The M1 Theory

 

The M1Theory

 

Pennsylvania State University was not the first choice of colleges for Thomas Lorey. If anyone dared approach the sullen faced figure, sitting under the two-hundred-fifty-year-old Eastern Hemlock, the tallest tree on campus, he would gladly proclaim that a University was never built that could house his towering intellect. With head buried in books of chemistry, biology, psychiatry, and the occasional Science Weekly, he would explain that his IQ was off the charts and, school was just an unpleasant formality. A more sensitive and caring soul may even attempt to reach out to the average looking bespectacled young man, and make brave attempts at breaking through such an obvious tough exterior. The hopeless romantic may even venture so far as to sit next to the frail young man with his mere five-foot six-inch frame, and employ the use of those customary tools such as levity, shared experiences, and simple small talk, like a construction worker using a sledgehammer to break through the hardened cement of his stoic exterior. The more artistic soul may even reach out and touch the pale hairless skin on the young man’s soft feminine arm and, consider his cold grey eyes, pretending that a genuine spark of compassion existed just beneath the surface, but only if you look hard and long. But none of these fine sensitive types would ever achieve the desired result of making contact with a like-minded being, made of the same warm flesh and similar hopes and dreams of the average person. That Thomas Lorey, the loving Thomas, died after the final beating given by his alcoholic Father. The Thomas Lorey, known to be kind to animals and take refuge in the beauty of a flower, or the serene sound of a gently flowing stream, died in the fatal car crash that sent his Mother to the void. The Thomas Lorey, who could have been sitting with the other students, under the smaller Elms, holding hands with a girl and talking of that wonderful future just within grasp, just outside the cold confining walls of the University was gone. This Thomas Lorey, the real young man, lived inside the dark and suffocating, yet safe, confines of his own mind.

What the disappointed good Samaritan would not know, to their benefit, was the nature of the thoughts that compelled the young Thomas to obsessively read, tirelessly research, and rarely take his eyes from the pile of papers, resting heavily on his lap. He takes comfort in the knowledge that his Doctoral dissertation, although unfinished, was sure to receive the Nobel Prize in the rapidly growing field of neuropsychology. He quietly contemplated the conversation he would have with his professor, Professor Richardson, upon submission of his paper.

“Thomas, this is a brilliant piece of work. A true piece of art, is what it actually is my young brilliant protégé.”

“Thank You professor. By mapping the specific electrical synapse responsible for varying levels of aggression and passivity, we have the potential to totally eliminate aggression within society.”

“I see. So, you have basically discovered one single cell, with several synapse channels controlling aggression, but only one single electrical channel that controls all the others.”

“Basically, you are correct Professor, but not entirely. Think of it like this, in simpler terms that you, or your other students can understand. Think of our aggression cell, I call Alpha X, as a house with four rooms, and each room is heated by a different type of fuel. One room, the excitatory synapse channel consists of solar heat. This heat is very efficient, clean, and simple in design, relying on the power of nature. The next room, the inhibitory synapse channel, is heated by coal, very efficient, but leaving negative residue behind that could interfere with the efficiency of the system, if not working properly. Finally, we have the other rooms, the non-channel systems and the neuromuscular junctions. Like heating with oil and gas, respectively, they do their job, but very sensitive to imbalance. Now we come to our electrical synapse channel I call, the M1 (mainframe 1). This is the most efficient system. The membranes of adjoining cells touch, allowing shared proteins and chemicals to pass freely into the other. However, this system is barely in use, as I have so brilliantly discovered. The other four less efficient systems continue their work as inefficiently as ever, as M1, patiently sits in wait. I do not know why humans have developed in this way and, I really don’t care. What I know is that, only when the other four systems have died, which is rarely ever, M1 takes over all operations of aggressive and passive, responses. A completely efficient system, if it works alone, unhindered by the other synapse channels.

“So, this is where your proposed practical applications come into play.”

“Imagine professor, if you can that is, how wonderful it will be to turn off all other systems, and then control the M1 pathway. The possibilities, both civilian and military, are endless.”

Not one to sail too deeply into the waters of fantasy, Thomas forced himself back to the lonely shores of reality to finish his final sentence of his dissertation. With the steady hand characteristic of those who enjoy the gift of supreme confidence, he wrote…Although once believed that electrical synapses only to be found in the eye and heart, the discovery of the M1 pathway itself, discards decades of now archaic scientific principles.

Thomas skimmed over his dissertation and walked hastily past the small groups of his peers, lounging lazily in the freshly cut grass of the University lawn, toward what he believed, his destiny of notoriety and fame.

Just Routine

 “It’s time for you to go stud,” stated Detective Sandra Becks, lead homicide investigator of the Pennsylvania State Police.

  The middle-aged cheating husband next to her groaned lowly, pulling her black satin sheet over his head and face as if, as she thought, in a gesture of shame for another empty sexual encounter, with another equally empty girl.

 Five years of living single after a bitter divorce and an around the clock career, allowed her the luxury of feeling guilt free after such encounters. She could look herself in the mirror knowing that she never slept with any man under false pretenses. An hour in the bar, a quick scanning of the herd for the right one, and the final agreement that this was for one night, with no strings attached. This was the routine for just a few times each year because her job as a homicide detective jealously monitored her time of leisure. She considered, with just a hint of depression, how many times she was on the verge of falling in love, just as her cell would scream out into the darkness that it was time to put girly dreams away and time to assume the role of speaker for those who could no longer speak…the dead. Looking at the nameless lump of flesh lying aside her, she realized that he could possibly be the next great romance in her life. This thought, once again, vanished as quickly as it appeared, like a rabbit in a magician’s hat, as she thought about the call of just a few moments ago that ripped her from the warm land of dreams into the cold depths of reality.

 “Yea, this better be good.” she answered the phone, with one long smooth leg still firmly planted in the hazy world of sleep.

  “Sorry detective,” stated Detective Ralph Klinger, her less than observant partner, “but we have another body here.”

  She hung up the phone and began her contemplation of her nonexistent love life, and mediocre sex life.

  “Hey buddy, get your ass up, I have work to do.” She pushed no name as hard as she could causing the sleeping man to fall to the floor with a loud thump that made her feel both pity, and amusement.

   “Can I at least have your number? He asked, as he hopped on one leg across the room trying to pull on his jeans.

  “Sorry sweetie, you know the agreement. You were good, but good always fades in time leaving us nothing but unwanted obligation. Let’s just end things now while it was still good, and carry these memories untarnished until the day we die.”

 He looked at her with an expression of shock. It was apparent to her, that he must have a very conventional wife, probably a bit dependent, she surmised. He looked at her in surprise that quickly transformed into a wide smile of understanding.

 “Yea, I completely agree.”

 Now it was her turn to be shocked. In the past, whenever she laid down the heavy cement of her modern independent woman philosophy, the man’s mind would seem to flatten under the weight, unable to comprehend the idea of sex without even the possibility of obligation. This time she was wrong, and it caused her to feel just a tinge of resentment, or as she considered with horror, pain of rejection. So, she did the only thing she thought would repair the damage to her ego. She gave Mr. No Name her phone numbe, and smiled as she watched him stagger sleepily out the front door.

Just Another Body

  Sandra rubbed her bloodshot eyes and yawned deeply as she parked her 1998 Chevy Cavalier just inches from the yellow police tape, marking the scene of what she sleepily thought, just another routine dead body. On her way to the scene, through blaring music used to mask the rumble of her nineteen-year-old tired four-cylinder engine, she already solved the crime. As Tom Petty detailed his “Last Dance with Mary Jane” through the original crackling speakers of her two-door rust bucket, she sadly called her office on wheels, she considered the details she received on the phone, just before expelling her latest male conquest out her front door. The information was, as usual, brief and straight to the point. The body of a young Caucasian female, early twenties, was found outside the Happy Go Lucky Motel off Fifth Street and Wilkens Boulevard. She already responded to this very spot on three separated occasions over the last two months. Each victim was killed by being forced to drink drain cleaner.

 “Well good morning Detective Becks, looking cheerful as usual,” stated Detective Ralph Klinger, as he greeted her just beyond the yellow tape. He lifted the tape up for her knowing that such an act would only cause provocation in her vulnerable tired state of mind. Detective Becks was known in the male dominated atmosphere of the Homicide Division as both an ardent feminist and, brilliantly reconstructionist, bordering on clairvoyant. Both the former and latter descriptions of her personality is always enough to cause jealousy and fear in a room awash with surging male testosterone.

 “Hi asshole,” she replied, as she walked to the side of the arched tape and bent low to clear the flimsy barrier.

 “Oh, how I love our little nicknames. It only strengthens those all-important workplace bonds,” he replied, snorting as he laughed loudly just a few inches from her ear. She winced each time he snorted. Although he was thin, tall, and as she secretly thought, handsome, each time he laughed she thought of a dirty pig. To her, even his features took on the form of some half pig and half man lowly creature, incapable of thinking above the waist.

 “Just tell me what we have,” no wait, she interrupted, holding her right index finger just inches from his face, “let me tell you what we have here.”

 She took just a moment to revel in the shocked expression on his pompous face. He was not accustomed to interruptions from a woman. She pegged him from day one as a bully, with a long history of getting what he wanted through intimidation. He was, as she surmised, one of these guys never happy unless barking, at minimum, three commands each day to a scared insecure wife, brainwashed by a childhood of playing with Barbie dolls and plastic oven sets.

 She continued, “we have a scantily clad young woman, with blue lips and chemical burns around the mouth. If you were to look inside you would see blistering and a partially dissolved tongue. If you were to stick a micro camera down her throat, you would see an esophagus torn to shreds by that dangerous yet, very effective, drain unclogger, Mr. Drain Clean.”

 “So, you think we have a serial killer?”

 She gave a light chuckle and looked at him with a purposeful expression of pity and replied, “no genius, we have a pimp killing his prostitutes. Sorry, not as exciting as a serial killer, but darn gruesome none the less. If you need any more obvious answers to dumb questions, I will be home in bed.”

  “You’re not even going to look at the body?”

 “Call me when you have a challenge for me,” she called through her open window, as her Chevy’s bald tires squealed away into the night.

Rejection (The Final Straw)

  “Now class, I know that many of you have literally dreamt of being the first scientist to map the entire human brain.” Professor Richardson gazed across the room at the sea of hopeful bright eyed young faces, as he perceived, faces glowing with the  hope of stranded shipwrecked passengers awaiting a heroic rescue from a turbulent sea. He always felt just a pang of guilt each semester as he prepared to dash their hopes of any rescue.

  He continued, “I would forget such childish fantasy. What we know of the human brain I could fit inside the head of this eraser.” He briefly held up his yellow number two pencil for dramatic effect.

  “Now before you bombard me with the temper tantrums of babies who just lost their pacifiers. Let me explain.”

  “No sir, you should not have a chance to ramble on with your conventional witch doctery,” came a loud steady voice from the back of the lecture hall. Professor Richardson looked toward the echoing voice, ready to reprimand the brave stupid soul for such a haphazard interruption. But he thought better of doing this. Debate was important for growth, as he always stated. Time to live by my own words, he thought, with an expression of self-restraint that masked the turbulent ocean beneath the surface of his skin.

 “Very well young man, tell us what’s on your mind.”

 “It is true sir that we are still living in the dark ages when referring to knowledge of the human brain, but it is possible to completely map the brain, in just a few short years.”

  “I don’t see how young man. I’m sorry what is your name?”

  After a few moments of uncomfortable silence, the confident steady voice replied, “I am Thomas Lorey.”

  “Very well Thomas, please continue.” “How is it possible to learn all there is to learn about the human brain?”

 As Thomas began explaining his theory of the M1 neural pathway in reference to controlling aggression, Professor Richardson remembered the name Thomas Lorey. Over the past few weeks he suffered under the weight of the tedious task of grading early submission thesis papers. He thought about the drudgery of grading so many, usually dull and uninspiring, thoughts, haphazardly committed to paper by overzealous students. Most of the students submitting early thesis papers were, in his experience, very plain and ordinary scientist hopefuls with temporary delusions of grandeur. He did not look down upon such students. Every person who is passionate about their field of study has such delusions, he considered.

 “So yes professor, I believe the M1 pathway is the birthplace of all future knowledge in the field of neuropsychology.”

 “Thomas, I believe you are forgetting one important detail in your theory. That detail involves the unethical practice of human experimentation.”

 Thomas returned to his seat, feeling embarrassed and rejected. He was embarrassed because just one word, ethical, created a brick wall too high for even a genius like him to climb. He felt rejected because he finally realized that he could never conduct his research under such an oppressive system based solely on religious principles. He thought about the centuries of human history, the centuries of scientific progress overshadowed by a carefully crafted blanket of guilt. Guilt created by religions designed for the hopelessly uneducated and lost.

 “That is all for today class. I want everyone to write a ten-page essay on ethics in the medical profession. I want it by Friday.”

 “Thomas can I speak to you.”

  Thomas walked slowly to the Professor Richardson’s podium as the rest of the class filed out to enjoy life and forget everything learned from the last hour lecture.

   “Thomas, I graded your paper. I gave you a 3.0 which isn’t really that bad for an early thesis submission.

   Professor Richardson felt a growing sense of unease as he considered Thomas’s eyes. He could see the rage bubbling just beneath the surface of the young man’s stone-faced countenance. I better smooth this over as gently as I can, he considered with uncharacteristic cowardice.

 “Listen Thomas, I find your paper very professionally written, worthy of publication in a journal. I find your theory fascinating and supported by very reliable and valid sources.” He was not lying when he stated this. Thomas’s paper was one of the very few he could remember from a student, so professionally written, and filled with a refreshing mix of logic and creativity. Too much creativity, he considered, and not any mention of ethical considerations concerning experimentation.

  “Professor, you are dull brained hypocrite. You have no business teaching bright minds anything.”

   Thomas stormed out of the lecture hall of Professor Richardson, never to return.   

Meeting with the Chief

  Police Chief, Daniel Morris hated talking to Detective Becks, as much as he hated Monday mornings. In fact, he would be the first to say, that he would rather spend a night out to dinner with his ex-mother in law, rather than talk to Sandra, and he hated his ex-wife’s Mother. He went out of his way this morning just to stop off at the local Quick Mart just to stock up on two-day old coffee and ant acid tablets in preparation for this morning’s encounter. He sat at his coffee stained desk with his head lowered staring at the black tarry residue left in the bottom of his Quick Mart plastic cup. He felt his stomach acid churn like waves violently crashing into the side of a rocky cliff, as he closed his eyes and remembered their last conversation.

 It was three years ago, and Sandra was a new detective to the division. She did not enjoy the distinction as the first female detective to work in the office. Three other women detectives stepped nervously into the office, only to be driven to the brink of insanity within six months by the coarse mannerisms of their fellow male detectives, but not Sandra. The day she walked into the sea of raging testosterone, everyone knew they were in for trouble. He remembered the day with the crystal-clear clarity of a shaved diamond necklace.

 “Oh yea, fresh meat coming through,” replied detective Carlson, as Sandra walked by his desk on her first day on the job.

 The Chief watched with a broad smile forming across his neatly shaved face. He kept his door closed purposely, so as not to be a witness to the vulgarities and harassment he knew would be thrown Sandra’s way. As he thought at the time, I’m still Chief and would be obligated to act if I witnessed poor behavior.

  What he wasn’t expecting, was Sandra’s reaction to the comment. He watched through the sound proof glass of his office window, like watching a silent comedy film, as Sandra turned around, seductively walked to within just centimeters of the loud mouth’s face. She brought her full moist lips to his ear. Just as the bulge in his pants began to rise, to his embarrassment, she reached down and squeezed between his legs with just enough pressure to cause a painful cramping sensation to course through his legs. This gesture was followed by a loud smack to his face, that caused every other detective in the room to quickly resume their duties.

