By Chase Docter
TW: Murder, dismemberment, general cruelty.
World religion has, at least in the most developed regions, shrunk significantly more than what was projected; not replaced by carefree agnostics and self-determined atheists, but instead a population of depressed and spiteful nihilists, all convinced that their lives mean nothing to anyone, yet all equally scared to cut the cord for good.
Nietzsche said that, after religion faded and declined, the world would be left full of the Letzter Mensch—a people lost in a daze of valueless nihilism, scared and confused and acting as brutish fools and spastic animals. Following this, Nietzsche hoped, would come the age of the Übermensch—a man who overcomes nihilism and builds his values not on the beliefs of his culture, nor centered around any god, dharma, or Tao, but instead his own humanity and the world. These Übermensch would then have a self-determined Utopia in themselves, living as a confident being, each a prophet for their own humanity sent only to themselves.
I hope that Nietzsche was right. I hope that, at the very least, the future will be good for somebody. Because if not, we will walk (as we do now) aimlessly as a pitiful race of Letzter Menschen until the actual last man alive can take it no longer and finally puts our species out of its misery.
Mandatory Journal of Detective Pierre O’Hannagain
Art-Crimes, Inc.
These documents are property of Art-Crimes, Inc. and Pierre O’Hannagain, meant only for the eyes of company administrators and those Detective O’Hannagain authorizes individually.
Monday, January 21st, 2019
(Martin Luther King Day)
Lafayette, Indiana
The crime scene was detailed with an array of dead, dismembered bats—their fur, bones, and other parts arranged in the mimicry of a complex, floral Iranian pattern around the beheaded corpse. Ten years ago, I would have considered this a disgusting, overkill display, likely a product of some edgy teen with unlimited recourse and no healthy outlet. But in the year 2019, this is simply the life of a detective.
We have our own organization now: Art-Crimes, Inc. Our mission is to first assess whether or not a crime is to be considered a work of art. Then, we are tasked with finding the meaning of the piece, or the killer’s motive. Finally, only if possible and necessary, we catch the artist. The first step has become increasingly difficult over the years, as many simple murderers have found it to be a great idea to blame their crimes on these artists. Oftentimes, though, there is a little tell. If the setup is elaborate, delicate and intentional, then it’s most likely an art-crime. If it’s violent, spastic, and unprepared, then it likely isn’t. However, even this is never a perfect science, as spontaneity is oftentimes an undeniable part of the artistic process. With enough training, though, one can differentiate between a manic, immediate spectacle and some swift, framed act of violence. Victims matter as well—a true art-criminal preys on the extremes of either end of the “who-will-miss-them” spectrum.
An artist who doesn’t care about getting caught, who wants to make a big scene, will go after the expected thin, young, blonde woman from the suburbs with plenty of friends and a well-off boyfriend. Artists more keen on laying low and making as many pieces as possible, on the other hand, will tend to strike at the so-called “dregs of society,” usually homeless migrants and queer sex workers; the kinds of people the average senator would pay them to kill.
Once a never-before-seen shocker and a headline above all others, the art-crime is now just a footnote. Every random disappearance and public disturbance is treated as a question; a rumor of the possibility of an art-crime. Parents now expect the worst when their daughters take too long to come home, and far too often are their tragic expectations met.
My name is Detective Pierre O’Hannagain, art-crime investigator. Following company recommendations, I’ve decided to start writing journals as a means to vent and give the admins a decent mental health record. This job is beyond taxing—watching brilliant intellectuals and beautiful creatives take to the heinous crimes that they do breaks down the spirit almost as much as the sight of their mutilated victims and the thoughts of their families.
Today’s victim: a teenage girl. Officially, her identity is yet unknown (as of today, still waiting on lab results) but it’s agreed that the main contender is one Sarah Owens: 16 year old white female, 5′ 5″, green eyes, brown hair, 120 pounds. Minus the missing head (and by extension her weight), everything about the missing girl matched the body. This is the second victim by the savage Angra Mainyu killer. The name is derived from the Zoroastrian deity of the same name—the first recorded appearance of a pure evil entity in monotheistic religion—whose visage was burnt into the exposed back of the first victim. The reappearance of Persian patterns led us to determine the connections, and the discovery made this an official serial killing.
