The Monster Within (17 page)

“This one actually looks like a suicide,” I say with a sort of sad, defeated feel to it.

“Except that it’s the exact same method of the others,” Mendez answers. “Two short sentences, a name, and a dramatic, horrific suicide. The coincidences are stacking up against these suicides. Had you not started poking around about this, I doubt any of us would have taken a peek into it. Thankfully, you’ve been such a pain in my ass, I had all suicide notifications sent through me. If a uniform found a suicide in this city, I wanted to be informed. This was the first one that popped up. Same MO as the others you listed in your report. Subtle, by the way.”

“I thought leaving it out in the open would draw some curious eyes,” I shrug. I shake my head at the peculiarity of all of this. “Lola Maretti ends up dead and no one has any clue if Lola knew Jenny Martinez. But, we know that Jenny Martinez had sex with Ted Martin the night before she commits her suicide. The following day, Chad here robs Ted on a four day theft spree, after which, Ted goes home and kills himself. Now, that night, Chad comes home, finds that his wife is leaving him because he’s been made, and kills himself in the most unreasonable way conceivable. So either this is all a bunch of random coincidence, or someone is doing this. Someone has to have known the four victims.”

“Except that other than the robbery,” Mendez shakes his head, “our techs can’t find a single way the four of them could have known of each other. Jenny and Ted hardly stand up as acquaintances. They were just a one night stand for each other.”

“So how is the killer choosing his victims?” I furrow my brow. The killer can’t just be following his victims around, choosing someone they come in contact with and randomly then deciding to kill them. That doesn’t work because how could the killer murder Ted and then keep following Chad, who had evaded the police for days? So how was the killer keeping track of everyone? How was he staying on top of all of it? “I need to talk to his wife,” I look around. “If the killer is targeting people that Chad has come in contact with, we need to know everywhere he’s been since Ted Martin was killed.”

“Ted Martin was killed yesterday and Chad robbed at least three places before coming home last night,” Mendez shakes his head. “There’s no way you’re going to be able to piece together everywhere he’s been and everyone he’s come in contact with.”

“Keep the techs digging,” I say, heading back to the Shelby. “There has to be some other way that they all knew each other. There has to be a substantial connection.”

I push through the flap and step back out into the sunshine that feels like it’s judging me, glaring down with no forgiveness and bitterness. There’s a dozen different voices talking and soon people start to catch on that I’m standing there. They turn and look at me, their eyes like those of hyenas, hungry for rot and death. They live off of the stuff. They crave it more than any meth head will ever understand. This is the fuel for the great big fear machine that runs the world. This is the media god’s sacrifice, the blood of the innocent, the guilty, and the uninvolved. They don’t care. Their apathy is your shame. They look at me with blood on their lips, eager for more.

“Detective,” one man in a suit nicer than Mendez’s shouts to me, “you’ve been spotted at multiple suicide scenes. Is there something that the police department isn’t telling us?”

“Is there a serial killer on the loose?” a woman in a low cut shirt asks, giving her viewers something to jerk off to in the shower after their wives go to bed.

“Is there a connection between the recent murders on Charter Boulevard?” a faceless voice shouts from the back. I shake my head and push through them. I’m not commenting on any of this bullshit. I’m not going to let them stir up people at home with their speculations and their conjectures. I guarantee that violence will spike tonight because of all of these reports and tomorrow they’ll criticize the city for not doing enough to protect their precious concerned citizens. I push through them all as they continue to shout their questions. They continue to follow me once I’ve broken through their swarm, but they break off, one by one, and head back to the yellow tape, waiting for Mendez to appear and give them their little scraps of food so they can go home happy to their producers.

I sit in the sweltering heat of my car a moment before I turn on the ignition. Dispatch still needs to get back to me with Rebecca Roberts’s location. I think she went to go stay with her parents, if Carson knew correctly. I’ll have a chat with her, see if she or Chad knew Lola, Jenny, or Ted. There has to be a connection that I’m not seeing. Maybe they all took the same community class together or checked out the same library book. I’ve caught killers doing stranger things in finding a method of killing their victims.

