The Suicide Killer Read online

  Danielle walked into the hallway and grabbed the doorknob.

  “Remember,” he said. “You promised you weren’t going to call anybody.”

  “I remember,” she said, and closed the door.

  Bobby stood and let the water hit him in the face and run down the rest of his body. His throat felt raw and hurt. He opened his mouth and drank water from the showerhead. He greedily lapped at the water until he had too much and coughed. The cough doubled him over and he threw up. The warm water poured from his mouth and joined the black streams as they flowed down the drain.

  Danielle beat on the door.

  “Bobby. Are you okay? Why did you lock the door?”

  “I’m fine,” he choked out.

  He didn’t remember locking the door. Emily must have wanted him to do it. That way the other woman would not try to join him in the shower. Until that moment, Bobby hadn’t realized he was no longer hearing Emily speak to him. He became weak in the legs, and his knees buckled. She thought he left her there alone and wasn’t going to talk to him anymore. Was she mad at him for coming home with Danielle? He hadn’t really had a choice. Perhaps he was just too far away from her. He would have to get back to her as soon as he could so she would not worry too much. That had to be the reason. She saw how Danielle dragged him out of the forest. He was too weak to do anything. He had to go. Danielle would never let him leave until he had some rest. As he turned off the shower he decided it would be best to play along with Danielle until he could find a way to sneak home. She promised not to tell anybody. He believed she would keep her promise as long as he played along with her.

  He opened the door, and Danielle jumped off the sofa.

  “How do you feel?”

  “I feel a little better. I think I just need to lie down for a while.”

  “You sure you don’t want to eat something first? You need to drink some water.”

  “I just had some. I’ll be fine, but thank you.”

  “If you say so. You can go sleep in my bed and I’ll be in here if you need anything.”

  “Thank you,” he said, and walked to the bedroom.

  The satin sheets felt cool and soft against his tired body. He closed his eyes and fell into a deep sleep.

  Bobby awoke when Danielle came to check on him. She walked to the bed and felt his head. He felt normal. She put a glass of water on the nightstand and climbed into bed with him. She wrapped her arms around him and fell asleep. Bobby laid staring at the ceiling.

  Chapter Five

  Wake up. Wake up, my love. Just lie there and listen to me. Don’t try to get up yet. You may wake her. I can’t believe she would wait until you were asleep and jump into bed with you. Does she have no decency? She’s trying to take you away from me. I know you were worried that I was mad at you and went away. That will never happen. I saw that woman force you to leave me. You wanted to stay with me by our tree, but she made you leave.

  Don’t worry, my love, I saw her drag you up the hill while you tried to fight against her, but she was too strong. Now that you have rested, she won’t be able to stop you so easily. She doesn’t know what’s best for you. Only I know what you need. I know it’s not your fault. I am still with you. I just had to find you again. And now that I have you, I promise you; they will never tear us apart again. But, before we are together again, I need you to do something for me. I don’t have too much longer where I am.

  She’s going to end up telling somebody where I am hiding, or I’m going to wither away, and there will be nothing left of me. Then I won’t be able to talk to you. Very soon I am going to need a new place to live. I am not picky about what the outside looks like. The only thing that matters is what’s on the inside, and I will be on the inside waiting for you. This is the only way we will be able to stay together.

  Now, get up, but don’t wake her, or she’ll try to stop you.

  Good, now don’t come to the woods. I need you to start looking for a new place immediately before it is too late and I never see you again. Leave her where she is. Don’t worry about her.

  Walk. Yes, help me, my love. We will be together again soon.

  Chapter Six

  She ran through the woods, trying to catch up with Bobby. He was too fast for her. He knew all the trails in the forest and could move without tripping or stopping to see where he was going. Danielle called out to him, but couldn’t understand her own words. They were soft and hollow. They echoed and reverberated around her. He ignored her and continued to run.

