Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. Vol. 127, No. 3 & 4. Whole No. 775 & 776, March/April 2006

Success Story by Sam Hill

“Cross Carl Hiaasen with Dave Barry, and you’ve got Sam Hill, of whom we’d like to hear more,” the Hartford Courant said when Mr. Hill’s first novel, Buzz Monkey, was published in ’03. The author, a Georgia native who currently lives in the Chicago area, followed up with an equally well-received second in the series, Buzz Riff (Carroll & Graf ’04) This is his first appearance in EQMM, and his first story.

Donald turned to serial killing as a means to deal with his midlife crisis, although strictly speaking, Donald should have been well past a midlife meltdown. The trigger for the crisis wasn’t the droop or having his comb-over get caught in a gust of wind and stand up like the hood on a Camaro. In Donald’s case, the catalyst was success.

Donald made senior partner of Lowell, Rehnquist, and Crowe, the 4th largest law firm in Chicago, at 51. He rewarded himself with a black Porsche and a third wife. At 52 he replaced the granite in his kitchen with marble, and a year later, he watched his youngest graduate from Notre Dame. It was the life he’d worked for, perfect right down to his new wife’s new breasts.

Perfect, perhaps, but miserable. Donald discovered his misery at a cocktail party, when midway through a long boast about his son’s latest promotion at Goldman, he suddenly realized that he was the least successful person in the room. In disbelief, he surveyed the room again. Sure enough, everyone here was a CEO or judge — federal, of course — or cancer researcher or Something. Yes, his kids went to Virginia and Notre Dame, but this woman had kids at Harvard, Williams, and USC. (Normally, he might have been able to score a point off that last one, but Universal had just optioned her kid’s senior project.) That he was stuck in this corner talking to a divorced dermatologist who kept looking over his shoulder and didn’t bother to hide it was proof of his failure.

He downed his Chardonnay in one gulp, tugged Krissie away from a drooling Senator, drove the half-block home, and locked himself in his study. Four inches from the bottom of a bottle of scotch, he found a truth: Success is a con, an ever-receding mirage. You top one hill just to see more hills. Senior partner is just another word for “not there yet, pal.” Black Label scotch isn’t Blue Label. Donald and Krissie were invited to cocktail parties because the real Somebodies needed an audience, someone to applaud.

Two inches further into the bottle he saw more truth: A black kid learns to dunk and becomes a playground legend, which gets him a scholarship to college where he becomes an All-American. He works his butt off and makes it to the NBA, only to find himself sitting on the bench yelling at refs and tossing LeBron his water bottle. Here is the truth: You must be born to greatness. LeBron went from high school to NBA All-Star. Hard work will only get you to mediocrity. Donald was never going to make Attorney General, or do anything else that would put him on that next tier, if indeed that next tier was real. He was an extra in someone else’s dream.

For six weeks he went to an expensive therapist of the McFerrin School (“Don’t worry. Be Happy.”) Then in the elevator after his twelfth session, he had his second midlife insight: Maybe the answer was not to go up the ladder, but down. Why not just find a place with lower standards, where he could spend the rest of his life basking in local adulation? Rather than kill himself chasing success, why not just find a place where what he already was counted as success? Thus Donald and a sulking Krissie retired to Deep River, Wisconsin, three hours north of Green Bay. Deep River seemed a bit extreme, but Donald did not want to chance Santa Fe, Aspen, or Carmel.

Like all Wisconsin towns, Deep River has a bar on every block. Donald selected the Dogsbody, a comfortable place with a warm, dark interior, worn leather-topped stools, and a drift of dust on the bottles behind Howard, the enormous bartender with “Love” tattooed across one set of knuckles and “Hate” across the other. The three afternoon regulars, Bob, Trent, and Marv, welcomed him in a quiet, guy sort of way and soon the four, along with Howard, spent most afternoons watching TV shows where overweight women fought over skinny, smirking men with no chins and incomplete sets of teeth. Donald paid for his own drinks, laughed at all the right places, and bided his time. After two months, he made his move.

