Chapter Three

A thrill of excitement rippled through him as he watched the evening news. They’d already given him a name: Mummy Man. It was perfect. He wrapped his victims in the same plastic wrap his grandmother had always used for leftovers. He’d start at their feet and work his way up, up, up, meticulously enclosing them in the stretchy, transparent film. He always followed the plastic wrap with a layer of gauze for the aesthetic qualities it provided. It just looked good. But the plastic wrap was what really immobilized them. As an added bonus, it would also add to their physical discomfort and panic in the moments prior to death, and it would fuck up things at the crime scene, too, by making it nearly impossible to estimate time of death via internal temperature.

But his main reason for starting and ending his death ritual with the plastic wrap was because of how it enhanced their mutual experience as the victim suffocated. He could watch it all through the clear layer of plastic wrap: how their lips and tongue quivered and wiggled as they fought in vain for air. If he covered their mouth with his hand, well, he’d just miss the whole thing. As it was, he could watch them try desperately to break through the plastic with their tongue. Sometimes he’d even press the tip of his tongue to the plastic wrap so their tongues could play a little. It was his guilty pleasure and always got him hard as pure hell.

It had started out as a fetish. When he had discovered a website that catered to his particular brand of kink, he felt like he finally belonged. Member profiles described the pleasure that could be derived from being wrapped up and made completely immobile. The sense of absolute containment made them feel secure, almost like being back in the womb.

His first kill had been unintentional, though. He had long enjoyed autoerotic asphyxiation. He decided to take things a step further and experiment with breath play with a partner, a one-night stand he had met online. In his enthusiasm, he had gone too far and there had been no way back.

They had been at it for a while, fucking brutally hard with him cutting off her air in increasingly long intervals. As he pumped into her like a jackhammer, he rested his weight on his hands as they’d clenched around her neck. When she suddenly began to writhe beneath him like a wild animal, he’d reveled in her struggles and had assumed she was climaxing. Then every muscle in her body seemed to seize. Even her pussy got in on the action as it squeezed his aching dick like a vice.

When her body abruptly went slack beneath him, he’d thought nothing of it and continued thrusting into her. In fact, her continued ennui began to irritate him. He’d reached down and swatted her ass to get her attention. “Move!” he’d grunted as he pounded away, chasing his own release. But she hadn’t responded. A quick glance down had revealed the truth: what he’d thought was an orgasm had been her final, panicked struggle for air before he’d crushed her larynx. She had died while he wasn’t looking.

When the sight of his cock slamming in and out of a dead body had gotten him even harder, he’d known he was onto something special. In that moment, something shifted within him. Fucking a corpse that had been murdered by his own hand became a fetish that he intended to indulge in at every opportunity for the rest of his life or until he got caught. And he had no intention of getting caught.

Now he was experiencing a new, visceral kind of power. He was holding a city in the grip of fear, and it was intoxicating. Suddenly people were checking their doors and windows. Women looked over their shoulder when they walked down the sidewalk. Everyone was a potential killer, and everyone was a potential victim. He was enjoying the attention. The television and newspapers were talking about him nonstop. Overnight he had gone from someone nobody knew to celebrity status. He’d always known he’d be famous or, as in this case, infamous.

He enjoyed the hunt almost as much as he did the killing and defiling of the corpse. He didn’t really have a type. It was more of a knowing. He would see a woman he just knew he had to have, then the game started. They never knew they were being watched, never knew their days were numbered, and they certainly never knew they would die at the hands of a madman.

He liked the married suburbanites best. Those bitches were so bored and sexually starved, they were flattered when somebody gave them a little attention. He wasn’t a bad looking guy and he knew how to flatter a woman without coming on too strong. All he had to do was give her an appreciative glance in a grocery store, offer a charming answer to a question while standing in line at a pharmacy, or be a gentleman by offering to help load her groceries into her car. It was almost too easy, really.

Yes, the married ones were the best. Having so much to lose made them even more desperate to survive. And when they were willing to say anything, do absolutely anything, to please him? He was only too glad to take them up on it.