Ryan Harding - Genital Grinder

“You watch that,” his father warned.

“The point is, you want ‘whorish scum.’ Well, she’ll be in my house Thursday night, practically gift-wrapped for you. Jana never misses her favorite show, even if she couldn’t ask for a better opportunity to go slutting around. Should have learned to program the VCR, right? It will still be early enough after the show for her to go out. You know how these ‘emergency staff meetings’ are.” He held up his fingers to create sarcastic quotation marks. “Follow her and take her when the opportunity presents itself. If she doesn’t leave, you’ll have no problem getting in. I brought you a spare key. I’ll take her car somewhere more appropriate and they won’t even know she vanished at the house. So you know what you have to do. Otherwise, I guarantee the police will be interested in your activities from twenty-five years ago, not to mention the past year and a half. It’ll be pretty hard for an old man who never leaves the house to come up with a good alibi on the nights in question.”

His father was silent for almost a minute, and then said, “Thursday?”

JOURNAL ENTRY: JULY 17 - JULY 22

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Jana was still there when he got home Thursday night. Most of her, anyway. For a moment, he thought he’d accidentally wandered into a slaughterhouse. He’d seen its like before, but never in such a refined setting as his own house. The kitchen looked like one of those avant garde paintings where the artist slings paint in all directions across the canvas, except this was apparently the work of a starving artist with only deep red on the palette. The bitter reek of sticky blood and lingering death clogged up his nostrils, heavy and sickening.

“You left out a few important points of your plan,” his father said from the living room doorway. Dr. Vincent was right—evidently the Slave Killer brought a change of clothes with him to avoid leaving a crime scene splattered with blood. He was clean in spite of the carnage all around.

He had a gun.

“Like the part where you tell the police your wife was supposed to meet me the night she disappeared,” his father continued. “I’m guessing you were going to leave her car somewhere near my house. It sure wouldn’t look good for me when the police showed up, especially when you suddenly noticed an eerie similarity between my handwriting and the Slave Killer’s. Those were your exact words in your journal, weren’t they? ‘Eerie similarity?’ Then it would be your word against mine, and they’d probably believe you. They wouldn’t know that the Slave Killer has nothing to do with the new killings. They have a profile of you, too, you know. They think you take out your rage for one woman against others because you’re too damned chickenshit to kill the source. That’s why you had to get me to do Jana; to ‘share needles.’” He mimicked the sarcastic quotation marks with his free hand.

“You also thought there was a good chance I’d take the fall for this business you’ve been getting up to with all these girls. You thought you could stop cold with Jana out of the way, and get away with all the ones you’ve done. You knew she’d been cheating on you for a lot longer than a week. That’s when it started for you. This all made for fascinating reading, though for the sake of dramatic license, I had to take any page that mentioned me in your plan. It’s funny. All this time, and I didn’t know my old issues of Shocking Crimes were the fuel for all your little wet dreams.”

He stood rooted to the spot. Like his father earlier this week, he denied nothing. Dad saw the journal. It was all in there. “Where’s Jana?” he finally asked, noting that while the kitchen was awash with blood so thick in some places he could see his own reflection, he saw no body.

“She’s in the bedroom. And the bathroom. And the linen closet. She’s on some of the stairs, too, I think. She’s the one who found your journal, by the way. She was fretting over what to do about it when I showed up. I didn’t need your spare key. I’m her father-in-law; of course she was going to let me in. She didn’t even get to the best part about how her husband hoped to drop her in the stack with the rest of the needles. I did, though. I’m bad about that—I have to flip to the end of a mystery to find out who did it.”

“I was at the Electra Complex,” he replied calmly. “I nearly got into a fight with some guy because I almost knocked his beer over. He told me to watch what the fuck I was doing and called me a ‘dicksucker.’ A bunch of people saw this. They say he has a habit of getting in people’s faces over nothing. They’ll remember me. What happens when the time of her death doesn’t fit in with when I could have killed her? Think about it.”

It was his father’s turn to laugh. “They’ve got a written confession for eight murders in your journal, and you think they’re going to let a little discrepancy like that bother them? I even used your knife on her. Found it right where it was supposed to be. Your Precious.”

“Look, Dad,” he said, almost smiling, “I swear . . . it’ll never happen again.”

“No,” his father said. “It won’t.” Channel Two News—Special Report on the Bartok Butcher

“How did he sound when he called you that night?” Geisha Hammond asked.

“He was hysterical. He didn’t say anything about what he’d done to Jana, but he said there was blood everywhere. He asked me to come over right away.”

“And what happened when you arrived? What did you see?”

“He opened the door, and he was just covered in blood. Like he’d been wallowing in it. That’s what I remember thinking when I saw him . . . He looks like he’s been wallowing in blood. And that’s when he started raving about all the other murders he’d done. I could see . . . I could see . . . Jana . . . I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay, sir. You take just as long as you need.”

“Thank you. Uh, okay, so I walked inside and I saw what he was talking about . . . blood everywhere. He destroyed that poor, sweet girl who never harmed a soul. I took my gun because of what he said about all the blood. I was scared . . . wouldn’t take any chances. I told him, I said, ‘Son, we have to go to the police.’ But he wouldn’t hear it. He was like a mad dog, and when that happens . . . you gotta put them down.”

The old man being interviewed wiped his eyes and repeated, “You gotta put them down.”

“And does it bother you that people consider you a hero for what you did? At the cost of the life of your own son . . . your only son?”

“Of course it bothers me . . . they couldn’t ever know the burden. And they shouldn’t . No one should. It’s like they say—the most tragic thing in the world is for a parent to outlive a child.”

I.

“What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?”

“I won’t tell you that, but I’ll you the worst thing I’m gonna do . . . the most depraved thing.”

“Does it have anything to do with this little movie we’re going to make?”

Von only laughed. “I lied; I’m not going to tell you that either.”

Greg smiled in return, and cast a backward glance to verify the cargo was still quite immobile. “All systems go,” he reported.

They were eastbound on Gardner Drive, destination Von’s house. They’d already run the risk of a hazardous houseguest in the form of Claire Perkins, the hit-and-run victim they’d kindly transported some time ago from Sherman Avenue (and Bowling Boulevard) to Von’s for the express purpose of necrophiliac debauchery. Claire was currently cooling off in a crisper, at least what was left of her. After three days and nights of experimentation, they’d exhausted every nook and cranny. Von came up with an ingenious idea to dispose of the body, but it was slow-going. The entire feast would probably last nine days between the two of them.