He knew he had screwed up by smashing the pictures at the teacher's place. Marshal McMichaels would have figured out that it was personal. He just hadn't been able to help himself. To see his child smiling out at him from her photo had enraged him.
His Grace, smiling, staring out at him, with her fifth grade teacher behind her, also smiling was too much. Grace had hated her. She had been mean and cruel. Grace had been sent to the office one day because she was sneezing in class and the bitch found it disruptive. But the bitch was the cause, Grace was allergic to cats, she always sneezed around them. And that bitch teacher had owned three of them at the time.
One by one, they had all disappeared from the teacher's house during Grace's time in her class. By the end of the year, Grace was back to being a healthy child.
She had even had the nerve to call him and his wife in to talk about Grace's problem. Her suggestion had been homeschooling the girl if her allergies were that bad. But Grace's only allergy was cats and she could handle them to some degree. She just couldn't handle all the dander the teacher carried on her clothes.
Henry picked up a cigar and a photo album. He took both outdoors. The women in his house were sound asleep. He had ensured it. His original plan had been to go hunting, but that hadn't worked out for him. He'd had a flat tire. It was the second time he'd been delayed this month. He wasn't happy about it. He had a schedule to keep.
Instead, he would content himself with the album. There were two hundred pages in it. Each page could hold four, four inch by five inch photos. However, that wasn't what was in the photo album.
Each photo holder carried a three inch by four inch swatch of skin. Under it, in meticulously neat handwriting was the name of the person the skin belonged to and the date they had died. He'd found it in his son's things.
The first three swatches had his son's illegible scrawl under them. It reminded him of Marshal Reece. His handwriting was nearly illegible on his autopsy notes.
His best estimate was another two weeks before they finally caught up to him. Marshal Reece had been muttering the entire time he had done the autopsy. Now the results of toxicology were going to go straight to the Marshal. And Marshal Reece, despite his unkempt appearance was a man who didn't miss much.
Henry had been unable to stop the basic tox screens that identified the sedative he was using to subdue unruly victims. However, he had been able to make them disappear. It wasn't hard. But Reece would see everything, find the clues. It would take a while to put it all together, but they would.
He had three women on his list. The whore upstairs, snoring her head off, was among them. Maybe a fourth, if they figured out it was him and he could manage it, he'd get Marshal Cain before they arrested him. She hit all the wrong buttons. Her dismissive wave today had been irritating. She thought she was so smart and so superior to him. He'd show her.
The waitress was still on his list. If his fucking tire hadn't been flat, she probably would have been on the menu tonight. The Marshals seemed to bring bad luck with them.
Tomorrow night would be her turn. After she was found, he'd go after the uppity bitch at the police department--the one that wrinkled her nose and walked away every time he came to talk about a case with her.
Then there was his secretary at the doctor's office. She had the audacity to think he was hitting on her, flirting with her. She'd been with more men than anyone on the planet. He had treated her for several sexually transmitted diseases and yet the bitch still thought that he wanted her.
In response to these imagined sexual advances, she had taken him aside and quite firmly told him that she would never be with a man as small as him. His slight size told her that he would have a small dick. And she just couldn't handle that.
She was just like the rest of them, convinced of her own superiority. He had almost fired her, but she threatened him with a lawsuit about sexual harassment if he did. That was the last thing he needed. This was the best solution.
And of course, the nag upstairs had been harping at him for years. He never did anything right according to her. He also knew that Grace was not his biological daughter. It didn't take a genius to figure it out; Grace had genetic features that couldn't have existed if she had been his daughter. Hilary still didn't know he knew. She still thought she had cuckolded him. She was wrong.
Grace would be his only regret when it was all over. He had written a new will, one that stated Grace was to go live with his brother and their family. His brother had been concerned when he got the call, but it had been shortly after the death of their son, so his brother had dismissed it. Henry remembered that conversation vividly.
