This story has some graphic descriptions, mature situations, adult language and some adult themes. This story is not intended for children or those with queasy stomachs. For the rest of you freaks, like me, I hope you enjoy reading this as much as I’m enjoying writing it. Please take note that all the characters herein are entirely fictional and this is neither a true story nor based on real life occurrences. I’m just strange.

If there was one thing she would never get used to, it was the stench. She’d arrived so many times to inspect the corpses that the mutilated sight of them was all too familiar now, when she saw them in her dreams it no longer frightened her, and the pools of dried, sticky blood were known too well also. On Saturday when she was woken up to check out the latest victim, her mind was already filled with the images of bodies cleaved in two, of limbs decorating rooms to spell out names and dates, and of the blood that somehow seemed to coat everything except for the body from which it came. The signs of torture were painfully obvious, fingernails and toenails absent from the fingers and toes, welts from a whip or belt, and bruises the only color against the alabaster of death. They were always found in their houses, usually in the den room or a living room and it seemed as though someone had painted the walls and carpeted the floor with blood, managing to splash the life-giving liquid on everything except for the bodies, something that would be impossible to do unless the murderer had cleansed the bodies afterwards.

There were so many clues left behind, so many trails left for them to follow. Too many. The names, were they of targets to come? And of what significance were the dates? It was always just first names, never the last, and only the month and day for the dates, not the year. For the murderer it must be great, gruesome fun, but for the officers working to catch him/her it was hell. There seemed to be nothing to connect the victims either. There were dead from every cultural background, every skin tone, every religion, no two were ever quite the same. If s/he had murdered an elderly black Christian man, another hit might have been an elderly black Pagan man, so even the closest related murders had discrepancies. It was horrible.

Already as she drove her Oldsmobile 442 to the latest site she was yawning, ready to crawl back into bed. It seemed more and more with each murder that they would never get a clue big enough to let them know who they were after, if it was a man or woman and what they might look like. When she had first seen one of the victims, she had thrown up. In fact, she had lost her lunch every time she had seen one of the corpses …or rather, the scene of the attack where the corpse was scattered, until somewhere around the twelfth one. The nightmares had continued for months after that, but those were few and far between now, even though the bodies frequently haunted her dreams. Whoever had been brutally killing those people was one of the most disturbed and dangerous murderers out on the streets. On some victims, male and female alike, there was evidence of rape, on others hours of lingering death, on all: torturous agony. She no longer cringed from the blood, and she could stare at the bodies and run through the pictures for hours without feeling faint, trembling with terror, or hurling, but the smell still brought her low. That was the one thing her mind couldn’t conjure even in dreams, the one thing she wasn’t too familiar with yet.

The stink of dried blood is nasty enough, the stink of rotting bodies is horrible, but those smells coupled, along with the rank odor of bodily excretion and the various ‘perfumes’ added was still enough to make her weak in the knees and to bring the bile into the back of her throat. The murder had a tendency to envelope the room with the corpse in it with a wild variety of smells, sometimes cologne, sometimes perfume, sometimes fruits from the kitchen, once it was toothpaste, a few time deodorant, and several times it had been of burnt flesh and barbecue sauce. Even the thought of barbecues now sickened Connie.

It was her job though, along with Scott Jacobs, Charlie ‘Chase’ Lynsday, Sam Veran, Jacqueline Tyrs, Francis Preel, and Ted Palmer. Six FBI agents working collectively to bring down the worst serial killer of the day, wanted for the cold-blooded murders of 47 people. The number brought a stab of pain to her heart, and the way the number kept rising made the guilt she combated daily soar to new heights. Every day that they spent scrapping together the innumerous and unhelpful clues they had, every day that they racked their brains trying to even scrounge up some possible suspects, every day that passed was another ticking of the clock for some other innocent person. Forty-seven victims in just under six years, and she had been trying to nab the murderer for somewhere around four and a half years, about a year less than Scott, Ted, and Jackie and about two or three months more than Sam and Francis because Charlie had been brought in around the same time as her. It was their job and they were failing at it.

