The Catcher in the Eye (America's Next Top Assistant Mystery Book 1) (20 page)

I’d managed to give
a flirtatious smile. “You really have to keep me alive, you know, otherwise you
can’t have all the fun we’ll have together.”  

“Kelly, you
totally impressed me, and I feel truly honored learning that you’re still open
for friendship and perhaps something more intimate.” said Alan. “But I need to
pluck out your eyeballs.”

I opened my mouth
but words didn’t come. I couldn’t believe he’s crushed my hope of extending my
life expectancy with just one sentence. What a killjoy.

“Please don’t chastise
me. Or, don’t take it too bad, Kelly.” He continued. “It’s nothing personal.”

“Excuse me?” I spat.
“
Nothing personal
? Are you crazy? You’re telling me not to take it bad
because it’s
nothing personal
that you’re about to pluck
my
eyeballs out of
my
eye sockets while I’m still alive and I happen to
need those eyeballs? And you tell me not to chastise you for killing all these
innocent women, because it’s nothing personal? That’s gross, disgusting,
outrageous and frigging unreasonable! Nothing personal, my ass. Are you fucking
insane?”

Boy, I was taking
it very personal.

“I said don’t
chastise me!” My capturer barked.

“Says you!” I snapped.
“You know what? You don’t get criticized for no reasons. I’m chastising you
because you deserve to be chastised. No,
chastise
is an understatement,
make it condemn. Here I am, condemning you. You are a disgusting, back-zapping,
eyeball-stealing nutcase!”

“A nutcase? That’s
demeaning, not to mention it’d be more politically correct if you said ‘mentally
unstable’ instead.” He said matter-of-factly. A little bit too
matter-of-factly, in fact. I was expecting he would show more emotion, such as
rage, but I couldn’t sense anything in his voice.

“So, you admit the
nutcase part?” I asked, trying my best to keep my voice cool and calm. I tried
my best to conceal that I was totally creeped out. According to this animal
trainer starring in Discovery Channel, it’s your best interest to keep your
confidence when dealing with animals.

Without saying a
word, my capturer smiled, spooking me out a big time. Emotion was completely
lacking in his voice. There was no sign of emotion even in his eyes. When you
get a harsh insult, it’s only natural to react with some anger, rage, or even
violence, but none of which was showing. He was giving me an empty, beady
stare. At this point, I recognized that his eyes were darker shade of hazel.

“You’re still
sporting the good old badass bitch attitude, just like the old days.” He whispered
to me. “I’m so excited.” Then I realized his eyes were shining.

“I don’t
understand,” I muttered. “What’s so good about that
I
am called a bitch?
First of all, you can’t go around calling every woman a bitch on the account it’s
rude. And on the second, on a rare occurrence that some woman was totally,
truly a bitch, still, she’s not all that useful for you. Unless…” I gulped, “You
have a special interest in bitches, for example, you like to poke the eyeballs
out of women that you discriminate as a bitch, and perhaps you eat her flesh.”

In my head, a scene
of my capturer devouring the flesh of his prey suddenly started rolling. I felt
really,
really
sick. (Actually, I puked a little in my mouth, but it’s
our dirty, stinky little secret, so don’t tell anyone. OK?)

“You know what?” I
continued talking through my sour and bitter and disgusting mouth. “Eating
human flesh is hazardous to your health. There’s this fatal neurodegenerative
disease called Kuru in Papua New Guinea. This disease is a transmissible
subacute spongiform encephalopathy and guess what? It’s transmitted by this
endocannibalistic funeral rituals that local people eat the brain of the
deceased.”

Thanks to hanging
around Michael Archangel, I got to learn big words like ‘neurodegenerative
diseases’ even though I wasn’t really getting what
I
was talking about.

“For your
information, I’m not planning to eat the eyeballs.” Alan shook his head. “If I
was an eyeball-eating pervert, then it doesn’t make sense that I’ve got so many
eyeballs with me at home. Besides that, I told you I’m not a pervert, didn’t I?”

“If that’s the
case, why are you snatching eyeballs from other people?”

