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  “I don’t know how,

  I don’t know why,

  Just reaching for the light,

  The stars shine in the sky...”

  With an audible, “Gnyaaaggh.” Dave switched off the radio.

  As the traffic slowed to a halt and the countdown beneath the red light was still at thirty-one seconds, he fumbled in his coat’s pocket and fished out a memory stick.

  After yesterday’s coffee at Anton’s, an impulse had appeared to listen to his old music. He hadn’t thought of his old project for almost twelve years.

  He slipped the memory stick into the appropriate hole and pushed ‘play’.

  With a slightly nervous pulse, he listened to the first bars of ‘Slaughterhouse Opera’. Cows mooed, sheep brayed, and guitars fuzzed and buzzed. It wasn’t as bad as he had feared deep down. Not only was it not bad, it also stirred dear memories as if from another life.

  A quick fantasy of making a new band even sped across Dave’s mind but this music was too heavy and morose by half for the start of the working day. He was humming to The Who’s ‘Love Is Like A Heat Wave’, bobbing his head in time with the timeless groovy drumming, when he reached the office.

  Maldiva was not with brown lipstick today, but with a normal purple one, which didn’t leave the boundaries of her lips. On second glance only her lower lip was purple. The upper, thinner one was deep orange.

  Around her left eye, the makeup was an imitation bruise.

  A love bruise certainly, for although even these days women suffered from prosaic domestic violence, the displayed trend in makeup was not intended to signify that one was abused by a drunken spouse. Rather, it served to show that one’s husband or lover was an untamed animal. Better yet—that one managed to turn the husband or lover in question into a wild lion, by virtue of one’s unique sexual attractiveness.

  Dave went through the morning ritual, i.e. he nodded at Maldiva, complimented her looks, made himself a mug of coffee, and went into his room. There, as usual, he opened the window and breathed in.

  It was autumn and Maldiva would soon cover herself suggestively with her scarf, suggestively in the sense of guarding her frail health from Dave’s eccentric fetish of opening the window instead of using the air conditioner.

  He sat himself on his chair, pressed his palm on the ID box, and typed in the password. With a hum, the computer’s monitor lit up. He had messages. One marked ‘report’, and one marked ‘Season Girls’.

  With a show of discipline, Dave opened the report first.

  Quite ordinary news.

  Girl goes to park with buddies, buddies gang rape her, passersby don’t stop, one fellow her age stops when the gang-rapists flee, gives her his coat so that she doesn’t freeze, and calls the police.

  She knows the identities of the young rapists and the police are already rounding them up.

  Dave took a drink from his mug. He opened the other letter. Andy Fortham had sent him a list of detectives who had worked in the past on the Season Girls case.

  1.Arthur Harris, went on the case in 1979. Deceased 1981. Cause of death: home burglary gone wrong.

  2.John Chen, went on case 1983. Deceased 1983. Cause of death: car accident.

  3.Irvin Nolan, went on case 1987. Left police force in 1989 after disappearance of daughter. Deceased 1990 in his office in security consultancy firm. Cause of death: heart attack.

  4.Abdel Faizabad, went on case in 1995. Deceased 1996. Cause of death: car accident.

  5.Liliana Kostova, went on case 2011. Deceased 2012. Cause of death: rape and robbery on way home.

  Note: Dave, this all looks mighty suspicious. No one has tried to handle this case since, and it took me ages to get this info. It was not readily available. Think twice before pursuing this. Andy.

  P.S. An old timer—Joe Anderson, you’ve met him I think, even mentioned ‘The Season Girl Curse’.

  Dave read the note three times and closed his eyes to think. For some reason the phrase “It ain’t rain, it’s a shit storm” swam out of some deep recess of his memory and spun in a closed loop in his synapses. From some old movie probably.

  “The Season Girl Curse,” he repeated to himself.

  God.

  He stood up.

  “Why does everything have to be so fucked up?” he continued asking himself things out loud and bit his lower lip, or rather scratched it with his teeth, as if trying to make his way to the chin.

  Well, curse or no curse, it would have to wait some more, because he had to wrap up the‘toy-basher business first.

  Dave paced a bit in front of his desk, trying to focus on the task at hand and free his mental drives from attempts to compute irrelevant information.

  He must not allow new information to do with cases that are for ‘later’, to interfere with his work on the case that is for ‘now’. At least, he should try to not allow it to interfere.

  He sat down and opened all of his files in the toy-basher folder. He read them carefully and then he opened his notebook, and saw the question mark, and ‘Next week Friday’ scribbled near the name of Desmond Boyle.

  He thought about Boyle again. Why wait for the git to return? He just had to phone him, perhaps even right now, and see if his info overlaps with that of Chippada and Bardales. If his hunch was correct, he wouldn’t need a lengthy interview.

  He took a deep breath, cleared his throat, and dialed the number. The phone on the other side rang for some time and then the voicemail switched on. With a frown, Dave dialed again. On the third ring, Boyle picked up.

  “Hello, yes?”

