Chapter 2

September 13, 1996 4:30 P.M.

Los Angeles, CA

“This one makes number seven."

Detectives Daryl Garcia and Steve Howe were at the foot of a section of the Los Angeles River in the City of Commerce, which was just west of East Los Angeles. Two dozen plainclothes detectives and uniformed officers scoured the concrete banks of the river and the sandy bottom for clues, while above dozens of journalists stood poised behind the chain link fence designed to keep trespassers out of the river. Los Angeles was currently in the midst of another late summer heat wave; at four-thirty in the afternoon it was still one hundred degrees at the civic center. Thank God this stiff had washed up now and not next week when it would have been positively reeking.

It was two days after their arrest of Rudy Montego and Frankie Rodriguez for the murder of five-year-old Stephanie Hernandez in a drive-by shooting. Both suspects had been arraigned that morning and had pleaded a big Not Guilty. Daryl and Steve had been in court that morning during arraignment, and Daryl had kept his gaze trained on both gang members as they sat with their court-appointed defense attorneys. When they had been led back to the custody of the Sheriff's Deputy, Rudy had turned to look back at the courtroom and Daryl caught his gaze and held it. I'm on your ass like a fly on shit, homeboy. Fuck with me, and it will be my pleasure to see that you suffer more than you can ever imagine.

It had been a good morning and the arraignment had been only the beginning of it.

After the court appointment, the two partners had gone back to Parker Center to fill out some paperwork pertaining to the case, and Daryl had gone through the motions mechanically. It was the least favorite part of his job, but he liked it anyway. He liked working with Steve, too. When Steve wasn't working he was a grinning goofball of a guy who looked like he'd be at ease renting you a Jet Ski at Lake Havasu or surfing in Newport Beach. He had bleached blonde hair, deeply tanned skin, and his five foot eight frame was toned and muscular. For a thirty-two year old man, Steve looked easily ten years younger. Daryl was envious of the way Steve got the attention from women on the sporadic occasions they went out after their beat to the local watering hole for a few beers. Still, he couldn't complain. Having Steve around only brought the women around to him as well.

Daryl was three years older than Steve and stood two inches taller. His black hair was combed back from his forehead, giving him the suave look of a romantic. His eyes were large and brown, his mouth sensual, a neatly trimmed mustache accenting his chiseled features. He favored neatly tailored clothing, even for undercover work. The guys always told him he looked positively dashing in his normal work attire, which consisted of slacks, a white shirt and tie.

Daryl wiped the sweat from his brow with the back of his hand and squinted at his partner. The air was hot and still. “What do you mean by ‘this makes seven'?"

“Don't tell me you don't know?” Steve asked in that incredulous tone he sometimes got. As much as he liked Steve, he could be a little irritating at times.

Daryl turned to the dozens of cops scouring the graffiti-stained concrete banks of the river. “Apparently it appears I'm not the only one who's in the dark since these guys are looking for evidence with us. Now would you please tell me what the hell you're talking about?"

“Okay,” Steve Howe took a step forward and glanced around, as if afraid to be overheard. He cocked his thumb back towards where the initial torso of the victim was found floating in stagnant water. “Look at what we have here; homeless guy scouring the banks of the river for recyclable bottles finds the torso. He hightails it up to call us. We get here. Find one dead, very dismembered human male. So far in addition to the torso, all we've found have been both legs, correct?"

“Right.” Thirty minutes ago an officer reported finding two human legs severed at the knees, presumably from their pal fifty feet away, already covered with a white sheet by the coroner.

“His head is missing too, right?” Steve went on. “Decapitated. Haven't found it yet."

“Right."

“Plus both arms are still missing and the sick fuck who did this cut the guy's cock and balls off for good measure, too. Right?"

