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We arrived at the address to find Olathe police had set up at a distance and were trying to discreetly watch the house. We were informed neighbors had heard screaming earlier. One of them had looked out to see a man in his thirties or forties of medium height and build, with brown hair starting to grey, forcing his way into the neighbor’s house. There was a truck in the driveway with Oregon plates. The police had pulled up information on the woman who lived in the house. She was a pretty woman in her twenties, a little heavy set. I had a sinking feeling in my stomach. We had Gabriel, Xavier, Fiona and me. Xavier had a bleeding disorder, and I had a cast on my dominant hand and a small part of my skull exposed if the gauze was removed in a fight.
Gabriel nodded to me. We’d set up at the end of the street.
“Well?” Gabriel asked.
“My gut says the Oregon Slicer is inside that house,” I said. “We have no choice but to go in and get him.”
“It’s his preferred victim type, Oregon plates in the driveway, and we’ve found a victim we suspect is his in the metro area, so while this is out of character, we already suspected his presence,” Xavier said.
“Yeah, fuck. I’d feel better if our door-kicker didn’t have bandages wrapped around her head,” Gabriel said. I grabbed a stocking cap with the US Marshals Badge embroidered on it and pulled it down on my head. Then I put on my helmet. Normally, Lucas and I went in first to any serial killer hidey-hole.
“This isn’t his normal lair, so he’ll be ill-prepared for us to make entrance,” I said.
“He’ll be expecting hostage negotiation,” Fiona said.
“He’s requested one already,” an officer told us.
“Is she friendly with any of her neighbors who might be able to give us the layout of the house?” Gabriel asked.
“I think so,” the officer replied, and gave Gabriel a cell phone. Gabriel began talking to whoever was on the other end.
“It’s the woman that called it in,” The officer told us. “She referred to it as her friend’s house, not her neighbor’s house.” It was a good catch, and I nodded sagely to the officer. One of the things I’d learned in the investigator classes I’d taken over the last year was that police were trained not just in how something was said, but the exact nature of what was said. The difference between neighbor and friend was huge. Gabriel was my neighbor; he was also my friend and my immediate supervisor. If I had to describe him in an emergency, though, I’d refer to him as my friend. Gabriel was drawing in his notebook as he talked to the woman on the phone. Then he put an X in one room. I stared at the X wondering if it meant that the woman could see where the hostage was being held or if it was for something else.
“The woman was able to give me the layout. There’s three cats and a small dog inside, along with the perpetrator and the victim. The woman says she can see into the living room and they aren’t in there. But the house has a basement,” Gabriel said. “Thoughts on how we should go in?”
“I have two. First, we set up a diversion. Have Olathe PD come in with lights and sirens, but have them go to a different house, two doors down or maybe three, on the opposite side of the street. Have them beat on the door and enter. Make a big show of it. He will probably come upstairs to see what’s going on. I’ll go in through the back door. Gabriel, find a basement window to enter through; break it if need be. Fiona can go with Gabriel. I’ll leave Xavier out here and use a PD officer with Kevlar to come with me,” I said. “If it’s the Oregon Slicer, he’s going to be armed. Most likely with knives.”
“The woman said he had a gun,” Gabriel said.
“Well, that’s good in the sense that he’s less dangerous,” I said. Statistically speaking, people were more likely to die by being stabbed than by being shot. Also, people who used guns expected the guns to cause enough intimidation, that they wouldn’t need to carry through with their threats and the same was not true of people being held at knife point. I also didn’t point out the Slicer had never been known to have a gun in previous abductions. But then he was usually abducting people in an area he knew well, and that would make a huge difference. I was guessing he was doing it this way to have time to kill the victim his way. He may not have expected a bunch of people to be home, given it was a Friday morning. He’d almost identically taken his killing method and victim profile out of a book. At home he held them for a few days, giving them water, but starving them. Then he broke their necks and took off patches of skin. We didn’t know what he was doing with the skin.
