Chapter 3

        Let me tell you about Dr. Robert Fox. He’s a brilliant man, and perhaps one of the only people in the world that I have genuine respect for. He wasn’t a doctor quite yet when he was assigned to my case, but he had been an excellent detective for fifteen years and had just earned his masters in Sociology with interests in Criminology. When I met him several years after my first murders he had earned the right of doctor. He has been the leading detective on my case since the day I did the unthinkable and he was the only one who was able to connect me to the many other murders I committed afterward.

        Fox knows my style and how I kill. He knew that unlike other serial killers who often change up their routines I wouldn’t. Unlike most serial killers I wasn’t exactly hiding who I was. Fox knew this and realized that I really don’t have a specific type of person that I kill, but I do have a distinct style.

        I think it best to let Fox to tell his part in my story as he saw it. Let’s consider ourselves lucky, it wasn’t easy to persuade him to write out everything, but eventually he realized there was no real harm in it. I did have to change it a little to make it seem more like a story, Fox basically wrote a f*****g report on it.

 

        The stench hit me first. After twenty years I had been walking into rooms that reeked of the dead. The first five years were the toughest since I was just a beat cop.         Sometimes we’d get the call to check out a smell coming from an apartment or home, but other times we’d stumble upon it. You never really get used to it. While I was a cop, I found the bodies and helped secure the crime scene, as a detective, I found the b*****d who killed whoever.

        Twenty years of finding dead bodies and helping solve who made them that way, and there was still no way I could have expected this s**t. Thirty-seven people dead, the majority of them students. I had never in all my years seen things like I did in that half burned school, at least not all in the same place. At least twenty of the bodies where burned or there was signs of asphyxiation. The others were all killed by stab wounds and sliced throats. I went to the yearbook room where the fire had started and found the worst of the dead. The kids insides were spilled out on the floor and his eyes were gouged out. It was pretty f*****g sick. A few of the kids had their throats sliced, one so bad his head was still on by a sliver. I wrote down every thing that might help in the investigation and let forensics take over.

Now I had to do the worst part of the job, in my opinion.         Talking to the survivors and the family of the dead. The families were the worst, they’d never see their son or daughter alive again, and judging by the look of the bodies here today, they were going to lose much more sleep after they identified who they could at the morgue.

        My thoughts were interrupted by someone screaming at us, “It was that psycho kid!” they were in hysterics. Tears were running down several faces, many still screaming in shock and horror. Something struck me as odd though, many of them kept referring to ‘the psycho kid.’ I approached one of the calmer looking teachers, who happened to be the principal, and asked him who the psycho was.

        “It’s his name,” he said. “S-I-K-O-W,” he spelled it out.

        “And you’re sure about this?” I asked him.

        “Yes, I’m f*****g sure,” he said as if I was stupid.

        “Calm down, sir, I’m just trying to make sure I get the right person behind bars.”

        “F**k jail,” a student yelled out. “Kill the f****r on site!”

        I sighed. It doesn’t take much for a crowd of mourners to become an angry mob.

        “Everyone just calm down,” I said. “I need to collect as much information about what happened, so when we find this Johnny Sikow, we can arrest him and make sure your friends and loved ones get the justice they deserve. Justice, not vigilante acts of revenge.”

        My announcement was not met with many pleased reactions, but there were enough people in the crowd who were willing to listen to reason. They calmed down enough to avoid a riot.

        At this point we started pulling away individuals to question them, not just about Sikow, but also about the people he killed. Everyone knew who was killed in the massacre. Many people reported that Sikow seemed to have targeted a few boys in particular, taking time in their deaths whereas others he seemingly killed at random. After a series of questions we figured out the history between our killer and his main victims. Apparently the tormented was pushed over the edge recently and became the tormenter. No one was sure just exactly what had pushed Sikow to kill. Many people also told us that Sikow seemed different. They couldn’t point out what specific, but they claimed he did things that a normal, ungifted athletically student shouldn’t have been able to do.

        In all honesty from what I gathered about Sikow, they were right. This was a kid who had been bullied almost all his life and had never shown any athletic prowess was able to outrun and over power star athletes. It was definitely weird. I figured we might find some more information once we searched his home.

