R/Nosleep (Get Spooked)

To My Big Brother

By: u/Erutious

Warning: suicide, homicide.

March 3rd

I always kind of hated my brother. Well, hate is a strong word. I just always hated how easy everything was for him. He's two years older than me, but everything just comes so easily for him. In highschool, he was in ROTC, taking courses in criminal justice so he could get a leg up on his law enforcement career, and had a string of friends and girlfriends to make his highschool years amazing. He never seemed to study, always retained what he needed for tests, and finished his highschool years half a year early with a nearly perfect GPA. He didn't need to, he could have gone straight to the police academy, but he chose to join the Army for four years; saying it was his "duty to his country. He served as an MP and later as a base investigator for base related crimes. When he got out, he was practically ready to start police work already.

Now he's a hot shot detective, while the only thing I got out of five years of highschool was negative comparisons to my perfect brother and too many bullies to count.

But, it looks like his streak may be coming to an end now that this new string of murders keeps piling up.

They're calling him the West End Canibal and his crimes are truly horrific. He meets woman online, pretty common in this day and age, and then murders them in their own homes. He cuts them open, sometimes stealing their organs, and they've found bites and burns on them as well. The missing organs lead them to believe that he's eating them, but they don't really seem to have any proof. My brother talks ceaselessly about this guy during our weekly meetups to have a beer and talk about life. This is something he insists on since it gives him a lot of opportunities to talk about himself. My work is so boring that no one in their right mind would want to hear about it. Very little happens to me that would make anyone want to hear about my life, probably why I'm still single.

"The crux of it is," my brother told me last week as he sat on his stool at O'Malley's pub, "is that I don't think the bites belong to him. We've found dental records from three different sets of teeth and one of them came back with dental records on a recently deceased person."

"So what? He's a grave robber too?" I asked, not really interested, but still wanting to hear him flounder.

"The guys still buried though. We exhumed his body, his wife was right pissed, and found his teeth intact. We're chasing our tails here. This guy isn't giving us a lot to work with, and his body count is nearly in the double digits."

I pretended to be speculative, but really I was laughing into my beer at him. My perfect brother, so confident and sure of himself, was being thwarted by some nobody. I had sat on this stool for years just waiting for a story like this. I know it sounds petty, but I liked to see him unsure of himself. It makes me realize that he's just as human as I am.

March 12

There were another two murders this week.

He called me this time, not having time for a beer as the department scrambles to figure this out.

"I just don't get it," he said and his voice sounded tired, "this guy is a genuine ghost. We have him picking up his first victim on Tinder, but his second victim was some random woman from a bar. Jesus, but he really did a number on her. He slashed one of her breasts off completely, we found it in a corner, and all of her organs were just strewn about the bathroom. We had kind of thought that maybe he was selling them or something, but now he's not even taking them with him. He's just dismembering them and leaving them sitting around."

I pretended to listen, cleaning up so I could get home as I prepared to leave my job, but my face likely looked like a kids on Christmas morning. He was really worried about this, he was really worried that he couldn't solve this case. I remembered a year ago as I watched something similar happening, feeling that this would be the moment of his failure, and wanting to see it. When he caught the guy though, a middle aged cubical jockey who was murdering prostitutes instead of buy a Jaguar like everyone else midlife crisis, I had watched him crow about it at a press conference and tried not to puke. If pride came before a fall, then his fall was a long time coming.