In Preparation
Could it be covered up?
This is the question I asked myself as I stood over her lifeless body, my chest a heaving mess, her face the very same. I have done many things in the fifty-six years I have been alive. Things I am proud and ashamed of, and things I’m sure I can no longer recall. I have loved and lost, I have cried and laughed. There has been heartache and pain coupled with the death of a child and a disdain for the world we’re born to occupy. Happiness has been there too though, and joy, along with the security which comes from the middle holding strong. I have had an average life is what I’m getting to, no greater or worse than any other once you divide it down.
For twenty-five years I have held the same job and for five more I’d been married to the same woman who up until yesterday continued to share my bed. Her name was Martha—she who was my rock.
It was she who turned me; Martha who succeeded for more than twenty years at keeping the beast within me at bay. I was a serial killer, you see, or am, depending on how you choose to look at it. In all the years we shared a life she never knew of my extra-curricular activities. I want that to be known. And I want this on the record, the one I’m sure too soon will come. How could she not know? No doubt some will say this once everything is said and done, and precisely because of that is why I am writing this—what any would call their last confession.
I have always been a narcissist, but a selective one at that. I feel I am above the self-admiration associated with such people. I am self-centered though, and of that you may be sure. I will not shy away from this part of my disorder, nor have I ever. It is who I am, nature undenied.
Like any good sociopath I have many tics and behaviors. Throughout the years I have learned to suppress many of these while mimicking others; what society has deemed the norm. This was not easy, not at first, but in time I managed to stick and hold the landing. My lack of empathy was hardest for me fake, that and remorse, which up until sometime yesterday I’m pretty sure I’d yet to feel. Martha was the one who saved me—which I think I’ve already alluded to—Martha who helped me find the middle I’ve as well already mentioned; her face, her beauty; her kind, kind soul. She was one in a million, my Martha, a woman so selfless I am still having a hard time believing she is gone.
In 1981 she was to be my sixth victim. Instead she became my wife—a woman who bore me a child and then helped me bury that same child eighteen years later. I have never recovered from Donavan’s death. I admit this freely and without shame while acknowledging that his death was most likely the tipping point which brought the killer inside me back out to play. It was the hollowness I felt inside, you see, this slick feeling which seemed to coat the lining of my stomach. It angered me, threatening my way of life. Did I say anger? I meant fury. Livid. And beyond unfair that he had been ripped from us—that we had taken the time to raise and nurture him, teach and believe in him, and then when his life was at the ripening point…his wings…spread…that cancer would intercede and cut him down to a shell of what he’d been. I’d have killed him myself if I thought I could have gotten away with it. Looking back, I believe right then is when the monster inside me awoke. And no, the irony is not lost on me—I’d now had someone ripped from me just as I had ripped from the lives of countless others. I do not deny this, nor do I embrace it. It is only the narcissist in me, a trait I think I’ve explained.
“Can I help you?” Those four words were the first she had ever spoken to me. She had strawberry-blonde hair back then, cut in a bob, and a series of freckles which rested across the bridge of her nose. With light-green eyes and lips I wanted to slit, she was bending down to pick up the oranges I dropped on my way out the door.
I had been in the grocer not for groceries that day but because of her; weeks earlier, as I was making my way home, she had found my eye. I followed her, discovered first where she worked and then that her name was Martha. I thought she was to be my next victim, one who like the others would scream as I ripped the flesh from her face and then her face from her skull. This changed however—changed instantly—in the moment she looked into my eyes while passing me the oranges I’d fumbled near the door. There was something between us then, a spark, different from anything I had felt before. Her touch, as she placed her hand over mine, was soft, gentle, honest, arousing in me something beyond the sexual, outside the primal. I was fascinated, spinning. The woman whom I had wanted to maim and rape and kill had somehow affected me on a level I was unaware I possessed. Had she broken through with just a touch? Was this all it took, really? I didn’t know; not then, nor now. But both are things I have thought long and hard about as the years wore on, challenging myself to find an answer which would somewhat satisfy. I am sorry to say I still have found nothing save Martha herself; her being and her grace.
