There were too many distractions. I sat on my living room floor with nothing surrounding me. I needed to find someone who was killing people and cleaning their bones, not chase after a phantom. If it kept up, I’d be pulled off the case, both cases. I didn’t want that. I wanted to solve the bone cleaner today. My phantom could wait until tomorrow.
All we had to go on was a truck with no registration information and bugs. I didn’t know much about bugs, which was a problem for me, my tablet was currently open to an entomology encyclopedia. I was flipping the pages about half my normal speed. Not because bugs were difficult to understand in their basic form or because I needed to process the material, but because I kept thinking about the fruitless search that had taken place after the burning of my car.
He had disappeared. Just gone. We didn’t find any trace of him in a tree, in a bush, even walking on the ground. He had no way to know we were headed out there, so he could not have planted a car beforehand. There was nowhere for him to go and yet, we hadn’t found him. It was impossible. Demonic possession was more probable than vanishing into thin air. At the moment, I was even willing to give more credit to Gabriel having a real encounter with a wendigo.
Which is why I picked up my phone and dialed the number that I knew I needed to dial, but didn’t want to.
“Xavier told me, how you holding up?” Gabriel asked me.
“It was a car,” I answered. “Nothing more. However, I officially have a stalker and not the kind that messes around with dead rodents in the mail. I think I need help here. I cannot focus on both cases.”
“He vanished into thin air. Do you want me to find you a paranormal expert that deals with that?” Gabriel asked.
“I was talking about relieving me from the bone cleaning case.” I snipped at him.
“Why? So you can obsess about a man who seemingly disappeared into thin air?” Gabriel countered with another question and I was finding the conversation irksome.
“What if he comes after one of the team next?” I asked.
“That would be stupid,” Gabriel answered. “We aren’t talking about a group of civilians. We aren’t even talking about a group of cops. We are talking about SCTU members. You do not directly attack them. That’s why he burned your car and not Xavier or Fiona. You are not the only badass on the team. Caleb, Fiona, Xavier, and even Rachael, come from very distinguished backgrounds that are not going to be easy to get the drop on. On top of that, there are men like Patterson and Apex running around the country side. They seem to have a vested interest in keeping the SCTU whole and working. Whoever he is, he is going to realize soon that he bit off more than he can chew. We aren’t talking about one psychopath or even two. We are talking about five of them and at least one of them is what you like to call a super psychopath. If he’s lucky, Apex or Patterson finds him first, because if we do, he goes to the Fortress. At that point, we can just ignore the amount of psychopaths he is going to encounter, because there is really only two he has to worry about; Eric and Turkish Jack.”
“Turkish Jack?” I asked Gabriel.
“You didn’t notice?”
“I remember him nearly killing us,” I reminded him.
“Please, I saw the footage, Eric and him kept nodding at each other. Your brother seems to be friends with him and it was all staged for a good show.”
“So, how do you know him?” I finally asked the burning question.
“I was involved in his capture. He didn’t fight us. He surrendered by laying his sword at his feet and putting his hands behind his head. When we went into the hotel room to secure him, there were nine severed heads lined up on the dresser and his tongue lying on an end table. He knew we were coming and he cut out his own damn tongue as a result. The heads I could deal with, but cutting out his own tongue, not so much. Do you know how we captured him?”
“No,” I said.
“An anonymous tip from a guy, but your brother kept eluding to the fact that he knew where to find him.” Gabriel paused. “In the thirty minutes before we received the tip, Eric was visited by his lawyer, he then made a phone call, and we then got the tip.”
“My brother orchestrated his arrest with his permission.” I let that sink in.
“Your brother has been instrumental in the capture of over three dozen serial killers. He just suddenly found them and turned them over or he’d see his lawyer and suddenly an anonymous tip would come in. I think he was filling the Fortress with allies.” Gabriel sighed. “I think Patterson and him set up Patterson’s capture. I’m not sure about his escape, but definitely his capture.”
“Gabriel, Eric defended himself at his trial, he has never had a lawyer.”
“Yes he does, guy’s name is Joseph Stram and he seems to exist only on paper and security footage. He’s never tried a case, has no other clients, and if I had to guess, his identity came from an agency that makes new identities for fun and profit.”
“My brother has no work history, despite telling me he was a teacher. Elle won’t talk about it. I’ve always thought he was CIA or NSA, it’s the only way to explain the money and his abilities. I know he is a psychopath, but one does not just take up a sniper’s perch on a rooftop and make twenty kills in twenty-one shots because of luck.”
“So, as I said, continue to work the case. This bone cleaner has got to be stopped. He’s too methodical and precise and he’s starting to claim victims faster than we can track missing persons’ reports. Your stalker is going to have a lot more to worry about than just you if he continues.” Gabriel hung up on me.
Precise, methodical, and claiming victims fast, he was definitely a psychopath of the charming variety. He also had access to an insect farm as either a hobbyist or a farmer. If we excluded the first handful of victims or so, we might have a better understanding of victimology. Gabriel was brilliant and didn’t even know it. Or we could group them; men on one side and women on the other. A charming man would need to target each sex different.
My experience with Malachi told me that to win over a guy, he toned down some of the self-confidence and hyped the laid back, easy going, nice guy persona. For the record, Malachi was many things, but none of them were on the mentioned list. Mostly he was an arrogant, narcissistic, asshole convinced he was godlike who just seemed like a good guy with lots of confidence and charisma. While I’d been in college, he had attacked and nearly raped my roommate because he didn’t believe she wasn’t into him. Even after she told him she preferred girls. I had to shoot him with his own gun to get him to lay off. He learned that no really meant no after that and never pushed it that far again, but toning down his sexual aggression didn’t stop him from being an asshole. The fact that I remained friends with him after that, said all sorts of bad things about me, but in many ways, we needed each other. However, that didn’t mean I couldn’t stun gun or Taser him every so often just to remind him that he couldn’t go too far into his own fantasy world where he was God.
Keeping that in mind, I separated the files on the victims into genders. I wasn’t sure he cared about what they looked like, if he did, he’d be gender specific, however, I could be wrong and putting them into groups based on their sex, might help establish a pattern. As the first rays of sun lit my living room, I realized the pattern was one of opportunity. The victims had very little in common as far as looks. I’d have Fiona double check it with facial scanning software, but I hadn’t seen much overlap.
As I stared at a photo of the most recently found victim, I noticed my hand. It was scarred from burns, stabbings, shootings, and one incredibly effective boot stomping. The woman that smiled out at me didn’t have a single visible scar though. Not on her face, not on her arms, nowhere that I could see. Not even a tiny one. I would have to have someone check with her family to be sure, but the person in the picture looked unblemished. I didn’t even see a scar from a pimple popping that had gone horribly wrong. I grabbed the other photos. More perfect bodies caught my attention. How did someone make it through their teens without a single scar from a bike accident or clumsy teenaged stunt?