She was the eighth one. The number eight is lucky, you know. You can write it on a slip of paper, carry it in your wallet, and never be out of money. You can tape the written number over a festering boil or nasty runny cut and cure it within days.
I admit I believe in a little magic.
She was lucky she got to be Eight. I positioned her bloody body in a way bodies aren’t supposed to bend. She was a red naked pretzel with heels pressed against her temples and cold hands in the dark cavern between her legs, and her toes bent down in rigor like fat peanuts. I do it for shock. I do it for fun. Fuck, I do it like no one does it, that’s the thing. If you’re going to do this final act, it should always be the ultimate scene the mind can imagine. Or what’s the point?
If they ever connected the murders strung out along the California coastal highway, they’d have known I was at work again. Every kill was artful and bizarre. I’d stopped for a period of time—three years (and it almost killed me to be so silent, slow, and useless)—to throw them off. Now I am back again and they haven’t even picked up on it. The last string of deaths left behind brought me close to capture. That wouldn’t happen again. Fuck me sideways if it did.
Cops and detectives were generally stupid anyway. I’d earned a Ph.D. in psychology by my mid-twenties, and it seemed to me many men drawn to law enforcement were twisted in some important way. Not as twisted as I had become over the years, no, but twisted just the same. You can’t convince me some of those guys don’t get off pulling the trigger on victims.
Boom! Motherfucker down. Permanently.
We’re all like that. All the twisted ones.
My mother knew the score. My father, that faceless slouch who died of alcohol poisoning before he was forty, didn’t know his toe from a kettledrum. My mother, on the other hand, oh, she was a slippery thing; she was an electric eel who sleeps deep in the dark and slithers out to take a bite from prey, crippling it, blood spewing to stain the water scarlet.
First time I realized she knew me, really knew me, rotten kernels filling my black heart hard as stone, I was staring at my acceptance letter to Stanford. I had taken the letter out the back door, letting it close softly. This was private. I’d worked hard, I’d taken all the extra courses, and I was a shining student who would be let into classes early. I was only fifteen. And brilliant, it goes without saying. It all came from her, from Mum, the eel who haunted me down there in the depths where I often swam. When educated with the proper words for people who are twisted, I labeled her folder: NARCISSISTIC-BIPOLAR. She was so manipulative you’d think she could have run a corporation. I’d kept that folder on her behavior for years. It was thick and stinking of depravity. She was, in a way, my first psychoanalytic case. The case was unsolved and the woman unsaved, but the longest study I ever did.
That day, when I knew she understood the real me, she’d sneaked to the back door and peered out the crack, watching with those black, masterful, all-seeing eyes.
I felt the stare right away. She was never far from me when I was home. I should have ridden off on my bike and hidden behind the piñon tree at the end of the street.
To hell with her, I thought. I have to know if they accepted me. She couldn’t stop me from going. They’d offered a full scholarship so her poverty, and certainly not her disapproval, mattered. I could do this on my own.
I looked from the sides of my eyes and saw the clot of darkness at the slightly opened door. Tearing open the envelope, I whipped out the white paper with the beautiful heading. “We are happy to offer you a position in classes at Stanford.”
That’s all I had to read. The rest was simply scribbles. I was in. On my way to a good life away from this dirt saloon. Soon to stride over the world like a Colossus.
I turned like a whip and saw Mother jerk back a bit, her dark column wavering as if underwater. I threw open the door and straightened my shoulders. My lips pulled from my teeth, producing a dangerous smile. If she was going to try to hurt me emotionally, she’d have to yank a miracle out of her ass. Nothing could change this. She’d just lost what little power she’d held over me.
“What is it?” Her body had settled and she appeared relaxed. She pretended to be a curious mother.
“They accepted me into Stanford University. Early entry.”
“You’re only fifteen, you’re fucking lying.”
I learned my language from her. I’d have to temper myself as I moved up in society. I leaned forward, my face not inches from hers, and said, “Mother, I’m a genius. How could you not know that? How could you miss it?”
“You’re…sure…you’re smart…”
“I’m intelligent. I surpassed all the tests. You’ve never known anyone like me and may never again.”
“Bullshit.”
I moved even closer so our noses touched and our eyes locked. “You’re a peon. You’re a peasant. You are inferior stock. I’ll never come back here when I leave—not until the day you die.”
She stepped back and slapped my face so hard my head swung to the side. The whole room twirled and swayed and threatened to drop me to the hard floor. It stung, but I didn’t reach to touch my cheek. Wouldn’t give her the satisfaction.
“I know you,” she said with a deep, ominous growl. “I’ve always known what you are. Smart, sure, you’re smart, like a viper, like a bear, a really wild thing, but I see the rest of it. The deep down. You’re the goddamn devil, boy, and don’t mistake it.”
“And you’re not? Your evil, Mother, is legendary.”
Now she smiled, and it reflected the smile I’d given her. “I can’t reach you. I’ve known that awhile. I didn’t think anyone could hate as much as I do, but I was wrong. You’re an infection. You’re antimatter. You’re the back ass of the moon.”
I cared no more for her opinion than I would if she were a cockroach. Antimatter, indeed. She didn’t even know what it was, silly old fool.
I took my precious acceptance letter and left her standing, that creepy Peeping Tom, among the shadows and the stink of cheap spaghetti sauce and under it all the scent of urine that leaked from the toilet bowl in the filthy bathroom. She was and always had been superfluous. I’d kill her if I thought I’d feel better, but she was such a nothing her death would have been anticlimactic. Like stomping a June bug on concrete. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing but an unsightly splotch on the grimy linoleum floor.
