Murder, Part 2

Chapter 2.
He kicks a pebble as he leans back against the brick, lights up a cigarette and takes a deep drag. He's tired, cold, and he hates giving interviews. They stopped being worthwhile a decade ago.
The check in his hands is for a pretty decent figure, but it's not as much as he was expecting -not as much as he needs, that's the main thing, but really that figure was never going to come anyway. He sighs and keeps riding his cigarette, hoping for a speck of relief to be nestled somewhere in the tobacco, like a golden ticket.
'Ramble on.' That's the kind of thing you expect your delirious grandpa to do when you're sitting on his knee sipping cocoa and talking about the good old days. Every person working in that fucking building acted like I was just another guy.
A door opens up next to him, and the kid asking him the questions comes out. He walks up to Walt and shakes his hand.
“I want to thank you for giving us your time, Mister Valero.”
“Come on, it's Walt,” he says amiably.
“Walt. Well, I want to thank you for coming in, it was a great pleasure talking with you, and an honor. Really. A lot of people sit in that chair and talk about their lives, most of 'em these faded has-been celebrities who weren't even relevant when they were relevant. But you're a real hero, Walt. I respect all the work you've done, and I just want to say, I hope my own kid turns out half as good as you.”
Walt smiles and pats the kid on the shoulder. “You're killin' me with your kindness, son. I wasn't a hero, just a guy doin' his job. You would have done the same if you'd been in my place.”
He blushes. “I don't know about that, sir.”
“Ah, you don't give yourself enough credit. You know, you remind me of an old friend of mine. If you're half as smart as he was, I'll bet you won't have to worry about a thing as long as you live. You tell your kid to keep up the good work, and you do the same yourself, alright?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Alright.”
The two part ways and Walt trots down the street. He still runs into an honest-to-goodness fan every once in a while, and it always cheers him up. It always feels good to be recognized.
He gets into his car and drives the long way home, savoring the afternoon air. It reminds him of his days working on the CK case, driving all across town to talk to character witnesses and compile leads. Truth is, no one could have done what he did. That's the bitch of it all, really. He was the only one who put it together, and if he hadn't, the guy would have gone on to kill again. Maybe so far as dozens more. It was pure chance that he and his team stopped Milovich before he killed his tenth. It was such an amazing story, in fact, that they made a movie about it in the 90's. Starring Clint Eastwood, of course. That one ended up feeding Walt's family for a good six years.
He's long since retired from the police force, long since divorced his wife and disowned his children. None of them gave what he needed. None of them lived up to his expectations. Sometimes it keeps him up at night, but that's why there's whiskey.
By the time he has pulled up, he's already in his chair hugging a cold glass. It's been a long day, productive as it was, and he's ready to get drunk.
His house is lined with memorabilia. News clippings about the CK case, pictures he'd taken with various celebrities, everywhere is a reminder of the glory days. Everywhere is a portrait of what his life was, and what he will be remembered for.
Walter Valero cannot help but feel small in this huge chair, but to feel old in this rapidly evolving world. He knows that the praise hefted onto him by his peers is ill-won. His career as a police officer was, in truth, nothing spectacular; sub-par really, if you want to get down to brass tacks. There was no skill involved in catching the Couples Killer -he just got lucky. And ever since then, he's been living off that one bright spot in an otherwise shitty life. Had the case not been as gruesome as it was, or had it not caught on to the public's imagination so thoroughly, Walter would be homeless right now. Without his press, without his house, without his whiskey.
If he doesn't do something soon, that's just how it's going to be.
He's going to die alone.
As he falls asleep, he thinks of the glory days, and imagines they're still here.

