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The first white stone slipped from his fingers and clinked against the others in the dish. Cold little eyeballs. Dead little planets. He’d spent a hundred dollars on them, and they still looked like something you’d buy at a craft store to spruce up a fish tank.
Which was the point, of course. Mundane objects transformed by context.
A stone in a garden: decoration. A stone in an eye socket: horror.
Thankfully, the teenage cashier with a septum piercing down at Shell World on Gulf Boulevard hadn’t even looked up from her phone when he’d brought them. As well as the stones, he’d also purchased two Acer plants and a ceramic turtle.
Why? He hated plants, and turtles even more, but it was the little things that changed the narrative.
A good murderer was a magician and a salesman rolled into one.
Like a magician, you needed to confuse the sequence of events in the spectator’s mind.
Like a salesman, you had to use that subtle terminology that disguised the truth.
Hence the additional purchases. When that pimple-faced cashier finally heard about Frank’s alabaster-stone eyes on the news, she might remember the customer who purchased a small bag of alabaster stones and nothing else. She wouldn’t remember a man purchasing stones, plants and turtles.
He’d also been sure to mention his new garden renovation, which was a complete lie, but it was the nuances that completed the story.
Stories. That’s what separated men from animals.
Not opposable thumbs or fire or taxes. Human beings weren’t rational creatures; they were narrative ones.
They didn’t remember facts; they remembered tales.
Every religion was a story. Every political movement was a story.
Every relationship was a story two people told themselves, at least until one of them changed the plot.
The files on his desk told stories too, but these ones all had a common theme:
They had no ending.
And because of that, these stories were the redheaded stepchildren of the true crime world.
These were the few tales that hadn’t yet been picked clean by the media vultures.
Forgotten, unloved, too mundane for Netflix documentaries, too complex for podcast simplification.
No podcaster wanted a fifty-year-old case with no resolution.
No streaming service wanted a story where the villain got away clean.
America liked its monsters caught, caged, or killed.
They were the cold cases that had slipped through history’s fingers.
The only people that remembered were the detectives who’d failed to solve them.
Some of the files in front of him were originals.
Others were copies of copies, degraded like genetic material, but still carrying that essential DNA of failure.
Each one told its own story of dead ends and missed connections.
Of evidence lost and witnesses who couldn’t quite remember.
Of detectives who got too close or not close enough.
Frank Sullivan’s file was dog-eared now. He’d been transferred to the completed file, and his life had been reduced to bullet points. Promising Miami rookie. Palm Harbor transfer. FBI fast-track. Retirement. Death.
He turned to a fresh file. Another detective. Another obsessive. This one still living. Still believing in resolution, as if the universe cared about closure.
A quaint belief. Like thinking prayers could stop bullets or wishing made things true. Closure was a myth sold by therapists and bad television. The universe didn’t do neat endings; it just stopped.
Or worse, it repeated itself in increasingly degraded forms, as evident by the state of true crime today.
It was a bloated corpse picked over by amateurs with microphones.
Everything had been done, hadn’t it? Every angle explored, every motive dissected, every gruesome detail fetishized until it lost all meaning.
If Ted Bundy hadn’t been cremated, they would have dug up his corpse and wheeled it out for the masses.
It was all old news. Mass-produced, sanitized, sterile garbage.
Streaming services that stretched out an hour of information into episodes.
Soccermoms fancying themselves as behavioral psychologists to their handful of listeners.
Even the obscure regional slashers had their dedicated experts now, hosted by people who sounded vaguely disappointed when the body count wasn’t higher.
Where was the artistry? Where was the narrative tension when every possible permutation of human cruelty had already been cataloged, categorized, and turned into content?
You couldn’t just kill prostitutes and mail cryptic letters to the press anymore.
You couldn’t just call yourself the-something-Ripper and let the collective conscious elevate you to mythical status.
That stuff was passé. By the same token, you couldn’t just become Serial Killer Version 2.
0. Things like the body count or level of violence didn’t matter anymore, because what the audience really wanted was stories.
Perfect example, the Jennifer Marlowe murder.
The few details alone made it worthy of dissection by the masses, but the lack of ending relegated it to a lower status on the true crime spectrum.
Without an attached narrative, it was just a weird isolated incident that didn’t hit quite the same as cases with clear conclusions.
But as of last night, it was now a real story. A crazy old detective, killed by the very case that haunted him. There wasn’t a true crime fan in the United States that wouldn’t salivate at that blurb.
The media hadn’t made the connection yet. They were too busy reporting on domestic stabbings and bar fight fatalities. But they would. Soon.
And when they did, the frenzy would begin.
He reached for the next photograph. This one was recent. Taken outside a courthouse in Tampa last spring. The subject wasn’t looking at the camera, which made it perfect. Candid. Unaware. The way prey should be.
This one would be special, and it required a strong stomach. If gouging out eyes almost made him sick, then tonight was going to really test his limits.
But once it was done, this kill would cement the pattern, turn coincidence into conspiracy and transform an old cold case into a modern mystery that would capture imaginations and spawn a thousand theories.
Jennifer Marlowe wasn’t just some dead girl from the seventies. She was prologue. She was the first domino in a sequence that had taken decades to arrange, but only seconds to topple.
Tonight he’d give another unfinished story an ending. Not the one his victim been looking for, but the necessary one.
After all, that’s what separated good stories from great ones - the ending had to feel both surprising and inevitable.
He reached for his tools. Not a gun or some alabaster stones.
No. Tonight he needed the axe.
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