“Just retired up here,” he said casually. “How about you guys?”

“Same story, Don, the same,” said the handsome one, Trent. “Decided to take it easy, make Howard rich.” Howard scowled at him, then ducked his head so Trent wouldn’t see the grin hidden in his gray-flecked beard.

“I used to be a senior partner in a big law firm in Chicago. What did you fellows do before you packed it in?” Slightest emphasis on the words “senior partner,” “big,” and “Chicago.” Bob looked at Marv. Marv looked at Trent. Howard grinned again at the lemons he was slicing.

“’Bout the same, Don,” Trent answered with a sideways shrug. “Marv here used to be in the lawyer game like you. What was the name of that firm you ran, Marv?” Marv mumbled the name of the largest law firm in the country.

“Really?” croaked Donald, now recognizing Marv as the keynote speaker at last year’s ABA.

Trent continued, “Bob is the guy to go to if you got anything in your head that needs rewiring, best shrink in Southern California, and after Howard left the FBI, he wrote some books that got made into bad movies.”

“Won him a couple of Oscars, though,” Marv inserted.

“And got him rich,” chipped in Bob.

Trent ignored them. “Myself, I was a plastic surgeon who got interested in the business side and started a chain of clinics. Business just took off. GE bought me out and I was out of a job. Moved up here to play golf and fish and hang out with you guys.”

“Yeah, he left out the part where he married one of his clients.” Bob nudged Marv, who giggled. “A dancer.”

Trent blushed red. “Aw, come on, fellows.”

“Miss September was it, Trent?” Marv snickered.

“That was a long time ago, Marv,” Trent said.

“It was last year, Trent,” Howard growled. “I almost put her picture up in the bathroom, but I wanted to keep it for myself.” Donald drained his beer and pushed off his stool.

“Hey, Don, where are you going?” Trent called after him. “What’s the matter?”

Donald stomped down Main Street. This wasn’t even Boca or the Hamptons, it was Deep River, Wisconsin. He wasn’t even Somebody in the Dogsbody Bar in Deep River, Wisconsin. People on the street saw the knotted fury on his face and parted to let him pass. He steamed through, muttering, fuming, not stopping until he came to a store with a hunting rifle in the front window. He stared at the rifle and the huge shiny knife on the table beneath it and thought of buying one of them, marching back to the bar, and teaching them all a lesson or two.

And that’s when the third and final insight of Donald’s midlife occurred. That’s when he realized that there is still one field where it is possible to make your mark, get your name known, where connections and genetics and raw talent don’t matter, one last bastion of meritocracy: serial murder. A look of wonder, then peace, came across his reflection in the glass. He spun on his heel and headed for the library, where he spent the next three days studying serial killing.

His research led him to the number ten. All the best — Bundy, Corll, Fogman, Chikatilo, De Salvo, Gacy, Dahmer — had ten or more kills. Five or six might make it in the old days, but it just wouldn’t cut it today, not when guys like Lopez were putting up tallies in the hundreds. And not just any ten. No one respected guys like Gary Ridgway or Wayne Williams who hit easy targets like drugged-out prostitutes or retarded children. To really count, the target needed to be a challenge. That’s what made Bundy and Gacy rock stars — wary victims, public places.

That and the fact they were stranglers. Stranglers were the supreme court judges of serial killing. Okay, so snipers got headlines, too, but no one wrote books about snipers. And bombers were just plain wack jobs. Strangle first, cut afterwards, he figured. Although Donald wasn’t sure about the cutting. Blood made him queasy.

