KILLER ADDICTION: When Murder Becomes A Habit

Chapter 17

Chapter 17

I CLEANED, SCRUBBED and exfoliated myself for what felt like an eternity. My skin was red raw, I was clean-shaven, and my hair was short. I’d cut my fingernails and toenails and had even trimmed my eyebrows, nose hair, and ear hair, for Christ’s sake. Once I started, I couldn’t stop. I wanted to wash all trace of my previous filth away and flush it down the drain.

I got dressed in my new outfit—shiny blue track pants, red check Miller western shirt and gleaming white Nike pumps, and for the ultimate finishing touch added my pimped-up sunnies. I checked myself out in the mirror and cracked a smile for the first time since Sally had died. She would have loved this outfit; it was exactly the oddball look she rocked. I grabbed some cash from my stash that I had weighted down in a waterproof bag at the bottom of the toilet cistern, then grabbed my push-bike and headed out the door of my motel room.

I rode the few miles to the police station, parked my bike in the hallway and made my way to the desk sergeant, noting with dread that it was the same asshole who had refused to take my missing person report. Thankfully, my marbles were more together than the last time I’d been in here, and I also had a different appearance. He still looked me up and down, but at least wasn’t dismissive. Clearly, he wasn’t much of a talker—anyone with half a brain should obviously interpret the meaning of his one raised eyebrow as, ‘Yes? May I help you?’

Responding to the unasked question, I inquired, ‘Is Detective Delaney in?’

This time the other eyebrow went up, which I gathered meant the sergeant had just asked another question. This man was the most economical wordsmith I’d ever encountered.

‘My name is Simon Winter,’ I answered.

Still, there was no verbal response from the impassive man behind the desk. With a flick of his head, he motioned me to the hardwood bench in the lobby, silently instructing me to wait. He picked up his phone, punched in a number and grunted something in a quiet voice down the phone, then again raised both eyebrows in my direction. His lip curled up in a sneer that silently communicated, ‘You have got to be shitting me! That guy?’ He put the phone back in its cradle and returned his attention to whatever mindless task had previously occupied him.

Half an hour later, Delaney finally appeared. He came out of the secure zone of the station’s inner sanctum, out into the lobby and then stopped in his tracks, looking me up and down. ‘Nice outfit, dickhead,’ he said in a perfectly deadpan delivery. ‘Did you build a time machine and go back to the eighties just to ransack a charity bin? Looks like the drugs knocked out your fashion radar.’

‘Nice to see you too, Delaney. I’ve missed you,’ I responded.

‘At least you can f*****g talk this time and you’re not jumping up and down like you’ve got fire ants in your jockstrap. And you’re not sweating and puking all over my police station. Looks like you cleaned up a bit. What’s it been, a couple of weeks? I wondered where you’d got to. Thought you might have OD’d and died in a gutter somewhere.’

‘No, decided against that option. I haven’t touched it since Sally died. Locked myself away in a motel room for ten days and went cold turkey.’

‘That’s hard-core Winter, I’ll give you that. It’s no picnic doing that on your own.’

‘Yeah, I’ve had better times. But I’ve got no one to blame but myself for what I had to go through. I deserved that withdrawal hell for getting Sally hooked on drugs.’

‘Didn’t end well for her, did it?’ said Delaney. ‘Or her family, for that matter. Her parents were real cut up about it. Something tells me you’re not on their Christmas list anymore. They’ve taken out a restraining order against you. So don’t contact them. Understand?’

This news came as a bit of a shock, but I guess it wasn’t entirely surprising. I had only met Sally’s parents twice, early in our relationship, and that hadn’t gone well. They had smelt a rat. Sadly, they were right. Before I’d met Sally, in my last year of college, I had blown out my knee playing football and after a long recovery ended up addicted to oxycodone, the powerful opioid painkiller. Apparently, I have an addictive personality.

After college, I had another serious knee injury—Sally and I met in hospital while I was in recovery. She was a cute nurse on my floor, and I was a charming patient; there were instant sparks, especially when it was time for my sponge bath and I couldn’t control my junk, which had a mind of its own.