No security cameras in this abandoned warehouse. No news about the girl’s prior whereabouts. And, with the bats assumed to be sourced privately, no other places to start.
Wednesday, January 23rd, 2019
The autopsy of the girl (now confirmed to be Sarah Owens) was finished. The parents identified her head, found in a dumpster behind a Wendy’s three miles away. I waited (I am ashamed to admit, impatiently) for the couple to stop crying and for the officers to be done consoling so I could move on with the investigation. This job has taken a toll on me. The first time I had to watch a scene like this one, I almost cried with them. Now I can’t stand here without tapping my foot and counting the seconds on the clock. The officers and my own co-workers seem more empathic than I, though I wonder if it’s just a mask.
The head gave us more clues than the rest of the corpse. Her mouth was stitched shut. Could be representative of frightened meekness, a guilty refusal to admit, or not being allowed to speak. On this part there was revealed a folded note tucked away into the severed stump of what used to connect to her neck.
“THREE MURDERS THREE HOLY CITIES ONE TO GO TIME IS TICKING DETECTIVE”
While a disappointment in punctuation rules, the note provided a vital clue. I only knew two holy cities, but the third I figured shouldn’t be hard to find. A quick Google search proved me right: Yazd, Iran is commonly viewed as the closest thing Zoroastrianism has to a holy city. It made a neat little triangle with Mecca and Jerusalem—the killer had played it cute and threw our poor team a bone.
The world of art-crimes made me used to cryptic hints. I found a map of where the killings had been and recreated the triangle: starting with Fort Wayne (the site of the first murder) as the stand-in for Yazd. Then, where Mecca sat matched well with the city of Lafayette, home of poor Sarah Owens and her rearranged corpse. Connecting the last of the dots and rotating the triangle a touch, the closest place to Jerusalem I could find was South Bend—the lost city at Indiana’s Northern edge. Of course, I packed up what few things I owned and set off.
I recalled the origins of the art-crime boom: The first grisly display to be publicly called such a term was a series of diorama setups made from the gutted innards of African Americans. Naturally, the force suspected a white supremacist to be behind the crimes, but they were proven wrong when the culprit was revealed to be a fellow Black. Angry at the lack of coverage and sympathy given to African murder victims, the artist enacted his spree: a series performed as a means of drawing more attention to the Black community and its plights.
A recent case that drew the nation’s attention involved a man who had grown unhappy at his megachurch pastor and subsequently tied him up with barbed wire and locked him in a homemade brazen bull, then coated the figure in gold paint to highlight his gripes with the pastor with a final Exodus reference. However, most art-crimes do not follow men’s gripes with society, rather they are performed as a result of a buildup of harsh emotion, using knives as brushes on a human canvas, planting hooks in patterns emblematic of their sadness. Tortured beings who believed conventional art was not enough of an outlet for their burdens, the typical art-criminal pays no mind to the feelings of others, and those who do are just about the worst of them. They’d ask the victim how they were doing at every step of the torture; recording their pain and cries as they worked. Sometimes, the killers would leave recordings of their victims for us to hear.
One killer I tracked had been known for planting girls on meathooks, then promising to let them go as long as they answered a few questions truthfully. The pain of the victims’ voices is enough to conjure vomit all on its own, and their situations were only made worse by what the killer would do next.
He would pump the girls full of drugs to sleep and forget, and during this period he’d remove the lowest remaining piece of the victim’s leg. He would cover the girls’ views of their legs, relying on the drugged haze and phantom limb to keep them further in the dark. Then, he would ask more questions and put them under yet again, repeating the process until he got what he wanted. I think his motive was a representation of his poor upbringing or insecurities. Hard to say.
Angra Mainyu was a unique case, however. He didn’t care to make his victims suffer; the coroners’ report claimed the bodies were killed with a quick breaking of the neck, with all further mutilations happening post-mortem. Whatever message the artist wanted to convey, it didn’t require screams; only blood.
