So Close the Hand of Death (11 page)

To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Subject: Washington, D.C.

Dear Troy,
It’s all cool. I’m in town. Getting close now, man.
44

T
raffic. Stuck in traffic. Always stuck in traffic. His daily commute was an hour each way; he’d taken a week off to play the game and was so excited not to have to deal with the mind-numbing lemming cars, stacked one on top of the other, crawling along. But here he was on the Beltway, late. Late was not good. The schedule was vital.

Shit, shit, shit. If he didn’t make this kill and report in on time, he’d be eliminated.

His leg started bouncing, making the car jerk forward. He managed to slam on the brake just before
ramming into the fender of the Infiniti G35 in front of him. Phew. That was close.

The angel shouted at him.
Don’t draw attention to yourself. You must be invisible. Invisible. Invisible. Invisible.

He hated this. He didn’t want to be invisible. He wanted to be splashy, huge. Famous. He wanted to have legions of fans, women who wanted to marry him, who sent him their stained underwear. He wanted to be the celebrity of death row. Jail wasn’t so bad. He’d done a few years in his early twenties and hadn’t thought it was that big a deal. Maximum-security might be a little different, but not much. Jail was jail, man, no matter where you slept and who tossed your salad. He was a good-looking guy, too—the beard made him look like Seth Rogen. The jail bunnies wouldn’t be able to keep their eyes off him.

Death row was where it was at. They never really killed people off, not regularly, and not quickly, either. The death row inmates spent twenty, thirty, hell, forty years in play, never having to work, commute, deal with traffic. They had computers and books, three squares a day, time outside to exercise. It was fucking cushy, that was what it was. He wanted in. No more dealing with others if he didn’t want to—he could just do something egregious and sit it out in solitary. Yes, this sounded perfect to him. An escape. He didn’t care if he ever got out. And losing his life, well, it would be worth it.

You’d be dead, homey. And what would happen to me, huh? Where am I supposed to go if you get yourself electrocuted?

Shut up, shut up, shut up, shut up.

If he stuck to the plan, to the letter of the law that had been handed down, he could have that freedom. He
could go on a spree, the spree to end all sprees, the one that would live in infamy. He’d gun them all down—the entire fourth floor of the building would lie in their own blood and sick. But he wouldn’t cop out by taking his own life, no, no. He would lean into his lawyer at sentencing and laugh at the judge, show no remorse at his trial. He’d be the biggest sensation they’d ever seen.

That’s better
.
Go to the crazy house. Tell them you’ve got a head full of crazy. They let you smoke, and fuck in there. Pills galore. The orderlies, you know what I mean? You catch my drift, brother?

Yes, all right. I get it.

The dashboard clock read 8:40 p.m. He rolled down the window, lit an American Spirit. Blew smoke into the chilly fog outside his car. He had to be at the landing by ten if he was going to catch them. Traffic began to move, sluggish at first, then picking up speed. Divine intervention.

He took the exit for the George Washington Parkway, paying close attention now. The park was after downtown, he knew that because of the map. The cars all came with navigation now—that was so cool. Even so, he sometimes got distracted—
bullshit, you just a crazy fucker
—and he didn’t want to miss the turn. Even in daylight, assignations were made in the park. But it was totally dark in there now, and he’d have his pick of paths to follow.

He fingered the suppressor, feeling the rough edges where he’d filed it down to fit his gun. This was the fun part. He loved the few moments before he went in for the kill. Wiping the abnormal bastards off the face of the earth was a pleasure; he was more than happy when he was assigned that subsection of the list. More than happy. It didn’t matter that he had a few latent
tendencies himself, that he fantasized late at night about the center of another man.

You’re not a homo, man. Don’t worry. Would I let you be a homo? Homey ain’t no homo.

The angel started to laugh, holding his belly, rolling back so far that he tipped right off his shoulder. He felt him crawling around his back, trying to get his footing. He leaned back in the seat and tried to smush him, ignored the squeaks.

Fucker.

No one needed to know about his…his…proclivities. That was his secret, one he even kept from the angel, who was climbing back onto his shoulder, mildly out of breath.

