Prologue
With the patience and precision of a
surgeon, he sliced into his victim’s upper arm and carefully lifted
the triangular piece of flesh. After placing the small chunk in a
cubbyhole of the sectioned plastic cooler he had brought with him,
he returned to the job at hand. One by one, he cut out more
triangles from the dead man’s arms and legs and then carefully
stored them in the container.
“I always used a new
scalpel and then tossed it afterward.”
He had purchased disposable scalpels
online. They came ten to a pack, with plastic handles and
individually wrapped and sterilized high carbon steel blades. Cost
didn’t matter. He always spent whatever necessary to accomplish the
job. But the scalpels were one of the least expensive tools he had
ever used—less than a dollar each. And the little blades did double
duty, first to slit the neck and then to make the intricate
carvings.
He hummed as he worked, a mundane
little ditty that he had heard somewhere years ago.
He took pride in his kills. He never
did less than his best.
“I wanted the kill to
be clean, quick, and relatively painless. The sweetest pleasure is
in those few seconds of initial horror they experience. I prefer
psychological torture to physical torture.”
Whether or not the death was quick and
painless didn’t matter to him one way or the other. He was not
opposed to making a victim suffer and had on occasion used both
physical and psychological torture, but not with these particular
people.
“It’s such a quiet way
to kill a person. With their trachea severed, they can’t
scream.”
His preference was not the
up-close-and-personal. He preferred killing from a distance. A
quick, clean shot to the head, if death was the only agenda.
However, he always did whatever was necessary to accomplish his
goals. That’s why this kill, like the three before it and the ones
that would come after it, required him to get his hands
dirty.
With his task completed and the four
triangles carved from each arm and each leg now stored neatly in
the cooler, he lifted the old man by his broad shoulders and
dragged him along the bank of the river.
“I never left them
where I killed them. I would move the body, usually near a river or
lake or stream. I even dragged a woman from her bedroom outside to
her pool. There is something peaceful about water, don’t you
think?”
He had been forced to leave the first
body in her apartment, but he had taken her into the bathroom and
filled the tub. Not exactly a river or even a pool, but under the
circumstances, it had been as close as he could get her to water.
As luck would have it, he had been able to drag the second victim
from the back porch, where he had slit her throat, to the river
nearby. He had dumped the third victim in a shallow streambed
located on the man’s property.
“I always struck after
midnight. Never before. I wanted the body to be found in the
morning. There is something beautiful about the morning sunlight
caressing a corpse.”
In his opinion, there was nothing
beautiful about a corpse, neither in the dark nor in the full light
of day. As a general rule, the time of day—or night—was
inconsequential, unless there was a reason for specific timing. But
he was following a sequence of events with these murders, somewhat
like following a road map to reach a specific destination. Each
step in the procedure was a necessity. The exact time of death was
not important—as long as the person was dead by
morning.
“I had a special
upright freezer where I kept my carvings.”
He never kept trophies. He didn’t want
or need any.
The souvenirs from these kills were not
for him. They were for someone else. Someone who would appreciate
their significance.