To Probe A Beating Heart

by Wren, John B

  “Damn, she’s heavy.” he muttered to himself.

  “Sarah’s not that heavy, is she?”

  “I don’t think so, but Ellie may be.”

  “Naw, she’s thinner than this one, maybe twenty pounds lighter.”

  “I hope,” and he took his duct tape, bound Marlene securely, placed a cloth wad in her mouth and duct taped over the cloth. His ‘subject’ loaded in the van, Averell picked up the water bottle and pulled a blue drop cloth over everything.

  Averell quickly but carefully drove to the deserted industrial park

  and parked in a lot across the street. He waited for an hour when he

  heard stirring in the back of the van, turned with sap in hand and tapped Marlene on the back of her neck. All was quiet until about 12:00 noon, when a police patrol car appeared and made its way to the side gate. No more than five minutes later the patrol car exited the gate and pushed it back into place. After the police were out of sight, Averell started his engine and proceeded to the same side gate and entered the site. He drove around the back of the building and stopped at a recessed truck dock. The van was all but hidden by the recess and the pass door was just a few steps away. Averell unloaded Marlene and half carried, half dragged her into the building. The open space was cavernous, extending about a hundred feet toward the front office area and about sixty feet wide. The space contained a number of pallets, shelves and shipping crates scattered about. One overturned crate would serve well as a work table and Averell forced his prize close to it before allowing her to drop to the floor. Marlene was semi-conscious almost mobile and he moved quickly to position the crate and stretch her out on it. She tried to speak, but the gag in her mouth was well positioned and no intelligent sounds were emitted.

  Averell maneuvered her into a sitting position on the edge of the crate.

  He removed her jacket and eased her into a prone position. Marlene, still stunned by the two blows to her head was easily manipulated and all four limbs were soon tied in place. Averell had spread her arms and legs leaving her stretched out and face up. He pulled on a set of surgical scrubs over his street clothes, then removed the bag from her head and saw that she had been bleeding from the first blow with his sap. He went out to the van and retrieved his tools and the plastic container. He made a second trip to bring in the painters drop-cloth and prepared to ‘probe’ his ‘subject’.

  Marlene was slowly regaining her wits and started thrashing in an

  attempt to get loose. No luck although she could move, she could not get loose. Averell approached with his knife and cut the cord from her waist band. She tried to see who else was there, but she could only see Averell. He walked around her prone figure as if studying, thinking. Then he spoke to someone else, “You see my friend, what we have here is a very bad person. Someone who should not be permitted to live. We shall remedy that soon enough, but first,” Averell turned toward Marlene, “You are a very nasty woman, Sarah, ah, excuse me, Marlene, and we are going to see what is inside you, we are going to see if you have a heart.” He opened her blouse and with his knife, cut the sleeves to allow it to be removed. He then gently removed the remainder of her clothing, only using his knife where he had to cut something rather than loosen her bindings. He paced again, walking around the crate and stared at her bound body. She was naked, completely at his mercy and he stared, paced and thought. Averell was not aroused sexually, he was rather excited in another way. He was going to cut her, to pierce her body with his probes and watch her eyes.

  He was going to see her pain and when the time was right, he was going to open her chest and see her beating heart. Then he would let her die, slowly as he watched her eyes, watched the life drain out of her body. As he approached her with his knife, he spoke, “Stelian, would you like the first cut?”

  “Why, thank you Averell,” replied Stelian,”But where to cut?”

  “Ah, yes, let me show you,” and Averell took a marking pen and drew a line on Marlene’s chest from the top of the sternum to her navel. “You see, follow the line, but not too deep, yet.” He then turned away from the crate as if addressing some else again and said, “Now watch closely Ellie, you are going to be next.”