Thursday, January 24th, 2019
I wish I could just take an overhead look at every train ticket in town. It wouldn’t take long; no one comes to South Bend anymore. All I’d have to do is cross-reference Lafayette to South Bend with Fort Wayne to Lafayette and this whole thing would be done within an hour. Management says we can’t, though. We’re a private company; we would need to go through law enforcement, who would then need to go to a judge, who would then need to go to the train companies. Art-Crimes, Inc.’s management is allergic to the very idea of red tape; their hatred of paperwork trumps the protection of human life every time.
Being stingy in general, Art-Crimes, Inc. doesn’t pay its agents FBI numbers, nor does it provide much for us to get hotel rooms. As a result, the sad lot of us are trapped in the thick-silked web of crappy company-approved motels. I was again stuck with the Rader’s Roadhouse, a place I knew all too well. Even my room number, 13, was a spot of bad luck. Thirteen is wicked to anyone, but even worse for me, trapped at this motel. I had stayed in that room before and thus knew I wouldn’t be sleeping much that night. I’d spent one of the best nights of my life here, a night later made a nightmare living in that room. I once stained this room’s sheets with the love I shared with a beautiful woman, but those same sheets were quickly stained with blood.
The girl I loved had been in cahoots with the traders of forbidden meat and assumed I’d love the taste just the same. Her unwell volunteer lay sprawled, gutted on the bed for the now-legal process. Her face beamed, mine tensed. I loved her as much as a man could love any woman, but love is a painful experience and I felt my hand forced to bring her the same release told of in all the celebrated canine novels. My uncaring employers didn’t take this motel, or even this room, off my motel allowances, and the trickster deity of fate and chance made a hearty chuckle occupying every room but this one. They’d already given me the pain of a taxing job, might as well rub some salt in the wound whenever they can.
While the officers in Fort Wayne and Lafayette worked on finding suspects and clues, I made it a mission to question all the hotels and motels I could find, naturally starting with the Rader’s Roadhouse. The man at the counter was a sad-eyed, woe-is-me type creature broken by a town abandoned quicker than anyone could have anticipated, much like other small American cities part of the three great waves of hopelessness that soured economies, infrastructure, and souls.
“Have you seen anyone suspicious come around?” I asked, “Anyone from Lafayette or Fort Wayne or anything?”
“No one suspicious, I suppose. As for people from those towns, well, we get a lot of people from everywhere. I don’t bother asking anymore.” The man had a young daughter sat behind him, her eyes glowing in fascination, unblinkingly locked on my person as a medical textbook and ignored homework sat on her lap.
The phone by his desk rang. “Excuse me,” he said, and took the phone. After an inaudible sentence from the phone, he sighed and looked to the girl. “Sasha, will you watch the desk for me? I gotta…” he left without finishing his statement.
I looked at Sasha. She took her father’s place in the seat and quickly asked, “Are you a detective?”
“That’s right…” I replied, “Pierre O’Hannagain, Art-Crimes, Inc. You like true crime or something?” The craze had just about hit its peak; art-crimes made crime a bigger spectacle than it had been even in the days of John Dillinger and Al Capone.
“A little, but I’m not as crazy about it as other people are.” There was a unique optimism to her voice that I hadn’t seen in a while. “Are you investigating a murder here?”
“I’m working to stop one,” I fished a card out from my pockets, “I suspect a man known as the Angra Mainyu killer may be in this town.” I passed the card her way. “Ever heard of him?”
“Nah, our news gets too cluttered by all the one-kill artists and concept muggings.” That had become the standard art scene of South Bend and other towns of the same breed.
“Well, I just want you to make sure that if you or your father see anything even a little suspicious, you just let me know, okay?”
“Alright!” She took the card and finally paid mind to her homework as I left the lobby.