Unfortunately for her, Sally had wanted to experience everything with me, and I was too selfish and self-absorbed to stop her. I’d been deeply in love with Sally and wanted to be with her all the time, doing anything and everything together in a destructive downward spiral. What started as bonding over alcohol soon escalated to pills, then cocaine, then crystal meth and finally onto the big daddy—h****n. If Sally hadn’t met me, she wouldn’t have gotten hooked on all that s**t and would still be alive today. And I wouldn’t be standing on the wrong side of a charge desk, staring like a dope at a silent police detective with a gloomy look on his face as I was processing all this and thinking about my dead junkie girlfriend.

‘You still in there somewhere, buddy?’ said Delaney, as he snapped his fingers right in front of my eyes. ‘Looks like you cooked that noggin of yours pretty damn hot, Winter. Dropped yourself down the old I.Q. scale a few notches, I think.’

‘Sorry, Frank. Still recovering. That s**t does some damage. It’ll take me some time to get back with it. Did Sally’s parents ID her body?’

‘Yep. The Medical Examiner cleaned her up first, took the syringes out of her eyeballs, for example. Sick bastard,’ said Frank with an involuntary shudder and a slow shake of his head.

‘Any progress on the case?’ I asked hopefully.

‘Nope. Nothing. Cold as an Alaskan winter. Nobody saw anything. The only person who could have helped her was unconscious, dead to the world and completely useless,’ he replied, with a deliberate stare right at me. ‘We processed the scene. Found a lot of evidence of you there, but not much else. The killer was careful. Brutal, but careful.’

‘Hm... sorry to hear that. Kind of hoped you would have made some progress by now,’ I said, in a disappointed tone.

‘What can I say? There’s only so much we can do. I’ll keep working the case, but don’t get your hopes up. A junkie taken from a park in the middle of the night is not exactly the case to generate any heat to get it solved. Sorry, Winter, but that’s all I’ve got for you,’ said Delaney with an air of resignation in his voice.

‘Okay, thanks Frank, I appreciate you giving it to me straight. I know the score. Can you at least tell me where she’s buried?’

‘Yeah, she’s over in Columbia Gardens Cemetery on Arlington Boulevard,’ he replied. ‘Good luck, Winter. I hope you can keep yourself clean. And find yourself a new f*****g tailor.’

‘Thanks Frank. Good to see those charm-school lessons are paying off. See you round,’ I replied, and took off down the hallway. I grabbed my bike, exited the station and then got my bearings and headed over to the cemetery. The closer I got to the graveyard, the heavier felt my heart, like an expanding sack of rocks in my chest.

After some searching, I found Sally’s grave, fresh with the beginnings of new green shoots coming through the soil. I laid down beside her on the grass, on my side and facing her headstone. I started my goodbye with a deep breath and immediately felt the tears form in my eyes and then spill out, running down my face. I placed a single sunflower on her grave, on a stem that was four feet tall. The head was a stunning bright yellow, almost glowing. Sally would have loved the deep hues. She was my sunshine, my light, and my colour. This flower captured all that; it was my gift and my apology.

‘Oh, Sally, I’m so sorry!’ I cried. ‘I’m sorry I dragged you down into the cesspit of my life. I’m sorry for debasing your beautiful life with the filth of my existence. Look what I did to you! I put my needs before yours—that’s not what love is. That’s not what a good man does. I’m sorry, from the bottom of my wasted heart.’

By now my tears were a flood, streaming down my face. I sat up, cross-legged beside Sally, with my left hand reaching out and resting on the dirt where I imagined her heart would be, buried under six feet of earth and inside a thick wooden box.

‘My soul exists in two states at once,’ I continued. ‘Full to bursting with love for you, but achingly empty without you in my future. The time we spent together was so precious, I’ll cherish it forever. I miss you so much, babe. I don’t know how I’ll survive without you. I nearly didn’t. I know I can’t make it up to you, but I’ll find the bastard who did this to you, I promise. I’m off the gear and I’ll stay clean. I’ll get my life back on track, work the case and keep going until I find him, even if I need to spend the rest of my life doing it, I promise. Goodbye, my beautiful angel. I love you.’