  Marlene was in complete panic, she knew this was a mad man and she was about to die. Averell placed the knife on her chest and followed the line with the point of the knife making a series of shallow scratches in the skin. “Yes my friend, now make the final cut and we shall see if this woman has a heart.” He repositioned the knife and started to apply pressure and draw the knife toward the navel and stopped just before reaching the base of the sternum. “Have we forgotten to apply the probes?” He seemed to ask the air. “We shall remedy that right now.” He took one of his new probes and positioned it on Marlene’s bicep and pushed. The probe passed through her arm. The pain of the probe in her arm and the thought of another probe made Marlene violent. She pitched and thrashed and tried to scream. Averell calmly picked up another probe and positioned it on her belly. Again he pushed as hard as he could. The probe went in about eight inches and slowed. Averell stopped pushing and looked into Marlene’s eyes. Panic, pure panic he thought. He picked up another probe and positioned it on Marlene’s neck. Averell knew what he wanted to miss in this insertion and held her head still as he pushed the probe slowly into and through her neck.

  “Ah, three more to go,” said Averell.

  “May I do the next one?,” asked Stelian.

  “Of course my friend, please.”

  He picked up another probe and positioned it on Marlene’s thigh.

  He pushed, hard and it passed through one leg piercing through to the

  other.

  Averell laughed and said, “Ha, a twofer, you hit both legs my friend.”

  “Oh, I did, not that I meant to. An accident, it was an accident,” replied Stelian.

  “Not to worry, we will simply do the other arm next.”

  Marlene again thrashed and twisted, trying to get free. Her sudden

  movement knocked the tool box to the floor.

  “Damn it” said Averell.

  “Relax, we are in control here.”

  He picked up the box and his tools and put them out of her reach and stood there holding a knife.

  “Now you be still and this should not hurt at all.”

  “We shouldn’t lie to the woman, Averell, it’s not polite.”

  “Again, you are right my friend.”

  Averell looked at Marlene and said, “This is really going to hurt.” and

  he plunged the knife into her chest, between two ribs below her left breast and tried to slice across her chest hitting her sternum. Marlene thrashed, twisted and gulped all at once, then fell absolutely still.

  “I think we have lost her doctor.” said Stelian.

  “Yes, I believe you’re right.”

  The fun was over, Marlene was dead and Averell stood silently for

  a moment looking at her body. He had wanted to see her heart beating

  before he was finished, but she died, damn-it. Another messy episode with blood everywhere. This time, though, he was more prepared. He picked up all of his tools that he had used and set them aside. Those he did not use, he put back into the tool box and moved it away from Marlene. He then pulled all of the probes out of her body, and with a bottle of water with a straw like drinking nozzle, he rinsed off his tools and probes and put them in a separate plastic bag. Then he stepped out of the scrubs that he was wearing, took off the surgical shoe coverings and placed everything in a plastic garbage bag. He looked at himself and noted some blood had soaked through the layer of scrubs and had stained his shirt and pants.

  “Damn it, I thought that the scrubs would keep the under layer clean.”

  “A lesson learned, my friend.”

  “Indeed, we shall make the proper adjustments then.”

  “For the next one?”

  “Yes, the next one.”

  When he was certain that place was clean of any tr
ace of himself and his participation in Marlene’s demise, Averell left the building, pulling the door closed. He put his boxes and bags in his van. He had the tool box, rubber gloves, garbage bags, he was sure that he had it all, he got in the van and calmly drove away. He went to a small strip mall at a cross roads east of Mentor where he knew there was a coin operated laundry. There he took the bag of bloodied clothing to be washed and dried twice with excessive amounts of both detergent and bleach. As the laundry was going through its first cycle, he rinsed off the bags, removing any obvious trace of blood. Having completed that task, he separated the used clothing into two lots and placed them in clean plastic bags. He left the laundry and drove out of the strip mall. As he was driving on a back road and passing an office park, he noted a trash dumpster where he deposited the old garbage bags, then he headed to the freeway. He was almost to the state line when he spotted a motel and stopped for the night. In his room, Averell checked his mileage and determined that he had put on an additional 573 miles, and he started a new record of miles to be blended into his log to balance with the odometer in his car. He drove something in excess of 50,000 miles each year, so hiding 500 or 600 miles was an easy task. The important thing was balancing his log and odometer. He retrieved his probes and his knife, the only tools that had been used on Marlene and cleaned them as thoroughly as possible then broke the knife and bent the skewers. These parts he would deposit in several trash cans in gas stations as he drove back west on I-90 in the morning.