Daryl sighed, nodding. He had never seen anything like this in his twelve years as a cop in Los Angeles. His first reaction upon initially viewing the body was one of question: it was very hard to tell that the lump of flesh that sat on the sandy concrete banks of the river was the torso of a human being. It had been even further puzzling, after making out the bloody stumps of where the head and limbs had once been connected, what the raw patch of flesh that lay in the triangle at the bottom portion of the torso signified. He actually had to look at the remains for a few minutes before it finally hit him. He had turned away sickened, then embarrassed. The way the human mind will rebel at such a shocking crime scene was something he thought as a detective of homicide he would never have to experience. He thought he had seen it all—shootings, stabbings, hell, one time he had seen a guy whose head had been split in two with a chainsaw by a guy on a PCP binge—but this beat them all.

Steve Howe continued. “Almost two months ago, Jack Looper over at Foothill Division gets called over to a scene in the San Gabriel Mountains right above La Canada and Pasadena. A couple of hikers found a dead body, naked, badly decomposed and decapitated. They still haven't identified him."

“You think they're related?” Daryl asked, his mind whirling. He hadn't heard about the Foothill incident. Murder was so common in this city that he never gave it much thought anymore whenever he was on the scene of one, whether it was the result of a domestic quarrel, robbery, or gang related. When you saw hundreds of murder cases in any given year, you grew numb to it after awhile.

“There's more,” Steve said. “In May there was that gang member found beneath the Eighty-First Street bridge near downtown. Remember that?"

Daryl made the connection. He remembered it vaguely due to the fact that one of the detectives that worked at Parker Center he was friendly with had been on that case. It had been the first time that he had ever heard of gang bangers decapitating a rival. “That's right. Where was he from?"

“Boyle Heights,” Steve said. “Don't remember what gang he was affiliated with, although I think it might have been Eighteenth Street. The point of it is this: his head was found first in his own pants stashed near some bushes on the side of railroad tracks about a quarter of a mile north. A day later some gang members found his body neatly laid out in some bushes about a quarter of a mile down the line. Not a drop of blood anywhere to be found. The gang members that found him were from another gang, and they claimed they didn't know how he got there. Lie detector tests and circumstantial evidence confirms this, much to their benefit. End of story?"

“Apparently not, since you eluded to seven victims."

Steve held up his hand, counting off on his fingers. “This January a prostitute was slaughtered in East LA. She had been dismembered and decapitated, found ten blocks from the Eighty-First Street bridge. We still haven't found the head. She was affiliated with a Boyle Heights gang."

“You think all these killings are gang related?"

“Gangs don't kill this way,” Steve said. “You and I both know that."

That was true. In reality, gang members were cowards who preferred to spray an area with bullets hoping to hit their target. The brave ones actually walked up to their intended victims and shot them point blank. The butchery as evidenced in the cases Steve was talking about was out of character for a gang member's standard operating procedure.

“What about the other three?"

“Last September I assisted a case in which two males were found at the bottom of a gully in Echo Park, only five miles from here. Both men were decapitated and emasculated. Both men had gang ties."

“Jesus!"

“And the year before that, a homeowner in Newport Beach reported a body that washed ashore near his home. A buddy of mine, Rick Mercado, was on that one. The body was that of a young girl, a teenager actually. Dismembered and decapitated. We weren't able to get prints because we never found her hands, but DNA testing matched those of a missing teenager from Echo Park.” Steve's voice lowered as he regarded Daryl with a serious gaze. “The missing teenager in question had ties to another Boyle Heights Gang. The thing to consider is this: the missing teenager hadn't been seen since she left home about three months before the body washed ashore in Newport Beach."

Detective Daryl Garcia turned away from Steve, toward the hub of the investigation. His heart was racing. Steve was telling him the truth; he was damned sharp at connecting things. He might be on to something here.

The reason they were gathered here today was due to the discovery of a dead male who appeared to be in his mid-twenties. At approximately noon a homeless man scavenging for bottles along the concrete bank of the river saw something white floating in the shallow waters in the center of the river. The unusual amount of water at the river's bottom was due to a freak summer storm that had dumped three inches of rain in the Los Angeles area. The flood had since trickled to a steady stream, leaving a good two feet of water running down the center. Surely enough to carry the remains of a dead human being.