In my own private folder I never failed to list my kills, the stalking, the planning, and the thoughts in my head. I knew what I was. Natural-born killer, that’s all. Of course I hated my mother and I killed women as men who hate their mothers tend to do. So prosaic, yes, it seems so. But over the years I found more than that inside my burred and dark insanity. More than just taking out revenge on a bad mother. I took out pain and suffering on the world for tampering with my perfection. I could have been something. I might have done some good with all the brainpower. But I was twisted and turned and blackened deep down where eels sleep. That’s why I wanted recompense. That’s why the world was to blame and life a monstrosity. That the victims were women was no mystery. That I hurt them so splendidly and then moved on without leaving evidence—well, that was the trick. I proved my superiority and it wasn’t that hard, to be truthful.
Television shows and movies would have you to believe we—killers—can be so easily caught. There are so many forensic scientists and tests to be performed. Well, let me tell you something, and it should scare the shit out of you. All that stuff is three-fourths fictional. There are very few districts with any criminal forensic techs at all. We’ll have him in cuffs by hour’s end, the character says on the television detective show. He struts in his dark suit, the sturdy detective, and he will, by God, get his man by the last commercial.
That’s a joke.
Because in reality, no, he won’t. For every murder solved, a thousand get away with it. Media won’t tell you the truth. Everyone would be paranoid all the time. Society couldn’t function. Yet that’s the way it is. Catching killers has a poor record of success. Get a homicide detective who has been around awhile, get him drunk, and ask him. You’ll find out.
I wish it was easier to catch me. It’s a little boring to be so successful all the time. Where’s the competition? Where’s my Sherlock? Where the fuck, Jesus God, are all the geniuses?
I teach at Stanford, where I was educated, because it’s easy and leaves me free time. I’m not likable or charming or funny, so I’m not one of the hot professors besieged by so many students they have to be turned away. My course is one I created. “Children in Therapy.” I don’t think I ever filled the room. You need charisma for that to happen.
I didn’t have a practice, but I knew how to be a therapist and children were the most interesting. With adults you have a lifetime of baggage. With kids you get the straight skinny, the unbending rail. I didn’t say it quite this way in class, but by the time they finished my course, students of psychology held a stronger respect for the subject matter.
I make a fine enough living to afford a nice two-bedroom cottage on a tree-lined street. I bought the place for eighty grand and now it’s worth four times that. I’m not moving because I’m a creature of habit in my “real” life—the life where I go to work, get a paycheck, shop for groceries, and mow my lawn.
In my killing life, and that’s the real one truly, things can get chaotic. It takes a lot of time and work to set up a kill. They have to be spaced apart by time and place. I don’t take the usual timber from the forest—prostitutes and runaways. It’s just too easy. I like all ages of women, all types of women who do different jobs for a living, but they’re always single or widows. I’m not into orphaning a kid.
Number Eight was thirty-four and lonely as a crab clinging to a rock along a hard surf. She rented a four-room house in a neighborhood that was partly commercial. All around her little place were drugstores, Mexican cantinas, chop shops, and convenience stores that sold a little something-something on the side when no cops were around.
I dressed down when hanging around the neighborhood. Chinos with a grease stain on the right knee and pullover solid-color shirts. My shoes were Walmart black sneakers that were wearing out in the toes and heels. I always took a cab in and out, pulling a brown felt hat down low over my face. I was as nondescript as the rest of the population squirming like fleas over the area.
Even my too-blue eyes were disguised with brown contacts. I wore them all the time. Not many people saw my blue eyes after the age of twenty.
Out to take a kill is no time to jockey for attention.
I’d watched Eight for at least two months. She had a hangdog look about her. She brought a man home now and then, but they never came back. She wasn’t that pretty and she wasn’t that young.
No one noticed who came and went at her place. It was small, clapboard, faded yellow, and had a black grilled door. She took me through it the last night of her life.
I used a knife. It wasn’t drawn out. A few solid thumping stabs in the chest and she was gone. I sat awhile, watching the blood course over her ribs into the mattress and sheets and then to the floor, where it pooled. I carefully took off her clothes and put them aside on a green satin chair in the bedroom. I positioned her wildly, laughing in a soft way, enjoying myself. I’d worn gloves the whole time.
When she offered me a beer and mentioned I might want to take off my gloves, I made up a silly story about a skin disease and how sensitive I was about anyone seeing my rashes. She shrugged, as I knew she would, and handed me a Bud from the fridge. I noticed a skim of black mold along the refrigerator’s gasket around the door and cringed. She asked if I were cold, should she shut off the window air conditioner, and I said no, honey, it’s all right. It’s all fine.
We sat at her kitchen table that still held an egg-streaked breakfast plate on it and drank beer while chatting about her life. Not mine. I listened.
She had been married once for three years, but he left for work one day and never came home. She had no children and didn’t want any. She made enough money to stay afloat, but she yearned to get away, maybe go down to San Diego sometime to the zoo. She was a meek, mild maid and I was her night’s fancy.
Until I wasn’t.
When they found her, they’d wonder why such a gaudy display. It would distract them and make them a little crazy, and they knew from the first they’d never solve it. This was majesty. Like the craziness of the Black Dahlia. This was no hooker bloodletting. No regular boyfriend rage.
