Chapter 6

 

        The phone rang in the dark. I clutched for it blindly, knowing it wouldn’t be anything good. At three in the morning it never is.

        “Fox,” I answered sleepily.

        “We got another body, sir,” my partner, Will told me on the other end.

        I sighed, “F**k, I’ll be there as soon as possible.”

        “Take your time sir, this poor soul is good and gone. His body’s not going anywhere.”

        I rolled over in bed and looked at an empty space. My wife and I were now officially divorced. I got the house, she had moved in with her girlfriend. In the last years of our marriage I had become more and more distant. At the divorce hearing, we barely exchanged words. I was shocked to learn that she was dating a woman.

        Since then my life had consisted of piling bodies thanks in no small part to the teen murderer, Johnny Sikow. Johnny had been causing waves ever since he murdered thirty-seven people in his high school. After that he went on to kill four people on the road, winding up at a run down motel. Across from the motel he met Nicole Jones in a shabby diner. Nicole had a history of mental disorder and joined Johnny in his travels after he murdered another eleven people.

        We had lost track of Johnny since then. The only clues to his whereabouts were the numerous bodies of homeless people he left in his wake. The Bureau certainly helped me out by assigning Will as my partner. The kid was a good detective and had a great way of being at crime scenes very quickly. 

        I was lucky with this scene, it was only a couple of hours away. On the way there I kept thinking about Johnny and how it didn’t feel like we got any closer to catching this kid. What bothered me was that I had almost been sure that Nicole would slow him down. I had been wrong. If anything having Nicole with him had just made Johnny more cautious. He only killed homeless people now. Was he trying to prove something? Did he have an agenda? I could only speculate as to what if any motive Johnny had for killing these people.

        As I pulled up to where all the cop cars where I saw a young man about thirty-two years old, blonde, blue eyes, handsome face and a dazzling white smile. The fact that Will was still unmarried baffled me. He was married to the job he said. At least he knew it was one or the other at his age, I hadn’t been that wise.

        “Well, where’s the poor b*****d?” I asked as I approached my partner.

        “Over this way Boss,” he said as I followed. He knew I didn’t like being called Boss, but I guess it was better than ‘Pops’ or some other term that would make me feel even older than my forty-seven years already did.

        “Oh s**t,” I said as we came upon the body. “Yeah Johnny’s struck again.”

        “How can you tell, sir?” some rookie beat cop asked looking on.

        “Johnny has a certain method of cutting his victims’ throats. See here,” I pointed to the place where the skin, muscle and arteries had been separated, “he always cuts left to right. Of course this is only when he cuts their throats, sometimes he stabs them in the throat or heart. He’s good at it too, knows exactly where to go. See how there’s just the one cut? If some amateur had done this it might have taken him a couple of times to get it right. Johnny only needs one shot and the guy’s dead. It’s a problem if you find multiple wounds.”

        “Why’s that Boss?” Will asked.

        “It means he was taking his time, being deliberate about the kill. He wanted them to feel every cut and every stab until he decided to kill them.”

        “F**k,” the rookie murmured.

        “Damn right, kid,” I said darkly and walked away.

I was tired of all the paperwork, there was just so many things to fill out and file about the murders and what made it more trying was the fact that we knew who did it. Usually a lot of my work involves trying to figure out who did it. But with Johnny, the question was, “Where is he?” And nobody had that answer. The press ate it up. My superiors were up my a*s about it and I couldn’t catch a f*****g break.

        “Fox!” Will called from his desk as I sat contemplating in my office.

        “What’s up?” I said.

        “You better come look at this.”

        Curious I got up and went over to Will’s desk. On his computer was a MySpace blog. At first I didn’t understand why he thought this was so important but then I started to pay attention to what I was reading. This blog was written by Johnny Sikow.

        “How did he get this up? I thought we were monitoring his MySpace page.”

        “It’s a new one, he set it up today and sent us the link.”

        “He sent this today?”

        “That’s what it looks like.”

        “Forward that to my computer, I want to be able to go over it in my office.”

        “You got it, Boss.”

        This was unbelievable, Johnny had made contact with us. In the blog he explained a lot of things that were missing from my information. He gave us a detailed account on why he had killed the people at his school and why he had killed the people in the diner. He also explained, as I had already guessed, that Nicole was not his hostage but was with him willingly. What got me though was that he mentioned me. Near the end, Johnny mentioned that he saw me giving a press interview and said he respected me. I was shocked.

        “Will,” I called out to my partner.

        He came in quickly, “Yeah Boss?”

        “Did you see this last bit?”

        “Yeah, seems like you’ve got a killer admirer,” he said trying to make a joke.

        “Ha ha, look why would do you think he even wrote this? Johnny never seemed to be one of those killers who needed his ‘work’ to be acknowledged.”

        “Maybe when he saw that his ‘work’ was being acknowledged he wanted to show his gratitude.”

        “No, I don’t buy it. It’s not one of those serial killer notes that says if we don’t print this in tomorrow’s paper he’ll kill a certain person or people in any place. It’s almost as if he knows we won’t and he genuinely doesn’t care.”