His brother had kept reassuring him that nothing would happen to Henry or his wife. Henry had been insistent that bad things happened all the time. They could have a car accident or something equally tragic and Grace wouldn't have anywhere to go.
So, his brother had relented and Henry had set about to do his son's memory proud. The twisted world in which he had grown up had turned him into a killer. Henry could relate to that. He found himself capable of it when he had dispatched those damned cats. He hadn't turned it on people though until four years ago. He had killed a homeless woman, stabbing her six times.
She had been the first to stoke his rage. It had been October. The winter had descended early with huge snowfalls. He had been walking from the doctor's office to the coroner's office when he saw her. He offered her a dollar.
The homeless woman had made a snide comment about how he could do better than a dollar. She deserved more than that. It would barely buy a cup of coffee and she needed the warmth and the food in this cold.
He had agreed, lured her to his car with the promise of a hot meal and a place to stay. They had arrived at the cabin only twenty minutes later. He had walked her inside and stabbed her. The release had been euphoric.
All his stress and worries had melted away in those few minutes. He had held her and watched the life drain from her. For the first time he had felt free. He had done it a few times since, always with the homeless and never the same way. There were computer programs to detect that kind of stuff. There was never a pattern.
Until now. His son had given him a pattern and a purpose. The release each time was just as euphoric. He had control over these stupid women that had beaten him down to a shell of a man.
In high school, Henry had been the man going places. He'd been voted "Most Likely to Succeed." And he had. He had just started his practice when he met his wife. She had come in with a kitchen knife injury. Chopping onions or something, the knife had slipped. He had thought she was about the most beautiful woman he had ever laid eyes on.
Six months later, she was pregnant and they were married. Their lives had been hell since the wedding rings slipped onto their fingers. She had done nothing but berate him since then. But he would get his own back. He was determined to find the man that might still reside in the shell.
He wanted to see her skin gone, wanted to listen to her cries and screams as he removed her evil covering. However, killing her was a huge risk now that he had screwed up and smashed all those pictures. If his wife died at the hands of the skinner, someone might take notice of his little girl smiling from the picture.
The first swatch caught his attention. It belonged to a girl named Amanda Turner. She had been pregnant when his son went overseas. She gave the child up for adoption and told his son she never wanted to see him again during a Skype conversation.
His son had been devastated. When he got back, he went to talk to Amanda. Henry wasn't sure what happened after that. His son had spiraled into a darker and darker mood until finally, the police had knocked on their door. It had taken over a week to find her body. They ruled him out as a suspect. A week and a half after that day, another girl had been found. Then another. Then his son had butchered himself, slicing into his flesh over thirty times before slitting his own throat and bleeding to death in the cold, white snow.
Three days after Christmas, Henry had agreed to go through his son's room. That's when he found the album he was now holding, with the names and swatches of skin inside.
He stubbed out his cigar and returned to his den. The radio he kept in there was chattering. The secure line was talking about a patrol officer pulling over a driver for running a light. They had found bloody clothes in his trunk. They suspected he was the serial killer.
Now would be a good time, Henry thought. While the Marshals and FBI wasted their time, he could go out and find himself a woman to fulfill his needs. But he still had a flat tire and it needed to be there in the morning. If it wasn't, his wife would nag him about going out so late and was he having an affair. She kept all the finances, she would notice him paying for the tire.
She had caused him social impotence with her strict checkbook balancing and money management. She even did the finances at his office. She knew exactly how much he got paid and it went into their joint account every week.
The same was not true of hers. Her money went into a private account. He didn't know what she did with hers. He guessed part of it went towards hotel rooms with her lover, Grace's real father. He didn't know why she just wouldn't give him the divorce. He had asked once, she had responded over her dead body. Henry thought that was ironic.
His mind still jumbled and screaming at him, he gave up on the night. Sliding the album into a hidden drawer in his large desk, he put his second greatest treasure away. Finally, he turned out the light and went to bed.