#

  “Have a seat Sandra, and that’s an order.”

  Knowing that she was still subject to the para military rules of the Stare police environment, she held back her instinctive response of telling him to go to hell, and sat down without a word.

  “I received word that you had yet another call for a dead body, but did not even process the scene. You know we have normal operating procedures here. You know I have to answer to the Commissioner, the Governor, and always, the damn press.”

  Sandra again suppressed her natural urge to storm out of the office rather than talk to her, as she perceived, obtuse boss. She considered the fact that she was walking on thin ice as it was already. This was not the first time she rolled upon a murder scene, and rolled off just as quickly in her tired old Chevy.

   “Chief, I apologize, but the case is very cut and dry. Some pimp is out there forcing his, less than obedient girls, to drink drain cleaner. He’s sending a message to the other ladies, that he will not tolerate skimming off the top.”

  “How the hell do you know that?” His voice elevated in depth as he homed in on her curiously uncharacteristic docility this morning. He continued, “these three women are so different in background. Yes, Sally Wilks was a known drug addict off the streets, but the other two. They were both housewives from the upper West side. One married to a lawyer, and the other was married to a CEO of a nationwide security company. This looked like a serial killer to me.”

  Sandra looked at him with her poker-faced expression. The one expression she always used to mask her annoyance with the stupidity of a superior who held her career in the palm of his hands.

  “I just have a hunch. I can’t explain Chief, I just know this is not a serial killer situation.”

  “Sandra, you are my best detective, but your unconventional bullshit needs to stop. This is your last warning. One more slip of protocol, and your ass is suspended pending an investigation. You got it?”

  Sandra slowly rose from her chair and cleared her throat, as if expelling the words that lurked there just waiting for an opening to spring forth into the musky odor filled room of the Chiefs office.

  “Ok, Chief. I will not let it happen again.”

   He could do nothing but stare in shock as she calmly walked to the grease stained glass door to leave.

  “Oh, by the way. We caught the bastard. He was a pimp, and his name was Robert Teller. It would appear that he had some dirt on the two socialite ladies. Instead of blackmailing for money, he forced them to work as prostitutes, better pay off in the end I guess.”

 Without another word, Sandra walked out of the office smiling brightly as she made her way past the nervous men in the noisy dimly lit room.

Setting up Shop

  Thomas felt the muscles behind his eyes throb under the strain as he tightly squeezed them shut. His hands turned a ghostly pale white as he squeezed the corner of the stainless-steel cadaver table he bought on Samslist, a site where one could find any second-hand product, regardless the level of its oddity. He could feel the growing tide of rage swell deep within, just as it always does, listening to his Father destroy furniture in an alcohol fueled rage. Sitting in the make shift operating room of his basement, he could not resist the awakening of memories of the past once thought dead and buried deep inside the confines of his subconscious mind. Like the hand of a rotting corpse, pushing through the cold dirt of a forgotten grave, memories of his childhood wormed their way to the light of his conscious mind. He squeezed his eyes shut tighter and felt nothing as the sharp corner of the steel gurney bit into his smooth hands, causing a trickle of blood to smear the gleaming surface of the table. He remembered countless days of a Father belittling his son. Endless nights of a husband beating his wife. A Christmas came to mind. A Christmas Eve when the comfort of a warm dimly lit room filled with presents and the smell of freshly baked cookies, was shattered by a man with nothing but hatred in his heart, and alcohol on his breath. That night, when he was just six years old, his Father decided on a grand finale to his drunken performance. Thomas Lorey Senior, beat his wife into unconsciousness, just before throwing the Christmas tree into the back yard. Thomas slowly opened his eyes and viewed the stolen instruments surrounding the operating table, now smeared with long streaks of drying blood. He felt his despair stifled and replaced with the energizing surge of hope, the more efficient cousin of happiness. His hope sprouted from the seed of superiority. I am smarter than all the others, he thought. I am going to change the world, and all other things in life are mere trivialities. Thomas decided that his Father would be his first test subject, because he had a desire to cure the man who brought him into this dark lonely world. For there is no stronger love than the love that springs from hatred, because when we lose the object of our hatred, we suffer the most terrible feelings of loss.

 Thomas breathed a deep sigh of relief as he listened to the eerie silence from above. He had no doubts, based on many years of experience with his Father’s binges, that he spent all his energy and passed out on the living room floor. He set to work preparing the drug cocktail that, he was confident, would produce the desired effects. His test subjects must be made unaware of the surgical implantation of his electrical transmitter device. Despite his towering arrogance that reached heights barely achieved by any human throughout history, Thomas knew his limitations. He was not a pharmacologist, a practiced surgeon, or even an electrician, for that matter, so his progress would be gauged by trial and error.

 Thomas mixed, what he hoped, was the necessary mixture of Diazepam and Propranolol, based on his Father’s weight. He paused several times during the process of crushing the tablets, replaying in his mind his lessons from a hazy neuropharmacology lecture he attended several months ago. He closed his eyes during each of the brief pauses, attempting to focus his mind’s vision on the blurred projection screen chart, the chart that detailed the precise ratio of various medications according to a person’s body weight.

 “Oh, how I wish I would have sat closer to the front, he laughed quietly, to mask his inner nervousness at this stage of his preparations. Too little of a dosage will cause drowsiness, but without the desired effect of drug induced amnesia. Too much of the drug combination will cause death or coma and, certain detection by the authorities. After several hours of uncertainty, and preparing several different batches, he settled on two milligrams of Diazepam, twelve milligrams of Triazolam, and four milligrams of Propranolol. Each drug, taken by his Mother when she was alive, and suffering with husband induced depression, anxiety, and symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, were heavy sedatives, with the desired side effect of short term memory loss. In combination, and in the right amounts, Thomas believed that the test subject would have no recollection of events immediately prior to the surgery. Thomas considered the drug cocktails interactions within the subject’s brain. Based on his research, he decided on the Triazolam, for its chloride releasing properties upon the pain centers of the brain. This, he knew, would aid in providing negligible post-surgery pain and discomfort. The laparoscopic hole caused by the thin drill bit would barely be noticeable, and the drugs pain masking effects would help keep the small incision concealed. The Propranolol assisted his Mother with memory suppression. He recalled, with heavy sadness, his Mother popping the drug like candy M and M’s, after a particularly bad night with Father. He remembered seeing her facial expression change, within minutes, from a frightened abused animal, to a smiling Mary Poppins, happily unaware of the bruises that covered her once smooth unblemished skin. The Diazepam, he considered, is a powerful sedative when, given in the proper proportions, will induce the same operative effects of anesthesia.

 With ambitious thoughts of future glory and prestige, he poured the finely powdered white and yellow mixture into a saline filled IV bag, and watched as the mixture slowly dissolved. Each particle of the powder dissolved, to him, was another painful memory lost to the irrelevance of time past. After an hour of joyfully watching his troubled past melt away in a saline sea, he produced a twenty-milliliter hypodermic syringe, punctured the bag, and carefully pulled back the orange plunger until seventeen milliliters of the clear liquid rushed through the plastic tube.

An Inconvenient Romance

  “Hello, this is Sandra.” she exclaimed, as she nervously answered her cell. She felt nervous because she did not recognize the number displayed menacingly across the screen. Sandra normally ignored such phantom numbers. After several incidents of half hazard answering of her phone without looking at the caller ID, she realized that such bravery usually ended up badly, with a collection agency hounding her for past due credit card payments, and her ending the conversation with a big Fuck You.

 As if reading her mind, a deep masculine voice stated over the other end, “I’m glad you didn’t ignore the unknown number.”

 Sandra felt a brief wave of conflicting emotion race through her head. On one hand, she felt annoyed at any man having the audacity to call her in the middle of the afternoon, particularly on one of her rare days off the clock. On the other hand, the one squeezing the phone tightly, she felt, what she could only embarrassingly describe as adolescent expectation.

 Not now, not now, not now, she thought, but only with a hint at real frustration. A part of her, deeply buried for many years, longed to continue the conversation.

  “Who is this?” she replied, knowing well who this was.

 “My name is Eric. We were with each other the other night. You know, the night you kicked me off the bed,” he stated with a playful laugh that signaled more enjoyment with the encounter than anger.

“Ok, so I guess I really did give you my number.” She continued with her most theatric interpretation of sarcasm she could muster, “So, I guess your wife is out of town, and you want to come back for some more.”

 There was a brief pause after her sarcastic comment. She quickly began to become concerned as the silence continued. She began to hope, deep down, that her sarcastic sense of humor did not scare him away, as it has done so many times in the past.

  “Actually, I’m not married. I never was married. I just thought we had much in common, and I think you are one of the most interesting women I have ever met.”

 Sandra was no stranger to fake flattery. The kind of flattery guys always use just to lure a woman to bed. But this compliment seemed sincere, and something happened that hasn’t happened in a long time for Sandra. She felt the need to see Eric just one more time.

  Or maybe a few more times, she considered.

 “Ok, Eric the single guy. Let’s meet for dinner this Friday evening. Be here at my place by seven. Oh, and bring wine, or your cute little ass doesn’t even get in the door.”

  She pushed the red button on her phone, laid back on her satin sheets, and wondered why the hell she just did what she did.

Basement Surgery

  The once dank and dusty basement of the Lorey residence received a complete transformation since his leaving the University just three months past. Since his less than ideal review of his M1 theory dissertation by Professor Richardson, Thomas busied himself with cleaning his Father’s cellar. At one time, many years ago, when his Mother was still alive, his Father used the space first as a woodshop, later as another quiet place to indulge in his relentless thirst for alcohol. He started first with selling the various drills, saws, chisels, and some of the actual art work that would sell. He marveled at the smooth cherry stained rocking horses, chairs, and end tables his Father produced, during the sober years, the good years. With a touch of sadness, he cleared the basement of the last remaining artifacts of more pleasant days. The days filled with family picnics on the banks of the Susquehanna, and bike rides along the winding paths of Wilkerson Park were gone. Those days were overshadowed by the black tarry sea of addiction. Thomas spent those months since the University, scrubbing the moss-covered walls and varnish stained cement floor with gallons of bleach to ensure as close to a hospital setting as possible. As a further precaution, he firmly pasted plastic on all four walls and the floor, to prevent any dust from entering the small incision through the skull, causing infection and, as he realized, an unwanted variable from being injected into the experiment. His final task, the riskiest of all, was to steal the necessary equipment needed for the procedure. Returning to the Neuroscience lab, just twice each week for one month, he managed to transport the more delicate equipment within the deep inside pocket of his crimson ski jacket. Luckily, he considered, his requirements were surprisingly few for such a complicated procedure. Fiber optic cables with attached miniature camera, endoscopes to provide the image of the prefrontal cortex, and a specialized stainless-steel drill for the one-half inch hole drilled into the proper location of the M1 pathway. He already secured outside assistance from an acquaintance from the University. With the proceeds he generated from the sale of his Fathers ancient wood working equipment, he paid a brilliant young engineering student, Ronald Dorfman, to produce the necessary transmitter.

  “What do you need that for?” asked Ronald.

  “I’m just working on a project. Look, here is a thousand dollars for now, maybe more if I need your assistance later.”

  “Ok, one miniature four hundred thirty-three Megahertz transmitter coming right up.”

   Ronald never asked any more questions after receiving ten one hundred-dollar bills. As a student trying to live off student loans and, the occasional meager stipend from his parents, he had no problems keeping his questions to a bare minimum.

#

  “Ok, here we go!” exclaimed Thomas to the brightly lit plastic covered walls.

   Thomas ran his fingers through his Fathers greasy black hair, just a few centimeters from the midline of the skull, marked by the scalp. He slowly ran his fingers approximately one inch toward the front of the heavy breathing man, lying on the stainless-steel morgue table. Satisfied that he was directly above the Broadman area 46 of the prefrontal cortex, he made another slight adjustment with his finger, approximately one eight of an inch to his left. This was the spot, as he believed, to be the exact location of the dormant M1 pathway, soon to be responsible for the complete regulation of human aggression. His M1 pathway, as he detailed in his thesis, lies between the dorsal prefrontal cortex and the ventral prefrontal cortex. One controlling cognition, and the other controlling emotion, respectively.

 Thomas raised the Dewalt twenty Volt stainless steel drill and with steady hands, placed the half inch disinfected drill bit to the precise location of his mark. He calculated that he must not drill further than three point four millimeters deep. He pre-marked the drill bit with red marker for the proper depth after making his calculations. Thomas was aware that once past the skin, periosteum, skull, and subarachnoid space, he needed to carefully back off the drill bit, so as not too damage the soft grey matter of the prefrontal cortex. He felt a temporary wave of nausea bite through his stomach as he listened to the sound of the sharp bit grind against the skull with the miniaturized friction of a car engine’s piston working without the lubrication of oil. After hitting the red mark on the drill bit, he flipped a small switch on the left side of the drill with his thumb, reversing the action of the drill, and carefully backed out. He turned off the drill and wiped growing beads of warm sweat forming on the edges of his brows, before inserting the fiber optic cable into the hole.

 Thomas watched the monitor with the wonder of a deep-sea diver exploring an unmapped section of the Oceans darkest trenches. With careful precision, he inserted the cable between the dark fissures of the prefrontal lobe. After several attempts, he noticed a distinct bell-shaped piece of grey matter just a few centimeters beneath the grey and red surface of the brain. He theorized that this area was the location of the neural M1 pathway. Gently pushing the thin cable to the left, he taped the cable in place on the surface of the skull. Thomas, grabbed the laparoscopic cable, with the receiver attached to the end. He breathed a sigh of relief noticing that there was just enough room to insert the receiver tube next to the fiber optic cable, now stationary and projecting a clear colored image on the monitor. After placing the receiver, Thomas removed the tubing and the cable, and applied antiseptic to the small wound. He placed a small drop of liquid skin to the outside of the hole, like a mason cementing a hole in a brick wall.

Thomas looked at peaceful sleeping form of his Father and stated, “Well Dad, I hope I cured you and brought you peace. Mother would have wanted this for you.”

All Work and No Play

  Michael’s Restaurant is always crowded on a Friday evening. Sitting directly in the middle of the University city, one of the five major financial centers of the nation, Michael Sarducci struck a gold mine opening an Italian restaurant in such a location. Sandra would normally never frequent such a busy establishment, preferring to avoid crowds. She was never comfortable with people, as she would be the first to tell anyone brave enough to get that close. She communicated much more comfortably with the dead, than the living.

 “The dead are much easier to understand,” she stated to Eric, sitting directly across from the small round tasteful decorated table.

 She watched for the normal reaction in Eric’s eyes, just before bolting for the nearest exit. Glairing into Eric’s eyes as if looking into a review mirror, her mind strayed to the past, on a night very similar to this one. She started that date, just like this, by talking about her job, the only thing that filled her time. She remembered, with a touch of amusement, how that date sat patiently listening to her go on about talking to the dead. She could see him begin nervously fidgeting in his seat, until at last looking at his texts,and putting on the worst fake expression of surprise she ever witnessed in her life. Before she knew it, he was racing to his car, no doubt relieved that he got out with his life, she thought, giving off a low chuckle.

 “What was so funny,” Eric asked, looking surprised at the strange interruption.

  Sandra shook her head, as if jarring her brain back to reality and asked, “Excuse me, what laugh?”