No, this was artful. She looked inhuman wrapped in all that blood. A perfect nonperson. My pleasure resulted from transformation. Alive to dead, human to thing, ugly to beautiful.
Mother died in the first week of April. She didn’t call me to let me know she was dying. Her doctor did. I’d given him my cell number and slipped a few hundred into his hand. He called early enough, like I’d told him.
I found her in bed. Same house I grew up in, but now it was darker, dirtier, less respectable. The landscape of the yard had hardened to dry sand and the trees had died. The house stood canted as if a big wind had pushed it off its moorings.
She opened her eyes when I entered the room. “You,” she said. Then closed her eyes against me.
I pulled a kitchen chair into the room and up to her bedside. The scraping of it along the floor sounded grating, and I saw her wince.
“Go away, I don’t want you here.”
“Open your eyes. Don’t be a coward.”
“You’re the fucking coward.” She kept her eyelids down tightly.
“Cancer, is it? Doc Blein said it’s eaten you up. Like a sweet—a cupcake or a Butterfinger.”
“You’re disgusting,” she said.
“You’re dying.”
“Thank fucking God.”
“I hate you, you know. I didn’t come to make this easy for you.”
“Do your worst. No love lost.”
She coughed and hacked, and when she calmed I began talking.
What I said to her was worse than if I’d plunged Eight’s knife into her chest. I talked for hours. There were old memories and I was sure to tell her once as a little boy I’d thought her beautiful, but that’s before I understood what she was really about.
I told her about the murders, all eight of them. I bragged that it had only begun. I’d never be caught.
She coughed in scared excitement and tried to threaten that she’d tell, but we both knew she’d be dead before the light left the western sky.
I never laid a finger on her. Didn’t have to. My long-talking, matter-of-fact voice and cold disdain did it all.
She rolled over onto her side away from me, and I hurriedly moved the chair around to that side of the bed and continued talking to her, this mother of mine, this bitch mother I’d hated nearly my entire life.
She never opened her eyes to look at me. Once she called out, “You’re the devil,” as she’d done when I was a boy, and then she spluttered, coughed up blood, and died. Just like that. The mother thing was at the bottom of the ocean now, floating amid the fish skeletons, no more than a shadow of her eel self. I had her cremated so I could fling her across the ocean, where she belonged, shadow flecks of hatred floating away.
Nine is unlucky. If you depend on nine to save you, think again. Nine isn’t good at all. My ninth victim caused a problem. None before her had caused even a ripple of disruption. This unbroken record had spoiled me.
Bad luck might have been because of the goblin cane and my intention for it. That’s what I called it. In reality it was a smooth-skinned, warped, three-foot of driftwood. One end was curved and gnarled like a handhold on a cane. The other end was whittled down by the washing of water and sand until it was sharp as a scalpel. It would fit agreeably for a goblin to use as a cane. Goblins are small, right? Studying the driftwood that day on the shore when I found it, I realized, too, it could be a lethal weapon. A murder tool to further mystify the homicide crew.
I took it along and stashed it where needed. I brought Nine down to the beach after tacos and beer. She was a single woman who had just landed in town. The golden land of California was going to make a big difference in her life.
“I couldn’t stand Choctaw County in Oklahoma another minute. Indians, casinos, bad weather, and I mean really bad weather. I’ve gone through four tornadoes!”
“Is that right?”
“Hell, yeah. Made my hair stand on end.” She giggled. “Once one of them took off the garage roof. And it was attached to the house. Sounded like a wrecking crew. I knew it would be so much nicer out here in Southern California. I saved for months to get the bus ticket.”
I almost felt sorry for her but not enough to change my well-laid plans. The goblin’s cane waited down at the shore near the pier, under it, soaking in the shadows high up from the tide. We were a long way from people. No one came here this time of night. It was almost midnight. The moon drove up the sky on its milky circle, the sea whiskered up the shore with creeping foam, and Nine just kept talking about herself.
I was a trained psychotherapist. I could listen, no problem. The story flowed over me, however. It didn’t go inside where I dwelled, the stories never did. In there I thought and plotted and panted for the act of murder. I might pick up a word here and there.
“…rode a horse…broke my cellphone…ate mac-and-cheese for a month…”
She was a slight woman, twenty-nine, childless, and unmarried. She was not a pretty woman, but they rarely were. Besides, I’m not handsome and prettier girls aren’t attracted. I didn’t go for the Hollywood wannabes, either, the ones who will go off with you if you’re an ugly toad if you tell them lies about being a director. Too high-caliber, with too many friends. Nine was slight and willowy, but her face was a perfect fat U. It looked as if it belonged on a much heavier woman. When she grinned she showed big teeth, these too big for her face, her face too big for her body. She was a mismatched piece of work. She had one saving grace. Her voice was mellifluous. If I didn’t look at her, she sounded like an angel. I let her story lull me as we tracked the beach, moving farther and farther from housing and cafés, closer and closer to the lonesome pier and the goblin’s cane.
Then Nine abruptly turned back on the beach and, looking up, realized how far we’d come. “Jesus, where are we? I got to get back.”
I tried sweet talk and pointed toward the pier. We could hear the waves shushing through it. She refused and even pulled away, my hand on her arm.
“You let me go,” she said, the angel voice vanishing and a sharp edge coming into it. “I don’t feel good down here in the dark. We came too far.”
I tried romance, taking her slim body into my arms and burying my face in her ropy neck.
