James Knapp - State of Decay

Someone out there meant to stir up some trouble.

When I arrived at the scene, the car had been taped off and the driver’s-side door was hanging open. The sun had started to melt some of the snow that was covering the windshield, and I could see the woman’s stark white face through the gap. Shanks was standing by the car, holding two paper cups with steam coming off them.

“You’ve got something on you,” he said, pointing to my sleeve. I looked down and saw a series of reddish-black splotches smeared near my cuff; blood from the revivor. It had taken some scrubbing to get it off my hands, and I still couldn’t get rid of that tar smell.

“Footage of the truck fire is streaming everywhere,” he said, handing me one of the cups. “That was a hell of a thing.”

“Yeah.”

“You actually touched one, huh?” he asked.

“What was left of it.”

“What was it like?”

I wasn’t sure how to answer that, mostly because I wasn’t exactly sure how the whole thing had made me feel. I didn’t want to think about the revivor. I didn’t want to think about the fire or the call I made. Wachalowski hadn’t been there. They said he was in the field and wouldn’t forward the call. I had to settle for his office voice mail, leaving the information and asking him to call me. Now I wished I could take the last part back.

“Are you okay?” Shanks asked.

“It’s not our problem,” I said. “I called the FBI; they can handle it. I’ll probably just have to make a statement.”

“Lucky you.”

FBI always meant first tier, and government-employed, first-tier citizens were pretty much golden boys. Wachalowski had served not just his minimum tour, but for years after that. When he’d left me behind, he’d done so in more ways than one.

“Yeah, lucky me.”

I approached the vehicle and looked inside. It was the same as the other crime scenes; Mae Zhu had a single puncture wound to the chest that drove right into the heart. Death was almost instantaneous.

The woman had been in the car for hours and she was starting to freeze up, her white blouse stained almost completely red. She was a small woman, with pale skin and tiny hands. Her head lolled forward and her eyes were just barely open, still staring almost wistfully at the hole beneath her chin.

I crouched down, leaning in for a closer look. Her seat belt was unfastened. Her keys were lying on the floor near her feet, as if they had fallen there from her hand. Her purse sat on the divider between the driver’s and passenger’s seats, and an expensive leather wallet lay open on the dashboard. The driver’s license was there, along with a few top-shelf credit cards.

“Mae Zhu,” I said, reading off the license. “Do we know who she is?”

“First tier, but never served.”

I nodded. So far, that was the one thing the victims all shared in common. None of them shipped off, and none of them were wired for reanimation, but they were all first tier. That didn’t happen unless you had special skills or connections, but I hadn’t been able to determine what either of those might be.

I looked down the street at the people moving past the barricade. They all wore expensive clothes. The cars on the street were all like Mae Zhu’s vehicle: high- end, and built for luxury. The building faces were all glass and marble, towering to impressive heights. There were security cameras everywhere.

“A lot of people have money and connections,” I said. “What’s he going to do? Kill all of them?”

There was a faint depression in the leather of the backseat where someone heavy had sat for a significant period of time. The person sat in one spot and didn’t move. He would have been visible in the rearview mirror when she got in, so he attacked right away. The mirror hadn’t been flipped, so the victim arrived during the day and was killed before she adjusted it.

I looked at the wound. In all the cases so far, the wound to the chest was always the cause of death and it was always the same: a single penetration through the sternum and into the heart. The blade struck with enough force that it always went clean through on the first shot. It penetrated without fracturing, so it was also very sharp. The fact that there was never any bruising around the wound implied that the hilt never impacted, and so it was also fairly long. No metal traces were ever left in the wound, so it was most likely made of some kind of superhard plastic.

None of that narrowed it down much. A lot of blades fit that description, but the exact weapon was just another mystery in a case that was full of them. The dimensions of the wound didn’t seem strange at first, but I had been so far unable to match them to anything, and that was unusual. The weapon was significant to the killer, most likely. Something he may have crafted himself, or that wasn’t commonly available.

What now?

What Dr. Pyznar called my voice and what I called my intuition seemed to get more talkative the more tired I got. I still believed it was just that internal self we all spoke to at one time or another, that entity we consulted when we wondered if we were doing the right thing, or when we were alone and talked to ourselves. Mine was just louder than most.

Now we look for clues , I answered.

I looked at the rearview mirror; she would have seen him there after he grabbed her from behind. With her head pinned, she would have seen his face in that mirror as he leaned forward, bringing the knife around.

“CSI has to have picked up something ,” I muttered to the dead woman.

He doesn’t leave hair, sweat, or skin flakes. Is that even possible?

Apparently.

Nothing obvious was missing from the wallet, and the glove box hadn’t been tampered with. He never took anything, and he never left anything.

There’s something unique about him, my inner voice said. He’s not like other people. That’s why you draw such a blank with him.

That was true; a blank was exactly what I was drawing. It was truer than I would ever admit out loud, even to Shanks. Killers were usually passionate if nothing else, and the passion of their crimes, whatever they happened to be, were imprinted on their victims and their families forever. They left trails, even when they weren’t physical ones. Even when they thought they planned well, they left trails, and every killer, no matter how far out there, had a reason for killing.

If I could just understand why , I thought, that would connect them. It doesn’t matter if the reason is typical or completely insane, but I can’t figure it out.

That scares you, doesn’t it?

A little.

Let me do what I need to do , he had said. He had a reason.

You can understand why someone might want to kill a first tier, can’t you? Especially one who never had to crawl through a trench to get it. You can feel that, can’t you?

Yes.

People killed for jealousy all the time. They killed out of resentment, out of a sense of injustice, all the time. People who didn’t have things resented people who did, even if it was only secretly. Sometimes they hated them. Sometimes it drove them to violence. Every one of the victims so far would most likely have looked down on me in life, so I could understand how the thing that seemed to connect them all might drive someone to kill.

I also knew that wasn’t it.

It’s because he’s different , the voice said.

Well, if you know something, then clue me in.