Serial Killing for Fun & Profit

It had been twelve months since the serial killer first struck. One single Friday night and sixteen were dead by the same hand, in the same manner, and dumped in the exact same place. The tragedy, terrible though it might be, was written off as the work of a one-time mass murderer by everyone, from the police to the press to the general public – at least, it was until the Friday night two weeks later, when another twelve were ripped apart.
A serial mass murderer – not unheard of, but certainly not orthodox behavior either. (Of course, it wasn’t like a single murder was very orthodox either, but it was at least expected.) In the first two months, his killings every fortnight ranged from four to nineteen victims. After that, his thirst for such extreme violence was seemingly satiated as the slayings fell to seven each time – or a death every other day, if you were fond of averaging it out like the papers were. People fled the city in droves, but there were always the ones who just knew nothing would happen to them, sure that they were above these senseless events and catastrophes that occur to the rest of the world. The same manner of people were the ones listed among the casualties of a hurricane or tsunami after refusing to evacuate. The killer had a vast group from which to choose his victims.
The victims themselves posed an impediment for the multitude of law enforcement agencies pooling resources in an attempt to track down the killer – or ‘Hell’s Monster’, as the papers had dubbed him nearly eleven months back, in a singularly inspired burst of idiocy. Most serial killers, however deranged, had a method to their madness, a similarity between who they chose to kill. The victims of Hell’s Monster were all over the place: young, old, teenaged; crippled, healthy, robust; male, female, undecided; genius, illiterate, normal; from the south end of the city, from the factories by the river, from the mansions in the north; doctors, mechanics, teachers, fast food industry burger-flippers. No group was safe, no group unfairly targeted. Not that this stopped every minority in the city from claiming it was a racist, sexist, homophobic white lawyer doing the killings.
The mayor, Charles Oliver, was doing his best to keep people from panicking, even if his own police force refused to patrol every other Friday night. Anyone who was intelligent, one detective argued, would be in their nice and locked-up apartment or house or shelter (All homeless shelters in the city were no longer allowed to turn away anyone on those Friday nights.) and if they weren’t, then maybe Hell’s Monster was doing them a favor by ridding the gene pool of idiots.
I nearly got busted down to a traffic cop for that crack and did receive a week’s unpaid suspension from the force, but I feel it was worth it. They never asked me to patrol on those nights again, anyway.
After twelve months of constant terror, people started getting used to it, went about their lives like normal for thirteen days before returning to their homes and cowering under their beds. On Saturday morning, they’d come right back out and take their kids to Little League games and picnics, and some would start planning the funerals. The resiliency of the human spirit never ceases to amaze. Or maybe that’s stupidity; I always forget how the saying goes. The theater owners were a bit miffed over the loss in revenue at the beginning (Fridays formerly being their biggest money day.) but most screens were sold out all of Saturday, so they got over it fairly quickly. The crime rate had even dropped to a record low since, aside from Hell’s Monster himself, criminals were just as afraid of everyone else of being killed. Murders other than those attributed to the serial killer became all but nonexistent. Max Garcia, salutatorian of my high school class, suggested (from a local prison where he’s currently serving a five year armed robbery sentence) this was because no one wanted to be caught and mistaken for the serial killer. Makes sense. When or if he was caught (When, according to my stalwart coworkers; if, according to my brother, who is a stock-broker and very well schooled in statistics.) he was definitely up for the death penalty, and our state doesn’t even have the death penalty. Don’t ask me how that works, I’m just a cop. It’s not like I have to know how the law works or anything.
Finally, Mayor Oliver (or Uncle Chuck, as we like to call him at Thanksgiving) sent out a plea to the federal authorities for help. The Federal Bureau of Investigation, with an undeniable air of smugness, sent over a team of their very best agents, post-haste. That had been well over a month ago, so the Feds weren’t feeling too smug now. The J. Edgar Hoover Building had come under fire for not catching the killer the very second they had set foot in the city, of course. The police were supposed to fail, they were just normal cops, but the FBI was supposed to be superior, gosh darn it!
And then word came. World-famous Benjamin Grant, the poster-child of the Central Intelligence Agency, was returning from whichever nation our wonderful country had decided to attack this week and had volunteered to solve the Hell’s Monster case. Oliver accepted immediately. The local police and the FBI may have failed, but this was Benjamin Grant. Benjamin Grant could do no wrong, could solve anything, was a modern day Superman without the loser alter ego.
And I was appointed to show him around.