He killed his first a month later. He threw a dart at a map pinned to his basement wall. Satisfied with the result, he flew from Milwaukee to St. Louis, and from there took Southwest to Love Field. In Dallas, he rented a mid-sized car from an off-airport agency, and drove north to Lubbock. There he bought a city map, found the largest hospital, and after a short wait strangled a beautiful, dark-haired nurse wearing a nametag that said Nancy. He dragged her body into the bushes, put the nametag in his pocket, left the white wire coat hanger twisted around her neck, and spit into the center of a yellow sticky note which he stuck to her forehead. Satisfied, and embarrassed to find he’d had an accident in his pants, he climbed back in the car and made his way home to Deep River.

That became his system. He flew cheap, easy, and anonymous airlines, but only to the next closest airport. He never stayed overnight within a hundred miles of the kill or failed to discard his clothes afterwards in a busy Goodwill bin. He used a popular brand of yellow sticky and common, white wire coat hangers.

The only change to the routine came after Three, when he wrote his first letter, a brief matter-of-fact note to the Roanoke paper mentioning the yellow sticky, information which the police had not released, and telling them to check with their colleagues in Birmingham and Lubbock. He signed it Mocking Man. The story made CNN the next afternoon.

“Hey, Howard,” Marv said back at the Dogsbody, “turn that up. You guys see this?”

“See what?” said Bob. Donald tried to look interested, but not too interested, but not too nonchalant, but still interested. The net result was a look somewhere between concentration and constipation.

“This guy has got some stones. Leaves his DNA on purpose. Calls himself Mocking Man,” said Marv.

“He just does nurses, right?” said Trent. “You think that’s got anything to do with that guy from Chicago, Richard Speck?”

“Nah,” said Marv. “That Speck guy is a nut. Did you see that special on him? He took drugs and turned into a woman while he was in prison. Grew these humongous—”

“I think this guy is just showing off. Styling,” Howard cut him off. “Hey, you need another one down there, Donald?”

Donald thought the ex-FBI man stared at him a second too long, and shook his head before nervously shifting his gaze to his own reflection in the mirror. The conversation drifted off into a discussion of Speck, and Donald lost interest, soaking in a haze of introspective self-glory. Stones, he repeated silently. Styling.

Four was Buffalo, Five was Toronto, Six was Winnipeg, and Seven was Gillette. Let them find a pattern in that, he thought, eyeing the random scatter on his basement map.

After Seven, he got his first VICAP profile on www.serialstars.com. How the website got hold of FBI summaries, no one knew. But there it was. He sat in the library for hours, reading his little blurb over and over, flipping to the library’s home page whenever anyone passed near him, then clicking back again once they’d passed. It read like a book review: “impressive debut,” “confident, distinctive,” “controlled,” “powerful.” And stylish. There was that word again, “stylish.” Donald thought about printing the page out, but he didn’t know enough about cookies and all that to be sure they couldn’t trace him, so he simply read it and reread it until the library closed, then went home and made insistent love to Krissie for forty-five minutes.

“Next time, just take one pill,” she complained afterwards. “I’ve got a spinning class tomorrow.” Donald ignored her and grinned at the ceiling, replaying his profile.

Eight was Des Moines, Nine was Peoria, and Ten was Milwaukee. Donald was a little nervous for Ten, and not just because this was the one that would put him into the big leagues. Milwaukee was closer to Deep River than he would have liked. But the thing with random is you have to stay random, even if that means you take your next-door neighbor. The chat-rooms called it a donut when killers left a neat, empty ring around their home base.

At two o’clock on the appointed day, he said “So long” to the guys and hit the road for Milwaukee. He left the loaner from the Porsche dealer parked in a supermarket lot and walked the six blocks to the hospital.

He was still two blocks away when a young red-headed woman stepped from the shadows. “I need to see some ID.” She wore a black T-shirt, blue jeans, windbreaker with an FBI iron-on, and a shiny badge that hung on a chrome chain around her neck. “Now.” She held out her hand. Donald moved the pink leash in his left hand to his right, fumbled in his pocket and came out with his wallet.

“Have you seen a white cockapoo?” he lisped, looking up. “It has a pink collar...” he trailed off.