“The information on the plates has come back. They are registered to a woman named Jessica Morten, who moved here last year to attend the University of Missouri medical school,” The officer told us.
“My confidence that this is the Slicer just dropped exponentially,” I said in response.
“Yeah, mine too,” Fiona said. “However, I still think it’s a solid plan and we should go with it.”
“Me too,” Gabriel said. It took another several minutes to get the Olathe PD ready and find an officer to go with me. He and Xavier were about the same size and we outfitted him in Xavier’s extra kit, including his Kevlar carbon steel helmet. His name was Brad Madison, and he’d qualified for Olathe SWAT before the individual SWAT teams in the area were replaced by a Metro SWAT unit. Unfortunately, Metro SWAT had so many officers already coming from the individual precincts that he hadn’t earned a spot.
According to the drawing Gabriel had completed, the basement door was almost immediately across from the back door, a design I found strange, looking at the piece of paper. Brad Madison and I huddled together over the rough sketch and planned; we would enter through the back door, he would head downstairs to the basement, and I would go through the kitchen to find the suspect, who I hoped would be looking out a front window at the spectacle up the street. At this point, I considered adding a third and fourth person to our entry team, because it would be safer for each of us if we had backup with us immediately, but it could also mean more people in the line of fire if our killer really did have a gun. Armed serial killers usually meant a battle would ensue; rarely did they see us and decide to surrender without a fight. I handed Madison one of our specially designed Tasers; we were still trying to limit the number of dead serial killers we took into custody, and the Tasers were effective in helping keep our body count down.
I had begun lumping captures into three categories: easy, the kind where they surrender, which was the rarest; unfortunate, where they usually shot or stabbed one of us before we could secure them; and exceptionally complicated, which usually meant we killed them to protect ourselves or someone else. I suspected the Oregon Slicer would fall into the unfortunate category, and warned Madison. My predictions on the type of capture were correct about half the time, usually because serial killers I didn’t expect to put up much resistance ended up trying to kill us. If I was incorrect about this prediction, it would go from unfortunate to exceptionally complicated.
Madison and I got into position in the back yard by using a neighbor’s yard to scale the privacy fence. We then scooted across the yard to the back door, crouching and taking up positions on either side. Once we were ready, I sent the go order to Gabriel and we waited.
It took only a few seconds for the patrol cars to get their sirens turned on and for us to hear them coming closer. We’d set them up in a convenience store a few blocks away to reduce suspicion. People could tell where a siren was coming from and going to most of the time, and it would be weird for the sirens to start on this street or the next and only come a block or less to their destination.
It took less than thirty seconds for the Olathe PD to arrive and begin knocking with force on the assigned door. From the other side of the back door, we heard movement, but no gunshots, which I found mildly encouraging. I’d only been about twenty percent sure the plan would lure the assailant out of the basement, if that’s where he was with his hostage. Madison popped the snap on his holstered gun and Taser. I was holding my baton and considered unsnapping the securing straps on my shoulder holsters, but the truth was, if I did I would be more likely to use the guns, and I really wanted to take this one alive and find out more information about the other competitors, and dead men tell no tales.
Madison touched the doorknob and it turned easily in his hand, which seemed like a lucky break. Who took a hostage and didn’t lock all the doors? Serial killers often overlooked details like locking doors and closing curtains, their focus was completely absorbed by the chase and capture. If this door had been unlocked when he first arrived, it was probable he would have come in through that door and not forced his way in the front with a gun. I scanned the yard. There was a small shed painted to match the house, a paved patio area with table, chair, and barbecue grill, and a long row of wooden boxes set a couple feet off the ground. Four tomato cages and two trellises stood empty within the planters and there were a few green plants in the box closest to the house. I imagined they were fall vegetables of some sort, although I didn’t garden and couldn’t name any vegetables that grew in the fall besides wheat and pumpkins, neither of which were technically vegetables. I was fairly sure by definition a gourd was a fruit and not a vegetable, and wheat was a grain, making it also not a vegetable. However, the plant looked too small to be a pumpkin and it definitely wasn’t winter wheat, leaving me clueless what she might be growing in it at the end of September.