  “Hi, Mister Boyle, it’s detective Cohran again, can you speak now?”

  “Yes, a secca, pissy.” Dave waited for about fifteen seconds.

  “Yes, hello, Mister Cohran. You be finding who is messing in the paddies?”

  “Almost, Mister Boyle, but I have to ask you four questions, if you don’t mind. Just the four.”

  “Be sure, go in.”

  “Did you go to the X-SEX shop on Garibaldi to purchase the destroyed doll?”

  “Yes, I think so,” answered Boyle with a suddenly more collected voice.

  “Okay,” Dave made a tick on his notebook. “Did you go there after midnight?”

  “Yes, it was around one. Listen, can I call you back?”

  “Just two more questions, Mister Boyle, you’re being a great help.”

  “All right, what are they?”

  “Was the toy in question a cyberpunk fifth grader toy-girl?”

  Boyle coughed and wheezed a little into the telephone. “Yes, yes, it was. Cost quite a hoola, you know.”

  Another tick. “Indeed, indeed, and the last question is, and please try to remember this precisely, at what day of the week did you make your purchase?”

  “Um, I don’t know really.”

  “Please think, this is important.”

  Boyle coughed and wheezed some more. “I be thinking it was Thursday night. Or you could say it be very early Friday.”

  Dave looked at the calendar on his monitor. “That would put it around the seventeenth?”

  “Er, maybe. I think so.”

  “Thank you very much, Mister Boyle, you’ve helped a lot.”

  “Thank you, Mister Cohran, for taking such interest.”

  Cohran rang off. He scratched his right ear. Everything fell together. All three victims had shopped the same article, at the same shop, at roughly the same part of the night. Chippada had shopped Thursday night, Bardales had also shopped Thursday night, but a week before, and Boyle had bought his toy on the evening after Bardales.

  Dave’s fingers did some quick drumming on the edge of his desk. His teeth chewed some more lower lip. He had already seen the shop’s website. There was nothing out of the
ordinary there. At least nothing that he could see.

  That was that then. Thursday night he would enter the shop and buy himself a fifth grader toy-girl of the cyberpunk line.

  The corners of his mouth twitched, as he imagined presenting the bill to ‘Expenses’.

  He played again the security camera clip of the toy-girl running in and out of the building in which Bardales lived. This time he watched the figure run is slow motion. It was even creepier that way. On an impulse, he dialed Anton’s mobile number.

  “Hi, Dave, what’s up?”

  “Hi, man, can you talk?”

  “Go ahead, how can I be of assistance?”

  “I need your opinion on something.”

  “So, your puny mortal brain needs the assistance of a mightier intellect?”

  Dave grinned and pinched his nose. “Yes, oh mighty one.”

  “Flattery will get you anything. Go ahead.”

  “Do you...erm...think sex cyber-toys can develop intelligence and ran rampant?”

  A burst of sincere laughter erupted at the other side of the line. “What, you mean: ‘The Day of the Sex-Bot’? ‘The Attack of the Fifty-Foot Dildo’?”

  Dave gave a laugh that was not entirely hollow. “Something like that. ‘Do Androids Dream of Electric Murder.’”

  “You are asking me this because of guilty paranoia concerning a thing in your closet, or because it has something to do with your work? I’m warning you, both possibilities would elicit a delighted guffaw from me.”

  “I’m afraid it’s to do with my work.”

  Anton obliged with a delighted guffaw. “Well, it seems your work is like a Philip K. Dick novel.”

  “So is yours, Tony, so is yours.”

  “You don’t have to remind me about that. Well, my answer to your question is: I think that anything is possible.”

  “Thanks a lot.”

  “I think a sex toy developing intelligence is rather far-fetched. Did you ask the people who make them?”

  “Yeah, I sent an email to their headquarters in Kuching.”

  “That in China?”

  “Malaysia.”

  “I’m curious to their answer.”

  “There isn’t any. I tried to get someone in the police to send an official query, but...”

  “They refused to involve the name of the city police in such disreputable madness.”

  Dave sighed, “Something like that.”

  “Well, good luck in hunting replicants, clones, and androids.”

  “This isn’t funny you know. So much creepy shit going on suddenly.”

  “What creepy shit?”

  “I’ll tell you over coffee one of these days.”

  “Okay, bye, Dave.”

  “Bye, Tony.”

  Dave breathed in deeply and felt something stir inside him. It was a vague affect, on the verge of turning into something more concrete: fear. Tingling tendrils of sticky anxiety in the face of the suddenly numerous unknowns tried to slither from his stomach up towards the solar plexus.

  Must be going soft, he thought.

  He locked the door, took off his sweater, and began doing push-ups with deliberate slowness.

  Chapter Twenty

  It was Tuesday afternoon. The rain had stopped during the night, but the roads and sidewalks still glistened in the dull autumn light. There was moisture on the small piles of leaves beneath the few trees in the city center. Five-minute waves of fine drizzle fell every half-hour.

  The city air was cleansed of heavier particles. Dave had stopped on his way out of his home to just breathe for two whole minutes.