Everyone dealt with the art-crime boom in their own way. The response varied person to person, town to town, state to state, country to country. Peoples’ responses shaped the modern scenes of both art and crime across the globe. Art-crimes officially started in St. Louis, though its roots and predecessors could be seen in London years prior. Europe, Japan, North America, Australia, New Zealand, and parts of Latin America had all been hit with the epidemic, with the European Union being the first to act on it. Headed by Germany, France, and Italy, efforts to promote mental health checkups, positive artistic expressions, limitations on AI art, and grants to foundations dedicated to helping struggling artists alleviated a great deal of the problem. It wasn’t completely gone, but the art-crime scene was far less severe there as it was elsewhere. The Brits, Aussies, Kiwis and Canadians all adopted a similar response. The United States, however, took its typical crime-and-punishment approach. This is, in part, where I come in. Private and government-owned police agencies across the country got a whole lot of extra funding, as did the FBI and none other than my own Art-Crimes, Inc.
The other hotels and motels brought about similar results to my own, as was expected. Still, I left them all my card and moved on. The second crime scene was full of dead bats, and the first one featured exhumed human remains strung up in the form of a great eagle, bones and dry skin taking the place of feathers. Angra Mainyu’s displays were highly decorated, all things no man could do in one day on his own in private. Someone was bound to see him with his supplies, no matter how well he hid his intentions.
The red light district was sure to have someone with a keen eye. But no one there would willingly spill to a cop, I knew, but it was still worth a shot. Black water and seeping sludge covered the street like a swamp. None of the street lamps worked, whether they flickered or were simply burnt out, and their job was taken by neon signs and glowing cars that played music with ground-shaking bass. The scents of weed and piss mingled in the air. Men dealt drugs out of tattered vans and women wore colorful articles that barely passed as clothes to solicit their business. One such woman leaned against a wall, dimly drawing on a vape pen and gazing into the curb. She had dyed blonde hair and torn fishnets up her thighs, leading into a dirty pink miniskirt spotted in cigarette burn holes. She called out to no one and paid no mind to my presence, so I figured her my best contact.
“You want something?” she asked, “You a cop or somethin’?”
“Not that kind of cop,” I replied, showing her my ID.
“Art-Crimes, Inc.! You guys finally decided to show, eh?” She spat on the ground and put the pen away. “Better late than never.”
“Have you seen anything suspicious recently?”
“Every hour of every day.”
“Relating to possible art-crimes, I mean. Material collection, location scoping, weapons, anything like that?”
“My answer still stands, detective.” She sighed and rubbed her forehead. “If you must know, a few of my friends got paid double rates to buy a few things from the army surplus place.”
“Did they tell you what he looked like? Is there anything else you can tell me!?”
“No, okay? I already told you more than I’ve ever told any cop. I could get in trouble for this shit.”
“Please, miss, someone’s life is at risk. Two people have died already and—”
“Who died? Some pretty young teens? Middle-class twenty-somethings with a bright future and the whole world in front of them?” I didn’t answer. She brushed the hair out of her face and applied another layer of red to her lips. “Honey, I lost five of my closest friends to gangs, art-crimes, and serial killer freaks within the past two years alone. No one asked me shit about them. I’m sorry, Detective. If I knew anything else, I’d spill. But I don’t, okay?”
I handed her a half-folded card. “Can you at least gimme a call if you see something? Please?”
A resentful reluctance clearly on her face, she took it. “I gotta get back to work now.” She stepped away, closer to the street. “Not everyone gets the luxury of detective work, y’know? Some of us have to go to the front lines.”
That comment stuck with me for longer than our conversation lasted. Maybe it doesn’t mean shit to anyone else, but to me it hurt. I had assumed my job was the front lines, that it was the toughest there was; the source of my woe and isolation.
Is this job really the dreadful task I knew it as, or is it all a product of myself? They say that 10% of your life is stuff happening to you, and 90% of your life is how you react. If that’s the case, then I really doubt I can blame my job for my poor mental state. This statement, in the moment it was delivered, brought up images in my mind of co-workers: other detectives who had nice family lives, good friends to support them, and who always showed up to work looking refreshed. I then thought to my own life: no family, no friends—I hadn’t dated in years—I don’t know anybody outside of work. Not to mention my sleep! My nightly rest yielded me only a range of zero to five hours a night.
Had I truly been too cynical? I had looked down at the motel manager for his woe-is-me attitude, but how could I judge when I had the same attitude? I can’t blame the guy for his attitude; his daughter would be just about the most common target! My empathy had never gone out for these surely anxious people, for neither the hookers on the street nor the middle-class folks with bright futures.