Looking back at the house, I’m feeling my first sense of doubt. What if Chad really did just decide to kill himself? What if he wanted to end it all because he didn’t want to go to jail for God knows how long, only to get out an old man with no one waiting for him? His children would have grown up and moved on with their lives without him around. I can understand that. Chad has been the only one with a legitimate reason to kill himself. What if this all is just a series of terrible, random circumstances?

But you don’t kill yourself with four separate saws. Chad had a gun, so why didn’t he just use it on his empty head? Why not just blow his brains out and be done with it? Why go to all the painful work of making yourself suffer needlessly when you just want to end it? Chad wanted all the pain and the suffering to end. He wanted an escape from the inevitable, but at any point through his dismemberment process, the police could have arrived and ruined the party. No. Even if you have the inspiration to kill yourself, you do it before anyone can catch you and stop you. Chad would have used the gun. Someone else made him use the saws.

Tomorrow is my birthday. Six has been a good year. It has been the best year so far. Mommy says that when I’m seven, I’m officially a big boy. She says that I’ll be able to stay up a whole quarter hour later. I’ll be able to stay up until eight-thirty. I don’t know what eight-thirty is, but I’m pretty sure that it’s much later. A whole quarter later. I look at the tape in my hand, running my fingers on the sharp, jagged part. It hurts when I press too hard, so I try to keep my fingers away from it. But every time I pull out the tape and try to tear it off, my knuckles rub against it. I look at the tiny white strips of skin sticking off my knuckle. What is skin?

“Can I have another one, sweetie?” Mommy asks as she looks over at the TV. She’s always staring at it. I’m not allowed to watch TV for more than an hour a day, but Mommy watches a lot more than me. She says that it’s because she’s a grown up and a mommy. Mommy doesn’t like it when I ask her too many questions. I pull out the tape and tear it off, my knuckles scraping against the teeth of the tape roll. I wince and look up to her with a sad look on my face. I want her to know how much it hurts. “Oh, sweetie, you’ve got to be careful,” she says to me, stepping off the small ladder and coming down to me. I look up at her as she hugs me. Mommy gives the best hugs. She smells like cookies.

She takes the tape from me and climbs back up the ladder. She tapes up the far edge of the banner and I look up at the writing on it, reading what it says. It says that it’s my birthday and that makes me happy. It’s been so long since I’ve had a birthday. We’ve had Christmas and fireworks and all sorts of other days, but we’ve kept skipping past my birthday. It’s finally here though and I’m so excited for it. I get to have all my friends over and I get to play Spider-Man and Star Wars with them. It’s going to be the best time. Billie and David get to spend the night, Johnny might spend the night too but he gets scared when he’s not at home. I heard David say that Johnny pees his bed. That’s gross. I don’t want him peeing over here. He’ll ruin my birthday.

“Caleb, you’ve got to be on your best behavior tomorrow,” Mommy tells me. She’s always telling me to be good. I don’t think she believes me when I tell her that I’m a good boy. If she did, why would she keep telling me to be good? I don’t do anything bad, or at least I don’t think I do anything bad.

“Yes, Mommy,” I say to her with a happy smile. I love her. She’s so pretty. She’s the prettiest mommy in the world.

Once I was out in the back yard and I found a kitten and I know that Mommy hates cats. I was afraid that the kitten would make Mommy mad, so I hid the kitten. It meowed a lot and I felt bad for it. I didn’t want to hurt it, but I know that Mommy would be mad if she knew that I was playing with a kitty. So I picked up the little kitten and took it to the sandbox where I was playing and pet it. It was so soft. I wanted to keep the kitten, but Mommy wouldn’t let me. Good boys do what their mommy tells them. So I decided to hide the kitten. I dug a hole for the kitten in the sandbox. I was afraid that Mommy would come out and hear her meowing so I dug the hole deep. It was deep enough that it went all the way past my knees when I stood in it. I kissed the kitten on the head and put it down in the hole with one of my army men to protect her. Then I pushed the big mountain of dirt and sand over the hole so that Mommy wouldn’t find the kitten. I forgot about the kitten and when I went to go dig it up, I forgot where I hid it. I think Mommy knew about the kitten and went and took it away from me, because I never found it. I think she was really mad at me.