The phone rings, and Walt is startled awake. He looks to his left and sees that it's nearly five hours later, but he feels as though he'd only dozed off momentarily. He picks up the phone.
“Hello?” he says groggily.
“Walter Valero?”
“Yes?”
“Hello, sir. My name is James Sanford, I'm calling on behalf of the Everett County Police Department.”
“Not to be rude, Mister Sanford, but it's nearly four in the morning.”
“I apologize for calling so late, but it's, uh... it's urgent. We've got a case going out here, we'd like to get your input.”
“You should know I retired three years ago. I'm no longer qualified to-”
“This is concerning the CK case.”
The world seems to grind to a halt, and for a moment Walt can't even speak.
“I'm sorry?”
“I can't say any more over the phone. Do you have transportation?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Come to 5900 Walnut Avenue and I'll tell you everything. Good night, Mister Valero.”
“Wait,” he said. Walt rubbed his temple. “CK is dead, I watched him get the injection. Are we talking an impersonator?”
“Come to the address and we'll explain everything.”
At that, the line clicks dead. Walter hangs up the phone and stares at the picture of Adam Milovich, sitting in a jail cell, smiling in that awful way he used to do. Looking at the man who caught him. Laughing.

He pulls up to an old house and it's like '89 all over again. Dozens of cruisers, several network vans waiting just outside the perimeter, floodlights.
Everyone's wearing a face like they don't know where they are or why. Walt's seen that before, too.
He gets out and walks up to the perimeter, where a portly cop stops him.
“Step back please, sir.”
“I'm Walter Valero, son. One of your guys called me in.”
“You got a badge, mister Valero?”
“Not recently.”
“Then I'm afraid-”
A voice shouts, “Jim! Let him through!”
The cop turns, surprised, then shrugs and lifts the tape for Walt.
For the first time in more than twenty years, Walter steps onto a crime scene. A chill runs down his spine, like he just stepped over his grave.
The source of the voice, an eager cop in his mid twenties, walks up to Walter and holds out his hand.
“Mister Valero, thank you so much for coming out at this ungodly hour.”
“Are you James?”
“Yes sir.”
He shakes the kid's hand. “Good to meet you, son. Now, you mind explaining what this is all about?”
The kid nods, but his face remains grim. “I think you need to see it for yourself.”
Walt shrugs. “Lead the way.”

