6. ART OF MURDER

6

ART OF MURDER

RYDEN

I felt like punching Phil until I bled from his pain, but he wouldn’t feel anything now, would he? He was already fucking dead.

The restless chill in my body never receded as I stared at the lifeless man hanging from the rope. One less piece of garbage, and the world was cleaner than before. But for the first time, I was not enjoying the process. The thing I loved most about killing was the art, the display. The power to twist these monsters into anything I wanted.

At that one moment, I was God, but tonight, the sense of smugness was smashed into smithereens. There was only a hollow sense of self-deprecation, and it was all because of that fucking woman.

I shouldn’t have given in to the temptation. I wanted to feel the adrenaline and look where it got me. There was a witness now, and she knew who I was, what I was.

“Who the hell are you, Blondie? Why did you follow me?”

Something about the way she caught the knife and sent it sailing back to me still bothered me. She fucking wiped her prints off the knife before she threw it at me, and it was her game at that moment. And then there was her car without a license plate. She came well-prepared.

I didn’t know what she’d do with the knowledge of what she saw. The cops would pay a lot if she decided to sell my secrets. They had been hunting me for a long time; they just didn’t know it was me.

“I hope you won’t do that,” I said. I enjoyed our conversation back at the pub. She intrigued me. But if it came down to her or me, I’d choose myself.

If I had spent my night drinking with Enzo like I often did, or perhaps cooped up in my room, working on Sofia and Nikki’s murder, I’d never have encountered this asshole or the phantom woman who came with him.

“You’re the reason for my predicament, Matthew,” I grumbled, untying him from the beam and placing him on the floor.

I sawed him in half before swiftly severing his head off in one fell swoop, feeling a moment of relief. I wrapped him in plastic until he resembled a massive, mashed pink sausage, soaked in his own blood. I chucked all the pieces into the garbage bags and secured them with zip ties.

This time, I had no intention of leaving anything behind. That would be unwise. That fucking woman was the reason my art now felt like a burden I had to abandon halfway through. Killing never felt so lifeless before.

In the past, I always left something behind for the cops to find—a head stuffed with writhing black snakes for a woman who murdered her husband and three daughters with poison; a severed hand holding on to colorful balloons for a man who kidnapped a little girl using balloons and then killed her.

It was my twisted note, to let the world know that these monsters were paying the price for the monstrous sins they had committed.

Resentment threaded its fingers with mine as I packed my bag, looking around to ensure I hadn’t left anything behind. I hated this nameless, faceless woman for disrupting my routine. Now no one would know the end of Matthew, and no one would celebrate that he was gone.

I barely broke a sweat as I grabbed the garbage bags and hauled them to my car. Soon I was on my way to Enzo’s funeral home. The man who opened the door was tall and pale, and he didn’t even blink his dark blue eyes when he saw my trash bags.

“Busy night, it seems,” he commented with a click of his tongue, opening the door wider for me.

It was a good thing that his funeral home existed outside the city. Enzo owned the funeral home, the crematorium, his house, and the surrounding lands. His family had been in the business of death for generations, and it was not a bad business to be in. He was fucking rich, even though one wouldn’t know that by looking at him.

“Yes. I was just going to get a glass of whiskey,” I said, scowling. “Then I saw him.”

“You called Reah.”

I nodded with a grunt.

Before I crossed paths with Enzo, I was discarding the pieces of the bodies in the Detroit River and Lake Erie. Sometimes, the bodies floated back up as if they were tired of staying buried in secret. I never got caught, but it had started to become increasingly hard, and that was when I encountered Enzo in a nasty twist of fate.

“So, what’s his crime?” he asked curiously as he grabbed a trash bag from me.

“Being born?” I said, and he chuckled.

“Shit, the worst sin.”

“He goes by Phil, but his name’s Matthew. He was a Florida native with a long rap sheet and not the kind you’d want to be associated with.”

“Makes sense why he’s a sausage now.”

“Fucker had three rape charges against him, but the evidence was never solid enough to put him away for good. Slippery bastard. I’ve no idea how he escaped three charges with no conviction.”

Enzo and I walked toward the back of the funeral home.

“Men like him deserve to go like this,” Enzo said, opening the connecting door to the crematorium with a bow. “I preheated the oven just like you asked. The fire is waiting!”

After investigating and reporting a story of fourteen-year-old Hanna, who was raped and murdered by twenty-four-year-old Jacob Levey, who then somehow escaped through a hole in the system like the rat he was… the animal inside me woke up, hungering for more blood.

My decision was made the moment I saw the girl’s bruised face, her broken body. It was like a shock to the system. How could anyone hurt something so innocent in that way?

Being an investigative criminal journalist was my job, but hunting these monsters was slowly becoming life.

The one man I’d always wanted to hunt and kill was still out of my reach. Until I could kill my father for all the crimes he’d committed, I’d have the others.

I hunted, I waited, I studied, and when it was time, I carved Jacob up until he was just as broken as the girl.

Enzo—Hanna’s older brother—who was also looking to kill Jacob, saw me sawing his hand off. He stood there and watched as Jacob begged Enzo to save him.

“Please, man, please. I-I did not… I couldn’t—” Jacob sobbed out, pain destroying his ego. Oh, how powerful the pain was!

“Shut the fuck up.” I kicked him in his mouth, making him whimper.