But that was the only time I did something she didn’t want me to. I swear that I’m a good boy and that there’s nothing bad I do to her. Sometimes she tells me not to watch TV, but I do and she gets mad, or I don’t like the food we eat for dinner, but that’s because she doesn’t make what I like. I don’t want her to get mad at me. I just don’t understand why we can’t eat good food for dinner. Why do we always have to eat gross, nasty food for dinner?

Mommy is looking at the TV and I can see that her hand is shaking, just like it did last night when she found me out on the road. I don’t know how I got out there. I remember dreaming that Mommy needed me to follow her, so I followed her and I remember waking up to Mommy scooping me up off the road and that strange, scary man was standing there, looking at me. There was something bad about that man. I don’t like the way he touched me. It felt scary. It felt strange when he touched my shoulder. I think he was a bad man. But when Mommy brought me inside, her hands were shaking. I think she was scared that I was going to run away, but I promised her that I wasn’t going to run away and that I didn’t know what I was doing out there. I was sleeping and just woke up, that’s all that happened.

“Sweetie, Mommy needs to make a phone call,” Mommy tells me, bending down and kissing me on the head before she runs off. Mommy is on her phone a lot. She talks to people all the time or she’s texting. She tells me that texting is bad and that when I grow up, I shouldn’t do it, but she does it all the time. It looks fun. She’s always smiling and giggling when someone texts her.

I walk out to the living room and stare at the TV. There’s a picture on the screen and it looks just like the man that I saw last night, the man who had been standing next to my Mommy. Was he a famous guy? Did he have a TV show? I never thought I’d meet a famous guy. Did Mommy see that? I decide that I need to tell her. She should know that we met a famous guy. Maybe she even knows what his name is. I rush through the living room and down the hallway to where Mommy’s room is. She’s shut her door except for a small tiny crack and I decide that I want to sneak up on her.

I’m great at sneaking. I’m the sneakiest of all my friends and I love to sneak up on them and scare them in school. Out on the playground, when we play dinosaurs, I’m the scariest dinosaur because no one ever hears or sees me coming. I’m the best at it. I sneak up on my tippy toes just like they do in the cartoons and avoid the spot in the floor where it creaks really loudly, and sneak up to her door. I can hear her talking to someone. She must be on the phone with Grandma. Grandma and Grandpa are coming to my birthday tomorrow. Last time I had a birthday, they gave me a big Lego set, but Mommy won’t let me play with it until I’m a little older. She thinks I’m a bad boy who swallows the little pieces.

“That man, on the TV,” she’s saying to someone. “He almost hit my boy last night. I had no clue who he was, but I saw him. He was here, right outside my house. I got a good look at his car. It was a silver Subaru. Are you sure?” She stops talking and I decide to scare her.

I jump through the doorway and throw up my arms like they have claws and roar as loud as I can. I hope she screams. I love it when she screams. But she doesn’t this time. This time she just jumps a little and flinches before she glares at me. Mommy has a look that’s really scary because it means I’m in trouble and that’s the look she’s staring at me right now. She snaps her fingers and points to the door, telling me to leave. I don’t know why she’s so angry with me. I just wanted to play.

I walk out into the living room and look at the coat closet in the hallway by the front door. Mommy tells me not to go near that closet, or at least she just started telling me not to. For days, I have been searching her room for presents when she’s not looking. I don’t know what she’s getting me and I can’t stand it any longer. All I can think about are the cool toys that she’s going to get me. She always buys me the best, coolest toys. Last year, she got me a super soaker and all the other kids in the neighborhood were scared of me because it shot so much water that it could drown a person. I heard that a kid did drown from it, so other kids aren’t allowed to have them now. Thankfully, Mommy got me mine before that happened.

I want an Xbox like Johnny has this year. He has a game where you can chop people’s heads off and you can steal money and there’s another one where you can fly an airplane and blow up other airplanes. Mommy says that videogames will rot my brain, but hopefully she’s changed her mind, because I would love to have an Xbox. I asked her and Grandma for an Xbox and I asked Auntie for one too, but she said that she already bought my present for me. That would be so cool if they all got me an Xbox. I would have so many Xboxes. All the other kids would wish they had as many cool games and stuff as I did. I just hope they don’t get me more clothes. Clothes are stupid and boring.