KILLER ADDICTION: When Murder Becomes A Habit

Chapter 3

Chapter 3

BLOOD POUNDED IN MY ears, intense beams of light pierced my eyelids, my tongue rasped in my mouth like sandpaper, and bolts of pain shot through my skull as I re-entered the ‘normal’ world after my h****n high.

Sally was nowhere in sight, which was weird. Normally after we shot up, we woke side-by-side, sometimes even holding hands. But I couldn’t see her anywhere. The early morning joggers and dog-walkers pounded along the banks of the Potomac River, ignoring the homeless people and junkies laid out along the grass and under bridges, anywhere they could find shelter. I gave up trying to push through my recovery, closed my eyes and laid my head down once more.

Once the bright morning sun had eased in intensity and the stream of human activity had slowed down, I finally summoned the will to wake up properly. Still there was no sign of Sally, which really was highly unusual—we were always joined at the hip, intensely in love and constantly by each other’s side. She wouldn’t have gone anywhere without letting me know where she was going. I rolled over on to my stomach, crouched on my knees and slowly, awkwardly, drew myself up to a standing position, swaying slowly and unsteadily.

I carefully extended up to my full height of six feet, four inches and looked in every direction but couldn’t see Sally anywhere. I knelt, stuffed our blankets into my backpack, and then gingerly walked up the hill to the top of the riverbank and surveyed the scene. There were homeless people dotted around the place, but none with Sally’s quirky wardrobe combination.

I looked down at my filthy hands, emaciated arms and stained clothes and shrugged my shoulders. I simply didn’t care about my appearance; I had more important things to worry about, like finding Sally. I grabbed a page of a newspaper from a rubbish bin and headed back down to the patch of grass where we had spent the night before. I retrieved a pen from my backpack and wrote Sally a note in the newspaper's margin saying, ‘Missed you this morning babe, gone looking for you. If you read this, stay here until I get back.’ Then I poked a stick through the newspaper into the dirt and set off on my search.

I had a sudden urge to take a dump and knew I needed to hurry. I was nowhere near a toilet and had shat myself way too many times coming down off h****n to want to do it again, so I quickly ducked into some nearby bushes, dropped my pants and emptied my load. As I reached out to grab a handful of dry leaves for the clean-up, I heard a noise and looked up to see a little kid, maybe six years old, staring wide-eyed at me with a dopey, gap-toothed expression, not moving. I smiled and said, ‘What’s the matter kid, never seen a grown man s**t in the bushes before?’

I wiped my a*s with my makeshift toilet paper, pulled up my pants and scurried off in the other direction away from the curious kid, chuckling to myself as I heard his mother calling out to him.

Hours later, after talking with more crackheads and homeless people than I cared to count, I was still no closer to finding Sally. I circled back around to our spot in the park five times throughout the day, but there was no sign of her. I went the whole day with no food, although this was not unusual. Eating never seemed to help—only smack could fill the emptiness inside me.

As the daylight slowly faded, I gave in to the ever-increasing fear that something terrible had happened to Sally. Since the day we met, we’d never been apart for this long without some connection. And to make it worse, my d**g cravings were already kicking in; I had stomach cramps, alternating hot flushes and cold sweats, my skin was crawling and itchy, my eyes were tearing up, my nose was running, and I was restlessly shifting my weight from foot to foot, trying to keep my s**t together, for Sally’s sake. God knows what I must have looked like to passing observers, but I was oblivious to them.

I reluctantly made my way to the nearest police station and stopped out the front. My inner voice screamed at me not to go in, but I summoned every ounce of will and forced myself to walk up the steps, in the door and approach the front counter. The desk sergeant stared at me with dead-fish eyes over his reading glasses, scowling at me as if to say, ‘How dare a street-filth junkie like you contaminate my station?’ He stared at me silently with an unblinking gaze and no trace of sound or recognition, waiting for me to speak.

‘Um... I need to report a missing person,’ I mumbled quietly.

‘What’s the name, how long have they been missing and what’s their address?’ he immediately shot back at me.

‘Uh... it’s my girlfriend, Sally Heineman. She’s been missing for the past twenty-four hours,’ I explained.

‘Ha-ha-ha-ha!’ cackled the desk sergeant in a most unexpected display of mirth. ‘You must be joking! A junkie missing for twenty-four hours? Well, let’s hold the phones, pull out all the stops and send out an APB, because some street w***e got lost on her way to get a fix from her dealer!’ he barked sarcastically.

I recoiled from his tirade and responded, ‘But it’s not like that—she wouldn’t leave me without telling me where she was going. Something terrible has happened to her!’ The pitch of my voice was getting higher by the second in my panic.

Now returned to a manner devoid of any trace of humour, the desk sergeant dismissed me with a wave of his hand and growled, ‘Get out of here, you scumbag, and stop wasting my time. And don’t come back, even if you find her dead somewhere. I don’t need the aggravation.’