  She pushed herself to run faster and tripped over a heavily rooted vine and fell into a bush full of briars. She put her hands in front of her to brace for impact and screamed as the thorns tore into her flesh. The tangle of thorns dug deeper into her soft palms the more she tried to climb out. She yelled in frustration and snatched her head back. The vines pulled and twisted around her hair. The skeletal branches released her head and left a clump of hair swaying from the mocking bush. She called out for Bobby to help, but her voice sounded as muffled as before. She pushed herself up and pulled her foot loose from the twisted vine and lost her shoe in the process. Searching for the shoe wasted her precious time in catching him before he disappeared. She resided to leaving it behind and ran to catch up with Bobby. When she finally caught up with him, he stood in a clearing in the woods. Her foot throbbed from stepping on jagged stones and piercing thorns.

  His back was to her, and he was bent down over something, but she couldn’t tell what it was. She heard low murmuring, but couldn’t make out what he was saying. What they were saying? Who was he talking to?

  She crept closer to Bobby, and he turned to face her. Red lipstick smeared across his lips and down his chin. His eyes were solid black orbs. Every muscle in her body went numb. He moved toward her, and she saw he had been kissing the girl he found in the woods. Emily.

  She was in a further state of decomposition. The skin on the left side of her face was missing. Dehydration pulled the remaining skin tight against her skull. Emily’s teeth peeked through the shredded flesh of her cheek.

  The teeth ground together, rippling the remaining strands of flesh. She was seeing things, but then the head slowly turned. The pallid face looked her over, but the eyes were no longer in the sockets. Only black holes watched her. Bobby turned back to face the thing on the ground. Emily’s arm resting in her lap twitched and then rose.

  The index and middle finger were missing from the right hand, so the girl pointed at Danielle with the ring finger. Bobby turned, and a loud screech came from the dead girl. Bobby laughed and moved toward Danielle.

  When she tried to flee, low hanging vines fought to keep her in the dark. She grabbed the vines and pulled them from the trees. Danielle ran, not daring to look back. She was afraid she would see Bobby about to grab her. His haunting black eyes would swallow her in their whirlpool of darkness, and she would be theirs.

  She ran until she could no longer move forward. Her foot and side hurt her too much to keep going. Bobby was nowhere in sight. She must have lost him, or he gave up trying to catch her. With hands on her knees, she tried to focus her breathing. She stood with her hands on her hips and breathed in the cool fresh air and tried to decide which way she should go. As she watched the leaves fall from the tall oak trees, the crisp air changed direction. The dry dew scent of the afternoon sun pounding on the pine trees no longer swarmed around her head. The smell of death and decay floated on the breeze, and it headed directly to her like it had followed her through the forest. She knew she needed to run again, but before she made her first step forward, Emily’s pale, white, skeletal hand fell on her shoulder.

  Danielle awoke screaming. She had been startled awake by the cold, boney fingers when they wrapped around her shoulder and pierced through her soft skin. Looking at the alarm clock, she wiped the sweat from her forehead and neck. It was midnight. She rolled over to wrap her arm around Bobby, but all she found were the cool sheets. She ran her hand across the sheets like she had made an er
ror and was trying to erase it. He had to be there, and her nightmare-fueled brain was playing tricks on her. Numbing panic filled her body. The room provided no answers to help locate him. She jumped out of the bed, and a single second of clarity hit her. The bathroom. He was in the bathroom, and she would feel silly for freaking out.

  She knocked softly on the door so he wouldn’t think she was freaking out because she couldn’t find him. When there was no answer, she knocked harder and then tried the knob. The unlocked door gave and opened to a vacant bathroom. She ran back to the hall and burst into the spare bedroom. Bobby wasn’t in there either. Shaking, she walked back into the hallway and toward the front of the apartment where the living room and kitchen were.

  He was in the kitchen. He woke up thirsty. When she found him, he had been dehydrated. That wasn’t something he could easily get over. The hospital would have been a better place to take him instead of her apartment. But Bobby would never have agreed to go there. They would ask too many questions and he would be afraid she’d tell somebody about the girl in the woods, which she needed to do as soon as possible. Handling one issue at a time proved to be harder than she thought it would be.