“You don’t
understand. I hate this rude nickname Eyeball Snatcher. I’m not a petty thief,
and snatching eyeballs is not what I’m trying to do.” He let out a sigh. Then,
reached to the chef’s knife on the table. “Why don’t we get started? So much
chatter and no work so far, that’s not good, you know.”

I froze.

He took a step
toward me.

One small step for
the killer, one giant leap for Kelly’s life to vanish…

Can you say “screw-up”?

One step at a time, Alan a.k.a.
Eyeball Snatcher the serial killer advanced towards me.

With a butcher
knife in his hand and a blank expression on his face, he was coming straight to
me. Undoubtedly, he was determined to yank out my eyeballs any minute. I prayed
to God to cause a sudden lightening that striketh and killth him on the spot,
but no lightening struck. Maybe causing a lightening indoor, not outdoor, was
extremely difficult even for God’s standards. I was open to the prospect of
Alan dropping dead due to a sudden heart attack, aortic dissection, stroke, or
a sudden episode of narcolepsy…something, anything! But none of them had happened.

So I spoke up. “Wait
a minute!”  

Not that I had
much to say in my mind, but I spoke up anyway. My pursuit of becoming an
assistant extraordinaire to a detective had finally seemed to be paying off. According
to the mystery novels I’ve studied for my job, “Do whatever you can do to
distract the killer from killing you” was the rule #1 in dealing with killers. Personally,
I’m calling this tactic Operation Sheherazade.

“What?” He tilted
his head but stopped advancing.

At least, I did it
well on distracting-the-killer-from-killing part. The next step was distracting
the killer as long as possible.

I thought hard. Very
hard. In fact, much harder than the time I took the SAT.

“Tell me about
yourself,” was the best I had managed to utter.

One of his
eyebrows twitched, but he didn’t say anything. Obviously, my lameness had taken
him aback as much as it did myself.

“Why do you ask
about myself?”

“Because I don’t
want to be killed by some stranger for no plausible reasons.” I thought about
adding “especially, when I know you’ll pluck my eyeballs out,” but I didn’t say
that phrase. I was hoping that he’d forget about eyeball-plucking part.  

“Where are you
from? Tell me about your childhood memory,” I said. I was hoping that talking
about childhood may bring back his inner angel. Maybe I might be able to talk
him out of the horrible plan by reminding him of his loved ones. He might remember
having people who cared for him, those who loved him unconditionally under any circumstances.
Perhaps he’d hate to dishearten those people with his horrendous cruelty.

“Are you playing a
therapist or what?” Alan made a face, “Don’t tell me about going back to the
time when I was in the mother’s uterus. I don’t want to relive the rejection
anymore.”

“What makes you
think your mother rejected you?”

“Kelly, you ask
too many questions, don’t you?” he gave out a resigned sigh.

And he sat down
and placed the knife on the table.

Hell yes! It was a
really good sign.

He continued, “I’ll
tell you what. Actually, I don’t have much memory from my early childhood. I
remember moving from one house to another and having new ‘family’ each time. Also,
at that time, I didn’t know I was in a foster care program. The most memorable event
in my childhood is seeing this vivid, recurring nightmare where I was shivering
and suffocating in the coldness. In this dream, I struggle to breathe, I suck
in hard, though cold water is all that came into my mouth and nose. The next
thing, I find myself in a total darkness.”

“Sounds like a bad
dream. Can you think of anything that might have caused this recurring dream?”

“Oh yes, when I
was very little, I got drown. Except it was not a pool accident. Also, I was
3-minute old when that happened. The woman who conceived me had decided that
she didn’t want a child at that time. That happened when she was in the third
trimester of pregnancy and of course, it was too late to seek help from an
abortion doctor. So she tried to terminate the pregnancy a la DIY, by dipping
her pregnant self in icy cold water over and over in the middle of February in Albany,
New York. After expelling the fetus from her body, she had presumably repeated
dip-the-baby-in-cold-water process until she was convinced that I was dead.”

I recalled
Archangel mentioning it was odd that the killer dumped the body of Leonie
Ganong in the wilderness close to a little pond, but not in the pond. Submerging
the corpse in the water has its perks, such as making it way difficult to ID
the victim, for instance. Now that I heard about his birth, I could understand
the reason why he didn’t get close to the water.

