KILLER ADDICTION: When Murder Becomes A Habit

Chapter 7

Chapter 7

FINALLY, MY GRIEF SPENT, I stopped crying.

I looked at Sally and somehow, like some unseen force took over my body and mind, a part of my former life came back, and an unexplainable feeling of calm came over me. My past life broke through the d**g t*****e I had put myself through over the past year, my training took over and I started taking in all the details of the crime scene around me. With the words of my teachers at the FBI Training Academy at Quantico ringing in my ears, I detached from the emotional connection I had with ‘the victim’ and committed to studying everything, missing no details, no matter how s**t I felt right now and how desperate I was for a hit.

My first task was to contact the authorities. I exited the scene, leaving Sally untouched. I crossed the canal and strolled into the lobby of the swish Four Seasons Hotel, hoping the late hour would mean some slack security. Thankfully, my hands had stopped bleeding, but they were drenched in blood along with my arms and clothes. I was filthy and reeked with a stench I’m sure didn’t grace the Four Seasons too often. I made it through the front door and over to the house phone, called 911 and reported the crime scene.

I left just as the night manager spotted me from across the other side of the lobby and was making a beeline for me. I was sure his next task would be to disinfect the phone I had just used.

I made my way back to my poor Sally and re-entered the warehouse. I knew I had little time left before the cops turned up and before my withdrawal symptoms got so bad that I could no longer function, so I got to work. The darkness made it difficult—all I had to go on was my trusty old Zippo lighter casting a flickering light on the grisly surroundings. I squatted down on my haunches, peering over what until just yesterday had been the woman I loved with all my heart. Desperately trying to detach myself, I studied the body, the wounds, and the bindings for any clues, careful not to touch anything that I hadn’t already. Unfortunately, the ground around Sally was a mess of footprints, blood, and scuff marks from my earlier activity, but I still tried to preserve as much of the area as possible.

As I examined the body, the thing that struck me most was the careful placement of the syringes. What had initially looked like just random stabbings turned out to be very strategic applications of the surgically sharp needles. The killer had inserted a syringe in various critical parts of Sally’s body. They had stabbed major organs like the heart, lungs and liver; I couldn’t see her kidneys because she was lying on her back and I didn’t want to disturb the body. The killer had stabbed both her eyes—I felt a fresh set of my tears burning when I looked at her face again.

I noticed a syringe poking out of each of her ears and one protruding from her suprasternal notch, the large hollow in the centre of her throat between the collarbones. There were more syringes along the neck, plunged into the jugular veins and carotid artery. Moving down the body, I noted her killer had stabbed each of the shoulders at the subclavian arteries and then also the femoral artery of each of her legs.

It was then that I noticed with a fresh wave of horror a glistening from around her v****a. I looked closer and realised with a shock that she had even been stabbed with syringes around her v****a. This new violation was just too much for me—I could no longer remain detached, and a wave of nausea hit me like a freight train. It took every effort I had not to vomit directly over Sally, and it was probably only because I hadn’t eaten for over thirty hours that I could turn aside and throw up a few feet away from the body.

Amid my retching I heard movement, so turned towards the sound and an intense beam of a flashlight blinded me. A shouted instruction came, ‘Put your hands on your head and get down on your knees! NOW!’

I briefly considered putting myself out of my misery and committing ‘suicide by cop’, but I quickly dismissed that thought from my mind, knowing I couldn’t avenge Sally if I was six feet down a hole somewhere. I stopped retching, put my hands on my head and got down on my knees.

While still being held under the flashlight beam and I assumed also by a g*n, another pair of hands roughly grabbed my wrists from behind and wrenched them down behind my back. As the handcuffs clicked into place, I felt I was safe for now from a stray police bullet, because they had neutralised any potential threat from me.

‘Take it easy guys, it’s okay,’ I pleaded. ‘I’m the one who called you. I know this probably doesn’t look great, but I didn’t do anything! I just came here and found her.’

‘Shut up, dickhead. Not interested,’ came the deadpan response. ‘Keep quiet until the detective gets here, then you can tell him your sob story.’

We didn’t have long to wait. A few minutes later, another torchlight bounced its way into the room and made its way over to the uniformed cops. After a brief discussion, the man newly arrived on the scene walked over to me and shone the bright flashlight up close, right in my face. As I squinted in protest, my fleeting mental clarity suddenly deserted me and all resemblance to my past life evaporated under the bright light and I was back to being a pathetic, strung-out smackhead.

The light moved up and down on me slowly from head to floor, and I could only imagine what conclusions the observer was coming to already, even before seeing Sally’s corpse laid out on the floor. ‘What’s your name, Boy?’ he snarled.

‘Simon Winter.’

‘My name is Detective Frank Delaney. And your a*s is MINE,’ he snapped at me, thumping me in the chest with the bright end of his flashlight to emphasise his point.

‘We’ve met before, Delaney. A long time ago in another life when I visited your station house from Quantico,’ I responded. I’d met him back in the day on an academy field trip to the local police force; he was a tough-as-nails local detective who I knew would be a giant pain in my a*s.

‘Well, well, well,’ chuckled Delaney in a tone full of derision as he looked down at me, still on my knees. ‘How the mighty have fallen! I remember you now; a snot-nosed, smartass kid who thought he knew it all. I heard you were some kind of genius, Son. Doesn’t much look like it now, does it? Did you put that super brain of yours on holiday when you became a f*****g junkie? A one-fifty I.Q. and you think it's a good idea to become addicted to h****n? f*****g dipshit.’

I was not looking forward to the impending interrogation.