He fingered the suppressor, feeling the rough edges where he’d filed it down to fit his gun. This was the fun part. He loved the few moments before he went in for the kill. Wiping the abnormal bastards off the face of the earth was a pleasure; he was more than happy when he was assigned that subsection of the list. More than happy. It didn’t matter that he had a few latent tendencies himself, that he fantasized late at night about the center of another man.

You’re not a homo, man. Don’t worry. Would I let you be a homo? Homey ain’t no homo.

The angel started to laugh, holding his belly, rolling back so far that he tipped right off his shoulder. He felt him crawling around his back, trying to get his footing. He leaned back in the seat and tried to smush him, ignored the squeaks.

Fucker.

No one needed to know about his…his…proclivities. That was his secret, one he even kept from the angel, who was climbing back onto his shoulder, mildly out of breath.

Ain’t no secrets from me, homey. I know what a trick you are.

Shut. Up!

When he went to jail, where it was expected, then he could indulge. In the meantime, he’d annihilate the abnormal ones who flaunted their desires.

The entrance to the park was on his right. He swerved into the parking lot. Licked his lips. The angel hung on to his ear for balance, and they both smiled. This was getting good. This was getting really good.

Nineteen

Colleen Keck was nearing her breaking point. Flynn was finally asleep. The boy had sensed something was wrong with his mother and insisted on clinging stubbornly to her neck like a limpet all night. She’d had a bitch of a time getting him down, too. He’d wanted to be held. Not be read to from his favorite book, not watch TV, not even have me time. Every time she loosened her hold on him, he began to wail. In the end, she’d left him crying into his pillow, stomach thick with guilt. She asked Tommy’s ghost to watch over Flynn, to comfort him if possible. It must have worked—he’d finally drifted off a little past ten.

In between Flynn’s crying jags, she’d been fielding calls all evening about the possible sad resolution to the Peter Schechter case. The phone started ringing around 8:00 p.m., a source of hers with Metro who she could always count on to spill the beans. There was a submerged body out in Percy Priest Lake, and the initial description matched the Schechter boy: white, young, dark hair. No one wanted to jump to conclusions, of course, but logic dictated it could possibly be him. There weren’t too many active missing persons cases in the region that met the criteria at the moment.

She had such a hard time with the cases that involved children. Since that was so much of her daily workload, she always felt on edge, but tonight it was worse. The Schechter boy, the Zodiac letter, the reports she’d gotten from her contacts in Boston and New York, all seemed to indicate that copycats of the Zodiac, Son of Sam and the Boston Strangler were back on the scene. So much death, so splashy and forward. These killings were guaranteed coverage. She’d been posting her speculations all day, now all the major media outlets had it. She’d gotten the scoop first, of course, but they were running truncated versions of it now. They published updates every fifteen minutes with no new information, creating a panic. And their reporters and producers claimed the story was their scoop. First on the scene. Typical.

How often do three murders happen on the same night that imitate famous serial killers? Insult to injury, she hadn’t even been mentioned for breaking the story. She should send a note to the producers, let them know she’d been first. She needed the media exposure, it would increase the traffic to the site, which meant more money in her coffers. A story like this could generate some serious cash.

She wondered for a minute if Peter Schechter could be a part of the copycat murders, then shook her head. Her imagination was running away with her. She didn’t get the sense that he was a part of this insanity. The only major serial killer Nashville had ever had was the Snow White, and he didn’t kill boys. No, Schechter was probably a leftover from the Halloween massacre. That made much more sense.

The only thing she knew was to report the truth as it came in. So that was what she was doing. Her headline said it all.

Has Pete Schechter Been Found?

She linked to all the stories she’d done on the case, four in all. She wrote a short bit of copy, expressing sorrow for the family, emphasized that there would be more tomorrow and posted it. Her day was complete.

She poured a glass of wine, moved her laptop computer to the living room. Her work email was under control, not totally empty, but manageable. Her personal email inbox had a zero count. That wasn’t unusual. Her friends had been Tommy’s friends, and after he died, after the initial outpouring of grief and sadness, she’d slowly fallen off people’s radars. Part of it was by design. She liked the isolation, it helped her work the Felon E persona with minimal distractions. But the rest was “out of sight, out of mind.” Survivor’s guilt only lasted so long before people went back to their own busy lives.

The past was meant to be forgotten.

There were still one or two wives who would send her a note every once in a while, trying to include her in recipe exchanges and the like. She just wasn’t interested in those things anymore. Being a part of a family was very different than being the sole head of a family, especially one reduced to the remaining survivors. If you could call them that. No matter what they said, she couldn’t shake the feeling that people dealt with her out of guilt rather than a true desire for friendship. It was tiring.

She took a sip of wine. Alone was better. Alone was safe. Alone was…lonely. The blog kept her sane, at least.

Colleen’s normal habit at night, before unwinding in front of the television and heading to bed to sort of sleep, was to run through the comments on the previous day’s posts. She knew how important habit was, how far behind she could get after missing just a couple of days, so she took another sip of wine, opened her content management system and started. If they were all counted, across the multiple daily postings, she garnered thousands of comments a day from hundreds of unique individuals. Sometimes more, if a conversation started in the comments, which happened most days.

Yesterday’s posts contained nothing unusual. She read through them looking for trolls, but all seemed in order. As she was about to exit the program, she noticed that the comment count on the first Zodiac post from this morning was exponentially high, so, yawning, she went ahead and opened it, just for kicks. She usually liked to wait a full twenty-four hours before checking comments, giving people from all times zones a chance to get into the fray, but there were already seven hundred entries. She clicked the link and glanced through them.

One leaped out at her immediately.

I know who you are.

She felt her heart begin to race. She set the computer down, and got up to check the doors and windows. They were all locked up, just the way she left them. She was being silly. There were plenty of freaking whack jobs out there online, always taking a chance to poke at her. She couldn’t help herself, she was totally creeped out.