Sunday One: Sickert: No Shit, Sherlock

Fuck … where am I? Who the fuck is this laying next to me? I really don’t want to have to remember exactly what it is that I did last night but it might be vitally important to getting out of this situation with a minimal degree of awkwardness. Unless, as I am hoping, she remains dead to the world and I don’t even have to speak to her. The thing is, when you want to sneak out, you know that it is almost guaranteed that she is going to wake up just as you are in the position to look the most sneaky.

I grab my clothes, steal a pack of cigarettes from the dresser and exit the room. I get dressed, spark up, and then I am out of the house. Man, how strange that the gods would be on my side – perhaps this is a good omen and today will deliver me some answers. A Sunday and answers generally aren’t things I expect to coincide but one has to be hopeful, eh?

How the hell I managed to drive in the state I was in I don’t know, but I did, and I seem to have parked quite well as well. I always used to claim to have one hell of a muscle memory – I could be half dead and still perform some tasks. The whole world is shaping itself around the incident which I am supposed to be investigating; we have the boys in blue out doing the rounds seeing if they can scare anything up at all, but thus far everyone seems to be drawing blanks. Surprise surprise – the bastard has gone to ground. What exactly are we going to do until he throws us another bone? Something else to sink our teeth into; some kind of context in which to
view the first killings? I’ve already said what I can do – diddly squat.

So, I know, people hear the word detective and they immediately imagine some Sherlock Holmes motherfucker who can pull the name of the killer out of their arse without so much as a by-your-leave, but I am not that man. I like to think of myself as a good detective but you have to have something to go on — not one of the killings in the house really gave us grounds to establish a modus operandi by. Everything was so carefully staged that I would imagine even one of the TV crime scene guys would have a job theorising about what went on. Ah, maybe I’m wrong; maybe I’m not that good anymore. Enough time and enough drink and you can surely lose your edge; not everyone has the constitution of a coke-sniffing London genius.

Everyone tries to look busy most of the time. Following concocted leads for possible suspects on improbable premises. Dead ends. Death ends. Fuck, this shit is depressing. I hate Sundays – if that Morrissey song were true and every day was like Sunday I think I might off myself. Have to keep soldiering on though, because that’s what’s expected. Time to go re-read the reports see if I can’t dig into it all some more.

Sunday One: Haggard: Church And Chinese

I find myself sitting in church, not quite sure how I got here – as if I managed to navigate my way to this place on autopilot. It’s not as if I need to ask forgiveness, or as if I need company or anything. Company? From these people? No: that is not what I am here for. Perhaps I am just curious – no, of course I am curious, and curious about all things … people, god, myself. I find all of those things fascinating. I contemplate myself in the mirror; I watch people through the lens of a camera or through my binoculars; and I come to church to probe how I feel about God. One must ask oneself about these things; one must strive for answers – isn’t it one of the most important dialogues one can be involved in? I think it is.

The members of the church move around me – I sit there still as one of their statues. They can operate without need for me to participate although it seems, to me at least, that the invitation to join is always implicit in their gaze. The question is always there – what did you come here for if not for forgiveness? It is a presumption on their part to think that they can offer this to me – but then they believe that their authority is given to them by God and not merely the heads of their church. The church has been a plague on me for a large percentage of my life and I have avenged myself by killing a few Christians, the odd Pagan, and various other denominations and faiths. Commit a religious killing and they run around looking for someone within the faith or someone in an opposing faith and they step right past you.

I sit through the whole service because it’s Sunday and what other choice is there? There is nowhere to go and nothing to do in this place, so I make do with what I can find. It entertains me, much more than Sunday television would. Part of me wonders what one of these people would be like to kill – would they be pathetic and sell out their beliefs in order to survive or would their faith stay with them right up until the last minute?

I have to admit that I have never really sat down and had a conversation with anyone that I planned to kill. I suppose you might say that I judged them blindly from the things that I had found out about them – the facts, not the personality. Is that wrong? Is a killer who put the effort into getting to know their potential victim somehow better? More human? Less human? A better killer. I sometimes get confused with thoughts like this – wondering whether they are indeed others expectations of me that I am puzzling over or whether they are my own expectations filtered through some ventriloquist act of transference.