The first officers on the scene immediately called for backup, and within the hour the river was swarming with cops. Daryl and Steve arrived two hours ago upon being told by their Sargent that they were to handle this case. On the drive out Daryl wondered to himself what it would be this time; another gang retaliation killing, or maybe a thrill kill committed by some sick teenager? Or maybe a robbery gone awry. Those were the kind of cases Daryl was used to.

Now as he saw the body, inspected the area for clues with his partner, and conferred with a couple of the other officers, Daryl wasn't so inclined to believe this was just another routine murder case. He hadn't been aware of the murders Steve just told him about—with the exception of the Eighty-First Street Bridge victim. Great, he thought.

Just what this city needs in the midst of psycho gang members and car jackers is another serial killer.

He turned to Steve. “Are there files on these cases back at the station?"

“Yeah."

“I'd like to see them,” Daryl said. “Let's not say anything to anybody until we review those files. I don't want to be spilling the beans without some substantial proof to back us up."

“I agree completely.” The two men started heading back up the bank of the river toward their cars.

“What about the FBI?” Daryl asked. The heat was tiring and he wiped his forehead. “Have they been called in on any of these cases?” Standard operating procedure was for the FBI to be called in if it appeared that the murder was sexual or serial related, or if local law enforcement had exhausted all their efforts.

Steve shook his head. “Don't know about that one. I'm fairly certain they were called in on the two guys from last year, and the hooker. I'm not so sure about the others."

It was probably hard to pin a series of murders as a case of serial murder. If the victims had gang ties and associations, it would most likely be chalked up as gang related.

But if this was a bona-fide serial killing case, it might help boost Daryl's career quite a ways. Especially if he went to his superiors with his suspicions and they were found valid.

For the first time in Daryl's career he smiled at the fact that murder, a commodity he dealt with every day in his job, might actually help him get ahead in life.

Daryl Garcia sat at desk, cradling his head in his hands. Before him on his cluttered desk lay a myriad of files and paperwork, all relating to seven different murders in the last day alone. All seven murders occurring in the same five block radius of Boyle Heights and Echo Park.

It was close to seven p.m., two days after the discovery of the LA River stiff.

Steve Howe had gone home for the day, as had all of the day shift detectives. Daryl rubbed his eyes and stared down at the mess of papers on his desk, wondering how what appeared to be a simple open-and-shut case of serial murder-as open-and-shut as serial murder gets-could accelerate into something like this.

Fifteen gang related shootings in the past twenty-four hours resulting in seven fatalities. Daryl and Steve were handling four of them, and with the dismemberment murder that sparked it all on their priority list, it was making work a trifle frustrating.

The coroner hadn't even identified the body when the reverberations of the killing began making their way through gang-infested Los Angeles neighborhoods. The gang that claimed the area the body was found in-Los Compadres Mafia-started the fire by belligerently voicing their opinions to news journalists that the LAPD and the Mayor didn't give a rats ass for the people in the barrio, especially the Hispanic community. The elders of the community echoed this, and a chorus rang through from members of the city council who were of Latin American descent. Daryl Garcia chalked that up to simple minority whining, something he had grown used to in the twelve years he had been a cop in Los Angeles; the LAPD is racist and beats down Mexicans and blacks and women.

Same old bullshit. It pissed him off more when they tried to appeal to him by bringing his own race up in the debate. You're Hispanic, too. You should know how it feels.

Well, he didn't. His basic philosophy was this: if you break the law, it is open season on your ass from law enforcement. He didn't give a shit if you were black, white, brown, purple, pink, or claimed to be from another planet. If you fucked up, you fucked up, and he wasn't playing favorites to gang members just because he happened to share their same ethnic background. To do so was the worst form of racism he could think of.