Saturday’s victim was a forty-nine-year-old woman with four kids, two boys in college, one boy a construction worker in the Detroit area and a girl living in Texas with twin baby girls. The victim, Shelly Swanson, had worked as a waitress for the Rosado Diner on fifth and seventh in Chicago, married for thirty years and a widow for seven months, when her husband, Richard, had died of a heart attack on his way to work at the police department. Saturday’s victim was the closest to Connie of all the others, only for that she had met Officer Richard Swanson twice when asked to assist the Chicago police force on other, simpler murder files about five years ago.

Sam and the rest of Connie’s group were already at the scene of the murder by the time she pulled up across the street from the taped off house, a café latte in one hand and the other stifling a yawn as she made her way through the herd of concerned neighbors, aggravating reporters, and local officers trying to keep the throng under control. Charlie was speaking earnestly with Jackie in the kitchen, both young women with coffees in their hands, and Scott made his way from the reeking room at the end of the hallway Connie was standing in.

"All right, who’ve we got for witnesses, suspects, whatnot? Who called in the murder?" Connie demanded, taking a gulp of her scalding drink and burning her tongue instantly. Swearing softly, she drew in a hasty breath to cool her mouth and gagged against the stench wafting from the bloodied room.

Scott walked beside her to the sticky living room, his face pale and the bags under his eyes leading her to believe that he was getting about as much sleep as she every night, in other words, not enough. "Hollie Paters, living next door, claims that she got up when her dog started to howl and whine outside. She goes out to see what the matter is with the dog and of course doesn’t see or hear anything out of the ordinary, but she does notice that the light is on in Shelly’s living room. So, the story is, Shelly’s been taking Richard’s death really hard and Hollie’s been over quite a bit to help her out, and thinking that Shelly must be up late bawling or something, Hollie – being the good neighbor she is – decides to go over to cheer her up."

Connie closed her eyes briefly and shook her head, knowing where the story must be leading. "That poor woman, that poor, poor woman …"

"Hollie opens the door and is knocked back about five feet by the horrible smell, which her dog had probably detected when he woke her. Unfortunately for her, she caught a glimpse of the room before the smell drove her away." Scott stopped then and sighed heavily, keeping his eyes to the ground as they reached the entrance to the living room.

Connie swallowed hard and forced herself to look over everything. There were entrails duct taped to the walls and ceiling, Shelly’s legs in the form of a pretzel in the Lazy-boy chair before the television set, which was turned on and tuned to the Disney channel. Shelly’s head sat upon the T.V. the skin and hair missing from her skull, though the eyes were still in place, wide open in horror. Scattered about the room and made to resemble geometric shapes were Shelly’s arms and other body parts, her torso propped up against a T.V. dinner tray. Connie’s breath left her lungs in a long, heavy sigh as she turned and made her way to the kitchen where Jackie and Charlie still were.

"It spells: Matt. The date is March 8th." Charlie announced. "About a month from now."

Connie set her latte down on the counter and dropped into one of the kitchen chairs. "Hasn’t there been a Matt before?" She asked dully.

"There was a Mike, a Michelle, a Mary, a Martin, a Marissa, a Milan, a Maggie, and a May. All were victims." Jackie replied. The three girls turned when Sam entered with Scott. "Francis and Ted are suiting up. Since you weren’t here yet, we just did the flip without you."

"I’m never going to be able to look at a quarter the same way again," Sam spoke, taking a shaky sip of his water.

"There’s a lot of stuff that I’m never going to be able to look at, or smell, ever again." Jackie shivered and gulped down some of her coffee. "What’ve we got to go on this time?"

"There’s the neighbor, Hollie, or maybe Hollie’s dog …uh …Squeaky or Squeakers or something like that." Scott said.

"Pipsqueak." Charlie supplied. "Cute little Welsh corgi. He seems afraid of his own shadow."