“A great honor to you,” Oliver had said. I could have very well done without the dubious honor, since not only did it cut into my extracurricular time; it also made everyone around the office mutter under their breath about favoritism. They were probably right, but it brought up all the old insinuations that the only reason I had ever been made a detective was because my uncle ran the city. They had shut up about that after I solved my first case in nearly record time, a hit-and-run that turned out to be an actual hit from the Mob, which had made me laugh loudly and at great length when I found it out. Now that I think about it, it might have been the hysterical laughter that stopped the muttered comments, not my incredible talent and investigative skills. But whatever the reason, the remarks had stopped.
Benjamin Grant was tall, broad-shouldered, and entirely full of himself. I could tell the second he stepped into the building and all the normal chatter and laughter and shouting had stopped dead. He gazed around the squad room like a king surveying his land and I, resigned to my fate, stood to face him. His eyes narrowed a bit – on anyone else, it would have been a squint, but on him it was a princely glance, – likely at the temerity of my daring to stand and face him, the Almighty. Jackass.
I knew without looking in a mirror that I was sneering. I could feel my face screwing up, my lip curling, and my eyes glowering. I knew this because the same thing happened every family dinner I went to, and my mom would immediately start nagging me about why was I sneering, what was wrong, when had I become so arrogant anyway, don’t you dare give me that look young man. I don’t go to many family dinners these days, not the least because I mentally categorize my eldest brother in the same age group as my parents, and that’s just disturbing. My uncle dear had probably not intended for me to greet our savior with an ugly glare, but he had given the job to me, so I was going to do it my way. Or the highway. Hopefully he’d regret it and never give me something like this again.
One muttered, whirlwind tour of the station later (and a bit of deliberate misinformation about which department was where), I threw the full case file at Grant and told him to read it that night. (I was slightly impressed that he didn’t collapse from having the file hit him dead on, the thing weighed twenty pounds easy.) Then I left. He rushed after me for a few steps, demanding to know where I was going and wasn’t I going to stay and help him learn the case? I informed him that it was my bowling night, and that I assumed he was able to read, but if he couldn’t I’d gladly catch him up. He glowered, and I left. The insulting of another’s intelligence was a surefire method of getting one’s own way, I had always found. It had the slight side effect of pissing them off, but most things I did had the same result, so I didn’t let it bother me.
Unfortunately, I did eventually have to work with Grant. This evil monster had to be captured, after all. (Now, I was all for letting him continue as long as he kept the crime rates down, but no one in the office seemed to agree with that opinion. Well, Rivera might’ve, but she was too busy yelling about how we always assumed it was a man as the killer, and couldn’t it very well be a woman mass murdering around the city? O’Keefe shut her up by pointing out that a serial killer wasn’t a good thing and that women should be happy that the vast majority of serial killers are men.) The morning after Grant arrived – Friday morning, natch – he had already formulated a daring plan to root out the evil being. One that included both of us going undercover in the old Heriot section of town –Heriot being some ancient, obscure word referring to a tribute paid to a feudal lord that some enterprising young landowner had decided would be an excellent, dandy name for a neighborhood of young urban professionals in the city. His fine vision of a rich land separate from the squalor of usual city living was dashed not long after everything was built, as many tenants found the cost of living too high and moved out, allowing the empty buildings to be overtaken by squatters and fall into disrepair. Heriot was now half slums and half brave (and/or) crazy rich guys with strongholds full of guns and a distinct lack of moral convictions. According to Grant and his fancy-ass algorithms or what-the-hell-ever, nearly ninety percent of the victims were either from Heriot or were killed there or dumped there or worked there or had family there or friends. Had some connection to the place, anyway.
I seriously doubted this; with all the billions of people on the case, wouldn’t one of them have figured it out before he did? But the Chief was all smiles and thankful praise to Grant, our savior, praise him, praise him, our savior hast come at last. I mimed aiming a gun and shooting CIA spook in the back of the head, making sure it was at an angle that only O’Keefe, who was currently on ‘guard duty’, could see. He bit his lip and coughed into his hand to muffle his giggles. I grinned, and then tuned back into the conversation just in time to hear the Chief give the go-ahead. I couldn’t help myself. I blurted out, “Are you insane?!” and stared at the Chief in slack-jawed incredulity. It was one thing for Grant to propose some half-assed idea in which we wind up as bait with a ninety-nine percent chance of falling off the hook, it was quite another for my boss to actually agree with the idiot (or for anyone above age eight, for that matter).
