Dead End - Part One

Detective Gordon Reed sat on the corner of the table, folding his arms over his stomach as he listened to the confessions of Frank Kemp. Every minute or so, he raised his hand to scratch the side of his head, a subtle clue to his partner that he wasn’t buying Frank’s story.

Over the past two days, Gordon and his partner John had heard a lot of bizarre murder confessions. But the longer Frank talked, the less likely his claims seemed.

His confession wasn’t helped by the fact that he just didn’t look much like a criminal. He was tall and muscular to the point of being bulky, and he carried himself with an air of confidence that was impossible not to notice. His wide chin and broad cheeks were clean shaven, and his short fade haircut gave him an almost military look.

Frank finished talking, and Gordon looked up at the clock. Frank’s confession had taken close to four hours, and he’d detailed an almost daily pattern of hunting down criminals to murder them and dispose of the bodies using thermite.

The story was too neat. If it was true, Frank had killed more people than any serial killer ever had. But his methods of disposing the bodies was so perfect that there was no physical evidence left, aside from a fire-pit on the outskirts of the city.

Frank had been sincere during his confession, and Gordon had already heard a lot of crazy confessions given with similar tones of sincerity. The night before, a sweet old lady had confessed to drugging boys from her neighborhood, killing them, and grinding their bodies to make sausage.

That’s wasn’t the crazy part. The crazy part was when she claimed that she’d been selling the sausages in a local deli for close to two decades.

Gordon wasn’t sure if he believed her either, but he was glad that he’d never eaten at the deli in question.

Raising a hand to rub the back of his sore neck, Gordon glanced toward his partner, John Matthews, who sat in the chair across from Frank.

Meeting Gordon’s questioning gaze, John raised his hand and circled his finger around his ear in a not-so-subtle gesture: This guy is crazy.

Like Gordon, John was showing signs of strain from working longer shifts. His short dark hair splayed out in all directions, and his cheeks were coarse with stubble. Gordon’s shorter fade haircut meant that his dark blond hair looked less frazzled, but his cheeks were also shaded by a day’s worth of unchecked growth.

The underarms of John’s white shirt were just as stained by dry sweat as Gordon’s light blue shirt. Both men had long ago stripped off their ties, and their shirts and dark slacks looked slept in. This was fitting, since both detectives had taken turns sleeping at their desks.

But the power naps could not remove the bags under John’s eyes, and Gordon suspected that he looked just as bad.

Taking out a pack of cigarettes, Gordon flipped the top and offered the pack to Frank. “Well...that’s some story you’ve got there.”

John leaned over the table and nodded, his eyes narrowing. “Yes, it’s different all right. Maybe you could try to sell it to a publisher. It might fly better with—”

“It isn’t a story,” Frank said as he took a cigarette from the pack.

He leaned over to light it using the match that Gordon held out and leaned back as far as he could with his wrist cuffed to the table.

Frank watched Gordon light his own cigarette before he smirked. “You’re sitting in the wrong place. The good cop is supposed to sit in the chair.”

“We save the routine for people who are being resistant.” Gordon paused to give a strained smile to Frank. “You’ve been more than helpful in explaining yourself, and the only reason you’re still sitting here instead of going back in your cell is that we aren’t sure of why you would want to confess.”

“No one else has told you why either?” Frank watched both detectives nod, and then he  dropped his head back to exhale a plume of smoke. “Then I’m not sure why I would try to either, unless I was hoping to take a trip to an asylum.”

John leaned forward in his seat and waved for Frank to go on. “Maybe you can explain why we’ve seen a sudden spike in the number of criminals confessing.”

“I could, but you wouldn’t believe me.” Frank took a long drag from his cigarette and sighed. “If I hadn’t seen for myself what was going on, I wouldn’t believe it either.”

“Frank, you know we need some proof of your claims,” Gordon said. “We’ve had all kinds of criminals confessing in the last few days, but you’re the first to claim that you’re a vigilante.”

