The Fairytale Killer : E&M Investigations Prequel

by Lena Bourne

  Blackman is sitting with his back to the windows of the office. He’s taken off his coat, but didn’t hang it up. Instead, he’s laid it over his lap and is clutching it like a blanket in his white-knuckled hands.

  He’s staring at Parcivall’s file, at the photo of the Parcivall family, more precisely, and he didn’t stir as I walked in and shut the door. The girl in the photo has such a vacant, faraway look in her eyes she looks more like a doll than a person, and the boy’s—Russell’s—face looks angry, rageful to the point of insanity. Their father, Wallace is sporting a big bushy mustache, his lips curled upwards underneath it. But his eyes aren’t smiling.

  “Those kids went through a lot, didn’t they?” I ask as I take off my coat, lay it over a chair, and sit down opposite him.

  “They didn’t deserve what they got,” Blackman says. “None of it. And what rankles the most is that they could’ve been saved if the Military had only acted on my findings and removed the children from him in time. But instead, they let that monster continue torturing them in the interests of National Security. Well now they have an international incident on their hands, don’t they? This will make the US Military even less popular than it already is, and I can’t say I’m sorry.”

  I pull the file towards me and flip it over, then start leafing through it. Much of it is redacted, whole passages crossed out with thick black lines. Especially the documents dealing with the investigation Blackman conducted.

  “That must’ve been hard,” I say. “Keeping silent all these years, I mean. And watching Wallace rise the way he did, despite all the damage he’d done.”

  He looks at me, his light eyes watery yet gleaming like the noon sun reflecting off clear water. Sharp. But I think it’s the first honest look he’s given me since we met.

  “I’ve never had a case where I had to watch a guilty man walk free,” I say. “And I know I couldn’t stand it. I’d resign the day it happened.”

  “I stayed on for a while,” he says. “Hoping justice will prevail. It didn’t.”

  “So you made your own justice,” I say and leave it at that, returning his honest look, keeping mine such as best I can.

  He inclines his head at me and grins, then looks down at the photos of the victims.

  “Rebecca was a true innocent. Still more a young girl than a young woman when she died,” he said. “Her doctors thought she disassociated completely at the age of ten. She never grew past that age psychologically.”

  This case sucked me in deep from the start and almost took me under completely when Eva was taken. What would I have done if one of the bodies I’d been called to examine was her? Would I ever surface from the depths of that insanity?

  I’ll never have to find out. But I don’t think the answer to that question is yes.

  “She loved those princess cartoons,” he mutters, more to himself than me. I purposefully kept the file open at the family photo and he’s looking at it now, his eyes just watery now. “They were her escape. Pocahontas was her favorite. She loved how Pocahontas took the name Rebecca as her Christian name. She hated Beauty and the Beast because Beast terrified her.”

  “You made sure she got the help she needed, didn’t you?” I ask. “After you left the military and your hands were free to help the children as a civilian.”

  I’m guessing here, since I didn’t have the time to confirm this suspicion yet. But I don’t think I’m wrong.

  Gleaming light flashes across Blackman’s eyes again. “It was too late. I was too late to save her.”

  “So you decided to avenge her by killing the princesses she loved,” I say with too much venom in my voice. I’m supposed to be keeping this friendly, coaxing the information out of him as if I care and understand him.

  His grin twists into a grimace. I’m ready for him to deny it, I know it’s coming, I don’t want to hear it. Whether I get his confession or not, I’m sure he left us overwhelming evidence at that farm. Eva would most likely be able to recognize his voice too. But I want to hear him admit the monstrous crimes he’s committed.

  “They were masterpieces though,” I say, hoping I’m right about the part of my profile of the killer where I assumed he’s high on the narcissism spectrum. “Not just the scenes themselves, which were perfect, but everything else too. You planted just enough evidence to make us feel like we were doing something and getting somewhere, while the whole time our wheels were just spinning in the mud you created, so to speak.”

  He likes the praise, I can see it in his arrogant, self-satisfied grin and the way his eyes are now gleaming with liquid light. Dangerous.

  I should stroke his ego some more. Then he’ll tell me more. But doing it is making me nauseous and bringing back my migraine headache. The deeper I go into his reasons, his insanity, the more I just want to get as far away from him as I can. Early on in this case, I knew we were looking for a madman, a person so outside the sphere of normality he’s in a circle of his own. I knew talking to the man as a human being would be hard. It’s proving damn near impossible.

  “You left us the witnesses to find too, didn’t you?” I ask. “That was masterful. The kid in the teahouse and the prostitute. You made sure she had the name too, didn’t you? Are you were the one sending Eva the photos and the articles, weren’t you?”

  “But she didn’t check them in time,” he blurts out, his eyes locking on mine, only a ring of pale blue color left around the black of his dilated pupils. He sighs and takes the photo of the Parcivall family in his hands, holding it so his thumb covers the father’s face.