The agent looked at the leash, then back at the ID and Donald’s pink cashmere sweater. She made her decision. “Get out of here,” she said.

“But Offither,” he said. Careful, Donald, don’t lay it on too thick, he told himself.

“I said get out of here. Right now. Go on,” she said.

Donald turned and walked away, forcing himself to stop every few yards, put his hands on his knees and stage whisper loudly, “Here, Skippy. Here, boy.”

After turning the corner, he plastered himself against the wall and hyperventilated, knowing just how close he’d come. It was a trap. The FBI was waiting for him. Quickly he thought backwards through his movements, and stopped when he got to the map. Random? How about a tight geographic spiral, leading them right to you?

He forced himself to concentrate; there would be time for analysis later. The important thing now was that he was still free. Every great one was an eyelash away from capture at some point. Donald remembered a poster from the break room in his law firm: It’s how you deal with adversity that matters.

“What would Bundy do?” he asked himself. A moment later he smiled, straightened the coat hanger, slipped it up his sleeve and turned back toward the hospital.

When he reached the shadows where the young agent waited, she stepped out, obviously annoyed. “I thought I told you—” she began.

“I couldn’t help it, Offither, I heard Skippy barking and... oh, there,” Donald said.

She turned slightly and instantly realized her mistake. But by the time she’d turned back Donald had whipped the wire around her neck and given it his patented double twist. She fell to the ground, one hand clawing at her neck and the other at her weapon. Donald calmly used his foot to hold her gun in the holster until she stopped struggling. Satisfied, he pulled a Post-it from his pocket and slapped it into the middle of her forehead. Working his jaw, he hawked a spray of spit across the note and her face. He ripped the badge from her neck and stuffed it into his pocket. On the way back to the car, he dropped a postcard into a mailbox.

Spent, he drove slowly back to Deep River. Just past midnight, he eased past blinking red lights down a Main Street empty save the three cars in front of the Dogsbody. He looked at his watch. It was well past Howard’s normal closing time. Donald licked his dry lips. Maybe the news was on. He pulled in beside Trent’s Mercedes, climbed out and walked stiffly up to the front door. The handle refused to turn. He cupped his hands against the glass and peered inside. His three friends sat at the bar, Howard across from them, a bar towel tucked in his waistband. Trent saw Donald, punched Marv, and waved. Howard came around the bar and opened the door, locking it behind him. He patted Donald on the back.

“Hey, Don, it’s about time,” Trent said.

Donald looked from face to face. “What are you guys doing here?”

Trent grinned back at him. “Waiting for you, what do you think?”

Donald shook his head. “What do you mean, waiting for me?” Bob beamed across his beer.

“Well, this is 10, isn’t it?” said Marv. “Big number 10? And in style, too, it was on all the news channels.”

“Pour us a round, Howard,” said Trent. He slapped a twenty on the bar. “To Mocking Man.”

“But...” began Donald. Howard slid five shot glasses onto the bar and poured a clear thick liquid into each. The men raised the glasses, waved them toward Donald, and tossed the iced vodka down.

“Twin Cities Killer,” said Trent, tapping his own chest. “24.”

“They call me the I-94 Tap Dancer. Signature’s a double tap from a Glock,” said Marv. “16 kills, but I’m taking a little time off right now until this replacement hip settles in.”

“The Coach,” said Bob, “11, all high school football players, eight found.”

“But he’s not gay,” Trent added quickly, eyeing Donald’s sweater. “It’s just his signature.” Donald stared back at Trent helplessly.

Trent whirled and pointed toward Howard with both hands, index fingers extended. “Can we have a drum roll, please. With 37 attributed kills, currently the top at-large serial killer in the U.S. and ranked number 8 in the world, our very own Fogman.”

Big Howard smiled back shyly. “It’s only 29,” he said modestly. “They hung four on me just to clear up cold cases, and the rest are copycats.”

Donald dropped his head onto the bar and sobbed.