"There’s something else too, something weird." Sam said.

Connie snorted and took a careful sip of her latte. "This whole thing is weird and disgusting." She shook her head and smiled apologetically at Sam. "Sorry, my temper’s kinda frayed today. What’s the weird deal?"

"The living room isn’t the only one to have been blanketed in blood."

They all turned to Sam then with questions in their eyes and Connie felt hope spark anew in her chest that maybe they’d finally have a helpful lead. "Where else in the house?" She asked quickly.

"The bedroom." He shuddered. "It’s nasty though, all sorts of knives and forks and stuff up there, pretty much everything with a point. There are razors clogged with peels of skin, even a few bloody butter knives. Looks like a massacre up there, that’s where her face is too, by the way. Ted’s got that room. What we’ve got to figure out now is which room she was killed in. There’s about twenty different ‘hows’ for how she actually died. Loss of blood, loss of limb, loss of face, fright, kitchen utensil wound …" He trailed off, shaking his head slowly.

"Spooky, man, real spooky." Charlie muttered. "This case just gets worse day by day. Forty-eight down …I wonder what number he’s working up to."

Sam raised a brow. "He?"

"What, you think a woman could do all this? Come on! Everyone knows men are the Wackos of the world." She replied, laughing bitterly.

"Come on guys, no more gender arguments, please," Scott begged. "We don’t need to be at each other’s throats when there’s this guy, or girl, who’ll be there for us. We’ve still got to tell the kids that mommy’s dead. Flip?"

Connie groaned. "No, no quarter toss, that’s just cruel. Telling the family shouldn’t be any more of an unwanted chore than it already is."

"So, Connie’s volunteered. All right, now that that’s been taken care of, we’ve got to get down to business." Scott inserted quickly. Connie gaped at him a moment and then shook her head in mute acceptance. "Jackie, you’ve got the pictures of the other times, right?"

"Yeah, and Ted and Francis are getting Polaroids of this one."

"Connie, there’s a phone in the dining room, on the second door to the right of the hallway to hell," Charlie offered, downing her coffee and taking a seat at the table where the pictures were already being spread out.

"Thanks," She muttered wearily. ‘I always get stuck with this job. Dammit, I hate being the messenger.’

***

"Oh God, I’m sorry, Mrs. Swanson …" Francis Preel whispered as he stepped carefully around the living room, suited up in one of the special investigation suits made specifically for this assignment. He had said more than once that it felt like he was walking around inside a giant Glad bag though he was sincerely happy to be wearing it now as he shifted and sidestepped an arm made to look like an isosceles triangle. "I pray that your soul finds peaceful rest in death,"

He cleared his throat carefully, though no matter how he tried to breathe it seemed inevitable that he would be forced to smell Mrs. Swanson’s slowly decaying body and the distinct aroma of Windex. The atrocities done to the victims of the murderer were almost beyond his ability to conceive; surely no person could be capable of such acts! But there was no other explanation, because Francis Preel was a practical and logical man, not one to buy into silly superstitions or the belief that aliens, ghosts, demons, or anything like that exist. Although …he really wanted to believe in devils when it came to things like this, anything other than that a fellow human, a fellow man or woman living on this earth, could be doing this. The smell stung his eyes as he traipsed further into the room.

One of Mrs. Swanson’s feet was jammed into the VCR where the tape is usually inserted and Francis, murmuring a quick word of prayer, gently eased the appendage from the VCR and set it on the floor. He’d already gotten pictures of everything in the room. All that was left was to bag up the evidence and to clean up the mess. He stepped up to the T.V. to remove her head from the antenna where it was situated and stopped dead in his tracks. There were marks on her skull. Moreover, teeth, human teeth, made the marks. His jaw dropped and he took a step backwards, his eyes falling and catching on Mrs. Swanson’s other arm, void of skin like her skull, but there was something else to it as well. The bone marrow had been sucked clean.