After a meal consisting of deep-fried spicy beef and egg-fried rice, I lay down and go to sleep. My only meal of the day distinctly satisfying.

Saturday One: Sickert: Let Them Swim

My life is all about answers – it marks me out; most people lives are a series of questions. I can only move on when I have solved the puzzle, whereas most people can just ignore the fact that they failed to provide a sufficient response to the thing they were asking only a short while ago. The questions drive us, the lack of answers frustrates us, and bouncing between the two we get on with what they call living. I spend most of my time in limbo, trapped there with the insistent ghosts of the murdered dead. Justice might be blind but it is unfortunately not silent – it talks to me all the time; shouts at me a lot of the time.

So I come here; same place as a lot of us have found comfort – the bottom of a bottle. It’s only temporary relief though: those bastard nightmares are damned good swimmers. The shit might be easier to shake off if you didn’t spend months in the company of some of those pictures that you have to cart around with you. But it’s the nature of the job, so what are you going to do?

People try to tell me that I have a drink problem but I tell them that’s not it – I have a life problem and drinking myself into oblivion is the solution. If I were to start flashing people some of the pictures that I have to see then some of their self-righteousness in the face of my inebriation might dwindle; but it’s not as if I can do that is it? I sit there and I take it and then I go and get myself another drink.

I think about the case; juggle the facts; try to ignore the mute imploring of those happy snaps they always give us. No common friends between any of them; no admitted grudges; no outstanding debts. I feel like one of those bloody free-climbers stood at the bottom of a rock face and it looks as smooth as a marble floor. And the thing I keep thinking, and I hate myself for thinking it, is please just kill someone else – establish a pattern. So I sink another; kill the questions; ignore the answers. They want to judge me, but I know what I am doing – I know what I have done, and I know what I have to do.

Saturday One: Haggard: Cartoons And Column Inches

The papers are full of it – a random stabbing. The apparent chaotic nature of the act  scares them more than the act itself. Why? Because they dont know who did it, or rather they dont know what type of person did it. If they have a perpetrator they can safely box up the whole thing in a carefully prepared stereotype; if not then the whole world becomes dangerous.

The police ask for people to come forward and I just know the kinds of thing that they will get; everyone constructs the villain from the meat of their own prejudices. Old white mean and women will have seen a drug crazed black youth; girls picked on at school might imagine some bitch with a grudge; some thousandth generation copy of Jack the Ripper, almost distorted beyond recognition, will step up. All the police will be able to say is that there were conflicting reports but they are doing their best to bring the killer to justice. After several months, a series of press conferences where the truth that they know nothing is side-stepped, they will downsize the investigation, and eventually the case will go cold – only remembered by the nearest and dearest of the victim.

I never knew her name. I had no grudge against her apart from the fact of what she was – another human being. How would they link us up? How would they find me?

Its Saturday; Im relaxing. After reading the paper and checking whether the thing I did got adequate coverage I sit there and watch the kids cartoons and eat bowl after bowl of cereal. I find that the build up to the act of killing and the aftermath drain me – they are necessary things these killings and, having had some experience of what they do to me, I know exactly what must be done for me to restore my equilibrium; to maintain my health.

I have a girl coming around later – someone I met whilst trawling the bars looking for someone to off. She’s beautiful and intelligent, and she has managed to avoid pissing me off yet. I know it wont last forever but I am a resourceful man and I have methods of releasing the tension that a failed relationship can produce. I say relationship in the loosest sense, the whole thing pretty much being confined to a physical thing – I don’t tend to form many substantial emotional attachments.

I am, as always, planning my next move.

Friday One: Haggard: Paint In Primary Colours

It’s raining hard today, people shuttling more rapidly between the mundane activities which mark the peaks and troughs of the worthless existences. I read the papers, watch the weather reports – I am always prepared, as one must be, to do what one must.

People duck out of the rain and find shelter in places that they would not normally set foot in. I wait, I watch, I follow, and I take advantage of the situation. Fall in rhythm with someone’s footsteps and you can become invisible – you match their music and they don’t even notice the shadow falling over them.

