J. Ellison - So Close the Hand of Death

And pizza. He was passionate about pizza. Just like his father.

Flynn’s daddy was an on-the-rise young cop who’d been mowed down in the line of duty. One minute here, the next gone. They said it was instantaneous. That he died bravely. That he never knew what hit him. She’d been at enough crime scenes to know they were lying-gunshots didn’t kill you instantly, you lingered for several minutes while your organs got the message that they were no longer needed and shut down, one by one-but she’d nodded like she understood and hadn’t asked anything more.

She’d held her silence all this time, though his killer hadn’t been caught.

When Tommy died, Colleen was working at the paper, pulling down just about enough to cover the mortgage and little else. Though the foundation his coworkers had set up was flush, that money was earmarked for Flynn’s college fund. The day-to-day expenses of a single-parent family were astronomical, and she quickly realized that even with the hefty insurance settlement, her job at the paper wasn’t going to cut it.

She’d always been a crime buff, that was probably why she married Tommy in the first place. A cop whore, he’d called her, joking and laughing at her over dinner, his dark eyes dancing while he filled her in on his shift. After he died, some of the other brothers in blue had sat in his rightful spot across from her at the rickety kitchen table, relaying stories and keeping her spirits up while she draped a blanket across her body and nursed Flynn.

When her grief allowed her rational mind to surface, she knew she needed to find something more to raise her small family. She was a writer, after all, so she thought about writing a book. It would be fast, easy money; she could break into the market with a flashy true-crime story. Then one of her heroes, Dominick Dunne, died, and the extensive coverage of his career brought another thought to the fore. The idea of a crime blog started to germinate. She liked it. Quick and dirty. Instantaneous feedback, a running record. Like Dunne, she could be a voice for the victims, but she’d be behind the scenes, an angel of sorts. She preferred that no one knew who she was. She didn’t like to sign her real name to her work; she never aspired to fame, or attention. It was better this way. Safer.

Colleen started populating Felon E with stories, announced it was under way on a few true-crime message boards, and it took off like a shot. She was still surprised at how well it was doing; within a year of the launch, she was able to quit her job and dedicate herself to running the blog full-time. She’d underestimated the fervor civilians had toward the intimate, gory details of the crimes they were surrounded by. She had a fascination, but she was a cop’s wife, and a former crime reporter. She’d been caught up in the scene. Her readers were regular folks off the street, but bloodthirsty for all that.

She’d attracted a few nuts and the like over the years, but Tommy had taught her well. She could shoot the guns in the safe with the ease of many hours of practice, had the house wired to an elaborate alarm system. She knew self-defense techniques. She was smart and savvy and capable of disguising her whereabouts with the computer. She’d been a computer science major at MTSU before switching to journalism her junior year. That gave her two important legs up, an edge over other crime bloggers-the ability to code her site with lovely little traps for those trying to sneak in the back door, and the skill to do all her own web work, ensuring that precious anonymity.

So much for memory lane. She really should move that picture of Tommy-every time she looked at it, the whole scenario flooded into her brain. She really should. But she wouldn’t.

Colleen stood and stretched, then slipped into the kitchen, past the cabinet that needed some work-it was practically hanging off its hinges-to the refrigerator with its broken ice machine. She cracked the lid on her fourth Diet Coke of the morning and started thinking of the angle for the next installment of the story. Teenage boys from upscale Nashville neighborhoods didn’t go missing every day. But if she was going to make this story sing, she needed a scoop, something major. Something official.

Settling back at her desk, she set the soda down and opened her internet browser. She tried to post five original stories a day, with attendant follow-ups as they happened, so combing the net and working her sources took the vast majority of her time. The minute one good story was in the can, she was off to the next.

Where was Peter Schechter?

Her message icon was flashing, so she toured through her new email first. She received tons of tips from true-crime buffs across the country, so many that she could barely handle them all. To help her sort through the mass quickly, she’d coded some of her best sources in the major metropolitans so they would stand out. There were three messages blinking red and marked urgent, one each from San Francisco, Boston and New York.

She popped up San Francisco first; it had come in the earliest. All thoughts of a local boy going missing disappeared when she read the message. Her heart began to beat a bit harder. She read it through twice, then closed it and sat back in her chair. Could it be? And was she the only one who had this?

She tried not to get too excited. A diversion was in order; she opened the message from New York.

A buzz began in her ears, the rush of adrenaline sparking through her system, bringing every nerve ending alive. She opened the message from Boston and nearly passed out.

If this was for real, this was huge. This was so huge.

She flew into activity, responding to her three contacts, asking the most relevant questions she could think of. Then she went to her bookshelf, her reference material, her background. Nestled on the left-hand side of the third shelf was a book she’d opened so many times that the edges were frayed and the binding broken. The Encyclopedia of Serial Killers.

She stroked the cover reverentially, then flipped it open. The book was organized alphabetically by proper name, not the nicknames given to the men and women whose crimes were housed in these hallowed pages.

She had to take this in steps. She debated for a moment, then decided. San Francisco first. She turned to a dog-eared page at the very end, to one of the few killers who was categorized by a nom de plume, one of the all-time majors. The man who remained anonymous after all these years. The man who hadn’t been caught.

She started with the Zodiac.

The Outer Banks, North Carolina

T aylor was only allowed to spend twenty minutes catching up with Fitz before Renee Sansom knocked on the door and told them it was time to transport him to Duke for his afternoon surgery.

Taylor had tried asking questions, but Fitz was surprisingly evasive about the crimes he’d endured. He kept repeating the same lines: “I was drugged, I think.” “I really don’t remember anything.” “All I know is what I told you.” “He said to tell you ‘Let’s play.’” “He said you’d know what that meant.”

She’d expected him to be forthcoming with her, but after ten minutes of trying and failing to get him to open up, hearing him reiterate his apparent memory loss, she stopped. She hoped he wasn’t suffering from full-on PTSD, that he was just overwhelmed by the situation, that he remembered more than he was saying, or would remember when the shock wore off. But that was probably wishful thinking, considering what he’d been through.

She switched tactics. She asked if he wanted to go back to Nashville for the surgery and was surprised to hear he’d rather stick to the plan they had for him, go to Duke and get the surgery there. She wondered if he wanted to stay close to Susie, lying in the morgue.