        I was wrong. Sikow didn’t keep a diary, or even a blog. There were no crude drawings or plans lying around about mass destruction or anything. I don’t blame music for people’s behavior. I’ve always felt it to be a cheap and quick excuse for someone who probably had some sort of problem. Besides, a lot of the bands he listened to were Christian bands. It’s kind of hard to blame “satanic music” when the music is Christian. There were no guns, homemade pipe bombs or anything. His room was actually very clean, compared to some teenager’s rooms I’d seen over the years. There was nothing at all to make us think that Sikow was anything but I quiet student, who happened to get picked on a lot. Aside from the hundreds of eye-witnesses that saw him kill almost forty people, we had nothing to suggest he was a serial killer. 

        We talked to his parents, before the media did amazingly. They really weren’t able to give us much more information than some of his teachers. Great parenting. They were able to provide a most recent photo (of course the school could have done the same thing). We went outside and told the media the usual. We’re doing our best to apprehend the suspect quickly and see to it that he is put to justice. It’s not like we were going to point out the fact that we had no idea where in the hell this kid was. Some punk blogger would do that for us later tonight.

        I reported back to police headquarters and went to see the commissioner.

        “So, really, we’ve got nothing,” said the commissioner after I had given him my report.

        “I’d hardly say that sir, we have a name, a face and hundreds of eye-witnesses to testify.”

        “Come on Fox, we have no body to show for the crimes. No body wants to hear about all the stuff we have to get the guy, they want the guy.”

I sighed, “I know sir, I was just trying to put an optimistic spin on it.”

        “Well spin the s**t with the media. They’ll be relentless until we get the kid. How old is he again?”

        “Sixteen almost seventeen.”

        “Christ almighty, how the hell did he get away?”

        “As best we can figure, he used to fire as a diversion and slipped through the woods surrounding the area. To be honest with you though, his escaping is far from the more puzzling aspects of this case. His physical prowess was described as almost superhuman. I know the obvious answer to that would most likely be adrenaline, but even then some of the stuff he did was a little too unbelievable.”

        “Hell you know as well as anyone that eye-witnesses are far from the most reliable sources of information.”

        “I know that sir, but hundreds of interviews all had some of the same facts. Normally a lot of facts will vary from witness to another. It wasn’t so in this case.”

        He sighed and reached into a desk, withdrawing a bottle of scotch. He poured a drink and knocked it back, “I’d say the feds will probably be getting involved but since you’re being transferred there in a couple of days, I can only hope they will keep you on the case.”

        “Same here sir,” thinking about how I would soon be an F.B.I. agent.

        “Go home and get some sleep Fox, I doubt anything will happen till morning,” he poured another drink.

        I went home. I had insomnia though, something about my cases. They kept me up. I went over the facts over and over again in my head. My wife occasionally cried in her sleep. When I became detective, I told her I wouldn’t bring children in this world. She thought she could change my mind and to be honest so did I. Five years ago we found out I was sterile. We’ve recently decided to divorce. Sikow. I couldn’t get the case out of my mind. When I became a fed almost all my cases would go to other detectives. They would finish what I had started. But this Sikow case, there was a good chance that I’d take it with me.

        Serial killer. I had called him a serial killer back at headquarters. As far as we knew the school massacre was an isolated incident. Considering though, he was likely to kill again. Still, I had made an assumption of his killing status. He was just a mass murderer at this time. When he started leaving dead bodies in his wake he would be a true serial killer. 

        “F**k,” I sighed. I took out my pack of cigarettes. I didn’t smoke all that much, but I was stressed more than usual. Unlike the commissioner I didn’t have a bottle of booze to lean on.

        I sat up with a start in my desk chair, it was morning. I must have passed out in one of those insomniac states. You’re not really awake, but you’re not really asleep. The cigarette was out, ashes covered my lap. It was then that I realized my cell phone was buzzing.

        “Hello?” I answered groggily.

        “Fox, we got some girl who says she knows why Johnny Sikow went…psycho the other day,” one of my sergeants said. It was too early and I was still out of it. “She’s waiting her at HQ.”

        “Alright,” I said. “I’ll be down there soon.”

I went up stairs and changed. No time to shower. I put on a little more cologne then usual to try and hide the funk of cigarette and body odor. Mary, my soon to be ex-wife, was still asleep in bed, or at least was pretending until I left.

        I got to headquarters and went to my office, where our newest witness was waiting. I walked in and saw a young woman, about fifteen or sixteen years old, dark hair and slim. She was pretty in a dark way.