        “Maybe it’s you.”

        I turned around to regard my young partner, “What?”

        “Maybe he’s just sending it to you, like he’s challenging you or something. He must have seen something about you when he saw the interview that made you worthy of hunting him.”

        I had to contemplate that one, “Maybe.”

        “I don’t know Fox, the whole case has been strange from the start. It’s like we have all the pieces and they’re all together but we don’t know what the f**k the puzzle is supposed to be.”

        No arguments there.

        “Fox, we got a body,” Will said, poking his head into my office.

        “Another one? It’s only been a couple of days since Johnny’s last victim showed up.”

        “This one’s no Sikow body. Victim’s cause of death is a gunshot to the head.”

        “What’s so special about it? Lots of people get shot in the head.”

        “According to witness reports, the guy was driving down the interstate when he suddenly lost control of his car and crashed it. When some concerned citizens and police went to see what happened they found him with a bullet hole between his eyes.”

        “What the f**k?”

        We raced to the crime scene and found a car of some kind totaled. I’ve never been a car expert but I didn’t have the first clue what kind of car this could have been. What really bothered me was what Will had told me when first describing the situation to me. Concerned citizens usually meant the possibility of the crime scene being contaminated was a lot better than normal. I was still trying to figure out how it could have happened. I could only guess we were dealing with an above normal marksman. Chances were good the guy could be ex-government agent gone out of control. The situation did not look good.

        There wasn’t much to do at the scene. Any shell casings could have been damaged or were half way on their way to Mexico by now. The best way to go was follow up on the autopsy.

        “Well Doc?” I asked the coroner.

        “Well let’s start with the obvious stuff first. Cause of death, no surprise, gunshot wound to the head. Lots of post mortem cuts and bruises from when the car crashed, blah, blah, blah. No real surprises in that area. Something did catch my attention though.”

        “What’s that?” Will asked.

        “Look,” he said showing us the right index finger, “see this burn here? That’s post mortem, but do either of you know what it could be?”

        “Looks like the imprint of a gun nozzle,” I said.

        “Exactly,” he said. “It seems like one of the concerned citizens from the report was the one who fired the shot.”

        “So it’s like a calling card or something?” Will asked.

        “Yeah, or something,” I said.

        I had too much s**t on my plate and I wasn’t even hungry. Johnny was a pile of bodies and more to come and now I had some trigger happy killer who could kill anyone at anytime and always left a burn from his gun nozzle as a sign that he’d been there. There’s only so much a man can handle.

        “The Nozzle Burner” had killed at least three other people. Now anytime someone was brought to the morgue because of a gunshot wound, the first thing that we looked for was a nozzle burn. Things were getting hectic.

        Then something both good and horrible happened. Johnny had made another major kill, but it was without a doubt the most brutal of all his murders. Two states over, fire and police departments had been called to home of Senator Adam Williams’ son Daniel, a young hotshot attorney himself. What they found their sent most of them away sick to their stomachs. The fire had started fairly small and they got there quick enough to stop it from getting out of control.

        They found Daniel Williams and Nicole Jones severely mutilated. What had happened to Nicole was so gruesome, news reporters couldn’t even bring themselves to list all the horrible things that had happened to her. The words “I’m a w***e and proud of it,” had been etched into her already cut and stabbed stomach. And below her waist…. It was just too horrible.

        Something had happened between Johnny and Nicole and it had been bad. I found out exactly what when I got back to my office two days later. Johnny had written another blog and again under a different MySpace. He described how Nicole had betrayed him, been cheating on him with Daniel Williams and he even went into detail about each and every grisly thing he had done to them. What shocked me was that he claimed he would be laying low for a while. He had no plans to kill anyone anytime soon. What happened to him because of Nicole really did a number on him.

        His declaration to not kill for a while, didn’t last long. A week later, we had him. Some pawn shop owner had pressed a silent alarm and police showed up within minutes. Amazingly Johnny was still there. But once again, he f*****g got away.

        “Mother F**k!” I screamed and threw my chair against the wall when I got the news.

        “What happened?” asked one of the agents passing through the hall.

        “We had him! We f*****g had him and he got away again! Goddamn it!”

        “I’m sorry sir. I’m sure we’ll get him soon.”

        “Yeah, yeah, f**k,” I couldn’t understand how we could have him right in our grasp and he kept slipping away. The kid had more than luck on his side, it was something else.

        “Sir, isn’t Agent Graves supposed to be here?”

        I turned in puzzlement, “What?”

        “Agent Graves, sir, he’s not here.”

        “I thought he was out on assignment.”

        “Not that I’m aware of, he was supposed to give a report but didn’t show up.”

        That wasn’t like Will. Not only would he never miss a report, he’d never fail to check in with me if something was wrong. Suddenly I was worried. I called his house phone and cell phone several times but couldn’t get in touch with him. Even during the middle of the night Will would have picked up. But he wasn’t.

        “Send someone over to Agent Graves’ apartment, now.”

        “Yes, sir.”

        Nothing was going right.

        They found Will inside his car, parked outside his apartment. He had a bullet hole between his eyes and a nozzle burn on his right index finger