JAKE | ||||||||||||
Jake felt ill. He had seen it before, two times before, almost exactly the same. He was not a hardened officer of the law, he had only been a deputy since Mandy had become sheriff a year and a half ago and, although he had seen some terrible things in those eighteen months, it didn't prepare him for this! What could motivate a human being into doing THIS to a fellow creature? It was Jake's job to find out. Her name was Stephanie Bummer, and the way she died certainly was a bummer. Her skin was torn and shredded and her body was perforated with evenly spaced puncture marks, as if a giant cat had toyed with her, played with her until she died from loss of blood. A giant cat, however, would not carefully make up her untouched face after death. It would not tie a large, neat bow around her neck as if to separate it from the carnage below. A giant cat would not leave a note: | ||||||||||||
"When the cat's away, the mice will play, When the cat comes back, there's HELL to pay!" They had been able to keep a lid, of sorts, on the media coverage, but that was difficult in an area where most people were friends or kin, and few were enemies, and everyone knew everyone else's business. Mandy swung her patrol car into the driveway of the remote single wide that sat a good 150 feet off the highway. Looking at Jake's face, she didn't have to ask what they had here - she knew. "Same as the others," Jake said. "Who found this one?" Mandy asked. "Kids from across the road," Jake answered. "Came over to ask permission to squirrel hunt in the woods. The door was open. He looked in, saw what had happened and ran home to call 911. Stephanie looks the same as the other two did, down to the green eye shadow, just like you wear." "Well, number three makes it a serial killing, except there doesn't seem to be much of a cooling off period. It's almost like the same murder three times. " Mandy explained. "Jake, I want this place dusted for prints. I want to know anything there is to know about the makeup. I want the origin of every speck of dust in this place. Get the lab guys here before anything gets screwed up! Then, cousin of mine, I want to know everything that has happened in this girl's life since the time of her conception! Understand?" Mandy continued, "We're going to need some help on this. See if you can get some insight from that on line friend of yours, the one that does profiles. I'm going to set up a news conference. In a couple of hours, we're going to be up to our asses in reporters, and I do not, repeat, DO NOT want anything printed that does not come from me. Understand?" Jake nodded. He understood. Standing there looking into Mandy's eyes, he found it disconcerting that all three of the murdered women wore the exact shade of green eye shadow as did his cousin. He e-mailed Jean Green, a professional profiler in D.C. | ||||||||||||
"Dear Jean, We have a real mess here. There have been three murdered. The murder weapon seems to have been a pronged hoe type instrument, or hand cultivator. All victims show evidence of blunt instrument trauma to the head and of being bound with duct tape ankle and wrist. They were found nude in their separate homes. All lived in remote areas. No evidence of forced entry, but, hell, no one ever locks their doors down here. The bodies were punctured and shredded only from the neck down. No evidence of sexual assault. No semen from oral, anal, or vaginal swabs. There was a note left at the first murder scene. "When the cat's away, the mice will play, When the cat comes back, there's hell to pay!" Around each one's neck, there was a large bow, as if to separate the unharmed face from the mutilated bodies. Their faces were heavily made up, including false eye lashes. They all had on lots of green eye shadow, just like my cousin, sheriff Mandy, wears. I know this isn't very much to work with, but I don't know how far I can trust this on line security. My cousin would serve me my own gonads if any of this got out! Thanks, Jean, you're a doll! Jake |
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Soon, Jake no longer enjoyed seeing his picture in the papers. The "CAT KILLER" captured the imagination of the American public and he found it unsettling to see his own image staring back at him from the tabloids as he checked out at the grocery store. A week later, they had another one, but different. Mary Knight had died of strangulation. The mutilation had been inflicted post mortum. He e-mailed Jean of the new development. Lousy makeup job, too. A cat murder? Yeah, copycat! They followed the money. Two days later, they had a confession from Joe Knight, husband and beneficiary of a large, new insurance policy. One murder down and three to go! Jake went home and pealed out of his uniform. He fired up the old puter and checked his mail. | ||||||||||||
E- mail from Jean Green: Jake- Really not enough information available. Obviously, killers who use pronged hoes are not a dime a dozen so we may surmise that these murders are related. Because there is no semen found at the scene, one could question if the killer was possibly a woman. Lack of semen at the scene rarely indicates this as some killers do not ejaculate at the scene and others wear a condom. One could theorize that the purpose of the blunt instrument trauma to the head was to render the victim unconscious and therefore easily controllable, even for a woman. However, history does indicate that these particular elements of stranger homicide rarely point to a female. The issue of the green eye makeup matching that of the female sheriff could lead one to believe perhaps the killer is offing women in the symbolic place of the sheriff against whom he has some grudge. Again, history shows this to be highly unlikely. Killers usually have a problem with women in general, and although they might pick out a victim on occasion that resembles someone in life who frustrated them, the outright constant revenge against one person is not consistent with most psychopathic behavior. Also, one must question how many other women in town have green eye makeup and therefore, this link to the sheriff would probably be coincidental. Let us analyze the note, another extreme rarity in sexual homicides (although I am profiling a murder right now that, indeed the killer left a note). One asks, does the cat refer to the killer, or some other person (like the sheriff)? Again, we find ourselves back in a cat and mouse game that serial killers rarely play with one particular person. This is one stupidity the movies always include. The serial killer and the profiler/investigator end up in a personal confrontation. In reality, psychopaths hardly consider other people all that worthwhile to waste their time with. Even a negative relationship is a relationship and