The evening the body was found two gang shootings were reported in the area, and by the end of the night LAPD had logged down seven additional shootings from four different gang factions in the area. The Los Compadres Mafia initiated the violence when three members of that gang opened fire on a group of men milling around outside a house in Boyle Heights. The targets were Eighteenth Street Gang members. Nobody was killed, but it trickled down that the Los Compadres Mafia believed that the dead man found earlier that day was a member who had been missing the past several days. They believed Eighteenth Street was responsible. Naturally, Eighteenth Street retaliated.

The resounding retaliations, encompassing two additional gangs, led to a tense situation in the East Los Angeles neighborhoods. The city council urged citizens to be calm. Angry residents, reacting to the news coverage of the latest killing, denounced the LAPD from the comfiness of their front porches as news cameras ground on. The LAPD

never protects us, came the same old lament. When something bad happens to one of us, the LAPD doesn't care. When something bad happens to somebody white, or in a good part of the city, they do everything they can to solve the crime. But they don't care about us.

The simple fact of the matter was that with manpower stretched so thin, there weren't enough detectives to cover all the murders in the highest crime infested areas of the city. Most of those crimes were committed by gang members, who were tough to crack in confessions, and usually skipped town to safe houses when the going got rough.

One out of every five murders in LA goes unsolved every year, simply because murder had changed. No longer was murder the result of a lover's triangle, or a simple robbery, or between family members. Most of the murders committed in these rough neighborhoods were by young street thugs protecting streets they didn't even legally own, pronouncing their sentences as indiscriminately as the common cold. Eighty percent of the time the murderer didn't even know the victim.

The four murders Daryl and Steve were assigned to had all been committed between the hours of eleven p.m. and noon today. They decided to split them up between them. The first two involved members of two rival gangs, the Los Compadres Mafia and Eighteenth Street, while the other two involved Eighteenth Street and Boyle Heights Thirteen. There were also scattered shootings involving a fourth gang, the Tortilla Flats.

Daryl Garcia looked down at the files. It was all the same. Young Hispanic men gunning each other down for what? To claim a piece of pavement? Because of the misconception that another man had looked at him with “disrespect"? Because a man from a different neighborhood had strayed into the “wrong one"? For those trivial offences did a man have to lose his life?

And to make matters worse, all four of these killings were built on further misconceptions; that the victim had something to do with the murder of the young man found in the LA River the day before.

They hadn't even positively identified him yet.

Information had come from a pair of detectives from the East Side division that there were thirteen men missing who loosely resembled the scant description of the man found at the river. Six of those men were known gang members, all on parole. Daryl thought about this as he read the report. Most likely they were parole violators; one had served time for grand theft auto, another for rape, another for second degree murder. Four of them had no gang ties, and not much was known about the others. Daryl looked at the list of gang members on the list who were missing. None of them were members of any of the gangs involved in the latest skirmishes in the area.

If gang members could read it might behoove them to take a peak at the newspaper. Especially this morning's edition, which had a large article on the latest murder.

The article, starting on column one, page one of the Los Angeles Times, stated the basic facts of the discovery of the LA River victim, as well as a few tidbits of information the LAPD had released to the public. All one with reasonable intelligence had to glean from the way this latest victim was dismembered was that gang members lack the sophistication to dismember people. They might stab each other in fights, but they didn't decapitate their victims. They didn't sever their arms and legs cleanly at the shoulder and hip joints. And they didn't kill their victims in one place and transport them to another, as the murderer had done in this case.

What the papers didn't report, and what the LAPD didn't release to the press, was that all of the victims were sexually violated post mortem.

What macho homeboy fucked the corpse of his enemy in the ass after he had killed him?

Daryl Garcia opened a file drawer on his right, gathered the four files up and put them in the cabinet. To be truthful, he probably wasn't treating the gang bangers fairly. He was very biased against them, and for good reasons. When he was twenty-two he and his first wife, Shirley, had been driving home from a nice relaxing day at Griffith Park.

