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True Crime Aficionado

Dolores

It’s 8:30 a.m. on a Friday, and as usual I’m crammed into one corner of the elevator with my face in my phone as I ascend from basement parking to my floor. The doors sweep apart for a pit stop at Ground to welcome the usual crowd, but today…today, there’s a little ripple in the atmosphere, the universe exhaling its breath on the back of my neck, and I look up to see the back of a head with familiar, neatly trimmed dark hair. Dark gray coat, gray slacks, black gloves. Ted Bundy in the elevator. The dashing stranger strangler.

I don’t get off at Fourteen or Fifteen or Sixteen. I stay put and watch from my corner as he reads text messages on nearby phone screens, tilts his head to the conversation around him, studies faces and notes the floors they sort themselves onto.

He steps off at Twenty, and I stay, chewing my lip. And maybe it’s the boredom building in my head, making my brain slide out my ear like a piece of charcuterie sliding off a cracker, but a chime tinkles, a prancing little dance of mallets on a xylophone that no one around me hears—a podcast jingle, the soundtrack to my boring little life.

My life was interesting, once.

Tinkle, tinkle, tinkle.

I jab the button just in time to stop at Twenty-one, cross the hall, and glide down the fire escape stairs, my heels snapping violently against the concrete steps. I peer through the door before stepping out onto Twenty. Coast clear.

I’ve perfected the art of gliding through populated spaces. I’ve been flying under the radar in this building for years, after all. The trick is to not slow down, to not make eye contact, to keep my face severe enough that the bashful intern is relieved when I pass by without acknowledging him. Down the hallway, past the phone desk, around the corner and into the bullpen, becubicled within an inch of its demonic, corporate, undead life. The sickly drone of industrial air circulation stabbed through with the frantic pulse of phones ringing, everyone murmuring, murmuring, murmuring, except for one loud jackass with the self-awareness of a two-year-old describing his skin fungus over the phone. I prowl the perimeter, my pulse ticking faster—until it stops.

Another sweep of the xylophone.

There he is.

Dark head bowed over his desk, fingers plucking methodically at his keyboard. His movements careful, rehearsed, like a stage actor playing a part.

He stands and pans the room, and I duck behind a pillar. He makes his way to the break area and drinks from a paper cup, slowly , definitely not listening in on the watercooler gossip being hashed out by two coworkers nearby, finishing his break a sensible ten seconds after they leave, using that time to monitor the movements of a gaggle of middle managers with studied disinterest. As he returns to his seat, he scans the computer screens of everyone he passes with a bored expression.

I stalk down the main aisle and breeze past where he sits, mere inches from the back of his bare neck, and complete my flash reconnaissance: just a spreadsheet this morning, a list of names; no photos on his desk; murder gloves stuffed in his coat pocket; his shoes aren’t filthy with mud from a shallow grave, and they haven’t been scrubbed with a toothbrush and bleach, either; fresh shave; bare ring finger.

A creak behind me could be his chair as he turns to watch me walk away. A shiver goes down my spine, but I keep my pace steady.

I leave the bullpen via a long, narrow hall I know leads to a stairwell, but behind me…Are those footsteps? It’s hard to be certain on commercial carpet, and now I’m in a stretch of office wasteland missing the ubiquitous wall of unnecessary glass that would give me a reflected view of everything behind me. It won’t do to allow him to track me back to my lair. But the difference between predator and prey is a predator will calmly allow herself to be stalked by another predator. She doesn’t bolt like a silly bunny. Predators understand how to play the long game, how to front, how to employ theory of mind. Predators are artists.

Without changing my pace, I round a corner and duck into an open door. The janitor’s closet. It’s pitch-black inside, except for a gash of light under the door illuminating my toes. I wait.

My heartbeat slows.

The silence stretches on.

I feel…disappointed.

There were no footsteps behind me.

Suddenly two shadows appear in the sliver of light under the door, and my toes disappear.

My stomach folds in half, and in half again—

My heart races—

Tinkle, tinkle, tinkle. The little mallets trill up and down my spine—

And my face—

It’s a good thing it’s dark in here. I never smile before noon.

The shadows vanish, my toes reappear, and I’m alone again. Just me, the mop bucket, and my heart, beating again after years of flatlining.

He’s definitely a murderer. I haven’t rotted my brain on true crime for five years for nothing.

—

At my desk I fish out my phone and set to work. He’s got his own page of notes, and it’s filling up faster than the one I keep for the shifty-eyed parking attendant or the new HR consultant with the unsettling, pale gaze.

