Dangerous Toys

The Final Girl In the late 1970s the San Francisco Chronicle dubbed him The Headsman. In the 1980s he was known as The Turnpike John, Killjoy, and The Santa Rosa Cannibal in Oregon, Wisconsin, and New Mexico respectively. He thought of himself simply as The Monster. No one had connected these disparate, sensational killers, but together The Monster's victim count was just shy of Gary Ridgeway's official count of 48. The Monster never realized how much pride he'd taken in his prolificacy until 2003 when Ridgeway confessed to the Green River murders, officially surpassing him, but even then, he'd not considered resuming his old work. He'd turned 65 that year, a little long in the tooth for a predator, and the drive to kill had simply never returned after the accident that had almost killed him. It was something he'd thought about a lot during his idle years, keeping careful track in a black hardcover sketchbook, dedicating two pages per victim, one with details of the girl and the kill, the second a drawing to remember them. His drawings were quite good. He had always been a good artist. When he died, he hoped someone would find the old sketchbook, so he could finally take credit for his work. They would put him in the ground knowing everything he’d done, and knowing he’d gotten away with it. For years The Monster thought his days of blood and death were long behind him. He was wrong. Pullman, Washington was a small town with pretensions, a farming community with a population swollen far past its comfort zone by students attending WSU, a university best known for its veterinary and agricultural programs, its football program, and drunk students falling from frat house windows. Its music and arts programs were lesser known, but also impressive. Jenna was a junior with an art major and a minor in communications, a program director for the campus radio station, and the sole person responsible for the station’s supplemental video blog. She was petite, vaguely Asian, very pretty, and politically liberal. If The Monster could be said to have a type, Jenna was it, but he never limited himself to a type. He liked variety. The thing that made Jenna most special was her schedule, late shifts at the studio, and the long walk back to her dorm. He had watched her before. She usually walked alone. The students felt safe on campus. It was their place. That would end tonight. He watched her from a tight cluster of trees where the walkway from the school of communication intersected Spokane Street. It was a quarter past nine when she stepped from the darkness on the building's south side. She had her backpack over a shoulder and a cell phone to her ear. Her voice was high and clear in the empty courtyard. She laughed, then hung up and slipped the phone into her pocket. For the next several seconds the only sound in the night was the slap of flat-soled shoes on the cobbled path. The Monster closed his eyes, willed the jackrabbit beat of his heart to calm until it matched the slow steady slap, slap, slap ... and stop. In the moment between beats, the monster was fully present for the first time since Rosa, in Boise, Idaho, 1996. Rosa had not been his type, only convenient. The Monster had been in his bloodlust and she had been willing to get in his car for fifty dollars. "Where we going?" she asked him over and over again, merely curious to start, then anxious, and finally terrified as he took her out of the city, and when she lunged across the seat to grab his steering wheel, he'd drawn first blood. He punched her in the face, swerving onto the shoulder as he pried her hand loose of the wheel, then back into his lane as he grabbed her hair and slammed her head against the dash. A passing truck blew its air horn but never slowed. Rosa groaned and flopped unconscious back into her seat. The Monster continued eastward away from the city, past the smaller town of Mountain Home, and finally turned off at the Bruneau Dunes State Park. He popped the glove box open, found his Idaho Parks Pass and put it on the dash, but it was past midnight and there were no park rangers at the entrance. He drove past the park headquarters, past the camping grounds and the visitor’s center. Rosa was awake again, curled into the passenger seat and sobbing quietly to herself, but she didn't try to escape. As if she was used to a little rough treatment, resigned to it. The Monster parked in a cul-de-sac at the end of the road, within sight of southern Idaho’s famous moving dunes. He pocketed his keys, shut his door, and walked to the passenger side. Rosa didn’t move when he opened the door for her. “It’s okay,” he said. He smiled and pulled a rolled up twenty from his watch pocket. Unrolled, the bill disclosed a joint. He offered them to Rosa, and when she reached for them, he stepped back. Rosa stared up at him, wiped a fresh trickle of blood from her nose. “You won’t hit me again?” The Monster shook his head. Rosa climbed out and took the offered bill, twenty on top of the fifty he’d already paid her, and the joint. He closed the door while she lit up and led her out to the dunes while she smoked. The Monster took Rosa on the loose slope, pushing her deeper into the shifting sand with each thrust. She cried out again and again, biting her lips in a vain attempt at silence. The Monster was not worried. The campgrounds were too far away for her muffled cries to carry, and the dunes were deserted. He thrust again, squeezed her breasts hard enough to leave imprints of his fingers, and was excited to greater violence by the tears tracking down her cheeks. She did not notice when his right hand released her breast and reached toward the boots he’d taken off and set beside them. She didn’t see him reach inside, didn’t see the gut hook blade he slid from the sheath hidden inside the