Grayson

Murder.

Is the desire to take life in our DNA? A hereditary trait passed down through generations. Or is it a malfunction of the brain? All those misfiring neurons. Or is it something more—something other—that which can’t be assimilated in a lab?

Nature or nurture.

The age-old question of scientists and doctors the world over.

Yet it’s a tired question. A boring one. And the answer doesn’t affect the outcome. Just ask Dr. London Noble. The doctor who shattered my reality. The woman who wormed her way into my decaying soul and resurrected me. Like a phoenix born from ash, I’m a new man.

Because of her, the question no longer plagues me.

Because of me, she has accepted her nature.

The only surety is that once you commit the act of murder, it’s in your blood. You have a taste for the kill. You crave it like an alcoholic craves the next drink.

One is never enough.

The late-night sky over Rockland is black with a dusting of city lights casting a hazy glow across the horizon. I’m in Larry’s car—the one he had parked at the Blue Clover. Larry is in the trunk.

I’m breaking one of my rules to only use public transportation while in Maine. Some of the most careful and meticulous criminals have been brought down by senseless traffic violations. Bundy. Kraft. Son of Sam. But right now, it’s a necessary risk.

I don’t construct a trap after the fact. It’s much harder to build a story, to link pieces together and create a design, once a kill is complete. You’re left with limited options. And mistakes.

It’s like working backward. Designing in reverse. But London and I are fashioning something new—something messy and brilliant all at once. It will have to be formed and realized as our story unfolds.

I admit, despite my nature to be meticulous, this excites me.

The way she lit up when she spoke… How can I deny her this? Even if I know the chances for success are low. I’ve calculated the odds. If we fail—which we most likely will—it will still be a spectacular finale.

Her ingenious plan? Bring the copycat to us.

To do so, we need a big enough lure. A bright and shiny baited hook that he can’t resist.

Larry’s glittering metallic shirt is a nice touch of irony.

I pull into the densest part of a wooded park. It’s too late for anyone to be around, but you never know when a group of teens or a pair of drunk lovers will decide to take advantage of the same privacy.

I have ten minutes to stage the scene.

Remove Larry from the trunk. Prop him against a bench. Wearing a pair of Latex gloves, scrawl RAPIST across his chest with his own congealed blood. Curl his hand into a claw and scrape his nails down my arm. This has to be done now, before rigger sets in. Then drive the car onto the gravel and backtrack to remove footprints and tread marks.

There is no lust in setting a scene; it’s business. Heightened emotion can’t be involved. There’s no room for error.

I take Larry’s car into downtown, where I park five blocks from the nightlife scene. It’s not much of one, but even a small coastal city has a watering hole. I now have twenty minutes. I locate a bar with no cameras. Wearing Larry’s obnoxious metallic shirt, I mingle with a group of women in the club, making derogatory comments they’re sure to remember. Then I order a round of drinks for the women and myself, placing the order on Larry’s credit card. I close out the tab and leave the card there before I exit the bar.

The moment Larry paid with cash at the Blue Clover, he made this possible.

Within thirty minutes, I’ve planted Larry’s whereabouts. Witnesses will describe my facial features and the metallic shirt—getting the two interwoven. This is fine; eye witness accounts are often unreliable. The police will assume it’s a combination of alcohol and seeing two men at the same place. They’ll put two and two together, and ta-da. How smart they are, linking the suspect and victim together.

I typically don’t return to the scene of the crime, but again, a necessary risk. I need the police to make this connection. I discard Larry’s shirt into a trash bin, then I abandon the car on the other side of the park.

The police will speculate that Larry was murdered in another location and brought to the park—a body dump. That’s fine, too. As long as they don’t speculate he was killed anywhere near London. She’s an hour and a half away from Rockland.

The police will also assume that given Larry’s criminal record, he was targeting women outside of his own city, hoping to misdirect authorities of his crimes.

But the big fish we want to catch—the reason I’m going through all this trouble—is the imitator himself. The copycat needs to know I’m here.

The bus ride to Portland takes longer than I want, and the little girl sitting opposite me won’t stop staring. She’s tiny, with shiny black hair and dewy porcelain skin—like a small China doll. Her mother wears a grungy waitress uniform and is slouched on the seat, sleeping off a late-night shift. Needle marks dot her forearm.

“Did that hurt?”

The little girl’s voice tinkles, barely audible over the roar of the bus engine.

I glance down at my hand and notice the raised white scar protruding from beneath the hoodie sleeve. I tug the cuff over my wrist. “Yes,” I answer her honestly.

She tilts her head, curious. “Did your mommy make it better?”