serial killers don't connect with anyone with that much intensity. The killer is probably poor at controlling a victim with a weapon or words: hence, the need for hitting them over the head. One last issue is the possibility of the sheriff being the killer herself. One could theorize that by holding a powerful position that is usually held by a male, she might well be more masculine in her behaviors and therefore, more likely to commit a more masculine style of crime. One could say she was angry at women who beat her out of the feminine things in life and therefore she offed them in retaliation. Her mutilation of the body represents her hatred of the female qualities (breasts, genitals, etc.) and her exaggerated makeup on the faces is her distorted mocking view of her own identity problem. That she wouldn't use a gun (unregistered to her) would be odd as she could express this very male choice of weapons, but perhaps she really wants to get off torturing these women instead. The note might refer to all the crap women pull behind her back, mocking her and playing their feminine games. Now that she, the cat, has caught up with the mouse, she will toy with her until she is dead. So, Those are the possibilities I came up with off the top of my head with so little information. All of them are relatively unplausable. Yours, Jean Green |
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Jake sat in front of his computer in a daze. Mandy, the cat killer? No way! Just no way! Besides, Jean did say all of her ideas were relatively unplausable. "That's what I get for consulting a female profiler. You ask for a little help, you get a novel! But Jean came up with this idea before I knew about George Holister. It's the only name that seems to be consistently linked to all the women. No, George couldnt have done it he's dead. Besides, he was Mandy's husband. Jake just could not believe that George could cheat on Mandy, or could he have, after all she had been arrested in connection with his death. Hhmmm. That's what prompted her to run for sheriff, after she had been cleared. A bartender had told him that he wasn't the only person asking questions, either. A tall slender blonde man had been snooping around shortly before the murders began. The bartender said the guy told him he was George's nephew. Interesting! George never have a nephew! Jake sighed. What did he have, really? Three dead women linked to his cousins dead husband, a mystery man, and a hell of a headache! He went to his medicine cabinet to get some aspirin, and then he remembered Nancy, the nurse. He discovered George had a thing going with her and she was still alive! "At least I sure as hell hope so!" he thought. The aspirin bottle landed in the sink as Jake sailed outside to his truck. He sailed right back inside and put his uniform back on. Nancy is going to have two shadows for a while, her regular one and me just a little behind, he thought. It was dusk as he turned into the gravel road leading to Nancy's house. Off the road to his left he spotted a parked, unmarked sheriff's car. He left a shower of gravel as he raced the last quarter- mile. He spun the vehicle as he slammed on the brakes, jumped from his truck, and raced full speed through the open front door. Nancy lay unconscious on the living room floor. The back screen door slammed. Jake charged through the kitchen and on out the door. Twenty feet ahead of him ran a slim figure dressed in brown, with short brown hair. "Oh, God no! Not Mandy!" He quickly closed the distance and reached for her. "Mandy! Stop! We can get you help!" Jake grabbed for her hair and it came off in his hand. He looked at it stupidly as the figure in front of him spun around and slammed him in the head with a blackjack He heard an explosion outside his head at the same moment he felt an explosion inside his head. Two explosions? He'd worry about it when he woke up. He was out before he hit the ground. There was a mule standing on his face. It was the only explanation his brain could come up with to explain the way he felt. He opened one eye, the other one refused to cooperate. He lay in a hospital bed. Mandy sat next to him holding his hand. He said," Wrhghrr!" "Quiet, Jake. Don't try to talk. Your mouth is wired shut." He blinked the eye that wasn't swollen shut and Mandy smiled at him. "Want to know what happened?" Painfully, he nodded. Sometimes she could be a little obtuse. "It's a little involved. I'm no rocket scientist, but I didn't have to be to know George was playing around on me, but I just couldn't let anyone know. I hired a private investigator to find out if my suspicions were correct and they were and to find out who the competition was. Besides the names of the three murder victims and Nancy, who, by the way is going to be all right, he turned up a fifth name. Joe Jantzen. A drag queen from Springfield." My one eye must have gotten very big with surprise. Mandy continued, "Yeah, I had trouble with that, too. It's one thing to get beat out by another woman, but another man? Ouch! The detective had pictures, though. Jantzen performed at one of the gay clubs in Springfield under the stage name of "Miss Kitty Litter" After the third murder, I realized there was a pattern developing. Wherever George had parked his boots, we had a murder. I checked with Springfield and learned Jantzen had been locked up for assaulting a fellow performer with a screwdriver. While in custody, he was determined to be a borderline paranoid- schizophrenic. While in the joint Miss Kitty read about George's accident and the allegations that I was responsible. With nothing else to do for fourteen months, he brooded up this insane idea of revenge against all his rivals for the love of his life, my George. With all the nice gay people in the world, why did George have to pick on this one? Jantzen hated me most of all because I was George's wife and he thought I murdered him. He pictured my career in ruins and me arrested as the perp. If that didn't work...well, I don't want to think about it. He bought a uniform similar to ours and a short brown wig. With the green eye shadow, he could probably pass for me at a quick glance, or at a distance. I knew it had to be him. No woman would apply makeup like that! That was drag queen makeup. I staked out Nancy's place and was about to move in when you roared up and went charging inside like a bull in heat! Sounded like you yelled," Mandy! Get help!" or something like that just before he dropped you. I didn't need any help. Once he sapped you and got you out of my way, I nailed him with my .357 magnum. This cat had apparently used up his other eight lives. What I don't understand, Jake, is how you ever got onto this guy, too?" "Wrghrrhef!" I replied |
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THE END |