 “You were saying how you were more comfortable with dead people, compared to dealing with the living. Then you just stared at me, and gave off a little laugh.”

 Sarah felt just a tinge of embarrassment threaten to turn her face a slight shade of red. She did not even notice her wanderings anymore. Her entire life, she could remember being told about her spontaneous daydreaming.

  Oh, I’m sorry. I guess my mind sometimes wanders away from me. Listen if you’re not comfortable, let’s just call it a night. We could skip the pretense of the respectable dinner, and just go back to my place.”

  Eric smiled and stated, “I am fascinated by what you do. In addition, I want to go through the pretense of this respectable dinner. You look beautiful, and I want this night to last as long as possible before I take that dress off. Think of it like a few hours of foreplay before we go back to my place.”

 Sandra’s worst fear was confirmed at this very moment. She feared that one day her luck would run out. One day she would meet someone with an actual name. She feared that one day she would meet someone that made her forget about the dead, and gave her the hope that she could function normally among the living. She feared that one day someone would break through her defensive mechanisms that protected her from a world, she knew how to navigate but, could never fully understand. That someone, she now realized, was Eric.

You Can’t Make an Omelet

 Thomas waited anxiously for his Father’s return from the corner watering hole, Joe’s Tavern. His Father was no stranger to Joe’s. Thomas sat at his coffee stained kitchen table, waiting for his Father to stagger in the door. As any prey in nature relentlessly stalked by a predator, he learned through the painful slow birth of adaptation, how to avoid his Father’s violence. Knowing his Father never dared to navigate stairs when under the influence of another alcoholic binge, Thomas spent most of his childhood weekends and, adult life, within the dusty confines of the basement. But tonight was different. Swallowing his fear, as every scientific pioneer must master, Thomas prepared himself to introduce the necessary variable to conduct his first experiment. His Father was not as easily provoked to violence in his older age. Like any individual familiar with living with mental illness knows, symptoms of the disease lessen in time. For the manic depressive, the deep dark abyss of despair grows shallow with each passing decade, as the dark canyon is slowly filled with the familiarity of misery. Like every unlucky person knows suffering from the ravages of bipolar mood swings, the healing power of time makes suffering more manageable, if not more tolerable. So, Thomas prepared himself to provoke that part of his Father’s disturbing nature buried, but not yet dead. He sat holding the six-inch square black box in his hand, running his thumb back and forth across the single green deadened button on the front panel. He considered, with a growing sense of unease, the consequences of this very button never turning on with its brilliant bright green color. The transmitter was of short wave length, so he must get as close as possible to send the weak electrical current into his Father’s frontal lobe. Any malfunction of the transmitter or, receiver implanted in the slick grey matter of his Father’s brain, could mean a death sentence for Thomas, the much weaker of the two. Without time for another nervous thought, Thomas heard the front door open with a bang, and his Father’s unequal footsteps approach the kitchen.

  “What are you doing in here, you little shit. Shouldn’t you be hiding like your Mother in the Fucking basement?” His Father staggered to the refrigerator and grabbed a cold beer from the empty space within. Food was never a priority in the house. As Thomas remembered hearing his Father exclaim, on more than one occasion, “I can’t hold my beer in here, with all that food in my way!”

   Thomas remained silent, waiting for the right moment to present itself. Prior to his Father’s noisy arrival, he did his best to remove as many sharp instruments from the kitchen, without his Father becoming suspicious. As a genius, Thomas knew well that he inherited most of his intelligence through both maternal and, to his wonderment, paternal genes. His Father was observant, and surely able to notice when something is out of place with his usual surroundings.  

   His Father drunkenly plopped himself down on the chair directly across from Thomas. He looked at the transmitter in his hand and watched hopefully as the green button began to blink off and on, indicating that the signal was growing in strength as the distance between the two shortened.

   Still staring at his son, he exclaimed with a sly smile across his whiskered face, “Well you little shit!”

   “I’m just waiting for you Dad.”

   “Oh, really. Whatever for you little coward.”

   “Just to tell you, that you are a drunken piece of shit, and I know something kept hidden from you for years…you old useless rag.”

   Thomas watched with beads of sweat slowly breaking through the pours above his brow, as his Father’s eyes widened with rage. His hopes were dashed just as quickly as he watched his Father’s bloodshot eyes return to their normal half shut drunken position.

   “Your trying to provoke me boy. Well it aint working. I’m much too tired of beating your little ass into a pulp. Besides, it’s no fun anymore since your Mother can’t watch me do it.”

   “Well, I just wanted to let you know that Mom was able stay for a reason. She had two good things in her life that kept her steady after those terrible nights having to share a bed with a stinking drunk like you. She had me to care for, and she had our old neighbor, Mr. Taylor’s, fully functioning dick to keep her satisfied while you were at the tavern thinking you were in such control.”

   Thomas quickly dived to his right, avoiding the empty beer bottle that came sailing directly toward his head. Before he could turn over on his back and spring to his feet to create a safe distance, his Father was on his back, and pushing his full two hundred and fifty pounds on his own one-hundred-and-fifty-pound frame. Thomas felt pressure squeezing around his throat like a pair of vice grips clamped tightly around the head of a stubborn bolt. The atmosphere of the kitchen began to darken, and he could feel the pressure building behind his eyes, as if they would pop right out of their sockets, and go rolling across the dirt smeared linoleum floor. Just before giving in to the, what hopelessly seemed to him as, inevitable darkness, Thomas felt the sharp corner of the transmitter box stabbing into his sternum.

  “Now I’m going to kill you, like I should have done years ago when your whore Mommy died!” he exclaimed, as he squeezed tighter around Thomas’s neck.

  Thomas flattened his right palm and pushed with all the remaining strength he had until his hand touched the box. He snaked his finger across the surface, finding the green button.He pushed hard just before blacking out.

The First Meeting

  Sandra rolled back to her side of the bed with a deep sigh, knowing what the ringing of her cell phone meant at two thirty in the morning. She opened her eyes and looked at Eric snoring lightly into the darkness of her bedroom. She was not ready to go to another man’s apartment just yet. As a woman who loves the thrill of a good mystery, some prolonged guessing at what his apartment may look like was just a small, yet important, part of this game.

  “Go ahead, where is the body.”

 “Ninety-Four Cricket Circle,” came the squeaking voice over the other end of the phone. “All we know, is that a Thomas Lorey called stating that his Father was dead. The phone then went dead. We tried calling back but got no answer. Two units are in route.”

  “I will give the boys some time to do their thing, and I will be there in about thirty minutes.”

 Sandra leaned over to kiss Eric on the cheek before getting dressed to go to the Lorey residence, but pulled back just before making contact. She was intelligent enough to be aware of her growing feelings for this man, as she contemplated in the dark, she really knew nothing about. I don’t even know what the hell you do for a living, she considered with another growing wave of excitement.

  “Little puzzles to unravel,” she whispered in the dark, as she placed her leather .45 holster around her strong but feminine smooth right shoulder.

#

  “Is the scene cleared?” asked Sandra, addressing a young patrol officer just outside the front door of Thomas’s home.

 “Yes detective, the scene is clear.” The young man, no more than twenty-five, she guessed, looked absently at a pocket sized writing pad, and began, “Thomas Lorey reported that his Father, Thomas Lorey Senior came home drunk and tried to kill him. He said he passed out and when he woke up, his Father was lying in a pool of blood on the kitchen floor with a gunshot to the head.”

 “Ok detective. I need you guys to leave the scene. Leave one patrol car here in case your needed. I will process the scene and talk to Mr. Lorey.” Without another word, Sandra entered the Lorey residence. Unlike most of her colleagues, to their annoyance, she relied more on instinct than facts. Since she could remember, she always had a sixth sense about when something is wrong. She thought to herself with amusement, psychics would probably call that extra sensory. Maybe something to do with sensitivity to people’s aura, or whatever. She didn’t much care what others called it. She referred to it as simply being in tune with her surroundings, from the physical, to the abstract. Regardless of the origins of this extra sense, she immediately felt that something was wrong with the atmosphere of the scene. She passed the living room on her way to the gore splattered kitchen, and briefly looked at the face of, who she surmised, was Thomas Lorey. She saw something in his eyes that reminded her of the plastic people of her youth. That’s what she used to call the department store mannequins in her neighborhood while growing up. She would gaze through the exhaust covered windows of the various jewelry and clothing shops that lined the busy Main Street Boulevard. She would gaze in wonder at the store mannequins with the very real eyes that would follow you in any direction you sauntered. That’s what she saw in Thomas as she passes by him, theatrically wrapped in a wool blanket, and sipping on hot tea made by one of the interviewing officers. She walked into the kitchen and began a grid search of the entire room careful not to walk in the splatters of drying blood that decorated the floors and walls. She made her way around the table and could see the brown colored broken glass scattered in a small area of the floor. Several small shards lined the bottom of the stainless-steel kitchen sink just above the main pile on the floor. She backed around to the other side to take a closer look at the elder Mr. Lorey. Without a prolonged inspection, she could see that the position of the gun on the floor, the penny sized hole of the nine-millimeter in the left side of his temple, the baseball sized exit wound of the right side of his face, and the blood spatter pattern on the far wall, all added to corroborate the story she received by the patrol officer.

  “Hi Thomas, can I call you Thomas?” she asked, careful of her tone, so as not to close any emotional doors.

  “Yes, you can call me Thomas.”

  “And you can call me Sandra.” “Just tell me what happened. I think this would be a great place to start.”

  “My Dad came home drunk, as is the usual for a Friday night. He started in on me, like he always does. Saying that I am a failure, and a disappointment.”

  Sandra was not surprised by the unemotional tone in his voice. His emotional affect did not match the tears slowly streaming from the corner of just his left eye. This imbalance between emotional tone and saddened facial expression only served to support her original observation that, something was just not quite right.

 “Why did he say you were a disappointment?”

  “I dropped out of the University a few months ago.”

  “Oh. What was your Major field of study?’

  “Neuropsychology,” he replied with a tome of pride that, as she observed, certainly matched perfectly the look of pride spreading across his face.

 “So, then what happened?”

  “I told him he was a stinking drunk, and the cause of my Mother’s death.”

  “He caused your Mother’s death?”

  Thomas looked at Sandra as if he were talking to a mindless lab rat. “Not literally, detective. He was an abuser, and caused her to take multiple sedatives and such. She crashed her car one evening, straight into the concrete beam of the Washington Street Bridge.”

 “I’m very sorry to hear that, Thomas” She surprised herself to utter these words, because she was truly beginning to feel sorry for this sad young man sitting opposite her in the dimly lit living room of a house with so many obvious skeletons in the closets.

 Thomas began, “he attacked me. He was so much stronger than me. He got my back and applied a chock hold. Before I knew it, the world went dark. When I came to again, I found him dead on the kitchen floor.”

  Sandra realized that she was pushing the proverbial envelope with her next question, but she could not leave without trying. When she was a patrol office, working the toughest section of town, she would often ask suspects if she could search their vehicles during routine traffic stops, when she suspected that something was amiss. She was always astonished at the number of experienced criminals dumb enough to give permission for the search.

  “Thomas, you think I can look around your house. You know, maybe your Father left a suicide note.”

  She watched as his expression changed from the sad, but prideful self-proclaimed genius, to an angry insulted child.

  “You may not search my house. What are you trying to do? I am getting a lawyer if I have to.” Thomas was red in the face and huffing like a child that just threw a temper tantrum in a candy store for not getting what he wanted.

  With her second suspicion confirmed-The one that told her that he has something to hide, she stated calmly, “thank you for cooperation,” and walked out the front door, leaving Thomas alone to consider what went wrong with the experiment.

Another Talk with The Chief

  Sandra still could not help feeling disoriented by the all too familiar sense of de ja vu, as she sat in the chief’s untidy office. She also felt what she could only describe as, vindication, as she noticed the mounting piles of headache the chief accumulated on his desk since her last reprimand.

  Looks like our little Lumber Jack is keeping the old fart busy, she thought to herself as she suppressed a sly smile. The Lumber Jack is the nickname of the killer, known to have committed ten gruesome hatchet murders throughout the country sides of Pennsylvania. Each victim was found in pieces placed neatly in large and small piles among the old ruins of various abandoned farmhouses in the State.

 Sandra was torn quickly away from her gloating fantasy by the seriousness in the chief’s voice. Previous reprimands, despite his obvious genuine frustration, were always laced with a hint of playfulness. If not playfulness, at least an understanding that she was never in any real danger of suspension. But this time was different. The chief meant business, and as she thought, I better listen up and play the game.

 “Guess who called me? Go ahead detective, take a good guess.”

  Without having to expend an ounce of mental energy, she stated, “Thomas Lorey.”

  “Well give the great Detective Sandra a gold fucking star.”

  Sandra knew for sure that she was in real hot water, and it was about to get hotter. She never heard the chief abandon the clean confines of professional respectability, and curse.

  “Guess what Detective. He is threatening to get a lawyer. I think he just may have a case.”

  “Chief, I only asked if I could search for a suicide note.”

  The Chief interrupted her before she could say another word in her defense-A defense full of holes. Every detective who attended Civil Rights 101 knows that you never asked to search a person’s home during an apparent suicide investigation, and if you suspected something foul, you went through a process before proceeding with a search.

 “You know full well what you were doing. More importantly, even a dip shit straight out of law school would know what you were trying to pull.”

  Sandra opened her mouth to explain her hunches, when she was subdued into silence by the glare in her bosses’ eyes.

  “You are becoming a liability detective. I am placing you on suspension for one month with pay. I figure this will cool your heels a bit, and my ass will be covered.”

   Sandra threw her gold shield on the mound of files littering his desk. She released the full clip from her .45 semi-automatic and placed both on top of her shield. Without another word she started for the office door.

   “Wait right there. Before you go, I want to say something off the record.”

  Sandra did not give him the satisfaction of seeing a small grin of triumph spreading across her soft shapely lips. She remained with her face toward the door as he spoke.

  “After you return, I am putting you on the Lumber Jack case. I believe in your hunches Sandra, but the Lorey case is closed. The verdict by our team is in, the Lorey case was a suicide. In fact, if the old man was alive, he would be charged with attempted homicide. Anyway, before you go on your little paid vacation, I want you to get familiar with the case. We brought an eleventh victim into the morgue last night. This body is a bit more intact than the others. Go to the morgue, and talk to your dead.”

 Sandra calmly walked out of his office, and headed downtown to the city morgue to see a new friend, Tonya Miller of Lancaster Pennsylvania.

The Lumber Jack Killer

  Sandra prepared herself mentally before the steel elevator doors opened to the strange isolated world of the city morgue. She always hated coming here to witness the final, not so gentle, handling of one’s mortal remains. As the elevator door dinged open, signaling her arrival, she was met by the characteristic sounds of saw blades biting through bone, and the sound of the long steel drawers banging shut, sealing the dead for the final days before burial, or burning. She thought to herself, this really drives home the fact that we are nothing more than bags full of water and meat.

 Sandra approached autopsy room number three, of five, and cautiously opened the door. She wanted to hear Dr. Emmanuel Zeigler speak into the small microphone hanging from the ceiling, directly above the form lying on the cold stainless-steel gurney. She watched as Dr. Zeigler, chief pathologist, removed the powder blue bloodstained sheet from, what was once, Tonya Miller. Tonya Miller, she thought, a young woman full of hopes, dreams, and ambitions. Tonya Miller, as she remembered from the file she read in the parking garage of the hospital, was a twenty-two-year-old student at Penn State Community college. She was last seen walking across the campus lawn at three thirty in the afternoon on November twelth, two thousand seventeen, just the day before yesterday, as she looked at her phone’s calender. According to witnesses, she just finished a lecture on Macro Economics, and did not have another class until four thirty that afternoon.