Ain’t no secrets from me, homey. I know what a trick you are.

Shut. Up!

When he went to jail, where it was expected, then he could indulge. In the meantime, he’d annihilate the abnormal ones who flaunted their desires.

The entrance to the park was on his right. He swerved into the parking lot. Licked his lips. The angel hung on to his ear for balance, and they both smiled. This was getting good. This was getting really good.

C
olleen Keck was nearing her breaking point. Flynn was finally asleep. The boy had sensed something was wrong with his mother and insisted on clinging stubbornly to her neck like a limpet all night. She’d had a bitch of a time getting him down, too. He’d wanted to be held. Not be read to from his favorite book, not watch TV, not even have me time. Every time she loosened her hold on him, he began to wail. In the end, she’d left him crying into his pillow, stomach thick with guilt. She asked Tommy’s ghost to watch over Flynn, to comfort him if possible. It must have worked—he’d finally drifted off a little past ten.

In between Flynn’s crying jags, she’d been fielding calls all evening about the possible sad resolution to the Peter Schechter case. The phone started ringing around 8:00 p.m., a source of hers with Metro who she could always count on to spill the beans. There was a submerged body out in Percy Priest Lake, and the initial description matched the Schechter boy: white, young, dark hair. No one wanted to jump to conclusions, of course, but logic dictated it could possibly be him.
There weren’t too many active missing persons cases in the region that met the criteria at the moment.

She had such a hard time with the cases that involved children. Since that was so much of her daily workload, she always felt on edge, but tonight it was worse. The Schechter boy, the Zodiac letter, the reports she’d gotten from her contacts in Boston and New York, all seemed to indicate that copycats of the Zodiac, Son of Sam and the Boston Strangler were back on the scene. So much death, so splashy and forward. These killings were guaranteed coverage. She’d been posting her speculations all day, now all the major media outlets had it. She’d gotten the scoop first, of course, but they were running truncated versions of it now. They published updates every fifteen minutes with no new information, creating a panic. And their reporters and producers claimed the story was their scoop. First on the scene. Typical.

How often do three murders happen on the same night that imitate famous serial killers? Insult to injury, she hadn’t even been mentioned for breaking the story. She should send a note to the producers, let them know she’d been first. She needed the media exposure, it would increase the traffic to the site, which meant more money in her coffers. A story like this could generate some serious cash.

She wondered for a minute if Peter Schechter could be a part of the copycat murders, then shook her head. Her imagination was running away with her. She didn’t get the sense that he was a part of this insanity. The only major serial killer Nashville had ever had was the Snow White, and he didn’t kill boys. No, Schechter was probably a leftover from the Halloween massacre. That made much more sense.

The only thing she knew was to report the truth as it came in. So that was what she was doing. Her headline said it all.

Has Pete Schechter Been Found?

She linked to all the stories she’d done on the case, four in all. She wrote a short bit of copy, expressing sorrow for the family, emphasized that there would be more tomorrow and posted it. Her day was complete.

She poured a glass of wine, moved her laptop computer to the living room. Her work email was under control, not totally empty, but manageable. Her personal email inbox had a zero count. That wasn’t unusual. Her friends had been Tommy’s friends, and after he died, after the initial outpouring of grief and sadness, she’d slowly fallen off people’s radars. Part of it was by design. She liked the isolation, it helped her work the Felon E persona with minimal distractions. But the rest was “out of sight, out of mind.” Survivor’s guilt only lasted so long before people went back to their own busy lives.

The past was meant to be forgotten.

There were still one or two wives who would send her a note every once in a while, trying to include her in recipe exchanges and the like. She just wasn’t interested in those things anymore. Being a part of a family was very different than being the sole head of a family, especially one reduced to the remaining survivors. If you could call them that. No matter what they said, she couldn’t shake the feeling that people dealt with her out of guilt rather than a true desire for friendship. It was tiring.

She took a sip of wine. Alone was better. Alone was safe. Alone was…lonely. The blog kept her sane, at least.

