Killer's Diary Read online

  No lost-and-found notice had been posted on the community bulletin board. No one appeared to be looking for anything. But every person who entered the café became a new possibility. She strained to hear words between patrons and the young girls at the counter. She listened for an exchange to begin with “I left a notebook in here yesterday…”

  She tried to imagine what the author must look like.

  She knew he was in his late twenties; that much had been revealed early in the text. The handwriting and tone were decidedly male. But the notebook offered no other clues to his physical appearance.

  Instead, she knew him on the inside. The brooding, sensitive voice that ached with the pain of a detached childhood. She empathized with his lonely search for a meaningful connection, his waves of insecurity.

  The voice was so strong, she was convinced she could match it to a face if he appeared here in the flesh. She evaluated every male patron who came into the coffeehouse against the voice, but kept coming up empty. The initial candidates were not promising: a slick, older businessman in a suit and overcoat, graying hair, posture solid with confidence; a jovial, athletic young man in a colorful sweater who knew everyone around him by name; a father with a wedding ring and active toddler; a pair of students, full of chatter about the previous night’s dorm party and “beer bongs”; and several more men in their forties, fifties and beyond. Also, a few young men with young women in tow, including a disheveled couple still luminous from an overnight romance.

  When a possibility finally presented itself in the form of a handsome, quiet young man with warm eyes, she wondered if he was a likely match or if it was just wishful thinking on her part.

  The young man had wavy black hair, narrow, silver-rimmed glasses, a nice build, and an introverted, gentle manner about him. He looked around the café for a moment before stepping up to the counter.

  She strained to pick up his soft speech. She didn’t hear anything about a notebook. He placed his order. He received his coffee and sat down at a table near her. She watched him.

  She allowed herself a fantasy where she approached him, the notebook in her grasp, red and vibrant like a beating heart. She heard herself say, “Excuse me, did you lose a notebook? I found this yesterday and wanted to keep it safe for its owner.”

  “Yes, thank God,” he would respond, jaw dropping, stuttering with gratitude. “I’ve been looking everywhere. I really appreciate this. You don’t know how much this notebook means to me!”

  He would invite her to join him at his table. She would confess to glancing at the contents. She would praise his writing ability. He would blush, flattered. They would get to know each other and discover common bonds. The encounter would blossom into a full-blooded romance over the course of a few days. They would be made for one another. And he would never hurt her, because he had great sensitivity and wisdom and understanding. He would be intense and passionate, like his writing…

  “Suzanne!”

  Ellen’s spell was broken by the subject of her fantasy calling out to an attractive, lively blonde who entered the coffeehouse. He stood up from his table. The blonde picked up her pace to reach him. They joined in an embrace and quick kiss. The blonde sat down with him, displaying sparkling blue eyes, perfect skin and a big smile of straight teeth.

  Snapped out of her daydream, Ellen checked her watch. She still had twenty more minutes to play this silly game until it was time to leave for the bookstore. Her coffee cup was empty and she had no reading material. She pretended to take sips from the empty cup to justify her lingering to those around her. As if anybody noticed or cared.

  More patrons spilled into the café, creating a line. Everyone seemed to have the same expression: tired eyes fixed forward, waiting for an opening at the front counter.

  A young man with a soft baby face and pre-shower morning hair received a cappuccino and danish and brought it with him to a small table. Ellen watched as he shook a backpack off his shoulders. He reached into one of the pockets and pulled out a long, narrow notebook, the type used by reporters or crime detectives on old TV shows. “Just the facts, ma’am…”

  The young man settled into his seat and peeled through several sheets before finding a blank one. He removed the cap from his black felt pen and began writing. His pen moved across the page in swift, crisp strokes.

  Ellen felt her heartbeat accelerate. She studied him.

  He was an earnest-looking man. Ellen could sense a match between his appearance and the voice in the journal. He looked lost in his thoughts, oblivious to the environment around him, even when an infant at a nearby table shrieked with restless energy.

  Ellen considered approaching him about the notebook she had found, but something inside her froze up. She lost her courage. She couldn’t craft the proper introductory dialogue in her head.

  “Excuse me, I took a notebook home yesterday…”

  “Hello, I couldn’t help noticing that you’re writing…”

  “I have somebody’s journal in my car…”

  “I’m sorry for intruding on your privacy, but I’ve been reading what you wrote…”

  It all sounded so absurd.

  She found herself staring at him for an extended period of time. He never looked up. She could examine him as long as she wanted.

  She shocked herself by imagining him kissing her.

  He wasn’t attractive or unattractive. But he would treat her well. She could just sense it. She would curl up in his gentle, caring arms. He would speak to her with great sincerity and soul, and they would find shared comfort, leading to intimacy.

  Good Lord, an inner voice interjected. Knock it off.

  She was a little too good at crafting romantic fantasies, no doubt due to reading so much fiction over the years. Her make-believe narratives fell neatly in place like well-laid tracks.