She pushed me away with force and stumbled back, eyes widening. It’s as if she detected something now, something riding the crest of her rampant fear. Looking in her eyes, I knew this was going to get messy. No easy go, this one.
I took her arm again and started off for the pier. Protesting, she began to kick sand and curse at me. I pulled her off her feet and onto my shoulder, where she struggled, but she was so slight she couldn’t get any purchase or do any real harm.
It took more than an hour to subdue her under the pier. When I brought out the goblin’s cane and she saw it in the moonlight, she screamed and wriggled and fought. I could feel her heart like a terrified bird trapped beneath my hand.
I put a trickle of sand in her mouth, then more and more, and sat on her belly until she stopped moving. When I plunged the driftwood cane into her chest she jerked. I pushed it all the way down through her heart by using the handle on the top of the cane and I felt life leave her, thumping as it fled, from the inside of my thighs, where I sat on her.
Blood gushed and I almost withdrew the cane to take with me, maybe use again, but it was red slippery all the way up to the crooked handle, and I didn’t want it anymore now.
I wanted to be done with the Oklahoma girl and her tornadoes and casinos and horses. I wanted to leave her and wash myself in the sea. The water was warm and the blood leached away down into sand and depths where there were eels and sea snakes and other ugly, wiggly things that lived in the deep waters.
By the time I got back to my parked car, my clothes were dry. I looked like I belonged on that street at that time of night. People still laughed in the cantinas and the bars. I drove home distraught. It was the messiest murder I’d ever committed and I didn’t like it. Did I leave prints on the cane stuck in her chest? I hadn’t had time to put on gloves.
A mistake. But blood slicked the driftwood cane from top to bottom, so it probably didn’t matter. I’d watch the newspapers and news reports on TV. They’d be sure to make the story a sensation—girl found beneath a pier with a piece of sharp driftwood in her heart.
It was only later when, sitting in my car, that I got the jitters and thought over leaving the cane in Nine’s chest. I loved that thing. I don’t like many material objects, don’t collect anything, but the gnarled smooth bone of driftwood with the deadly point seemed made just for me. Hadn’t it dispatched her quickly without bending or breaking? Couldn’t I use it again?
I started the car, hurrying back the way I’d come. I’d get it. I’d get the goblin’s cane and take it with me.
I didn’t notice I’d stepped in the blood-wet sand near her chest when I pulled the cane free of her flesh. I had what I wanted. I was leaving nothing behind.
Except later I’d discover I did. My footprint in the sand.
I felt the swarm come on now and trembled. In the dimness of the bustling bar no one noticed. I said to my daughter, “Why don’t you go home with me?”
Cara frowned and twisted away to the bar and the sea-green eyes of the man standing next to her. I knew she was attracted and I didn’t blame her, but hooking up with strangers in bars gave me the heebie-jeebies. She knew I didn’t like it.
The “swarm” is a way of describing…intuition. Native born, been with me all my life. It’s like precognition or a psychic feeling or what old-timers used to call “the shine.” I called it a swarm because when it came I felt as if the world swarmed me. Colors and motion and sound swirled around and around in a cone with me in the center of it. It meant something bad, never anything good. It meant something was coming or about to happen. I really didn’t want Cara out alone when I’d just been swarmed.
I had never told her about it. She knew I was spooky right when I predicted certain things, but never questioned it since it had happened her whole life. “Don’t get near that tree,” I’d warn, and when she did anyway a fierce rash broke out all up and down her arms. “Don’t step on that porch board.” And sure enough someone else did, and it broke clear through, trapping a man’s leg. I couldn’t even count the swarmings I’d had and how often they’d moved me and Cara away from harm. I thought of it as guardian angels keeping us safe. We’d been on our own since Cara’s father died when she was a girl. Without a swarm I might have been less successful, certainly less safe.
Now I’d just half-swooned with a second swarm hit and I clutched my daughter’s arm hard. “Cara, come with me.” I spoke low and fierce and urgent.
“Mom, stop already. I’ll come home in an hour, I promise.”
“You won’t go anywhere else? Just here, then home?”
“Cross my heart, hope to…”
I put two fingers against her lips. “Don’t say that. One hour. I’ll be waiting.”
One hour later the swarm came a third time and spun me out the apartment door, down the steps, and to the sidewalk. I stood swaying, my heart pounding, a shushing in my ears, and I knew this time it was something really bad. Catastrophic, even.
I ran down the street toward the bar with my lips flapping, my mouth open wide, and breathing hard. Don’t let it be, I prayed. Don’t, don’t, don’t hurt my baby.
It was three weeks since I’d left Nine under the beach pier. I’d cleaned the goblin cane and it rested on the mantel in my living room, a crooked little thing that drew my gaze from anywhere I went in the room. It had taken on a slightly pinkish stain from Nine’s blood that I couldn’t get out, no matter how I washed or bleached the wood. It looked like a jolly pink cotton-candy circus midget’s evil wand.
I took it with me tonight because it was time for Ten. I’d watched the girl for three weeks. On Wednesday and Friday nights she went to a local bar accompanied by her mother. I knew it was her mother because they could be sisters—same square jaw, petite build, and dark hair. And anyway, the girl called her “Mom.”
This mother was evidently overprotective. Therapeutically I’d call it an insecurity issue that bordered on mental illness. She hovered over the girl like a mother hen and seldom left without her. Tonight she did leave. I knew she did that now and then. Their apartment was just six blocks down and one over, so it wasn’t as if this grown young lady needed the security of her mother. The girl was at least twenty, the mother twice that.