  This was all crazy talk. He just needed something else to drink and had not seen the glass of water she left for him. Sure. That made sense. She was overreacting.

  As she moved down the hallway, a cool breeze wafted through the apartment and swirled through her hair. She turned the corner. The front door was wide open. Bobby was gone.

  Chapter Seven

  Detective Gregory Burns arrived at the house on Red Rock Court to a flood of churning lights. The pre-dawn morning helped the lights to bounce off every dark surface. He hated pulling up to a crime scene like this. The light hurt his eyes, and he felt like they were burning deep into his brain. All the fluorescent lighting at the crime scene would have a cobalt hue long after the flashing lights were out of sight. He got out of his car and surveyed the blue street. It didn’t look like the media had arrived yet, but they would be there soon enough. The neighbors were beginning to crowd around the driveway.

  A car pulled up behind him. He turned only to have the headlights blind him. The driver left them turned on, and a feminine silhouette stepped from the car and flanked the blaring light.

  “Detective Burns. Can you tell me what’s going on here? I heard there was a murder. A single, white, female. Can you confirm this?”

  He knew the voice. He had heard it at so many crime scenes that he thought he could pick her voice out of a crowd before he could recognize his wife’s. Morgan Cramer was a crime reporter for the Crystal Valley Times. The newspaper industry was going downhill, but the Times had managed to create a strong Internet presence. They still released a printed version every day, but had outsourced to another newspaper’s print shop. The outsourcing of local jobs had given the Times a bad rap as they closed their downtown shop, but people still wanted their local news, so the impact had been minimal.

  Greg got to know Morgan better when he worked on her sister’s case. Her twin sister, Amanda, had been raped and tortured before her body turned up in Lake Oliver, across town from where she lived. He never solved Amanda’s case, and now Morgan hounded him for information on all the cases he worked. He thought she did it because she thought he owed her for not finding her sister’s killer. In a twisted way, he kind of thought he owed her too.

  “Look, Morgan, I just got out of my car. At this point, it sounds like you know more than I do. But, as soon as we have any information, I’m sure somebody will leak it to you at the appropriate time.”

  He left her at the curb, fidgeting with her voice recorder. She didn’t deserve to be treated that way. He felt bad about it and would make it up to her later. He ducked under the low-hanging branch of an aging oak tree.

  “Get a perimeter set up,” he yelled at the stationary police.

  Greg walked across the front yard and into the garage. He ran his hand over the hood of the car. It was still warm.

  “Good morning, Mark.”

  Mark Harper looked up from the body on the driver’s side of the car.

  “You’re going to contaminate your own crime scene, Detective,” Mark said, and snapped on latex gloves.

  “Nah, it doesn’t matter. They’d never leave any evidence on the hood, would they?”

  “I’m not going to try and tell you how do to do your job, Detective, it would just seem—”

  “Well, that’s a good thing for both us. Cause if you thought you could do my job, well you wouldn’t be the one in the car with the dead girl, and I’d be out of a job. Of course, they also wouldn’t have woken me up so early this morning, so there is that.”

  “It would just seem like it would be easier if your fingerprints weren’t on everything too,” Mark said.

  Greg extended his hand to the annoyed technician. Mark grabbed the plastic bag off the dash and handed it to him. Through the plastic bag, he could see a folded piece of paper with writing on it. He took the letter out of the bag and cleared his throat.

  “What is a few short years to live in hell when that is all I get around here?” He read aloud. “That’s an interesting way of looking at things. Signed, what is that? Maybe an N? What’s the woman’s name?”

  Mark took a deep breath and let it out slowly. He was already reaching his limit with Greg, and he’d just gotten here. Greg grinned and extended on his tiptoes. Maybe waking up this early had its benefits.

  “Rachel Martin.”

