Darker Still (11 page)

He started the film back at the beginning and watched it again. He loved to see the way the whore behaved when he showed her who was boss. She thought she could tell him what was what and who he was? She thought she was too good for him? That was crazy talk. He put his mind to it and he got her in every possible way and he decided her fate in the end. That was power. That was control. He was the most important person in her life and she never would realize it. So she had to go.

He proudly finished the video as he sipped his herbal tea. It was one of life’s greatest pleasures. He loved it this way. There was nothing that could compare to the way he felt after a kill. The anticipation leading up to it was marvelous.

He switched to the footage of the actual kill. He always saved that for last. So much planning always went into that to make it special. He knew that it was the only thing in the world that really mattered to him. He had to get it right or the experience would be ruined. And it wasn’t like he could bring them back from the dead and have a do over.

He had told the girl that she was going to die right then. The terror overtook her and she went completely bonkers, letting go of every ounce of resistance. All that was left was to beg for mercy and he just didn’t have any mercy to give. He never had really. That was just not the way he was wired.

Thanks to his father that is. He hated to think of his father when he was about to watch and relive such a beautiful moment, but it happened sometimes. He hated to admit it but he was always trying to get his father’s approval, even now. With each kill he knew his father was around there somewhere pulling the strings and telling him that he was wrong and would never do anything right. He was still trying to please that piece of shit. He couldn’t believe it.

His father had beaten him for sport and when he didn’t do what he wanted the right way. His father expected him to excel at everything. He had been large for his age, but he was an awkward child and was never very athletic. His father had insisted he play sports anyway and when he messed up his father would call him stupid and lazy and a total disappointment. Then his father would beat him and beat him while he made him practice repeatedly. Every time he failed to do it perfectly he would suffer another round of beatings.

His mother would behave the same way when it came to his school work and his social standing. He was awkward and shy. He had never been good at making friends. He didn’t understand other people. Even then he knew that he was different. Other people had all of these feelings and emotions that he didn’t even begin to understand. He could not for the life of him grasp why people cried when they lost friends or family members. Nothing in your life really changed, although he would have felt relieved if his parents had died.

Which was probably why he had killed them both. It had been easy. He had been away on a class trip when the carbon monoxide detector failed and the carbon monoxide had asphyxiated them. He could thank his mother’s harping at him about his chemistry grades for showing him how carbon monoxide worked. It really was a beautiful gas. It just took a little tweaking to make it happen. Both of them had died in their sleep.

He had been left their life insurance and he was able to start his new life without any interference from them.

He smiled now as he thought of it and how it had been his first real taste of murder. He had thought about murder almost nonstop since he was very young. He knew that others did not have these ideas or these feelings, so he kept them all hidden away. But then when he was twelve he had discovered a book in his local bookstore about people who killed lots of people. He read it cover to cover and was fascinated to know that there were a lot of people in history just like him and he could learn from their mistakes to avoid detection.

He had devoured everything he could on the subject and about a year later he had captured his first victim and the rest was history.

He often thought about his roots and his beginnings and how far he had come. He watched the video of Holly Janson’s death repeatedly for the next three hours. It was just so amazing to watch and relive it and to remember how he had felt during every single piece of it. She had been such an Angel to him. It had been years since he’d had a victim that was so deserving and so worthy of his blade.

He finished burning the footage to a DVD and then he made two copies on the PC.

Now he could focus more on detective John Anderson. He had to be freaking out a bit after all of the carnage his delicate eyes had seen. But he had not seen anything yet. He didn’t know it yet, but his selfish feelings were going to be the cause of heartache that he could not possibly imagine coming for him.

The bastard thought he was untouchable and above everything. He actually thought that he was a worthy opponent. Please… the boy was still an amateur cop.

And if he survived what was in store for him then he would graduate to be an expert cop or he would be a total babbling basket case. It was going to be amazing no matter what.

The picture on his computer screen was the picture of a beautiful young woman. He finished pulling up all of the pictures he had taken of her at her friend’s house where she was “hiding” and a few shots even had her silly police escorts in them. He laughed so hard every time he saw the bumbling incompetence that the police force around there hired. Was that really the best they had to offer? It was beyond pathetic.

But nevermind them. He was much more focused on the beautiful girl. He had seen her before. He had known her sister very well.

Theresa had put up a pretty good fight, but something told him that Cheryl was going to be extra special.

John finished scarfing down his burger and fries just as Amy, the head of the forensics department came jogging up to his desk. She sat a folder with several pictures down in front of him.

He picked up the folders and began to look through them. The pictures were of a large man in his mid-fifties. John recognized it as the man that Trevor had pointed out before. And then beyond those pictures were pics of the license plate and very clear pics of the car he was driving.

“We got him!”

“I thought you would be glad to hear the good news,” Amy said.

“I’m super stoked.”

“Great. And by the way, your boy Professor Steven could not have committed that murder. The scum bag attorney was right; the timing was way off between where we have proof he was with his students and when the girl was killed. It happened at approximately the same time.”

“Wow, thank you so much. Did you tell the Chief?”

“I thought I would leave that honor to you good sir,” Amy flirted.

“Well, thank you ma’am.”

John ran down the hall to Michaels’s office. He showed him everything and the look on the Chief’s face was completely priceless. He wished he could just take a picture and keep it in his wallet for when he was feeling down. That picture would have perked his spirits no matter what.

He even seemed ok and happy about the fact that Raymond was right about the damn time not matching.

“Let’s go get his ass,” Michaels said.

