To Probe A Beating Heart (11 page)

             
“Cozy, he has a new key,”
chuckled Stelian.

             
“Yeah, they deserve each other.” said Averell. As he was about to leave, the door opened and out came an attractive blond teenage girl about the age Sarah would be. She was wearing a pink blouse, blue denim shorts and white shoes. It was very familiar, she had dressed that way before, frequently, since she was a little girl. Within a minute, a middle aged woman with dark hair came out dressed as if she were still nineteen wearing the same outfit as the younger.

             
“C’mon mom, we are going to be late, hurry.”

As Ellie walked across the parking lot to her car, she looked directly at
Averell, then turned away and toward her car again.

             
“Who’s that?” asked Sarah.

             
“I don’t know,” said Ellie and got in the car.

             
Averell sat in his car and watched them pull out and drive away. He sat there for another few minutes and then started to drive away.               “Well, they don’t care, so I don’t care.”

             
“Yeah, we don’t care,”
agreed Stelian.

             
“I hate them,” said Averell.

             
“Yeah, we hate them,”
agreed Stelian.

             
Averell drove west on I-90. He arrived in Rochester and decided to spend the night in a motel. He would determine his next move in the morning after a good night’s sleep and breakfast.

* * *

CHAPTER TWELVE

That is why we plan . . .

Morning had Averell up early and taking an abbreviated run before breakfast. As he returned to the motel, he noted the exercise room on the first floor. It had ellipticals and treadmills. “Good to know, maybe I won’t have to do this in the heat, or the rain.” he said to himself. He returned to his room, found the complementary newspaper and browsed through the several sections. It was of little value to him and after a shower and getting dressed, Averell went to the front desk and asked if he could get a current Sunday paper with the want ads.

             
“Drug store across the parking lot, they have ‘em from Buffalo,

Rochester and Syracuse, even have the New York Times if ya get there

early enough.” said the clerk.

             
“Thanks.” and he walked across the lot and bought a local paper. He returned to the motel and went into the restaurant, ordered coffee and a bagel and began reading the newspaper looking for work. He had plenty of time and therefore options but was not one to sit idle when he could be productive. He found several ads that looked interesting, one was for a salesman who could travel on a regular basis. As he read further, the travel was on the highway from Albany, New York to Toledo, Ohio, selling office supplies. His customers would be primarily larger distribution centers, with occasional visits to the outlets located in shopping centers and strip malls in each local area. Office supplies was something he fully understood, having dealt with that for the last two plus years for the army. His military experience may have been more useful than he expected after all. He answered the ad and was given an interview the next day. When he arrived, he was wearing his uniform, since he didn’t have anything else that was suitable. “Pardon the uniform, Just got out and none of my civilian clothes were right for this session.”

             
“No problem,” said the personnel director. “I was in the army too.

Where were you stationed?”

              “Georgia, the state, not the country. All I did for three years was count, store, deliver, reorder, restock, estimate office supplies. I think that I was pretty good at what I did, but I decided to join the civilian world and do it out here. So here I am.” He listed a few references at Fort Benning and gave the local motel as his address. The next afternoon he was called and after another short interview with Fred Dennis, the manager for whom he would work, they offered him the job. He had no reason to look further and accepted. His training period was a week in the main distribution center and two weeks on the road with Fred meeting the significant contacts in each distribution center and several of the larger outlets. The job was easy and Averell had time to do other things. He made his own hours and as long as he visited the supply centers and stores on his route that stretched from Albany, New York to Toledo, Ohio, all within a few miles of Interstate ninety, nobody bothered him. The majority of his customers were in industrial parks or shopping areas where motels, restaurants and theaters were easily found. There were a few that were remote, but all still close to the main highway. Many of the strip centers also had theaters and he found himself frequently catching a movie right after an appointment. He also found that several of the communities that he visited had summer baseball leagues running from June through September. The PONY league was good baseball, a lot of infield activity and fun to watch. Averell found the teams in Auburn, Batavia and Jamestown, New York more interesting than others because of his Syracuse roots. He made a point of visiting these games and even taking his “clients” to a game on occasion.

             
Averell tracked his appointments, miles traveled and expenses in a composition notebook. He also made notes about the people he met at each store and distribution center and even had comments on the baseball games he attended. His notes sometimes were flavored with comments such as “nice guy” or “jerk” or “don’t like” or “ball game” or “good talker”. These proved helpful when he hadn’t seen someone for a while and he could refresh his memory. It was also his record of expenses he would submit for reimbursement.

             
It was summer, 1990, he had been on the job almost a year and he thought about the woods he had not visited in five years, the fun he had with the animals, the thrill of doing his probing and secreting all his tools and hiding the remains. The army had monopolized his time, keeping him busy for the last three years. There was always something to do, and others to do it with, but now he had to find other distractions. Baseball and movies could only fill so many slots and there was still time for other things. Now there were no officers to salute, no privates to push around, no sergeants to avoid, no buddies with whom he could catch a movie or shoot some pool. He was now on his own to find entertainment, to find a distraction. As he went about his business he would see squirrels and rabbits in parks and residential areas. The thoughts of playing with the little animals, poking and probing, cutting and dissecting were always there. There, but not as compelling as when he was in high school. Now he was older, he had moved on, he was now an adult and his activities should be more in tune with his abilities. He could do more things, he could use bigger and more complex tools. He could probe bigger and more complex subjects. He opened his bag of probes and remembered. “I always wanted to use these on Sarah and Ellie, now what is there to stop me—? Nothing—.”

             
“Could we do that, go to their new place and—?”