I turned my attention back to the shed; it didn’t have a lock on the door, just a bolting slide latch, which was thrown, securing it. Why was the back door unlocked? The privacy fence was actually not that great, standing only four feet tall, allowing even me to see over it and into the neighbors’ yards. I suspected this was done for economy purposes, as privacy fence panels got expensive quickly. I knew because my yard had cost a bundle to secure for Badger with a seven-foot-tall privacy fence, and if she’d bought the panels at four feet or created them herself, it would have been significantly cheaper for lumber because she could have gotten three slats or more out of a twelve-foot board. Being shorter than normal had made it easier to scale, therefore, I was certain our killer would have come over the fence and tried the door before forcing his way into the house using the front door, where everyone could see him. I stopped Madison from opening the door and motioned to the shed.
Madison nodded and slunk over to check it out while I stood sentry at the side of the back door. He threw the bolt latch as quietly as possible, but the door squeaked as it opened. He gestured to me and went inside the shed. A moment later, the comm unit in my ear crackled and Madison said he had a deceased female in the shed that didn’t match the description of the homeowner.
That was unexpected, and I struggled to categorize the information as to whether it was helpful or not. I asked Madison if he could estimate how long she’d been dead; was it possible the homeowner was also a killer? Serial killers did occasionally stumble upon each other by accident. After a moment, he told me the body was still warm, proving she hadn’t been dead more than a few hours at most. Once we resolved the issue with the Oregon Slicer inside the house, we’d need to identify the body in the shed and find out when and how it got there.
I was still bothered by the unlocked back door—could it be a trap? Most serial killers were not that inventive, but there were exceptions, and I didn’t know enough about the Oregon Slicer to know if he was the creative type or not. His killing method was not particularly creative or even interesting, it was methodical and mechanical, and Lucas and I felt he was a man that worked with tools in his everyday life as opposed to doing office work or something else that did not require exceptional dexterity of the hands and fingers.
Madison made his way back to me and took up a position. Hopefully, if the door was a trap, we’d survive it. This time I turned the knob and opened the door. I did not immediately shout my name and affiliation, which was standard practice; if he had remained downstairs with the hostage, I didn’t want him alerted to our presence. Madison came in and opened the door to the basement, which didn’t look as weird as I had expected. The back door opened into a small, neat kitchen painted in yellows and pinks; it made me feel ill just looking at it. There is something about the color yellow that I hate so much it’s a physical repulsion. I particularly despised yellow kitchens, for some reason. Madison disappeared from view, and I could hear muffled sobbing from below. I continued on through the kitchen to the only other door in the room. The kitchen was neat, but older, and I realized the nauseating yellow and pink was wallpaper, which made it worse because it meant there was enough call for these colors that at some point someone had made a bundle of money off it in the form of a sought-after pattern and there were hundreds of houses with the yellow and pink color scheme.
The door leading out of the kitchen didn’t have a knob. I observed the hinges and noticed it was a swinging door that would open either direction; into the kitchen or into the room on the other side of it, which according to Gabriel’s drawing was a living room.
I flattened myself against the opposite wall and gave the door a small push. It squeaked. Not as loudly as the shed door, but this homeowner would have benefited from a can of WD-40. A small dog wearing duct tape around its mouth ran into the room. I thought it might be a sheltie mix because it looked like a miniature collie with a stocky body similar to a bulldog.