She tamed me, really. For lack of a better word, she neutered a stone-cold killer with a bat of her eye, the touch of her skin. The sociopath smitten, my desire to sever her neck from her shoulders became a thing of the past, dissolving, replaced by a need to know everything about her—but by choice, hers, not force, mine. This was the key—that she could stir in me something other than the tendencies which had ruled me since before the summer of ’74.
It was all I could do not to fumble for words. Oranges up, I asked her out. With a smile she agreed and the rest, as they say, is history. A good history, if I do say so myself. We had our ups and downs, yes, all married couples do, but for the most part it was a happy time, a time where I actually felt and was no longer pretending as I once had—my mask in place for the world to see. It was genuine what I was feeling, you see, which I’m sure is the reason why my need to kill went dark. It had been replaced by the love of a woman who stood outside the sum of her parts—a wife who was true to her man, her life and her marriage, and was of the type who put her needs behind all others, her husband’s especially.
And I know you are thinking sexual and for the most part you’d be right, though this was not always the case, as the emotional aspect of our lives had its quirks and spurts as well. Where Martha was open and engaging all the time, I seldom was. She worked at me however, worked hard, and because of this I have over the years become quite the conversationalist—people no longer staring as they once did whenever I laughed at a joke being told during a party. She refined me is what I am saying, teaching me everything I should have been taught by parents who should have taken the time to love me.
But the sex! My God! The sex is what destroyed me. As free and giving as Martha was outside the bedroom, it was when we found ourselves within that she truly knew no bounds; her selflessness amplified. “Come,” she would say, whispering into my ear. “I want you in my mouth.” When she would say things like this…they filled me…that she wanted me…that I would never again have to take. This was part of it as well. How I think she put to sleep the more dangerous parts of what I was before we met. Her appetite for intercourse so large and so unabashed that it enveloped me, quashing any thoughts or needs I might find in the arms of murder. Martha did this unintentionally though, and I want that to remain clear—she had no idea as to what she was bottling as she soothed and sucked and fucked. She was only pleasing the man she knew of then, not the man I’d been before.
Insatiable, I tried to please her but could never keep up. It wasn’t so much that I couldn’t, but Martha, as I said—she only wished to please. I mean, there would be days when my penis fought to leave her mouth. Days! That is how selfless she was, how much she lived to please. I miss her. Really, I do.
Those days are over though. Long gone and dead, like the boy. Had the cancer not taken him, he would’ve been twenty-eight this fall, a man in his own right. He was smart too, smarter than us both. He had his mother’s eyes and the line of my jaw. He never should have died, my son. Actually, he never should have been born, but God’s humor, it ain’t so much in the department of ha-ha if you know what I mean; that Donavan, by dying, became the catalyst which set the killer in me free. His death awakening in me once more the need to render and violate; to balance the violation someone had seen fit to throw our way. As I hurt, so would others. It was only fair. I thought this then. I do not think this now. I have changed. Martha’s death has seen to that.
So twenty years after a woman’s love restrained a beast the beast was back and open for business. And as they say—it was like coming home.
I started small, baby steps, wading into the shallow end of the pool—the woman was in her twenties, pretty, and bound and gagged before she knew what hit her. She screamed as I remembered them screaming and died the very same. The very last light of life winking out of her eyes as I looked down on her from above, her head held softly in my the palm of my hand. Door to door I continued on, selling insurance to those who would least suspect. An acceptable cover, selling insurance—always had been—then as well as later, after what happened with the boy. Made it easier to scout out and take notes of who lived alone and who did not. For five years this continued, five years after the death of our son. It was then I got sloppy.