I cut and sliced until he was but pieces of shredded skin. I stuffed his limp corpse into a trash bag I’d brought. It was a fitting end for such a man.

I displayed Jacob Levey’s pathetic, shriveled dick in his hand, tied together with red string cutting into his cock.

It was a tribute to Hanna.

The cops went mad. I had masterfully displayed five before Jacob. The media had by then dubbed me The Abstract Killer, and I had become a headache to the Detroit Police Department.

“I know the perfect place to discard the rest of this garbage,” Enzo said as he grabbed the garbage bag filled with the pieces of Jacob and threw it into his trunk.

He drove me to the funeral home and we both settled into a strange silence. “It was my great-great-grandfather’s, and eventually it came to my father. Now that Hanna’s gone, it ’ s me. Just me. I shouldn’t have… Hanna was all I had.”

Together, Enzo and I watched Jacob burn. Enzo sniffled as the fire crackled, swallowing the man who destroyed his sister.

When Jacob Levey was gone, he looked at me and said, “I’m glad it was you who wrote her story. You know, if you ever want to do this again, the crematorium is always open for you.”

I didn’t deny it—I knew he would see through the lie. “Thank you, Enzo.”

“No. I’m the one who has to thank you.”

“But it isn’t… it’s not that simple. If I ever get caught, the DPD will dig deeper, and they ’ ll charge you as an accessory to murder or even an accomplice. Do you want to do that for a stranger?”

Enzo took a deep breath. “You did it for Hanna. You succeeded when the law failed us. I won’t fail you,” he said with a smile. “And I’ll go down for a friend.”

A friend. I smiled.

That night, I found someone who was now like a fucking brother to me. He’d die for me, and even though I wouldn’t admit it to him, I’d die for him.

“No display today? He looks intact to me. Or did you take something from the inside?” he asked curiously as he studied the body, noticing every part was where it should be. Clenching my hand into a fist, I shook my head. “Something wrong, Ry?” His eyes narrowed. “You look ready to pounce.”

I had planned a poetic display for Matthew, but it was all wasted because of that woman. I heaved the pieces into the cremation chamber in silence and watched as he caught fire.

“What the hell’s wrong with you? You look… like you’re brooding. You’re usually happy after a kill… No, don’t tell me—” He went pale. “Fuck, what the hell happened?”

“I think a woman saw me. No, I know she saw me,” I muttered as the room was filled with the sound of fire eating away flesh and bones. “She must have followed me.”

“Fuck, man. This isn’t good. You shouldn’t have killed tonight.”

“I wasn’t planning to kill tonight,” I said, shaking my head, and tugging at my hair with a growl. “It just happened. He was a fucking rapist, and I couldn’t let him destroy another woman.”

“Do you know anything about the woman who saw you?”

“Nothing. She was wearing a black dress. And a scarf to cover her face. I only knew it was the same woman from the pub.”

“You met her at the pub? For fuck’s sake, Ryden.”

“She was driving a sedan—it was old. She’d covered the license plate with black tape. I couldn’t just leave this asshole and follow her. Now she’s out there somewhere.” Like a ticking time bomb. If she exploded—when she exploded—my life would be over, and so was Enzo’s.

“What now?” Enzo asked, pacing back and forth.

“I don’t know. Wait for her to make the first move,” I said, hating how foolish the idea itself was, but I had no other choice. I didn’t know who she was. I only saw her silhouette and heard her voice—that voice was very memorable. I’d know if I heard her again, but where the hell would I go to hear her?

My head pounded. I rubbed my temple, grinding my teeth. Never in my life had I felt so inexplicably trapped, exposed.

“Can you, though? Wait?” Enzo asked.

“Well, I have nothing. I think even her blonde hair is a… wig.”

“Who the hell is this woman?” Enzo grunted, shaking his head. “It was like she came prepared for something like this. Why? How?”

“I don’t know.”

“I hate it,” Enzo said, punctuating his words with a punch to the wall.

“I can go back to the pub and ask the bartender. She might have used her card to pay.”

Enzo grunted. “A woman that careful, I don’t think you’ll find her there.”

“Fuck. I don’t know what else I’m supposed to do.”

When Matthew became nothing but bone and dust, Enzo quickly swept the remains into the tray and went through the rest of the process, softly muttering about what a fucking idiot I was. I had to concede. He put the bone pieces into the cremulator. The machine whirred, the sound strangely soothing, pulverizing the bone shards into fine ash.

Poof, and Matthew was gone. Enzo collected the ash, bottled it, and handed it to me. “Here’s to the Earth that has one less asshole.”

We walked back to the funeral home and sat down on the bench.

“Now, the woman…”

“My head’s killing me. I can’t think about her right now.” Every nerve in my body was strung tight and ready to snap.

“Go home. Go to that woman of yours—I mean, Vanessa, and stay away from trouble for a while,” Enzo said as he pierced me with a look that said how unimpressed he was with me getting caught.

“Vanessa isn’t my woman.” She’d never be. I wasn’t made for relationships; they’d only ever be a distraction, and I didn’t like distractions. I loved the simple arrangement I had with her. She called me when she needed the itch scratched, and I called her when I needed it.

“I wonder why she isn’t,” he said with a huff. I chuckled and shook my head. “She’s good for you, Ryden.”

“She may be good for me, but I’m not good for her.”