Gagging now, somewhere between joy at having finally gotten a few clues that could really help and being sickened beyond belief, he staggered back another step and tried to call out to the others, but his voice was weak and whispery. Clearing his throat and turning his gaze from the skull and arm, he fixed his sight on a hanging picture of the Swanson family, smeared with blood, and raised his voice again. "Scott, Charlie, Jackie, Connie, Sam, I’ve got something here! I think we’ve finally got something!"

He turned around and retrieved the skull from its place on the T.V. and picked up the arm as well and made his way to the entrance as everyone he had called for came to a running stop before entering the bloodied room. "What is it? What’ve you found?" Sam demanded at once as Francis stopped before them.

"Look at this!" He exclaimed, pushing the skull and arm towards them.

"Oh, dammit, Franny!" Charlie yelled, recoiling instinctively from the items of importance. "What’s so important about that stuff? We already know that her head and arm were bared to the bone …what about it?"

"Don’t call me Franny," He replied automatically, having to say that to Charlie about fifty times a day. "Look closer, at her cheek and her chin. There are teeth marks. And check this out, see the hollow of the bone here? Normally that’s filled with marrow. There’re teeth marks on it too."

Jackie peered at it with interest. "So what, this guy,"

"Or girl," Scott amended.

She flashed him a glare. "Or girl, did what? Drank his marrow? Got hungry and decided to chew on her face? That’s disgusting!"

"And it looks like that’s exactly what he or she did." Connie pointed out. "I didn’t know our little friend here was a cannibal, but why not? The freak already does just about everything else to these poor people. This is good though, nasty as it is, this is really good! We can match up these marks to all the dental records on file and get a match."

Jackie moaned. "Are you kidding? Do you have any idea how long that’ll take with the lack of suspects we’ve got to pick and choose from? We’d have to go through just about everyone alive and on record!"

"Don’t scorn what few blessings we’re given," Francis warned. "Mrs. Swanson here …and there, and over there, and upstairs too …she’s been the best victim yet. There’s a lot here that wasn’t anywhere else. This could be it, folks, we could finally have it here."

"I hope so, I really do." Charlie whispered. "Good going, Franny,"

Francis scowled in her direction and waved the skull in her face. "Don’t call me that!"

***

The euphoria from the discovery of the teeth marks was rapidly dying by Tuesday with still no results from the matching. It was certainly possible that whoever was murdering all these people and who had gnawed on the bones of Mrs. Swanson had no dental records on file, but no one was drained enough to want to seriously consider that possibility. They were gathered in the recreation room of the Chicago Police Department, their ‘home away from home’ while the search was on. Typically, after the discovery of another victim, they would move into the rec. room while going over all they knew and brainstorming, and so it was at lunchtime on Tuesday, February the fifth. Sam was lazily tossing darts at the dartboard where they had pinned up a picture of a black shadow with a question mark beside it and scribbled comments of what they wanted to do to the murderer. Jackie was sleeping on the couch, curled up into a ball on her side next to Charlie who was merely staring into the distance, her expression void of emotion.

Connie herself was sitting across from Scott at the small table with a Scrabble board set up on the table between them. Clicking her tongue in annoyance she surveyed her letters for the sixth or seventh time and growled softly. Scott lifted a brow and smiled at her, laughter gleaming in his eyes. With a sigh, she scooped up four letters and arranged them on the board beside the word ‘cheese’ and spelled out ‘chase’ working off the C and going horizontally across the board. Scott made a scoffing noise and jotted down her points.

"Hey, Charlie, you’re on the board," Connie called to her zoning friend.

Charlie blinked and glanced at the pair. "Eh?"

"You’re on the board, Chase." Scott said, pointing to the word.

Charlie nodded and returned to her own little world, tucked inside herself on the worn and faded yellow couch. Sam tossed another dart and hit the shadow man in the face. "We’ve got, what …thirty days ‘til March 8th? That’s a month. We’ve got to find some ‘Matt’ that might be a target between now and then."