Shirley was seven months pregnant with their first child. Daryl had just graduated from Long Beach State with a degree in Psychology. As they sat in traffic on Normandie Avenue waiting to get to Los Feliz, which would take them to the 5 freeway and back towards home, the unthinkable happened.

A robbery in progress at a video store on Normandie spilled out onto the sidewalk as the robbers—members of an East Hollywood Street gang—ran out of the store, one of them shooting the merchant as he went for the phone to call the police. Daryl's car was in the right lane, closest to the action. He was blocked in on all sides by cars, and as the light changed green and traffic started crawling forward, two of the gang members lunged toward his car, tugging at the passenger side door and smashing the window on Shirley's side. “Get the fuck out of the car, motherfucker!” they shouted. Everything after that happened in slow motion.

Daryl had tried to speed off but there was still a car in front of him. In his excitement and fear, he crashed into it.

The gang member at the passenger side of the car smashed the window on Shirley's side, reached in and unlocked the door.

Shirley's screams ... ?

Daryl's screams for help and mad attempt to free himself from the seatbelt so he could get out and help her ... ?

...as the gang member opened the door, grabbed her arm, and tried to pull her out of the car ... ?

...as another gang member grabbed Daryl roughly by the neck and hauled him out, spilling him onto the pavement ... ?

Daryl didn't see what happened next but he didn't have to. Gunshots mean only one thing.

When it was over the gang members were speeding off in his car, leaving Daryl and Shirley bleeding on the street. He remembered crawling over to his wife.

He remembered the vast pool of blood that was gathering underneath her very pregnant body. He remembered her blue eyes as they stared up at him, still alive, knowing that what she had wanted most in her life, to be a mother, a devoted wife, had been cruelly taken away from her forever.

She died in Daryl's arms as the sirens of approaching help arrived.

He was never able to make love to another woman after that without thinking of Shirley. She had been his best friend, his companion, his lover. They had been high school sweethearts, and he had proposed marriage to her only a month before they graduated. They were married at the age of twenty and had shared a small apartment near his parents house in Gardena while they both attended school They had their whole lives ahead of them. When Shirley got pregnant, she dropped out of college and took a job as a secretary at a law firm while Daryl finished up his degree. He had been dedicated to Shirley with body, mind, and soul.

The day she and their baby had been taken away from him changed everything.

Daryl sat at the desk and straightened up the files. Thinking about Shirley was hard. He hadn't thought about her in a long time now, and every time he did it brought back painful memories. That horrible day occurred twelve years ago, but it still felt like it was only yesterday when she was alive and with him.

He had been with other women since Shirley was killed, was even serious with two of them. But the spark wasn't there in those other relationships. If there was such a thing as having a soul mate, one person with whom you shared your life with until death do you part, Shirley Watkins had been that person. And she had been taken away from him. Brutally.

He could feel a headache coming on and he pinched the bridge of his nose with his fingers, head bowed toward the desk, eyes closed. He always got bad headaches like this when the work was especially grim, or whenever Shirley came to his mind. Despite the fact that the police had caught the men who killed Shirley, and the killers were later convicted and sent to prison, all but one had been released within the last year-and-a-half.

One of them was later killed in a gang shooting, and the other one was currently out there somewhere, working within the criminal system. Not a day went by when Daryl didn't think about the men that did this as he drove his beat or investigated a crime. Not a day went by when he didn't think if it weren't for those scumbags who ruined my life I wouldn't feel like I need to be here trying to stop them and their kind.