“Yes, it’s not the most popular area of crime. It doesn’t pay well, and nobody really appreciates what I do.” Frank flicked his cigarette, and the ash missed his empty coffee cup. He brushed the ash over the side of the table and looked at Gordon to see how he would react.

Gordon was still unconvinced, but Frank shrugged indifferently at his incredulous stare. “Still, that’s what I do, and I’m not making any of this up. I can claim a higher rate of success than the police do, and until last night, I’ve never felt out of my league. Now I think I’d rather get off the streets while I still can.”

“Frank, will you excuse us?” Dropping his cigarette into Frank’s coffee cup, Gordon stood up and walked to the door of the interrogation room. “We’ll be right back.”

Snorting Frank nodded at his cuffed wrist. “Sure, I’ll just hang out here then.”

Gordon waited for John to follow him out and closed the door. “What do you think?”

John shook his head, stuffing his hands in his pockets as he turned to walk down the hall. “I’m not sure. He’s confessed to killing over a hundred criminals, and he claims that he can provide proof. That much is consistent with everyone else who’s come in to confess over the last two days.”

He stepped into a break room and headed straight for the coffee maker to fill himself a cup. “He is claiming to be a costumed crime fighter, and that...it does stretch credibility. If he’s been working the town for a year like he claims, we should have seen something about him somewhere. Maybe an APB for an idiot in a black bodysuit or a report of someone who spotted him and called the media.”

Gordon listened while he sipped a cup of coffee. He set it aside to fill another styrofoam cup and picked both up. “I’m still curious to know why he’s coming in. Maybe he is making it up, but something has him spooked badly enough to want to be in jail. We need to get him to talk about that.”

John sighed, his round face full of skepticism while he sipped his coffee. It was several hours old and bitter, and his face squeezed in a grimace as he swallowed the first awful mouthful.

But he didn’t throw the cup away. He needed it to stay awake.

John waved the cup back toward the door and said, “He probably won’t give us anything. No one else has.”

“Sure, but we can tell him that if he doesn’t give us something more solid...” Getting an idea, Gordon pivoted on his heel and left the break room.

John followed his partner back down the hall. “Still waiting,” he said.

“Sorry, I was just thinking how crazy this is, but suppose we threaten to release him? Everyone who’s come in has been extremely keen to be locked up. We’re full, as are most other precincts in the city, and they aren’t all murderers.”

John nodded. “Yeah, I know. We get the homicide confessions, but everyone is booking confessions instead of driving out to do investigations.” He made a tiny smile as he stopped by the door of the interrogation room. “If it weren’t so damned eerie, I’d almost look at this as a good thing.”

“Right, well since we do need to lean on him, why don’t you do the honors?”

John nodded and opened the door. “Mr. Kemp—”

“Frank.”

John sighed, resting his coffee on the table before he took the seat again. “Frank, don’t take this the wrong way. We’d love to book you tonight, but the problem—”

“The problem is, I sound like I’m full of shit,” Frank interrupted him. He took the other cup of coffee from Gordon.

Sipping the coffee, he winced and remarked, “I wouldn’t blame you either. My story is far fetched, to say the least.”

 “Your story is incredible by itself, and you haven’t explained why a successful crime fighter would just decide to confess.” John pointed to Gordon. “We’ll need a reason to take you in, and right now, your story isn’t convincing us.”

“I can offer you proof.”

“Yes, you’ve said as much.” John frowned and shook his head. “Frank, if you can’t help us out here, we may be forced to release you.”

For the first time, tension registered in Frank’s dark blue eyes. “You can’t be serious.”

“I’m afraid he is, Frank,” Gordon said and sat down on the corner of the table. “You’ve given a neat story with no loose ends. But one thing you haven’t explained is why you need to get off the streets.”

