Darker Still (8 page)

He grabbed her by the face and forced her close to him so he could glare into her eyes.

“You see what happens when you misbehave?”

The girl continued to try to move away from him. She was averting his gaze and he had the feeling that if she wasn’t gagged she would be trying to bite him. He knew she wanted to gnaw his face off.

He would show her who was boss. She was about to become another message to his old friend John Anderson. Detective John Anderson he was now. He had been shocked to discover that John Anderson was moving back to town and even more interested to learn that he was now a cop.

He had actually been keeping tabs on John ever since that day at the old house. John had wrecked everything for him and he’d had to start over. He hated him for that and he was damn sure not just going to let that sort of thing slide.

He knew that one day he would punish John, but it had to be when the time was right. Killing John when he was still a child would not have proved anything. As much as he hated John for what he had done he also respected the boy. He had stood up to him and had escaped his clutches. He wanted to torture him and he wanted to challenge him.

That was why he had bided his time. When he learned that John was coming back to Belpre then he knew that the time was perfect. He had been getting bored with the same old routine. He needed something to spice things up and this was just the perfect storm to do it. He had to laugh at the fun that was to come.

“Now, sweetie. You are going to try to be tough, but it won’t do you any good.”

He removed the duct tape and ball gag from her mouth. As he was doing so he gave her one last piece of advice.

“Feel free to scream as loud as you want. No one will hear you.”

He picked up the hunting knife and she began to scream.

“How could anyone do that to another human being?” Michaels asked as he held a handkerchief to his nose. He carefully moved around the crime scene trying to make sure that he didn’t step on any evidence.

John watched him with sorrow and disgust in his heart. He would never be able to get the ghastly image out of his head. It was another young woman. This time the killer had left the body to lie and rot in the middle of the park. She had been hung from the monkey bars on the playground. Her guts were hanging mostly out of her body. There were several strange symbols carved into her flesh on her face and the eyeballs were once again missing.

Her head was lying on the ground beside her.

John wanted to throw up the second he saw it. The body had been discovered by a jogger on his early morning run at sunrise. He was in total shock and had to be removed from the crime scene. John had listened to his 911 call and he could hardly speak. By the time they got there the jogger was practically catatonic.

“Ok, there is no denying it now. There is a serial on the loose and everybody knows it,” The chief said.

“Yea, so much for talking this over with the rest of the crew during morning briefing,” John added. They had received the call at six and the briefing usually occurred at eight. All John could really do at this point was to shake his head. He knew that there was nothing they were going to find here and that the killer was just taunting them now.

He looked in disgust as the crew of news reporters who were all over the scene trying to get the scoop first and get their stories out there. They reminded him of bloodthirsty vultures who had come by to pick the corpse clean of any left meat. That was really what they did; they were the scum of the earth and it didn’t matter if they were a big city organization like he was used to scaring off in Columbus or a smaller local newsgroup like the ones here in Belpre—it was disgusting.

“Hey, Chief!”

One of the lab techs who were combing the body for evidence suddenly called over.

Michaels and John walked over to him ignoring the cops who appeared to be standing around, but were actually just waiting for the lab geeks to finish their sweep. Of course they should have been questioning people in the crowd about what they might have seen. It wouldn’t have amounted to much most likely, but at least it would have been something somewhat productive.

John knew that the killer might be in that crowd. A self-obsessed narcissist like this guy was always going to be watching. He was probably twenty feet from them in the crowd of onlookers taking pictures to add to his trophy collection. He wanted so badly to just go over and start giving everybody there the third degree. It might be helpful if he just shoved a gun in their stupid faces until one of them confessed. It would be so easy.

“What have you got?” Michaels asked the female tech.

She held up something in a pair of tweezers. “I don’t think this belonged to the victim. It was a different color strand. The victim was blond but the hair was dark brown.

“Shit yea! Can you get some DNA off of it?” Michaels asked.

“Yea, I should be able to.”

“Well, get back to the lab and get on that pronto.”

John felt overwhelmed with excitement for a minute, but before he let himself get overjoyed he thought of something; the killer did not leave these kinds of mistakes. There was no way that was his hair. The body had been scrubbed clean of all DNA evidence except for the victims own blood. You could see it plainly; it was just like the last victim had been.

Why this hair? It sounded like a set up to him.

“See? I told you he would drop the ball at some point. Now we got him!” Chief Michaels exclaimed.

“I’m not so sure,” John said.

“What? Why?”

“Well, assuming we can gain the DNA off the hair, I don’t think it will match our killer.”

“You have to get some faith about something in this world John. It isn’t all pity parties and bad endings. Sometimes good things do happen to the right people.”

“I do believe that Chief, but this doesn’t feel right. Why after all of these years would this guy suddenly make such an amateurish mistake? It doesn’t fly with me.”

“I hear where you are coming from, but you have to remember that he has never done this but once. He has always had a controlled environment like before where he killed and disposed of the bodies on his own property. There were no bodies and no crime scenes; without this you can’t even prove a murder has been committed. Now he is bored and he is toying with us. I know it is weird, because killers typically mild out as they get older and this guy is getting bolder, but he has made the amateur mistake a lot of these guys make; he thinks he is too smart and that he is invincible so he starts playing games with the cops. Now he fucked up and we got him.”

John dwelled on what the chief was saying. He had some valid points. The Valley Ripper, as he was being dubbed on Facebook, was stepping outside of his comfort zone. He had reached out to them because he needed to be recognized more. He wanted to take his game to another level; he was tired of playing by himself. That may have been his whole purpose for reaching out to John in the first place. It was possible that his arrogance was getting the better of him and he had left a minute clue behind that was going to get him caught. It was a sweet thought that was really hard to let go of after it was in your head.