Wet weather calls for wetwork – death administered at close quarters. My Knives are sharp – I never make the mistake of not being properly equipped. I have read many texts that describe botched kills; these psychopaths and the lackadaisical way with their craft. Well, to be honest most of them do not consider it a craft – they are consumed by their passion and are not in control of it; that is what gets them caught.

I know where I am going, what I am doing: how I intend to do it. If I get the sense that achieving the goal I have set myself is not achievable or must be delayed then I am quite happy to withdraw and not forge foolishly ahead. Why waste oneself on a fruitless effort? Only an idiot would allow themselves to succumb to the foolish notion of something having to be done there and then. I am not that man.

I execute with precision.

I fake a stumble and crash into her. I step away and keep moving, moving along with the normal tide of the pedestrian traffic. She drops to the ground clutching her throat. Shock kept her upright for longer than I might have hoped. She was unable to scream, the blood filling her throat almost instantly, and by the time anyone breaks out their stride to find out what is wrong with her, or before anyone notices the blood, she will be dead and it will be too late.

I am far away from the scene of the crime. The knife, barely bloody I acted so swiftly, is sheathed safely and hidden by by longcoat. When I get home I shall dispose of it in the vat of hydrochloric acid I keep for such purposes. I created a bright patch drenched in primary colours to light a dull day.

Friday One: Sickert: The Weight Of Waiting

Eliminating difference and trying to strike through the chaff to discover the commonalities. The squeak of the pen on the white board and the smell of the marker as I sketch out four time lines wakes something in me. You read all the facts, they float around like a pile of leaves caught by the wind, and then you must forget them for a moment, try and breathe as the person you are following might breathe; take steps in their melted footsteps. I have spent half my life walking the paths of ghosts; some days I feel like a ghost myself.

Four sets of facts, intersecting lines – the same motives for wanting them gone; different motives for wanting them gone; or most scary of all, no motives. Until one chain presents itself as being the most likely we follow all of them. They don’t call it footwork for nothing.

The heavens open up and the rain comes down. The streets empty when its like this; traces seem to vanish, neon stains and extinguished cigarettes. I’m gonna have to go inside to shake anyone down and that makes me nervous. I want them nervous, not comfortable on their home grounds. Still, what choice do I have? I have a job to do and my job says I can walk where I want even if someone’s personal boundaries try to stand in denial. Reasonable suspicion, or in this case, and at this point – questions. We haven’t got near the need for warrants yet.

Anyway, I don’t know why, but something is telling me to take my time on this one. Something is saying – these crimes are cut loose of the normal considerations. Something is saying that studying the usual patterns, treading the usual paths will deliver nothing.

What do you do when your senses, when every part of your being, is telling you to wait? Well, if you are what I am (a person tasked with solving a crime) you go through the motions. Why bother? That’s what you ask. Well, you have to appear to be engaged in some activity because no one wants to think that a detective on a case is just sitting there waiting – it doesn’t fulfil his duty to those dead or to potential future victims. I know the score though – not much I can do yet. I know a lot about the victims; I know a lot about the crime scene; I know nothing.

Thursday One: Sickert: Gods And Monsters

It’s hard to get up this morning and even the coffee doesn’t jumpstart me the way that it should; the cigarette shakes in my hand and I have trouble lighting it. None of this is nerves – they’re burned out; all it is is a mental exhaustion disguising itself as a physical one. These damned killers make you so tired, and they have so much energy. It’s like the amount of energy I can expect is directly opposite in proportion to the killers, and then when I am in the ascendant their power will begin to trail off. Seems like simplistic dualistic bullshit, but I, like my co-workers, am a superstitious man. Why am I superstitious when so much of what I do is rooted firmly in the real world I hear you ask? Well, it’s simple – when you see the kind of monsters that people can turn themselves into you have to have something to believe in. Half of us are drunks and the rest of us are born again – you have to have something to have faith in and I can guarantee you that not a one of us is a damned philanthropist.

