Page 42 of Don't Shoot Me Santa

Kenny didn’t let it faze him. These weren’t his Ryston undergrads, sharpened on ambition and espresso. This was Northbay. Local. Messy. Brilliant in patches. Half-asleep in others. And no less deserving of the work.

He stepped around the desk, picking up the marker. “Let’sstart with a basic distinction. Organised versus disorganised offenders. Who can tell me the difference?”

A girl near the front raised her hand, twisting a pen between her fingers.

“Organised is, like… someone who plans it out. Like they pick the victim on purpose and clean up after?”

“Good,” Kenny said. “Premeditation, control, deliberate staging. That’s organised. Disorganised, then?”

A boy in the back with his hood up and one AirPod in, grunted. “Loses it. Messy. Snaps.”

“Exactly. Impulsive. Leaves evidence behind. Often under the influence or emotionally driven.” He turned back to the board, drawing two quick columns. “Now, most real offenders don’t fall cleanly into one or the other. People are inconsistent. But profiling helps us build a psychological map. A set of traits and patterns that narrow a search.”

A hand shot up from the middle row. A girl with too much eyeliner and not nearly enough hesitation.

“Sir, did you hear about the boy they found in Ventnor?”

The atmosphere in the room shifted like a breeze through a cracked window. Whispers stalled. Pens froze mid-air. And every gaze turned forward.

Kenny hesitated long enough to make it deliberate. “Yes, I’ve heard. But that’s a live investigation. An active case. Let us stick to historical and theoretical.”

“My mum said they found him dressed up. Like… someoneputstuff on him. Wasn’t that what you were on about? Deliberate staging?”

Kenny folded his arms, controlling the flicker of discomfort in his throat. “Let’s bring it back to theory. If a crime scene is deliberately arranged, beyond what’s necessary to commit the act, we’d consider thatsignature behaviour.”

A few students started scribbling. Others leaned forward, drawn in now.

“Signature is not the same asmodus operandi,” he continued, walking to the whiteboard. “MO refers to the practical methods. How the offender carries out the crime and escapes detection. Signature is something else. Something psychological. It’s what theydon’tneed to do, but feel compelled to.”

He wrote the two terms cleanly across the board, underlining them with sharp, practiced strokes.

Another student called out, “So, like, dressing up their victim in a Santa suit? What’s that about?”

“Maybe he was on the naughty list,” someone muttered, chasing a cheap laugh.

Kenny turned. Aaron might get away with that sort of black humour with him, not only because he was in love with him but because with Aaron, it was a defence, not a dismissal. From anyone else, though, especially here, it hit wrong.

“I’ll gloss over the exceptionally poor taste, considering a young man not much older than you lost his life only days ago in this town, to address that as a theory and not the cheap, ill-timed joke you intended.”

He should have shut it down and moved on. Steered them away before it stuck. But the ripple of attention across the room was the same kind he used to get in lecture halls, when a case was fresh and the blood hadn’t dried. Alive cases always had an edge, and he hadn’t felt that pull since Ryston.

“That ‘naughty list’ logic?” Kenny snapped the lid on his pen. “It’s not as ridiculous as it sounds. Some offenders build entire internal codes. See themselves as enforcers of morality. Judges. Saviours. We’ve seen it with religiously motivated killers, with ritual offenders, with those acting out delusionsof moral authority. They’re not just killing. They’re sentencing.”

He paused, letting the words settle.

“Santa, in that sense, isn’t just festive. He’s symbolic. He sees you when you’re sleeping. Decides who gets rewarded and who gets punished. To someone with a fractured moral compass, that imagery is a perfect mask.”

The class was silent now, fully focused.

“But remember, profiling isn’t prophecy. It’s a tool. A lens. And the most dangerous offenders are often the ones who know exactly what we’re looking for, and how to hide behind it.”

He turned back to the board and let the silence hold.

It was too close to the truth.

Too raw for a Monday morning.

But inside, something clicked.