 Sandra restrained a growing feeling of sadness as she remembered, what she always considered, the most important information of a case. She remembered that Tonya, was the  daughter of two parents who loved her very much. Tonya Miller was a lover of animals and called home twice every week to make sure that Mr. Snickerdoodles was getting along fine without her. Tonya was a member of the Homeless Outreach Association, giving her spare time in between studies, and worrying about her cat, to distribute food to the growing homeless population. The war in Iraq officially ended several years before, but the rise of homeless returning veterans, suffering from PTSD and addiction, was alarming, and Tonya was determined to combat this little piece of evil on our not so blue and happy planet. Sandra considered these facts as she looked on what remained of Tonya Miller and listened to Dr. Zeigler make his professional observations.

 “Subject is a twenty-two-year-old female, approximately five feet four inches in height, and weighing approximately one hundred and twenty pounds. Cranium separated from the body directly three centimeters above the C4 cervical vertebrae. The instrument used was very sharp and straight across, possibly that of an ax, or hatchet head. No other external damage to the skull, except for a two-inch diameter contusion on the left side of the cranium just above the zygomatic arch.

  Dr. Ziegler, continued with his examination of the rest of the body as he slowly made his way down the length of the table.

 “Both upper extremities separated approximately two inches below the deltoids, again with the same type of cutting instrument. No other signs of trauma to the dermal layer. Both lower extremities separated in the same manner. No signs of sexual trauma. Cause of death: blunt force trauma to the left side of cranium, with unknown object of a circular pattern. Possibly, a hammer, or other such instrument.”

 “Oh, hello Sandra. Welcome to my little chilly universe, once again.”

 “Hello Dr. Zeigler, I wish I could say that I was happy to be here.”

 “I understand young lady. I sometimes get the heebie jeebies being down here in the basement myself.”

  Sandra liked Dr. Zeigler. He was in his mid-sixties, tall, with pepper grey hair. Sandra walked closer to him and waited for the distinctive smell of apple pipe tobacco, the same her Father used to smoke. She always remembered her Fathers scent in times of discomfort. Days sitting by the fireplace, as her Father took time away from his busy schedule as a bank president, to read to her and her sister, Mable Becks. Her sweet memory was always laced with just a hint of sorrow, when she would think of her deceased sister Mable. She died at the age of seven from a rare type of brain tumor, and the emptiness she left behind always haunted her from time to time.

 “Sorry, I don’t come to visit more. You know I love to talk to intellectual men with class. Hard to find these days in a world full of metrosexual wimps,” she stated with a laugh.

  Dr. Zeigler replied, “Yep, they don’t make us like they used to. John Wayne must be rolling in his grave.”

  “So, what do think about Tonya?”

  “I think that whoever did this is an interesting individual who should be killed immediately when found. That is my opinion.”

 “Interesting how?” she asked, not at all shocked by his statement. Dr. Zeigler was a forensic pathologist but with an impressive past of behavioral profiling.

  “In my opinion, he did not want to hurt the girl. There are no biological markers of freight, or increase in adrenaline. No severe trauma present before the dismemberment of her body. The blow to the left side of her temple was swift and with such force, I can say with certainty, she felt nothing. It’s almost as if he didn’t want to kill the girl. If it wasn’t for the other ten bodies, I would think that he hit her in a fit of passion and was interrupted when cutting her corpse into pieces.”

 “Maybe, he has a daughter,” she stated under her breath as she looked at the six neatly severed pieces on the examination table.

  “What was that,” he asked”

  “Oh nothing, just trying to run some things through my mind. Thanks, you were, as always, a big help. Oh, and Tonya thanks you,” she stated as she headed for the safety of the elevator, bringing her back to the normal world.

  Sandra ran through the facts of the file, and the findings of Dr. Zeigler. She sat in the hospital parking garage, closed her eyes, and let the world of beeping horns, crying visitors, and carbon monoxide fumes fade away. The faces of all eleven victims ran through her mind. All the faces seemed so different upon first glance. Body sizes all different. Occupations all different. Three male and eight female victims. Just as she was prepared to bring herself back to the real world of distraction, and senseless activity, something flashed across her mind. She remembered one small item that four of the victims shared and, she suspected when reviewing all the cases again, the other seven would also have in common. She quickly dialed the number to the morgue.

  “Dr. Zeigler, can you please check and let me know if Tonya had any piercings.”

  Sandra listened, feeling a slight tinge of nausea turn her stomach, as she heard a wet suction sound as Dr, Zeigler pried open Tonya’s clenched jaws. To her it sounded like someone forcing their foot loose from being stuck in wet mud on a rainy night.

 “You got it kiddo. She had her tongue pierced, but I found no jewelry, just the small opening a few centimeters from the tip.”

 Sandra ended the call without another word. She was too lost in thought to give the proper courtesy of a thank you, or goodbye. But just like her kind hearted and understanding Father, she knew, that Dr. Zeigler would understand. Her fits of flighty day dreaming were known throughout the department.

  “So, you don’t like those naughty girls with their piercings, but you don’t like hurting them either. I bet you have a daughter. I bet she wanted a piercing also,” she mumbled to the inside of her empty car, as she drove out of the hospital parking garage.

Making Connections

  After just a few days on, what she hoped would be, a much-needed vacation, Sandra found herself pacing her apartment like a caged animal. Each attempt at occupying her mind with frivolous activity, only seemed to draw her closer to her new obsession, the hunt for the Lumber Jack killer. Exhausted with pacing her two-room efficiency apartment, she plopped down hard on her barely used chaise lounger, placed her aching neck on the back of the chair, and closed her eyes. Images of the Lumber Jack victims swarmed through her mind, like a hive of angry bees. Each time she strained to make a connection it was as if poking the bee hive with a stick, sending angry stinging wasps to do their work. Her head ached, and she did not feel one step closer to finding that connection.

 “I know it has to do with the piercings,” she said loudly, still holding her eyes closed as if opening them would make the images go away. She needed those case file images of the blood and gore to keep her focused. She needed the pain in her head to keep her sharp, to make her feel, because it was, as she knew, powerful emotion that fueled her gift.

 She continued talking out loud again, but in a softer tone, “only some of the victims had piercings. Only three out of the eleven though. Not enough to make a connection.”

 She began speaking in choppy sentences, and single words…” some piercings.” What is related to piercings?” “What is taboo?” Taboo to you, but not me.” Why you?” “Old school.”

“Values.” “Uptight Daddy.” “You love her, but hate her.” “Kill your daughter, no way, you love her.” “Tattoos.” “Tattoos.”

  She opened her eyes and sprung off the lounger to retrieve her phone from her purse. Just as she was prepared to dial her partner, Ralph Klinger, the phone began to ring.

 “Yea, I can’t talk now, call back later,” she stated out of breath, as she hung up the phone. She quickly dialed her partner, feeling like a born loser who just hit the ten-million-dollar jackpot.

  “This is Detective Kilinger,” stated a sleepy voice over the other line.

  Normally, she would have a little bit of sarcasm for the, as she described him, slow witted man. But there was no time for such play. She needed him for an important mission. She did not have access to the departments database and she needed some research completed for this little hunch.

  “Ralph, I need you to run the names of all the victims of the Lumber Jack. I want all the information you can give me. Information that may not be contained in the coroners’ reports. I also want a list of single Fathers, living alone with teenage daughters, in every rural area of the state, especially the Northeastern and Central areas.”

  Sandra was not surprised when she did not immediately get a response on the other line. She was not even surprised, or annoyed, at the hysterical high-pitched laugh coming from the other end of the phone. She waited patiently for him to stop, and begin with his weak protestations.

  “That’s a lot of work Sandra. The chief is already up my ass to clear my desk of old cases. Besides, do you know how many single Daddy’s there must be?”

  “Probably not as many as you think. Most single parents are female, so I am not expecting more than a hundred or so single Daddy situations. Please Ralph, I think I am hot on his tail.”

  Ralph heard the uncharacteristic sincerity in her plea for help. He may be slow in matters of perception, but he knew better than not too trust Sandra’s instincts.

   “Ok, but this will be a big project, and may take a few days.”

   Sandra, looked at the small brown boxed digital clock next to her bed, and stated with a low and slow tone, “I have all the time in the world.”

   After hitting the red hang-up button on her cell, she looked at the missed call of just a few minutes prior. She saw Eric’s phone number displayed accusingly across the small screen. She felt a wave a guilt quickly pass over her, for her rude reception of his call.

   “Hey babe, come on over and I will make it up to you.”

Another Guinea Pig

  Thomas once again sat in the make shift operating room of his basement pondering over, what was now, an entire volume of notes on his M1 theory. Although, M1 was no longer theory, he considered, as he reviewed the events of his Father’s suicide. He wrote on a blank page of his journal-What Went Right-in large red letters.

What Went Right:

1. Subject experienced complete amnesia. (Not aware of procedure)
2. Operation successful. (No excessive bleeding, or signs of secondary infections.
3. Subject cessation of violence immediate. (M1 region confirmed)

Underneath, he wrote the word-Complications in large letters.

Complications:

1. Transmitter/receiver connection only activated within two feet of subject.
2. Placement of receiver incorrect. (Subject committed suicide. Suicidal impulse activated)

Thomas sighed deeply looking at the smaller list of complications. He felt powerless with number one on that short list. He did have any more funds left to buy the homemade transmitters. “This will just have to do.” he stated to the lonely plastic covered room. He looked at the second complication on the list, with a brightening enthusiasm coursing through his veins. His placement of the receiver was exact in relation to the control of aggression. He considered how suicidal and homicidal impulses were closely related, like first cousins of the same maternal bloodline. The M1 pathway, as he contemplated, would no doubt control both impulses. He decided to continue with the experiments in the same prefrontal region. His theory began to take a slight turn. Thomas considered that if he would not have passed out after hitting the transmitter’s green button, he could have watched his Father, against his will, point the gun to his temple. He could have simply cut off the signal and possibly, shut down the suicidal impulse. As a secondary effect, he theorized, the chemical constituents flooding the region would have subsided, causing the violence to subside. This round-about method was not how he expected to prove his theory, but it was a start.

Thomas turned on his hp laptop and entered the SamsList personals section. He carefully scrolled through the listings, unsure of exactly what he was seeking. The incident with his Father’s suicide taught him a valuable lesson. With the risk of death so high in the early stages of the experiments, he could not afford to call undo attention to himself. He did not consider himself a serial killer. The thought of causing the death of another did not arouse any sexual or, mental stirrings deep within his soul. Thomas considered himself a humanitarian, a genius on a mission to better society through behavioral modification. If some people died on his operation table or, as he thought with a deepening feeling of weighted sadness, by blowing their heads off against their will, these were acceptable losses.

 “I will be sure to list them in my memoirs as heroes who died for a great cause,” he stated to himself, as he scrolled down the list of potential candidates.

 He was searching for a guinea pig with no personal attachments. Someone with little, or zero, ties to other’s. Someone like yourself, was the thought that came to his mind, making his depression even deeper.

 “Ah, here we go!” he exclaimed, clicking on the thirty fifth add on the page. The ad read:

 SWF (single white female), looking for a NSA (no strings attached) encounter with a clean and disease-free guy. I am blonde, five feet six inches, forty years old, green eyes, and love new experiences. I can host, or you can. It doesn’t matter either way. Just be DD free (drug and disease free), sane, and not looking for anything serious. More of a FWB (friend with benefits situation). Oh, and no pic, no reply.

Thomas considered the ad carefully. He guessed that if she was willing to host a strange man at her own place, she was lonely, and lived alone. Other ads involved women who could not host (married or boyfriend), and women asking for the guy’s phone number (spammer). Without overthinking the situation, and anxious to get started, he typed a message back:

Hi,

I am a single male, twenty-three years old, University student. I have very little experience dating, particularly from a dating site. I am very clean and disease free. Very busy, so I am not looking for anything serious. A FWB situation would be perfect. Well here is a pic. I hope to hear from you soon.

Thomas attached a pic of him taken the day before he began his studies. He was pleased that the photograph was one of the few featuring him with a large smile, showcasing perfectly straight and white teeth. He did not expect an immediate response. In fact, he did not expect a response at all. He did not consider himself to be very attractive, but he did not suspect that the woman on the other end was either. SamsList was not your typical dating site. He knew that most people posting on SamsList lied about their body stats (how they look), and generally were desperate for that human need, he rarely thought about, sex. Thomas lived in a world of theory and ambition. Sex to him, as he would readily admit, is an unnecessary act that never made him feel closer to others. He remembered his first of two sexual experiences just before starting college. He could not understand Betty Lango’s reaction for weeks after the act in the very basement he now called his laboratory. She called him incessantly looking for another encounter. For him, the orgasm was just slightly more intense than during the climax of masturbation-something he knew more about. Making time for something barely more pleasurable than pleasuring himself did not seem logical. To test his theory, he went ahead and tried it again. Trying different positions, and the like, but sex was still a flatlined experience. Since then, he had barely a noticeable interest in sexual contact and he certainly, as he will admit without shame, did not have the capacity for a deeper romantic love.

I Got You

   “Tell me you have something good,” Sandra stated excitedly into the phone.

   “Well I don’t know if its useful information or not but here it is.” I have a list of seventy-two individual males taking care of teenage daughters in the areas that you outlined. I sent them to your email, pictures and all, if I could find any.” I also sent as much miscellaneous information I could find on all the Lumber Jack victims. Information not contained in our limited files.”

   “I owe you one, and I promise, I will never talk shit behind your back again.” Sandra hung up the phone without waiting for a reply.

   She turned on her hp laptop and pulled up the files sent to her by her sleepy partner.

   “I love you, you little sloth,” she stated out loud.

   “What are you doing babe?” asked Eric, sitting next to Sarah on her only other piece of furniture, a second-hand pea green couch with a torn middle cushion.

   “Hello in there, do you want me to make breakfast?”

   Sandra did not hear Eric as she scanned the files sent to her email. She heard a distant voice, that was like a voice coming from deep at the bottom of a forgotten canyon. She did not even notice as Eric put on his clothes and silently walked out of her apartment.

   A full smile grew across her face as connections came easily between the line of each individual case. Through coroners’ reports, dental, and medical records, she could see that most of the victims had tattoos, body piercings, or both. She moved on to the long list of single Father’s taking care of teenage daughters. Out of the Seventy-Two, just ten experienced some type of tragedy involving their daughters. Seven of the ten included the young girls running away from home. Probably to make it big in Hollywood, but only finding a smooth-talking pimp waiting at the bust stop, she considered, with sadness. She was no stranger to investigating the disappearance of young girls and, sometimes boys, only to find out that some met a horrible fate on the sunny side of the country.

 Her heart thumped wildly in her chest, as she read the case files of the remaining three men on the list. All three had teenage daughters that met a terrible end.

 “Now which one of you is the best serial psycho candidate,” she said out loud. She was already on the burner for tramping on people’s civil rights. This thought brought Thomas Lorey back into her mind. But there was nothing more she could do with that case. The official report was an attempt on his life, and the subsequent suicide of his Father. Still, there was a lingering doubt in her mind. Her instincts screamed out to her, like Thomas Lorey’s Father’s restless spirit tugging at her ear, that something was just not quite right with the situation. “Something she said, not quite right with the son.”

