I've never seen anything like it. Four years towards a bachelor's in criminology, two more years to master's. Five years in Detroit PD, eighteen months of that working my beat in the worst prostitute lairs and druggie corners you can imagine. Three years in the FBI, seeing a lot of things you can't. But this... this was foreign to me.
In that time, I've seen serial killers, yeah. Not a ton of 'em, but enough to keep me off pulp fiction for life. A few of 'em we never caught, a few were already dead when we got there. I've seen every imaginable motive for killing: Sex, love, hate, drugs, money. Those I saw a lot of in Detroit. Then, with the serials, that's when you start getting what I call the "excuses".
Look, no one "deserves" to die, except maybe the assholes that kill others. But if some coked-up druggie knocks off his dealer because "I was fucked up out of my mind and I thought the bitch looked at me funny and and and also he turned into a rat person for a minute there and tried to eat me," you can sort of understand it-the guy was high on coke and hallucinated, then reacted. If someone kills the woman who she caught sleeping with her husband, you can kind of get how she got there a little bit, even if you'd never do it yourself. Those aren't reasons. There are no reasons. Those are just motives. Then again, if you're me, you're still grateful for just the motive. At least it's a starting point to understand why you'd ever take a human life outside self-defense, right?
Thing is, you get every kind of motive imaginable with true serials. None of them ever make sense to me.
"Jesus told me to do it." "Satan told me to do it." "She was a whore." "He was asking for it." "They looked like my parents and I was abused as a kid." "My alter personality did it." "I wanted to."
"I needed to."
There's one I really couldn't wrap my brain around.
The first time I heard that excuse was a man in Iowa who had killed three people, enough to be labeled a serial murderer. He was a twenty year old man who I'd like to diagnose here and now as a true psychopath. We're lucky we got him when we did; otherwise he could have evolved into... something I don't want to think about. However, that man, Harold Ross, was put to death two and a half years ago, so I'm not really concerned about telling his story right now.
The story I'm telling right now is that of a woman who is labeled in her case file as Janet Doe. She is not a victim but a killer - a female serial killer. Although I'm pretty sure she has sociopathic tendencies, she's not mentally ill in any way psychologists have been able to diagnose. She isn't even a sociopath; she can empathize with people, understand their pain. The only thing is with some people, she doesn't care.
She is not a disorganized killer or fueled by a delusion, like Aileen Wuornos. She doesn't kill for money, like the Black Widows of tabloid fame. She has no partner putting her up to this - and, frankly, I doubt she'd allow someone to tell her what to do or to act as her subordinate when she's perfectly capable of killing by herself.
She's never given any explanation for her actions to anyone - nobody has ever managed to interview her.
Except, that is, for me.
I'm not going to bother giving you the whole backstory, but a smattering of seemingly unrelated deaths had been dotting the country, literally from coast to coast. Some were clearly homicides - many of these were apparently drug-related. Some passed as accidental deaths or suicides. However, the presence of a signature alerted our team to the killer: at each death, a Tarot card was found at the scene. Among the detritus of some of the victims' lives, it was easy to dismiss-but in the death of one Bill Hawkins, it was prominently displayed next to his hand-card 0, the Fool. Bill Hawkins was a militant atheist; there was no way he'd ever own a Tarot card deck, and his death was from a shotgun wound to the gut. Hawkins, as far as we knew, was also a pacifist and owned no firearms. Then, three days later and three hundred miles away, Troy Workman died in his car of a carbon monoxide overdose. A Tarot card-3, the Hierophant-was found under his tire. Gradually, through the VICAP and INTERPOL databases, we found several other suicides and homicides with Tarot cards left at the scene-beginning in France, traveling briefly to Russia, segueing back to Poland, then to Spain, then to the USA (beginning in Maine, and the last one in Chicago). At the time that we caught onto this, we believed that the killer had only used each card in the deck once. The interesting thing was the fact that many of these victims were at the time of their deaths, or had previously been, suspects in incredibly violent crimes.
The killer began contacting the police with messages written in green ink on Tarot cards mailed directly to our office, the office of the profiling team for the FBI. We always attempted to track the mail. The trouble was the killer clearly knew that, and had a strategy to combat it.
Each card pertained to a murder connected to the Tarot card it was written on. The thing was, we began to realize that each card was connected to a series of murders. The killer would commit murder A, and flee. We'd find out about murder A. The killer would commit murder B, then mail the card pertaining to murder A. By the time we'd tracked the card, we were already three steps behind. The media hadn't caught onto the story yet, thank God. There was one DC newspaper that ran a small feature in their crime blotter regarding our receiving the cards, but we managed to pass it off as a kook.