Excitement and horror. That's what he's feeling.
The house is torn up on the inside. Pictures ripped off the walls, wall paper peeled back. The contents of any cabinets have been tossed onto the floor. Broken glass litters the carpet.
In some places, there's blood.
He's walked all through the house, seen the damage, examined the little tells. The same tells CK left twenty years ago.
Walter does nothing but breathe for a moment, taking it all in. What was he expecting, exactly? Whatever it was, it wasn't this. An impersonator, sure. Not this.
This is CK down to the letter.
The kid makes to explain the scene, but Walt stops him. There are other cops on the scene, and they're watching him closely.
He takes a deep breath and says, “The killer came in through the front door, probably knocked and either let himself in or was let in. You'll find traces of tranquilizer in both the male and female victims, which the killer got into them by way of a dart gun. He bound the female in a wooden chair, which he set right here, then stripped and hogtied the husband and laid him out in front of her. He went all through the house and broke every mirror he could find, and judging from the amount of glass here probably took a few windows too, and gathered it all up in a pile here. He used an ammonium carbonate to wake them, and from that point until about four hours and forty five minutes later, he tortured the husband until finally putting two bullets into either side of his chest. Approximately five minutes later, he shot the wife in the head. He then dragged their bodies into the backyard, where I assume they've been arranged very artistically.”
The kid turns to the other cops in the room. “Guys, this is Walter Valero, key investigator on the original CK case. I opted to bring him in due to his unparalleled knowledge of the particulars of the Couples Killer.”
“He ain't told us nothing we don't already know,” said a bald cop.
Walt chimed in. “And you're not going to know anything he doesn't want you to.”
“Maybe if this were the actual CK, but that guy was put to death what, eleven years ago?”
“Twelve.”
“Either way, he's gone. That means this here's the work of an imitator, and that means the guy's probably delusional, and-”
“And that means he probably made a mistake, yeah,” said Walter. “That's what I would be inclined to believe, if I didn't have twenty years of nightmares on my side. Gentlemen, there have been a few CK impersonators, but they all either made mistakes or failed outright. This is beyond the point of imitation. I visited all five crime scenes in the original case, they all looked exactly like this.”
“So what? Guy probably saw a documentary on the History Channel-”
“I've seen every one of them, trust me,” Walter said. “We never released pictures of the bodies to the press.”
“Then he read one of your books.”
“I never detailed the full process of CK's cycle.”
“Then he read someone else's book.”
“Alright, cue-ball,” Walter said, “you want to question me, that's fine. But you don't give a starving man a brick and tell him it's a cheesburger, alright? I know what I'm lookin' at here. There are things about this that an impersonator simply wouldn't know. Now, Mister Sanford, you brought me in on this to get my professional opinion, presumably because you and your friends are out of leads. Well, I'd bet money that this isn't the work of just an imitator.”
There's silence in the room for a moment, then cue-ball says, “Alright Mister Valero, thanks for the hints, now would you mind leaving us to our crime scene?”
“How many have there been?” Walter asks Sanford.
“Excuse me,” cue ball says.
“These are the third and fourth, respectively.”
“Alright, have your lab guys run the gamut of tests, on the bodies, on the floor and walls, on the samples, on the evidence.”
“Hey!” the bald cop screams. “What the fuck do you think you're doing?”
Walter turns on the guy. “Alright Gonzo, you want to direct traffic? I hope you know what to look for, 'cause if you yell at me one more fuckin' time, I'm leaving and I'll never help your department again.”
He stares Walt down, balling his fists, but he says nothing.
“Alright then, it's established,” Walt says. “You folks need my input on this.”
“The problem here isn't what we need from you,” another of the cops says. “You're not a cop anymore. Legally, we could get in trouble for letting you tell us what to do. All due respect sir, when it comes down to the paperwork, we're the ones who are going to be held accountable for what you end up doing here. Isn't that right, Fenton?”
The bald cop nods his head, “That's the polite way of saying it.”
Walter looks around at the group of people and nods. “I apologize, fellas. I haven't been on a crime scene in years, and old habits die hard. Please, do your jobs. Sanford, can I speak to you a minute?”
He and James walked into a side room of the house and stood across from each other.
“You didn't clear me coming out here with your colleagues?”
“No, sir.”
“Or with your department?”
“Not exactly.”
“What does that mean?”
“When the first set of killings happened, I immediately made the connection to the CK case, and when I proposed we bring you in on counsel, my superiors said it takes two to make a trend. Now, we got out here two hours ago, and nobody here has any idea what to make of it. The guy who did this, he wasn't under any pressure at all. No prints, no tracks, no left-behind property, not even hair or skin in the glass. We've already had a background check done on the victims, there's no overlap in friends or family, so ostensibly there is no connection between the two couples so far. My assumption was, the only way we could find a lead was to look back on the case this one is imitating, and that means sooner or later we'd have to bring you in.”
Walter shakes his head. “That's admirable, but you should have cleared it with the proper folks first.”
“I just didn't want anyone turning over the crime scene too much before you got to see it.”
“Well, kid, I'm here now, and seeing what I have, I'm just as lost as you guys.”
“You haven't seen the bodies yet.”