“You wouldn’t believe me anyway. Why do you suppose that out of all these new confessions, no one has bothered to explain their reasons for coming in? It’s because what they saw was crazy, and there’s no way it could be real. Until you saw it with your own eyes, you wouldn’t believe it either.”

“Look, just give us something here, Frank,” Gordon said.

Frank looked down at his coffee and emptied the cup in one long pull. He set the cup aside and leaned back as his expression relaxed from a disgusted grimace and became thoughtful.

“Let me try something of an analogy to explain what’s going on,” Frank said. “Will that be all right with the two of you?”

“Try us,” John said.

“Okay... first, I want you to think of society as a body, and of every person as a cell which serves some kind of purpose. As the police, you represent one part of the body’s defenses. Crime would be a disease that either develops within the body, or is contracted from an outside source.

“For the most part, our societal bodies have limits for any disease, and anything below that limit is acceptable to the whole. If burglaries were exceptionally low, you would try to focus your efforts on other areas like rapes, murders and missing persons cases. In other words, you would consider a small burglary infection as being not worthy of your full attention.”

“This is going somewhere, right?” John asked.

“It is, but please bear with me. What I represent is a disease you’ve ignored, and that’s due in part to the lack of competition in the field. I have no partners, and most of society is unaware of my presence. You could think of me as a free radical, or as a diseased cell that attacks other diseases.”

“Something new is out there,” Gordon said, watching the vigilante nod.  “It’s something that’s got the attention of the criminals, but we haven’t noticed it yet.”

“Yes, and if you’ll allow me to stretch that analogy a final time, the body of Dallas has just contracted Ebola.”

***

Captain Janice Turner set down the phone and rubbed the bridge of her nose tiredly. A knock sounded at the door of her office, and she heaved a sigh. “Come in.”

Gordon opened the door. “We’ve just finished up with the vigilante. He didn’t give us much more than any of the other criminals have, but he has at least confirmed that there is something on the streets bad enough to cause this mass panic.”

Under better circumstances, Janice was cute in a bulldoggish sort of way. Short and stocky, she had a round face that was accentuated by her short pixie-cut hair.

But the dark bags under her brown eyes and the lines of fatigue etched in her face made her seem at least ten years older than her true age of thirty-nine.

Her blue blouse and khakis were just as wrinkled as Gordon’s, and stray hairs jutted out all around her head. She looked like she’d just been woken up from a too brief nap.

Janice waved a gesture for the detectives to sit at the two chairs in front of her desk. “I just finished a call with the mayor’s office. They’ve been going over the crime statistics for the last three days.”

“It should be easy reading with all of the stats going down,” John said.

“Some of them are, but not all of them, ” Janice said. “They’re going to need a few more days to confirm this, but while most petty crimes have diminished, there’s been no decline in violent crimes or missing persons reports. In fact, missing persons has seen a huge spike in reports over the last two days. But even more confusing, there a rise in the number of streakers.”

John’s mouth twisted in a bemused smirk. “Nudists?”

“That’s what the callers are reporting now, and—”

The office door swung open, and the thin woman who stood panting at the door was unfamiliar to Janice or either of the detectives.

For a moment, she wouldn’t speak as she tried to gain control of her breathing.

She gasped another breath and swallowed before she said, “Sorry for the intrusion, ma’am. I’m Lieutenant Martinez, and I work in missing persons. I know you’re probably swamped, but we’re going to need everyone you’ve got available.”

“Why? What’s going on?”

“I think we’ve found the missing people, and they’re all dead.”

Janice sat up stiffly in her seat. “Where?”

“In an office building on North Akard Street. The officers who first reported it said there had to be at least six hundred bodies.”

***

Gordon moved his flashlight around the office while he tried to count bodies. It was almost a futile effort for the sheer number. At a glance, he was sure that there were far more bodies in the building than there were missing persons reports.

There had to be, because just in the office where he stood, there were at least one hundred bodies.