This was anything but.
The first card delivered to our office was the Death card. It read "II: children". Three victims had received the Death card-Irma Stanislowsky in Poland, accused and acquitted of killing a string of foster children. The second was Martin Jiminez, a Mexican national connected to a string of drug murders - Jiminez kidnapped and killed the children of rival drug lords. The third was Hiraldo Guererra, suspected of raping a small boy in Spain, but let go due to an alibi given by his family. Later, the Fool card, which read "III: reckless". Bill Hawkins of Pleasance, Georgia, was a repeat drunk driver who had several hit-and-runs in his past-in my opinion, he only got drunk to suppress the fact that he probably enjoyed running people over. Pacifist guilt, you understand. However, we were unable to find any victims in any of his hit-and-runs, or even in unsolved hit-and-runs for a 30 mile radius, who had died. Shortly after this card was mailed, an aging nurse was found dead in her apartment. She was known around her local hospital to be rather flimsy with her patient care, but as far as the hospital staff knew, no one died directly because of it. Another man in Michigan was shortly discovered to be found dead (supposedly suicide by hanging). He received a Hierophant card; both he and Troy Workman weren't suspected of anything at the time of their deaths. However, our killer kindly clarified things by sending us a card reading "II: selfish".
DNA was never found at the scenes, but one eyewitness allowed us to catch who we thought was the killer. A woman in her early or mid twenties (you know how the age thing goes) named Lanette Marshall pointed the finger towards an older man in a small town in Illinois, who had bought several decks of Tarot cards from her New Age store recently. She had seen him running from a mailbox with blood on his hands.
When that man, Andrew Dubois, was found dead and determined to have been dead for at least three days-including the day that Lanette claimed to have seen him-"Lanette" had some explaining to do, but she was nowhere to be found. In her home, we found a neatly compiled scrapbook full of her victims and their alleged crimes - some were people we didn't even connect to her yet. Each had a picture and their card aligned neatly next to it, as well as descriptions of them, the crimes they'd committed, and their routines, ad nauseam. In her earlier days, many of them were like Irma Stanislowsky and Hiraldo Guererra: disgusting, but not exactly Son of Sam. Guererra wasn't even a killer; he was a rapist. Later on in the scrapbook, we discovered that her targets were almost exclusively undiscovered serial killers - like Troy Workman and our man in Michigan. In those scrapbooks were nearly enough bits of evidence to prosecute them-had it been obtained in a legal manner, and had they still been alive.
That's when the press got ahold of it and started calling her the Hand of Fate. There were a lot of headlines that had puns to do with the phrases "calling card" and "dealt a killer hand" and cards in general. For Christ's sake, where do these jackasses get their ideas? You'd think they'd try and come up with something original once in a while.
We chased "Lanette" from state to state. Periodically, someone would turn up dead with a Tarot card somewhere around them. We never caught a glimpse of her, but we followed her through her crimes. When we realized that there were a string of break-and-enters involving expert lockpicking along a route between murders, we figured that was her main source of income-she always took cash, but weirdly enough, would leave behind something valuable from one of the previous victims' homes. It was so strange... almost an apology of some kind. She never harmed a break-and-enter victim; none of them ever saw her.
Interpol got involved when she jumped ship to Spain again, then Portugal, even dipping into Ghana for a short time. Hounded, she swung back up to the States and landed in Louisiana during Mardi Gras. We predicted she'd stick to the cities-easier to blend there, what with her recent publicity and all. We set up a tipline for "Fate spottings"-although we got more "fuck off and leave her alone, she's just killing baby killers and shit; are you just mad she's getting there before you even know they exist?" than legitimate tips.
When she killed a man in New Orleans, we were waiting there for her. We papered the place with fliers, had roadblocks at every entrance and exit to the city.There was no way she was getting out of there.
An anonymous caller spotted a woman of her description entering the bayou: brunette, athletic build, favoring more exotic dress. All this fit with the way we'd seen her back in Illinois. But something didn't sit right. This woman operated at a level above even our heads - and I'll admit it. The only reason we knew about her was that she'd deliberately called our attention to her back in California with Bill Hawkins. Someone who was intelligent, who'd avoided us for so long, was not going to keep her appearance the same. Maybe she was trying to pull a modified version of the trick she'd pulled with Andrew Dubois. My team didn't agree with me, said it was her way of challenging us, of taunting us. We split: I went to comb downtown, where the call had been traced to; the rest of them went with local and state PD and a Creole guide into the bayou.