I slipped the goblin cane down into the specially elongated pocket of my overcoat. It was brisk out, mid-November. The air along this part of the coastal highway north of Long Beach tasted of brine. My hair flew over my forehead and into my eyes like black bats. I swiped it away just as the girl emerged from Willigan’s Bar and Grill. She was alone. She’d dumped the guy chatting her up at the bar.
I caught her two blocks away. I could hear her humming a pop tune. Her hand was in her jacket. Maybe she clutched a cellphone. I’d bank on it. She was oblivious that she was being stalked. Between the bar and her apartment complex it wasn’t deeply dark but shadowed by lacy acacia trees and lined with velvety green hedges.
She jerked, trying to get away, but I had my hand over her mouth, her petite upper body in my arms, and my car waiting just across the street.
I had to knock her out once I had the passenger-seat door open. She slumped onto the seat just as I heard a grunting sound and saw the mother across the street, running for all she was worth up the sidewalk toward the bar.
Time to disappear.
Like a goblin under a bridge.
They found Cara not far from the bar, in an alleyway with a piece of cardboard from a packing box draped over her body.
I knew she was gone the second I rushed inside the bar and saw she’d left. I also knew she hadn’t gone in a car with the man she’d been admiring at the bar.
Yes, I knew things. I winced and turned away to weep, I knew so many things. They didn’t have to tell me what had been done to her. I knew already and felt my heart fold over like an accordion while scream-crying and wringing my hands and looking to heaven for some kind of reason in a universe where a lovely, kind girl like Cara could be butchered for nothing. Patrons of the bar surrounded me in wonder at my grief when it appeared nothing had happened.
It wasn’t her fault for staying behind and not my fault I couldn’t force her to come home with me. It was his fault, the crazed killer who waited in the dark to pounce.
A swarm hit me and I stood frozen, waiting for it to pass. It showed me a shadowy figure and it was the man of the night. Tears sprang to my eyes and I tried to wipe them clear so I could see the figure better. I brushed off the consoling hands of the people around me. Leave me alone, I thought. I have to see. The figure was medium height and weight. He was a brown man with slightly hunched shoulders. Brown hair and eyes, white skin, freckled. He had a studious air about him, a man who spent his days self-absorbed. If I saw him again I’d recognize him. He didn’t look like a monster. He looked like a nicely dressed insurance salesman. Maybe all the monsters looked like that; it was their favorite costume. I’m just a common man, their appearance shouted. I’m no one in particular, no one to be afraid of.
A jolt of blue-purple-pink flattened me in the face and inside that swirling color was a…stick. Some small, smooth stick or branch with a handle and a sharp point. Two, two and a half feet in length. Pinkish. A little sword? A child’s toy? What did it mean?
I asked the swarm to tell me, but the feeling sped away and vanished. I’d know no more for now.
I pulled away from the crowd and, weeping, walked slowly home to call the police. She’d been missing only a couple hours, but I had to tell someone. I sank onto the side of Cara’s bed in her empty bedroom and, putting my face in my hands, I cried enough tears to wet my knees.
Ten was a hasty kill. I knew it would be, that close to Willigan’s Bar. I did it in my car with flickering shadows from the acacias punctuating the kill. People coming and going, someone might see. I only got to plunge the gnarly wood into her heart and pull it free, that’s it. No posing of her body when I got her to the alley. No excitement of making her look all Hollywood, with her shirt pulled down and her hair brushed off her face. I killed and hurried away, sliding through darkness like the wraith I hoped to be.
If I’d chosen another subject, it wouldn’t have been that way. I could have taken my time, done my creative best to twist the limbs into ungodly formations. I don’t know why it had to be this particular girl. It just did. There’s no way to answer the question. The overweening mother, maybe. The close relationship they enjoyed. I admit I hated it.
A month later I was ready to shadow number Eleven, when the night before I planned the kill I saw a news report on television tell me there was evidence found at the pier. A shoe print in the sand where I’d dropped Nine.
I began to hyperventilate and rushed to the hall closet for the shoes. They were Archer brand, some knock-off Chinese shit, and as ragged as garbage. I turned them upside down and peered close at the soles. Just like the print blown up large on the television. Sand still snuggled in the rugged warp and weave of the cheap rubber. Was that blood? I looked closer, so close my eyes started to cross. There were tiny dots and clots of black…it was…something. They smelled bad. I threw the shoes on the floor and stomped them like live snakes. I cried out in frustration.
Nasty goddamn things! Cheap fucking Walmart crap sneakers that hadn’t lasted a year. And I’d stepped in the sand, leaving the print in the bloody mud for everyone to see. Was I losing my brain, the only element I thought I could count on? Was I really so sloppy I left this evidence and didn’t even know it? How stupid am I?
“You’re gifted,” they said. “You’re Mensa, high Mensa,” they said. “You’ll be brilliant no matter what you decide to do.” They said. Would a smart killer step in bloody sand and just walk away?
The authorities didn’t know I’d become a serial killer who was successful until I found a goblin cane and took a young woman with it beneath the pilings of a noisy pier on the oceanfront. A detective began putting cases together and realized what they were dealing with. The artful poses, the stabbings, the dead women littering the West Coast rim of California like dots of icing on the edge of a cake. It was serial, all right. A task force was set up immediately. As far as I knew they hadn’t named me with a serial killer moniker yet. The media hadn’t got hold of it.