Scott grunted as he spelled out ‘steak’ from Connie’s ‘chase’ working off the S. "We’ve tried that before, remember? A few times actually, and every time we tried to watch out for most, if not all, of the people with a certain name on a certain day, absolutely nothing happened. What makes you think that this time it’ll be different?"

The door opened and Francis stepped in with a box of glazed and sugar powdered doughnuts, Ted behind him. "Because this time we’ve got more to work from?" Ted suggested, running a hand over his baldhead.

"And because we’ve got nothing else to try." Connie replied.

Sam shrugged and returned to his game. "I suppose." He conceded.

"Your turn, Connie," Scott said, gesturing to the board.

"I know that!" She snapped. "Give me a minute, I’ve only got the worst letters in the world to build from here."

"Story of our lives." Francis muttered, sitting in one of the beanbag chairs before the television as Ted sat down next to him. Francis turned pleading baby-blue eyes to the ceiling. "Oh please, God, or whoever up there, please let something be on today …I can’t be stuck watching Disney …"

Connie shivered and smacked his shoulder. "Shut up, Franny,"

"What?"

"Your turn," Scott reminded her.

Fixing him with an evil glare, Connie looked down to her letters and picked a few up. "Here, we’ll have a ‘fortnight’ from your stupid ‘night’ first turn. Fortnight, as in, a fortnight from now we’ll have whoever this loser is in the bag with the help of those teeth prints. Fortnight as in fourteen days from now I won’t be getting my butt kicked in this retarded game. Fortnight as in …oh shit."

Francis, Ted, and Scott looked up at her. "Oh shit …I never like the sound of those words coming from your mouth, and not just because ladies shouldn’t swear. What’s wrong?"

"I …I’m not quite sure yet …just a hunch." Connie replied slowly. "This all started about six years ago, right? In September of 1996 the first victim was found. That’s when you, Scott, you, Ted, and Sleeping Beauty over there, were recruited. About four and a half years ago, Charlie and I were drawn into this. And then sometime after that, Sam and you, Ted."

"Yeah, we all know that." Ted replied, biting into a glazed doughnut.

"Do you guys remember …ah …October of 1998, how one of the victim’s body parts said ‘Grace’ and February the 19th?" She persisted.

"I do," Scott replied.

"Me too," Francis said.

"Sam and I weren’t with it then, we came in December." Came Ted’s response.

Connie nodded. "Yeah, but remember how when February rolled around, especially the 19th, we were trying to keep watch over all the Graces in the area of the other murders?"

Scott nodded and put down ‘fried’ from the ‘fortnight’. "What about it?"

"That’s what we’ve done for all the murders. We’ve used the dates we’ve been given and jumped forward to the first time that date appears in the future. What if we’ve been wrong? What if it’s not the first time the date shows up but the second, or the third?"

"Well, it’d be easy enough to find out if it’s the second time, but if it’s anything beyond that …" Ted thought aloud.

"Not true, it could be going from the second time, and then the third, and then the fourth and so on," Francis argued.

"Or any pattern like that," Connie added, nodding her head.

"What if it isn’t a logical pattern though?" Scott argued, his arresting blue gaze locked onto hers. "What if this person is just a raving lunatic and sticks the dates and names around to confuse us?"

"That is a possibility," Connie allowed, brushing a lock of her rich auburn hair from her face, "and the only way we can determine that though, is by running through the information we’ve got."

"We could make a chart or a graph or something, to see if any of the dates we’ve been given match up to dates of a murder, and we could see – if the dates match – how much time elapses between murders." Charlie piped up, watching the rest of the group with interest.

"At the very least," Sam noted, "It’ll give us something to do until we get the results of the teeth prints."

"Right." Connie said decidedly. "And here is a ‘practical’ stemming from your ‘act’. Take that, Scott, all seven letters used and right over a triple word score at that."

***

"So wait, explain this to me again, I’m not that good with math or logics." Jackie complained, munching on a powdered doughnut.