 She returned to the files, and read each case carefully. Two of the cases were homicide. Both girls died at the hands of jealous boyfriends, with ego’s too masculine to accept the ending of the relationship. The other case was a vehicular death. According to the police report, Eric Drew, hit Becky Marlow with his car. The young man stopped, so this was no hit and run. He stopped and explained to the police that she just came out of nowhere. Police report that her phone was found approximately twenty feet from the site, and the last call was made to her Father Jack Marlow.

 Sandra closed her eyes and tried to imagine the scene. She visualized Becky talking on the phone and not realizing she was too close to the edge of the road. She could see Eric in his car and slamming into the petite frame of the young girl. A girl with such a bright future ahead of her. She was accepted into a prestigious music school, and according to people around town, was the apple of her Father’s eye.

 Sara clicked on a file labeled coroner’s report. She viewed the autopsy photos with as much cold professionalism as she could muster. Her eyes widened as she noticed a black and grey rose tattoo, on the outside thigh of her left leg.

 She clicked on a second file, labeled Eric Drew Criminal File. According to the police report, Eric was just released from prison, on a breaking and entering charge. She clicked on a third file marked, Eric Drew Autopsy Report.

 His remains were obviously different than the other victims. To Sandra, the differences were as obvious as a hooker attending Sunday school. The other victims were dismembered with a clean precision, indicative of someone skilled with cutting instruments, possible an ax or hatchet. Eric was the only victim who had his face smashed in beyond recognition. In addition, he had over a dozen artificial cuts on his back. According to the coroner, they were not life-threatening cuts, but certainly enough to cause discomfort. This little detail was dismissed, because the body parts were found on a pile of sticker bushes and thought to have been the culprits of the lacerations.

 “I got you Mr. Marlow. You hated that your little girl was going to the big city. I bet she got that tattoo when she was well underage. You probably wanted to kill her for being such a little slut. but you couldn’t. She was your pride and joy, and only reason for living. Wasn’t she? So, you killed other slutty little bitches. You killed your daughter repeatedly, trying to wipe that guilt away, that guilt because you hated your little girl.”

 Sandra stood up from the couch and paced around the small living room. “Eric Drew wasn’t a victim. He was unlucky number ten. He was a revenge killing. The bastard ex con who killed your little flower, but then you couldn’t stop so, you killed your eleventh victim, poor little Tonya Miller.

 Sandra looked through the files but could not see an occupation listed for Mr. Marlow. “I bet you are an actual tree cutter. I bet you are an actual Lumber Jack.” The thought struck as a bit comical. She never considered that, in her concrete world, some people actually work for a living.

Catfish

  Thomas groggily walked to his front door. He could not imagine who would be knocking at seven thirty in the morning. The first clear thought that broke through the fog of interrupted sleep was that Detective Becks was back with a warrant. One month passed since the suicide of his Father. He tried to push back the memory of that night, but with little success. Nature is not always so kind as to allow some memories to fade. Some memories grow with the passage of time, and Thomas was left with trying to stuff this memory deep into the safety of his unconscious mind, like stuffing his entire wardrobe into a pathetically small overnight bag.

 He cautiously opened the door, clumsily grabbing the handle of his Father’s nine-millimeter pistol, tucked into his waistband, and resting uncomfortably against his lower back.

 “May I help you?” he asked, with a confused expression on his face. The woman standing on his doorstep was, by his approximation, no more than five feet five, with curly black hair, dull brown eyes, and at least one hundred fifty pounds.

  The woman gave Thomas a nervous crooked smile, and extended her hand. “I’m Kathy Brier from SamsList. We talked just yesterday.” She rolled her eyes, in a way that made Thomas think of someone with very little going on upstairs, and continued, “Well we really didn’t talk. We technically texted,” she gave a little laugh, that was more of a snorting, making Thomas cringe. He was prepared to kick her off his doorstep, but not before giving her a lecture on catfishing. He could not believe that she would have the nerve to come to his doorstep after giving such a contrasting description over the computer. Just as he raised his pointed finger up to her face, and begin his condemnations, he quickly changed mental direction and extended his hand. He forced a pleasant smile on his face, and stated, “I was hoping you would show.”

 “Wow, what a great place you have here,” she mumbled.

Thomas looked around and laughed to himself. He realized that this poor creature must really come from a sad background, if she thought that his house was anything more than run down and common.

 “Thank you, I live here alone. My studies at the University keep me busy, but I try hard to keep the place nice.”

  “Wow, so you’re a student. I don’t meet to many smart guys.”

  Thomas thought to himself, “I’m sure you don’t, and if you say wow one more time, I may just bash your head.”

  He said out loud as he took a seat next to Kathy on the couch, “How would you like a beer. Is a bottle ok?”

  Without hesitation she stated, “hell yea, I will have a beer.”

 Thomas was pleased with his meticulous preparation. Immediately after signing off SamsList, and the obvious fantastical discussion with Kathy, Thomas made a thin and clear glue using a touch of flour, water, sugar, and vinegar. He laced the mixture with a small amount of his drug cocktail in just the right amount to cause sleepiness. Carefully, he spread the mixture inside a dark green glass, the same one he just handed Kathy with her closed bottle of beer. He didn’t believe for a minute that even a situationally unaware person like her would accept an open bottle from a guy she just met on SamsList.

  “Here you go, enjoy.”

  “Hey, Thomas, do you smoke pot?”

  “Sure, go ahead and light up.”

  Kathy removed a pipe from the inside of her purse, and loosely packed it with marijuana. Thomas was a stranger to the pleasures of drug intoxication. He always feared not being in control of his immediate situation, so drug and alcohol usage was never an option. However, he thought, I must make a show of it, and at least take one hit. He studied Kathy and imitated bringing the pipe to his mouth and igniting the sweet-smelling weed with her red lighter in his other hand. He immediately felt his head become light, and afraid that he may lose his focus, quickly handed the pipe back to his guest. Thomas coughed in violent spasm’s as his lungs exhaled the foreign smoke.

  “Wow, you really are a virgin,” she giggled, between deep drags.

  Kathy finished smoking, and poured the beer into the drug laced glass. To Thomas’s disgust, she gulped the entire twelve ounces in two large swigs, making loud grunting noises as the beer poured down her, what Thomas thought with disgust, her oversized gullet.

  “So, you ready to take me to the bed?” she asked, batting her eyes, as he perceived, like any common whore on any dirty street corner in the world.

   Thomas stalled as long as he could. He did not see any visible signs that the drug was taking effect.

  “The bedroom is upstairs. Let’s get comfortable up there,” he stated, in a voice devoid of emotion, as he started toward the spiraling staircase. To his relief, he could hear Kathy begin to yawn.

  “On second thought, let’s just use the couch. Hon.” As she began to yawn again.

  Thomas watched at the bottom of the stairs as Kathy walked to the couch, plopped down without extending her arms to break her fall, and started to snore loudly with her face deeply imbedded into the plush green velvety fabric of the couch pillow.

  “What the fuck happened?” she asked, slowly lifting herself off the couch, and sleepily rubbing her eyes.

  Thomas was sitting on the matching green fabric chair across from her. “It looks like you passed out. I’m surprised though, you only had one drink. That stuff you smoked must have been pretty strong,” he stated in as casual a tone as he could muster.

   Kathy, touched the top of her head and rubbed back and forth exclaiming, “Shit, I have the worst headache ever!”

   Thomas began to perspire under the arms, as he watched her rub her hand over the half inch diameter hole in her head. The surgery, like the first, only lasted approximately twenty minutes, and the liquid skin was still only half an hour old. Upon completion of the procedure, Thomas gently dragged Kathy, straining his back, up the stairs and back to her position on the couch. Thirty minutes of recovery, and she was conscious complaining of a pounding skull.

  “I don’t know. We were ready to go upstairs for some fun, and you just walked back to the couch and fell asleep. I considered calling the ambulance, but I am sure you want to be discreet. Besides, you were snoring loudly, so I assumed everything was ok.”

  She sat back on the couch and ran her eyes across the front of her clothing.

  No doubt checking for signs of molestation, he considered.

  “No, I did not take advantage. Unconscious girls are not my thing. Besides, I figured we will have an opportunity to do this again. Can I see you safely to your home?”

   This seemed to have brought down her guard, and suspicion.

  “I guess I have just been under some strain lately,” she said with a confused expression, still running her hand over her head. She continued, “I just must have had a bad reaction to the alcohol, weed, and as I said, a lot of stress. You can see me home. I have a confession to make. I only live six blocks away.”

   Thomas walked her home, taking her hand in his. He noticed that she looked at him with an expression that reminded him of a wounded animal looking sadly, appreciatively, at its lifesaving caregiver.

   I have her now, he thought, without the slightest shadow of guilt. As they stopped in front of a dilapidated green and white building with intermittent missing pieces of siding., a storm door off its one hinge, and a roof that looked as though it constantly leaked, Thomas began, “I hope we could see each other again. Let’s do it right next time, and see each other in public.”

  Feeling her last remaining defenses crumble like a castle made of sand in the face of a sea churning with romantic notions, she agreed to see Thomas in one week, in a public setting.

Hello Mr. Marlow

  “Hello Mr. Marlow, I’m Detective Sandra Becks. Can I come in and talk?” Sandra held out her hand to the towering muscled Mr. Marlow. This is something she normally would not do when face to face with a suspect, especially a serial murderer. In this case, she figured that such a risk was calculated carefully and would go a long way, she hoped, to bringing down his defenses.

  “I already went over all this detective. My little angel was killed in a horrible accident.” Sandra could see his eyes begin to well with tears. For an instant, she felt a flash of deep sympathy well within her. The sight of a the large muscled heavily bearded man, standing in his plaid shirt and suspenders, no longer intimidated her. Talking of his daughter’s accident transformed him from a murderous Paul Bunyan type of monster, into a very sad, lonely, gentle giant. She quickly brought herself back to reality by recalling the pictures of almost a dozen dismembered bloody pieces of gore that, she knew by now, was the bloody work of this sensitive giant.

 “I know sir, and I am so sorry to bother you. I just have a few more questions about Mr. Drew.

  Sandra backed a few inches away as she watched the earlier transformation abruptly reverse. His features grew dark upon mentioning the name of the punk ex con who killed his little flower.

  “Come in, but I need to be at work at the lumber camp in a few hours.”

 “I won’t keep you long, girl scouts honor.” She said, holding her two fingers up in the characteristic peace symbol of the scouts.

  This gesture seemed to bring the other face back to the man. He smiled, a smile that made her feel warm, and invited. “Come in detective.”

  Sandra quickly absorbed the surroundings, including all avenues of escape, if it came to that. The home was plain and ordinary. Much like, she already knew, homes characteristic of a small country farm. Very nice, and clean Amish hand crafted couches and matching chairs. Very few decorations adorning the humble settings. Characteristic, she considered, of a home without the creative touch of a female.

  “Have a seat detective. I hope you don’t mind me going back and forth as we talk. I have my little rituals before leaving out the front door,” he stated out loud, as he walked to the kitchen, as if talking to himself.

  “I don’t mind at all. It’s good to see a man who actually works for his pay.” she stated in her best flattering voice.

  “Yea, you’re a big city girl. I bet you run into mainly flimsy boys in the big city.”

 She thought to herself, and then stated out loud, “You got that right.” Her tone of voice gave away that she was experienced with meeting too many disappointments in her time in the city.

  “Well the clock is ticking detective. What’s on your mind?”

  He sat down on the sofa, just a few feet from her own position on the cherry wood Amish chair.

  “You are aware, that Eric Drew has been identified as the tenth victim of a serial killer.”

   He looked at her without a twitch, or a bat of the eye and said, “Oh, you mean that character, the Lumber Jack killer?”

   She considered his dark hypnotizing eyes and thought, the best poker face I ever encountered.

   “Yes sir, the Lumber Jack killer.”

  “Well, I can tell you, I can honestly see why you are here. Here I am an actual sort of modern day Lumber Jack, and the bastard who hurt my little girl is dead. I would suspect me too. I’m just surprised it took so long for you to catch me.”

  Before Sandra’s flight response could kick in, Mr. Marlow closed the distance and slapped her with an open hand across the left temple. She felt the world spin, as she tried to force herself up with all her power. Dizzily, she reached into her purse, and pulled out her .45 caliber automatic pistol. For what seemed like an eternity, she managed to strain all the muscles in her arms and legs, bringing herself to a kneeling position. She looked toward the kitchen, and saw Jack standing just a few feet from her position.

  Why didn’t he strike, she thought, with mixed feelings of gratefulness, and confusion?

 Sandra leveled the .45 at the darker silhouette of the two figures she saw standing with what she perceived as a long-handled ax dangling from his right hand. She was seeing double, and only hoped she wasn’t aiming at the phantom shadow version of the towering man. He isn’t going to give me a second chance if I miss, she thought.

 “Don’t you move sir. I will shoot.”

 “It’s time to meet my baby!” he exclaimed, as he moved slowly toward Sandra, still kneeling on the floor, spent of all the necessary energy to stand upright.

  Sandra fired five times, just before losing consciousness.

#

 “Wake up sweetie, come on wake-up darling,” came a voice that seemed to be coming from the blaring light directly in front of her. Sandra felt as though she was outside of her body, like dense clouds floating effortlessly toward the blaring yellow sun.

 “Come on now, napping time is over,” Sandra felt cold soft hands touching her face. She struggled to open her eyes, squinting against the bright lights reflecting blindingly against the bright white hospital room’s walls.

  “Hey there babe,” came the familiar masculine voice of Eric. This seemed, to her pleasure, to revive her back to full consciousness, and the less than comfortable world of reality.

  “Hey sweetheart,” she stated, not believing her own ears. She always thought pet names for partners were silly and childish but, as she thought, I never had a real romantic partner before.

  “You did a stupid, but brave thing,” he continued. “I think you are in some hot water with your chief,”

  Before she could say anything in response, she heard the gruff deep voice of her boss coming from the other side of the bed.

  “Well, I will leave you two alone to talk. Be back later love.”

  When Eric, and the attending nurse cleared the room, the chief began, “First, I am so glad you are alive Sandra. Now that that is out of the way, “Your suspended with pay until further notice.”

  Sandra did not have the energy to fight with the order. Even if she did have the strength, she thought later when at home on leave, she would not have fought with her usual crafty protestations. She knew that going to Mr. Marlow’s home was a sure way to losing her job. She was just grateful that she was not fired. Her ego was boosted to soaring heights with that thought. For once, in a very long time, she felt invaluable to the department.

 “I got it chief. I will be a good girl from now on. Scouts honor.” She held up her two fingers in the salute as a sly cat like grin crossed her full lips.

  Just as he was leaving the room, he turned to her and said with his own sly smile, “good job detective.”

The Second Experiment

  Just five blocks from Sandra’s apartment, where she has spent the last month on leave pacing the floor and making love to Eric, when he was available, sits Charlie’s Dinner. A local hole in the wall with a floor that has, as proud patrons will tell you, more grease on it than the french fryer. Today was Thanksgiving, November twenty third two thousand seventeen. This was sure to be the busiest day of the year. Charlie’s was known to be a refuge for that fringe population, always finding themselves alone on the holidays. The homeless looking for a cheap meal, the drug addicts, prostitutes, and the lonely singles all had a place of honor at Charlie’s Dinner.

 “How about this booth in the back?” asked Thomas, pointing to the booth next to the double swinging doors of the hot greasy kitchen.

 “This would be fine. Thanks, Thomas,” replied Kathy, taking her seat opposite him.

 “Well it looks like Charlie’s is full of the lonely souls of the city on yet another Thanksgiving,” he stated, with a slight chuckle.

 “Well, we have each other this year.”

 Thomas felt a feeling he had difficulty describing rise within his chest. It felt like a knot was stuck in his throat, as he looked into the hopeful eyes of Kathy.

