A Killer Like Me

CHAPTER TEN

Saturday, July 28, 7:30 AM

The killer grins as he stares at the morning newspaper lying on the breakfast table in his kitchen. He has read the front-page article three times. He can’t stop grinning. Someone has finally discovered him.

It is unfortunate that his discoverer is nothing more than a plain detective, some unimaginative flatfoot who, given enough pieces, finally put together the puzzle.

But in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.

It took the flatfoot long enough. Eight bodies, according to the paper. They got that wrong. They missed the first two. Partially, though, he has to blame himself for that. It was, after all, his fault the local constabulary failed to put those two together with the others. He overestimated their intelligence, or perhaps he underestimated his own cunning.

The killer stirs his coffee and gazes absently into the cup. In the new Sodom, as in the old, the harlots and sodomites see themselves as quite distinct and separate. It’s only in God’s eyes that their sameness is revealed. They are dizygotic twins, wallowing in their own apostasy. In order to be saved, both must die.

As the warm liquid from the first sip of coffee slides down his throat, he gazes again at the headline.

SERIAL KILLER STALKS CITY

How sensational. He wonders if the reporter who wrote the story also wrote the headline. Probably so, he thinks, because he detects the same alliterative prose in her lead sentence: “A serial killer is stalking the streets of the Crescent City, mutilating and murdering women.”

The story is good, if not completely accurate. He can hardly wait to hear more official reaction from the police department and city hall. Reading the article, it’s obvious the police chief is in denial about the presence of a wolf among his flock of sheep, a wolf masquerading as a lamb.

But what of this detective, this Sean Murphy, who defied his superiors and told the newspaper about the killer and his work? The flatfoot was at least clever enough to finally link the harlots’ deaths, though their connection could not have been more obvious, but he apparently was not clever enough to link those killings to the deaths of the two sodomites.

Maybe what this detective needs is a little push in the right direction. Maybe what this city needs is a message, a warning. After all, didn’t God warn Abraham that he was going to destroy Sodom before he rained brimstone and fire down upon it?

The cop is no Abraham, nor Lot, but maybe he can be useful.

At least he finally recognized my work.

The killer rises from the table and walks down the short hallway connecting the two rooms of his small apartment. His bedroom walls are lined with shelves, stacked with more than a hundred books, many on religion, many on… other topics of interest to him. As he brushes past them, he traces a hand over a hardcover edition of H. Montgomery Hyde’s A History of Pornography.

The killer sits down at a small writing desk wedged against the wall next to his bed. On the desk sits a Royal typewriter, circa the 1930s. On a shelf overlooking the desk stands a five-by-seven-inch frame holding a black-and-white photograph of a young woman with long dark hair and dark eyes. His mother in her early twenties, taken almost forty years ago.

The killer has decided to write a letter, but he hasn’t yet decided to whom he will send it-the police or the newspaper. After a moment’s thought, he realizes that the police may bury the letter. The newspaper will likely print it.

From a drawer beside his right knee, the killer pulls a pair of thin cotton gloves, the kind darkroom technicians once used to handle color enlarging paper, before everything went digital. He slips the gloves onto his hands, then pulls a plain sheet of twenty-pound paper from the center drawer and rolls it into the typewriter. For several seconds he holds his index fingers above the keys, mentally composing his letter, the first he has ever written about his work. Briefly, he considers the enormity of what he is about to do.

Writing to the police or to the newspaper, essentially the same thing, is fraught with danger. Look what happened to Kaczynski with his rambling manifesto. And to BTK after his taunting missives.

But I am doing the Lord’s work.

Still, he realizes that making his words public is a dangerous game.

Something tickles the back of his subconscious, something he has read. That phrase, dangerous game, where is it from? The word game certainly has more than one meaning. He bends over and picks up a dictionary from the floor beside his desk. He thumbs to the Gs. There it is. game (noun) 1. a form of play or sport, esp. a competitive one played according to rules and decided by skill, strength, or luck. His eyes glide down the text until he finds another definition. 3. wild mammals or birds hunted for food or sport.

That’s it. The game. The most dangerous game. He has read Robert Graysmith’s books about the Zodiac Killer, who was allegedly obsessed with Richard Connell’s short story “The Most Dangerous Game.” In that story a crazy Russian aristocrat stalks an American big-game hunter on a private island. In the title, and in the story, the word game has two meanings: a form of play or sport, for certainly the hunt itself is a sport; and a mammal hunted for sport… or food, because the American hunter is himself the prey.

What a wonderfully delicious plot twist it would have been had General Zaroff intended to hunt Sanger Rainsford down like an animal and eat him.

The killer looks at his antique typewriter, bought from a pawnshop for twenty-five dollars cash, and untraceable back to him. He tries to force his mind to focus on the task at hand. He needs his medication to keep him focused. Something dragged his mind here, to the word game , to the short fiction story, to the Zodiac. What was it?

The codes. That was it. Those unfathomable, indecipherable Zodiac ciphers. The Zodiac Killer included long passages of code in several of his hand-printed letters that he said contained clues to his identity. The ciphers were combinations of letters, many printed backward, and arcane symbols. Only the first one or two coded passages were ever deciphered. The rest remain unbroken to this day.

The killer knows nothing about codes. He wants to type a letter to the newspaper, not invent a cipher. But the police and the paper don’t have to know that. Thinking about the hours they will waste poring over every letter makes him laugh. He imagines the police bringing in the FBI, the CIA, the National Security Agency-all for nothing. His code will be meaningless, just babel. But it will stymie them.

He will also send them a little gift, something to establish his bona fides right away.

The killer’s hands hover again over the type keys. Carefully, he begins to peck at them.

DEAR EDITOR:

THIS IS…