Fifteen Times a Killer

by Alan McDermott

  Jane died five months later.

  If Sloane’s company had priced their product so that every diabetic could afford it, Jane and many, many others would still be alive today. But they didn’t. They got together with the other two firms in the racket and kept the price artificially high so that they could maximize profits. That’s all. Not to prevent the companies going under, not to secure jobs for the workers. People died so that the investors could make more money.

  I know many of you will call me anti-capitalist and say I’m against people making money. Not at all. I much prefer capitalism to communism, or socialism, or whatever it’s called these days. What I object to is companies putting profit before people. Did you know that the Federal minimum wage has remained at $7.25 in our great country since 2009? Meanwhile, inflation has eroded your spending power, so you’re seeing less bang for your buck. And who do you think is keeping it so low? The government? Well, yes, but why? Because they are being lobbied by the big corporations who insist that a higher minimum wage will result in millions of jobs cuts, and no president wants to be responsible for that. The thing is, there wouldn’t be such massive job cuts. What would happen if it rose to $9 an hour is poor people would have an extra seventy bucks a week, and when a poor person has money, they spend it. That extra money goes on a little luxury each week, and the businesses offering these luxuries (be it a meal out, or a new shirt, or a day trip with the kids) also makes more money, enabling them to pay the higher minimum wage. Call it trickle-up economics. If you give a rich man an extra $70, he’ll just put it with the rest in an offshore account and it’s effectively taken out of circulation.

  But CEOs don’t see it that way. As far as they’re concerned, all that matters is this year’s balance sheet. It has to please the investors, or they won’t buy the stock, and that’s what business is all about. Fuck the little guy who actually makes something for the company. If he quits, we’ll get someone else.

  That’s the rant I gave to Garrett Sloane, Ellis’s eldest son.

  Garrett, it turns out, was a pretty stupid guy. Considering he’s the son of a CEO pulling in over seven million a year, Garrett didn’t know when to shut his mouth.

  After I’d finished my little speech, Garrett—strapped naked to my table—started telling me how wrong I was about everything. The little guy wasn’t the economy, big business was. Shareholders were the most important consideration, he told me. If companies spent more on the labor force, profits—and therefore dividends—would be down. Investors would look elsewhere, which would have a negative effect on the stock market.

  “If one company did it, perhaps,” I said. “But make every company do it, what are the investors going to do? Take their money to Vegas and stick it on red? No, they’ll continue to invest, just with a slightly reduced return. And after a few years, that will have become the new normal. By 2030, the 15% dip will be just a memory, the only difference being that everyone in the country now has more money to spend, which is good for the REAL economy.”

  If I had my way, I’d create the Employee Recognition Act, where every company has to give 10% of their profits to the staff. From the cleaners to the CEO, everyone who’s worked at the company for two years or more gets an equal share. If the place you work at makes $10 billion a year, you get a share of a billion dollars. That’s a billion more going back into circulation instead of being sent offshore. Did you know that corporations made 2.2 TRILLION dollars last year? Ten per cent of that is $220 billion, and if you divide it by the 155 million employees in the country, they would each get an extra $1400. It may not seem a lot, but to someone making $8 an hour, that’s a fortune, money that would be instantly recycled. It helps the employees, it helps the government because that bonus would be taxed, it helps business because people have cash to spend. Federal employees would get their own bonus from the increased tax revenue to make it fair.

  “And what do shareholders make?” I asked him.

  He looked at me as if I was stupid. “Money.” he said.

  “That’s my point. They make nothing. They produce nothing. It’s rich people betting on companies, and when the company gets it wrong, the Fed bails them out so the rich guys still win!”

  “Yeah, but if the Fed didn’t step in, tens of thousands of jobs would be lost.”

  I had to call bullshit on that one. “What about Chapter 11 bankruptcy? Happens all the time, and the only people who lose their jobs are the jerks at the top who put the company in that position in the first place. The business is reorganized, and most of the time they come out of it healthier and stronger.”

  Garrett dismissed my argument, saying the current model had created the greatest economy in the world.

  So I smashed his balls. I put a block of wood underneath them, moved his tiny cock out of the way and pounded them with a hammer.

  That’s the problem with the world today. Well, not just today; since humans popped into existence. The children learn from their parents. When a child is born into a Christian family, they will grow up believing in God. If they are born to racist parents, they will grow to hate anyone who isn’t the same color.

  You wanna know how to eliminate racism? You don’t. You can’t. You might have “diversity” classes in school, teaching kids that all people are equal, but those who spent their childhood learning from Mommy and Daddy that blacks are subhuman are not going to change their outlook. They’ll get together with their other racists friends and say it’s all bull crap, that whites are superior, that foreigners should be kicked out of the country. Then they’ll grow up and meet racist girls, get married and have little racist babies. The cycle goes on and on. Diversity classes may save a tiny percentage, but if you tell people something they don’t want to hear, it’s not gonna register with most. It’s called cognitive dissonance, and it’ll be at least thirty generations before racism becomes a thing of the past. The only way to halt it is to round up every racist and prevent them having children or interacting with anyone else so they can’t spread their hatred, and that’s not going to happen.

