Diary of a Serial Killer

by Ed Gaffney

  But until her father was out of prison, Steph just didn’t have the energy to start trying to hook up with anybody—no matter how fine they were. Even Zack Wilson.

  Holding her pizza in her left hand, she opened the phone with her right. “Hello?”

  Ten seconds later, she dumped the phone back into her purse, grabbed it, and, still stupidly holding on to the pizza, she ran across to her neighbor’s house.

  The phone call was from a Lieutenant Carasquillo from the police. Mrs. G. was in some sort of trouble.

  Terry pushed open the door to the courtroom and discovered a scene out of a horror movie.

  He was met by a small wave of people who pushed past him, out of the room, and into the hallway. Everyone else in the courtroom seemed to be ducking or crawling on the floor. Terrified screams filled the air. It was pandemonium.

  The normal overhead lights had been shut off, and only the emergency flood lamps were shining—throwing weird yellow beams in crazy angles across the windowless room.

  Terry couldn’t see Justin, but he knew where the little boy was sitting, and as he started running down the aisle toward him, trying his best not to step on any of the people who had flattened themselves there, another shot rang out.

  Terry looked up, and saw Alan Lombardo, standing at the front of the courtroom on the left side, aiming a gun out into the gallery.

  Another shot was fired, and sure enough, Goddamn Alan was going postal in the courtroom.

  Well, if he hadn’t been a mass murderer before, he was going to be one now.

  The screaming intensified, amplified now by the voices of people shouting for help and crying. Terry tripped on someone’s outstretched arm, and fell. When he scrambled to his feet, he saw a figure running across the front of the room from the right, toward Alan. It was Zack.

  But Alan must have seen him coming, because he aimed his gun at Zack and fired. There was a spray of blood into the air, and suddenly, Terry’s best friend of twenty years was flying through the air toward the clerk’s table.

  Terry kept fighting his way toward Justin. He couldn’t remember whether he’d left Zack’s son in the second or third row. Justin was on the right side of the courtroom, so as long as he hadn’t moved, he was fine. So far, anyway.

  Terry could only pray that Zack was fine, too. But from the volume of blood that had exploded out of him, and the way his body acted after getting shot, it sure didn’t look like he was fine.

  The number of terrified people crawling along the aisle toward the back of the room made it feel like Terry was wading against an impossibly strong human tide. And even if he reached the third row, which was still ten feet away, it was too dark to see down the length of the benches clearly. And with all of the screaming and crying, Terry couldn’t imagine locating Justin by voice.

  He dove into the fifth row of benches and scrambled up on top of the bench. If Alan looked this way, Terry would be screwed. But fuck it. This was the only way he would have any chance of making progress toward the front of the courtroom with any speed. He stepped up onto the back of the bench in front of him with his left foot, and then stepped over it with his right, bringing it down onto the bench itself.

  There was another gunshot. Alan looked like he was swinging around toward this side of the courtroom. Terry didn’t have much time.

  Again, he put his left foot on the back of the bench in front of him, stepped up, and swung his right foot over the back of the bench, bringing it down onto the bench in the third row. Terry looked down past his feet at the people cowering on the floor. They were all adults. No seven-year-old child.

  And then, for no good reason at all, Justin just stood up, facing the front of the room.

  He was in the second row—one ahead of Terry—and off about eight feet to his left.

  And worse than that, Terry saw Zack, using the clerk’s chair as some kind of rolling crutch, still heading toward crazy fucking Alan.

  And still worse, when Justin saw Zack, at a tragically coincidental lull in the screaming, the little boy cried out, “Daddy!”

  He might as well have painted a target on himself.

  Besides Terry, Justin was the only person standing in the entire room. And he was in the second row.

  Jesus Christ. Wearing a bright white T-shirt.

  Alan didn’t miss it. He turned and brought his gun up, preparing to kill the coolest kid in the world.

  The next thing Terry knew, he was flying through the air.

  Then there was a very loud bang at the exact time as a sharp pain sliced through Terry’s head.

  And then the emergency lights in the courtroom stopped working, and the screaming seemed to fade.

  Terry thought he heard several more gunshots, but he couldn’t be sure.

  In fact, Terry wasn’t sure whether he had fallen, or where Justin was, or just about anything else.

  And then it got really quiet.

  And then he was gone.

  Vera was speeding through the streets of Springfield, siren blaring. She was still at least ten minutes away.

  She used the radio to call the station house. Maribel, the administrative assistant, picked up.

  “Maribel, this is Vera. I’m heading for 54 Queen Street, Code 6. I’m going to need backup.”

  “Oh no, Detective.” That wasn’t exactly the response Vera was hoping for. She started blasting the air horn as she approached the intersection with Main Street. “Every available car is already gone to the courthouse. There’s a shooting in progress. Multiple victims.”

  Vera made a hard left onto Main, tires squealing. She barely missed a stupid cargo van that decided its right turn on red was more important than letting a cop car come through the intersection. “Get somebody here as soon as you can, Maribel,” Vera said. “Or I’m going to have multiple victims, too.”