  “He killed their mother, you know,” he says. “Pushed her down the stairs in front of them. Let her lie there dying in her own blood while he got them ready for school. That night, after the cops investigated and cleared the scene, he made them scrub her blood off the floor. They worked all night. Rebecca was five, Russell seven. Neither of them recovered. Rebecca retreated into a fantasy world inside her head and she never quite left it after that. But the boy, he shot his father a few years later. Unfortunately, he missed anything vital, so the father was back home with them in two weeks. That’s when I was brought in to investigate and I found everything out. I had two weeks to stop him returning, but I failed. And I couldn’t even keep them away from him. Your reporter girlfriend was supposed to tell you all this days ago, but she’s slow and lazy.”

  I have no idea where I’m getting the strength not to fly over the table at him and choke him until his eyes are as dead as Eva’s almost were.

  “But even if she had, she'd still end up as Snow White,” he concludes. “That I decided as soon as I saw you two together. What better way to get the publicity and attention I needed than to make the investigator’s woman one of my victims?”

  It’s not a question he wants to be answered and I couldn’t if I wanted it. My jaw is clenched together too tight as I struggle not to say what I really mean and do what I really want to do. It’ll do me no good to kill him now. I had my one and only chance last night and I missed it.

  “I took no pleasure in the killings, you understand,” he says. “But they had to be done and they had to be done perfectly. Russell and I, we got our revenge for Rebecca, and for all the years the children suffered. It’s not my fault. It is the unjust, unfair system that rewards monsters and has the ability and the will to shelter them that’s to blame.”

  Outside the office, Thompson is standing by the large interactive table, flanked by two MPs. Wanda and Ross are there too, off to the side, Wanda clutching a stack of papers so hard she’s crinkling them.

  “I believe that you took no pleasure in the killings,” I say and that’s no lie. There was no passion in the murders. Only clinical, methodical precision as though the killer was just doing a thing that needed to be done. So many lives lost to prove a point. So many people terrified by deeds that will forever remain incomprehensible. Two wrongs will never make a right, no matter how you twist and turn them. “But you were beginning to enjoy them, weren’t you? Henc
e the repeats of princesses you’d already killed?”

  “I knew you were a worthy adversary,” he says, inclining his head at me. “It could be you sitting where I’m sitting.”

  That cuts deep, but I don’t let it show on my face. I take one last look into his eyes, at all the vast, watery nothingness in them, and then I’m done. I won’t glorify what he did by listening to another minute of his rationalizations.

  I walk out and leave the office door open.

  “You can take him now,” I say to Thompson. “He’s confessed to being The Fairytale Killer. I’ll have my report ready in an hour. Then you can do with him as you see fit.”

  Thompson nods but remains silent. He looks like he’s aged twenty years since I’ve seen him last.

  “He was my friend since we were teenagers,” he says quietly. “What do I do with him?”

  I will not even try to answer that. I don’t think he wants me to.

  “In the end, he used you to get close to this investigation,” I say. “I believe your friend, the man you knew has not been around for fifteen years or more.”

  Thompson nods again. “I expect you’re right.”

  He tells the MPs to take Blackman into custody and I stand off to the side as they do. Blackman’s eyes are almost as blank as Rebecca Parcivall’s were in that photo, but the defiant grin on his face as he passes first me, then Thompson as though I’m not there tells me he believes he has won. And in a lot of ways, he has.

  34

  Eva

  Upbeat music is blaring in my headphones, a happy song, one you can dance to. I keep it so loud they can probably hear it next door, although I’m using headphones. Maybe I’m wrong. It’s not bothering Mark one bit, he’s fast asleep in my bed—our bed now that it’s all over.

  Only it’s not over. Not yet.

  I never used to be able to write to music, but now I can’t stand the silence. Chained to that bed with nothing but silence and fuzzy dreams for company has destroyed my love of both.

  Outside, tiny little snowflakes are falling, but I bet they’ll grow thicker soon. Before the street lamps all went out at one AM, the night had an eerie, dark orange glow. Now it’s just black.

  The ice flower in the corner of my living room window is there again, gorgeous and big, but it doesn’t interest me anymore. Nothing much does anymore.

  I’m happiest working. Writing. Keeping busy.

  The woman who escaped a serial killer. The most notorious serial killer the world has ever seen. My story is in high demand.

  The Fairytale Killer—Otto Blackman, retired Colonel of the United States Army, who killed to avenge a wrong done to a girl he couldn’t save.

  I’ve stopped apologizing to Mark for not wanting to do any of the things we used to do. He still hasn’t stopped apologizing for not catching the killer before I was harmed. Each morning he wakes up and I’m not in bed beside him, the apologizing cycle starts all over again. It’s not his fault. He did what he could. He did more than enough. He doesn’t believe me when I tell him that, but I won’t stop until he does.

  They wanted to keep me in the hospital for a week, but I checked myself out after three days. As soon as I could walk, I couldn’t stay in bed anymore, I’d pace the room until I was too tired to stand then fall asleep in a chair. That was four weeks ago. I still can’t sleep in a bed. And I can’t sleep in darkness, so I sleep during the day on the sofa.

  I need the space, the peace, the ability to do only what I want to do, and nothing else. Mark understands, I know he does. Deep down underneath all the self-blame and self-reproach, he wants the same thing. We’ll find our way back to the easy love we used to share.