  It’s the same with religion. Over 165 million people have died in religious wars in the last thousand years. That’s half the US population! How many have died from racism in that same time? One million? Ten million? Fifty million? Yet religion still flourishes. No-one is calling for school classes denouncing Gods of all faiths, are they? And all religions advocate love and peace. Pity they don’t practice what they preach. “My religion is the most peaceful and tolerant, and I’ll kill anyone who says otherwise.”

  Dumb fuckers, the lot of you.

  But I digress. Sorry, I just wanted to highlight the hypocrisy.

  My original point was, big business is like religion. The tenets are the accumulation of power, manifestation of greed and disdain for mankind. Garrett had grown up believing that his money and privilege set him apart from the average person. Joe Public was a commodity to be used and discarded, like toilet paper. Hire them, squeeze them for every ounce of productivity while paying them as little as possible, and when they’re past their best, replace them with a newer model.

  “Why is it,” I asked Garrett, “that fifty years ago, the average family of husband, wife and two kids could survive comfortably on one salary, but now most couples have to work two jobs each to make rent?”

  He didn’t answer that. He said something about sore balls, but he wasn’t really coherent. Fine. If you don’t wanna talk, you won’t need your tongue.

  Snip!

  “That’s for your father’s greed,” I told him.

  Then I drilled through his kneecaps.

  Oh, and I have a new surprise for them. A mirror that I can wheel into place above them. That way they can see everything I do to them. Isn’t that fun! I think Garrett was squeamish, though, because when I invited him to watch me slice his nipples off, he squeezed his eyes shut.

  Oh, and he screamed. You wanna know how he screamed, Ellis Sloane? I’ll put it in terms you can understand. He screamed
like a CEO whose quarterly projections are down three percentage points! That’s how painful it was for your son.

  Mind you, that’s nothing compared to the agony he felt when I ripped out his toenails. Imagine his agony, Ellis. Just think about how much your actions hurt your son. Because they hurt the families of the people who died rationing their insulin.

  And I wasn’t done with Garrett. I sliced chunks of meat from his bones. His arms, his thighs, his calves, careful to avoid any arteries. Then I sliced open his stomach cavity. It’s fascinating inside there, I can tell you. So many things to play with. Did you know that if you slice through someone’s intestines, the stink is horrendous? Well, it is. Smells worse than shit.

  I didn’t have much time left once I’d done that, so I poured drain cleaner inside him and watched him squirm until the very end. It was the kind that clears stubborn blockages. Sure did a number on his organs, that stuff.

  That was about it. Garrett didn’t last very long after that. A couple more screams—once when he opened his eyes and found himself staring at his insides—then he just whimpered a bit and died.

  As Ellis Sloane’s company would say when another diabetic lost their life because they couldn’t afford his product: my thoughts and prayers are with you. Well, not my prayers, obviously, but always my thoughts, Ellis.

  Always my thoughts.

  Chapter 33

  Corrina was buoyed as she entered Travis’s office. There had to be a reason for Seth Benning to hightail it when he saw her, and that was good enough for her to seek a warrant to sift through his private life. Hank was already working on it. He’d passed an affidavit to the prosecutor working for the US Attorney’s Office, and they would present it to the local magistrate judge. Once granted, they’d be able to demand Benning’s phone records and financial history, among other things. Josh was looking through public records in the meantime, hoping to get something on Benning’s family.

  Corrina stood before Travis and explained what had happened during her visit to Benning’s home, but the ADIC didn’t share her enthusiasm.

  “How can you be sure it was Benning?” he asked.

  “The neighbor said it was.”

  “The old woman?” Travis said. “What was she, sixty?”

  “More like seventy,” Corrina told him.

  “So it could have been any silver van she saw.”

  “She was convinced,” Corrina said, though she had to concede that the woman’s eyesight might not have been as good as her own.

  Travis picked up a pen and studied it while forming his answer.

  “We also have his hair at one of the scenes,” Corrina said, trying to sway her boss. “And he hasn’t filed a tax return in years.”

  Travis carefully put the pen back in place and looked up at her. “Okay, go with it.”

  “Thanks—”

  “But, I want no action against him without my say-so. No early morning raids, not even a drive-by on his house. I want concrete proof before we move on him. You got me?”

  “Got it.”

  “And pass that on to Loney, too. If he’s acting on our intelligence, he plays by our rules. I can’t afford another fiasco. I’ve already got the director all over my ass on this one. No more fuck-ups.”

  “I’ll let him know right away, though he’s already assigned a team to watch the house in case Benning returns.”

  “That’s fine. I just don’t want him kicking in any more doors.”

  Corrina nodded, turned and left before Travis could impose more restrictions.

  Her first stop was Hank’s desk, and he told her that the warrant was in the pipeline. Corrina thanked him and went to the task force room to update the wall.

  Josh had already posted a picture of Seth Benning, presumably taken from his driver’s license. At 33, he was younger than she would have thought the killer to be. His dark hair was cut in a neat side parting, and he was quite good-looking. Not stunningly attractive, but certainly not ugly by any stretch of the imagination.

