All of these people, with their silly relationships and their bullshit lives, are only here for his amusement. He isn't less than they are. He is more. More intelligent. More evolved. More powerful. He embraces the feeling like a miracle drug.
As he gets older, he learns to hide his obsession from others. Neighborhood pets disappear, but it rarely leads back to him. He has a little place, out in the woods, where he takes the animals. Where no one will hear the screeching. Where he can bury them when he's finished.
Fantasy often accompanies his mutilations. He imagines himself the ruler of the world, with all creatures trembling before his might. Like Satan on a throne of bones, torturing the meek, laughing at their pain. Dragging it on, sometimes for days, keeping the animal alive.
Or sometimes the animals represent people. His classmates. His teachers.
Father.
It's invigorating to pretend that the dog he's tied up and castrating is his father.
From what he's read about serial killers like himself, there are several features they all share. Kind of like a big fraternity, everyone conforming to a basic set of rules.
Most apply to him as well.
Fantasy plays a big part in recreational murder; in fact the stalking and the planning and the dwelling on it are almost as much fun as actually ending someone's life.
Most budding serial murderers show evidence of the triad when they're children; bed-wetting, starting fires, and hurting animals. He lays claim to all three, wetting the bed until his late teens.
There are also stressors and escalation.
A stressor is an event that unleashes or sets off a murder spree. This particular spree in the Gingerbread Man's career of slaughter can be linked to a very specific occurrence. And as for escalation...like any drug, the more you get, the more you need later to feel the same high.
The majority of serial killers were also abused as children, physically or sexually...
He didn't like to think about that.
At age fifteen he gets a job at an animal shelter.
His fantasy world quadruples overnight.
There are plenty of things to do at the shelter to amuse himself. This is where he learns to give injections -- too many injections, poisonous injections, eyeball injections; at one point he keeps a log of different things he injects into animals, with descriptions of what happens.
The stressor comes when he gets caught mistreating one of the animals and is immediately fired. His rage is all-encompassing. He continues to visit at night, letting himself in with his keys, but it isn't enough. He needs more.
So he decides to kill a human.
He picks a girl at school. A freshman. Fat and pimply. He watches her for a week to make sure she doesn't have any friends.
Then one day at lunch he sits down next to her and asks if she wants to see the puppies where he works.
She does.
Don't tell anyone, he warns her, or he could lose his job. She promises she'll keep it quiet, thrilled that someone is actually paying attention to her.
They walk there after school. He tells her they'll enter the back way, takes her into the alley, and sticks her with an animal sedative.
When the shelter closes for the night, he lets himself in.
After trying unsuccessfully to rouse her, he uses her sexually, and then pulls her into the crematory.
That wakes her up. For a little while, at least.
Three young women disappear from his town that year.
No one ever questions him.
And now, many deaths later, he's ready for the big time. Headline news. National attention. All the murders that came before were practice, a warm-up for the main event.
After he kills the last whore, the one who started it all, he'll write a long letter to the media. Explaining what they all had in common. Explaining the reason he leaves the cookies. Making a mockery out of Jack and the CPD.
Promising more deaths someday soon.
It will go down in history as the greatest unsolved case of all time. And with good cause. All of the planning and preparation, the stalking, the plotting, the violence, and the surprise ending will make this the crime of the century. Worth all the time he's spent hunched down in his truck, following these whores around. Worth all the pain that lousy bitch has caused him, her and all the others like her.
When he was a child, nothing ever made him cry. Not even the time Father made him kneel on tacks and beg for penance.
'You have the devil in you, boy,' Father would say.
Father was right.
Chapter 24
NOW THAT I WAS VICODIN-FREE, stairs posed a real problem. The pain was bearable, but the muscle I'd injured was apparently essential for climbing, and it wouldn't do what I commanded. To get to my office I had to
