Consumed

Daylight poured in through a hole in a wall of what Richard Kirkwood called “the old house”—a home built in the late eighteen hundreds. The big white house, along with what remained of its red roof, should have been leveled decades prior. A few windows remained, most of the floors of the upper levels weren’t safe to set foot upon, and the foundation had sunk on one side, causing the house to lean toward the south—the new house, which was much smaller, unkempt, and still the better part of twenty years old, stood a thousand feet away on Richard’s property.

Richard Kirkwood, a giant of a man, stood in the living room of the old house, where with each footstep or shift of his three-hundred-plus-pound weight, the floorboards beneath his feet creaked in protest. He’d fashioned himself a table from one of the home’s doors and a pair of sawhorses—blood ran from the makeshift table’s edges and pooled at his feet. Richard looked down and noticed the blood running through gaps in the floorboards to the old basement below.

“Let us out!” he heard from beneath him.

Richard didn’t respond.

The sound of other voices joined in, requesting to be freed.

Richard stamped his foot, his heel cracking the old wooden floor beneath his boot. “Shut up!” he yelled. He went to his hands and knees and stared down through the cracks into the darkness of the basement.

The voices stopped.

“That’s what I thought,” he said.

Richard stood and returned to the task at hand. He pushed the wood saw’s blade forward and pulled it back, the blade’s teeth digging into the wood beneath what he was cutting. The saw had made its way through. He picked up each piece of the quartered leg he’d just sawed through and dropped them into a white five-gallon pail at the edge of his makeshift table. Richard removed his blood-soaked leather work gloves and ran a hand through his long, dirty gray-and-black beard. Then he brushed some of his shoulder-length hair, the same color, from his face. He lifted the pail by its handle and left through the open front doorway of the house. Richard walked across the half-collapsed front patio and made his way toward the new house down the car path—a set of two tire tracks that had caused depressions in the field. He passed the rusted remains of a tow truck and a sedan that once belonged to a family member years past. Miscellaneous agricultural equipment, all the better part of a hundred years old and all in ruins, scattered the property. In the distance, he could see what used to be one of the family barns, just a pile of faded red wood. His family’s once-productive tobacco fields hadn’t sprouted a leaf in eighty years.

Richard pulled the screen door open and entered the new house. The aluminum door, on a spring at the top, slammed closed at his back. A cat sitting on a box of car parts scurried from the sound.

“What did I tell you about letting the damn door slam!” he heard.

Richard said nothing.

He walked through the cleared path of junk in the kitchen and tossed the pail up on the kitchen counter. Then he went to the old refrigerator and began pulling vegetables from inside. He set his carrots, celery, and potatoes on the counter next to the pail.

“What are you doing up there?” he heard the woman ask from the basement.

Richard closed his eyes. “None of your damn business!” he shouted.

“Tell me. Are you being stupid?”

Richard clenched his jaw, took five quick strides to the basement door and yanked the door open. “Leave me the hell alone, I’m cooking!”

“What are you cooking?”

“Supper,” Richard said.

“Don’t use too much salt.”

“Leave me alone!” Richard shouted.

“Don’t forget the broth.”

“Shut up!” Richard yelled.

“I don’t like your cooking, Richie.” The woman’s voice was snappy and shrill.

Richard’s feet pounded the stairs down to the basement. He spun around the corner and yanked a hunting knife from a sheath on his hip. “You’ve been bugging the shit out of me all week long. Like a little gnat around my ear. I can’t take it for another second. One more word, and I’ll gut you where you stand.”

The woman didn’t respond.

Richard turned his back and started for the stairs.

“You’re going to get caught, stupid,” he heard. “Remember what happened to your father?”

Richard’s nostrils flared. He spun back and advanced on the woman. He sank the knife into her stomach repeatedly. “You couldn’t just shut up, could you?” He ripped the blade up and down, feeling her warm blood on his hands. The knife’s handle became slick in his grasp.

The sound of the woman’s laughter echoed in his head.

Richard squinted hard and then opened his eyes. He was still standing at the kitchen counter. He looked at his hands—no blood, at least not from his mother. The hunting knife that was normally on his hip was stuck into the kitchen counter. He rocked the blade back and forth to remove it and used it to cut the vegetables.

Richard went to the cupboard beside the stove and found himself a large pot. He filled the pot with water, placed it on the stove, and lit the burner. After bringing the flame up to high, he left the water to heat. He glanced at the cat clock on the wall, the eyes and tail moving in opposite directions with each passing second. He would let the soup simmer for four hours, then he’d have to leave to find himself another woman.

Richard gathered everything that would go into the pot and dumped it in.

“Make sure you wash that girl’s meat real good before you cook her,” said the woman’s voice from the basement.