There’s a knock at the door and it’s a runner come with all the information that I requested. The crime scene boys and the guys at the mortuary are good to you if you’re good to them – they don’t ask much so I give them a little more. Keeping the guys who do the grunt work sweet only makes sense – all those jackasses like

Kirkcaldy and Bunion get zero help when they ask for it. Why? Because they act like total douches and no one wants to do a goddamned thing for them. I learned early from one of the best – Sirroco, a good man who got mistaken for a toothless old dog, despite the fact he closed more cases than any of the so-called hotshots. “Sickert,” he said “All of us have a job to do, and it isn’t a pleasant one, why make it any harder than necessary?” Man, for those days, when I could still walk around with my eyes closed, and re-parse everything as a learning experience; somethng seen from the distance of innocence. It was an act even then – you don’t get transferred to this homicide department if you haven’t proved yourself capable of dealing with a certain type of crime and by that point I had more than proved myself. Still, I like to stay quiet, listen and watch – see how Sirroco used to do it and see if I might pick up something useful; I did.

I sit there and I look at the manilla folder – nothing as unthreatening as a manilla folder, eh? Bullshit – the only thing I ever saw that looked that harmless and contained such poison was the telegram my mother received to tell her my brother had bought it in Danang. Oh well, have to open it some time – may as well be now; have to get this game on the road; and game it will be … that you can guarantee.

I look at the first body and the ragged neck wound where the head was hacked off on first appraisal might suggest someone panicking and not knowing what they are doing but the report confirms what I assume – that it was a blunt tool that made the mess and given the time of death and the marked improvement of technique and choice of weapon demonstrated with the other kills that this is just experimentation. Experimentation is not a good thing – it suggests that they have confidence that they will not be discovered and have time to do what they want to do. This is doubly worrying given the number of the people in the house because it means that he found a way to disable all of them while he worked on the first victim. The tox-screen came back with high levels of Vecuronium bromide something they call Norcuron which shouldn’t be that hard to trace, you would hope. A hunting knife buried in the chest seems to be one of the few pre-mortem wounds that were inflicted which makes sense if you consider that the most important thing to the person doing this isn’t the killing or the person killed but the message he uses the body to send. If I sound too sure of myself then that only speaks of the imprinting damage these things have on the soul and the memory. The sigils and designs scrawled on the skin come from different sources, like this person is trying to say something but also wants to confuse the fuck out of whoever is witnessing it. We believe this one to be Albert Couran.

Number two’s head is intact but they have been sexually mutilated with what appears to be a lump hammer and the shock of that understandably killed them. This one had a female symbol scrawled on them so one has to wonder if they were gay maybe – something further investigation is sure to reveal. Jake Sendark, a good looking kid.

Number three suffered asphyxiation due to the plastic bag that has been tied over her head. She has what appears to be angelic script etched along the contour of each rib, a pentacle carved into her breast bone between her breasts. It appears that her pubic hair was shaved and a fig leaf placed, to what? Protect her modesty? It would seem so. Miriam Kavanagh was known to us through the death of her mother five years ago at the hands of her estranged father.

Number four is the most elaborate and has not yet been identified. Teeth removed and arranged into a semi-circle around the feet. Ribs opened with a rib-spreader and cleaned of meat with what we are thinking is a blowtorch of some kind. Heart on a small table in front of the victim, placed atop a single white feather. Two five inch masonry nails driven in at acute angles to the hip bones – the same nails which have been used to nail feet and hands to the wall. The penis has been transformed, in an act of sculpture that must have taken great skill, into a lotus flower. The script on this one has been identified as Babylonian, Hebrew, and Italian. Looks like I have some heavy reading to do.

Thursday One: Haggard: Medicine

I wonder how many people join up at the library just to get free internet – because I spend a lot of time here and there are people who I have seen come in on a regular basis and never walk out the door with a single book. One has to assume that they are literate because they are reading things off the screen – it’s not like you can stand there at one of the terminals and just check out you-tube. The books are just as free to them as the internet is, so one has to assume that they are just not interested in books. If that is true then I have to say it’s a damned shame – how small must their world be without the poetry of Eliot, the prose of Conrad and Dickens.

Every thing I read, even if it has no intrinsic value, makes me a better person than these mindless drones. It is at least forty eight hours since I caused harm to someone. On the weekends I break into doctor’s offices and read the extensive notes on their patients, noting down all their allergies and conditions, and then I go out of my way to exacerbate the problem. It is no feat to take someone’s address, plug it into google and map their location – then I follow them around for a while and work out what will be the perfect opportunity to strike. I have sometimes waited as long as a month or two before I deemed it right the time to inflict pain.