Colleen’s normal habit at night, before unwinding in front of the television and heading to bed to sort of sleep, was to run through the comments on the previous day’s posts. She knew how important habit was, how far behind she could get after missing just a couple of days, so she took another sip of wine, opened her content management system and started. If they were all counted, across the multiple daily postings, she garnered thousands of comments a day from hundreds of unique individuals. Sometimes more, if a conversation started in the comments, which happened most days.

Yesterday’s posts contained nothing unusual. She read through them looking for trolls, but all seemed in order. As she was about to exit the program, she noticed that the comment count on the first Zodiac post from this morning was exponentially high, so, yawning, she went ahead and opened it, just for kicks. She usually liked to wait a full twenty-four hours before checking comments, giving people from all times zones a chance to get into the fray, but there were already seven hundred entries. She clicked the link and glanced through them.

One leaped out at her immediately.

I know who you are.

She felt her heart begin to race. She set the computer down, and got up to check the doors and windows. They were all locked up, just the way she left them. She was being silly. There were plenty of freaking whack jobs
out there online, always taking a chance to poke at her. She couldn’t help herself, she was totally creeped out.

Just to be extra safe, she reset the alarm system, this time on the highest security setting she had, the one that would send a silent alarm to the police station the second someone even touched her door or window. She secured the drapes, checked on Flynn, who’d finally tired himself out and was sound asleep, breathing deeply, his little chest rhythmically rising and falling. Her heart filled with love and dread watching him, so innocent, so pure. She closed his door almost all the way, leaving a crack so she could hear him if he cried out in the night, then went back to the laptop.

I know who you are.

She started scrolling through the messages, fear choking her. There must have been a hundred entries, all with those five words. All left anonymously, between half past noon and 1:30 p.m. today.

She opened her web stats and looked up the IP address associated with the comments. Nashville, Tennessee.

A few more clicks showed her it had come from a private server at a temporary internet hot spot, but that was as far as she could get.

She chewed on her thumb, teeth catching on a hangnail. She worried it until the skin tore away, leaving a fresh bloom of red blood across the bed of her nail. She sucked on the cut until the pain forced her to stop. She’d received threats before, but they’d always been silly, empty, designed to piss her off more than anything else. Always diatribes, rants against her and her
purpose. Sometimes family who hated what she was doing, or an irate fan. But nothing like this. For some reason, this felt real.

She checked the other posts she’d done today. It was there. On every post, the same five words, so seemingly innocuous, that made sweat break out on her neck and her flesh crawl.

I know who you are.

No one knew she was Felon E. No one. She’d been so careful to protect her identity. She’d even started completely separate mail and phone systems for contacts that were meant for the blog. The cell was disposable, only charged when she used it, which was never, and the P.O. Box was registered under a completely different name. Nothing that could be traced back to her, Colleen Keck. Neither the phone company nor the post office had the capability to put two and two together. The only way was if someone followed her to the post office and caught her checking the Felon E mailbox, then followed her home.

Unless there was someone in her system checking her phone bills against her IP address. That was a true long shot; she routed through multiple servers so she wasn’t easily traced back and created new IP addresses every time she logged in. She clicked a few keys and engaged a search, was relieved to see that wasn’t the case. No one had been in her system. There were no tracks.

So why did she get the feeling that this crackpot wasn’t lying?

I know who you are.

She started looking frantically through the rest of the comments, and found something even more disturbing.

A short exchange, buried in the middle of the mess, from one of her regulars, @texasmassacre. It read:

“Hey, did you hear about @kittycrime and @chaosmaster? They got themselves shot out in San Francisco.”

The responses varied from horror to smug nastiness. Colleen felt the fear tear at her stomach, a gnawing, aching terror. She checked the forum, saw the conversations going on about the two regular commenters who’d been gunned down last night. She fished through the forum’s registration information until she found their real names: @chaosmaster was Ike Sharp and @kittycrime was named Vivi Waters.

She didn’t have to check her notes. She knew the names. They matched the names of the victims in this morning’s Zodiac killing in San Francisco.

I know who you are.

Colleen didn’t know whether to panic or stay calm, but two words escaped her lips with utter sincerity. “Oh, shit.”

She couldn’t keep this to herself anymore. She needed to go public. Not on the blog, not speculation and reporting. She needed to go to the cops.