Now they had a piece of me. I was a known thing who wore certain easily identifiable sneakers.
I ran into the living room, grabbed the cane from the mantel, and in a fit of rage threw it all the way across the room into the living room, where it bounced off the glass dining table and landed in a corner. It had to have Nine’s DNA all over it. I should get rid of it for good, but…I did love it.
Breathless, I stood seething at the incredible ignorance of my mistake. My stupidity. Grabbing up the mauled sneakers, I took them into the kitchen and with the kitchen scissors cut both of them into ribbons. When finished it wasn’t evident the mess had been shoes or a canvas purse, or horse shit, for that matter. Blisters rose on my fingers from the pressure of the scissors. I bared my teeth at the red swelling skin. Outside in the yard I hauled the metal fire pit into a dark corner and set fire to the round pile of dead shoes. I squirted it all with charcoal starter and kept at it until there was nothing left but stinking, melted rubber and ash. After it cooled, I bagged it and carried it to the garbage can on the curb. Let them have the print. They’d never have the shoe that made it, by God.
There was no question I would track the monster who stole Cara from my life, my heart. I hadn’t used the swarm that way before, but there was always a first time. I made false starts and stops and almost gave up, but hatred and sorrow wouldn’t let me. I called the swarm. I didn’t control it, as the paranormal can’t be controlled. After all, it exists outside people. I might be given insights, but that didn’t mean I could call it on the phone and tell it to boogie like a meth head promised a fix.
One day during a swarm of light and ethereal sound, I saw his house. I didn’t know where it was yet, exactly. I saw that it was a modest bungalow and it was north, near Stanford, California, between San Francisco and San Jose. That was as close as I could come, no matter how hard I concentrated, meditated, begged, and prayed. I’d find it. If it took a year, two years, I’d find it.
I’d find him, and when he wasn’t suspecting, I’d come up behind him and I’d stab him in the back so the knifepoint pierced his black heart. I’d ride him down like a mad dog and stab him until he stopped moving. This was murder I contemplated, but if I didn’t do it, who would? I couldn’t tell the police.
Here’s how that would surely play out. “Sir, it’s a bungalow, nice place, good neighborhood. He lives alone. How do I know he’s the killer? Well, there’s this ‘swarm’ that happens, and…”
Like that was going to work out well. If I didn’t know it was the truth, I wouldn’t even believe it myself.
I asked for time off from work. They knew I was still mourning and let me have whatever time I wanted.
I equipped the trusty Camry with a cooler for water bottles and ice. I selected three different kitchen knives and then went to JCPenney, searched the kitchen utensils, and bought two more. I brought along a baseball cap, sunglasses, and surgical gloves. I wasn’t going to prison for avenging Cara and ridding the world of this murderous bastard. I had my cell charged and a charger in the car’s lighter socket. I had a flashlight with new batteries. Maybe I could have used a gun, but I didn’t own one, and buying one new wasn’t going to happen. Buying one illegally wasn’t going to happen, either. I didn’t even know those kinds of people, the ones who sell guns.
This killer stabbed my girl with some sharp instrument—the medical examiner wasn’t quite sure what—and I would stab him in return. It seemed to me he should reap what he’d sown, feel the pain he’d dispensed, and die the sort of death he most heartily deserved. Had I ever killed before? No. But this wouldn’t be like that. It would be taking back what was stolen from me and paying the piper for the strange tune he sang to lure away my girl. It would set the scales aright. I didn’t think I could live unless I did it. I couldn’t eat or sleep, and could hardly breathe from the time I woke in the morning until I passed out at night.
I had to do it.
I watched him watching her. The monster sat in his indistinguishable concrete gray Ford Taurus for hours, his head turned toward her house.
First I found his bungalow. The swarm helped a little once I got close. I’d driven the streets of a dozen neighborhoods before it happened. I had to rent a motel room for days, it took so long. When I neared his place I ran off the street and onto the curb and sidewalk. Had to jerk the wheel. I passed the house and slowed. I parked, sweating or crying, the dampness coming down my cheeks from somewhere. I hung over the steering wheel, trying to breathe. I was too close to him. I could feel his darkness like a cloud at my back. His sickness poisoned the air and left it short of oxygen. I had to leave here, run, hide. I had to get away, fast, fast.
Back at the motel I sat on the bed with the draperies drawn, and in the dim lamplight I arranged the shining knives on the white sheets. I had to choose one, the right one. If I wanted to be sure to kill him and not get myself killed, I better choose well.
I finally picked it up. The big, shiny new knife with the stainless-steel shaft, the razor edge, and the fine wood grip. It would do. If I came with enough speed and aggression behind it, the blade would sink right through muscle, slide off rib bone, and puncture the heart like a bag of salt.
Now I had to trail this monster, mongoose after a snake, so I’d know when to strike.
If I could get that close.
I saw her coming from the first. I looked out the front window when I heard her car bounce off the curb and come to a halt down the block. I slipped to the door and peered out. She leaned over the wheel and I knew that dark hair. It was a shock and stunned me breathless for a few seconds. I knew the driver, Ten’s mother.
The days after discovering she trailed me, I allowed it. I never glanced back, never behaved as if I saw her car. She, of course, had come for revenge. I hadn’t expected it, but it wasn’t that much of a surprise, either. I just couldn’t figure how she found me. If she could do it, how far behind were the cops?
