Pulse

Pulse
By KT Andersen


Chapter One
Out of the Darkness


He was clever, trying to get himself caught. He thought it would get me caught too, haha! I am not a part of him. I am not anywhere near the coward that he is. I am not a fool. I stopped him before he could commit his foolhardy act of stupidity. I killed him. There is no more Wallace P. Edmunds. I am Leroy Malkins. I am Thomas Roberts. I am Hector Ramirez. I am everybody and I am nobody. They can't catch me like they almost did that moron, Wallace Edmunds. They can't catch a nobody.
- The Slicer

It was Tuesday, October 29th when the 36th precinct received the above note from a killer known as The Slicer. His trademark was slicing his victims and letting them bleed out slowly after stabbing them near a vital organ. Whichever thing killed them first was not important, or didn't seem to be. As long as he got the pleasure that they were gone and that it took some time, it didn't matter to him one iota. It was not too long after, actually it was Thursday... Halloween night - that we found his sixth victim. It was after trick or treat hours, eleven thirty to be more precise. It was snowing. A little early for that. The pool of blood was frozen. To be honest, it made it easier to collect. A CSI hollered over to me. "Hey, Ross!" I hustled over to CSI Briggs and we both knelt down beside the corpse. Her name was Kendra Gage. She was 20 years old, pretty, blond, blue eyes. She was stabbed in the chest near the right lung, and had twenty slice marks all over her petite body. It seemed like there was one slice mark for each year of her life, which didn't really make sense. It was my job to take notes of all the evidence the CSIs collected, and boy howdy there was a lot. The damndest thing was, it was all circumstantial.
My boss, Captain Norris, gave me the file and told me it would probably be the toughest case I had ever worked on. I said, "You're probably right, boss" and left his office. Little did I know. I sat back down at my desk and poured myself a cold Diet Coke. A gorgeous female officer who has been bantering back and forth with me, and whom I had hoped to one day ask for lunch, walked over to my desk, knowing that I was just taking a sip, and leaned over my desk, winking. I nearly choked. "Not funny, gorgeous!" I hollered, half out of amusement and half out of frustration. She chortled. "I'm sorry. You just look so damn cute drinking Diet Coke. Looking to lose some pounds? Take my advice. You look good enough." "Then go to lunch with me." She grabbed her sidearm and turned to me. "Alright. Mickey - D's at 2:30 sharp." I smiled. "I prefer Wendy's." She nodded and answered the call she had just received. Just to make me turn an even deeper shade of red, she flapped her long blond hair that was supposed to be up in a standard issue pony tail, and then put it up in said standard issue pony tail.
"Watch yourself." A fellow officer named Reese said. Reese was an ex - boyfriend of hers. Thing was, he had a misplaced concern for my heart. She dumped him because he was a moron and a womanizer. She found out she wasn't his only conquest and made him wish he wasn't such a stupid idiot. But she wouldn't give him a second chance. I didn't blame her.
Looking at the pictures in the file Captain Norris gave me, I spotted something that didn't seem right. My theory about the slices indicating the years of the victim's life was erroneous. Our latest vic was not twenty years old. She was thirty - seven. She merely looked younger. So, a new hypothesis emerged. I began to think that the killer was indicating years that he had been trying to get with a girl. I met with a forensic profiler named Leanne Lake, and she said I might be right. She also indicated that the profile might be more complex than that of simply a serial killer or pedophile, because he didn't stop pursuing this fantasy when she became of age, apparently. I could see no reason why this shouldn't be pursued as a working hypothesis. I told her of the note we had received, and she offered the idea that he could have targeted more than one woman simply on the basis that he may have been "more than one man."
Later that afternoon, I visited the ME who was on the case. He told me, "If your theory is correct, then it's possible that we have found these corpses out of the sequence of the actual times of the murders. It could very well be that Miss Gage was not murdered on Halloween night, but some time before and was publicly displayed on Halloween to present the appearance that she was a fresh corpse. I stumbled onto this when I discovered the embalming fluid that had been inside of her for a matter of months. There also have been twenty bodies to come into my little sanctum over the past months. Now, if he were numbering the victims by the slice marks and it was the fatal wound that bleeds out, slowly killing them before the slices, then it would just be the icing on the proverbial cake.
The Slicer used multiple names, but our ID men couldn't trace any of them. He left no fingerprints, no identity, not a damn thing that could peg him. Not that he would, purposely.