 She is just a test subject, he repeated to himself in his over worked mind. Several times repeating this phrase seemed to have the desired effect of washing away any residue of guilt that may still be lingering.

 Before losing his nerve, and before increasing his chances of being seen with her, Thomas stated, “can you go to the counter and fetch a waitress. I just want to hurry and get back to the house.”

  Kathy smiled, no doubt, according to Thomas’s egotistical vision, thinking about having me for Thanksgiving.

  As Kathy was passing him, Thomas pressed the button on the black receiver box, hidden within his long grey overcoat. He watched as she doubled over at the waist and buried her forehead into the palm of her left hand. As quickly as she maneuvered herself into this position, she straightened and slowly walked, with blank expression, to the long counter, busily occupied to fuel capacity by those patrons who enjoyed the atmosphere of the stool sitting section. Thomas watched with delight as she grabbed a steak knife from a patron’s plate, still dripping with A1 steak sauce. She raised the knife, and stabbed the man in the throat. Blood jetted in bright spurts of blood, as the man fell to the floor in a growing puddle of his own blood. Patrons, first stunned, like deer under the intense glow of a large spotlight, began darting out of the only visible front exit. One patron, a young woman, as Thomas guessed, in her early twenties, with long blonde hair, wearing a mini skirt and tight yellow colored blouse, slipped in the puddle of blood as she ran for her life toward the front exit. Kathy, or the empty shell of what was once Kathy, jumped on top of the screaming girl, and plunged the knife into her right eye. The blood did not squirt like the man’s neck, but streamed in a small river of copper smelling dark blood.

 Thomas decided it was time to break the signal and mentally record the results. If his theory was correct, another push of the green button on the box would cause an immediate cessation of the violence. As several large men from the adjoining table jumped on Kathy, Thomas casually walked past the bodies, just a few feet from her and the two men. She managed to wriggle her way from underneath her restrainers, and jumped to her feet.

 Thomas looked in horror as Kathy plunged the knife in his direction. Just in time, he managed to dart backwards, the pointed end of the knife striking the outer pocket of his jacket. He could feel the knifes teeth catch the small fibers of the material, making a slight ripping sound, like the sound produced when quickly opening a zipper. Before she could lunge at him again, he pushed the button on his box, causing Kathy to stop dead in her tracks. Thomas watched the blood caked catfish from SamsList run the blood-stained knife across her thin throat, causing her own blood to jet into the air, mingling with the blood of her victims. Thomas walked quickly from the Diner, and returned home to record his observations.

It’s a Blood Bath in There

 “You know, this may not work,” stated Sandra, lying with her head on Eric’s chest, outlining the shape of his nipple with her fingernail.

 Eric sat up in bed resting against the unpainted and undecorated plaster wall of Sandra’s multipurpose efficiency room. “What do you mean, Sandra. I thought we were hitting it off perfectly.”

  Sandra sat up and considered Eric’s eyes. She saw an expression of preemptive heart break pass over his face, like a man bracing himself for an all too familiar situation of rejection.

 She continued in a soothing tone of voice she learned to use during her brief stint as a student over the phone mental health counselor at the college. “I’m just being honest my dear. My career has never allowed me to get close, and right now I am feeling very close to you.”

She watched as Eric’s expression transformed from one of alarm, to one of conquest. Like a man who just scaled an insurmountable mountain peak, Eric realized that both have surpassed that basic stage of brief animal lust, and have now ventured into the second stage of deeper, more meaningful, companionship. Of course, with a lot of lust also, he thought, as he felt himself becoming aroused and wanting more.

 “I feel the same way, Sandra. I have never had a meaningful relationship in my life. I can’t get you out of my head.”

 Now was Sandra’s turn to scale that insurmountable mountain top. She felt an unfamiliar, yet exciting, warmth fill her body from head to toe. She felt the exhilaration of stepping through that boundary that separates sex for the simple sake of release, from sex that merges two souls into one.

  “Well, Happy Thanksgiving Eric, you ready to cook my goose again?”

  “Oh yea, but how about a little music to go with this meal,” stated Eric with a laugh as he reached across Sandra and turned on the night stand clock radio.

 Eric and Sandra listened as every local station broadcasted, they reported as, the Diner Bloodbath.

 Eric’s arousal was extinguished, like a bucket of cold water thrown on a budding flame, as he watched Sandra’s eyes sparkle as she listened to the broadcast.

 She turned to him excitedly and stated, “That’s right down the road from us. I need to check this out Eric. Come on, let’s go!”

 Eric sighed deeply as he clumsily dressed. The small apartment’s room darkened just a bit, and seemed to grow smaller, as he considered that Sandra’s earlier jest may just be correct. This may not work, he thought, as they walked out the door to Charlie’s Diner.

 “You will have to wait here my dear,” she said, as she kissed Eric on the cheek and headed toward the yellow police tape, flapping noisily in the cold breeze. She recognized the slumped over sloth like posture of her partner, Detective Ralph Klinger, just inside the front entrance of the Diner. As she opened the door, she was greeted by the sickly smell of burnt cheeseburgers, old grease, worn plastic booths and, what she perceived as, massive amount of spilled blood.

 “You’re under suspension. If the chief knows you are here, your done for,” stated Ralph, as he gently grabbed her arm and ushered her to an unoccupied corner of the Diner.

 “First of all,” she replied, grabbing his hand and applying just enough force to make him feel his finger joints creak under the pressure. “If you ever touch me again, I will break your fingers clean off your hairy palms.” Secondly, I am just a regular customer, who just so happened to walk in on yet another scene of good old American senseless brutality. Thirdly, you will clear this place, so I can do my job, and help you catch a killer.”

 Ralph began his customary protestations but stopped himself in his tracks. He was no stranger to being cut to pieces by Sandra and he knew she was right. There was no point in arguing with her. If anyone can find a clue it was her. She proved this some countless times before. He stepped aside and without another word, gestured for everyone to clear the Diner.

  “You have five minutes, and then I call the boss,” he stated, as he herded the other officers out of the room.

  Sandra slowly walked to toward the three bodies lying on the dirt stained linoleum floor, her focus gazed on the body of Kathy Brier. She guiltily whispered to the victims, forty-seven-year-old, John Edwards, and twenty-three-year-old Cindy Lakes, “Sorry, you two but the answer lies with your killer, and not you.” Sandra realized, as many of her colleagues would not, that the answer is to be found with the killer, not the victim. She laughed as a thought flashed briefly across her mind, as she stepped on her tippy toes to avoid walking in the thick soupy coagulating pools of blood. She thought of her aloof partner, spending all his time examining the wound patterns and blood spatter of the unfortunate late Mr. Edwards and Ms. Lakes. What a bunch of block heads, she thought, with arrogant disdain.

 Sandra found two small areas of linoleum within the sea of black red blood, like two tiny dry islands in a surreal foul-smelling sea of gore. She planted each of her feet in the dry islands, causing her legs to spread in an unnatural position. Her legs began to shake steadily as she bent as low as she could without losing her balance and diving head first into the bloody evidence.

 That’s all I need, she thought, trying not to laugh and losing her shaky foothold, to fall into the evidence, and get caught in the act. She did laugh as she thought of her sitting in the Chiefs office covered head to foot with blood as he screamed at her, “Your Fired!”

 “Ok bitch, time to get serious for once,” she stated out loud, to the eerie silence of the room. She stared for several seconds at the position of Kathy’s supine body. She could see Kathy’s left hand bent slightly upward toward the top of her head. It was possible she simply landed like this, thought Sandra, but something is just not right. To Sandra, it looked as though Kathy was holding her head. This theory was only strengthened by the look on Kathy’s face. Sandra observed that her expression was one of discomfort, almost pain, like the pain felt, as Sandra could attest to, from a severe migraine.

 Sandra stretched the six extra inches to reach the top of Kathy’s head. She knew that she only had maybe one chance to reach for the right spot, before losing her foothold and slipping, as she thought, right into the chief’s office. Sandra looked at the position of Kathy’s hand and drew a mental line with her imagination until she thought that she found the right spot. She stretched some more and planed her left index finger on the top front portion of Kathy’s blood-soaked hair. Sandra gently ran her finger back and forth over, what felt to her, like a perfectly, unnaturally shaped scab just under the hairline. Slowly she straightened herself, feeling her back crack under the strain of realigning joints and muscle. Unsure if her discovery was worth even a grain of salt, she walked back to the front door, turning one last time to apologize to the victims for her lack of attention.

 Walking out of Charlie’s Diner, she closed her eyes and inhaled deeply, feeling the fresh crisp November air rush into her lungs. For once in her life she was not terrified at the thought of never doing this job again. Meeting Eric gave her, as she admitted, uncharacteristic thoughts of family. Taking on the role of a Mother was still a vague abstract notion, like viewing distant trees through a thick morning fog, but the image, as she considered, was becoming so much sharper. She opened her eyes and scanned the growing crowd of police, detectives, and the usual rubber neckers with nothing better to do on Thanksgiving. She felt her domestic fantasies slowly fade as she could not see Eric’s face.

  “Well there goes another I scared away with my bullshit.” She whispered to herself.

   She was snapped back to the harsh reality of her life as she heard the familiar guttural shout of her boss, the chief.

   “What the hell are you doing here. Ill have your tiny little ass for this one.”

  Sandra no longer seemed to care about threats of losing her job. She was prepared to hand over her findings to the coroner, give the chief her budding theory that Kathy was not in control of her own actions, and just bravely walk off alone into that stormy night. Just as she was prepared to throw in the proverbial towel, her partner, Detective Klinger, pulled the Chief to the side. After a few minutes of heated discussion, the chief walked to the entrance of the Diner and approached Sandra.

 “Your partner told me the story. He said you were eating here with some guy when this whole thing went down.” He looked at her suspiciously for, what seemed to her an eternity, pointed his finger just a few inches from her face and stated, “I want a full witness report from you,” and walked away.

  “Ralph, first of all thank you again. You are becoming my knight in shining armor.”

  Ralph turned a few shades of red before replying. “But now you need to make a written statement on what you saw. This makes us both guilty of perjury. So, all I did was prolong the inevitable. Your time, and mine, at the department is short.”

  “No Ralph, I will figure something out. I will get you out of this, but my time is definitely short,” she stated with a voice filled more with relief than sadness.

  “Oh yea, your little boyfriend is behind the building, acting all incognito.”

   Sandra felt her heart beat wildly like, as she embarrassingly considered, a virgin on prom night.

  Sandra rounded the corner of Charlies Dinner and without uttering a word, wrapped her arms tightly around Eric’s shivering body and kissed him hard on his wind burned lips.

Never Saw Anything Like This

  “Ok Doc, what do you got?” asked Sandra, feeling the goosebumps sprout from the surface of her skin, despite the room temperature of Dr. Zeigler’s autopsy room.

  Dr. Zeigler looked up from his work and smiled at seeing Sandra. He never told her, but ten years ago he lost his only daughter to a drug overdose, Sandra, in a way, has become his surrogate daughter, and warmed his heart every time she visited.

  “Well my dear, I was poking through this young lady’s brain, as you requested.”

  Sandra looked down at the lifeless body of Kathy Brier. Although not their first encounter, Kathy looked markedly different lying on Dr. Zeigler’s autopsy table with the top of her head removed.

  Dr. Zeigler turned to the table to his side and carefully grabbed hold of a small glass tube with his trusted pair of tweezers. He held the eighth of an inch glass cylinder close to Sandra’s eyes and stated, “I have no idea what the hell this is.”

  Sandra reached into her purse and grabbed her own trusted instrument, a simple dollar store magnifying glass. The same dollar store tool that helped her solve over thirty murders, two serial killing episodes, and provided her a bridge to a world she was much more comfortable viewing, the world of the almost invisible.

  “It looks like a very tiny old school television picture tube.”

 “That’s what I thought,” he stated with a smile. He was glad to hear someone from the younger generation make references to the past. Sandra made him feel young. He continued, “But this is no ordinary tube. Look closely inside.”

  Sandra squinted her left eye behind the already magnification of the glass. She gasped as she traced the intricate pattern of intertwining miniature wires all leading to, what she thought, is a miniature computer chip.

  “Who could make such an intricate design, and what the heck does it do?” she said softly, forgetting where she was at the moment.

  “I can tell you this. I am no engineer, but only a brilliant one could produce this…whatever it is.”

  “Where did you find it,” she asked placing the magnifier into her left coat pocket.

  “Right below the small hole in her head. The prefrontal region of the brain.”

  “Any history of surgeries?”

Dr. Zeigler laughed, “Just a broken tibia when she was ten years old, but last time I checked, surgeons don’t operate on the brain for such an injury,”

 Sandra punched him lightly in the arm, laughed and stated, “Ok smart ass, I got it.” “So, what we have is a foreign object implanted in her brain by a skilled engineer.”

  “No, probably not,” he stated. “A brilliant engineer made this thing, but I doubt would also possess the skill and precision needed to implant such a device. God doesn’t normally give one person that much talent. No, I think someone else planted this, and gave her a cocktail full of drugs.”

  “You ran a toxicology?”

  “Yes, but the boys at the lab are breaking down the components. I can say for now that she was given a precise amount of a delicate mixture of hypnotics, sedatives, and psychotropic medications.

  Sandra closed her eyes and let the room just melt away into the background of her dark thoughts. She considered everything she heard by Dr. Zeigler, and every detail of the diner. Through all the swirling facts and images of the dead, one face continued to surface through the bloody mire of her consciousness, Thomas Lorey.

   “Thank you once again Doc. I know right where to go.”

  As Sandra was walking out the double steel doors of the morgue, feeling a rush of comforting warm air brush across her face, she heard Dr. Zeigler remark, “take care of yourself Sandra, your all I got left.”

Burning Bridges

  Thomas slipped into his body suit made of the three-ply plastic, bought fresh off the shelves of an out of state mom and pop hardware store. He dawned his clear plastic shower cap over his recently shaved head, with a feeling of dread creeping into his empty stomach. He could not eat for two days since the incident at the restaurant, knowing what he must do. He thought to himself, causalities of science are one thing, but murder is something different. As with most, his civilized heart conflicted with the cold reptilian like nature of his psyche. Because despite man made laws and abstract concepts of morality, the evolutionary drive towards violence and destruction is still very much a part of the human experience. Thomas knew that he was no killer. The trail of bodies that he knew were leading to his front door, were nothing more than martyrs slain for the greater good of scientific achievement, and all the wonderful things that come from such endeavors. He fantasized his entire life, since he could remember, of killing his Father. On those cold dark nights of hearing the painful cries of his Mother at the hands of a sadist, he dreamed of running a sharpened knife across his Fathers throat. It was these fantasies, he considered, that kept him from his own death, by his own fragile hands. Now, he was faced with a decision. He could see, in his tired mind, Ronald Dorfman sitting under the hot spotlight in the dank basement of a police station, describing in detail, with an air of superiority, his construction of the transmitter/receiver apparatus. He could envision Ronald explaining every tedious step in the wiring and connections of the receiver, as dim-witted detectives sleepily wrote down every incriminating word. The solution was clear, horrifying, yet clear. Ronald Dorfman must die before he has a chance to talk.

 “Hi Ronald, stated Thomas, as he emerged from the shadows of Ronald’s garage workspace.

  “Where the hell did you come from, and what is that your wearing Thomas?”