  Stephanie Hartz

  IT WAS 1:51 P.M. WHEN STEPHANIE HARTZ ENTERED Mrs. Giordano’s house for the last time in her life.

  She was still holding the Maxie’s pizza box in one hand, so with her other, Steph fished her keys out of her pocket and opened her neighbor’s door.

  But once Steph got inside the house, she knew that something was terribly wrong. It was too quiet. The police lieutenant said that Mrs. G. had called the police for help and had identified Steph as a neighbor that could stay with her until they arrived. So she expected to see or hear something as she entered.

  It was eerie. Mrs. G. was always doing something—baking cookies, cleaning the windows, writing letters. Steph couldn’t hear anything. “Mrs. Giordano?” she called. “It’s Stephanie. Mrs. G.? Are you okay?”

  And then she heard it. A noise. Coming from the room to the left of the entryway. Like a soft, high-pitched, what? Moan? The sound someone makes when they’re having a bad dream?

  Steph set the pizza down on the little table in the front hallway and put her purse on the floor beneath it. Then she hurried into the living room, and saw Mrs. Giordano.

  Bound and gagged with duct tape to one of her straight-backed dining room chairs.

  Monster

  HE HAD JUST LEFT THE UPSTAIRS BEDROOM—old people’s homes were really boring—when he heard the front door open. And then a woman came inside, closed the door behind her, and called out for Mrs. Giordano.

  He smiled. Of course she’d come. He’d heard her on the phone with Mrs. Giordano countless times over the past weeks. The two were obviously quite close. There was no way Stephanie would stop to think for a second that in emergencies cops didn’t call the neighbors to tell them to come over.

  He waited, silent, until Stephanie moved into the body of the house. Then he hurried down the stairs, and stopped. His Taser was out, and he was ready for business.

  He had already checked—there was only one other exit from the tiny house. A side door led to the outside off the kitchen, the room to the right as you came in the front. Fortunately, there was a keyed dead bolt which he had secured, and then removed the key.

&nbs
p; The kitchen led to the room at the back of the house, a small formal dining room, which had no exit except to the living room, where Mrs. Giordano sat, quietly awaiting her fate.

  Nobody was leaving this house except through the front door, where he currently stood, listening, trying to figure out where his second guest was. If she had gone into the house to the right after she entered, she would still be calling out for Mrs. Giordano, because the kitchen was empty.

  So she must have gone to the left, and seen the old lady taped to the chair.

  That was fine, as long as she hadn’t set the old woman free. He enjoyed catching victims, but only one at a time.

  No worries. Stephanie had only been in the house a few seconds. Duct tape was tough stuff—it was going to take a while to get it all off.

  Still, he didn’t want his new participant to be focused on Mrs. Giordano. He wanted her concentrating on her own problems.

  So he decided to open communications.

  He took his gun out with his free hand, and fired it into the ceiling. The gunshots reverberated throughout the little house, punctuated by the gentle sounds of plaster falling to the floor.

  The settling dust drew his eye to a small table and the box on it.

  He laughed, and then shouted into the silence, “Wow! Pizza! My favorite!”

  THIRTY-FIVE

  “WOW! PIZZA! MY FAVORITE!”

  The bizarre words of the serial killer rang out even before the echoes of his gunshots had stopped bouncing off the walls.

  As she stood there, dead still in the dining room at the back of the house, two competing feelings battled for control inside Stephanie.

  On the one hand, she had never been so completely terrified in her life. It was possible that she was literally within seconds of her own horrible death at the hands of an inhuman creature who reveled in the pain and torture of others.

  On the other, her senses had never been so alive. She smelled the gunpowder from the shots the killer had taken, the plaster dust in the air, the pizza sitting in the front hall.

  She heard the labored breathing of Mrs. G., still taped up in the living room, as if she were still standing next to her.

  She hadn’t had enough time to free the old woman.

  At least she was still alive, thank God.

  Plan A was obvious—Steph needed to call for help. But there was no phone in the dining room, and her cell phone was in her purse, which was in the front hall, underneath the little table with the pizza on it.

  That left Plan B—get out of the house, and then call for help.

  To her right, she could go back through the living room, past Mrs. G.

  And to her left, she could go through the kitchen. She thought that’s where Mrs. G.’s phone was, and she also thought she remembered there was a door to the side yard off the kitchen. But there was no way the killer was going to let her take the time to dial a phone number, or fiddle with an unfamiliar lock. The house was so small that as soon as he knew where she was, if she didn’t keep moving, he’d be on top of her in seconds.

  She was going to have to use her newly heightened sense of hearing, and listen for the way he chose to walk around the house. She’d sneak around the other way, reach the front door, and escape.

  If she went the wrong way, she was as good as dead. He’d shoot her, and she’d never get away.

  Even if her plan worked, it was, of course, a very risky one, leaving Mrs. G. alone in the house with this psychopath. He could kill her in a moment.

  But Steph was gambling that if she could make it out the door, the killer would be so intent on self-preservation that he would just bolt, fearing capture if he stayed long enough to murder Mrs. G.