  The next morning Averell drove west again passing Mentor and stopping in Cleveland, Lakewood and North Olmsted. He made it to Toledo that night and in the morning he cleared two appointments and

  was on his way to lunch. He had his radio tuned to a local Cleveland

  station, one that was heavy with news, traffic and weather. He had his radio set for a similar station in each major city along his route. The reporter was talking about a meeting at the world bank when he shifted gears and said “This just in, police have found a woman savagely murdered in a suburb of Toledo, Ohio. The woman had been left in an old abandoned warehouse off of Sutter Avenue. The woman’s name and the specifics of this murder are being withheld pending notification of the her family. We will keep you posted on the progress in this investigation. In other news—.”

  “I am not happy with the way that went. I want to change things,”

  said Averell.

  “What sort of changes are we talking about?,” inquired Stelian.

  “Well first, Sleepy was big, bulky, you know, hard to move around.

  Then Marlene was smaller and easier, but still difficult. That leads me to consider only smaller people that we can easily lift and carry until we get better at this. We had the right tools, we had a decent place to work in and we planned for the clean-up alright, but—.”

  “Okay, I can see that, perhaps someone like a younger Sarah or Ellie would be easier,” said Stelian.

  “Yeah, a younger Sarah. I would enjoy that, the little b—.”

  “She’s not little anymore, my friend, she’s grown,” replied Stelian.

  “You’re right, she has grown up. And the both of them are still the

  objective that we are planning for, I hate them, and they will pay, when we are all ready. They had too many laughs at my expense.”

  “Them and Steve too.”

  “I told you, I don’t care as much about Steve, it’s them that I want to do. Steve would be an add on, but not a primary target. So then where do we go next? Ellie and Sarah are out of the question, for now. We need to have this procedure down the right way before we do either of them. Steve could be a problem, he is a tough piece of work, no, I think we should go for the younger, female, Sarah type. Someone much smaller, easy to handle. A little girl, to start with, then an older one, until we have the process all worked out. Yeah, all worked out—.”

  “Yeah, and after a bit we can move on to the real Sarah and Ellie type.”

  “So let’s have a plan one that covers all the bases. We should also hide our work, If we leave any trace of what we are doing, we could be found. We have to hide them when we are finished with them.”

  * * *

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  No, we should follow the plan . . .

  As he was driving along interstate 90 from Rochester toward Buffalo,

  Averell was thinking that he had been lucky as much as he had been clever about the first ‘session’ with Marlene. He was also very lucky with ‘Sleepy’, but luck was a gamble, smart was not, at least not as much. He wanted to be smarter and gamble as little as possible. “Better planning, that’s the magic we need.” Traffic was light and the conversation with Stelian was very relaxed and directed at finding a solution to a few of his greatest concerns. First was a place where they would not be bothered while they did their work and second was a means of disposing of the remains.

  “Planning, Magic, explain please.”

  “Okay, if we were to find another ‘subject’ today and do our thing, we know that we would not want to leave him, or her, somewhere they can be found. That’s taking a chance, and I don’t like taking chances.”

  “So, what do you propose?”

  “Well, we are going to pick a smaller subject, one that we can move around and control easier. One that we can also dispose of easier. So where do we put them?”

  “I don’t know, in a river, or bury them.”

  “Bury them where? In a field, in the woods, or in a cemetery. In a

  cemetery, yeah, it’s a natural.”

  “Okay, I’ll buy that, but how?”

  “I’ll work on that, maybe if.”

  “Well what about a place to do our thing?”

  “We should have a place that we can use and know that no one will interrupt our session.”

  “Yeah, agreed.”

  “And I like the idea of using a cemetery, we have to have a place to put our subject when we are finished so that she won’t be found.”