The Chief glowered at me, and I had a sudden, sinking recollection that he really didn’t like me, and had protested my appointment as a detective at the top of his lungs violently and long-windedly. I have this problem, you see, in which I tend to believe that everyone loves me right up until the point they shoot at me. I get shot at a lot, but most generally miss, either because they weren’t aiming to hit or because I’m rather twitchy (mostly the latter). My old partner, a couple years back, actually got a bullet in me. He still swears it was an accident, but he swears with this little half-smirk on his face, so I’m not sure I believe him. “No, I’m not insane, but I do have half a mind to take you off the case!” the Chief snapped, bringing me back from the nostalgia of cute nurses in the hospital.
I blinked, and signs of my joy at that statement must have shown on my face, because then he sneered at me, “But the rest of me is hoping that you become a tragic causality in this trap. So you’re still on the case, Lake. Oh, and you’re now under Special Agent Grant’s command. Have a nice day.”
He wasn’t serious, he couldn’t be serious, he just couldn’t! I stumbled out of the room, just a little bit horrified by the prospect of kowtowing to Mr. CIA. And, you know, the prospect of my own death looming uncomfortably near. O’Keefe patted me on the back sympathetically and almost managed to bury the amusement in his eyes completely. I could tell it was there, but the sheer effort he had made touched me. Really, it did.
I’ll admit that Grant didn’t take control with malicious glee like I would have had the situation been reversed. You’d think it would make me like the guy, but it just made it worse. There’s some saying, I bet, about how the graciousness of the great is more than any mortal man can take. And if there isn’t, there damn well should be.

***

The smart side of his plan was the fact there was a definite scarcity of anyone on the streets on Friday nights, so the killer was pretty much guaranteed to come after us. The idiotic side of his plan was that the killer was guaranteed to come after us. I actually planned on living a long, full, happy life, with billions of little brats. (O’Keefe’s response is generally to ask why on Earth I decided to be a cop, and how I expected to have any children at all when my longest relationship was all of five weeks long and had been in ninth grade.) Maybe my methods weren’t the best, but I still hoped to achieve the same end result. Eventually.
As traps went, it was fairly simple: we wander around Heriot until one of us is grabbed, then we get him. Grant says he likes his plans to be a little flexible, just in case we run into some problems. I thought about pointing out the “problem” of the many, many cops who had already attempted to capture the killer and had wound up dead, but in the end I kept my mouth shut. I had already mentioned it nine times (and counting) and he still wasn’t paying attention.
So alas, here I stand on some random street corner, attempting to drink a cup of piping hot coffee (which, by the way, I detest) without burning off anything important, waiting to become a statistic. An event I was almost looking forward to, as this endless, nervous anticipation had to be far worse than any death. It was almost as bad as walking the beat back in my thankfully short patrol officer days before the promotion.
When a hand reached out of the darkness and covered my mouth, gripping hard, I abandoned all the years of advanced police training I had under my belt and reacted instinctively. Not so much the instincts nature had give me as the natures two older brothers had instilled, though. An elbow to the gut of the guy – who had to be the killer, because what kind of idiotic jackass would be mugging people on a killing night? – standing behind me, treading over where logic dictated his feet should be, flailing my arms in an attempt to grab hold something that would be incredibly painful.
He dropped me to the pavement, and I whirled around in time to see a flash of metal coming at me too fast to be good for my well-being. This time, the training kicked in and I ducked under the whirl of the knife, although the action sent me sprawling across the rough pavement. I yelled off a curse or eight as I hit, managing to bite my tongue in the process. Brilliant. Blood was so the last thing I wanted to taste before meeting my maker – not that I thought I would, being all agnostic and so on, but it was a useful euphemism.
There was a shout from the next corner down and then the blast and echo of a gunshot going wide. Taking the opportunity so fortuitously presented to me, I rolled away from my startled attacker and quickly glanced down the street to the origin of the noise, although I was already pretty sure of whom it was.
Sure enough, Benjamin Grant was barreling down the street towards us, gun in hand. He had fired it off as a warning shot, and to distract the attacker from our tussle long enough for me to get away. The killer gave a mirthless grin and leapt to meet Grant, knife at the ready. I shuddered as I scrambled to my feet, getting my first good look at the knife. As long as my forearm and laced with jagged edges, the knife was definitely not something I’d want sticking in me and slicing open my innards like the other victims. Not that I had envied them before or anything.
They struggled for a moment, an unstoppable force meeting an unmovable wall, only without the whole ‘breaking the laws of physics and so destroying the world’ deal. Then a foot lashed up, and Grant’s gun flew through the air in a graceful arc. I watched with a detached sense of wonder as it soared upwards and then crested toward the ground, a detachment that ended as it hit the pavement and fired off the live round within, the bullet striking a nearby trashcan with a loud ding and ripping noise.