Jake the Ripper: He’s Doug’s. He doesn’t seem to have any real responsibilities. No particular friends. He wears the exact same clothes, day after day after day, the monotony a form of visual Vaseline to make people’s eyes slide right off him. He takes public transit; he definitely does not drive the Aston Martin that appeared once in basement parking, and as a matter of fact, no one does. Whoever owns it sits in it and masturbates to the thought of their car’s price tag. I know that’s what I’d do.

Full points for his mask. He’s exactly like everyone else here, a cookie-cutter corporate drone with a number tattooed in his ear. Cheap suit, boring tie, shoes that can’t possibly be comfortable. He’s a temp, a little sore thumb poking out at odd angles from the corporate body, and that’s all part of it. It’s easier to sustain an act for short stints. It’s handy to point at the challenges of being thrust into a department full of strangers and blame the antisocial behavior on shyness. And when things get weird—when someone notices him stuffing a duffle bag full of plastic sheeting into his trunk or wiping a speck of blood off his shoe—he takes a new job and vanishes. Just like the Paper Pusher, he slinks into offices like vapor curling in from under the door, and then leaves, barely imprinting onto the memories of anyone there. You remember that temp—what was his name? Jack? Jonathan?

And all the while, he slinks around, studying people, learning their routines, casing his next victim.

There’s a thud behind me. I swivel in my chair to look out the glass wall of my office, and who should happen to be claiming the cubicle opposite but…Murder Gloves himself.

He performs his move-in rituals solemnly and fastidiously, wiping down his desk with Clorox wipes before taking a seat. His movements are slow, smooth, careful. He lines up his pens, twists his Post-its just so , presses the power button on his computer, folds his hands. And then raises his eyes to mine.

I already knew he was attractive in a neat-hair-and-glasses sort of way. I’d noticed. Good looks give you a leg up in every field, including remote farmer’s fields full of unmarked graves. People like you, they trust you, they want to be alone with you. The glasses are a great idea. Thick-framed and dark, they’re what you see first when you look at him. He probably looks completely different without them. But if you look past them, he’s got a sort of root-cellar paleness, like someone who’s been kept in a secret basement all their life—which no doubt he has been. Dark hair and expressive eyebrows. Behind his glasses his lashes are thick, and dark circles give him a debauched, cocaine-weekend, hasn’t-slept-in-three-days look. Or hasn’t-slept-in-ten-years. He’s being eaten from the inside out by a horrific secret—the body hidden under the floorboards.

I know all about bodies hidden in plain sight.

And then the fucker smiles at me. An unhinged smile that doesn’t reach his eyes, the sort of smile you see right before Hannibal Lecter bites your face off.

Tinkle fucking tinkle.

I don’t smile back. I hit my quota early today.

He’s gone by the time I finish for the day. I board the elevator and lodge myself in the corner behind a pair of Spencer & Sterns accountants. That wall of bodies blocks me from view when he steps in at the ninth floor and turns to face the doors. What a pleasure. What a delight . So much Jake Ripper in one day. I creep forward until I stand just slightly behind and to one side, close enough to inhale that signature bouquet of social isolation overlaid with the lighter, cloying notes of bleach for wiping away DNA and fingerprints.

Except…he doesn’t smell like that. His mask is too good, after all. He smells pleasantly mannish—like clean hair and soap and something else, something inviting and red-blooded that would make a woman lean her face right into his shoulder seconds before he reached up and wrapped his hands around her throat.

He raises his chin to watch the numbers— 9, 8, 7 —and I raise my chin to watch him, the neat outline of his head, the contours of his shoulders. His head is angled so that I can see the world through one lens of his glasses, distorted and strange. He turns slightly to let someone off at Four, and I notice a patch of stubble that he missed, right over an artery in his neck. I could take care of it myself, quickly, gently, whisking the razor over that tender skin between heartbeats. Maybe I’d be careless, and a ruby of blood would form.

Our greasy reflection comes together as the elevator doors close, and when I look, I can see his eyes were on me first.

I work it out in my head on the drive home. He knew I was there behind him, as I leaned into his space and studied his haircut, his shave, and breathed in his smell—

He was breathing in my smell. He knew I was there because he recognized the scent of my perfume.

Three things occur to me. First, he’s been watching me . I made the mistake of drawing his attention. A couple of jokes in an elevator and now he’s like a pale, fluttering night bug that glimpses a flash of light and won’t go away. Or maybe a mosquito that’s sniffed blood and circles around lazily, waiting for its opportunity.

Second, a crooked little part of me likes that he’s been watching me. My life’s come to a pretty pass when I’m lonely enough to be flattered by the attention of a man who wants to carve my face from my skull and wear it.

And finally, this is bad. Nobody is supposed to notice me.