  Now, four hours later, he was sitting in his private office, with five piles of paper, and a number of orphaned crisscrossed sheets covering his desk and parts of the floor. These were photocopies of the five maps of the city in different periods.

  He was clutching a magic marker and squinting with angry intensity at the twenty-eleven map. A small crooked vein pulsated on the side of his forehead and an invisible pincer was already hovering near his skull.

  He had just marked the places of the Season Girls’ homes. There was no apparent pattern. A full third of the girls were not even from the city itself, but from nearby towns.

  Only in the last twenty-five years had all the victims been from city. Perhaps because by this time it had grown large enough to reach a level of chaotic anonymity that allowed the killer to operate in safety without the need to go on victim tourism.

  At least there was a pattern of sorts to the places of where the bodies were found. Each year they were placed on four sides of the city. On, or a little beyond its edges.

  At first, it had even seemed like the body sites were marking the points of the compass. Unfortunately, the points changed every year. When Dave superimposed laboriously all the sites on one map, all he got was an irregular, fuzzy circle of dots.

  When he connected the four dots signifying the four corpses in a given year with lines, a cross appeared. This had given Dave a pang of hope, but when he connected the dots of the next year, the center of the cross was in a different place of the city.

  Of course, that would have been much too easy. Too Hollywood.

  Pushing aside the marred map, eliciting an annoying rustle from all the other papers, Dave planted his elbows on the desk and planted his cheekbones on his fists. He tried to visualize the person responsible, the season killer.

  If it was the same person all these years, he must about eighty by now. Unless he started killing as a toddler. Which was highly improbable to say the least.

  So, point one is, he thought, there is more than one killer working.

  Accepting this assumption there could then be only two possible alternatives. Either the killer picked a successor, or more than one successors, or this was the work of an organized body of people. Some sort of evil Cabal or something.

  Perhaps a family of crazies.

  Okay, three possible alternatives. A master—apprentice business; an evil sect-like organization; or an inbred mad clan.

  Dave got up and closed his window. He had suddenly felt a chill. Outside the appropriately and inappropriately dressed inch high pedestrians were going about their inch high lives. Not one of them was looking up at him through a sniper rifle.

  Of course, that didn’t prove anything.

  He sat down again.

  If it were an organization, or a mad clan, this would also explain why the detectives who worked on the case all met with unfortunate accidents. For a master-apprentice thing, it bordered on the impossible, unless the killer was a policeman himself.

  Unless he was a policeman himself...heavy shit.

  Dave did not believe for one minute that the list of car crashes and heart attacks was a wave of coincidental deaths. So, why had no one probed deeper into this? If the police can’t handle it, why not pass it over to some secret service or other? That’s what he would have done.

  Prompted perhaps by the uncomfortable doubts surrounding the Season Girls from all angles, Dave slipped into some quick daydreaming. If he were head of police, there certainly would be some changes made. Resources would pour into the force, they’ll have their own experts and detectives again, and criminals would always get their due...

  A year ago, he had cracked a case of gang-rapists who stalked and attacked lesbians. The culprits had turned out to be immigrants from Sub-Saharan Africa, and they had only been practicing ‘correctional rape’ as they’d called it.

  When caught and charged, they were not remorseful, but rather taken aback. Baffled. As if at the back of their minds they had really believed that the rape laws were just nonsense for the sake of appearance and that no one was really that much opposed to it.

  These were nobody’s women really, no man’s honor
had suffered. Anyway, what more logical answer can there be to the existence of lesbians, than to gang rape them, to make them see the error of their ways?

  Dave was so proud to find the clues and testimonies enabling the force to finally catch these animals and then was devastated, when the whole lot were deported back to Africa. He knew that they would get some ridiculous slap on the wrist back home.

  For all he knew, they all probably got medals for the struggle against Western satanic decadence.

  Now if he were chief of police, he would bug Parliament, or the Senate, or whoever did these things, until they passed a law that sex crimes committed here would be served here. To hell with not enough space in jails. Surely, it was just a question of will and management to build a few jails more.

  Lots of jails in fact.

  He looked again at the city map with the fuzzy circle of spots and decided to let the matter stew below the threshold of his consciousness. His thoughts were going everywhere. He really should learn some sort of concentration mantra or something.

  He opened a newssheet at random.

  A new film about a love affair between a Victorian werewolf and a time traveling zombie had taken the box office by storm. Spiderman 15 was a distant second.

  Rumors that Madonna was about to embark on another farewell tour. Dave looked at her photo. She looked surprisingly fantastic.

  The little-known party of the National Patriots had issued a statement concerning the new raising of the retirement age. Dave clicked to see the whole statement.

  “For too long we the people have allowed our political class to fleece us like sheep. We are not a conquered country and they are not conquerors. Yet we have forgotten that it is we the people who tell them what they should do and not the other way round.

  For decades, honest people have toiled and planned for a retirement that never comes. Joe the plumber and Maria the hairdresser have worked and worked and looked forward to when they are sixty-five, until it turned out that they must work until seventy.