Friday, January 25th, 2019
Midnight had come about during my wandering. My spinning mind was left incapable of noticing until my phone went off and broke my trance, simultaneously flashing a new time: 12:11 a.m. Beneath it read Chris Munson, my supervisor at the agency.
“Hello?”
“O’Hannigain, how’s the investigation going?”
“Slow. No leads beyond the map. I’ve just been checking out hotels and chatting up hookers.”
“Ah, I gotcha. Well, I have some good news from Fort Wayne—our new prime suspect is a man named Matthew Ronson.”
“Matthew Ronson?”
“That’s right; FBI found books on murder, religion, animal anatomy, and Zoroastrian art in his home, so—”
“Wait, they searched his home? What led them to do that? What made him a suspect in the first place!?”
“…They, uh, they didn’t say, come to think of it…but they said that they think he’s in town now. He bought tickets to both Lafayette and South Bend, but his card records don’t show any changes after that, so check out as many cash-based motels you can find, okay?”
“But you don’t know what made him a suspect?”
“You know the FBI, Pierre.”
“Yeah, well, they usually tell us a little more than this! You’re not missing anything?”
“Uh, no. I don’t think I am.”
“Christ…alright, I look into them.”
“Fantastic. I’ve got pictures of the guy coming in. Make sure the motels see it, okay?”
The suspect’s face was clean, as often expected from such killers. His eyes sagged and wrinkled an otherwise spotless mug. Young man, medium height, brown hair. Small indentations on the sides of his nose suggested glasses. Further details described him as an intelligent young man, deeply interested in philosophy and politics. I wondered, then, what it meant for his motive. The Persian patterns suggested some kind of foreign fascination, with specifically Iran, and his whiteness meant it couldn’t have been a sign of his background. Described with nothing but praise, called an empathetic figure, the man was far from the monstrous creep we all imagined him as.
After a brief rest and an uncomfortable daybreak, I went back to the streets with printouts of the suspect and a new set of cards to find no new leads; not from the joints I checked out before, nor from the seedier spots I found for the first time. The fruitlessness of this act made me wonder if this guy was even at a hotel, or if the downtrodden city dwellers were too suspicious of lawmen to turn in anything. I can hardly blame them, though, for I had heard it from partnered officers that it was a common strategy to use the veil of serial killings to look for (or plant) evidence of drugs, prostitution, or the undocumented in order to shut everything down. If these people weren’t cursed with an undying suspicion of the men meant to protect them, then perhaps the snake could have been crushed before its venom spat a third fatal tragedy.
Back in my motel room, Munson shot me an email elaborating on details about the suspect. My curiosity opened it before my door had even closed; I had to see what scraps the FBI would toss us.
Matthew Ronson was, for a single year, an executive aide servicing some cabinet secretary, their identity unreleased by the FBI. They wrote that he had become disillusioned with the administration and country after only a year on the job. He had “gone the way of Kurtz,” they suggested, though they refused to elaborate further. Even Munson, a foolish man too spaced out for investigation, was frustrated by the vagueness of the information. While Munson was an idiot, I could piece a thing or two together. At the time, I couldn’t tell the true purpose of the killer, but I figured his Persian patterns and political frustration pointed together to one place: Iran. The killings, according to the killer’s map, began there, then moved to Saudi Arabia, and now lurked in Jerusalem.
The Pentagon changed things. What was initially little more than a confusing art piece had become a political conspiracy, the FBI acting to blanket its true nature. While my brain had spread this case far and wide, flying across the globe and cosmos, I knew that, on the ground level, everything is the same.
“How’s the case going, detective?” The girl from the desk, Sasha, was peering through my open door.
“Oh, yes! Sorry.” I got up to close the door. Before I could, a hand shot through the doorway and froze my abdomen.
“Sasha. Sasha Goen,” we shook hands, “Sorry, I forgot to introduce myself earlier.”
“No, no, I’m sorry I didn’t ask!” I laughed.
“Any updates on the case?”