boot. His left hand released her other breast and found her throat, choking off any scream before it could begin, and he brought the hook end of his gutting knife down to the soft flesh beneath her sternum. The point of the hook made a popping sound as it punctured her, and as he finished, he dragged it down her stomach to her belly button, unzipping her in one smooth stroke. The sound of parting flesh was like old canvas tearing. Rosa stared up at the monster, pain and horror twisting her face, clouding her eyes. She pulled and beat at his strangling hand, but her hands fell away as her strength and life ebbed. When he thought she must be at the edge of death, needing only one light push to send her over, he reached inside her and pulled out a fistful of her guts. He held them up for her to see. Her eyes blinked, her lips pursed and parted. She reached up for him one last time, but her arm fell limp to the sand beside her. The Monster spent the next hour digging a trench in the sand at the base of the dune, and when he could dig no deeper without the sand collapsing into it, dragged Rosa’s eviscerated body down into it. He threw her clothes in on top of her, recovered his seventy dollars plus another eighty-five from her purse, and dropped it in beside her. He filled in the trench, burying her deeply enough to avoid immediate discovery, and covered over the bloody patches of sand he could find. The Monster was on the road again a few hours before dawn, the Bruneau Dunes and Mountain Home behind him, when a dozing tractor-trailer driver crossed the median and jackknifed across both westbound lanes. The Monster, half-dozing himself after the night’s exertions, plowed into the tipped trailer without ever touching his brakes. Most of a year passed before he opened his eyes from a hospital bed, and a great deal more time passed before he rose from it under his own power. Things could have been worse, he knew. Rosa remained undiscovered while he convalesced, had in fact remained hidden until after he left southern Idaho behind for good. For all The Monster knew she was still there, her once shallow grave now much deeper as the constantly shifting sands of the Bruneau Dunes piled up on top of her. Jenna stopped at the sidewalk only feet away from The Monster in his concealment. She searched the street in both directions and frowned. Then she saw him, and smiled, as if in happy surprise. “Professor Smith!” After a single, surprised step away from him, she approached. “What are you doing out so late?” The Monster returned her smile, happy that she was making it so easy for him, at least to start. “I don’t sleep well,” he said. “I like to walk.” Jenna peered past him down the street, then back the other way again. “Are you expecting someone?” “No,” she said, giving up her search. “Only hoping.” “I can give you a ride home, if you want.” This was where things could get tricky. Hard or easy never used to be a concern for him, he had always been ready for a challenge, but these days he took easy wherever he could find it. He wasn’t as young or fit as he used to be. She eyed him shrewdly, tilted her head in way she no doubt thought was coquettishly cute, then winked. “Well, I know you’re not a maniac or pervert, so sure.” That’s right, no threat here. Only doddering old Charlie Smith, Art History professor and everyone’s favorite harmless old man. She followed him to his car, an aging Tempo with sun-blistered paint, chattering all the while as if silence made her nervous. “I just wrapped up the new video blog, it’s about the alt-right movement on the WSU campus, but I want to do something lighter next week … maybe about the art program, if I can get an interview from my professor.” She winked at him. “I think that could be arranged,” The Monster said as he fished his keys out of his pocket. He unlocked the passenger door and opened it for Jenna. She swept past him and tossed her backpack in the rear seat before slipping inside. He closed the door behind her, unable to suppress the predatory smile he saw reflected back at him from tinted glass of the passenger door window. Not able to slow the quickening of his heart. He felt The Monster crouched and waiting inside him now. Soon. “Your door’s busted,” she said as he slipped behind the wheel and started the old car’s engine. She pointed to the stub of broken plastic on her door, the handle that he’d snapped off that morning. “Only on the inside. Could you get my glasses?” He motioned toward the glove box. She popped it open and wrinkled her nose. “Something in there stinks!” She found the clamshell case and handed it to him. He opened it, pulled out the sopping rag folded inside, and slapped it against her nose. Jenna squealed in surprise, slapped at his arm, but only for a few seconds. Her slaps weakened to feeble swipes, then her hands fell to her sides. The Monster stuffed the rag back into the clamshell case, shut it back inside the glove box, and fumbled beneath his seat for a moment. He brought out his glasses, a roll of duct tape, a pair of sturdy zip ties, and a baggie with a small blue pill. He took his pill first, he wanted to be ready when the moment came, then went to work with the tape and zip ties. A minute later he was driving again. Jenna sat across from him, sagging against her restraint, bound at the ankles and wrists, her mouth taped shut. The Monster was ready to play. He made his first kill at the age of fifteen. It wasn’t something he’d planned, just something that happened, and it was the closest he’d ever come to getting caught. Her name was Patricia. He first saw her from his deer stand high up in the pines overlooking the Old Peck Grade. Afternoon was fading toward evening, the sun and moon peeking at each other from opposite sides of a clear sky, and it had been unusually warm for fall.