Blood Marks

  BLOOD MARKS

  By Bill Crider

  Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press

  © 2012 / Bill Crider

  Copy-edited by: Patricia Lee Macomber

  Cover Design By: David Dodd

  LICENSE NOTES

  This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to the vendor of your choice and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  OTHER CROSSROAD PRESS PRODUCTS BY BILL CRIDER

  Novels:

  Dead on the Island (Truman Smith, Book 1)

  Gator Kill (Truman Smith, Book 2)

  When Old Men Die (Truman Smith, Book 3)

  The Prairie Chicken Kill (Truman Smith, Book 4)

  Murder Takes a Break (Truman Smith, Book 5)

  Westerns:

  A Time for Hanging

  Medicine Show

  Ryan Rides Back

  Horror (writing as Jack MacLane):

  Blood Dreams

  Goodnight MooM

  Just Before Dark

  Keepers of the Beast

  Rest in Peace

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  From the Houston Post:

  POLICE FAIL TO FIND LINK IN BRUTAL AREA SLAYINGS

  A spokesman for the Police Department said today that there are no apparent links in a series of brutal slayings of young women in the Houston area in the past several years. Sgt. D. P. Preston said that although all the women were about the same age, being between twenty and thirty, there is no other connection among them. "They all died in a different area of the city, they all died by entirely different means, and they had absolutely no connection among themselves that we've been able to discover, except of course for the fact that they've all been murdered." The latest murder victim, number nine in the series of unconnected slayings, was discovered two days ago in an apartment on the city's southwest side. Laura Roberts had been living in the apartment complex for approximately two months, and she was known . . .

  PART I: MISSING LINKS

  Chapter 1

  There's so much blood.

  That's what no one understands, how much blood there is.

  They watch TV, they see people killed, they think that when you die violently there's maybe this little spurt of blood, or maybe this little stain on your blouse.

  They don't know what it's really like.

  I know.

  I could tell them, but of course I won't. And they'll never get a chance to ask me. I'm far too good for that ever to happen. The cops are idiots. There was an article in the Post today that said . . . well, never mind what it said. It was all wrong, though.

  All wrong.

  But that just goes to show how stupid the cops are and why they'll never be asking me about things.

  Back to the blood. Sometimes I get off the subject. It's not that my mind wanders. Hardly that. My intelligence has been measured, and it's very high. My IQ is genius level. It's just that when I'm thinking about one thing, other things catch my interest. I'm a man with a wide range of interests. My mind likes to examine all aspects of a problem, but that leads me to digress now and then.

  The blood.

  As I was saying, they don't know, the sheep in the streets. They just have no idea.

  The cops know, though.

  Oh, yes. The cops know.

  They've been there after I've gone. They've seen the walls, the floors. Sometimes even the ceilings. The cops know about the blood, all right.

  That's all they find, however, the blood and the bodies. They don't find any fingerprints, and they don't find any fibers. No hair, no semen. They don't find a thing to let them know that I've been there.

  They never will.

  I'm much too careful for that, now. The first time, that was different, but after all, it was the first time. Everyone is entitled to a few mistakes, and I didn't even know there was going to be a first time. It just more or less happened.

  After that, though, I knew I'd have to do it again, but I knew that I'd have to do it right. I didn't want to be caught. If I were ever caught, then I'd have to stop.

  And I don't want to stop.

  The only record of what I've done will be kept on this disk, and I'm keeping this because someday I expect to be quite famous. I'll tell the world my story then, and everyone will see just exactly how brilliantly I carried everything out.

  There will be movie offers, I'm sure, and the big stars will be fighting to play me. I'd really like for Paul Newman to get the part, but he's too old. It will have to be one of the young ones, maybe Dennis Quaid.

  They'll have to get someone young and handsome, and they'll need someone who can show the requisite amount of intelligence. I think Quaid can do it, even if he did play Jerry Lee Lewis.

  They'll need someone who can show exactly how clever I was and how I fooled everyone, unlike most of the poor incompetent fools who give my hobby a bad name.

  You take Bundy, for instance. He was stupid; he got caught. And then he waited until the last to start talking, so nobody really knew whether to believe him or not. Sure, he got a lot of books written about him, but he never told anyone how it really was. He had the chance, but he didn't know what to do with it. It won't be like that with me.

  In the first place, I won't get caught. And when I decide that the world's ready for the truth, it will all be printed out in black and white. Right now, I'm storing it all on this floppy disk. Computers are a wonderful thing. It won't be as if I have anything written down where just anyone can read it. But it will be there if I decide to let the world in on the facts.

  Otherwise, no one will ever know exactly how things happened, how those women died.

  I'm the only one who knows. They can guess, speculate, but they can never put it together. I'm the one with the knowledge. I did it. I was there.