He sniffed the air again, perplexed by the lack of any odor of decay. Stepping closer to a stack of bodies, he lifted his flashlight to look at the woman on the top of the pile. Like all the others, she was nude, and her skin was pale white.

That by itself sent up red flags in his head. He expected to see bruising from where blood had settled in the body after death. But then he’d expected to see some kind of wound to explain how the woman had died. Instead, her white skin was flawless and unbroken. None of the bodies seemed damaged in any way, and it only added to the creepy feeling of being alone in the room.

The woman’s eyes were open, and she had no color to her irises, nor a set of pupils. He flicked the beam of light over her face, which picked up a faint outline of the outer ring of the iris, and then the outer ring of the pupil. But it appeared as though the liquid inside the eye had also become milk white somehow. The only thing that had not been bleached was her dark red hair.

Gordon spun at the sound of a door opening then relaxed when he saw his partner wave to him from across the office. He asked, “Did the feds show up?”

“Yeah, and they’re clearing us out before they start taking pictures.” John shuddered as he started walking down the hall toward the stairwell. “I feel like I should be waking up from this nightmare any time now.”

“Yeah, that’s how I’d describe it too. I want to go home and call it a day. I’ve worked two days in a row, and I’ve had less than three hours of sleep in my chair between confessions.”

“But we can’t go home yet, can we?”

Gordon shook his head. “No, we’ve got to go talk to Frank Kemp again. Somehow, we’ve got to gain his trust enough to get him to open up.”

“Why? So he can bore us with more stupid analogies?” John quipped.

Gordon stopped and turned to frown at his partner. “Hey, look around you. Walk over to any office door and look at a stack of bodies. Once you’ve got that image locked in mind, think about the analogy again. If this is just the prelude to something bigger, I think his ‘stupid analogy’ was a fitting comparison.”

***

Frank smiled as the cuff was locked down to the table again. “Well, let me see if I can impress you with my own minor skills of detection. The two of you are much paler, and neither one of you looks ready to play the bad cop this time. So you either saw something bad enough to rattle you, or you’ve run a more thorough background check on me.”

Gordon watched the uniformed officers leave and turned to study the vigilante before he moved to sit down in the chair across the table. “We saw something. A police patrol found a building filled with dead bodies, and we were sent over to watch them until the FBI showed up.”

“Yeah, that can take the wind out of your sails.” Frank looked from Gordon over at John. “I am mildly curious...did you find the bodies in a warehouse on the south side?”

“No, this was a two-floor office building not far from here,” John said. “Do you think this is another pile of bodies?”

“It would be hard to say without checking out the warehouse again, but if that clock is correct, I think the sun set about two hours ago.”

“Yeah, but what—?” John began to ask.

“I’m not going anywhere until tomorrow,” Frank said. “I’m sure at some point that daylight isn’t going to mean much, but for now, your new threat prefers to work the night shift. There’s less witnesses at 3 AM.”

“You won’t tell us what you saw yet, will you?” Gordon asked.

“I’d love to, but you aren’t ready for the truth. You’ve seen only the first glimmers of evidence. I could take you out tomorrow to show you where I saw a collection of bodies, but I’m going to suggest something that will sound crazy. I believe the warehouse will be empty when we arrive.”

“Right, and someone just moved all those bodies across town,” John said.

“It wouldn’t be so hard,” Frank said. “I’m sure you noticed there wasn’t any odor of decay. More than that, you had to have noticed the lack of wounds on any of the bodies. So it isn’t like they’d leave behind a trail of genetic evidence by moving the stack, right?”

Frank glanced between the detectives in the following silence. “Right, it’s the same pattern that I noticed. So tomorrow, it should be easy to convince you to take a road trip with me.”

“We could make you leave with us tonight,” John threatened, his lips tightening in a frown when the vigilante laughed.

“You could try, but you don’t know which warehouse to check, and I can always button up and leave you to sort this mess out on your own.”