Full Tilt

31

Lost River State Forest, Minnesota

“You come up here for the birding?”

Zurrn didn’t expect the attendant pumping gas into his van to start a conversation. He was in Pine Mills, a village that skirted the state forest near the Canadian border.

The forest was known for bird-watching.

It was dusk. Bishop’s General Store and Gas, where he’d stopped, was the only sign of life. The attendant, “Ferg,” according to the smudged name patch on his shirt, was chatty.

“That’s right,” Zurrn said to his side-view mirror.

“I figured.” Ferg clamped on his toothpick as the smell of gasoline wafted while the flow hummed. “I see by your plate you’re from Delaware. Folks that come that far, usually-”

A sudden muffled sound from inside the van caught Ferg’s attention. Cupping his free hand to his temple, he drew his face to the tinted window.

“You got a dog in there, or something?”

Zurrn eyed him then caught the flash of a turn signal. A car was approaching the service station from the highway. It bore the emergency light bar of a police unit.

“No.” He kept his voice soft. “My wife’s trying to get some sleep.”

Oh, Ferg mouthed. “Okay.” After finishing the fill-up, he replaced the nozzle quietly and took care tightening the van’s gas cap.

“That’ll be forty-five,” Ferg whispered. “Want me to check the oil?”

Zurrn held three twenties out the window.

“Nope. Keep the change.” He started the engine.

“Thank you, sir! Want a receipt?”

“Nope.”

As a Klassen County sheriff’s white patrol car wheeled up to the pumps, Zurrn slipped the transmission into Drive and eased away.

That was close.

Watching Bishop’s General Store and Gas shrink in his mirror, Zurrn then glanced over his shoulder, his attention flicking to the enlarged storage area he’d built under the van’s master bed. The sleeping pills were wearing off. Not to worry, it wasn’t much farther.

That little scene back there underscored the need to be vigilant.

Now that he was at war, now that his struggle was national news, mistakes could not be made. He glanced at the newspaper on the passenger seat, folded to the latest article on Rampart. There were photos of the farm with insets of the victims and that reporter, Kate Page, the one who’d begged and pleaded to know more about her sister.

There was a sidebar story about Page and her painful, unrelenting search for her sister. The story praised her as “heroic, brave, courageous and smart.”

Your reverence is misplaced.

Zurrn seized the paper and looked at her face with contempt before tossing it aside. She was a moth, circling mindlessly in his brilliance. He was on the edge of immortality, of achieving something monumental.

You have no understanding of who I am.

Or what I am.

As twilight yielded to the dark he searched the dense woods, unearthing the pieces of his life. His mother had come to America to live with relatives when she was a student from Bulgaria, or Romania, or Serbia. He was never sure. She drank a lot and told him different stories. She may have been a Gypsy. She became an US citizen, working as a nurse until she became a drug addict and lost her job. Her life was far from the American dream. When Frank, the paramedic she’d married, realized that Zurrn was not his son but the bastard of one of her many affairs, he walked out on them.

Zurrn stared into the darkness ahead and admitted what he was.

I am the result of a whore’s barter for drugs.

He had no idea who his father was. Zurrn grew up poor, friendless and with a love-hate relationship with his mother. As a child, he had an ungainly limp, which he’d had surgically corrected as an adult. His mother was protective of him during her periods of lucidity, feeding him the promise of a better life, telling him he was exceptional.

“You’re not like other kids, Sorin. You’re destined for greatness.”

His teachers had found that his IQ was the highest of any student they had taught and that he had an eidetic memory. But Zurrn was ostracized and bullied at school. He would hide away alone after classes in one of the labs, building new computers from discarded ones.

His mother struggled to pay the rent on their cold, ramshackle home but was hostage to her addiction between jobs cleaning hotel rooms or serving fast food, leaving them to rely on charity. One day a boy teased Zurrn because of his shirt.

Hey, why’re you wearing that rag, Hopalong? My mom donated it to a church. How’d you get it? You steal it?

Others soon gathered round and started poking Zurrn.

Know what I heard? A bigger boy grinned. I heard your old lady gives blow jobs for dope, anywhere and anytime!

Zurrn burned with shame.

Limping away, he tore off the shirt and threw it in a Dumpster before he got home and sought refuge in his collection. Ever since a class trip to the Chicago Botanic Garden, he’d started collecting butterflies. He began by stealing several exotic ones from the Garden, putting them under his shirt, feeling his prisoners flapping against his chest near his heart. He was enamored with their beauty and, later, the whole process of chasing and capturing specimens in parks.

He soon became expert with his killing jar where he imprisoned each catch. He’d watch his beauties flutter themselves to death or die slowly in captivity. Sometimes he’d pinch the thorax to stun them. After death, he took great care spreading their wings, pinning them, mounting them and soaking up their poetry.

My pretty dead things.

They didn’t leave you to buy drugs and get stoned in the bathroom. They didn’t bring home strange men stinking of alcohol.

They didn’t humiliate you.

They were his to own, his to possess, his to control.

He held the power of life and death over them.

He was never alone when he was with his collection. They were individual works of art, so beautiful. Unlike the ugliness he’d endured at every turn. Every day with each indignity he suffered, his anger grew, evolving into a quiet rage.