I told her the truth: “Classified, I’m afraid.” The girl nodded; she knew the drill. “I’ve got to be going, then. Stay safe, okay? Don’t talk to anyone you don’t know, and don’t go out when you don’t need to!”
She nodded again. I could see on her face that she was uninterested in my warnings. This young woman was an unencumbered creature set on her own path. Sasha lived on her own values, rooted in confidence in herself and the world she knew, not the one she was warned of. Perhaps I made all that up; I can’t see into her head. The more likely story goes that my preexisting deep thought exaggerated her subtle expressions.
In any case, I knew that she wasn’t going to listen.
A shame.
Saturday, January 26th, 2019
The room was colder when I awoke. Turned on my side, I could see that the window had been pried open. This didn’t spring any anxiety; instead a disappointment over my survival. This stupid case just had to keep going, didn’t it? The most likely truth was that this was some pretentious A-student who thought he had something new to say. Feathers were scattered all across the room—most likely hand-plucked from real birds, rather than synthetic—and my mirror had been curiously turned around in its position, leaving a blank sheet of silver in place of my reflection.
A printed photo of my sleeping form was taped to the mirror. It was black and white, only lit by a single match I would later find sticking out my shoe. On the back was a note, written in a bold red marker:
“DEtECtIVE O’HANNIGAIN
ThIS IS Ronson. MEET ME ON THE rooftop of 666 Devil evil
COME ALONE OR More Will Die.
I WILL TELL YOU Everything.”
It was written exactly as presented, funky capitalization and all. The blocked address needs no explanation. A smaller photo, found with the match, displayed a crude bomb as a message that he wasn’t bullshitting. I could feel the urgency here, not just the bomb threat (this wasn’t new), but also from some unseen tension.
When I threw the door open, though, all momentum drained to my feet and out the heels. Doors were open. People stood, still in bathrobes, looking down the hall. Grim chatter and the plastic sounds of tools fluttered against the walls. I crept toward the source of the noise; I had to flash my ID to move past some police tape. My heart sank when I came to room 001. Outside the door, on a bench, sat the manager. Half-naked, draped in a cloth, he looked forward with wet eyes into the void beyond, unable to see the creatures before him. I peered inside the room.
Angra Mainyu’s third victim, Sasha Goen, lay dead. Embedded in her open torso was a small cauldron containing a little fire. Torn, unraveled cloths of camouflage draped the walls and windows. The girl’s wrists and ankles were tightly wrapped in thick, gold-painted rings, tied to the legs of her bed. Parallel to the lengths of the bed were, written in blood, as they appeared on the Iranian flag, the words of the Islamic Takbir.
I couldn’t stand being in that room long. The metallic scent of fresh blood and rising smoke combined were too much. I had seen the corpses of people I knew many times before, but this was a special case wherein a pure, ambitious soul had all opportunities ripped from her. The father sat disassociating, gently rocking back and forth, viewing the officers as mere ghosts and muttering indecipherable chants to himself.
Angra Mainyu, or rather Matthew Ronson, was a sick son of a bitch for sure. I unfortunately have little to say about him otherwise. Though he was a monster, he was hardly a unique one. All there was left to do was face him personally on the rooftop, so off I went. All things considered, I probably should have turned that letter in to somebody, had someone planted in neighboring buildings to keep watch before I went over there. But hindsight is 20/20, and fury is blind.
“I was worried you wouldn’t come alone!” His voice, though faced against the roaring winds of January, hit my ears well. I trained my gun on him. “Hey, easy there! I’m unarmed, you know!”
“Well, then, you son of a bitch? Got anything you wanna say?” While Ronson wasn’t unique as a killer, his consensual private interview was new to me.
“Oh, I’ve got so much to say. Where should I begin…” he chuckled. Bearded now, I could tell the years since his resignation hadn’t been kind. “They say I’ve gone the way of Kurtz, is that right? Well, that couldn’t be farther from the truth. It’s them who’ve fallen to that side!”
“What the Hell are you talking about!?” I was then only somewhat familiar with the character of Kurtz, and even after I gained that understanding, I still likely would have enjoyed silence or conciseness from this clown.
He scoffed, clearly assuming my inferiority, “Can’t you take a little guess?”
