Scott Wittenburg - The May Day Murders

And unlike the rest of Jerry Rankin’s paintings, this was no abstract study.

Instead, it was a traditional rendering of three nude women, lying side by side, flat on their backs in identical positions. All three were evidently dead and had “May Day” inscribed across their breasts in what appeared to be bright red lipstick. Ann gasped in horror when she spotted the vial of lipstick shoved up into the vagina of the middle woman’s spread eagle legs.

A woman who bore a stunning resemblance to Marsha Bradley!

Ann stood with her eyes transfixed and mouth agape, oblivious to the fact that Jerry Rankin was no longer screaming and beating on the door. She felt her stomach muscles tighten as she studied the image of the woman lying to the left of Marsha. Although she hadn’t seen her in over twenty years, Ann was almost certain that the woman was Sara Hunt. And when she looked at the woman on the right, Ann began to shiver. The woman bore an uncanny resemblance to herself, only with blonde hair!

And then she spotted something else, placed on the lip of the easel. Three Polaroid prints lined up in a row…

Shots of the nude bodies of Marsha Bradley, Sara Hunt and the blonde woman who resembled herself.

Jesus Christ! she thought as she felt the bile rise in her throat

…

Stanley Jenkins!

Jerry Rankin was Stanley Jenkins!

But how could he be? It was impossible!

Suddenly, she heard a whooshing noise coming from her left. Her eyes shot past the half dozen or so paintings to the sliding doors that led to the balcony just as Jerry Rankin was entering the loft.

“You’re going to die!” he hissed, springing toward her. Ann let out a shriek and ran for the hatch door. But Jerry Rankin was too quick. He caught her before she even had a chance to open the latch.

He was so enraged that he punched Ann hard in the face and forced her to the floor, jumping on top of her and pinning her down.

“I should kill you now,” he spat, his face only inches away from hers. “But not quite yet.”

Ann screamed hysterically and wrestled with him, but to no avail. He doubled up in laughter. “Don’t even try it, Ann. You’re no match for me!”

His voice had taken on the hillbilly twang again.

“Who are you?”

He glanced over at the painting then back at her and Ann could see his face clearly now. His left eye was green, but his right eye was brown.

Apparently, his other green contact lens had fallen out into the Jacuzzi when she’d slashed him with her wine glass.

Stanley Jenkins, she vaguely recalled, had brown eyes.

A hideous grin came to his face and instead of replying, he merely eyed her body for a moment and then stared at her expectantly, as if waiting for her to answer her own question.

Ann already knew the answer, despite the utter inconceivability of it. Her mind flashed back twenty years to the last time she could recall ever seeing or hearing Stanley Jenkins. She recalled his voice, a sort of whiney, nasal twang-just the sort of voice one would expect to hear from a nerdy egghead…

“Well, Ann? Who am I?”

Ann felt her heart bursting out of her rib cage. Stanley Jenkins had found her. Stanley Jenkins was going to kill her. Just as he had killed Marsha and the others…

She turned her head away from him.

“Stanley Jenkins?”

He grasped her chin in his free hand and jerked her head back around. He was leering at her as he said to her in a confidential tone of voice: “It didn’t have to end this way, Ann. I told you that this room was off limits. But you just had to come up here anyway, didn’t you? And now you’ve discovered my little secret.”

“Why did you kill my friend? And the others?”

“Your friend?” he retorted with a smirk. “Marsha wasn’t your friend, Ann! She deceived you! She went behind your back and played a trick on you. She and that deplorable Sara Hunt bitch!”

Ann’s eyes widened in absolute shock. “What in the world are you talking about?”

Stanley loosened his hold on her and shook his head. “You don’t get it, do you? You have absolutely no idea what happened, do you? I’m very disappointed, Ann. Hell, you’re every bit as naive as these other stupid women! Now you’re probably going to disappoint me even more and tell me that you don’t remember my asking you out to the Prom our senior year. Please, Ann! Don’t let me down. Tell me that you at least remember that; or was it so fucking insignificant that it has slipped your mind after all of these years?”

“I-I remember,” she stammered.

“I’m impressed! You were at a basketball game, cheering the team on in that cute little mini skirt that showed your ass so nicely. I was watching you from the bleachers, doing your splits and getting tossed in the air so high that I could see the crotch of your red panties as clear as day! I never got tired of watching you, Ann. You were so beautiful, so damn classy! I never failed to get excited whenever I watched you-it didn’t make any difference what you were doing-studying, watching television, taking a bath-it never failed to give me a hard-on! It didn’t take too long to realize that I wanted you more than anything else in the world. You became my only reason to exist for quite a while, in fact. I dreamt about you every night, after I went to bed, I dreamt of someday having you all for myself. To hold you and touch you and have wild, kinky sex with you. God, you were all I could ever think about! And I made a vow to myself that someday I would have you.”

Ann stared up at him as he spoke, as intrigued as she was mortified by these disturbing revelations. He paused just long enough to climb off of her and re-situate himself, kneeling on one knee as she remained lying flat on her back.

“I had it all figured out, Ann. My plan was to put you under surveillance and learn all I could about you without your ever knowing it. I started following you home from school and at night, hanging around your house and spying on you. Your house was perfect-lots of windows and neat places to hide without being seen by any of the neighbors. You lived alone with your mother and she went out a lot, too, which really helped. Anyway, I did this for practically our entire senior year, and in that time I’d discovered a lot of interesting things about you. Besides the obvious fact that you had the most luscious body I’d ever seen, that is.”

He winked and grinned impudently at her when he said this, sending a cold chill down Ann’s spine. She looked way from him and found that what he was telling her was simply too hard to believe.

“I never had much luck with girls at school, as you no doubt recall. They all thought that I was some kind of nerdy do-gooder and even I know they thought I was uglier than sin. I couldn’t change my looks any-mother wouldn’t let me-so I figured that if I could somehow attract you in a spiritual way, I might have a chance. My plan was to show you how well I knew you and that I understood what made you tick, Ann. I thought you’d be impressed and would go out with me, because you were different from the others. You had a heart. I snuck into your house once and read your diary. I discovered by reading it that you had compassion for others less fortunate than yourself. You felt sorry for your mother because your father had died when you were so young. You felt sorry for your friends for various reasons: one got knocked up by her boyfriend, another got jilted by hers, and so on and so on. But you never felt sorry for yourself. You cared for others more than you cared for yourself-you were a true “giver.” I thought that was so classy! I had myself convinced that if I played my cards right and approached you at just the right time to ask you out on a date that you’d do it. And you probably would have, if it hadn’t been for your so-called friend, Marsha Stillner.