I look at her mother, oblivious to her daughter striking up a conversation with a stranger. Then I look at the girl. She can’t be more than five. “My mommy made it worse,” I say, and crouch closer to her in the isle. “You shouldn’t be talking to people you don’t know.”

She nods vehemently, like she’s been told this before. “I know you. You’re the man on the TV.”

My mouth kicks up into a grin. She didn’t say bad man. I glance again at her mother, and say, “Are you a good secret keeper?”

She nods, her silky hair bobbing.

“Good. You can’t tell anyone but your mother this, okay?” When she agrees, I say, “Tell Mommy that the man from the TV said to stop sticking needles in her arm and drink a big coffee before she leaves work, or else he’ll pay her a visit soon.”

Her dark eyes widen, and she smiles. “Promise?”

I give her a wink. “Our secret, remember?” Then I stand and grab the cable, deciding to get off before the next stop. The early morning work crowd will be piling on, and I’m too drained to risk another Angel of Maine sighting.

I enter my apartment just as the sun rises. The small downtown studio is nothing like my typical haunts. It’s not spacious or inviting. It’s efficient, and the few essential items I need are easily stored on the inlaid shelves near the door. Ready to grab on a dash out.

I unload my pockets—knives, wire, tape—into the drawer beneath the shelving. I keep the sculpting wire on me in case a situation calls for a less messy means of removal. I cover my tools with a cloth, then tuck Larry’s cash into the paper bag I keep there, too.

Cash is always a necessity while on the run. I’m not a saint, despite what the press is trying to depict me as. One needs money to survive. My victims no longer had need of their money. I do.

I had to ditch the RV. It’s too conspicuous to keep a moving location along coastal towns. People remember seeing an RV; townies don’t like strangers.

I paid the landlord cash for a short-term lease on the apartment just yesterday. Week to week. I’m Jeffery Kinsey to him. And as long as I have the cash, I’m of no more importance than his loud, nagging wife who berates him down the hall.

There’s two windows: One for keeping watch, and one for escape if necessary. I keep security cameras recording at all times, from every angle of the room and outside the main door.

I shower to rid myself of Larry’s stench, not because I need to remove the evidence. Criminals make mistakes all the time—even intelligent ones. Stupid, unfortunate mistakes. The taskforce will ponder it for a while; how the escaped convict they’ve been chasing for weeks, eluding them at every turn, suddenly makes such a grave mistake by allowing a victim to scratch him. Leaving epithelial cells beneath the vic’s fingernails.

Because the MO is so different from mine, authorities will need the DNA evidence in order to link the kill to me. My gift to them.

Then the theories will start. The deviation in method spurring specialists to speculate on why my MO has suddenly shifted so drastically. According to the specialists, I’ll be regressing, devolving.

There are natural stages of advancement, and one should always be evolving. My first kills, I left the bodies on display. I was a young, cocky amateur, and I wasn’t above bragging back in the day.

I got smarter, of course. Pride comes before a fall and all that, so I began discarding my victims. I buried them in remote locations. The next logical progression in methodology would be to destroy the remains. Leave no evidence. No body, no crime. Fire, as we well know, is a destructive force—the earth’s natural cleansing agent.

After I burned my hidden kill spot, even the taskforce could make an intelligent assumption as to my next level of progression.

This deterioration should niggle at them just enough.

But what’s really going to get under their skin is the location. How close I am to London.

It’s all going to happen very quickly now.

I fix a cup of coffee and sit in the worn recliner. I draped a bed sheet over it to prevent the coarse, germ-infested fabric from touching me. As the sun’s rays stream through the dingy windows, creating a kaleidoscope of colors on the cement floor, thoughts of London erect in my mind. Her satin skin. Fresh lilac scent. The key tattoo she no longer conceals along her hand.

The feel of her soft, delicate hand slipping over mine, taking a life.

It’s enough to sustain me…but not for long. Since our first kill in the maze of keys, the compulsions have come on stronger, more demanding. Uniting with London has opened Pandora’s box—and what I believed could be my salvation, I now fear has sparked a maddening flame that will consume me.

I push a shaky hand through my damp hair, a laugh spilling free. I’m no better than the junkie on the bus. Craving the very bad thing. Wanting her more than I want oxygen; more than I want freedom.

Why else would I be in Maine? Initiating a half-hatched plan that will get me caught if not dead.

For her.

I was designed to kill…not love.

She’s destroyed me.

However, six weeks of waiting, and watching, and hiding, of feeling stagnant while I play it smart has its downside, also. But we have to give our enemies time to show themselves. We can’t fight what we can’t see; it’s like swinging aimlessly in the dark.