Outside, the sun's just starting to crest the horizon, and Walter is a little confused.
“This is wrong.”
“You see it too, then?” Sanford says.
The husband is on the left, the wife on the right, and they are set head-to-head in a straight line horizontally with the house. They are completely naked, covered in blood -the husband far more than the wife- and their eyes have been glued open.
And their extremities have been severed and replaced where they were once connected.
“Was it post mortem?” Walter asks.
“Yes.”
Walt shakes his head. “No. Milovich said there was a sanctity to his victims after death. He would never have dismembered them like this.”
“So, what do you think it means?”
Walt rubs his head. “I don't know.
He turns away and rubs his head, looking at the sky. After a yawn, he turns back around. “I think I'm going to go home and give this a long think.”
“But don't you think you should look at the scene some more. or-”
“Son, I've seen all I need to. Milovich never left anything he didn't want found at a scene. If this guy's worth half his salt, your techs will find something and that'll lead you to him. Me, I'm going to go home, have a glass of whiskey, and try to think out of the box.”
“Alright then.”
As Walter starts to walk away, James says, “Uh, Mister Valero?”
He turns around and says, “Please, it's Walt.”
“Right. I just want to say, there was another reason for me calling you out here. I actually did my dissertation on the CK case, and you were my motivation for joining the force. I think if we caught this guy, and I had my name next to yours in the books, well, I think I'd be set for life.”
Walt looks at him for a few moments.
“Yeah, you'd think that. Well, thank you much, son. I'm honored.”
At that, Walt walks away, leaving James to consider the corpses by himself.

Murder, Part 1

Chapter 1.
1989:

It ends tonight.
Through the cold evening air I can feel shortness of breath, the trembling heart, the tensing of muscles, her eyes getting wider and wider until it seems like they could pop right out of her skull. At least one of her fingernails is missing from compulsively digging them into the oak chair I've bound her in. There's blood on her chest, her legs, her upper arms, and splotches on her face, and none of it is hers.
The horror she embodies in this moment is a mirror, and I stare into it as willingly as any man to face the truth of his own dementia. I feel sorry for her, and I wish I could cut her bonds and give her the gun I used to shoot her husband, tell her to put it to my knees and fire because that's where it would hurt the most, then put a round in my stomach and let me die as its acids ate through the rest of my organs. But that would be too easy.
To give her a way out would be too simple. I want to be defeated, more than she or anyone could ever know, but I refuse to make it easy. I want her to find a chink in my armor of her own volition, and I want her to exploit it to every gruesome end. But I already know she won't. She's stopped begging, stopped crying, now she's just staring at me. I think it's possible she's altogether forgotten how to speak.
She looks like a domestic cat, caught in the arms of an angry child, knowing it's going to die but incapable of striking back by virtue of its own origins.
I hate her for being so pathetic. I hate her for being so helpless, for giving in so quickly.
And I hate myself for needing to do this thing in the first place. And deep down I've come to understand a horrible truth, one that I've only barely touched on as yet, but will surely revisit as these killings continue; though this act will set the demons at bay, in less than a week I will be hungry for more.
Killing sets me at ease, but like sex and drugs, its effect is only lessened by time and experience.
She will be my tenth victim, and my last. I've made sure of that.
I wave the gun in her face and watch as she becomes a pencil sketch of herself from the fear, and I put my finger on the trigger and she practically shits herself. It's a crude thought, I feel guilty for it, but what the hell, it's murder.
I take a deep breath, and I consider just walking away. I won't, obviously, because she's seen my face, heard me talk. Not that it matters at this point, but I can't stop the killer in me from going down that road. But, really, how big of a mind-fuck would it be if I pressed the gun into her temple, leaned close, got right in her face, and just screamed at the top of my lungs? And before she has time to let that sink in, I just turn around and walk away. I'd be out of the apartment before she could even process the fact that she was still alive. It'd be worth doing just for the weirdness of it.
But I'm too far for that now. Caught up in my own silly little web. I have to kill her, and not just because of the ostensibly obvious reasons. The carnal necessity that brought this whole thing out in the first place, that's why I'm here. That's why I have this gun, that's why I shot her husband, and that's why I have to shoot her.
I have to because I need to because I want to.
So I put the gun against her head, and I lean close, close enough to kiss her on the lips, and I look her right in the eyes.
“I'm sorry,” I say, and I pull the trigger.