  There was also a note on the wall that Benning owned a 2014 Chevy Express van. Corrina took out her phone and was about to look it up when Josh walked in with a sheet of paper. He pinned it underneath Benning’s mug shot.

  “We’ve already got a Savana picture,” she said, looking back at her phone.

  “That’s the Chevy,” he told her. “They do look similar, but then they would. Both are built by General Motors. The only difference is a little trim and a slightly more powerful engine in the GMC.”

  Corrina almost lost it. “And you’re only telling me this now?”

  Josh wasn’t perturbed by her outburst. “I only just found out myself. I saw his van, noted the similarity and looked into them. I was just coming in here to update you.”

  Guilt gnawed at Corrina. “I’m sorry,” she said. “You did good, Josh.”

  “Not a problem. We’re all stressed out. Hopefully this Benning guy’s our man and we can put it to bed in the next few hours.”

  Corrina shared his enthusiasm but wasn’t so optimistic. “I’ve got a feeling it won’t be that easy,” she said. “If he got spooked when he saw me, he might have gone into hiding.”

  “You said his house doesn’t match the one in his story. No basement, no storm doors, too close to the neighbors. Do you think he’s got a second home?” Josh asked.

  “I do,” Corrina nodded. “Find it.”

  * * *

  Seth Benning was tired. He always was after a torture session.

  The remains of the thirteenth victim were still warm, all neatly packaged and ready to be buried. This one would be left close by, just a few miles from his home. He couldn’t risk taking the Chevy out again, not now that Corrina Stone was on to him. He was surprised he hadn’t seen his picture plastered all over the news, but that would come. Once their attempts to locate him failed, the police would recruit the public to help in the search. That would make things tricky, so he had to act fast.

  But first he had to write up the latest kill. It was always best to do it immediately afterwards, when the events and emotion were still fresh in his mind. This one had been close to his heart, and he’d taken great pleasure in making the woman’s final hours as excruciating as possible.

  Once it was finished, he would send the remaining chapters two at a time. Corrina’s appearance at his house had forced him to revise his schedule. It was an inconvenience, but these things happened.

  Why do they happen?

  They just do.

  Benning smiled as he recalled the prologue he’d written. If his mother hadn’t been struck down all those years ago, his life would have been totally different. Maybe he would have written the story as a work of fiction. Maybe he’d be a famous author by now.

  As it was, his fame was guaranteed. Or infamy. He’d certainly be remembered, that was for sure. They’d write books about him. There’d be documentaries, maybe even a movie. Who would play him on screen? He couldn’t think of more than five actors as he wasn’t really a film buff these days. In fact, he rarely watched TV at all. When he did, it was mostly the news and documentaries. True-life murder cases, cold case files, programs like that. He’d learned a few techniques over the years, such as wearing the paper body suit when killing and packaging his victims. He didn’t want any hairs falling on the body. No saliva, no skin fragments. He even chopped the fingers off in case his DNA had gotten trapped beneath the nails. It was easier to clean them properly that way.

  He took the toes off for the hell of it.

  He wondered if the lead actor from that psychological thriller he’d watched a few years ago would be interested in the role of Seth Benning.

  Probably not.

  It didn’t matter, anyway. Movies always got it wrong. They’d portray him as a lunatic, a psycho, but that wasn’t the case. He didn’t hear voices, didn’t have visions, no-one was urging him on.

  He was righting a wrong, that’s all.

  Sure, there would be those who’d say he sh
ould take his grievance through the courts, let them administer justice, but Benning had lost faith in the judiciary. How many companies had been sued, lost, and gone unpunished? Sure, they might get hit with fines, but the people who perpetrated the crimes, what happened to them? They moved on to another job, that’s what.

  Someone had made a conscious decision to dump toxic chemicals in the ground near his home twenty years earlier. The investigation had shown it wasn’t a leak. The dumping had been done deliberately to avoid processing costs. And it wasn’t some menial employee who made the choice. No, it was the people at the top. The average worker didn’t care about costs and balance sheets. They did as they were told or found somewhere else to work. The top man did it, and he denied it, and he fought against the lawsuit, and he ended up settling.

  The man responsible was still at the helm. No personal fine, no jail time, just a dent in his profits.

  Where was the deterrent to stop others doing the same thing? Put a guilty CEO in prison for corporate manslaughter and others would think twice. But in the US, that wasn’t even a recognized crime. If it were, executives would be sent to the chair by the hundred each week. As it was, companies could recklessly endanger life, and the worst they could expect is a civil lawsuit and a big fine.

  Benning had changed that. Or to be more accurate, he’d planted the seed. Once his spree was over, his dream was that others would pick up where he left off. He wasn’t the only person on the planet who was pissed at the way things were, but would anyone else go as far as he had? Would they be willing to take lives to save lives, or would they just sit behind their keyboards, starting petitions, emailing their congressman and sharing their anger on Facebook?

  He decided to add something to chapter thirteen to encourage others to follow his example. Not much, just a little push in the right direction. If he didn’t, if it ended with him, then it would have been for nothing. Nothing would change, no lives would be improved. The status quo would be maintained.