That’s the only thing bothering me. Her? She was a delightful mystery to solve. She trailed me for days and there was a smile on my face the entire time. It didn’t mean I wasn’t wary. I knew her whereabouts every second. This did impede the plans for Eleven, however. That number was slipping away as time passed driving to the grocery, the convenience store, the department store, and the park in town. I’d called and arranged a sub for my few classes. A personal matter, I told them, I’d rather not discuss it.
Murder. Revenge. The taking of a nosy mother who couldn’t give up her daughter. It was definitely personal. The more days I spent waiting for her to get close to me—and I gave her ample opportunities—the closer I felt myself lifting to the surface of the real world. Like the eel burbling up toward the sun from the cool depths, it made me irritated, and finally I thought I would snap.
I carried the driftwood cane with me everywhere. I’d use it a third time if Ten’s mother would just. Get. On. With. It.
I was horrified when I realized he knew I stalked him. The swarm let me know. I was around the side of the gas station waiting for him to pay for gas when I was swarmed, and this time the sound accompanying the colors filled with voices. I caught snatches of warnings from men, women, maybe even angels or aliens for all I knew. He knows. He sees you. He’s waiting for you. He’ll murder…
I suffered faintness and swayed and stumbled back against the station wall. My car was parked in back. I held on to the wall as I clawed my way there.
He knew.
He waited for me. He wanted me to come after him. That’s when he’d kill me just as he had killed Cara. My God.
What could I do but go to the police? Whether they believed me or not, I had to tell them now. If I stayed here much longer, this man would take my life.
I sat in the car, watching the building in case he came around back to find me. I gripped the big knife, my hand shaking and knuckles white.
I made it to the Stanford Police station, and on weak legs went inside to ask for a detective. I sat across from him and didn’t know where to start. Then, once I’d begun, I couldn’t stop, the story spilling out of me, words running together, my heart racing, my eyes wide. I tried to calm down. I could see the officer’s discomfort, his disbelief. I began crying, though I didn’t want to, I tried not to. It wouldn’t help me to cry. Just the opposite. I already sounded nuts, and crying only cemented it.
Blubbering, my voice softened and trailed off until I sat there with a tissue in my hand, my head down, eyes lowered. I didn’t want to see the officer’s face. I knew it would prove how badly my explanation sounded to reasonable ears. A “swarm”? Psychic? Murderer living in their fair town?
They asked for his address, at least, since I had no name, and after the officer checked it out on his computer, he glanced at me suspiciously. “This man is a psychology professor at Stanford. You know, the research university?”
I was so stunned my mouth fell agape and I couldn’t speak. A college professor? Of psychology? A killing machine on campus—was that even possible?
“That’s ridiculous,” I said, drying my eyes and cheeks. My spirit was back. I was strong and I’d have to get to the truth of this.
“It certainly is ridiculous,” the officer said, standing, hitching up his belt. “Or perhaps incredulous might be closer to it. I doubt very much we have a serial killer teaching psychology here. That would be…be…” He couldn’t finish. He flung out his hand as if shooing a fly. “Ma’am, I’m sorry for your loss. I know about your daughter’s case. Can I drive you to your motel?”
He wasn’t going to listen to any more of it; he made that clear. He waited for me to rise. But hadn’t he heard of Ted Bundy, who worked as a lawyer? Who had hung out on a campus? Why couldn’t Cara’s killer be a professor?
It was the Swarms, Psychics, Killers on campus. It was too much, and how could I have thought for a moment he’d protect me? I was the insane one, not my daughter’s murderer. I believed in “feelings” and “signs” and “voices.” I was a threat to one of their finest citizens. He was a prominent man, an intelligent elite. It had all turned in a somersault, leaving me on the bottom.
My shoulders sagged as he walked me from the office, down the hall, and to my car. I drove back home a hundred miles while watching the rearview mirror. He’d be coming for me. I might as well have put the target big and red on my back. How laughable I was. How…ridiculous my hope for vengeance. I threw the knives on the floorboard and drummed my heels.
The swarm nagged me all the way home, warning of this and of that. Warning of darkness, of shadows, of sharp things and pointed objects, of the need for safety. Perhaps I should run to Mexico. Fly to Hawaii. No one would believe me. He was a teacher. An outstanding member of society, educated, and known. He was above reproach. This was an abomination. I saw no way out of it, no method to make him pay, and now I had to watch everything. Even with the assistance of the swarm, I didn’t believe I could find a way out of it except to flee.
I thought she might leave town. Yet there she was in her apartment, her shadow behind the blinds treading across the room from wall to wall. I tired of watching her. She was pacing, a mother lion. I needed to kill her. I needed to be rid of the one person in all the world who knew me for what I was and had done—not to mention where I lived. Had she seen me the night of her daughter’s abduction? I’d only been across the street as she’d sprinted past on the opposite sidewalk. I hadn’t seen her glance over, but I’d made one mistake already, and this could be another. She could ruin everything.
Tense and ready, I stepped off the curb and crossed the street to her apartment complex. She lived on the ground floor, facing an open, empty courtyard. I stood at her door. I reached and unscrewed the door light so the soft night embraced me. I peeked around to the front window, and just then she dragged the drapery edge aside and we were staring into each other’s faces. She flew back, dropping the drapery, and I hurriedly jimmied the door. I’d practiced for years until it was second nature to release a lock. I was inside, the apartment dimly lit, but I didn’t see her anywhere. I turned my head this way and that, listening, holding my breath.
Then I heard her whisper down the hall and I pulled the goblin cane from my pocket.
