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TWO STUDENTS KILLED WITH CLAW HAMMER
It has been revealed that the bodies of Jocelyn and Ella Dunlop, discovered on the MSU campus by fellow student Natalie Smalls on April 8th, had both been bound with fishing wire and repeatedly bludgeoned with a claw hammer. In a police statement issued yesterday Detective Ryan Mills, Deputy Chief of the Bozeman Police Department, said the extensive injuries sustained by the two students, who were both attending MSU, “had rendered initial identification impossible.”
Police are still calling for witnesses or anyone who might have seen anything suspicious on or around April 8th.
Mimic examined the online news article on his iPad for the second time, but figured he’d bided his time in the car long enough. He put the device in the glove box and took off his jacket. He rolled up his powder-blue shirtsleeves and gently closed and locked his charcoal Toyota Corolla behind him.
It was past dusk and the kids he’d watched earlier sharing crank by the deserted gas station had moved on. All in the scuzzy neighbourhood was still as he ambled up the tiny incline of gravelled driveway. It bordered an unkempt garden and led down the side of the dilapidated two-storey house he’d been observing.
He didn’t want to leave his car unattended for too long. It would be like a punk magnet in a shithole like Billings. There were some local places worth visiting, though. He’d done a little online research and gleaned the Pictograph Cave State Park was a must, as well as Lake Elmo and Pompey’s Pillar National Landmark. It wasn’t a rush job and that made a pleasant change. Normally he didn’t have time to take in the scenery, but he was determined to do a little more of that while he was on the road.
He paused a third of the way along the alleyway between the vinyl sidings of the house and its neighbour. A door slammed and then bare feet slapped on concrete. Somebody had just walked from the back of the property into the yard situated through the wooden side gate to his right. There was only one person it could be.
Trip Stillman’s long yard was secluded, tall conifers affording him privacy but also obscuring the back area from any windows overlooking him. He’d inherited a burglar alarm and had security lights front and back. It took Trip just under three minutes to hang out his washing, but it was two minutes and fifty seconds longer than Mimic needed. He slipped in during the gap in illumination Trip repeatedly triggered by waving his hand at the sensor as he pegged out his laundry. When Trip returned to the kitchen, Mimic was upstairs.
Trip put the empty basket on the table and locked the back door again. He knew he had to be security-conscious. It was a bad neighbourhood he’d just moved into, despite his parents’ misgivings, but snapping up the foreclosed property was the only way he could afford a place of his own. He thought he’d never escape Kalispell but he’d just put over four hundred miles between him, Skylar, his psycho ex, his brain-dead band members and all the assholes of his childhood, even if the south side of Billings was where he’d landed.
Mimic waited, crouching low on the far side of his bed in the gap between it and the wall. The bed sheets were a dirty grey and smelt of stale sweat, and the carpets hadn’t been vacuumed since he’d moved in. Trip couldn’t afford a vacuum. He’d posted that on Facebook. Although Mimic’s body exhibited the wear, tear and encroaching flab of over half a century, he was very much an ambassador of social media.
How long should he wait here, until Trip came upstairs? The houses opposite were boarded up so nobody could overlook him work. It was late and maybe time for Trip to take a shower. Naked was good. He got a waft off the bed again. Perhaps washing wasn’t top of his agenda, though. Attacking him on the landing would be better. The passage between rooms was usually where people least expected to be assaulted.
He listened to the downstairs activity, looked at his hands hanging between his knees and the blue surgical gloves he’d just pulled on. Trip had the radio loud and was singing along, badly. He liked to wait. Give them a sense of all being normal; let them settle into their daily rhythm. It was when they were most vulnerable.
His breathing had slowed now but was slightly constricted by his squatting position, and his knees ached. He hadn’t had any dinner and hoped Trip had something in the refrigerator. Some ham and cheese for a sandwich, maybe. His mouth watered thinking about it. His stomach gurgled a response.
That made his mind up. He heard his knees crack as he raised himself and strode back across the bedroom. He stopped at the small Heineken mirror beside the door and examined his reflection. Mimic was balding at the front but had a thick step of amber hair at the back of his pate. Most people thought he wore a toupee but, in fact, the fibrous yellow clump was all his.
He was way below average height, five foot four and shrinking. It meant he got overlooked in bars and lost in crowds, which was a real virtue in his line of work. He had an avuncular face that appeared to be tanned but was actually a mass of freckles. They usually flourished in the summer, but their reactions had slowed as much as his had lately and set up permanent camp on his weatherworn features.
His only distinguishing detail was a straight line that ran from his receding hairline and cut through his temple, stopping just above his right eyebrow. It looked like somebody had taken a blade to him, but it was a sleep wrinkle that was getting deeper. He supposed the passing years made the skin hang looser around your skull.
But he was more distracted by what was at the corners of his mouth. The little blobs of white spittle were already back even though he’d only just wiped them away. It made him look as if he were permanently eating a chicken mayo sandwich. The deposits seemed to materialise the day he turned fifty. He took his white handkerchief out of his top shirt pocket and swiped them off, and took a deep, faltering breath at the door.
People’s reactions were often unpredictable, but he’d learnt to anticipate every conceivable eventuality. Flight was the usual response. But as he’d heard Trip lock the back door, he knew he had the time it would take him to try and unlock it to subdue him. Defensive counterattack was also likely, particularly with women. They seemed to respond with physical force faster than men. Males took several more seconds to realise it wasn’t a joke and for their egos to recover from having been caught off guard. Those few seconds were his window of opportunity. Brute force took care of faster feminine reflexes.
He didn’t need to cover up his footsteps back down the stairs. The radio and tone-deaf singing gave him ample cover. Mimic couldn’t sing either, and the idea that somebody had been listening in on him in such a private moment would have mortified him. He stood outside the door to the kitchen and waited for Trip to finish murdering Chris Martin. Somebody should, he thought. When Trip started the next performance he would walk in.
But at that moment, the door opened and Mimic was face-to face-with Trip’s anaemic features. He was chewing gum and his jaw halted. Mimic grinned as if he’d been caught midway through some piece of well-intentioned mischief, removed the hammer from the waistband at the back of his pants and slammed it forcefully into the left side of the kid’s skull. His head sunk to the bottom stair, and the weight of it dragged the rest of his limp body down.
Mimic dumped the bloody claw hammer on the kitchen table. It was a clumsy but effective implement. A glance at the crime stats for a two hundred mile radius had soon yielded the story about the Dunlop sisters being bludgeoned with the same weapon in Bozeman last April. The perp had never been caught. Mimic had purchased the hammer and fishing wire from a hardware store before he’d entered Billings.
He opened the refrigerator door. Corned beef. OK, he could work with that. As long as there was mustard. No fucking mayo.