“According to the
record, she visited the local ER carrying an unconscious, non-breathing,
hypothermic, bluish newborn with weak pulses. And she was carrying the baby in
a cleaning bucket made of cheap plastic, saying,
‘I guess it’s probably
dead, you can just get rid of it.’
The baby didn’t have anything on to
cover his body, not even a cloth, much less a blanket. She told the nurse that
she just had a miscarriage. When asked if it was intentional that she had a
‘miscarriage’, she shrugged saying
‘I dunno and it’s none of your business.’
In the meantime, the newborn was successfully resuscitated from the
catastrophic condition. The doctor who was treating her mild hypothermia asked
her if she was 100% sure she didn’t want to see the baby but she was firm
saying,
‘No, it’s none of my business, much less yours,’
and that was
it, she left the hospital totally refusing to see her own child.”

I was at a loss of
words.

“When I was young I
didn’t know the meaning of the recurring nightmare, or the fact that I was
actually drowned just after the birth. Anyway, I saw the nightmare over and
over and over… like I was living in that. I cried and shrieked maybe a couple
of times at first, but soon I learned to just suck in the feelings, lock it up
and act like nothing had happened. That didn’t stop me from living the
nightmare, but at least that saved me from getting spanked by some of foster
family members that got fed up with the troubled kid making a fuss in the
middle of night, each night. And getting spanked wasn’t the worst thing that
happened in foster homes. Before turning three, I was raped. And it was not
just once or twice.”

I gasped.

“Newsflash, huh? Foster
care program where adoptive agencies, facilitators, attorneys are involved, it’s
all about money. When I was five, the agency that had supposedly arranged my
custody got busted for fraud and deaths of kids in foster homes, and my case
was handled by a better agency. So I was placed in a very rich family who had
kindly adopted me. Then again, it was not happily ever after with some major
drawbacks. Say, the adoptive father had a thing for boys and only adopted boys,
and the boys had to accompany him in bath and in bed every night, taking turns.
Not to mention all the other boys were bigger and stronger than me and they
often abused the little, weak, naïve newbie. Again, shutting the feelings out strategy
helped me survive that.”

“And you survived,”
I muttered. A part of me wished he didn’t. It was mean to think of it that way,
but I couldn’t help it. Now I remembered one of my faux-dads (the orthopedic
surgeon) mentioning the trickiness of helping people’s lives as a doctor. So
it’s wonderful to save a dying person’s life, sometimes not save this person’s life
is the best interest for the better good. Gosh, he was right. If it was not for
the brilliant medical professionals at the hospital, Alan the Eyeball Snatcher
had been dead decades ago, which would have, ironically, helped the murder victims
live much longer, probably as healthy persons.

“Yeah. As much as I
was a survivor, I was a fast learner. In no time I learned to say the right
things and act just the right ways so that I can take control and get the most
of the situations.”

He said as if he
treasured the memory.

“As I grew up, I
got better and better. Fortunately, I’d managed to become the only stepson in
the household when I was thirteen.”

“What happened to
other boys?” I couldn’t help asking the question, but I wasn’t real sure if I
wanted to know the answer.

“Some died from unexplained
illnesses, some from freak accidents, and others just disappeared.”

“Did you, like—off
them?” I asked, a half of me wishing to just shut up and the rest of me driven
by this little monster called curiosity.

“Maybe, maybe not,”
he shrugged. “Who cares? Things happen.”

He continued, “When
I went to college, I was pretty wealthy. The step-parents passed away, they were
both killed in a freak golf cart accident in Florida. Again, things happen. As
the only heir, I had inherited their money.”

And I was positive
he had something to do with the freak accident.

“Kelly,” he said
abruptly. “Can you imagine how I felt back then?”

“Happy?” I said. “Blissful,
delighted, euphoric… maybe, victorious?”

