Diary of a Teenage Serial Killer

by Jem Fox

  She shook her head. “God, stupid, right? So stupid.” She looked out the window. “He said the stuff we did at the building wouldn’t show my face, but then after I did it — and they made me sign a form saying I wanted to do it — after that, he showed it to me and goddamn it if they didn’t have a second webcam that totally did show my face. And he said nobody would have to see that part, unless I did anything to piss them off. And if I did, it would go on the internet.”

  She looked at me then. “I’m the first one in my family to go to college. I’m barely making it with my loans and that stupid cafeteria job. I tried doing telemarketing but the pay was so bad, and I was getting strung out from not sleeping enough. I can’t let my grades slip too far down or I’ll get kicked out of school. I’m not making excuses. I’m just saying, when he offered me that money, I didn’t just want it. I needed it.” She bit her lip. “I didn’t know what I was getting into. It just snowballed.”

  “I understand.”

  “I wanted out of it right away, but Robby said I knew I couldn’t quit. He said my parents would get a DVD in the mail.” She shivered. “He had a little flash drive — one of those little plastic things you can store files on. He called it his ‘insurance’. He used to take it out of his pocket and waggle it at me at work. God, how I hate that son of a bitch. I’d like to kill him for what he did to me.”

  As fast as she flared up, she wilted back down. “How’d you end up out there if they don’t have anything on you?”

  I set my can down on the table, pushing aside a pile of junk mail. “They want me to find a girl for them.”

  She got real still. “What girl?”

  “I don’t know. Somebody that Robby and Ramón had but she got loose from them. They think I can find her and bring her back. And they’re holding a friend of mine until I do.”

  She didn’t say anything, so I knew she knew who the girl was. I just looked at her.

  She licked her lips. “Would you do that? Trade some girl in for your friend?”

  “No.”

  She looked relieved. Why did she believe me? In her place, I wouldn’t have believed a word I said. “But I need to know who she is and what her story is.”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  “Yeah you do.”

  She put both feet on the floor and crossed her arms tight across her chest. “Believe me, if somebody manages to get away from them, I wouldn’t help them find her, even if I knew where she was. And I don’t.”

  I just looked at her. “What if they found out that you know where she is?”

  She turned pale and licked her lips again. “But I—”

  A little boy with dirty blonde hair appeared at the doorway and goggled at us. He looked around seven or eight. He had a dirty face and a dirty shirt and no shoes on. He stared at me and I stared back at him.

  Melody jumped out of her chair and stomped a foot at him, sending him running. “And stay out, Dylan! I mean it!”

  She slumped back down in her chair. “My brother.”

  I took a deep breath. “Let’s cut the bullshit, Melody. I think you want to deal with me instead of them. I need to know who the girl is and what her story is.”

  “But you said—”

  “You need to not worry about it and just let me take care of it.”

  She was digging her fingers into the skin on her arms and chewing her bottom lip like she was an animal caught in a trap trying to bite its way out. I let her wrestle with it and work it out in her own mind.

  “I don’t want to … shit.” She started to cry a little. I looked away. My own arms were crossed now. There wasn’t going to be any girl hugging session here. When she let me in, she was acting like we’d both been inducted into the same sad little club. Like we’d both been felt up by the same social studies teacher in the back of the bus on a field trip. Like we should have a secret handshake or something. Now she was going to have to rat out one of the club members to save herself.

  In the end, she told me everything. When I left, I felt like I’d beaten her up, and she looked it. She looked like telling me the story had bruised her inside and out.

  This is what she told me.

  They started out by paying guys on campus to give them naked pictures and videos of their ex-girlfriends. Then they blackmailed the girls into coming in and doing stuff on camera. They had them sign forms saying they were doing it of their own free will and they gave them money. They probably pulled the same scam they pulled on Melody — told them they wouldn’t show their face, but used a second webcam to get a different angle. Then they could blackmail them again, and they’d be in it even deeper.

  They checked IDs to make sure all the girls were at least 18, but they favored the ones who looked younger.

  The girl who was missing was called Celia.

  Celia was a skinny little thing who looked 12, Melody said. She wasn’t the type to usually get attention from guys, so when a good-looking guy started paying attention to her, she was flattered. She fell for his bullshit hook, line, and sinker.

  It was GLG who did it. Melody didn’t even like saying his real name: Glenn. She said it in a whisper. She didn’t know his last name. She said he brought in a lot of girls. “They get bonuses for the girls they bring in. Like a bounty.” Glenn was so good at it, they called him the Collector.

  She told the rest of the story in a strained and quiet voice, like it was making her sick to remember it. It was making me sick to hear it.

  “Celia was so upset when Glenn showed her what he had on video, she threw up. They made me and another girl go in and clean her up, calm her down. There wasn’t much to say. We’d all been caught the same way.”

  Melody kept shaking her head over and over. “But what they did to Celia was worse, way worse. They basically raped her on camera. They got her to sign something first, saying she was doing it because she wanted to do it. She couldn’t say no. And she’s no actress. But they didn’t care. It wasn’t like they wanted her to pretend like she liked it.

