Drinker

“Ravi had just worked a double shift and was having trouble keeping his eyes open.” The young woman spoke through her tears, arms folded, and legs crossed. Her foot fidgeted in such a way that spoke of her harried mental state. Traumatized, thought Detective Peters. With good reason. Her boyfriend had just been found dead and drained of nearly every drop of blood, a pair of puncture wounds in his neck the only observable injury. Peters watched her closely, looking for any signs of guilt. He found none. Conducting interviews in the field often meant visiting a person’s home or place of business. It had been here in the bar the victim and his girlfriend had both worked until nearly midnight. It was now nearly three a.m, the last customers having been shooed away over an hour ago. Sitting across from her in the oversized booth, Peters made an mmm hmm sound that suggested the woman continue only when she felt ready. In his experience, the death of a lover elicited grief comparable at times to that of a child or beloved pet.

“He’s been working doubles a lot lately,” the woman continued, and realizing she’d spoken of him in the present tense she dropped her head into her hands and sobbed anew. Peters allowed her to finish, and when she apologized for her pitiful condition, he gave her a look a sympathetic parent may give a child.

“No need, ma’am. You have every reason to be upset.” Ten years in Homicide had made him familiar with death, as well as what it did to those left behind. Hundreds of cases, yet none as unusual as this. A couple taking a midnight stroll through a park had discovered the young man’s body propped against a tree, the eyes and mouth still open. Skin the color of chalk, and those two puncture marks to his neck. Not wholly unusual by itself, until Peters considered the six similar murders in the past year. But if this had been the work of a serial killer, he had never displayed his victim in such a way before. A new tactic that spoke of becoming more comfortable with killing. Or enjoyment perhaps.

“Did you observe any suspicious persons immediately before or after you last saw Ravi?” Detective Peters asked.

“Not that I remember,” she said through a series of sniffles. “After work, we had a bite to eat at the pub down the street. The only other people there were a few regulars and the normal bartender.”

“No one else? Are you sure?”

“Yes, I’m sure,” she said, then after a moment’s thought her face came alive. “Wait—there was a man sitting in the corner I’d never seen before. I looked up once and caught him looking at me. Not in a creepy way, but it still made me feel funny.”

The detective scribbled a note in his pad then leveled his gaze on her. “Funny?”

“Yeah. Most times, a man will look away when a woman he doesn’t know catches him looking at her. He didn’t do that. He just kept looking, like he was appraising me.”

She shuddered.

Peters nodded to himself. “Can you describe him?”

“Yes. He had dark hair and very pale skin. Like he hadn’t seen sunlight in a while.”

“Height? Build?”

The woman thought for a moment. “Average, I’d say.”

“If you saw him again in a line-up, would you be able to identify him?”

“Probably.” Then, “do you think he may have had something to do with Ravi’s death?”

The detective treaded carefully. The description she’d just given him closely matched one given by witnesses in the six other murders. Each time, a strange man with jet black hair and pale skin had been seen in the area just before the victims had been found. Peters had no intention of setting off unwarranted alarm; giving away crucial facts known only to police and the killer would only harm his cause.

“Clothing?”

“Black, mostly, with high boots. His shirt had frilly white cuffs, like something you’d see in those old pictures. What’s that age called?”

“Victorian?”

“Yes, that’s it. He looked like he’d just stepped out of some Victorian picture. It was weird.”

The detective frowned. He asked if she had a recent picture of her boyfriend.

“I took one of him tonight,” she said, and after thumbing through her phone she held it out so Peters could see it. In the photo, Ravi mugged for the camera, a playboy smile plastered on his rugged but handsome face. He’d been wearing a woven leather necklace adorned with orange beads. Yet his body had been found without such a necklace, and no sign of it had been found at the crime scene.

“Do you mind showing me other photos of him?” Peters asked. Obliging, the young woman swiped through dozens of photos depicting Ravi alone, and of he and her together. In all the photos, he had been wearing the same necklace.

A souvenir for the killer?

After several more questions, Peters slipped the notepad into his jacket pocket and stood to leave. “If you think of anything else, you have my card. And again, my deepest condolences.”

The young woman nodded her thanks before dissolving into fresh tears. Peters placed a gentle hand on her shoulder before turning to leave.

Death. It never got any easier.