  “Okay, I get that too.”

  “So before we do another one we should take care of those basics. First a place where we can work, a laboratory. Then, we find a cemetery, or two, or more.”

  “Just one or one of each in each town from here to Albany”

  “Let’s concentrate on one laboratory and at least two cemeteries,

  around Syracuse to start with.”

  “Okay, I like that, a laboratory. But why Syracuse, maybe we should look at a site farther away from our home base, like in Ohio, what do you think? Then we find a cemetery near there, but how do we make that work for us, I don’t understand?”

  “I’m not sure yet, but maybe, if we find a cemetery that is out of the way, more country than town, and the place is not locked up at night, maybe we could dig an old grave, make our deposit and fill it up again.”

  “Or if it’s a big enough place, they may not be ready to use all the parts of what they have, maybe an acre or two won’t be dug up for twenty years or more.”

  “Or maybe we find a grave that has just been filled and the ground is still soft and easy to dig and we come back after hours and dig down to the vault and drop our package in and refill the hole.”

  “I like that.”

  “Yeah, it could work, we’ll see.”

  Averell drove around each city as time allowed, looking for suitable

  locations. Not much appealed, too many people, locked fences and

  guard dogs. He looked each weekend and other free days and was getting nowhere. August became September, September became October and his mind drifted to other things. Winter was coming, he had a number of appointments that would require him to be there when planned and no late arrivals could be tolerated. All this time spent searching for a place to hold another session had made him less clock conscious, and that had to change. More discipline in his routine was in order. He began to schedule appointments, two in the morning and two in the afternoon, four per day, minimum, and try to be 15 minutes early for each
one. It sometimes meant spending an extra day somewhere to assure being on time, but it would set a pattern that he could carry through the winter months.

  “We could do another one, it’s been over two months.”

  “No, I told you, we need to plan, to take care of some basics.”

  “When then?”

  “Basics first, then fun time.”

  “Okay, okay.”

  Averell’s routine forced him to work full weeks and travel on weekends, but the job was important, and he was doing fairly well. As a result of this better organization of his time and regularity of appointments, he was increasing his sales and he qualified for the quarterly bonus, each quarter. A plus for his savings account and his retirement program, also opening the doors to nicer vacations. Kind of a toss-up for Averell. If he could arrange a two week vacation in the summer, he might be able to arrange a really good session with two or maybe more subjects.

  A lot to think about. He continued his search for a laboratory in Syracuse, Buffalo, Cleveland and Toledo and discounted the other, smaller cities and towns in between. Cleveland and Buffalo had a number of vacated warehouses and factories that should be a good for his purposes. As he narrowed the search, he was honing in on an industrial park off the Interstate 90 corridor north and east of Buffalo. He still took a side route periodically and as it turned out, he found a deserted farm house south of Cleveland, almost to Portage County where he could park the van and be undisturbed for days. All planning suddenly concentrated on this remote farmhouse. He decided to experiment with that first. He pulled into the driveway leading to a barn that was close to the house and surrounded on two other sides with overgrown bushes and a thick stand of trees. He got out and walked around. If anyone saw him, he was prepared to say that he was in the market for just such a place, but this one needed more work than he wanted to do and just might deplete his finances.

  He surveyed the lot with his eyes and went over to the doors on the barn. They opened easily, but with a bit of a squeak. He then pulled the van into the barn and dug out a container of motor oil, for his old car, and applied a little oil to each hinge. Two or three swings of the doors and the squeaks disappeared. The barn was empty except for several empty wooden crates, a broken coal shovel, an old broom, a pitch fork, some straw in the stalls and three bales in the center, odd bits and pieces of rope and baling wire and his van. There was plenty of room to be used as a laboratory. He closed the doors and walked over to the house, looking toward the neighbors on either side. He couldn’t see their houses until he was well in front of this little gem and went back to a side door. It was secured, locked from the inside with a bolt. He walked around to the rear and tried that door. Again, locked, so he went to the front door. Locked.