  “They got some boy they found drunk or high and told him she was into it and she was going to act like she was being forced. The boy was good-looking, like a TV star, and he had, um, well, he looked good naked if you know what I mean. Then after, they told him he really raped her and it’s all on camera. Now they’ve got him, too. They’re telling him he’s going to go to prison if he doesn’t do whatever they say.”

  She wiped away a tear. “Once they have that video, they have your whole life. Because if they put it on the internet, everybody’s going to know. Your grandma, your boss. Later, when you get married, your husband … your kids, even. You’re never going to get away from it. You can maybe change your name, but you can’t change your face. And you can’t run away, either. The internet is everywhere.”

  She leaned forward and touched me on the knee. I saw it coming and I didn’t flinch. She didn’t need any shame from me. She had plenty for herself.

  “Darla, if they don’t have you for anything, don’t go back there. Just don’t go back. Once they have you for something, they own you. Do you understand? That boy they tricked, the one with Celia? He cried afterward like he was crying at his own mama’s funeral. Do you understand? And now we’re all even more scared than before. We don’t want them setting us up like that, so they can get us to do … other things.” Her eyes filled up again. “I’m telling you, if you can stay away from them, stay far, far away.”

  “I don’t understand how they get away with it. That can’t be legal — there’s no paper you can sign that gives someone permission to rape you.”

  She gave a real deep sigh. “I don’t know. It’s probably not, but they signed it, right? I mean, what’re they going to do? Tell the cops? Tell their parents? The whole reason they get trapped in the first place is because they don’t want anyone to know. Then it just gets worse and worse and they want to keep it a secret even more.”

  She avoided looking me in the eyes. “Plus, I know it’s w
rong but … the money. Some of them really need it. They get roped into it and then the money starts coming…” She bit her lip. “Some girls get a bonus if their stuff does well. They offer you more money than the others.” She stared down at her toes and shrugged. “My stuff’s pretty popular.”

  Oh, Melody. Poor, stupid Melody who loves animals and wants to spend her life looking at run-over dogs and mangled cats.

  I asked her if the guys I saw at the building, the thugs keeping guard, were ones who’d been blackmailed.

  Her eyes turned dark. “No, not those guys. They want to be there. They’re into it.” She gave me a bleak look. “It’s the money, but they like the rest of it. They … like hurting people. And watching people get hurt.”

  The amateur porn business must pay well if the geek could keep so many creeps on staff. “Does the geek work for somebody else?”

  She frowned and shook her head. “No, I don’t think so. He sure seems like the boss.”

  “You’ve never seen anybody else out there?”

  “No. Well, there’s one guy, but he definitely works for the boss.”

  “Who?”

  “Big fat guy. Some kind of computer guy, I guess.”

  “Young or old?”

  “Young. Our age or thereabouts.” She looked exhausted. She wiped her eyes and looked at me. “What’re you going to do?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  “Are you going to hunt down Celia?” Her voice broke a little. I could tell that by making her tell me, I’d made her feel even worse about herself than she did before.

  “I don’t know.”

  Her eyes filled with tears again and her mouth trembled.

  “Calm down, Melody.” I leaned forward, planted my elbows on my knees. I looked up into her destroyed face and raised my eyebrows. “What does Celia look like?”

  Robby’s apartment building and mine could have been twins. In fact, we only lived a few blocks away from each other. I didn’t have to break in when I got there, because the door in back was propped open. A guy sitting there smoking a cigarette just nodded at me as I went past. When I got up to Robby’s floor, I didn’t have to jimmy the door because I found his extra key under a loose piece of carpet a few feet away. Robby’s not exactly a Mensa candidate.

  The apartment was rank and stuffy. It was like pressing your nose to a taxi floor mat and breathing in deep. It smelled like old gym clothes, old food, and cat pee. I flung my arm over my nose and went over to yank the windows open and let in some air.

  The living room looked like garage sale central. A cockroach peeked out of a pizza box and waved his feelers at me.

  The story of Robby’s life as told by his apartment was depressing. A cheap TV set, a beat-up video game system, a tangle of wires as big as a dog. Worn-out porn mags on the coffee table. Carpet that had never seen a vacuum cleaner. A sofa that looked like it had lived through a couple floods and maybe even a touch of fire.

  The bathroom was straight off a don’t-do-meth billboard.

  There were yellow and brown striped sheets tacked up over the windows in the bedroom, giving everything an odd golden hue. I could hear flies buzzing. I didn’t want to touch those sheets to open another window.

  A laminated desk at the foot of the bed was piled with crap — wrinkly magazines and scarred video game cases and used tissues. The only thing not thickly overlaid with dust and threads of cobweb was a perfectly clean square in the center — presumably where his computer used to sit.

  There was another smell in the bedroom, unfortunately familiar. It was so hot and close in there, I had to wipe the sweat off my forehead before I made myself look on the other side of the bed. There, soaked into the carpet and bedeviled by the aforementioned flies, was a big sticky patch of blood.

  There wasn’t enough there to definitely confirm his demise. I walked over and eased his closet door further open with the toe of my shoe. Wherever he went after he leaked some essential fluids, he took off without his shoes or his fake leather jacket. I suppose he could have had a second pair of shoes — although I doubt it. But I’d never seen him without the jacket, unless he was exchanging it for his apron at work.