  I keep forgetting to talk about the blood. I don't know why I keep getting off the track, unless it's like I said: I want to get everything down right, and all these other things keep occurring to me.

  There's not always so much blood, anyway, not every single time. It just depends on how you do things. That's one of the reasons I'll never be caught. I don't ever do it the same way twice.

  Bundy did. He thought he was smart, but he wasn't.

  He couldn't help it, I guess, but he went for the same type of woman every time. They even looked the same. I've studied the case and seen the photos in the books; I know. And he used the same approach lots of times, too, before he went more or less off his rocker there at the end.

  That won't ever happen to me, either, going off my rocker, I mean.

  No way.

  If there's one thing I'm sure of, it's that I'm completely sane, a lot saner than most of the people I know.

  It's just that I look at things differently, see things other men can't see.

  Like the blood marks.

  That's what I look for, the blood marks. Very few women have them, but when I see them, I know them.

  Other men don't, but I do.

  Sometimes the marks might be on their faces, other times in their eyes. I don't know why I was the one chosen to be able to spot them, but I was. There's nothing I can do about it.

  Other men may look at the same woman and wonder what
she'd look like in a bikini, or what she'd look like in a leather garter belt, or what she'd look like if they stripped her naked. How she'd squirm under them if they fucked her or cry out when she came.

  I look at her and wonder how she'd look with her head cut off, or with her stomach laid open, or with her mouth twisted in a scream as I tell her that she's going to die. I wonder how that scream would sound.

  It's all in the point of view.

  When they've got the blood marks on them, they're just asking for it. Why no one else can see this has always been a mystery to me, but it's probably that you have to be of a higher order of intelligence to notice in the first place. Most men are just dumb sons-of-bitches anyway.

  It takes vision to see the blood marks.

  I would never touch a woman without the marks on her. That's what I mean about being sane. Bundy finally went berserk, just breaking into that sorority house and killing randomly. He even bit one of the girls, left his tooth marks, for god’s sake.

  Stupid.

  Insane.

  And think about Jack the Ripper. He never got caught, so they say, but maybe he should have been. He killed in the same area all the time, killed the same kind of women. Whores, all of them. It’s a wonder the Ripper remained free.

  You couldn't get by with methods like that today, not at all. You wouldn't have a chance. The cops, as stupid as they are, would be all over you sooner or later.

  You've got to be smart. You've got to watch for the women with the blood marks on them, and when you find them you've got to kill them.

  But not if they know each other. Not if they're from the same part of town. Not if there's any connection between them at all.

  You can't let the cops have a pattern, a clue, anything. Dumb as they are, they'd get you.

  The blood. That's all they find after I've been there and gone, and sometimes not even the blood.

  There have been nine so far.

  There will be more.

  Chapter 2

  "Goddammit," the chief said. He knew there would be more, too. He could feel it. "There's got to be a connection, Howland. You know it as well as I do."

  Howland looked across the desk at the Chief, who had come to Houston from a southern city where he had made his reputation because his department had cracked one of the biggest and most puzzling serial killer cases ever to splash across the front pages of the nation.

  To Howland, a homicide investigator, the Chief didn't look like anything special. Just a slight, balding man with a beaky nose and faint smile lines at the corners of his mouth. He always wore his uniform for photo opportunities, but now he was wearing a dark blue suit with a vest, a white shirt and a dark tie.

  Howland had to admit, however, that he himself didn't look like anything special, either. He was lanky and spare, with mild blue eyes. His unruly brown hair tended to fall over his forehead, and he had a habit of brushing it back, even when it was still in place. He looked like he might go to sleep if he got still and stayed in one place for very long. His suit bagged at the knees and looked like it needed pressing.

  He had the highest percentage of solved cases in Homicide.

  "Look, Chief," he said. His voice was light, soft, hard to hear if you weren't listening carefully. "We've checked everything. I mean, everything. There's no connection. The closest we came was those two that went to the same high school and graduated the same year, but there were over four hundred people in their class, and as far as we can find out they didn't even know each other when they were in school. They sure as hell haven't seen each other since then. And that's the best we've got."

  The Chief got up and walked around to the front of his desk. He was no more impressive standing than he was when he sat, though his suit certainly fit better than Howland's. Howland figured the Chief couldn't be more than five eight.

  Howland himself was an inch over six feet. He unfolded himself and leaned forward in his chair, but he didn't get up. The Chief didn't like it when the taller officers towered over him.

  "They're all young," the Chief said.

  Howland nodded. That was true. Between the ages of twenty-one and twenty-seven.

  "Doesn't get us very far, though," he said. "That's about the only thing they had in common." So far, there had been two real blondes, two bleached blondes, one redhead and four brunettes, of varying shades. The Chief knew all that.