John could not believe that they had a name and a face to go with their killer. It had been thirty some odd years in the making. The whole thing was a total mind trip. He could not believe that it was finally going to be over.

The Ripper’s name was Frank Alan Diel. He was a freelance photographer who made most of his money online by selling pictures to websites and stock photography websites. He had been doing this for ten years. He had been an Accountant before that for almost twenty years. He had risen to the top of his firm and become partner. Then just like that he had stepped away from it to just become a hermit and do freelance photography. It was a very odd career choice to anyone looking at it, but it did not really surprise John at all. Nothing about this freak did.

He read the bio information and statistics to the chief as they led an army of patrol cars to Frank Diel’s house. He would never see them coming. That was for sure. They were not sure if he was going to be home, but John was willing to bet that if he wasn’t home then he was going to be somewhere doing something very awful to some poor young woman that they were going to find mutilated in the next couple of days.

“So, apparently this guy’s parents died from mysterious circumstances when he was eighteen and he didn’t really have much other family around him. So he has been on his own since then.”

“You’re breaking my heart, kid. He was never questioned in the death of his parents?”

“He was away from the house at the time on a class trip. He had an airtight alibi; they died from carbon monoxide poisoning. And there were rumors around the neighborhood that his parents were abusive according to the new articles about the deaths of the parents. Odd that the neighbors would just add that out of the blue to something seemingly unrelated.”

Frank Diel lived about ten miles outside of Belpre up towards a small area known as Little Hocking. It was a bit off the beaten path, but John remembered playing little league on some of these fields when he was eight. It was actually the same summer that Frank Diel had killed his beloved sister and had tried to end his young life also.

He was going to make that son of a bitch pay for what he did that was for damn sure.

They pulled up in front of Frank’s house. He lived a bit off the main road down a long dirt road with no close neighbors. This was not at all surprising. He wanted his privacy. He needed it to conduct his clandestine activities. The place was perfect. John found himself wondering if there was some poor person in there right now being tortured. He wanted to run up the steps and kick the door in and shout that they were there for Frank. He wanted to see that son of a bitch piss in his pants.

The chief motioned for some of the officers to go around back and wait in case he tried to run and then he instructed the officer with the door breaching tool to ram the door. The door popped open and they all entered with guns drawn screaming at the top of their lungs.

“Police! Come out with your hands up! We have you surrounded!”

John tried to slow his pace down a bit so he didn’t end up just running hog wild through the house until he found the man. He wanted to get him so badly and slam his balls in a vise until they popped. He had never wanted a perp so badly in all of his career. He could taste this sick asshole on his tongue. That was how badly he needed this victory.

The house was nice and excessively neat in contrast to the pit of crap that had been the last house that Frank Diel had worked in. John was thinking what he had originally feared and that was the house they were at was just his normal day to day house he lived in. There was probably nothing in the place that could tie him to any wrong doing. Just like in his playhouse there would be nothing that would tie his identity to anything in that house. Never had John seen a subject who was so damn organized and so good at compartmentalization. He was able to be two completely different people and flip from one to the other faster than most people could change a T shirt. It was uncanny and John had seen some stuff in his time.

They did a complete sweep of the house and found nothing. There was no one there and there was nothing there out of the ordinary. They were going to have to just wait for him to come back. There was no way to tie him to another place. John could just imagine what Frank Diel was doing to some girl right then and they were powerless to stop it. They knew who he was and what he did. They had him and they were going to nail him forever, but for right now they just had to sit tight and wait. It was so damn frustrating.

“Well, this sucks,” Michaels said.

The sentiment was shared by the entire group.

John’s phone began to buzz right then. He cursed himself for not turning it off and he tried to ignore the rolling eyes of Michaels.

“Really detective? You forgot to turn your phone off when we are doing an ambush?”

“Sorry. I got too caught up in the moment,” John said. He ignored the stares and the anger bursting from the chief’s face right then.

He started to turn the phone off. But as he did so he received a text message with a picture attachment.

His heart almost stopped completely in his chest right then. It was a picture of Cheryl. She was tied to a pole above her head. She was naked and her feet were a few feet off of the floor. The panicked and painful look on her face was the stuff that nightmares were made of. John dropped his phone as he put his hands up to grab his head that felt like it was splitting wide open. Sharp bursts of pain followed by horrible flashes of light bursting through his eyes.

“John? What is it?” Michaels asked.

He saw the screen of John’s phone just then and he knew. He picked up the phone slowly and handed it back to John.

Just then the call came through again from a private number.

“Answer it,” Michaels said. “Go ahead, son. You have to.”

John took a deep breath and swallowed hard.

“Hello?”

“John! What a pleasant surprise. I hope you are well today,” Frank Diel said.

John wanted to shout at him and tell him exactly where he was. Michaels put a hand on his shoulder and shook his head no. His eyes told John everything that he already knew to do, but had temporarily forgotten due to his momentary lapse of judgment caused by the torture pictures of his girlfriend.

“I’m good. How are you?” John said with false cheer.

Frank laughed. “That is good John. Real good. It’s best to keep things light hearted and fun isn’t it?”

“I guess so. What do you want?”

“I want what I’ve always wanted since I met you that day thirty years ago; I want to watch you die a slow, painful death caused by my hand.”

“I’m sorry, I don’t think we carry that flavor,” John said through gritted teeth.

“Oh, come now John. You don’t want to be rude to me. I have something very valuable of yours.”

“I’m sorry, Mr…”

“Oh, we don’t need to go with labels today do we John?”