Bobby Akart - First Strike

“Why can’t you just let me be miserable?” he asked jokingly.

“Because, Detective Albright, that’s not who you are,” she replied. “I heard about it on the radio. Was it that bad?”

Jess also worked for the Monroe County Sheriff’s Department as a member of their WET team, an acronym for Water Emergency Team. She was a trained scuba diver as well as a paramedic.

Mike nodded. “Much worse than the first one, Jess. I just don’t understand people.”

“Same MO?” she asked, hoping that by talking about it, Mike would feel better.

“Yeah. Vic was a young male. Stabbed to death. The first murder weapon was a butcher knife. This time, the killer used a spring-assisted knife.”

“Like a switchblade?”

“Sort of, but shorter by law. The max length is three and a half inches, I think.”

Mike and Jessica had met in 2017 when he was investigating several brutal murders in the Middle Keys. In the spring of that year, a woman lost control during her birthday party and went on a bloody rampage, stabbing her boyfriend to death. The couple’s four children were in the house at the time. A month later, a man was arrested for stabbing his friend to death after the victim made unwanted sexual advances in a trailer they shared. In late summer that year, a man got into a dispute with his landlord over an eviction notice. Four lethal stab wounds later, the landlord was dead, and the killer had dumped the body in the brackish water off the Upper Keys. Jessica’s team had recovered the corpse, and Mike had been assigned to investigate the murder.

A murder a year was the norm, and they almost always involved a domestic dispute or an argument between transients. Because of the significant tourism levels in the Florida Keys, the crime rate was twenty percent higher than the rest of the country. While the rate of violent crime was much lower than the state’s, property crime was nearly thirty percent higher.

The two continued to talk about the murders, which Mike was prepared to identify as the work of a serial killer. Jessica asked a logical question. “What’s your gut tell you?”

Mike sat back again and glanced over at the television, which was airing CNN. It was the top of the hour, and as was their custom, the breaking news graphic was displayed on the screen. There was always breaking news of some kind as far as cable news networks were concerned.

“In a way, they resemble a crime of passion. Well, at least the first one did. Killing someone with a knife is very personal. The vic and the killer are necessarily in close proximity to one another. The killer can feel the life of their victim being extinguished.

“What bothers me the most by this second murder is the escalation in the attack. Jess, it was sadistic. Angry. It makes me want to gather up all of our family and hide on Driftwood Key where the monsters can’t get us.”

Jessica nodded. “I’ll be honest. I was worried for Lacey when she moved to California with Owen. I look at that place as a cesspool. Did you know many of the nation’s serial killers began in California? After what I’ve seen here, maybe she’s better off out there?”

“Maybe,” replied Mike in a soft tone of voice. His eyes suddenly became affixed on the television when the chyron read Secretary Sanders unharmed . The video footage of the carnage caused him to jump off his barstool and scream at the bartender, “Hey, turn that up!”

“Mike, what is it?” asked Jessica.

He turned back to her abruptly and replied, “Peter is over there.”

Friday, October 18

McDowell Residence

Hayward, California

“Tucker McDowell! Let’s go!” shouted his mom, Lacey, from the bottom of the stairs. “Do you wanna walk to school?”

Her son had the perfect solution, at least in his mind. “Just leave the keys to the Bronco. I’ll drive myself.”

Lacey shook her head and rolled her eyes. She turned around to check the time on the grandfather clock in the foyer.

“Not a chance for two reasons! One, you’re fifteen and only have a learner’s permit!” Lacey paused. She couldn’t think of reason number two right off the top of her head. She went with the old standby used often by her mother. “And because I said so!”

“You don’t have to yell, Mom,” Tucker said calmly as he stepped off the stairs into the foyer.

Startled, Lacey swung around to address her son. “Where did you come from?”

“Duh, upstairs,” he replied sarcastically, pointing his thumb over his shoulder. “Are you ready?”

He’s just like his father , she thought to herself. Why couldn’t I have had a sweet adorable little girl? Because they grow up to hate their mothers, that’s why.

“Jesus!” she exclaimed as she tried to stop the debate raging in her head.

“Okay. Okay. I’m sorry. I was just pullin’ your chain. I’m ready.”

Lacey took a deep breath. “No, I wasn’t yelling at you. I was only—”

“Yelling at Jesus,” Tucker interrupted. “You know, Mom, prayer works best in silence sometimes.”

Lacey playfully swatted at her son, who easily dodged the blow. “Come on, kiddo. You know this is a big day for your dad. I wanna get there early, that’s all.”

“Who’s opening the store for you?”

“Carlos is coming in. I should be there to relieve him by two.” She swept her key fob off the foyer table and picked up her handbag, which waited for deployment in a chair. It was rare for her to carry one, opting for a shoulder-sling backpack most of the time.

They made their way to the car when Tucker commented, “You look really nice, Mom. I’m sure the muckety-mucks will be impressed.”

Lacey appreciated the comment from her son. “Thanks, honey. As long as your dad is proud and confident during the presentation, that’s all that matters.”

“Do you think he’ll get the job?”

Owen McDowell was a marketing executive with Yahoo in Sunnyvale, California. The tech giant had just hired its fifth chief executive officer in the last nine years. The new CEO, an accountant and marketing executive by training, intended to bolster Yahoo’s presence in the lucrative online display advertising market by competing with Google AdWords.

Yahoo had been experiencing declining sales and market share for years until Owen used his formidable technical skills and marketing intuition to give the brand a makeover. Over time, Yahoo had failed to generate a brand identity geared toward the younger generation of users. Owen had instituted a number of marketing programs that yielded inroads into Google’s market share.

Today, he was making a pitch to corporate executives focusing on the Yahoo! portal as a starting and ending point for users’ web visits. He’d led the charge on a more privacy-oriented search function, much like upstart DuckDuckGo, which differed significantly from the overly intrusive Google search engine.

“We’ve got our fingers crossed, son,” Lacey replied. The two headed toward Hayward High School, which was only a few miles from their home. The sprawling campus taught nearly two thousand students. Tucker had just begun his junior year and was an above-average student.

A few minutes later, Tucker was off to class, and Lacey gave herself one last look in the mirror before she headed for Sunnyvale. She turned on the radio to listen for a traffic report.

The Nimitz Expressway was bumper-to-bumper. “No surprise there,” she quipped as she considered her alternatives. She decided on the Bayfront Expressway over San Francisco Bay into East Palo Alto. As she drove, her mind wandered to her husband.

They’d met at the University of Miami. Owen had been a graduate student pursuing his master’s in science in the management of technology curriculum. Lacey had been a junior when she and a group friends went scuba diving at John Pennekamp Coral Reef State Park near Key Largo. Owen and some of his guy friends were on the same dive, and the group got together for beers that night at Snapper’s. They immediately hit it off and began to date.