He hated gang members. Loathed them. When they killed each other on the streets he was glad. He went about his work in a mindless fashion, going about the routine of asking the same questions, filling out the same paperwork, chasing down suspects. He tried hard to solve the crimes he worked on, but he secretly he applauded the vermin when they killed each other. If it was up to him, he'd put every gang member on a deserted island somewhere, give them an array of machine guns and say there you go, knock yourself out, kill each other, I'd be fucking glad to help you. What drove him to do his work was remembering what happened to him twelve years ago, as well as things that happened every day: children with their heads blown off in drive-by shootings, the elderly victimized in their own homes, the children of the neighborhood who were good kids in their hearts, beaten and intimidated, their dreams crushed. It was this that kept him going.

Thanks to those images, he felt no guilt when he got rough on the gang members.

He had beaten more than his share of gang members, and at one point was getting involved in too many officer-involved shootings (he always kept a spare handgun in his ankle holster that was unregistered; the handgun was later placed in the hand of the dead or dying gang member after they were shot). In the wake of the Rodney King beating and the LA riots, Daryl had to rein in his anger a bit. Luckily, he was never indicted or reprimanded for his handling of the gang members, and it was at this time that he made it to homicide. And it was in homicide that he started to make headway. He made contacts in the neighborhood and used them when needed. He relentlessly pursued leads, doggedly went after evidence, and worked on his temper through the martial arts training he began to study about three years ago and it helped. Now the only time he resorted to violence was in instances like five days ago when he and Steve had beaten the shit out of Rudy Montego and his little scumbag friend for killing that little kid. In cases like that, resorting to violence was a good thing: he got to relieve pent-up aggression on lower forms of life, and in doing so he gained valuable information that was needed to close cases.

All in a day's work.

Daryl gathered up the files and arranged them in a neat order. The office was starting to come alive again as the nightshift officers arrived. Daryl gathered his personal belongings, rose from his chair, and grabbed a leather satchel that was resting under the desk. He put the files in the satchel. He needed to chill out tonight, drink a few beers, clear his mind. He was already thinking about what he would do tomorrow, how he would approach the case. His main concern was the decapitation murder; he felt that if he could help identify the victim it might assure the homeboys that none of their kind had anything to do with it. He hoped it would. With all this crazy speculation fueling the fire, it was eventually bound to get an innocent person killed.

Daryl couldn't have that.

As he was heading out of the office Raymond Skipp, a friend of his from the days when he worked nights four years before, raised a hand in greeting. “How's it going, Daryl?"

“Same old, same old, Ray."

“You working tomorrow?"

“Yeah. You?” He stopped by Ray's desk on his way out the door. Ray was a short, wiry little guy who was nearly bald. He sported a frizzled beard and beady little eyes. He worked undercover narcotics.

“Nope. Catchin’ the last game of the season at Dodger Stadium."

“Well, good for you. What you workin’ on lately?"

“Same old crap,” Ray sighed. “I hear you're working on that latest Butcher case?"

A journalist from the Los Angeles Times had termed the killer the East Side Butcher. Daryl's supervisor, Hank Wilkson, and some of the other guys in the office were calling him LA's Jack the Ripper. Daryl nodded. “Yeah, and the fallout that is happening because of it. I've got four gang murders to handle in addition to it."

Ray shook his head. “I heard about that shit. Nasty."

Daryl felt the smooth taste of Miller Lites calling him at his apartment. “Well, listen, Ray, I gotta—"

“Oh, wait a minute,” Ray said, holding his hand up. “Now I remember why I called you over. I've got something that might help you on this Butcher thing."

“Yeah?” Daryl stopped, looking at Ray curiously.

“One of the drug counselors I work with on the East Side, guy by the name of Danny Hernandez, seems to think he knows who this latest victim is."

“He does, huh?"

“Yeah.” Ray plucked a pad of paper from the clutter on his desk and wrote an address on it. He tore the page off and handed it to Daryl. “Give him a visit tomorrow."

“What does he say?"

Ray shrugged. “He said judging from the description in the paper it sounds like a guy he used to hang out with when he was using. Guy named Javier Perez, member of the Eighteenth Street gang."

Daryl nodded. That was a nice lead. So far Eighteenth Street hadn't been implicated in the crime, and none of the supposed missing persons were from that gang.