* * *

Stepping beneath the crime scene tape, Detective Peters surveyed the murder scene. Found in a park by lovers on a midnight stroll, the victim remained as he’d been discovered: sitting propped against a tree, still fully clothed, mouth and eyes still open. With uniformed policemen and forensic teams working nearby, Peters knelt beside the body and, using his flashlight, inspected the two needle-like punctures on the side of the victim’s neck. Consulting his notes, he read over the woman’s statement. According to her, she and the victim had just gotten off work and had been walking to a nearby eatery when they’d begun to argue. The victim had decided to end the night alone, electing to take the long way home through the park instead of taking his normal route. Romantic partners were the first suspects in a murder, Peters knew, and this case had been no different. But after speaking with her, he had quickly crossed the girlfriend off his list. The victim weighed two hundred thirty pounds and had played football his whole life. The girlfriend weighed just one-hundred fifteen-pounds and suffered from asthma. Besides, her grief had appeared genuine. Looking over the body again, Peters noted no signs of a struggle, and no blunt force trauma to suggest he’d been knocked unconscious. Just those two puncture marks. Speaking aloud to himself, as he often did to better place himself in the victim’s shoes, Peters did his best to step away from himself, from his own personal concerns and into the victim’s mind.

“I’m tired, just worked a double-shift. I’ve had a fight with my girlfriend over bullshit and I’m not in the mood to deal with it. I live six blocks away, and normally I walk around the park, but tonight I need to clear my mind so I take the long way through the park.” Peters spoke this quietly to himself, reverent in this solemnity of death. A human being had lost his life here just hours before. Conversely, a killer had also been here, performing his grim work that had entailed draining nearly five quarts of blood from a grown man’s body. That fact alone troubled the detective, but even more so did the fact that not a single drop of blood had been found on the victim’s clothing or on the ground. The medical examiner had shaken his head, claiming such a feat to be impossible for even an experienced physician or embalmer.

A patrolman passed who the detective recognized. Saying hello, Peters stood and swept his eyes across the darkened, empty park beyond where his fellow officers worked. “Where did you go?” he whispered to himself. A half-moon appeared from behind a cloud, and it was then that Peters noticed something he had not seen during his first inspection of the scene. Fresh footprints. Leading away from the tree into the shadows. His instincts told him to radio for another detective, that following a suspect alone into the darkness was unwise at best. But another part of him argued that time itself was a detective’s worst enemy. If he waited for available back-up, or worse, until daybreak, the trail could grow cold. Seizing the initiative, Peters drew a compact flashlight from his jacket pocket and flicked it on. Following the beam of light, he walked through the underbrush, tracking the fresh prints. Whomever had made them had been of average weight, he judged. Boots, with worn heels. Peters thought back to what the woman had said about the man she’d caught looking her way, of his pale skin and his strange clothing. Peters imagined the smaller man overpowering Ravi, then inserting some instrument into his neck to drain his blood. How had he managed it, and why? Of the many ways to kill someone (and Peters had seen them all), this had been a first. Intrigued on a personal level, he told himself he would follow the trail until he found a resolution.

He didn’t have to go far.

The prints led him half a mile to the far edge of the park, where they ended at an alley in an industrial part of the city. From his experience, he knew no one lived here. Rats had infiltrated the area years ago, driving away even the most hardened vagrants. Sensing the presence of someone nearby, Peters halted at the corner of an old factory and weighed his next move. He could either move up the street, along the shuttered and dilapidated buildings that fronted the rear of the park or head up the darkened alleyway. He chose the alley. Clicking off his flashlight, he drew his gun and stepped cautiously along the cobbled bricks, training his eyes on the shadowed crevasses and darkened doorways as he went. His sixth sense, one he’d honed from years of tracking killers, told him someone had taken this precise route recently. Where are you hiding? And why on earth do you drain their—

A noise from ahead. Someone, or something disturbing a garbage can. Much larger than a rat, by the sound. Flattening himself against the brick wall of a building, Peters trained his eyes into the fallow darkness. His heart racing, he re-considered radioing for backup. Deciding again that it would take too long and that the added activity would eliminate his element of surprise, he chose against it. No. He would go on alone. If after another ten minutes the trail ended without a sighting or solid clue, he would go back.

Live to fight another day had been his career-long mantra.

Keeping as close to the brick building as possible, Peters came to a large dumpster. The noise he’d heard had come from a rear-entranceway on the other side of it, and judging that a person standing there would not have had the opportunity to flee down the alley without Peters seeing him, even in the semi-darkness, he made the tactical decision to immediately take whomever may be hiding there at gunpoint. He removed his flashlight and placed it beneath his outstretched gun. Stepping to the far side of the dumpster, he moved slowly out at an angle. This would give him a line of fire should it be required, while lessening his exposure as he slowly cut the corner. Once the entranceway became visible, Peters flicked his flashlight on, bathing the area in sudden light.