He stood outside! We were inches apart, the window glass between us. His eyes blazed and the swarm threatened to hit. I pleaded in a panicked whisper, “Not now, not now.” I gripped the hefty knife hard and ran. I had carried it every waking moment and was now glad I had.
I raced for my bedroom, where my cellphone lay on the side table. I heard him behind me, shutting the door. He was inside!
I waited behind the bedroom door for him to enter the room. I must stand and fight. I hadn’t time to do more than I’d done by dialing 911 and dropping the cell to the carpet to kick it underneath the bed.
“Hello, Mother,” he said quietly. Goosebumps broke out on my arms, my neck, even my scalp.
As he cleared the door and before he could swivel his head in my direction, I lunged, burying the knife blade into his shoulder. I’d missed his back, his torso, and I screamed, knowing I’d merely winged him. I jerked out the knife with adrenaline-laced effort and ran across the room, putting my back to the wall near the bathroom.
He hadn’t screamed in pain, and in fact the silence was eerie. I’d buried the knife right below the collarbone, down to its hilt. It had to hurt fiercely, but not a sound issued from him. He hadn’t even raised a hand to the wound. I could smell coppery blood and gagged.
“You killed Cara and I’ll kill you for it,” I said.
He reached into his coat pocket and withdrew what I knew instantly was the item he’d used to kill my girl. I couldn’t see it clearly, but it was wickedly sharp-pointed. He held it by the top of the shaft. It looked crooked, like him, and it made me lose my breath. The swarm came, the room turned in a tornado of light and sound and color. My brain wanted to shut down. It would be so easy to pass out and let him at me. Get it over with. And then the voices rose, a cacophony shouting that I wake up, that I fight, and if they could, they would help.
I came back from the near faint and he was halfway across the room, favoring his shoulder. I saw blood dripping across the carpet. I’d wait no more. I’d die and join Cara, I didn’t care, it didn’t matter. I needed a victory.
I rushed him, the knife raised, and he tried to block it with the strange stick in his hand, but the impact broke it loose, sending it flying to the floor. He balled his fist to strike, but the knife found his gut this time, sinking into his sausage belly. I dragged it out and struck again, not knowing I was screaming at the top of my lungs. The knife was deflected this time and spun like a silver dagger across the carpet, landing near the far wall.
I backed away, circled the bleeding man with his bared teeth, and made for the hall. When I got to the front door I detected sirens in the distance and prayed they’d come from the 911 call.
“Stop running,” he said behind me at the entrance to the living room. The door wouldn’t unlatch or open. He’d done something to the lock. I dove around the sofa, got to my knees, then my feet, and hurried back down the hall for the kitchen. I opened the pantry door there and slid inside. I had to hold my breath when I heard his dragging footsteps enter the room.
Oh, God, I silently cried, help me. The swarm crept over me like a soft, multicolored shawl playing orchestra violins. I had no weapon except canned goods on the shelves. As I looked at them, the cans glowed lime and I saw the absurdity of it. I heard him shuffling, slower and slower. He’d stopped near the kitchen island and I pictured him leaning there to prop himself up. He was bleeding to death. His stomach was punctured and leaking poison into his body.
Die, I thought, bleed out, die, die now.
His voice pierced the silence. “Mothers always ruin everything,” he said. I could hear the pain in his voice. He was dying, but slowly, too slowly.
The swarm hadn’t left me. It lingered around my body with soft colors and only a strain of a single violin.
“You killed my daughter,” I said. “You stole my girl from me and she was all I had.”
“You’re a peon, an ignorant worker slave, a…a nothing. So was the girl. I hate you with a rage you can’t imagine. Because of you…”
The sirens neared and I pushed open the pantry door. I stood in the dark, watching him. He lay across the table, one arm hanging over the edge to keep him anchored.
“This is what you did to Cara. You stabbed her with your sharp stick and left her to bleed alone in a dirty alley.”
“A goblin’s cane,” he said, coughing blood.
“Monster.” I took a couple steps toward him. I understood “goblin’s cane” the way I understood “a swarm.” There were mysterious objects and events in the world no one could explain. Magical elements of good and of evil. It took tremendous effort to deal in either.
The siren screamed, then abruptly shut off at my front walk. “They’re coming,” I said, leaving him on the table to try to let in the police.
When they finally knocked down the door and returned with me to the kitchen, when they had the lights on and the house searched, he was gone.
I barely survived. It was close a number of times, and once my heart needed a restart. I had to be secretly smuggled across the border to Mexico for surgery. I haven’t been back to the States for six months. They’re looking for me for extradition, but I’m safe, hidden in a Mexican shack on the edge of a Sonoran desert. A young man I trust helps me. He cooks, cleans, runs my bath, changes my bandages, and administers the medicine. I read psychology textbooks and the philosophy of Nietzsche while I wait to recuperate.
Everything is gone—my position at the university, my home, even my face. I expected I might need an exit plan if anyone ever made me. I had money stashed, a huge savings, as I never required much. I had medical staff on call and the shack under the shocking sun. I had to have plastic surgery on top of repairing my shoulder and intestines. I’m handsomer now, my jaw harder, my eyes wider, cheekbones higher, and lips fuller.
She won’t know me when I come for her eventually. The only thing the same is my voice, so when I finally do have her alone and speak to her…she’ll know.
When she sees the goblin’s cane, she’ll know for sure.
My lovely number Eleven. She hasn’t realized you can’t deter a fucking genius.