  “I just wanted to let you know that your equipment works beautifully, before I kill you,” replied Thomas, as he brought his right hand from behind his back, revealing a thirteen-inch curved bladed hunting knife. Ronald rose quickly from his workbench chair and sprinted for the automatic garage door opener just a few feet from his position, but he was too late, and too scared, to reach the button in time. Thomas closed the distance and with all his strength plunged the knife directly into Ronald’s back between his shoulder blades. Thomas felt his stomach churn as he felt the stainless-steel tip of the knife penetrate Ronald’s soft flesh. He vomited a thick streak of sour bile into his closed mouth as he felt the tip of the knife strike hard against solid bone. Thomas swallowed the bile so as not to leave any DNA behind, causing his throat to burn and his stomach to churn angrily again.

  Ronald fell forward against the garage door and cried,” please stop, please stop!”

  Fearful that others would hear Ronald’s screams, Thomas instinctively removed the knife from Ronald’s back and swiftly drove the blade deep into the side of his neck. Thomas turned away in terror when he watched the exit of the blade out the other side of the dying man’s throat. Thomas was covered in blood, pouring in small red streams following the creases made by his plastic suit. He felt dizzy listening to the ever-decreasing gurgling sounds as Ronald attempted, in vain, to hold on to life with deep gasps of breath. Thomas collapsed on his hand s and knees feeling the physical world slip into the darkened silenced. His instinct was too let go and just pass out for a short while. The peace of darkness was never so enticing, so intoxicating to him as it was now. He fought the urge to slip into the deep undercurrent of unconsciousness, knowing that he needed to collect his weapon and leave.

 He waited for a few more moments until the gurgling stopped, and walked slowly to the bloodied form propped against the once freshly painted white garage door. He reached down and quickly pulled the knife from Ronald’s neck, looking briefly into his wide-open accusing eyes.

Closing the Gap

 Sandra waited patiently in the Fifth Street alley just outside the department headquarters. She peeked around the corner carefully, aware that being caught anywhere near the chief’s office would burn her career for good. Every instinct within her screamed the name of Thomas Lorey. Few times in her profiling career did she feel this certain about a person’s guilt, without any real hard evidence.

  “Until I produce the hard evidence, my hunches are as useless as tits on a bull,” she stated softly into the cold morning air.

  Waiting for Officer Carson, to leave the precinct, following that mornings roll call, she considered everything she had so far. She recalled the night she met Thomas after she examined his Fathers crime scene. His eyes were dead, she considered. Black and dead, and as he described events, subtle flags just kept being raised. She considered the scene at the diner, the implant found in Kathy’s head, and a thousand other details, but none pointing directly to the sad young man with the lifeless eyes.

  “I know your involved. I know your responsible you little bastard,” she stated again to no one in particular.

  Sandra quickly snapped back to reality as she watched officer Carson exit the three-story dirty grey precinct building.

  “Pssssssst, hey Carson, come here,” she whispered, pocking just half of her wind burned red face from behind the alley.

 “Oh, you. I’m not allowed to talk to you. Word has it, you’re over the edge, and on a one way trip to the rubber wall academy.”

  Sandra laughed and stated,” yea, and if I’m right, your about to become one famous cop. If I’m wrong, I promise never to mention our little talk.”

  Sandra was pleased when she watched officer Carson’s eyes light up like a Christmas tree. Appealing to the beat cop’s ambition for greatness was always, as she knew from experience, a great way to get what you want.

  “I’m listening, he continued, but make it quick.”

  “All I need to know is if any witnesses saw anyone with the Kathy Brier prior to creating her own version of steak tartare.”

  “Yea, several people witnessed a man leaving the diner during all the carnage, but nobody Identified him as with her.”

   “Well, who is he?”

  “Couldn’t tell ya. You know eye witness reports. I have a vague description of an average sized guy, wearing glasses, and with short brown hair. That’s it.”

  “Oh yea, he continued as he tuned back to Sandra. Evidence found a small strand of grey and black material imbedded in the teeth of the steak knife she used.”

  Sandra watched him walk away as her mind floated away to images of the knife, the blood-soaked bodies at the crime scene, and the face of Thomas Lorey as he exited the diner wearing a long grey and black coat.

#

  “What can I do for you detective?” asked professor Richardson, absent mindedly placing term papers into his briefcase.

  Sandra waited for the lecture hall to clear before beginning, “I would like to talk about a former student, Thomas Lorey,” she stated, looking for his first reaction to hearing the name. She learned through experience, that an individuals first and, most revealing reaction, is a silent one. The expression of a person’s face can tell the story of a fifty-thousand-word novel.

  As she guessed, he grimaced for just a moment revealing his disdain, or jealousy she considered, just before he put on a characteristic mask of pleasantness.

  He smiled and stated, “Oh, yes my Thomas. A very temperamental, but brilliant young man.”

  “What can you tell me about him.”

 “Not much, he stated, as he shrugged his shoulders. He quit the University after I gave him a bad review on his early submission thesis.”

  “Why a bad review?”

 “He wrote a brilliant piece that took nothing of ethics into consideration. In addition, he did not have the necessary evidence to back up the claims.”

  “What was the theory?”

  “Well, he believed that you can control human aggression. Kind of turn it on and off by way of, what he termed, the M1 neural pathway.” He believed that he pinpointed the exact location of the, so called, M1 pathway in the pre-frontal cortex of the brain.”

  “Thank you, professor, I have one more question. Did he have any friends I could talk to?”

 Professor Richardson placed his right hand under in his chin, rubbing his beard and looking off into the distance as if deep in thought.

 “He was a real loner type, but he did meet with a young man after class at times. He was about Thomas’s height, glasses, with long black hair tied in a pony tail, kind of a modern hippy type. My guess, an engineering student.”

 “Hello professor Jones, I am detective Sandra Kline.” She guiltily flashed her identification in front of the eyes of the unconcerned looking man. She felt strange flashing her ID since her suspension. She did not feel like a true member of the department since the diner incident, like a terminally ill person still going through the mundane routine of life.

  “How can I help you?”

   “I’m looking for a student in your department, average height, glasses, and a long greasy ponytail.”

  He laughed, throwing his head back and without hesitation stating, “Oh, you mean Ronald Dorfman. A brilliant, eccentric, and typically aloof young man. I haven’t seen him in a few days. Not like him to miss classes.”

   “Thank you, professor, stated Sandra, as she rushed out the door without giving him the chance to make any replies.

I Need a Warrant

   Sandra drew her pistol as she carefully walked to the front of Ronald Dorfman’s garage. She felt a chill pass through her from bottom of her spine out the top, as if death itself walked through her without any concern or interest. She looked at the ground where the bottom of the door meets the cement driveway and could see a small pool of blood slowly squeezing from underneath, like a living thing with a mind of its own, trying desperately to escape the carnage inside. She made her way to the side of the garage and placed her weapon back into the shoulder holster under her left arm. The killer is long gone, she considered as she turned the knob of the windowless paint chipped door. She felt a warm breeze wash over her face as she stepped inside. Normally the warm breeze would have comforted her on such a brisk November afternoon, but not here in Ronald Dorfman’s garage. The coppery smell of blood recently released from shredded organs, choked any comfort she may have felt upon entering the garage. She walked over to Ronald’s bloody corpse, now in the later stages of rigor mortis. Her only business with the body was to check for any scaring of the frontal portion of Ronald’s scalp. Running through the greasy blood-soaked hair of Ronald, and satisfied that he was not a victim of unauthorized brain surgery in, what she now suspected, Thomas’s basement laboratory, she walked to the middle of the garage. Sandra looked down at the bloodstains on the dirty cement. She looked at the strange blood patterns, made on the floor and quickly shut her eyes, leaving the image of the stains to dance briefly behind her eyes before fading into darkness.

 “You wore a suit Thomas. Very smart my boy. A plastic suit I bet, with a matching plastic cap to boot,” she stated to the dark silence of the room.

 “Ralph, get over to 3174 Cricket Place Circle immediately. There you will find the body of a Ronald Dorfman. He was the only friend of Thomas Lorey. He was an engineering student, and you will find some type of, what I now know is a, receiver.in a cardboard box under a loose piece of cement in his garage. The same type of receiver pulled out of the head of Kathy Brier.”

 Before Ralph had time to respond, Sandra hung up her phone. She realized that it may take days, weeks, months, or never for Ralph to find an excuse to go to Ronald’s garage, and receive a search warrant for Thomas Lorey’s home. In fact, she thought, we may never get a search warrant for his home. The evidence is still very sketchy. “However, she stated as she made her way to the vicinity of Thomas’s home, I am getting close, and you are soon to run out of time my friend.”

#

Thomas Lory spent the next several weeks disposing of all evidence that could link him to the Ronald Dorfman, Kathy Brier, and consequently, the diner bloodbath and his Fathers suicide. He also spent time following Sandra from her apartment, to Eric’s house, and finally to the abandoned house just across from his own. He was starting to enjoy the surveillance as part of a game. His experiments were curbed, for a short time, so he decided that a little fun was just what the doctor ordered. His young life was devoid of pleasure and dangerous games of cat and mouse awakened the child within him, the child that never had a chance to develop under the totalitarian sadistic kingdom his Father carefully constructed. He carefully removed any trace of the activities of his basement laboratory, removing the plastic from his walls, burning clothing, equipment, monitors, and notes. He was certain that his last experiment would be a complete success. He had one more receiver left in his possession, and enough knowledge to perform the procedure anywhere he needed. He already scoped his final Guinee Pig for his final test. Now he would simply have to wait until the right opportunity presented itself. I better hurry though, he considered with a growing sense of both urgency, and anxiety. To him, Sandra was a certain intellectual match, and if not an intellectual match, a definite superior in the realm of intuition. He was impressed and afraid of the almost clairvoyant nature of Sandra’s mind. He followed her for three weeks now, and never suspected even a hint of her losing her resolve. It was obvious to him that she would never quit until he was safely behind bars, “depriving the world, he whispered, of the greatest discovery society has ever benefited from.”

This is your Last Chance

  “Hello Mr. Lorey, I have a warrant to search your premises,” stated Detective John Connor, lead investigator of Sandra’s homicide division. He knew Sandra well enough to take this particular search seriously. In his time at the department more homicide cases were solved by Sandra’s hunches than his entire twenty years in the division before her.

  “Come on in detectives, would you like something to drink?” asked a sleepy-eyed Thomas. His smile, and pleasant demeaner masking a raging sea of anxiety crashing against his psyche just below the surface.

  Detective Connor and three of his most seasoned colleagues entered his home and immediately began a grid pattern search of the home. A uniformed officer stood guard at the door, eyeing Thomas with the cold impassionate stare of a man who just wants to make it home on time to watch the game, regardless if he must put someone down to get there.

 Detective Connor personally took charge of the basement area search. Based on Sandra’s, unofficial, information of Thomas Lorey, he, like Sandra, suspected that any medical procedures, mixing of drugs, or other illegal activities, would take place in the privacy of the basement. As a classic sci-fi and horror connoisseur, he could not help but imagine frail average Thomas sewing pieces of the recently deceased together and screaming at the top of his lungs, “It’s alive, its alive,” as lightning bolts sparked his monster to life. Using his luminol mixture, Connor sprayed random areas of the basement with camera in hand waiting to take the shot. Luminol only illuminates the area where blood was present for just a few seconds, making the urgency to take a quick snapshot essential in accumulating admissible evidence.

  Connor continued to spray the areas most likely to contain traces of blood. He sprayed the middle of the room, as Sarah explained, because this is the most likely spot for a make shift operating table. After an hour of work, he admitted defeat and continued with his search. Overturning loose concrete, wooden beams, and inspecting any place that may hide evidence, he gave up the search and returned to the upstairs. Both detectives were waiting for him in Thomas’s living room.

 “We found nothing,” replied the stockier detective of the two.

  Detective Conner replied, “what about the coat?” referring to the fabric found between the serrated teeth of the steak knife.

   “Nothing sir.”

   He looked at Thomas and felt a familiar rage surge through his ageing frame. Even after thirty years since the academy, he often felt the blind aggression of combat nip angrily, as he watched suspect after suspect smile smugly during a search that turned up empty.

  As he passed the smiling Thomas on his way to the front door, he whispered in his ear, “Its not over yet punk.”

  “Yea, we turned up nothing Sandra. You know what this means. It means its over. You have nothing on this guy, and we will doubtfully ever get a warrant again, that is unless he decides to leave all the evidence sitting in his front yard for a garage sale. But I doubt that any evidence exists. He burned it all up by now.”

  Sandra listened over the phone as she sat on her living room sofa with her arm draped around Eric’s neck. He was snoring lightly after spending the entire night listening to her ramblings about Thomas Lorey. If she did not realize it before, she realized it now. She was in love with the man.

  “I can’t say I’m surprised,” she replied into the receiver. “This one is clever, and he destroyed all that evidence right under my nose.”

  “Listen Sandra, and listen good. Leave this alone. If the chief knows your this involved, you’re not only getting fired…you’re going to prison.”

  Sandra knew she was becoming too involved. Thomas Lorey was now a full-blown obsession. But his smugness could not go unpunished. She considered the arrest and capture or, death, of Thomas Lorey to be her last, and greatest, act of her career. Time was ticking bringing both her and him to an inevitable ending, and she would not cheat destiny of its chaotic design.

#

  Thomas watched from his upstairs bedroom window as the detectives drove away, feeling a heavy burden pressing on his mind. He was now certain that Sandra no longer worked for the department in an official capacity. Otherwise, he considered, she would have been present during the search. Sandra was more dangerous than ever. He could not help feeling a vague sense of respect or, admiration for her. Her dedication to catching him was beyond reproach.

  He thought, with a new growing sense of excitement, that she was in the game until the end. He ran through scenarios in his mind, each one opening and closing doors to possibilities on how to wrangle himself from under her tightening grasp. Killing her would be a mistake and, as he knew, too dangerous an undertaking. She was too aware of that that, which normally lurks quietly behind the mask of others. He did not doubt that she would anticipate the strike long before he could deliver, like a preying mantice with its unmatched speed and agility in the natural world. He considered simply taking photographs of her unauthorized surveillance of his home and filing another complaint with his lawyer. However, he realized, this would only bring more undo attention to himself. His final option, the only option left, was to kill Detective Sandra Becks, but not by his own hand.

You’re not Fooling Me

 “Hello Chief, what can I do for you?” asked a sleepy Sandra Becks. She looked, as she always did first thing every morning, at Eric laying beside her in his bed. He was on his first personal vacation in years, and she felt guilty at not planning a nice get away for just the two.

  Forgetting the world around her, she whispered toward the direction of his peaceful form, “Two days away from it all, just me and you, I promise babe.”

  “Who the hell are you talking to?” came the angry gruff voice of the chief over the other end of the line.

   Sandra gave a little embarrassed laugh and replied, “Sorry chief, I guess I drifted again.”

   “Well get your shit together, because you’re not going to like what I have to tell you.”

   Sandra knew that she was betrayed by those she asked for help. No, not asked, she thought to herself., I coerced them with my charm, like a spoiled child using others for some type of petty personal gain. She already, preemptively, forgave her partner Ralph, the kind Fatherly figure of Dr. Zeigler, and the ambitious patrol officer, Conner. These men had families, ambitions, lives that were not part of her own. Under the persuasive pressure from the chief, she could forgive their confessions.

  As if reading her mind, the chief began, “Yea, that’s right detective, I had a little talk with several of your colleagues. I know you have been conducting surveillance on Thomas Lorey. I know about your little trips to the morgue, the phone calls, and most damaging, your little trip to Charlies Diner. That’s right, as I already knew but could not prove, you were not just a patron on the night of Kathy Brier’s killings.”

  “Chief, I will resign from the department,” she stated with, strangely to her, no feelings of disappointment, or sense of loss.