  "There's something we're missing,” the Chief said. "I can smell it."

  Howland could smell it, too. His nose for that sort of thing was just as good as the Chief's, if not somewhat better. Unfortunately, however, there was absolutely no proof of any connection. You had to have the proof. About the only ones who could catch the bad guys by smell were those dogs that they used at airports and high schools.

  ''You thinking about setting up a task force?" Howland asked.

  "Hell, no. What do you think I want to do, scare every young woman in the city shitless? The newspapers would have a field day and rake us over the coals for not coming up with any more than we have. As long as there's no connection, they'll lay off."

  Howland wasn't sure of that. "I think some of those reporters smell it, too, Chief. They're asking more and more questions pointing that way."

  "Yeah. Well, let them come up with the connection and they can rake us all they want to. As long as they let me know what it is."

  "So,"' Howland said. "We're just going to treat it on a case-by-case basis, right?"

  "Right,"' the Chief said with a curt nod. "Except that you're going to be assigned all the cases."

  "That might give somebody the wrong idea," Howland said. "Or the right one."

  "Everyone in the department will catch on quick," the Chief said. "The reporters might not, not if we don't tell them. And I'm not going to tell them." He looked at Howland pointedly.

  "'Hey, you don't have to worry about me," Howland said. "I never tell those guys the time of day."

  "There'll be leaks within the department, though, ' ' the Chief said. “There always are."

  That was true, Howland knew. Like any other organization, the Police Department thrived on rumor and gossip. "You'll want to talk to Romain," the Chief said.

  No I won't, Howland thought. No one wanted to talk to Romain. "I'll go by today," he said.

  "You'll go by this morning," the Chief said. "You'll go by at ten-thirty, to be exact. I had my secretary make an appointment for you."

  "Oh," Howland said. "Thanks."

  The Chief smiled. He knew that Howland would simply have told him later that Romain wasn't in or that he'd just missed him or that he'd gotten tied up with his paperwork and hadn't had the time.

  "Romain's a good man," the Chief said.

  "I know that," Howland said. "He's the best." But that didn't make the son-of-a-bitch any easier to take.

  Chapter 3

  Romain didn't care whether anyone on the force found him easy to take. He didn't give much of a shit if nobody did. In fact, he would have preferred it that way. He didn't like anyone that he worked with very much, no one that he could think of, and he thought it was only fair if they didn't like him, either.

  Romain was almost six feet tall, thin as a plank, with the kind of face that would make him look youthful even when he grew old. The eyes gave him away, though. The eyes were old already, a thousand years old.

  He had sandy red hair, thin and combed back from his forehead, and he wore thick glasses with heavy black plastic rims, the kind no one wore anymore. The glasses served to make his sad eyes look even older and sadder.

  The truth of it was, Romain thought most people were shit. There might be one or two of them out there somewhere that were worth something, but Romain didn't know them.

  Romain was the way he was for at least two reasons.

  One reason was that Romain was a cop, a member of a profession that was more often than not confronted with human beings at their very worst.

  Romain didn't often see the loving father gently changing
his baby daughter's diaper and feeding her with a bottle.

  What Romain saw was the thirty-year-old man who had snatched his two-year-old girl up by her ankles and whacked her head up against the wall "a couple of times, that's all. Hell, what's the big deal? The little bitch wouldn't stop squalling."

  Romain didn't see the couple, happily married for fifty-six years, who still held hands when walking down the street and shared their joys and triumphs in secret conversations.

  What Romain saw was the woman whose husband had told her one time too many to "bring me another fucking beer, and get a move on," after which the loving wife had gone in search of her husband's .38-caliber pistol that he kept in a bedside table for self-defense and had then blown the top of the sorry bastard's head off, splattering blood and brains all over the shabby living room, including the TV set that he had watched incessantly.

  Romain didn't see the teenage boy who earned his own spending money by doing yard work around the neighborhood and who spent his spare time painting the house of some widowed impoverished grandmother.

  What Romain saw was the teenage boy who shot his buddy three times in the face with a .22 rifle and then took the $200 stereo out of his buddy's pickup because "it sounded real good, and I wanted it."

  Those were the kinds of things that tended to sour Romain on humanity.

  Add to that the fact that Romain was not just an ordinary cop. He was a police psychologist. He had to talk to those people, and he had to try to explain them to his colleagues.

  It wasn't easy.

  Everything Romain had learned about human behavior while working at his chosen profession led him to believe that human beings were basically pretty damned worthless.

  For every example of human dignity and worth that a colleague would bring up, Romain would bring up five examples of human greed, selfishness, neglect and callous disregard of the lives of others.