned off the lights and sat down to wait.
I’m not good at waiting. I fidgeted in the recliner, got up and rooted through the fridge, snapped an ear off the sculpture and played with it a bit. I found a steak knife and killed time by stabbing holes in the arm of the recliner. It was getting on past midnight and I seriously thought about turning on the TV, but the light would alert him to my presence. Sighing in boredom, I continued to hack bits of foam and stuffing from the chair arm. If this guy didn’
t get home soon, I was going to order pizza.
It was close to four in the morning before Boomer alerted me of the ear-man’s approach. I’d already drank all the beers and sodas in the fridge upstairs and used the empty bottles to improve the lumpy ear sculpture. Luckily I’d found some ham and cheese and made myself a sandwich, too. I was still starving though. Waiting with anticipation in the dark basement, I heard a dragging noise and a huffing of breath. He must have dragged his victim in some kind of tarp or blanket all the way from the parking area. Now that was dedication.
The guy unlocked the door with familiarity and flicked on the light as he came in. Instead of yelling ”Surprise!”, I took a bite out of one of the ears I’d impaled on the steak knife and chewed thoughtfully.
“This one needed a few more minutes in the dehydrator,” I told him as he stared at me, stunned. “It’s a little raw on the inside.”
You would think the guy would realize something was off. Normal humans wouldn’t break into your house, re-arrange your body-part sculpture, hack up your chair, and cheerfully chow down on one of your victim’s ears. His emotions clearly took control of his brain in this instance, and I saw the red flush of rage flare up his face. With an impressive, piercing scream, he launched himself at me from the doorway.
The guy had good physical instincts. He cleared the floor space and slammed into me, knocking the recliner backwards with the force of his impact. He’d also been paranoid enough to have a knife, a really sharp knife, on his person. I’d barely smacked the floor and he was slicing at me, stabbing furiously over and over into my mid-section with the knife.
“Bitch, bitch, bitch,” he screamed in time with his stabs.
He was heavy, and fast. I couldn’t push him off or completely avoid his knife without using energy, and I didn’t want to hurt him too much yet. This was going to be fun, and I wanted to prolong the experience even if it meant I got sliced up. Inspired, I grabbed his head and planted a kiss on him, figuring the oddness of having someone he was stabbing kiss him might jolt him back into his brain.