  “Well you have a choice. You can stay with the department after a long suspension without pay, but Ralph then takes the fall for lying about your whereabouts.” After a brief pause he continued, “you see detective, I don’t care who takes the fall, and I do hate to lose someone with your specific talents, but the choice is yours.”

  Sandra already knew the answer, but felt like she would be betraying her human nature not to at least consider throwing Ralph under the bus. But the decision was clear, she was ready to step down from the department and begin, what she hoped, a long life together with Eric.

  “I will turn in my badge and every other cheap equipment owed by the end of the week. Without another word, Sandra hung up the phone, laid her head back on her soft pillow and thought about Thomas Lorey.

Getting Away

   Sandra and Eric happily packed their suitcases surrounded by the familiar stale shadows of Sandra’s efficiency room. For her, this was the death of her old life of living among the shattered hopes and dreams of the dead, and the beginning of a new life, filled with the typical pain and joy among the loving. For Eric, this was an opportunity to incorporate something with meaning into his own mundane existence, a type of merger that he never thought possible in a life full of contracts, figures, and meticulous planning of other’s success.

 “I promise a tropical paradise vacation once we have time for a little more planning,” she stated, as she ran her hand gently back and forth across his back.

 “No worries dear, I could spend two days anywhere with you and it would feel like the golden beaches of Tahiti.”

  Sandra laughed playfully and replied, “even in, let’s say, a Russian gulag.”

  Eric laughed, stopping his packing and placed his hand under his chin. He smiled and replied, “Ok, maybe not anywhere.”

 Sandra slapped him lightly on the shoulder, laughed, and squeezed his left ass cheek, just enough to make him jump a few inches off his feet. Both lovers embraced and kissed each other passionately as if the world beyond their embrace no longer existed.

   Sandra pulled away, laughed, and said, “now let’s get to Vermont and break our legs skiing.”

   “Plenty of time to break our legs,” he replied, “the lodge is only a few hours from here, and I might add, I will be travelling as fast as I can, so I could limit the amount of time listening to your playlist.”

    Sandra smiled, but said not a word. She knew that her playlist of eighties pop was not for the weak of heart. Two hours of big haired bands could be enough to send anyone into the much more pleasant atmosphere of an eighties flashback induced coma.

   “Ok, smart ass, lets roll,” she stated, still giggling as they left her shadow laden apartment into the bright January light.

Tiny Pieces of Guilt

   Detective John Conner was having difficulty sleeping since the search of Thomas Lorey’s home. He never considered himself much of an empath, but his thirty years’ experience gave him that special type of intuition, only gained by dealing with the lies and deceits that dwell within the human heart. He was also no stranger to encounters with psychopaths. He did not need a mental health textbook to list the personality traits of a psychopath or, sociopathic personality. As a practical man, he knew that every human on the planet shared psychopathic, narcissistic, and neurotic traits. Examining himself, a well-adjusted family man whom always lived within the confines of civilization, and the law, he could list some very disturbing traits. He considered how good he felt when he pulled the trigger of his pistol, bringing the ultimate justice to a criminal hurting others. He never felt the withdrawal, nightmares, or depression characteristic of those suffering Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, after any of his seven shootings. He understood that dispensing justice made him feel like God and, he suspected, those who prey on others, kill to feel like God, or the Devil. Either way, he surmised, the feelings are equal, equal in power. However, there are those who stalk among us that feel nothing for others. He went down his list and considered the complete lack of empathy, pity, or remorse of the psychopath. He thought about Taylor Dobbs, the South End Strangler, infamous for killing sixteen young gay men around the area. He killed Dobbs, in Dobb’s own kitchen, after piecing all the evidence, what little there was, together like a macabre jigsaw puzzle of shattered dreams and lives. He recalled the look in Taylor Dobbs eyes, just before he pulled the trigger three times, sending Dobbs back to the abyss. His eyes were lifeless, like a mannequin’s eyes. Like the eyes of a soulless animal, surviving, navigating, the world only through the imitation of others. For the past several weeks, when he closes his eyes to sleep, he could see the eyes of Thomas Lorey.

 “Hey Richard, I just knew you would be working late,” he stated into his phone. He looked at the alarm clock on the night stand next to his bed. The large glowing red letters screamed to him that it was two fifteen in the am, and time for him to go the Fuck to bed.

  Richard Johns, head of the crime scene investigation team of the department, was not surprised to receive an early morning phone call. He worked the nightshift hours, preferring to work alone without the daytime distractions of ringing phones, shuffling feet, and endless questions pointed in his direction.

   “Go ahead my man, what’s on your mind?”

   “I recently conducted a search of the Lorey residence. As you know, I didn’t come up with anything.”

   Richard interrupted him, already knowing the reason for the call. He was accustomed to several detectives on the force being haunted by searches that came up empty. He also knew that ninety-nine-point nine percent of the time, the searches came up empty because, well there was just nothing to be found. But there was always that slim percentage where something could be found. A microscopic clue swept carefully into a plastic evidence bag. A tiny speck of blood imbedded into the fabric of a suspects clothing. A small seed hiding deep within the soft decaying tissue of the deceased, screaming to be found, in the name of some cosmic sense of justice. He loved nothing more than to answer the call and rework the evidence, in hopes of bringing that justice to a world, he painfully understood, was not always just and fair.

  “You want me to go over the dirt you collected from his basement floor, correct.”

   “Its scary how you could read minds Richard. You should have been a mind reader with a traveling circus.”

   “Maybe in the next life, I will do just that. Unless of course the Universe has other plans for my released energy.” “I will rework the dirt now, but I may not have an answer for a good twenty-four hours.”

   “Just do your best my old friend. I would love to retire next month with another arrest under my belt. There is something off about this Lorey guy. Sandra could see it, and I think we owe it to her to listen.”

Rest and Relaxation

 Sandra raced down the mountainside with her heart beating wildly in her chest. This was her tenth time down the beginner’s slope, each time making the excuse that she was not ready for the intermediate course. She was fully aware that this was nothing more than her own fear of the unknown. For as strong a wall that she built around herself through the years, she was not impervious to the fear of change, the transition from the comfortable and familiar, to the new and uncertain. But none of that mattered to her at this moment in time. She was with the man that she never thought she would love. A typical one-night conquest has grown into something meaningful, and good in her life. Unburdened by the demands of her former life, she boarded the ski lift an eleventh time to Eric waiting patiently at the top. He was an old hand at the art of skiing. The advance slope was not even much of a challenge to him anymore, but he stayed with Sarah on the beginner slope until she was ready, and she loved him for his patience.

 “Wow, that was a fun day,” stated Eric, as he removed his clothes to take a hot shower.

  “I’m already undressed so I will go in first. Later we can take another one together.”

  “Ok, babe, I will just stand here naked until you’re done.”

   She laughed, as she walked to the bathroom, leaving Eric standing naked with a faked look of rejection on his face.

   The hot water of the shower felt rejuvenating against her cold naked flesh. She closed her eyes and breathed in the scent of her strawberry lavender shampoo, as the soapy bubbles slid down the curves of her body. All seemed right with the world, but for just a moment, the world grew dark and a shadow seemed to pass across her mind. The image of Thomas Lorey flashed across her conscious turning her fantasy world once more into cold reality. She was aware once again that Thomas Lorey got away with murder on her watch. He believes himself to be a pioneer of the mind, using others as his human guinea pigs, and he is not going to stop.

#

  “Detective, its Richard, I found something,” came the voice over the other end of the line.

  “Go ahead Richard, what do have for me?”

  “In all that dust and dirt, you swept up off Thomas’s floor. I found a tiny copper wire, too small to accurately identify with the naked eye. In a pile of dust, not noticeable at all, I would imagine. Well anyway, the wire is approximately the same size of several copper wires retrieved from the Dorfman crime scene. We pulled apart one of the, what Sandra called, some type of receiver from Ronald Dorfman’s collection, and they match.”

  “Son of a bitch. He either dragged it with him, or Ronald was making these things for Thomas.”

   “I would put my money on the latter,” stated Richard.

   “I owe you one big time my friend.”

#

   “Chief its John Connor, we got him.”

   “Got who?” asked the sleepy voice of the Chief over the other end. “And why the hell does it always turn out that people want to break cases in the wee hours of the morning?”

  “Sorry chief, I know its late, but yesterday morning I asked the crime lab to recheck the Lorey evidence.”

   The chief immediately interrupted him upon hearing the dreaded name of Thomas Lorey.

   “The Lorey case is closed John. Don’t end up in the same boat as Sandra. You are close to retirement and can’t afford to lose everything.”

   John knew what his boss was saying was true. If he was smart, he would just pack his bags, sit on the edge of his bed, and do nothing but wait for his official retirement day to arrive. He would not have a long wait either, just forty-three days and counting.

   “Chief this is not just a whim, or a hunch. Not intuition like Sandra’s. I have proof that Lorey knew Ronald Dorfman. They worked together in some capacity.”

   “On what! What did they work on together? I’m getting tired of hearing this guys name come across my desk. He already cost me my best detective and, he may be costing me to lose another.”

   He picked up easily on the chief’s threat, but he could not ignore the connection. Either Ronald was at Lorey’s home, or Lorey was at Ronald’s garage. This did not prove that Lorey gutted Ronald Dorfman, but Sandra’s instinct certainly tipped the scales in that direction.

    “Ok chief, at least tell me please she let someone know where she was going.”

    “How the hell would I know. I wouldn’t be surprised if she never spoke to me again.”

End Game

   “Ok baby, here I come,” stated Sandra in her best come hither sexy voice. She removed her towel, and was pleased to find that all the right parts of her firm body still dripped wet with warm water. Before even reaching the bathroom door, she felt herself tingle with anticipation of the act.

   “Come here sweetie, I have a confession to make,” stated Eric, sitting on the queen-sized luxury bed.

   Sandra wrapped the towel tightly around her body and sat down next to him on the luxury queen sized bed. She didn’t dare to speak after looking into his eyes, that were filled with a seriousness that she never saw before in another. This thought only brought him closer to her heart. She never had a man so considerate that he was almost paralyzed by the fear of ruining, what she could see, was the best thing in his sterile world.

   “Honey, he began, I was a bit jealous of your time. I felt very lonely as you conducted your constant surveillance of Mr. Lorey.”

   Sandra breathed an inner sigh of relief. She was expecting Eric to tell her that he slept with another during her absence. To her, this slight indiscretion was understandable. They did not know each other very long, and sex is just that, its just sex. What they had was more than just a harmless role in the hay. She could forgive a minor romp before they really got serious, and started talking marriage.

   “Sandra, I went to Thomas Lorey’s home to see what all the fuss was about.”

   Sandra’s heart felt as if it dropped heavily from her chest. She thought about the drug concoction found in Kathy’s system. Toxicology gave her the knowledge that such a combination could, in just the precise amounts, cause amnesia.

   “We need to get you to a doctor. Don’t ask questions. Don’t pack. Let’s go.”

   Sandra quickly dressed and grabbed her car keys off the lodge’s nightstand table. She ran to the door and noticed that she was alone. She slowly turned her head, feeling Eric’s hot breath on the back of her neck. Before she could react, Eric punched her with violent blunt force on the side of her temple, the same temple still bruised by the power of the Lumber Jack killer. She fell to the floor determined not to let this scenario end in the same way. Sandra crawled across the plush carpeting with one side of her face numb, and the other burning from the carpet fibers being scraped deeply into her skin. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Thomas Lorey step out from the bedroom closet. He was holding, what looked to her, like a black box, with a green button protruding from the top.

  Thomas touched the button, and Eric immediately ceased his attack, like a robot made of wires and cables submersed in oil, rather than veins ands arteries, submersed in blood. He stared at the floor with a long string of drool pouring from the corner of his mouth, forming a small discolored spot on the floor.

  “Yes, it worked. I can control aggression by way of the M1 pathway!” exclaimed Thomas, jumping up and down like a spoiled child on the neighborhood playground.

  “You did nothing but created a zombie. No different than a depraved cannibal like Jeffrey Dahmer.”

  Sandra could see the insult cut deeply into his flesh, like a knife slicing through rice paper. She watched as his eyes turned black, revealing the monster that lurked hidden deep within his soul, hidden from the rest of the normal world. She felt a stab of pity overtake her own rage, as she considered the abuse that must have created such a sad young man.

  “Thomas I’m sorry,” she stated just before he pushed the button again. I know what that bastard of a Father did to you and your sweet beautiful Mother. I recognize your brilliance, your achievements, your dedication to the world.”

  Thomas lowered the box, and for just a moment appeared as a sad wounded child, with the color vibrancy of the well adjusted brilliant scientist, he could have become, before the world grabbed hold of his mind.

  Sandra was laying her cards on the table. The time for bluffing and holding her best cards was over. She recalled her discussion with Dr. Zeigler, just before catching the Lumber Jack killer. She remembered him saying once that the brain is the most elastic organ in our bodies. One part may suffer terrible damage, only for another dormant system to take its place. As she looked at Eric, and watched him wink his left eye at her, she could see that the old man’s theory was spot on target.

  Eric quickly turned toward Thomas and jumped on top of him like a tiger leaping on a wounded prey. Thomas and Eric struggled on the floor of the lodge, giving Sandra just enough time to reach for her pistol in the night stand drawer. Sandra could see the black box transmitter lying just a few inches from the mingling bodies of Thomas and Eric. Before she could close the distance, over top of the bed, and grab the box, she watched in horror as Thomas’s frail hand found the top of the box. He pushed the button, and silence filled the room.

  Eric stood up with blood streaming down his face from a bit upper lip he received during the struggle. Sandra watched Eric’s eyes turn black as coal, just like Thomas’s eyes. It was as if looking at evil sadistic twins, hungrily desiring her blood…her death.

  Sandra fired one bullet at Thomas Lorey, striking him directly between the eyes. She watched the familiar glob of bloody gore exit the back of his head and splatter against the closet door. She leveled the gun at Eric, now slowly crawling over the bed toward her, with a look of murder in his eyes. Her short life with him flashed before her eyes at the thought of what she might have to do. Within a split second she weighed every option possible that could save his life and, save hers because she could not think of a happy life without him. She attempted to aim for a non-vital part of his body but he was coming on too fast. She fired just one time before collapsing on the floor and losing her own consciousness.

#

  Eric opened his eyes slowly blinking against the blinding white light. He could hear a voice off in the distance, coming closer, as if, he thought, an angel calling me home.

  “Hey baby, wake up. Come on get up.”

   Eric opened his eyes and through a drug induced haze Sandra’s face came into focus.

   “So, I guess I’m not dead,” he laughed briefly before wincing in pain.

   “I shot you in the stomach, as far left as I possibly could. I didn’t have a chance to shoot you anywhere else that would be effective so I picked the easiest target that just so happens to take, sometimes days to bleed out.”

   “Eric smiled, and took Sandra by the hand. “Well, thank you for shooting me in the stomach. By the way, would you marry me?”

  Sandra rolled her eyes and played as though she were considering such a suggestion. She turned her gaze to his hopeful face and said, “your goddammed right I will.”

   As Sandra bent down to kiss Eric, her phone began to ring.

   She looked at the number and stared with a blank expression until the ringing ceased.

   “Why didn’t you answer it, sweetheart?”

   She looked at the chief’s number on the front of her screen and stated, “I’m done with living with the dead. Now I’m just going to live.”

End

           

           

 

 

 

           

 

           

 

           

 

 

 

 

           

           

           

 

 

Impressum

Texte: Brian Hesse
Tag der Veröffentlichung: 03.12.2017

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