  “Doesn’t look like it’s one of her initials then.”

  “Unless it’s her middle initial,” Mark quipped.

  “Yeah, there’s always that. So, what can you tell me about how she died?”

  “I can tell you it’s definitely not a suicide. Full rigor hasn’t set in, so I’d say she’s been dead three or four hours at the most. Her roommate came home this morning and found her in the car with the engine running and the garage door closed.”

  Greg put his hands on the roof of the car and ducked his head through the open driver’s side window.

  “If everything looks like a suicide, how do you know it definitely wasn’t one?”

  “Because she has a wound to the back of her skull. She suffered a blow from something with a sharp edge, but I haven’t been able to find anything that could have done the damage. The killer may have taken it with him. It’s hard to tell if it was the blow she took or if the fumes finished her off. You’ll have to wait until I get her back to the lab before I know which one actually killed her. But if I had to guess, I’d say it was the blow to the head. It’s a pretty nasty wound.”

  Greg knew Mark liked for it to be quiet while he worked, so he walked around the car and looked over Mark’s shoulder. The back of Mark’s neck turned blood red as Greg scratched lines in his notebook and hmmed a lot.

  “Don’s inside with the roommate if you want to see what he has.”

  Normally Greg would have hung around to bother Mark a little more, but it was too early. There would also be a lot of pressure to solve this case in a hurry. They wouldn’t want the city to panic because somebody found a girl with her head bashed in and made it look like a suicide. He went through the garage door that led into the kitchen and found his partner, Don Murphy.

  Don looked ragged and tired, the gray and black stubble on his face made him look older than his forty-two years. He was still Greg’s senior by seven years, but times like this caused the emotions of Greg’s previous cases to reveal themselves, and he felt like the oldest one there.

  Don empathetically put his hand on the roommate’s shoulder. The act was a melancholic Norman Rockwell painting showing true life. Don was always better at that part than Greg. He was glad Don beat him to the scene. That way he got to talk to her first. Greg didn’t want to talk to her at all if he didn’t have to. Dealing with emotional people was not Greg’s skill set. He was better when following the evidence to a logical conclusion. Don noticed Greg sulking in the doorway and gave one
last reassuring pat on the crying woman’s shoulder and walked over to Greg.

  “What did Mark say?”

  “I don’t know. Something about not being a morning person.”

  Don huffed.

  “Look. We all know he’s the one that went to the captain, but you still have to work with the guy. He’s the last one you want to be goofing off around. The more ammunition you give him, the steadier his aim will be.”

  “Aw, don’t worry about me. I’m not goofing off. I’m serious at all times,” Greg said, trying to hide a smile.

  Mark Harper had it in for him since they first met. He didn’t like Greg, and he didn’t care who knew. He had gone to Greg’s superiors on multiple occasions because their detective wasn’t conducting himself in a professional manner. Mark told them Greg played around too much and was never serious. Greg wasn’t trying to cause a scene or make light of the situations. He was only trying to keep the mood light. He could see it on everybody’s face, including his when he dared to look in the mirror. The job was getting to them. Too many officers ended up turning their guns on themselves because of the job, and he didn’t want anybody he knew to be another statistic. Including Mark.

  As far as Mark knew, the upper brass had not said anything to him, and that was the way Greg wanted to keep it. If he thought nothing was being said, maybe he would let it go and find somebody else to worry about. He didn’t think he went too far. It’s not like he had ever picked up a victim’s hand and done a shadow puppet show or anything morbid like that.

  Both detectives noticed Rachel’s roommate watching them, black tears running down her face, longing to understand, to know why this happened to her friend. The two detectives paused and slid into the living room so she couldn’t hear what they had to say. She did not follow.

  “He said that he definitely doesn’t think it’s a suicide. We’d have to wait for the ME’s report to find out the actual cause of death, but he thinks it was the trauma she sustained to the back of the head and not from the exhaust fumes. He also said she’s been dead for three or four hours.”