The Butcher and the Wren(10)
“Well, we have to kill it. We would be monsters to let it suffer for too long.”
Jeremy felt his breath hitch in his throat.
“Kill it?” he asked, never breaking his gaze from the doe’s.
“It’s life, son. You don’t let something suffer needlessly. And besides, there’s a pecking order. Some are on the top, and some are here to provide something to those on the top. This doe’s sacrifice will provide good meat,” he explained and yanked on the drop cloth, causing the injured animal to shudder with the sudden movement. “Come on, help me pull her down.”
Jeremy was awestruck. He robotically helped his father pull the drop cloth toward the tailgate and climbed into the bed with the doe to lower her down while his father pulled. Now the noises were loud and urgent. She was calling out, trying to alert her kin for help, but she was too far from home now.
She hit the wheelbarrow with a repulsive thud. A slight cracking sound and more high-pitched screams followed. His father quickly wheeled the creature to the back of the house, and Jeremy followed wordlessly. When they had reached the tree line, he helped dump the doe onto the grass.
“Come next to me, son,” his father beckoned him away from the creature and to his side.
He lined up his shot, standing with his foot touching the doe’s back leg and the rifle angle down and toward her head. The doe screamed louder, like she could sense the doom standing next to her.
“Now, you want to hit it between the eyes,” he said quietly. “Dispatching an injured animal should be quick.”
With that last word, he squeezed the trigger without warning. Jeremy’s body jumped with the sudden sound. Everything seemed like it slowed down for a second as the doe’s head snapped back with the impact. Then the silence crashed down like heavy rain, causing him to shiver with its arrival. They stood together for a moment, his father and him. Looking back, Jeremy considers that day vital in his development. He saw suffering, pain, and the release of death.
Jeremy walks through his home’s front door and tosses his keys into a copper dish just inside. He imagines that the sudden sound of metal hitting metal probably startles his guests, and the thought of their fear excites him. He walks straight to the sink in the kitchen and begins to scrub his hands vigorously, ridding them of the germs he no doubt picked up at the office. Unbuttoning his dress shirt, he excitedly makes his way toward the basement door. He only stops briefly to hang his shirt on a hook placed strategically on the wall. He smooths his white undershirt before creaking the basement door open and descending the stairs.
CHAPTER 8
WREN SWIPES HER KEY CARD to open the imposing morgue door and makes her way down the steps to the back parking lot. She slides into the driver’s seat of her modest black sedan and quickly taps the button to lock the doors. She has seen the aftermath of too many people who sat obliviously in their own vehicles while a predator waited close by.
She sits inside, taking a moment to collect herself before heading home. The hot breeze carries a hushed conversation to the car, and she looks up to find Leroux stalking out of the back door, running a hand through his hair. She’s about to call out to him but sees that he’s about to be on the phone. She watches him tap his phone’s screen and bring it in front of his face. The voice on the other end is on speaker and sounds hurried.
“It’s Ben. The book came back clean.”
Leroux audibly sighs, ducking behind his own car’s steering wheel and slipping a cigarette from the vanity mirror.
“Jesus, not even a partial?”
“I’m sorry, man.” Ben sounds genuinely disappointed on the other line. “I thought we might’ve had something this time.”
Leroux holds the cigarette in front of his lips for a moment.
“Did this asshole wear gloves to the library? How does he manage such forensically clean crime scenes?” he vents, lighting up and taking a quick, deep drag. “Man, first Muller gets stumped by this guy, and now you? Where have all my experts gone?”
Wren chafes at this but watches on as he exhales a cloud of smoke that crawls out of his open window. Leroux has been on the job long enough to know that no case wraps itself in a bow like they do on television. But he is used to being able to find a thread to pull somewhere.
Even Israel Keyes, one of the most meticulous and profoundly cunning serial killers the world has ever seen, slipped up eventually. Everything he did was carefully considered. He always traveled, sometimes taking planes and cars and trains, to abduct and kill his random victims, burying kill kits all around the United States so his tools were ready for him when he arrived. After these efforts to distance himself from each of his previous victims, a crime that he committed in his own town led to his capture. When he saw the young barista at the small coffee kiosk in Anchorage that he had planned to rob that evening, he lost years of carefully honed control. He kidnapped, raped, and murdered her in his car without any planning or forethought. His spontaneous abduction was caught on CCTV footage, and when he tried to flee, was captured again by bank cameras after using her debit card on his way out of town. His perfect reign of terror ended with some carelessness. She hopes this killer will befall a similar fate.
It’s all over Detective Leroux’s face as he sucks in another cloud of toxins to quiet his jittery nerves. He is wondering if New Orleans has produced a serial killer that defies even Israel Keyes’s level of Machiavellian plotting. Ben chuckles from out of the speaker, and a coffee machine can be heard brewing loudly in the background.