“Wrong answers,”
he shook his head. “On the contrary, I felt miserable. Indeed, I felt much
worse than the hard times back in the old days. When I was struggling to
outsmart others and survive, I used to imagine the future of living happily
ever after. I believed I’d be happy if I could manage to get by all on my own,
but when my dream was finally realized I felt just empty. Maybe it was a post-victory
blues. After all, throughout all those years, I’d been in a fight-or-flight
state 24/7. When I was busy surviving, I often told myself I’ll be a happy person
without a care in the world if I could make it on my own. Even though I couldn’t
picture happiness, since I had no idea what happiness is all about. You can
imagine things or situation only based on your past experiences and feelings,
and you just can’t go beyond who you are. So, I was clueless.”

“Maybe, it might
have helped if you kept some of your family members alive.” I suggested. I had
my share of having dramatic stepsiblings, but in my case, as much as they gave
me headaches and tears, they provided me with moral support, entertainment and
friendship.  

Naturally, it had
never occurred to me to hate my stepsiblings, much less offing them. After all,
I knew in the deep down that every step-family things were just temporal
affairs. 

“Fortunately, the
college I enrolled was one of those hard partying schools, so I had access to
easy distractions.” He continued without acknowledging my remark. “I used
booze, drugs and sex, but none of which filled the emptiness. I got
self-destructive and took on playing stock market, which only worked just fine to
boost up my wealth. So I did everything somewhat successfully, but the feelings
of misery just got worse. I even went to therapy, it was so worthless. I quit
college, stopped partying, broke up with one girlfriend, then another, I ended
up alone.”

Even though his
story sounded like a hard-partying college dropout’s cliché, I knew he was no
ordinary freak. Still, I was happy to keep on listening to him. As far as he
was talking, I could keep my eyeballs attached to myself.

Unlike Mom, I’ve had
no experience or aspiration much less, for a career in the big screen, playing
the role of this poor girl who by the end of the movie gets slashed and axed (as
in literally,) splattering Mr. Yoshida’s Gourmet Sauce all over the camera lens.
Personally, I wanted to keep my gourmet sauce inside myself, where it belongs
to. Thank you very much.

So I nodded
encouragingly to show him I was listening.

“One day, I had a
bad cocktail of cocaine and some mysterious substance after binge drinking, I started
running around, laughing, shrieking and puking, then I lost consciousness and
dropped down on the sidewalk. The next thing I know, I was lying on a hospital
bed. An assistant nurse told me that technically, I had been dead for more than
a couple of minutes. Good Samaritan found me unmoving and unconscious on the
pavement and called 911, and when the ambulance came over, my heart had already
stopped beating and I was not breathing. According to this assistant nurse, the
paramedics had successfully resuscitated me at the scene but that doesn’t
happen all the times. And after being rushed to the hospital, I stayed
unconscious for three days.”

“That’s dramatic,”
I commented with an enthusiasm of an ex-cheerleader turned a perky reporter
covering the NFL.

“The event was
mind-blowing, seriously. The near death experience made me see the perspectives
of dying, and it also gave me a craving to learn about my living perspectives
as well. For the first time, I found myself desperately wanting to uncover my
background, my root, and the real history of me.”

He closed his eyes
and took a deep breath, as if going through a pain.

“So I found out
about my birth. It was an easy task, you know, especially since I used a
private investigator. In no time I got information such as the name of the
hospital where I was born, the description of my birth, and the name of the woman
who tried to kill me when I didn’t even exist in this world. Maybe I should
have let it go. After all, I survived as a rich guy. But I couldn’t let it go. I
had to find her, and I had to meet her…I needed to ask her why she had to try
to get rid of me. I got a report from the PI that she had gone out of the US
and moved to Paris, so I immediately took a flight to Paris and started looking
for her on my own, only to find out she had moved out of France years ago. So I
continued looking for her by myself, trailing after her footsteps for years. Maybe
I was a bit sentimental, but as much as I wanted to find her, I wanted to see
what she saw and feel what she felt on my own way. So I went from one place to
another in Europe—Paris, Nancy, Antwerp, and Amsterdam.”

He sighed. “Indeed,
it was a long way. Still, it was worth the time, money, and effort. By
following her trail, I got to meet the people who had known her and talked to
me about the times they had spent with her. So my expedition was not just a
wild goose chase; a preparation to see her by getting to know her life was more
like the word.”