        “I hope I haven’t kept you waiting too long,” I said as I hung up my trench coat.

        “It’s cool, they’ve cancelled school until further notice, so I’ve got no where to be,” she said casually.

        “Well I’m Detective Fox. I’m in charge of investigating what happened at your school. I was told you have some new information?”

        “I’m Brooke. I’d rather not have my last name on public record if that’s alright.”

        “It’s fine,” I assured her.

        “Of course it wouldn’t matter if, Johnny would know it was me. If he cared and decided I was an enemy.”

        “You and Johnny were friends?”

        “More like associates, we hung out at the same lunch table and were picked on by the same cliques. I’m not sure that really qualifies as friendship. I never took time out of my life to hang out with him or anything. I think he had a crush on me though.”

        I considered what she told me, “So what do you know about why Johnny attacked your classmates?”

        “From what I heard, the big five apparently left him for dead that morning.”

        I sat alertly, “Left him for dead? What do you mean?”

        “Well,” she considered her words, “I don’t know all the details but I heard Johnny mocking them for thinking they had killed him. That’s about all I know on that.”

        “Why didn’t anybody else hear this?”

        “Oh they did, they just didn’t want to be the ones to ruin the image of the ‘Fab Five.’ A lot of what I heard Johnny say to them was dead on. Those guys were a******s, who were gonna float through life on their good looks and their parents money. I never really thought it would be Johnny who would stand up to them though, and certainly not kill them.”

        “I think I understand a bit more about why Johnny went off then. What about um…Zak? Some of the other students said they saw Johnny kill one of his friends.”

        She laughed, “Dude, none of us were friends, definitely not with Johnny anyway. Well Zak was my ex-boyfriend, way before he got killed, but no one was really friends with Johnny.”

        “Why?” 

        “He was the freak of the freaks. Being friends with him meant that we’d be more abuse then we already got. We’d get the ‘Sikow treatment.’ Not exactly the best way to go through high school.”

        “What else can you tell me about Johnny?”

        “Not much else. He was a good writer.”

        “Really? When we searched his room we found no diary or journal or even a blog on his computer.”

        “He burned stuff after he wrote it, did it in class once actually. He always wrote really dark and creepy stuff for class. Anytime we had some poem or short story due for class, he always volunteered to read out loud. It was always the goriest, sickest s**t you’ve ever heard. Teachers never called on him to read stuff, he just did it. Sometimes they would tell him no and he’d still do it.”

        “Well Brooke, I think you’ve definitely helped us understand who we’re looking for a little better and hopefully we’ll be able to catch him quickly and get some justice for your classmates.”

        “Detective, you don’t have to sell me promises. As long as he doesn’t come after me I really don’t care if you catch him or not. And in my honest opinion sir, you’re not going to catch him.”

        “What makes you say that?”

        “He did things that he could never have done normally. Whatever happened that morning before he got to school, it changed him. He’s not gonna get taken in easily if at all.”

        “Thanks Brooke,” I said, my tone telling her she could leave.

        Yet another person claiming Johnny Sikow is more than what he should be. This was probably one of those mysterious I may never solve. One thing was certain though. I had to find Johnny Sikow.

        Four days later I officially became an agent of the F.B.I. and was able to bring the Sikow case with me. I also got the first new news of Sikow an hour later. Eleven bodies had been discovered in some diner a couple of towns over from Johnny’s school. The manager of the hotel down the street identified Johnny Sikow having checked out two days before. The a*****e claimed he didn’t know who Sikow was when he checked in and it was only after he checked out that he discovered who was in his motel. F*****g liar.

        We found a couple in the room next door to Sikow’s in tears. They told us that Johnny had kidnapped their daughter Nicole. With a little investigation I found out that their daughter wasn’t exactly a stranger to trouble. She had at one point had an extended stay in a mental institution.         Apparently she was attracted to danger, sexually. When I saw her picture I realized Sikow really has a type. She was strikingly similar looking to Brooke, mostly in the dark hair and dark look about her. I didn’t tell them, but it was more likely that their daughter had run off with Johnny of her own accord.  

        Great, now he’s got a sidekick, who enjoys danger. 

Author's Note

Fox's story is in a different font to hopefully avoid confusion, i stole this idea from house of leaves