  Romantic reality was another story. She could not control the outcome or dictate the events. Her skinny good looks drew a fair number of first dates. Once they got to know her, however, there was a sharp fall-off period, with fewer second dates, then fewer still third dates, until she faced a slim and disappointing selection of long-term possibilities. She knew that her personality had suffered ugly bruising in her youth. She was unable to let her guard down and open up to get close to anyone. Men grew impatient and stopped calling, sending her deeper into herself.

  The relationship that had lasted the longest, nearly culminating in marriage, was the one with Jeremy. At least in the beginning, he exhibited patience with her skittishness and emotional walls. In exchange, she gave him the sex he wanted, offering easy loyalties, feminine curves, and a receptiveness to his adolescent interests like comic books and martial arts movies. The lack of conflict in their relationship compensated for a lack of any real spark.

  She couldn’t pinpoint the exact moment he turned cruel, but months after the relationship ended, she landed on a motive: he wanted a way out of the engagement without being the one responsible for breaking it off. He was working to incite her to call it quits. And when she didn’t respond accordingly, he turned up the mistreatment until she absorbed an almost absurd amount of abuse.

  She took the abuse because she didn’t want him to leave. The pain of abandonment would be worse than the pain of mistreatment.

  Finally, one day, aggravated by a multitude of problems, many that didn’t involve her at all, he struck her. She shrunk back, cried, and her passive reaction seemed to make him even madder.

  The engagement ended that night. He ended it with a simple sentence: “We’re not getting married.” He never apologized for striking her. She never expected an apology. George had never expressed remorse for his abusive treatment of her, either.

  Jeremy vanished that day as if he had already expected the relationship to terminate. She responded by withdrawing further from the world, preferring her collection of books to people, reading to human interaction. When the opportunity arose to work in a bookstore, she jumped at the chance. She now spent most of
her hours working at the Book Shelf or reading books in her apartment, a simple and comfortable routine. She had been proceeding on this path just fine until the red journal entered her life, stunning her by stirring passions and feelings out of the numbness. It was the last thing she had expected.

  Now she had to trace the journal to its owner to determine if perhaps someone did exist who could understand her, reach out and resuscitate her.

  As she pondered the thought, the man with the baby face and reporter’s notepad stood up. His chair screeched as it dragged backward across the floor.

  Ellen watched him, quickly glancing away when their eyes met for an instant. His eyes were soft, gray.

  He walked across the coffeehouse and into a small corridor that led to the washrooms. She watched him disappear and then looked toward his table.

  The notepad remained.

  Ellen knew she only had a few minutes to act if she wanted to steal a glance at the handwriting.

  It’s now or never.

  She rose silently, trying not to generate any attention. She walked toward his table while checking the faces around her. No one looked at her.

  She felt giddy with uncharacteristic courage. She rarely acted on impulse and typically put deep thought into any unusual action, analyzing every potential outcome. But there was no time for that.

  Ellen reached down and flipped open the narrow reporter’s notebook. Her heart pounded so hard that she felt a throbbing in her ears.

  The handwriting did not match that in the red notebook in her possession. The penmanship was round, crisp, almost feminine. She limited her stare to a few seconds, then moved on, across the floor to the other side of the café, where there was a counter with napkins, spoons, stirrers and steel containers of milk and cream. She took a handful of napkins, as if that was her true intention, and returned to her seat.

  The baby-faced man came out of the bathroom corridor a few minutes later. He returned to his table, and his forehead furrowed for a moment in confusion. Ellen realized she had opened his notebook but not closed it.

  Ellen stared down into her empty coffee cup. She felt as though arrows danced around her head, pointing her out, shouting guilty.

  She couldn’t bring herself to look back at him.

  “Excuse me.”

  Ellen jumped with a gasp and looked up.

  An older man with a gray mustache stood before her. He asked if he could borrow one of the chairs at her table.

  “Of course,” said Ellen. She promptly stood.

  “I don’t need your chair,” said the man. “Just the one you aren’t using.”

  “I have to go anyway,” she responded.

  During her lunch break at the Book Shelf, Ellen left the store and climbed into her car, her breath visible in the cold winter air. She slammed the door shut. The vinyl seats were cold. Bundled in her down coat, scarf and winter gloves, Ellen reached under the seat. She pulled out the red notebook.

  She opened it to her bookmark, a childhood gift from her father more than two decades ago, a slender blue strip with the words Books Are Friends printed in bold simplicity. She returned to the page where she had left off the night before.

  She read for fifteen minutes, lost in every word as the prose became darker and bleaker, descending like steps into a private hell. She recognized her own darkest period of hopelessness and despair in a long passage that described the author’s desire to end his life.

  I find myself conjuring images of the many ways I could leave this world, witnessing the act and then lingering on the image of my body after my spirit has passed on, reducing my existence in this world to an empty vessel that cannot feel love, pain or even the dreariness of indifference. I crave this departure but I keep the feelings at bay. What saves me from acting on them is the determination that I will, I must rise above this spiritual crisis. I will be strong again. I will rediscover hope.

  Whack! Whack!

  A round, pink face appeared at the driver’s side window, inches away from Ellen, accompanied by a loud rapping of knuckles.

