CHAPTER TWENTY ONE
He sat at home, in his study, looking out over the peaceful suburban surroundings outside his home with a strange, almost disjointed contempt. How could the rest of the world live like that? How could they pretend that their lives were normal? How could people just drift from one banal moment of existence to the next?
How would they react if they knew that he was planning a murder even while they went about their drab lives?
Probably, they would be horrified. There was a time when he might have pretended to be too, when he had spent all his time trying to pass for normal. It had almost killed him. Now, he was the one who did the killing.
He’d been working quickly in the last few days, quicker than he normally would have. Normally, he left time between each kill, letting the impact of it settle in, making sure it was seen by the one person who mattered. Now, though, with Lars Ingram’s execution scheduled for today, he had to move quicker.
Lars had been… an inspiration. More than that. Hearing about Lars had literally saved his life. Trying to fit in had made him depressed, had made him want to kill himself rather than live one more moment of the ordinary life that so many people seemed to settle for. He hadn’t seen the point in going on if that was all there was.
He’d actually planned it. He’d decided that he would throw himself off a bridge into the Potomac, leaving behind nothing but a note. Even that seemed dull and empty now, a conventional way out of an all too conventional life.
Then he’d happened to look at the news, just killing time while he tried to summon up the courage to actually do it. A story about the latest murder by the Caretaker Killer had been there on the news, back in the early days when Lars only had two or three kills that anyone knew about.
That one moment had changed things forever. It was as if something had clicked into place inside him, showing him that this was what he was meant to do. He’d gone out and researched everything there was to find on the murders then. They were a template for him, a guide on how to be everything that the hidden part of him had always wanted to be and not get caught.
Two weeks later, he made his first kill, a babysitter out somewhere in Virginia. He was still a little embarrassed by how sloppy that one had been. He hadn’t gotten the details right, and she’d managed to run out of the house before he could kill her. He’d caught up to her, though, and the exhilaration of the moment when he stabbed her had been like nothing he’d ever experienced before in his life.
That had been special, but in a lot of ways, the one he was planning now would be even more special, more meaningful, simply because of what it would represent. It wouldn’t be his final kill, of course, he had no plans to stop. But it would be a particularly significant landmark.
After his first kill, he’d come to see himself as Lars Ingram’s shadow. He’d realized that any kill he made would be attributed to the Caretaker Killer, but it had also become something of an unspoken competition between them. Whenever he’d seen a new kill by his idol, his rival, he would start to plot one of his own, trying to make it at least as spectacular, at least as difficult.
He wanted to show that he wasn’t just some second-rate tribute act; he was an equal, a colleague, possibly the only other person out there who might understand. It didn’t matter to him that the police thought that both sets of kills were the work of one man. If anything, that was simply validation that he was copying Ingram’s methods perfectly.
He knew that Ingram started to respond to him. The rate of his kills went up, and there were whole phases where the two of them had seemed to be in a back-and-forth game of one upmanship, as if determined to have the last word. It had only stopped because the media and the police seemed to be so poor at picking up on the kills that belonged to the two of them. Fewer than half of the total murders seemed to actually have been labeled as Lars Ingram’s work, and when Lars had been convicted, it had been for a random sampling of both their crimes.
It had been… disappointing when Lars had gotten caught, partly because it had shown that Lars wasn’t perfect, but mostly because it meant that it was impossible to go on killing in the same way without it being obvious that there was a second killer at work.
He’d briefly considered changing his methods, but that hadn’t felt right somehow. Instead, he’d stopped for a time, telling himself that he had achieved enough, ignoring the itch at the back of his mind. He’d watched as Lars was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death, the way someone else might watch seeing a sports hero brought low by injury. It had felt like the end of a dream.
As the execution loomed, though, he’d found the need to kill again proving harder and harder to ignore. Finally, he’d realized what his mind was trying to tell him: that he wasn’t done, not even close. That there was something far more important he could be doing.
So he’d started his current spree, still in a game of one-upmanship with Lars, except now, Lars couldn’t hit back with murders of his own. It finally gave him a chance to not just compete with, but actually surpass, his idol.
Yes, the world would see him, when before he’d been hidden, but that didn’t have to be a bad thing. He’d found himself looking at the news reports with a kind of satisfaction that came from knowing no one was confusing his work with Lars’s anymore.
One slight irritation was that they were calling him a copycat, as if he were merely second-rate. Still, after what he had planned, they would stop that soon enough. They would go from calling him a copycat to what he truly was: a successor.
Today, the Caretaker Killer would be executed, and tonight, people would see that his replacement was every bit as deadly.