The Persian patterns, the Zoroastrian themes, the army surplus, the Holy Cities; they all pointed one direction. “War in the Middle East, I reckon? Something to do with Iran?”
“You’re not bad, are ya?” He began pacing. I almost wanted to shoot him then and there, that piece of shit. “In the Pentagon, I once saw something I don’t think I should have. Plans for a subtle destruction of Iran and its population, disregarding the innocent and peace-friendly civilians. Destabilization, mass opinion manipulation, coded prejudice, sabotage, even plague—that’s the kind of shit on the table. It’s already started, Detective! Do you understand!?”
He said more to me but I cannot repeat it, even in writing.
“And how does murdering three innocent girls factor into this!?” My trigger finger twitched impatiently.
“Their lives were a tragic sacrifice,” he drawled, removing his glasses, “but I’m afraid this was the only way to get people to care.” Enthusiastically, Ronson approached me; I took a step back. “You yell at the government, nobody gives a shit! Everyone does that—they can just make me disappear if they want. No big deal! But do an art-crime, then—well, now all eyes are on you! We get someone else involved, a non-government private institution!”
“Art-Crimes, Inc…” I put the pieces together in my head, “So you want to get caught, then?”
“Exactly!” he cried, jumping around as a Christmas child, “Yes, that’s right! And then, when it comes time for the court case—”
“They’ll need to dig up the motive…”
“YES! Everything gets leaked in court! You spill the beans on their shady shit for me!” A monster he surely was; he seemed passionate. “These poor girls, you understand, their deaths may have saved millions if only you help me, Detective!”
I paused for a moment. “You put in a bomb threat, didn’t you?”
“I apologize, Detective. Not for the bomb, but for the threat. You see, I have no such device. I could never kill on such a large scale.”
A crack rang out across the skyline, as if a home run strike. Before my eyes, Matthew Ronson’s temple exploded in a misty red spray of fluid and bone. Within seconds, two FBI agents appeared from the doorway to the stairs. Naturally, they told me that none of this happened.
A simple gift, as they called it, was offered to me in exchange for my silence. Though their words of ease were ultimately unsatisfying and insulting, I accepted their stories without question. I didn’t prod or demand to know who was behind this all; I was no hero. They said this was a cold case, and that a generous package would be delivered should I repeat that.
Partially out of fear, and partially out of greed, I accepted the bribe. My next few weeks were spent pretending to do work, knowing full well that this would just be marked a cold case. With my newfound free time, I found myself with a new openness to sleep but a conscious too guilty to actually do so. The victims’ families will never see closure. Though their daughters may be avenged in the physical realm, in the realms of their minds, the killer has made it away unpunished and free.
Now this is my cross to bear. Only I know that closure exists, but I am condemned to, by my own greed and cowardice, withhold the vital comfort only I can offer. For the sake of my own skin, I have abandoned justice and betrayed the moral teachings of every philosopher, prophet and preacher. The only atonement I can offer for such a sin is to embrace my job. I understand now that this is not a curse, but a way to lift curses off of others. I can work now to bring monsters like these to justice, give people closure, and prevent further pain.
Nietzsche said that, after religion faded and declined, the world would be left full of the Letzter Mensch—a people lost in a daze of valueless nihilism, scared and confused and acting as brutish fools and spastic animals. He predicted the coming Übermensch, set to live life on his own terms and by his own morality. Be it like the Machiavellian Matthew Ronson or the more Camusian Sasha Goen, self-determination will, as I see it, be the guiding light of the century. I yet don’t know if I truly am among them; I accepted a hideous bribe, but could new self-determination and ethical code really change this?
Still, I don’t know the answer. All I know is that I have a job to do: investigate elaborate murder scenes, determine the motive, evaluate their artistry, and catch the bastard.
Author Bio
Chase Docter is a young author from Northwest Indiana, just outside of Chicago. At 20 years old, he lives with his parents and siblings. Incredibly tall and quite autistic, Docter does his best to navigate life without bumping his head. Inspired by the works of David Lynch, David Bowie, Hunter S. Thompson, he writes primarily for himself but has always dreamed of others reading his work.
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