The duct tape prevented it from barking, and it sniffed at me and rubbed against my pant leg. I tried to quietly shoo the dog, but it was determined to stay with me. I checked to ensure the baton was fully extended. If Madison had found the bad guy in the basement, he would have given a shout. Since he didn’t, I was guessing the bad guy was in another room, and I set out to find him. I looked down at the dog and shook my head. It was one thing to kill people, but duct taping a dog’s mouth shut was just ridiculously cruel, especially a dog that seemed to be as excited about people as this one was, as it continued to rub itself against my leg. The duct tape would need to be removed by a vet, but I wasn’t sure how well the dog could breathe. I made a decision and reached down, grabbing the dog and picking it up. It gave a small whine, I put my baton on my belt and pulled a small knife from the sheathe on my wrist and cut the sides of the tape, allowing the dog to open its mouth. It snuggled into my chest at that point and I put it down to run and bark at will. It barked twice; it was surprisingly loud for such a small dog. It brought footsteps toward the direction of the door, and I sheathed the knife and grabbed the baton again. Then I got ready; as soon as he came through the door to check on the dog, I was going to go on the offensive. The dog heard the footsteps and ran around to hide behind the table. I took a heartbeat to hope the man was not as tall as my coworkers. The baton was amazing, but if I didn’t want to kill him with it, gut hits were better and if he turned out to be tall, my preparatory stance might cause me to miss his gut and there would be a fight.
The dog was now growling at the door. I said nothing to it as the door began to swing inward. I swung as he stepped from behind it. He was tall, not Malachi tall, but taller than Xavier and Gabriel, and my attempt to hit him in the gut missed as the baton smashed across his waist, the tip whistling through the air before slamming into his hip. There was a loud cracking sound, and the man screamed in pure agony before collapsing to the ground.
“US Marshals, SCTU.” I said to him, letting the baton rest at my side. He didn’t move, but lay on the floor curled into a fetal position and made whimpering noises.
“Cain, you good!” Madison shouted up from the basement.
“Yes, do you have the homeowner?” I asked.
“Yes, she’s alive.”
“I’ll clear the rest of the house,” I said. I grabbed the man and rolled him over, causing him to scream and curse at me. My baton is carbon steel with a weighted tip and left serious bruises, but I had to wonder if I had perhaps cracked his femur or maybe his hip socket based on his screaming. It had broken many bones in the past, but I hadn’t considered it as possible because the hip and femur are the strongest bones in the body.
The rest of the house was just as neat and clean as the kitchen, and I found no one else inside. I came back to the kitchen to find my handcuffed suspect attempting to get off the floor. He’d wiggled over to the table and had a hand on a chair, trying to pull himself up.
“I wouldn’t do that, if I broke either your hip or femur, standing will make it much worse. If I only caused a hairline fracture, standing may cause a full break and you’ll just collapse back down on the floor again,” I told him. I hadn’t found a gun while handcuffing him, and as he gave up and let his hand fall back to the ground, I wondered where it had gone.
I shouted to Madison that it was clear and I was bringing in paramedics. He said they would come upstairs. I had my gun drawn when a woman came through the door. Her hands were bound with zip ties. Both eyes were black, her nose was swollen, blood had dried under it and both her upper and lower lips had been split open. Large spots of blood had dried on her shirt. She looked like she’d been beaten pretty good. Madison looked tense, but was treating her as if she were a victim.
“I found this in the basement,” Madison said, laying a revolver on the counter next to the fridge. “The woman in the shed is Miss Williams’ friend. She claims that man is her uncle.”
“Ah,” I said looking at the man. The front door burst open and I realized I’d forgotten to open it in my quick sweep of the place. Gabriel came in, followed by a couple of paramedics and animal control. Miss Williams looked dazed, and I sent the paramedics to her first. They sat her down at the kitchen table and began examining her as Gabriel and Xavier came in and took control of the suspect on the floor. “I might have broken his hip, I’m not sure,” I warned them as they tried to pull him to his feet. The man screamed and swore. One of the paramedics bent down to evaluate him.
“We’ve called for a special transport to the hospital. When they arrive, we’ll sedate him, and armed guards will escort him to the hospital,” Xavier said.
Eventually, we got everybody loaded up and headed to hospitals. Miss Williams was in shock as well as having been struck in the head, and needed to be checked out.
Xavier and Gabriel followed the homeowner to the hospital while Fiona and I returned to the office.