“Maybe you are right,” John said.

“Well, don’t start celebrating quite yet. We don’t know if it will bring back anything yet, but we will just keep our fingers crossed in the meantime. No one breathe a word of this to the cops. I’ll tell the others.”

Chief Michaels went around the unit whispering in ears trying to keep things on the down low and away from the prying eyes of the media vultures that were buzzing and circulating around their heads.

He hoped the bastard was watching and that he was enjoying his last few nights of freedom.

*

Holly Janson slammed her car door shut and started walking down the street. This was the fourth time that damn car had left her stranded in the middle of nowhere since her asshole step father had given it to her for her eighteenth birthday. It was supposed to be a reliable car that would get her to and from college in Marietta every day. So far it had forced her to walk more often than not. And today of all times it had happened in the dead zone between the two towns where the cell phone signal was very touchy on a good day. She was getting no bars at all. Her phone was useless right now.

There was hardly any traffic this late at night out this way, not that she would have hitchhiked anyway. With the murders that had happened so close together, there was no telling what kind of psycho might be behind the wheel of any one of the cars that might happen by. She would take her chances with the dark, thank you very much.

She kept looking at her phone as she walked hoping that she would hit a sweet spot and get some signal so she could call triple A. But as of yet she was not getting anything.

She hated the summer semester at school. The classes were always so long and grueling. Four hours three times a week for most of them because they had to cram in ten weeks what a normal semester did in sixteen. But some of the classes she needed for her major were only offered at this time. It was pathetic and it had angered her severely. They liked to split the summer sessions up into two sessions, so they could pump more money out of you. And it made things so much harder than they needed to be. How anyone retained any information from their summer classes was beyond her; it couldn’t be done.

But she only had to complete about six more classes in the fall to be finished with her degree. Then who knows what life would throw at her. She still wasn’t sure what she wanted to be when she grew up. Even after four years of college it was all still pretty much touch and go. It was a tough decision to wonder what you were going to do with your life for the next forty years.

She heard something behind her.

It sounded like a branch cracking beneath a footstep. She spun around and peered into the darkness. There was not much to see. She turned on the flash light on her phone which offered just a minor glimpse into the darkness that surrounded her, but still did not provide her nearly enough light to see if someone was really there or not.

She held her breath to quiet the sound of her breathing so that the silence was now deafening in her ears. She heard nothing. There was no one there.

She turned around and started walking again, this time faster trying to check her signal furiously. Oh, why wouldn’t she get a signal? Was it too much to ask for to just have a small little break once in a while?

The sound again.

She spun around so fast that she almost lost her balance. Every sound around her was being amplified right now and she didn’t know what sound was what. It all sounded normal and it all sounded suspicious, but her breathing was drowning it all out. She tried to stop her breathing, but her gasps came in quick succession roaring in her head.

She knew that someone had to be there. She was going to be murdered right then and there. She was sure of it. It was just a gut instinct that she had. There had never come a time when she was as frightened as she was right at that moment. Every bead of sweat rolling off her body felt like a dagger digging into her flesh and every thump of her heart beat sounded like the nails of her coffin being pounded into the pine box she was lying in. The imagery would not stop.

She reached into her pocket and pulled out her small can of pepper spray. Her stepfather had given it to her in case she ever needed protection, like she did now. It was probably because he felt guilty about buying her a car that was going to break down on her every other day and put her life in danger.

She pumped her legs as hard as she could hoping that she would come to a house or a business where she could go inside, and at least some sort of land line phone service that she could use to call for help. There was nothing out here. She hated this drive during the day and she despised it at night.

Suddenly she heard a loud grunt and she spun around with her pepper spray raised up high. She fired hard into the darkness, but heard nothing but the sound of the spray rolling through the air.

There was no one there.

A hand grabbed her mouth and as she tried to spin around the figure held her still as she moved the pepper spray up to spray back at them. They quickly grabbed her hand and jerked it from her puny grasp. She could see who was attacking her now. It was a tall, powerfully built man, dressed in black from head to toe. He wore a black mask over his face and head. Only his eyes were uncovered and it was too dark to see them clearly.

The man jerked her off the road into the woods several feet where he instantly twisted her head and neck hard to the right and suddenly she was being sprayed non-stop with the pepper spray in her face and eyes. The pain was unimaginable. She tried to choke but she was unable to cough and her eyes felt like they were going to explode.

Her whole body tried to heave as the vomit began pouring out of her mouth adding to the choking issue she was having. The air was not getting to her and she felt her body begin to shut down. She flailed her body hard enough that he let go and she fell crashing to the ground. She tried to crawl and move away, but her body was done.

The last thing she remembered was the sound of the man whistling a happy tune.

*

“We got it!”

Michaels burst into the room and began to rally the troops.

John was awoken instantly from his pending nap. He jerked himself awake over the paperwork he had been pretending to work and wiped the drool off the top page. The Chief was in one hell of a good mood.

“What’s going on?” John asked.

“We got him! The DNA came back with a match—Steven Rich!”

The entire stations collective jaw dropped on the floor. He couldn’t believe it. That was the first person he talked to after Theresa’s murder. He was much too young to be the Valley Ripper.

“Chief? How can that be? The Ripper has to be at least fifty years old.”

“The DNA does not lie. We matched that DNA to the crime scene of the last victim, Natalie Walker.”