  “Hey!” said the face.

  Ellen slapped the notebook shut. She dropped it into her lap and faced her co-worker Peg.

  Peg’s freckled face bobbed for a better view, curious and grinning. “What’re you doing in there?” she asked. “Aren’t you freezing? What’re you reading?”

  Chapter Six

  He sat in his favorite chair facing the window that overlooked the busy street below, watching the activity through the glass like a large-screen television.

  This television program even had a regular cast. There was Old Woman with Dog, faithfully picking up the droppings with a newspaper (Chicago Sun-Times). There was Rollerblade Girl, wearing pigtails to appear youthful but middle-aged when seen from the rear, chatting up the young men in the neighborhood. There was Mr. Cigarette Break, periodically stepping outside of the hair salon to steal five minutes of quick puffs.

  And there was Oranjacket.

  Aside from the orange jacket that covered a slight build, short black hair and big glasses, he knew exactly five things about this woman.

  She worked at a little grocery store two blocks away.

  She came home at approximately ten fifteen every night except Sunday, her day off.

  She lived in the building across the street on the third floor.

  He had once seen her naked pink legs and white panties before the blinds had fallen shut.

  She lived alone.

  Tonight Oranjacket did not fail him. At 10:17 p.m., she appeared on the sidewalk, alone, eyes fixed ahead, oblivious to the world around her, slumped somewhat, probably tired and possibly sad.

  How many truly happy people are there?

  She seemed inconsequential in the scattered after-hours crowd. As she entered the vestibule of her building, she disappeared from view and his mind play took over…

  She checked her mail.

  Bills, junk, perhaps a catalogue of nice things, the latest fashions to fantasize about in bed before drifting off to sleep, legs naked under the sheets.

  As she shut her mail box, he appeared next to her. Casual, young and well-groomed. No cause for alarm. Not like one of those scary, foul homeless lumps who roamed the neighborhood. He could have been one of the graduate students at the nearby college.

  He said a friendly hello to her and reached into his pocket. He took out a key chain, as if to check his own mailbox.

  She said, ever so faint and shy, “Hi,” and advanced to unlock the main door leading to the stairs. She entered the building’s interior and did not look back.

  He caught the door with the tips of his fingers just before it slammed and latched shut.

  She moved up the steps in small, thunking footsteps. Keeping his own steps soundless, staying on the carpeted section of the stairs, he followed Oranjacket to her apartment.

  She reached her door, unlocked it, entered the apartment and flicked on the lights—an automated sequence of events, which she had performed hundreds of times before. But this time something interrupted the routine. Something moved behind her. A dark shape.

  Before she could turn for a better look, a strong force slammed into her from behind. She fell hard to the floor, wind knocked out of her. From an awkward angle—low, tilted—she saw a man wearing a ski mask over his face. He stepped inside her apartment. He shut the door and locked them in together.

  As she struggled to return to her feet, he snapped off the lights. She gasped as he landed on her, his knee in her belly. He held her down with his left hand covering her face. The right hand gripped the handle on a four-inch hunting knife. He said, “Let me hear your death scream…”

  Oranjacket shed her coat and placed it on a small sofa. She walked to the window, offering him a better look, briefly, before shutting the blinds.

  In the moment that she faced outward, she had no expression on her face. She had no idea. She had no fucking idea.

  Sitting in his favorite chair, looking through his
window at her window, a screen within a screen, he continued to stare at the closed blinds, burning his gaze through them, through her clothes, through her flesh…

  I did it before, I can do it again.

  His first elimination from the human race, the girl in the parking lot, had been remarkably easy. It had been the first time in his life that he realized he wielded some power. He could hurt the world that damaged him. The role of victim and perpetrator had been reversed, and it had felt like fresh air in his lungs, a revelation. He could rise above the sludge below, the insect people, and manipulate them as he chose, one at a time.

  As long as his efforts remained on a small scale, the world did not fight back. A fellow citizen had been removed, a stranger plucked from the land of the living, and aside from the momentary alarm of a headline, it was business as usual. No one cared unless it was their turn. Looking at the street below, the scene became evidence that this dense urban jungle just kept on going, even after losing one of its own. There was one less straggler on the sidewalk to navigate around. One less cast member in the world’s playhouse.

  Confidence hardened his muscles and bones. He could continue his work in this environment, sacrificing strangers to bring his own life back from the dead, draining the vitality out of them for his own rejuvenation.

  A long time ago, a psychiatrist had told him he lacked goals. It was true. He had not identified any passions that would motivate him. He was adrift. But now he had a desired end-state. A go-forward strategy. He knew precisely what he wanted and the focus was clear.

  He couldn’t hurt the people who hurt him all those years ago. But he could pay it forward. His goal was to expel all of the pain inside him, delivering it to others, like a special mailman, until he became cleansed, a newborn without a trace of history, unchained from the past, the ultimate state of freedom.

  Chapter Seven

  At eleven thirty p.m., well beyond her traditional bedtime, Ellen passed the halfway point in the red spiral notebook. She based the milestone on the thickness of the pages completed and the pages unread.