  She stood directly in the middle of the dining room, exactly the same distance from the entrance to the kitchen, on her left, as the entrance to the living room, on her right.

  The way the room was set up, she couldn’t see more than a few feet into either of the rooms to her sides from where she was standing. And it was impossible, no matter how hard she tried to strain her peripheral vision, to see both of the entrances to the adjoining rooms at once. She was going to have to keep moving her eyes back and forth, and try to pick up some hint of the direction the killer had decided to take.

  With each passing glance, Steph caught sight of the antique china cabinet standing on the wall directly in front of her. Glass doors revealed shelves of beautiful plates, saucers, and cups.

  But beneath the upper cabinets were a set of drawers, which she knew contained potential weapons. Keeping watch for the killer at all times, Steph eased forward, and silently opened the center drawer, revealing a set of flatware.

  Including Mrs. G.’s collection of steak knives.

  She stood dead still, trying to hear everything. Or anything.

  A car drove past the front of the house.

  Quietly, quietly, using just the tips of her fingers, Steph reached into the drawer, and removed one of the knives.

  A lawn mower started up, far off in the distance.

  A car horn sounded.

  A kitchen floorboard creaked.

  As if she had been training all her life for the Olympic house-sprinting finals, she was off like a rocket, knife in hand, flying into the living room, past Mrs. Giordano, heading for the front door, when suddenly, she heard a crash in the entryway. Probably the little table with the pizza.

  Then a male voice bellowed, “Shit!”

  He was heading toward her through the living room.

  She skidded back in the direction she’d come, toward the dining room at the rear of the house. She’d go through that room, into the kitchen, and around to the front that way.

  But from the thunderous sound of the killer’s footsteps, he had reversed direction, too, and had returned to the kitchen, intending to cut her off again.

  Thank God Steph was wearing her cross-trainers today. She planted her left foot, stopped on a dime a few feet into the dining room, and turned around again, once more running past Mrs. Giordano, who sat helplessly in the chair, shaking her head frantically and gargling something in her throat that Steph couldn’t understand.

  As Steph passed the old woman for the third time, she realized that the killer must have finally committed to coming all the way through the kitchen, chasing her through the dining room and into the living room, because she no longer heard him in front of her.

  And then suddenly he was standing there, smack in front of the door, as she tore directly toward him.

  The reason she hadn’t heard him running was because he wasn’t running. He had started back through the kitchen just hard enough and just loud enough to make her think he’d decided to chase her all the way around the house, and then, once she’d committed herself to running through the living room to the front entry, he just stopped, and waited for her to come to him.

  As soon as Steph saw him, two things happened.

  She slammed to another body-shaking stop.

  And he raised what looked like a strange, large gun, and said, “Stephanie, we meet at last. Welcome to my world.”

  Before the words were out of his mouth, Steph had already turned around and started to run. A crackling sound and an astonishingly painful shock blasted through her, running up and down her spine, into her skull.

  It was pain she’d never experienced before. Completely humbling, terrifying, thoroughly disabling agony.

  The inside of her head was crackling. She heard nothing but that and a buzzing, ringing sound, and thought she might smell something burning. She lost all control of her limbs, and fell flat onto her face, twitching and convulsing helplessly. Her arms spilled out above her head, the knife—her only hope—skittered away on the hardwood floor.

  After an eternity, the electrical current stopped blasting through her body, and the incredible pain ceased pulsing through her, but Steph still could not use her muscles. Paralyzed, she lay there, motionless except for an occasional, involuntary twitch, staring out at the knife,
mere inches away.

  Desperately trying to put out of her mind the terror, the lingering pain, the buzzing in her ears, the full horror of her situation, she used all of her concentration and willed her right arm to move.

  Nothing. So she concentrated on her right hand, and then only on the fingers of her right hand. Move. If she could just get control of something, she could get that knife in her hand, and fight this monster off.

  But her body refused to respond. She lay there, motionless, staring at her unresponsive arm. Her mouth lay open, and a small puddle of saliva began to form beneath her open lips.

  There was nothing now but to wait for a psychotic killer to torture and then murder her.

  An image of her father formed in her mind, and a tear ran down her cheek. He didn’t deserve this.

  She didn’t deserve this.

  Her hearing was slowly returning, and the sound of his footsteps approached. He was going to pass Mrs. G. on his way to her. But then he stopped.

  “You know what, ladies? I’m a little hungry. I think I’m going to get myself some pizza. I’d offer you some, but, well, you know.”

  And then his footsteps moved away. He was going back into the hallway for the pizza. Moments later, there were sounds from the kitchen. He was opening the refrigerator.

  “Mrs. Giordano? Do you have anything to drink?”

  The gagged woman didn’t answer.

  The killer’s mocking continued from the kitchen. “That’s okay. No—don’t get up. I’ll get it myself.”

  Steph focused again on her arm. The electrical shock had so completely messed up her nervous system that the signals from her brain weren’t getting to her hand. She kept trying to contract a muscle, to get anything to happen, but her arm just lay there, as if it belonged to someone else.

  The refrigerator door closed. Then there was the rasp of a soda can being opened.