"It’s really quite simply," Ted said, enthusiastic about the project now that he understood what they were looking for. "There are certain things that our murderer does when he kills. For example, he won’t kill two people who are alike. If he has already killed one little Caucasian Jewish girl, he won’t kill another little Jewish girl with Caucasian skin. A boy, sure, a woman, or an elderly woman, or a man, or an elderly man, yes, and of any skin color other than Caucasian, but he or she never repeats. And then there’s what Connie pointed out about the dates. It could be that he’s following a logical pattern involving the names and the dates, and so it would make our job much simpler, if we knew how much time went by between the name and date s/he gives and when a murder is committed on that date, killing a person by that name."

Jackie’s honey-brown eyes blinked sleepily but a moment later she was grinning hugely. "Yeah, I have that now. I get it!"

Ted smiled tolerantly at the young woman. "Glad to hear it. Now, Connie and Francis are going back through the dates and names to try and find any matches. Unfortunately, we already know that he doesn’t do things a year in advance, so we don’t have a whole lot of time to go back through, just from when this all started until about the time when Charlie and Connie were brought on."

"So, okay then, once we’ve figured out the lapse of time, we’ll know which names to protect on which days, right?"

"Better than that," Sam inserted.

Ted nodded. "We’ll be able to go through and single out who he hasn’t already gotten. If we’re given the name Monica, and he’s already gotten a black woman of every age grouping, you know, child, woman, or old woman, and an Irish woman of every age grouping, and an African woman and so on …until we find out that he hasn’t gotten a Japanese Mica."

"Mica?"

"One Japanese religion. I think that’s the one that stemmed from China." Sam replied.

"Whatever. But when we can go through the general specifics, by that I mean religion, skin color, cultural background or whatnot, we’ll have less people to have to guard and more of a chance of picking this guy, or girl, up. Conceivably, we’d be able to catch them in the act."

"So, wow, our job is almost done, right?" She asked, tossing her raven-black hair over her shoulder.

"Eh …not quite. We’ve got a lot of information to go digging through and we still might not have any leads if it turns out that there’s no pattern and that the murderer is just a lunatic." Ted said, shrugging.

"I think it’s safe to say that our murderer is quite insane with what we’ve gathered already. I mean, if you doubt that, just look at the pictures again. Who in their right mind goes around torturing, sometimes raping, and eventually killing something in a very painful manner, and then making a puzzle and a riddle with the body parts? We’re dealing with a very sick person here." Jackie stated confidently.

Sam nodded, arms crossed before him. "But, if there are no dental matches and no pattern in the murders, we’re practically back at square one."

The trio, when faced with reality, became more sober. "No getting our hopes up then, eh?"

"Sorry, Jacks, not yet." Ted retrieved a doughnut from the box and wolfed it down. "But we’ve got to be getting close. There’s no way a person can leave so many clues and leads for us to follow for so long without getting caught eventually."

"How many more people will die between now and then, though? How many lives will we have to virtually sacrifice before we’ve got enough to nab this jerk? I …I don’t think I can deal with these much longer. So many people already, forty-eight …shouldn’t that be enough?"

"Jacks, that’s too much already. But, we’ve just got to wait for this guy, this girl, this psycho to decide when it’s enough. I just hope we don’t have to wait for him to give himself up, or her, be it female." Ted sighed and ran a hand over his head again, rubbing his bald scalp. "Some things are too horrible to have even begun …and this is one of those, but since it has …"

Sam closed his eyes and sat down, twirling one of the darts between two fingers. "It’s a nasty business we’re trying to stop, but someone’s got to, and if we can’t stop it, a lot more people will be killed, more than those that would be sacrificed for us to get enough information on the killer. Don’t worry though, with all we’ve been given on this latest on, I figure the cat is in the bag." And with that, eyes still closed, he threw the dart at the board, piercing the shadow man’s heart.

To Be Continued …