He remembered walking home one afternoon and seeing his mother searching through the trash cans along their street. At that moment he saw a pack of neighborhood teenage girls swarm her, mock her, slap her and rip apart her plastic bags, scattering her soda and beer cans. Mortified, Zurrn stayed out of sight. Then he ran off, his tears and fury nearly blinding him with shame for not defending his mother.

And shame because of her.

Tonya Plesivsky was the girl who’d led the attack. He knew where she lived and that she had a beloved dog, Pepper. That night, Zurrn lay awake seething. A week later, MISSING flyers went up in the neighborhood for Tonya’s dog. Pet lovers were sympathetic. One day Tonya even stopped Zurrn on the street near Ben Bailey Park.

Have you seen Pepper, Sorin? This is serious. I’m worried.

She had a lot of nerve, after what she’d done to his mother.

No, he had lied.

Of course, he knew where Pepper was and he considered sending the mutt’s head to her with a note-“I’m missing you in hell”-before dismissing the plan. He was happy knowing that she would never see her precious Pepper again. At the same time, as much as he loathed Tonya, he saw how fear became her, how pretty she was in her anguish. His power over her enthralled him and he fantasized about what he’d do to her, about seeing a MISSING poster with Tonya’s face on it.

The van’s headlights raked the woods and gravel popped under the tires as Zurrn turned onto an abandoned forestry road. He knew this area, he’d been here before. As the van toddled along the old rutted path, soft groaning and cries rose from the back.

“Don’t worry. Not much longer,” he said aloud.

That incident with Tonya was the catalyst that had put him on the path of what was truly his life’s work as a collector. First, he earned scholarships to college and studied computer design. That didn’t last long before he drifted across the country trying this and trying that, before jumping from one computer job to another. During this time, he grappled with his animosity toward his mother, growing distant and out of touch. Only she knew where he was-he’d allow her that much-but he rarely responded to her letters or calls.

Perhaps out of guilt, but more out of curiosity, he monitored the online editions of the Chicago newspapers. He was living in Denver when he saw his mother’s death notice in the Chicago Tribune.

His mother’s church had placed the notice.

He contacted the church, then returned to Chicago to quietly arrange for her funeral. But he couldn’t bear to attend. Instead, he’d watched from a distance as they buried her, along with his past.

After her death he returned to Colorado and began severing all ties with his mother and the family name. She had no estate. She had nothing. He ignored or tossed into the trash any records or correspondence linking him to Chicago and the Zurrn name.

At this time he used his expertise to take on a new identity.

He was reborn and started a new life, off the grid.

He was invisible.

Still, he longed for the only joy he’d known through his collection. And he recalled how much he had enjoyed Tonya’s anguish. That’s when his metamorphosis happened. He was traveling when he was seized with a compulsion to start a new collection, a special one that rivaled anything the world had known.

He was nervous and made tiny errors in the early days when he captured his first specimen.

But it was a success.

A work of art.

He cherished it because he owned it.

Over the years he acquired other pretty specimens, enhancing his collection. He became expert at finding them, hunting them and keeping them for as long as he wanted. Each new capture enthralled him, so much so that he would press himself against their cell to feel the panic in their hearts beat against him. Oh, how he loved it.

Flutterings in the kill jar.

Most specimens were cooperative and loyal, but some would fall ill, harm themselves or try to escape. Escape was treasonous-it meant disloyalty. It was a wish to abandon him, like his father abandoned him; to break a promise and walk away from parental responsibility.

It meant that over the years it was necessary to discard and replace them. It broke his heart, but that’s how it was. The posters of the missing online, with terms such as “last seen,” and “disappeared without a trace” stood as testament to his refined skills as a collector.

My glory.

And no one ever knew.

Yes, other enthusiasts would occasionally surface in the news but only because they’d failed. Some across the country and around the world had kept their work going for years, as well, but they were defeated because of mistakes.

Never let a specimen escape.

True, Rampart didn’t go according to Zurrn’s plan. He’d intended for the case to be closed with the death of “Carl Nelson.” Sure, he could’ve ended things in the house rather than the barn. But the fire and staging of the specimen were stylistic touches he couldn’t resist. Still, the discovery by police wasn’t a setback.

It was a challenge.

Maybe I’ll go public like the Zodiac and the Ripper.

Zurrn would carry on creating his new garden paradise. But he’d have to make further adjustments along the way. At this moment, he was grappling with keeping the last of his remaining specimens. For years his plan was to start over with all new prospects to capture. But he’d grown partial to some of his specimens and decided to keep them.

And now, with the situation brewing in Rampart and all that business with that reporter, he realized that this was a game changer. This was his chance to showcase his mastery to the world. And the only way to do it was to sacrifice his treasures.

It had to be done. He was at war.

Time to get started.

He brought the van to a stop on a soft, earthen patch alongside a fast-flowing stream. Crickets chirped and starlight glimmered on the water. Isolated. No one around for miles.

No one to hear a thing. Perfect. History will be made, right here.

He stepped from the van wearing high-quality night-vision goggles. They provided him with brilliant, sharp images in the darkness as he worked.

First, he maneuvered the heavy-duty handcart used for moving vending machines and removed the wooden crates, positioning them on the ground.

Then he set out his instruments.

Next, he set up the stands for the studio photography lights, aligning them just so. Then he stood there addressing the questions:

Which one, and how?

A soft cry rose from one of the boxes.

“Please.”