I'm blinded by the gunfire and deafened by its scream, but it sticks around too long. Something terrible has happened, and before I can take it in, I'm pulled backwards onto the floor. A foot stomps on my hand and the gun I had is ripped away. I've been flipped over and put in cuffs, and I hear some vague mumblings about rights. And then my vision returns.
There's sobbing, and it's a woman's voice, and I look up to see that she isn't just alive, she's unharmed.
There's a smoking hole in the wall behind her, and I can't help but smile for all the rage and relief I feel.
“You couldn't have cut it any closer if you tried!” I shouted.
A pair of spit-shined shoes under a perfectly trim brown set of suit pants steps on the shattered glass in front of me, and suddenly I'm yanked up off the ground, made to be eye level with whoever's in front of me.
And as soon as I see his face, I smile.
And I wink.


2009:

“Alright Walt -uh, may I call you Walt?”
He rubs behind his ear. “Absolutely.”
The kid smiles. “Cool. Alright Walt, here's the deal, I'm going to ask you some questions, and they're going to be vague. The way we do these sorts of things is, we ask these short form questions to give you room to work with, so you feel free to ramble on about whatever comes to mind. What we're going to end up doing is, we're going to cut up the footage of the interview -use the bits and pieces that are most compelling, or best represent a certain period in your life.”
“Period?”
“Uh, yessir. We're doing a retrospective on your whole life.”
“I was under the impression you were going to stick mainly with the Couples Killer.”
“Well Walt, that will certainly make up the bulk of the thing, but we have to fill forty five minutes of air time. The CK case, as compelling as that is, everyone knows it, we spend the whole night talking about it people won't watch through to the end. What we're going after here is the story behind the story. What motivated you to become a cop, you know, stuff like that.”
“I see.”
“Are you comfortable with that, Walt? I assume our legal team went through the particulars-”
“I'm afraid I was misled a bit, but that was the fault of my people, not yours. Don't worry about it, son. What do you want to know?”
“Hold on just a moment.”
The kid turns and signals to the crew around the set -a yellow wall and plastic tree that could only look natural from a handful of perspectives. Red lights flash on top of three separate cameras, two of which are fixed, the other resting on the shoulders of a bald man with orange facial hair. Everything in place, they give the kid a thumbs up.
“Alright Walt, tell me about your childhood.”
“Ah, well. It was pretty run-of-the-mill. I was born in Dallas, 1961, youngest of six. My dad was a WWII vet, flew with the 8th Pursuit Group in '43. I was not exactly a planned child, my brothers ended up taking care of me more than anyone. My father died of lung disease when I was in high school, mother following soon after for... various reasons. I was brought up a pretty strict, upstanding kind of guy. Now, my brothers, they tended towards the hippie movement, but by the time I was old enough to really see what it was, it had already started to fall apart. Then there was Vietnam, now I never went over there obviously, I was only fourteen when the war ended, so I can't say much about it first hand, but I watched my siblings burn their draft cards and run from their responsibility, and I swore I'd never go down that road. Retrospectively, sure, it was a bad war, and probably not worth fighting, but I was raised to follow the orders of my country. I went into the army in '79, went to Grenada in '83, came home and joined the Academy. By '89 I wasn't too much better than your average beat cop. Big difference was my morals. Most of these guys, they were raised on Dirty Harry, you know what I mean? That was a big problem back then, a lot of guys were getting into law enforcement for the wrong reasons. They wanted to be Clint Eastwood with his .44, taking the law into their own hands and lookin' badass the whole way. That ain't the way of things in the real world, though, you understand, police work is mostly just boring paperwork. Me, I'm one in a million. I got lucky with my career, and you ask any other famous cop out there who made a name catching some serial killer, he'll tell you the same thing. Right place, right time. And if he says different, he's a liar. Now, that's not to say that there isn't any skill involved, there's a lot to being a cop that most people don't realize. There's plenty of people who couldn't have figured out the pattern, who would have been stumped by all the bits and pieces, and there were, too. But I can name at least five guys offa top of my head who were a stone's throw away from my job, who coulda took that case as far as I did. It's just a matter of being in the right place at the right time. And being the right guy for the job.”