It’s frustrating, you know—this part of it. I mean, it’s not like I don’t know, but more to the effect that I have a hard time understanding the meaning behind the why of why we embrace it. I mean, seriously, you would have to be out of your fucking mind to attempt such a thing—and hey, yes, I will call a spade a spade, but truly, all of us? Down to the most inept of us? It has to be the narcissism, has to. There is no other way around it. I mean, why else would men like me feel the need to keep some sort of article which relates to their victims? It’s idiotic! No, reckless, foolish. Lacking the minimum amount of common sense the worst of us should have. Is it because deep down we want to get caught? Is this why our judgement is so off? It doesn’t make sense. No, not now that I see it in hindsight. Why would we keep these trinkets in the first place? Is it inherent, brought on by the conceit of us? It would appear so, as history shows—the ones you read about doing it again and again. Some guy collecting ears he kept in a jar to another who would take only jewelry to which he and only he could masturbate to at half past the crazy hour. Doesn’t matter. Not what it is, but that we do it. Some little part of us. It wants to get caught, must. This is all I can figure. Why else had I kept their licenses?
Yep, licenses. That was my thing. Sometimes health cards and the like but only when this was all they had. The cards were bound by elastic and sealed within a Ziploc bag I held in a box in my shed below the second to last floorboard beneath my workbench. Do I have to explain how unwise something like this can be? Sure I had my safeguards, who wouldn’t? But did I honestly think it would ever happen? No, I did not. It did however, and only because of a portrait painted by my son.
Hanging in the main hall leading into our living room, Donavan had created the picture in sixth grade in honor of Martha’s thirty-first birthday. Years later, unbeknownst to any of us, it would become the linchpin which outed me. The string attached to either side of the portrait, the one which hung upon the nail coming out from the wall, this is what broke. And this is what sent Martha out to the shed that night. Did the nail she went to get fall from her hand? Is this what happened? Did it roll? I don’t know. Still, I have a hard time understanding why she would be in the shed looking for nails when all she needed was a new length of string from the drawer in the kitchen. No matter. What’s done is done and what’s found was found. What upsets me is how it affected her. I pictured her finding the licenses and at first denying it once she realized what they could signify. After that, knowing Martha, she would try to rationalize what she was dealing with. It wouldn’t happen. No, not if I knew Martha. Which I do…did. Later, I would find the trail she left on her laptop. The one which had linked some of my trips to some of the towns and cities the licenses said the woman were from. Quite the investigator my little Martha had become, doing all this in between the time I called to check in—which I always did whenever I was on the road for more than two days at a time—to the time I returned. It was then, as I spoke with Martha over the phone, that I knew something was off. It was minute but there, her octave just shy. These are the things you know after thirty years of marriage, things that only one other could ever come to know.
Anyway, I knew she knew but did not let her know I suspected. I couldn’t, not then, when the phone I was on was the only device I had at my disposal. I drove home instead, speeding six hours straight. During this time was when I decided not to kill her, certain that reason and the assurances I would give would be enough to see me through. I would tell her I had stopped once before and that the reason for this had been her. This worked in my head better than it did in real life, as she agreed with me in every scenario I could conjure, especially the one where she fully understood and realized that the death of our son had shaken me so much that I could not be blamed for lashing out at the world as I did. That it, not me, was at fault because of what it had done to me. She would even go so far in saying it was on par to what my father had put me through growing up on the farm.
Fantasies, all of it—the mind of a madman—except for the truth which of course came next.
As I rounded the corner which led to our street, I knew I was taking a chance that Martha had instead called the police once she found my souvenirs and I was moments away from driving myself right into the walls of a cell which would before too long end with me strapped to a chair. Either way, I was beginning to have the feeling that I had become more than fucked from Sunday.
Headlights off, I continued forward, around the bend. All was quiet. All was dark—save for our bedroom where the light was still on. Inside, I checked her computer and found exactly what I thought I might. Martha had been busy since last we spoke. Next I went out back and checked the floorboard in my shed, the one which held my secret. Sure enough, the fine dust of shavings had been disturbed. Pulling out the box, I examined the cards. Close, but the order was incorrect. Allison Jersey was before Brenda McClellan, not after. Martha had tried, yes, but failed. It was time to talk.