That’s how most criminals on the run get caught, and get caught quickly. They try to take on the whole network. The FBI is not my enemy. The local authorities in every city across the country are not my enemies. Most of these people clock in and clock out. Go home to their families and pay a mortgage. Or they’re just trying to get laid on the regular.

They’re people. Doing a job.

Your enemy is a little harder to spot unless you know where to look.

He’s the one with an obsession.

He’s the one who won’t stop coming.

I stand and go to the bedroom area of the studio, where I store my map and collection hidden beneath the bed. Not the most secretive spot, but I only need to keep it out of view from a nosy landlord’s wife.

I tack the board to the wall and step back, letting my gaze follow the black string on the map. The string is anchored to points denoting my locations over the past six weeks. A second string—red—aligns with the black. The timeline off by only a couple of days. Then a third string—blue—sidles up next to the first two. Four days off on the timeline.

All three have one thing in common: the dates of appearance. Both men—denoted by the red and blue string—arrived prior to the discovery of the bodies.

Both of them were present before the murders happened.

Granted, I left a pretty obvious trail of crumbs for them to follow, but only one of us staged scenes to kill off two victims—and it wasn’t me.

The scenes themselves—the traps—should’ve tipped off investigators that the murders were done by someone trying to emulate my method. Again, most people do their job just good enough.

Only the perfectionists, the obsessed and the meticulous, care enough to get it right.

I cross my arms and stare at the emerging pattern. Stare at the map and strings and photos. I let it all blur together, becoming a collage. A labyrinth.

The FBI and police officials have all been asking the same questions, trying to make sense of it, trying to make the connection that will answer the why and, ultimately, the where—that will lead them to me.

Why did I let Dr. London Noble go?

Using a red pen, I circle the image of London. Over and over. She takes up residency in the middle of my board. For me, she’s the answer to every question. And to two fanatical men, she might just hold the key.

The circumstance surrounding my escape has spurred certain individuals to look more closely at her. Their interest in the good doctor is alarming, and dangerous.

London is insightful and clever. She might even be a better manipulator than I am. With intuition comes power. The power to do damn near anything we want. But because we were not born naturally to this world, we’re set apart, we’re other—that which gives us insight also serves as a weakness.

We’re a target for those trained in deception.

Enter Special Agent Randall Nelson of the FBI.

He rescued London, storming the blazing scene like a white knight. This agent has a real hard-on for me. It’s almost cliché, but then, everything’s been done before, hasn’t it? Every career criminal needs his counterpart. The white knight cop pursuing the chaotic-evil bad guy. The great cat and mouse chase.

Agent Nelson has declared himself the yin to my yang.

And he’s using London to get to me.

He can become an obstacle, or a means to an end.

Agent Nelson is only one phase of the elimination process, though. There’s a second element in the form of an obsessed detective who has sworn my demise by his own hands. We can’t leave out Detective Foster. He’s been on Nelson’s tail the whole way, always coming up in the rear. He just won’t go away.

Foster may be less of a threat, but he’s still another obstacle to hurdle. I made the mistake of underestimating him before. I learn from my mistakes.

I’ve been feeding them crumbs for weeks; they’ve got to be starved by now. Ready for a big, juicy meal. Larry should have them chewing for a while. I can’t give either of them the answers all at once. That would over stimulate them. Like children, they need to be fed little by little. Bite-sized answers they can swallow without choking.

We don’t want them to choke. Not yet.

London’s trap needs to be realized first.

I could’ve taken her with me on the run. Settled in Canada. She could’ve even opened a new practice under an assumed name. We could’ve moved around, never staying in one place too long, never getting caught.

But what kind of life would that be for her?

No, with London’s talents, she deserves better. Bigger. Brighter.

What’s more, why remove a perfectly positioned chess piece?

Now the image is coming into focus. She’s right in the center of the investigation. She can reach out and physically touch our enemies. She plays the most pivotal role of all.

Process of elimination.

Once you’ve eliminated your obstacles, you’re free. The FBI manhunt can’t use tax dollars forever. Resources run out. Cases go cold. And eventually, criminals at large are assumed dead when leads die off.

Now that the big picture is revealed, it’s time to break down the details. Cut them up into tiny, chewable pieces.

I tack a marker to the newest location. Rockland—the crime scene that will tip the first domino. I string the black thread to the marker. Maine is my final destination. It has to begin and end here.

Agent Nelson in the red and Detective Foster looking so blue, trail behind. Who will be the first to reach the Rockland crime scene?