  They’d come for his computer and maybe him, but it didn’t look like they’d picked through the rest of his stuff yet. They’d be back. There was maybe no hurry, depending on whether that blood was from an appendage or a vital organ.

  On the way over, I’d thought about an old black-and-white detective movie I saw on TV awhile back. The detective was searching some guy’s apartment for a key. I can’t remember if he found it or if it was revealed later on, but the key was hidden inside a bar of soap in the bathroom.

  Now that’s good hiding.

  On the other hand, this is Robby we’re talking about. Robby whose apartment key was stashed three feet from his front door. I felt around in the pockets of that cheap brown plasticky jacket and found the thumb drive snapped into one of the chest pockets. It doesn’t take a master sleuth to deal with the short-bus contingent.

  I pocketed the bit of plastic and took a hard look around the room. I knew I should check under his mattress, but the thought turned my stomach, and my stomach was already uneasy.

  Then I heard an exclamation from the sidewalk down in front of the building. I stepped quick back into the living room and to the window to peek out. Two of the thugs from the industrial park were goggling up at Robby’s open windows, evidently surprised to see someone was home. Either they weren’t expecting him or maybe they weren’t expecting his ghost to need fresh air. They pounded up the front steps double time.

  I was close to rabbiting out the back when my thoughts turned sleuthward again. Robby’s closet had an attic access in the ceiling. Lickety-split I was back in the bedroom hefting myself up there, one foot braced on the door jamb. I was just settling the square of plywood back down when they burst in.

  If I thought I was hot before in that hellhole of an apartment, I didn’t know how hot it could get in an unventilated attic surrounded by fiberglass insulation that stuck to my sweaty skin, my hair, and my clothes until I thought I was going to die of lung cancer or get baked to death or both before I ever got out of there.

  If it was a TV show, those two thugs would have chit-chatted to each other and run through all the details of their boss’s operation, where their money was hid, their evil intentions, and every other thing, but it not being a TV show, they didn’t say a damn thing but just grunted at each other as they tossed the apartment to bits.

  Whatever was under Robby’s nasty mattress was theirs along with whatever was hiding under his furniture, in his drawers, and in his kitchen cabinets. I crouched there breathing in insulation and feeling more and more like I was going to pass out, waiting for them to say something useful. It never came.

  I heard one of them come back into the closet underneath me and root around again. Evidently they hadn’t found what they were looking for yet. I really doubted it was the little chunk of plastic in my pocket — I’m sure Robby’s boss would have thought it was a bad idea to carry evidence of his crimes around on his person. Still…

  The square of plywood I was crouched over suddenly came up. Oh shit. They were going to make sure Robby didn’t stash something up here. Why hadn’t I thought of that?

  This wasn’t a granny attic with a solid floor, a headless rocking horse, and a sea captain’s chest — this was just two-by-fours and cancer-causing pads of insulation and mouse shit. And walls of hell-hot darkness pressing in on all sides.

  The plywood square bobbled under me like a pot lid dancing over boiling water as the guy in the closet tried to figure out why it wouldn’t lift right up. He was probably becoming more convinced by the second that he’d found Robby’s secret stash.

  The bit of light that his fumbling let in was just enough for me to hotfoot it up and backwards, keeping my feet on the two-by-fours so I didn’t shock anyone by suddenly making a leg appear through the ceiling. I grabbed for the joist above my h
ead and caught splintery wood with one hand but just a fistful of insulation with the other, teetered for one bad second pinwheeling uselessly, then froze in place, my heart hammering so loud I couldn’t hear what was happening below.

  The plywood square was up and a hand was crab-walking its way around the opening, feeling for treasure. Then I heard his voice, plain as day: “You got a flashlight or something?”

  “No, I don’t got a fucking flashlight.”

  “Hand me that lamp, then. I got to make sure he didn’t stick nothing up here.”

  “Shit. It don’t reach.”

  “Unplug it, shithead. Plug it in right there. Give it to me.”

  The lamp came rising up into the black attic like a miniature sun as I let myself silently down into Robby’s neighbor’s apartment.

  Lucky for me, there was no one home. I could have hung out awhile, waited till the coast was good and clear, maybe even grabbed a quick shower, but I could feel the dregs of my luck ebbing away. I went out the back window onto the fire escape and dropped ten feet from the guy smoking his cigarette. His mouth fell open, the cigarette dangling from his lower lip, as I gave him a small salute. I was covered in bits of pink insulation.

  Robby had a computer and they took it. They came back to make sure he was gone or else — if they knew he was gone for good — make sure he didn’t have anything else they wanted. That, or they were looking for something specific.

  Ramón was either still a big carpet burrito or he was dead or he was otherwise preoccupied. I doubted they’d let him go. It looked like they had plans for him.

  Maybe they hadn’t tossed his apartment yet. Maybe he still had his computer.

  Ramón’s apartment was on the other side of town, closer to Melody’s place. He rented the basement from a Hispanic family with about two dozen kids, most of whom stared at me at I walked up and examined his below-ground door.