             
“Yes, I remember standing in Ellie’s bedroom with a probe in my hand. I wanted to push it through her neck, but what would happen to me. I would be punished. I dreamt about doing it to both of them, Ellie and Sarah.”

             
“We could do it now, and who would know? nobody.”

             
“No, we would have to have a plan and be very careful. If we did it, we would be the prime suspects. No, we have to think, to plan— and when everything is right Then we do them.”

             
“Then we do them!”

             
“Yes, but first I need new probes, these are too small. They seemed bigger when I was younger. Now, for what we can do today, we should have bigger and stronger probes.”

             
“I agree, we should go to the store and look at what they have,”
said Stelian.

             
“You mean, look in the medical aisle for ‘Probes’, I don’t think so?”

             
“No, no, no, let’s see what they have that we can use. You never know,”
said Stelian.

             
Averell went to a Wal Mart and walked around. He looked in the

tools, in the pharmacy and finally in the house wares where he spotted

barbeque skewers.

             
“Perfect. Absolutely perfect.”

             
“See, I told you,”
said Stelian.

             
“Yes you did, and you were right. It’s a set of eight.”

             
“You shouldn’t argue with me,”
said Stelian.

             
“I see that, it wouldn’t look good either, would it?”

             
“Nope,”
said Stelian.

             
As he walked through the store in conversation with Stelian, hardly anyone noticed that he was alone. He noticed and quieted down, almost whispering his thoughts.

             
The rabbits and squirrels of the woods in Syracuse were no longer appealing. Averell now had an objective, actually two objectives and he viewed other people as potential ‘trial subjects’ with which he could practice for the final probing. The thoughts that were most present during every session in the woods when he was probing rabbits and squirrels were Sarah and Ellie. On several occasions he was tempted to use his probes on each of them in the middle of the night while they slept. Temptations to which he never acceded, as great as the want to push his probes into and through their necks, to pierce that major artery, he maintained control of his urges and walked away each time. Now he was thinking of them again, but now he would take his time, he would plan, he would practice, he would become perfect and when he did it, it would be done so that no one would suspect that it was him.

             
As he visited the client base he had established, there were people that he met and with whom he interacted that he considered as very desirable targets for his ‘practice’ sessions. Desirable but not practical. Any one such individual removed from the world would attract attention to all who knew them. This would lead to Averell himself as a part of a larger group. If he ‘did’ more than one person that he knew, the Venn diagram would narrow the group to a point where he would become part of a smaller group of “prime” suspects in their removal. This was completely unacceptable. His solution was to consider only those with no connection to himself. He considered people that he saw on the street, complete strangers. These he could watch for a short period and assess the risk, plan the trap, implement the strategy and enjoy the process. He fantasized over a number of prospects, but he never carried the planning beyond that initial stage. When he was ready to seriously begin, the strategy would want to be well thought out. A location where the process would occur would have to be found and verified as safe. Averell knew that the planning should be thorough, every contingency considered and a “Plan B” for everything should be developed. He was not ready to begin, yet. Casually thinking and developing scenarios in his mind, fantasizing over the play of the session and considering as many possible problems as he could, would lead to an almost perfect plan. So as he went about his business, dealing with ordinary people in ordinary circumstances, he was constantly thinking of ways to get them into that potentially compromised positions where he could control them, get them to a place where he could restrain them, then probe them, watch their eyes, open their bodies and see their beating hearts, then watch as the life blood flowed out of them and the fire left their eyes. He thought about Sarah, bound and helpless. He envisioned Ellie being forced to watch as he probed Sarah. Each time he ran the scenario in his mind, he became more excited, his eyes widened, his muscles tensed and he would begin to perspire, heavily. Then as the problems with his plan would become obvious, his mind would try to act quickly to address each flaw in that plan. His thinking progressed through various scenarios, finding the weakness, modifying his plan and gaining confidence as he progressed.

             
“That is why we plan.” He muttered to himself as he drove the interstate.

             
“So, we are constantly making a new plan, a better plan.”

             
“Yes, each one is better than the last, we are getting close to our first experiment.”

             
On a July evening as he was walking across a parking lot to his car after a movie, he spotted a man, apparently drunk, lying on the ground next to a dumpster.

             
“We could start with this guy, practice, remember, practice,”
said Stelian.

             
“No, it’s too risky” said Averell.

             
“But that’s part of the fun,”
said Stelian.

             
“No!” asserted Averell, “and he is not right. It should be a woman, not a man. And he is dirty and smells.” Averell got into his car and drove to a nearby motel he had used before.

             
“Well it’s been, what two months, welcome back” said the desk clerk.

             
“How long are you with us this time?”

              “Just the night, gotta’ get back on the road and be in Erie in the

morning.”

              The clerk gave him a key and said good night.

             
“Good night,” said Averell and he went to his room and was asleep almost immediately.

             
Morning came and Averell was back on the road heading for Erie.

             
“We could have done that guy in the gutter, who would know?, who would care?”
said Stelian.

             
“I said No!”

             
The rest of the trip was relatively quiet, Averell turned on the radio but stations were in and out, he turned it off and said to himself, “I should get a tape player installed. I should get a new car, with a tape player.”

             
“Yes, that’s a good idea.”
and again, silence.

             
He arrived in Erie around 7:45 and had time for breakfast before his first appointment. He drove to the shopping center where the big box store was and parked near the front door. It wouldn’t open until nine, but his appointment was at 8:30. He walked down to the fast food place a few doors away and went in for breakfast. He was sitting at a table finishing his coffee when a man approached, “Averell, good morning.”