Short stories, prompts

DIRW 3: I succeeded

It took him a lot of time to get over his loss, or more precisely, it took him a month to get over the loss of his only daughter. Maya was still not over it, despite it being three months but truth be told, it might appear that he did not get over it either, just channelling that grief to brainstorming ways on how to catch the serial killer, who had only gone on to commit many more murders, so many more that it was astounding, and it was not in one part of the country but from various parts of the country. The only reason they knew that the murder was associated with him was that dreaded signature of his on his victims, The Carver. It was really difficult to track down his location but looking closely at the bodies, they finally had their clue as the letters seemed to match to say H-E-A-R-T-L-E-S-S. There would be another victim with a H after the second S used to be over. Thus, the cycle continued. This clue did nothing to help them. There were just so many people. Who was the culprit? Why could USA not be a quaint little country with forty thousand people? Why did it have to be so big?

Finally, they found him. He was a college mate of his first victim, Sara, who had rejected him because of his nerdiness. She had similar features and even though she was not the most beautiful, she still considered the poor killer way out of league compared to herself. When he did propose in front of the entire college, something he had planned for days on end, she rejected him brutally as was evident in the college CCTV records.

This was the only clue they had. They worked up on where this man was because he seemed to be moving about a lot, so he might not have a real local job. His work might be focused online mostly where he could do it from anywhere in the world. Soon, they found the man, Nazeem, a freelancer white hat coder whose heart was basically tar black, because of how he targeted innocent victims because of his own sufferings.

He was in New York right now, just where they were working on the case. That was super convenient as they had just received an arrest warrant against him, and a search warrant of his belongings. His house was watched and his usual timetable was noted.

The next day when they were still watching over his house, he left the house and they knew that he was going to kill another victim. Another police team followed him. Why did he have to fixate himself on a girl with features which were so common? That gave him a lot of victims and for the police a lot of cases to solve.

They entered his house, which somehow fortunately turned out to be his birth house. This was the house he was connected with, unlike the motels he used to stay for five days to take care of victims and then leave. The detectives' colleagues were surprised as to how he used to be so quick with finding the victim, travelling to her location, kidnap her, kill her, carve her and then leave the body, but he reminded them that he was a white hat coder. White hat coders are paid by companies to hack company websites, security codes, etc. so that they can reveal the weak points of the company's codes and data protection. So, such a person might definitely know about stalking on the internet and social media apps.

He still remembered how Nisha wanted to have her first facebook account but Maya had sternly told her that she was not old enough for this and on how unsafe this was for her privacy. However, he had told his wife to relax herself and let their daughter live a little. It was because of him that his daughter had come to the devil's attention, or at least that was what he had assumed.

They broke through the door and tried to search everything as soon as possible, looking for false walls or any room with its door hidden out of sight. Finally, they came across such a door and this door was hidden behind a very big painting. As they took the painting away, the door behind it appeared. Searching the room revealed a very thick journal along with pictures of the final pictures of victims. His journal was pages and pages of cursive writing.

All of it was confiscated, as the Detective finally whispered, "We did it. We were finally successful. Now my Nisha will get justice."

A police officer came inside, holding the suspect, Nazeem as the police officer said, "Sir, we caught him trying to run away after seeing the yellow tapes around the house. Apparently, this time he was just going to get the groceries."

The detective was barely holding himself back from marching to Nazeem and asking him why he had to kill his daughter. However, he did manage to hold himself back. Most work was done, probably it was better for another detective to take over because if he continued, he would end up killing Nazeem instead of leaving justice in the hands of the law. After all, he had succeeded in getting his daughter the justice she deserved...