“Shut up, Mom. I know what I’m doing!”

Beth and I hadn’t been hot at the office since we’d wrapped with Brett Bailor two months prior. As our investigation into him expanded, we realized that he was in fact the same person we had two additional open serial-killer cases on. His face had been all over the national news. Apparently, the owner of one of the best-known websites in the United States moonlighting as a serial killer brought in the ratings. We’d successfully identified all of his fifty-some victims, aside from a few. Those investigations on the unknowns would remain open on the chance that we would receive additional information, but we were done actively investigating him.

Scott and Bill had gone hot earlier in the week and left to conduct an investigation in Louisiana. A small-town sheriff had three people found strangled in their homes inside of a few weeks and had reported the killings to the local FBI. The method of strangulation, a homemade electrical-wire garrote, matched up with an open investigation Bill had been on two years prior in Mississippi. The word, which had trickled through from Agent Ball, was they were making progress and had been interviewing potential suspects.

I glanced down at the time on my watch—inching up on five o’clock. I spent my workday just as I had the last few weeks, sitting at my desk, researching cold investigations, and seeing if I could bring anything new to life. While the work could get a little tedious and boring, it allowed me to be home every night at a predictable time, which was nice.

“What time are you taking off?” Beth asked.

I turned in my chair and faced her. Beth had her dark hair pulled back in a bun with a pencil stuck in it. Dark-rimmed glasses wrapped her eyes—something she’d been wearing for the past few days—waiting on her contacts to be delivered, she’d said. I’d called her a librarian a number of times. She wore a white long-sleeved button-up shirt and a black knee-length skirt. “Maybe an hour or so. You?” I asked.

“Probably fairly soon. I was going to go catch a movie.”

“Solo?” I asked.

Beth shook her head.

“New beau, Agent Harper? You didn’t mention you’d been dating. Meet him at your library?”

“Yeah, yeah, ha ha. It’s not serious with this guy or anything. I’ve only gone out with him a few times. He seems nice, though. He works in a bank not too far from where I live, actually.”

“Is that how you met him?” I asked.

Beth squinted and made a face as though she was bracing for something. “No. I, um, met him online.”

“Online?” I asked. “Ooh, be careful. You know what happened last time you were alone with a guy from the personals section.”

“Yeah, yeah, whatever. He’s nice and certainly not a serial killer, as far as I can tell.”

“Wear your gun,” I said.

Beth smirked. “What are you and Karen doing tonight?”

I shrugged. “Probably binge watching some awful television series that I have no interest in would be my guess. She recently got us a subscription to one of those Internet TV deals that have full seasons of everything. Apparently, that means that we have to sit through a whole season at a time. The last night or two has been some new zombie series. It’s okay, but I don’t pay that much attention. I mostly just surf the Internet on my tablet. After that, I’d guess Karen will want to start packing.”

“Heading somewhere?” Beth asked.

“As long as nothing comes up within the next day or so, we’re going to try to head to Tampa after work Friday and come back Sunday night.”

“Weekend getaway?”

I rocked my head back and forth. “Kind of. My old partner Kane just had a baby—well, technically his fiancée did. They asked Karen and me to be the godparents, so we were going to go down and have a little thing there on Saturday out at their place.”

“That’s awesome. What did they have? Boy or girl?”

“Boy, named John.”

The sound of knuckles against a wall caught my attention. Our supervisor, Agent Ball was leaning around the edge of the conference room, looking at Beth and me. “Meeting room,” Ball said.

Beth and I stood and headed over to the meeting room. On the center of the table were three files. Beth and I sat while Ball closed the door.

“Hope you two don’t have plans for the weekend,” Ball said.

“Shit,” I mumbled.

“Say something, Rawlings?” Ball asked.

“Huh?” I asked. “No, I didn’t say anything. Just clearing my throat.”

“Right.” Ball grabbed the two top folders and slid them to Beth and me.

I opened the folder and caught the cover page. It read, “SK28”. I’d learned the numbers after SK, which stood for
serial killer
, were in reference to when the file had been created. The smaller the number, the older the investigation. The latest ones were deep in the four hundreds. The number twenty-eight meant the file was old.

“Twenty-eight?” I asked.

“There’s a chance it could be a copycat,” he said. “Yet we can’t be certain. The original investigation is from the early eighties. The thirty or so years is still within the realm of a long hiatus or being active without our knowledge.”

“Sure.” I flipped past the cover sheet and was met with photographs. I rolled my head back and looked away. “What in the hell am I looking at here?”

“Yeah,” Ball said. He paused. “I probably should have given you a heads-up on that. It’s not pretty.”

“Geez,” Beth said.