Grant, in response, kneed the guy in the groin. I winced in sympathy as he went down, momentarily. Grant took this brief respite to shout, “LAKE! GUN!” at me. I stared at him for a moment before the meaning clicked into my mind, and I struggled to pull my Glock out of its shoulder holster. Ah, the shoulder holster. More convenient than an ankle holster but less obvious than a simple belt. Besides, I kept my cell phone and pager on my belt. The gun finally popped free and, after a quick check to make sure the safety was on, I threw it at Grant with my usual uncanny aim. It occurred to me shortly after the gun left my hand that maybe I should have shot the guy myself. But it was probably for the best. My aim while throwing is dead on, but when it comes to shooting my accuracy is spotty at best – even after years of being a cop, loud noises make me flinch, another side effect of having two older brothers – and that’s when I haven’t just been face-to-face with my own probable death.
He caught it easily, and pointed it down at the man currently on the ground. “Freeze,” he said. “You’re under arrest.” I stared at him. He was actually trying to arrest this psychopath? What was the point? The psychopath appeared to agree with me, as his hand zipped towards his butcher’s knife. Grant fired once, twice, straight into his chest, and the man stopped.
The world froze in that instant: the body of a murderer lying in a growing pool of blood; Benjamin Grant, standing over the corpse breathing heavily, face covered in blood spatter; and me, awkwardly crouching a couple of feet away and wondering if now would be a good time to ask for my gun back.
Grant had me use my cell to call headquarters and inform them that we were going to need a body wagon – okay, so he actually told me to go to the phone booth on the corner and call for an ambulance, but I was well skilled in the art of translating the language of noble technophobes into English. Or American, at least. I had unfortunately managed to get a hold of O’Keefe, who immediately started to babble in awe until I informed that he had to either shut up or I would hang up on him.
The body wagon arrived quickly and along with it a squad car to take us back to the station. Grant had insisted on us going in dressed in plainclothes and on foot, as otherwise the killer might suspect us of being law enforcement officers. I had then rattled off a nice long list of the officers who had gotten killed; it wasn’t like the guy was avoiding us. That made Grant insist that I was proving his point, that he was prepared for cops. But if he thought we were two hobos or businessmen or something, he wouldn’t take nearly as many precautions.
It hurts to admit it, but the guy had been right.
Thanks to Grant being CIA, the usual Internal Affairs investigation into officer-involved shootings didn’t even occur. It probably wouldn’t have happened anyway, if I had been the one to shoot, no one was going to stir up fuss that maybe the shooting of a mass murderer was unneeded. Except the usual fruitcakes who, after this, would claim every single murder, suicide, and accidental death (and some of natural causes) were the work of Hell’s Monster, and that we had killed the wrong man, and those guys were all nuts anyway.
I continued my career as a homicide detective with an assignment to the trail of some guy who had managed to slip out of death row and had been seen hanging around various exotic locales within our own fine city. Come for the veal, stay for the psychotic killers! The higher-ups (higher-up than the Chief, that is) had decided that I had to have picked something up from Grant, so I was the man for any insane and amazingly dangerous assignment that no one in their right mind would take. I took them, mostly because I have a true coward’s talent for avoiding death and dismemberment and taking these jobs would look good when it came promotion time.
Needless to say, Benjamin Grant went on to be the nation’s hero, and the Central Intelligence Agency enjoyed an era of popularity not seen by a government agency since the adoration of G-Men during the Cold War. He unearthed about fifty foreign terrorists in the space of a month – I had to assume he had help from others in the agency, because that was just ridiculous otherwise. He wasn’t Superman, or even Batman. Maybe the Human Torch. But the hundreds of articles that came out after the even lauded him as the single solitary hero in each and every case. He even took down the Dragon, the single most powerful Mafia boss in history. (Also supposedly single-handedly, if I worked at the Central Intelligence Agency I’d be way pissed at the guy for constantly stealing my thunder. Of course, the media didn’t give me any credit for the takedown of Hell’s Monster, but I’m camera-shy anyway. And I got a bonus in my paycheck. So it evens out.

Of course, sometimes – like when I’m staring down at Grant, smiling up at me from the cover of Time with a banner reading ‘Person of the Year’ – I almost wish his plan had failed. Of course, I only wish that if it would have ended with him and not me being killed, I wasn’t crazy. And hey, bonus in my paycheck!