  Otto Blackman sent his manifesto to all the news outlets he could find, revealing his reasons for what he did in minute detail. The man who helped him, Russell Parcivall, is currently held on the closed ward of the hospital for the criminally insane.

  I’ve started writing a book about what they did and why.

  Blackman has agreed to let me interview him.

  Mark is waving at me from the kitchen doorway, his hair a mess, his eyes still half-closed. He’s wearing a white t-shirt and dark blue pajama bottoms, both well-worn. Like always, just the sight of him fills me with a sharp, deep longing for simple things, a simple life, lazy days spent well. Longing for what we used to have when days passed fast like hours when we were together.

  I take off my headphones, the song spilling into the room nearly as loudly as it was spilling into my ears a second ago.

  “Did the music wake you?” I ask, closing the lid of my laptop to make it stop playing and setting it all on the coffee table. “I’m sorry.”

  “You’re not coming to bed?” he asks. “It’s past four AM.”

  When he went to bed at midnight, I promised I’d be right there. I didn’t lie. Not exactly.

  I walk over to him, pulled like a magnet to the peace and joy his presence, his look, his arms around me used to wake in me. Joy and peace and love I had given up trying to find in another person by the time I met him.

  I reach out my hands and he takes them, pulling me into a loose embrace.

  “I have to prepare for the interview,” I say.

  He winces, his arms growing tense. “Are you sure you want to speak to him?”

  He’s been asking me that since Blackman agreed to grant me an exclusive interview.

  “He just wants the publicity,” Mark adds. “He’s a very sick man, Eva, even if the German psychologists deemed him fit to stand trial.”

  He’s said this before too. Many times. And I could tell him what I’ve already told him many times. That I’m a grown woman and I can handle speaking to that man. That whatever Blackman was, he was also one of the leading forensic psychologists in the world and his specialty was serial killers. The fact that he then turned into a serial killer is big news echoing across the world. I’ve already gotten a huge advance on the book I’m writing about him and what he put me through. More money than I usually make in a year.

  “I don’t want to argue about this anymore, Mark,” I tell him. I just want him to hold me and remind me of how it used to be, let me remember only the good times.

  “Yeah, me neither,” he says and pulls me into a tighter embrace, stroking my short hair. I shaved off the dyed black hair three days after I left the hospital. I couldn’t look in the mirror without remembering the fear and desperation of lying motionless on that disgusting camp bed.

  But even that memory isn’t as heavy or piercing as it was. Not when Mark’s holding me.

  “I think I could sleep now,” I whisper into his chest where his heart is racing. “Let’s go back to bed.”

  Once I’m laying by his side in the bed, he kept warm for us, my head resting on his chest and his arm around me, I know I didn’t lie. I could sleep. I can do anything when we’re together. Better than I ever could alone. We’ll find our way back to the place where I knew that for certain every minute of every day. I know we will.

  Mark

  Mere hours after his confession Blackman was handed over to the German authorities and all connections between the US Military, past, present, and future were severed. He will be tried and, hopefully, incarcerated here.

  The evidence against him is overwhelming. He was not careful at the abandoned farm where he kept, killed, and prepared his victims. There were several barrels of gasoline in the basement of the house where I found Eva. He was planning to torch it all after the last murder, his coup de grâce, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Only six of the seven dwarfs survived. One of them succumbed to hypothermia three days after we found them.

  I’m sitting in a car outside the jailhouse where they’re holding him, waiting for Eva to finish her interview with Blackman. Outside, snow is falling softly and insistently. The windshield is already covered with an inch thick blanket of snow as soft as gauze. I wish I was anywhere but here, even in the room with Blackman and her.

  She wants to do this, and she needs t
o do it alone. She keeps claiming it’s because of her book, and gets angry when I suggest she’s doing it to find closure, to confront her tormentor. She’s sure she’s not scarred by it as deeply as I think she is. It was only two days, is her main argument.

  I’m afraid she’s just buried the fear and terror of it so deep down in her mind, she’ll just suffer all over again when it comes gushing back out.

  But what do I really know?

  Certainly not enough to have caught the guy sooner. Certainly not enough to recognize the most deranged murderer I’ve ever met or read about when he was standing right next to me.

  She wants to talk to Russell Parcivall too, but thankfully, the Germans have locked him up so tight it’ll be months before they even consider her request.

  It’s freezing inside the car, but I like the soft silence the blanket of snow is creating inside the car. It calms me the way few things do anymore.

  Eva does.

  She’s walking towards the car, wrapped in her long parka, a knitted black cap with a huge pouf on her head. Her small pale face is glowing amid all that black, but not as brightly as her eyes. Those are blue as the summer sky and just as vast and welcoming.

  I’ll never stop blaming myself for failing to uncover Blackman before he could hurt her. My intuition was telling me not to trust him from the moment I first spoke to him, but I didn’t listen. And I’ll never forget Eva’s screams right before I found her. But all of that will fade with time. I’m sure of it. As sure as I am that summer will follow this winter.

  THE END

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  Also by Lena Bourne