Onwards I went, upstairs, toward the bedroom and Martha’s sleeping frame. On her side as always I watched her steadied breaths, looked on and reminisced. How would I begin? What would be the magic words? From the beginning, then—this is what I thought as I spoke her name to wake her. Instead she attacked me; verbally, not physically, though it might as well have been. If I didn’t know it before, I sure as hell knew then: my wife’s compassion—it was not a thing to be trifled with. Martha had always been a strong and upfront person, this you know. What I might have failed to interpret was how deep and far that compassion for any one person could go. Me I’ve explained. How she suppressed in me this need to kill, if only for a while. She approached this in many ways: physically, emotionally and intellectually. But not just for me. For everyone she met in life, be it family, friend, or foe. It was elegant; she was elegant, the way she conducted herself. What I am trying to say is that I was caught off guard as I stood beside our bed and she roared up out of it, her rage at the ready, full and dark and much like venom. Shocked, I stepped back, trying to gain my bearings. It was extraordinary what I was witnessing, unprecedented, from a woman who in the previous thirty years had not so much as furrowed a brow at me. A brow! She had raised her voice, sure, who hasn’t? But the display I was beholding, the ferocity of it…
“Seriously, you are my husband!” she said, her voice all fury, her face much the same. “How is it that you are even capable of this? You’re nothing! We’re nothing! The meek—isn’t that what you said? That we’d inherit the earth? Murray, you’re a goddamn insurance salesman for Christ’s sake! How can something like this be inside you?” Those words haunt me still, the last she ever spoke. And do you know why? Would you like to? I thought you might. You’ve come this far, why not a little further? It was the look, you see, the one which danced upon the steel now set in the green of her eyes. I knew it, and I knew it well. It was the look every woman I have ever taken saw in my eyes before they died by my hand.
If I did not end Martha then she was very much about to kill me. This is what I want you to know; this is what I wish to confess.
Which brings me back to the question I began with: Could it be covered up?
However, before I go on with that, I want to get something off my chest. Something I realized not long ago. It has to do with my unchecked narcissism. I say unchecked now because I was wrong before, earlier when I said I did not need the admiration associated with my condition. I am a big enough man to admit this. Why else would I have told Martha how I liked to do them? Why else would I leave a signature every single time? Yeah, it’s about me. All of it. Always has been, always will be. Did you know they even have a name for me? Did I mention that? “The Wrecker” is what the papers say—what I’ve been deemed. It’s because I destroy their faces, you see. Not only, but mostly. The other reason is because I remove the jaw—the bottom half, taking most of the neck as I rip down to pull it free.
So…could it be covered up; this is what I’d been thinking at the beginning as I began to write this. Is that really the kind of question a story should start with? And believe me, this is a work of fiction: nothing in the above sentences actually happening. Did you see that coming? Well, did you? You’re probably thinking I’m fucking with you now, yes? Or someone is anyway. What is happening? could this be what’s running through your head? Or perhaps: Where is the author going with this? Better yet: Have I missed a page, possibly some crucial point of plot? They’re all good questions, every one. But the truth? The truth is now—me and you; what I do. My MO is simple. I watch. I wait. I see. I scout. Gathering information, I see if the person I have chosen lives alone or not. Satisfied, I continue to wait, continue to watch. I look for boyfriends. I look for girlfriends. I watch for parents who visit much too often and stay far too late. After this is when I take it to the next level; when I write a story similar to the one you hold in your hands. I then address it to you, my intended victim, and leave it between your doors. But that’s where I found this is what you might be thinking now. This is when the fear should set in, when you’re almost in the know. I then go back to waiting, observing from somewhere close. I have installed cameras in your house, the type you’ve failed to see. You will look around as you are doing now but still you will not see; they are tiny, these devices, and very state of the art. Once I know you are reading and once I know you’re near the end I slip in undetected and travel up your stairs. Sometimes they creak as I climb and sometimes they don’t. I walk soft; I do, but sometimes still I’m heard. Is that me now is what I’m saying, out beyond your door? My feet now off the rise and stepping ever close?
To those who know me, I am a nondescript white male who blends well within a crowd. For those who don’t, I have taken over two dozen people in my lifetime.
To you I say prepare.