Know their patterns, understand their habits, memorise their weaknesses. I have watched angina patients rolling on the floor clutching their chests, knowing that fear is the mint flavoured fake pill I have substituted for their medication. I have watched people with nut allergies swamped in confusion as their throats close to a pinhole, only a vague trace of the peanut oil I poured in their fabuloso mocha detectable to the tastebuds on their swollen tongues. My favourite was perhaps the wild bee’s hive that I left sitting atop the washing machine of a former track and field champion – he didn’t run fast enough that day.

Yes, I like reading – it expands the mind and it changes the world. Each fact I discover is like a little stamp of ownership that I have placed on part of my rightful inheritance.

Wednesday One: Haggard: Books And Ballistics

I often spend my time looking out of bookstore windows at the people down below. I know it isn’t exactly the same as a book depository but it is the closest that I can get and there is plenty of reading material to keep me occupied. I know that America died the day that they put a bullet in Kennedy’s skull and all these people that are walking around are not real – they are fake versions of what came before. I am a prophet because I can see what underlies all this papier mache bullshit that they call truth and reality.

I studied snooker so that I might better appreciate angles and geometry; so that I might teach my muscle memory how to find the angles it needed. This was all before I ever went to a shooting range; before I ever fully admitted to myself what my mission required of me. I am an evangelical assassin. You know of course that nothing is ever random? That it only appears so to the untrained eye – to the person who does not yet possess enough information to make an accurate analysis it seems like chaos has a foothold.

I do not believe in the magic bullet; at least not in the physical sense. I believe that on that day the only magic bullet that was fired was an informational one – a lie wrapped in a symbol; and that symbol is what killed  the American people; killed their souls and left these lifeless husks to wander around polluting the planet.

The idea of me was born on that day – an avenging angel. My coming was delayed until the time was right; delayed until I could achieve my full potential. I am an idea. I am an idea to be shared. I am the meme that will save the world.

Wednesday One: Sickert: April Fool’s Day

Humpday is the apex of the broken back of this week and I am stuck atop it squeezing the bellows of my lungs to get anything vaguely resembling fresh air inside me. I smile nicotine yellow and speak in black coffee tones that sour the air. People look at me funny and I throw fuel on the fire; why does everyone think that their judgements matter to other people? What is that arrogant idiocy all about?

My partner is hooked up to various machines which are running all the bodily functions he used to be able to manage by himself, all because someone felt they needed to share with everyone all those stupid little thoughts that were buzzing about in their skull.

This is one of those days when people do stupid shit so half the calls we go out on we expect to come to nothing – the few that we go to which are serious are usually more fucked up than any others. This looks like it is going to be one of the latter kind which sucks – it could have come in earlier. It feels like today has lasted way longer than it should have and this had to come in at the last minute. It seriosuly does not pay to be fastidious in your job – it is the kind of thing that has you stuck behind in the office completing paperwork when every other fucker has gone on their merry way. If I hadn’t been sat there writing about the latest example of how the human race is going down the toilet then I wouldn’t have been given this crappy case.

The hallways are sticky with blood and it already stinks and as soon as I see that this is not just arterial spray, that there are some kind of designs smeared into the mess, I know that this is not going to be one of those things that I get over quickly. There are at least three rookies out back adding to the lake of puke that the first guy on the scene started, and shit, who can blame them? This is one of the worst I have seen in a long time – this ranks with, and you have to know I hating say this, but it ranks alongside those Ripper crime scenes.

Thankfully it doesn’t look like we have another copycat – they can be a bastard because sometimes the pressure will force them into anomalous behaviour, and there isn’t much you can do with that. When they suddenly break off from copying so they can prove themselves in their own right you can lose the trail for long enough that it consitutes a problem. It sounds strange to say it, and perhaps unbelievable, but I know from looking at what we have here that this is not someone we have seen before and I know that this is something that is going to run and run and run.

I ask the crime scene guys what they have; tell them what I need, and then I leave. They won’t send the clean-up guys in until tomorrow afternoon at the earliest and I find it easiest to assess things when there is less traffic about the place. Time to go home and drink myself to sleep.