“Okay, I'll pay him a visit tomorrow. Thanks for the lead."

“No problem, man,” Ray said. “Oh, listen, one more thing."

“Yeah?"

“This Danny Hernandez guy is a former gang banger. Used to be a heroin addict and a dealer, but he's been clean and sober now for almost ten years. He does a lot of gang and drug interdictions with the kids and works well with the community there. He's very tapped into the community on the East Side. If there's anybody who is clearly from the streets that knows what these people think, and who can communicate with them and work with us, Danny is the man."

Daryl nodded. “He sounds like a good resource. I'll make double sure I see him tomorrow then."

“Good. See you later, man."

Daryl left the office and took a look at the address Ray had scrawled. It was in Boyle Heights, only ten miles out of his way. It was only seven o'clock, still relatively early. Perhaps it wouldn't be a bad idea to look up this Danny Hernandez character on his way home.

He did precisely that. He detoured east on Interstate 10 heading for East Los Angeles.

The confessional booth he was seated in at Our Lady of Guadalupe Catholic church was growing hot and stifling in the lateness of the day. Father John Glowacz was just about to get up and leave for the day when he heard the outer door of the confessional booth open. A figure stepped in and closed the door. He settled in his seat behind the screen and crossed himself, waiting for the person to sit down and begin the liturgy.

“Forgive me Father, for I have sinned.” The voice that came from behind the screen was spoken in a hoarse whisper. The priest detected an eerie familiarness to it but couldn't quite place it. “It has been one week since my last confession."

“I'm listening, my Son,” Father Glowacz murmured.

There was silence for a moment. It had been unbearably hot all day and at the latter part of the afternoon and early evening the confessional booth had been stuffy and hot. The priest loosened his clerical color, wiping sweat from his neck. He hoped this one would hurry it up.

The silence dragged on for a moment. The priest was just about to urge the poor soul on when there was a strangled gasp from the other side of the screen. “I..."

“Yes, my son?” Father Glowacz urged. It sounded like the poor soul was really struggling with something bad. Andthere was something familiar about that voice. Had he heard this penitent's confessions before?

The whisper was choked and garbled. “I've done some ... bad things, Father."

“God forgives all those who confess their sins, my son,” he said, his stomach suddenly growing leaden.

“Does He?” The whispered voice held a hint of doubt.

“Yes, He does."

“Thank ... Jesus...” the whispered voice cracked.

There was silence for a moment. Father John Glowacz took a deep breath, licked his lips, and urged him on. “Go on, my son."

The figure behind the screen cleared his throat. “Nothing I tell you goes outside of these walls, right Father? It's all between you, me, and God, right?"

“That's right, my son."

“Good.” More clearing of his throat. No matter how much he cleared his throat, the penitent's voice still sounded hoarse and whispery. “Because I've done some bad things."

“Well, let's hear what they are before we decide how bad they are, eh?” Father Glowacz's heart was beating hard. His hands were shaking. It couldn't be, it just couldn't be who he was thinking it was.

“Okay.” The penitent paused again, as if trying to decide which sin to confess first. “I did it again."

“Did what again, my son?” Oh God, no!

“I told myself I wasn't going to do it anymore,” the whispered voice went on, becoming slightly falsetto. “Especially since the one I got over a month ago is still with me. But.... I just couldn't help myself.” His voice squeaked slightly, cracking in its hoarse, deep tone.

“What did you do, my son?” Father Glowacz's stomach felt leaden with dread. It's him, he thought. It's him, oh why God why—

There was a shuffling from behind the screen, as if the person sitting on the other side of the confessional was shifting in his seat. There was a squeak of the bench as if the person was leaning forward.

And then he confessed. And Father John Glowazcz sat on his side of the confessional booth, his mouth gaping open in horror, his hands trembling, his heart racing with fright as the madman confessed his sins once again to him.