Nothing. A metal garbage can sat beside the recessed door of an abandoned building. The door stood slightly ajar, a slice of blackness within. Never in a million years should he or any cop who valued his life enter such a place alone, but he did, for reasons he did not entirely understand, and once he’d pushed open the door and entered he knew with every fiber of his being he’d made a grave mistake. Still, his sense of purpose propelled him forward. He’ll never stop killing if I don’t go in, a voice in his head said, and almost in response, a noise from a nearby staircase came to his ears. Had they been footsteps? He couldn’t be sure. Straining his ears, Peters stood stock still for a full minute. When no further sound came save for the scurrying of rats, he found the staircase and began to mount it, taking each step methodically, as if each movement itself had been a direct and separate order from his brain.

He came to a landing then continued to the floor above. Here, a fetid, almost ancient smell came to his nose, like a chest full of clothes opened after a hundred years. Another smell lay beneath it, something dark and troubling. Peters licked his lips. His heart continued to race. He moved the beam of his flashlight across the mostly barren floor, and at first he thought he saw a person lying on the floor and began to shout an order for the person to show their hands when he realized what he’d seen had actually been a container of some kind. Approaching slowly, he recognized it as a box of sorts, oblong and made of dark wood. Seeing no one to his left and right, Peters leaned forward and reached out for the box’s scuffed and dusty lid, his curiosity spilling over into unreasonableness. You shouldn’t be here. Yet here he stood, alone and a mile from the crime scene, without anyone knowing where he was. It went against every tenet of good police work. His heart climbed into his throat. His hands lay slick with sweat, the pistol in his hand feeling strangely worthless now, a toy. Unable to stop himself from doing so, Peters curled his fingers beneath the box’s lid and lifted it, expecting for nothing to happen, but the lid came open, and as he shone his light inside the box a sound of surprise and horror escaped him. As quickly as he’d opened the box he stumbled backward, the lid slamming closed and the flashlight falling from his hand because he’d realized a person had recently been lying in the fabric-lined box, the indentation of a head still present in the plush white pillow, and even worse was what he’d seen resting atop the pillow–a braided leather necklace adorned with orange beads.

Turning back toward the staircase, the half-moonlight spilling in through the window, Peters came face to face with a figure that had just stepped from the shadows. A figure dressed in black, with equally black hair and skin that had not seen the sun in months, years perhaps. Before he could pull the trigger, Peters felt the figure grasp his wrist, the fingernails pressing into his tendons and muscles with impossible strength. Crying out, he felt the gun slip from his hand where it went clattering down the staircase. On instinct, he brought his free hand up to strike the figure in the head, but the figure caught his hand mid-strike and brought it down to his side, slowly, as if the action itself were some silent rebuke. Struggling to free himself, Peters soon realized the strength against him was too great to overcome. Remembering his training, he head-butted the figure, but instead of feeling the expected crunch of bone and cartilage, he felt something much different—something impervious and unrelenting, like concrete or even steel. Resorting to using his feet, he kicked wildly at the air as the figure grasped him by his jacket lapels and lifted him a full foot off the floor.

And then he saw them. In the figure’s black and soulless eyes—faces, dozens of faces, flipping by in rapid succession. It reminded him of the old Viewmaster devices from his childhood. The faces of men and women continued to flip by in the figure’s eyes, faces from every background, dating back to the earliest days of the city, the last face of which belonging to the young woman’s boyfriend Ravi. And all of them viewed in the final moments of their lives and meeting their fates the same way–by those fangs the figure revealed now in his yawning maw of a mouth, the jaw unhinging to accommodate an object the size of a small tree limb—or a person’s neck.

That fetid, dank smell came even stronger to Peters as he struggled in vain to escape the figure’s iron grip. He flailed and clawed, to no avail. Digging his fingers into the figure’s face, he watched as he peeled away the flesh there as if it were already dead, leaving behind blackened, bloodless tracks in the skin that sealed themselves up a moment later. Screaming, he pounded at the figure’s ever-widening mouth, pushing it away as best he could but unable to resist the drawing force that brought him closer, closer still. And then the sensation of being pricked by needles in the side of his neck, faint at first, like that from an animal or insect that by nature had evolved to do so without detection, until it was too late and the deed gone so far that it could not be undone. Then the pain, like electricity coursing through his entire body, and his eyes snapped opened wide in shock and surprise. He felt his life’s blood being emptied–not emptied, but drank—and heard the greedy, gulping sounds from the figure’s throat, and he knew then he’d never leave this place alive, that once his lifeless body was cast aside by whatever this figure was, it would seek out Ravi’s girlfriend next, then dozens more afterward, because as long as blood flowed through veins it would do what it did best, what was in its nature.

Drink.