I didn't find her. I, like an idiot, ducked into every dark alley in the damn city without fear, clearly a fed, clearly out for blood.
She, however, found me. I had just come out of a restaurant after grabbing something to eat (I was on friendly terms with the chef, an old college buddy; he put me together a doggy bag with some gumbo and shrimp so I didn't have to brave the crowds and take a 3 hour break from my search.) I had no idea I was being tailed, but as soon as I ducked into another dark alley, a cold ceramic barrel found its way to my temple.
"Hello, Agent Wiggins." Her voice was calm, cool, oddly pleasant.
I exhaled. It was pretty much the only thing I could do. "Hello, Lanette."
"Janet."
"I'm sorry?"
"Janet, Agent. I'm not Lanette."
"You aren't Janet either."
"No. But in Portugal, I wasn't Palomita. In Spain, I wasn't Marisol. In France, I wasn't Jeanne, Blanche, or Heloise. In Sweden I wasn't Lisette. In Florida I wasn't Candy. I definitely wasn't Josie in Ghana, or Cameron in Chicago."
Candy? Was she a stripper? "You were in Florida?"
"Brief vacation before I came here. I didn't kill there-or break into anyone's house. I'm sure you've figured out how I support myself by now." I felt a slight tug on my pants and glanced down. My holster was empty, and I abruptly noticed the absence of my wallet and cellphone: they were no longer pressing against my leg. Dammit, is she a pickpocket too? Am I going to die here without a gun, without a phone, without even my badge? A small warmth of fear and then a chill of inevitability went through my body like I was suddenly dunked in the tepid bayou water, then thrown into the Arctic. Lanette-or Janet-whoever the hell she was-had never killed an innocent to the best of our knowledge, but that didn't meant she wouldn't make an exception for me. "Ooh, a Glock. Very nice, Detective - is that gumbo in that cup?" Her tone was warm, interested, and genuinely appreciative. What the hell?
"Janet, if you're going to kill me, could you at least do it now instead of toying with me?"
Janet chuckled, her voice just behind my ear. "Agent, if I kill you it'll be in self-defense-so, please, don't do anything ridiculous like trying to retrieve your gun. I wanted to offer you the chance to interview me, seeing as by about midnight tonight, that chance will be erased from the universe." She paused. "I'm mainly concerned about you. From the interviews I've read, I know the question of motive dogs you, and... frankly, I'm sure you haven't been able to find one, based on what little you know about me."
This seemed like ego-feeding, but if it was, wouldn't she have contacted the press herself, instead of us? Women don't kill for attention, unless it's Munchausen's by proxy gone terribly awry. Then again, generally, women don't kill at all, and if they do, it wasn't like this. Janet was an anomaly, a rare bird-maybe even unique in the history of the world: a female vigilante killer with no partner to speak of and nothing known about her at all, save for the fact that she was pretty skilled at both killing and breaking-and entering. And what was that about "by midnight tonight, that chance will be erased from the universe"?
Was she planning to kill herself?
I had to know, though. Horrible as it was - is - I had to to know. I knew it was my ego just as much as my tortured brain, but I needed to know who this woman was-and if I could keep her talking long enough, someone from my team would find me, or I could get hold of my gun. You know she'll notice, the sane part of my brain replied, but I had to try. "Could I at least look you in the eye?"
"Feel free to turn around; I'm not going to shoot you."
I slowly turned to face her, the gun-I'd guess a Beretta-now aimed at my gut. She'd dyed her hair red. It had been long and straight in Illinois, but now it was curly and just an inch or two below her jawline. Dammit, they told me that it was brown like last time! Was she wearing a wig? Lanette had favored minimal makeup paired with wildly printed dresses and enough jewelry to clothe France; Janet was wearing some heavy eyeliner, a Louisiana U sweatshirt and jeans, no jewelry to be found. Lanette wore ridiculous violet contacts. Janet's eyes were blue. She had changed every aspect of herself that she could, but her face was still the same: high cheekbones, pug nose, wide mouth-and that look in her eyes was still utterly chilling. "You look different," I told her.
"You don't." She gestured with the hand not aiming the handgun. "There's a crate right there. You look completely drained. Sit."
When someone with a gun gives you orders, you should really listen. I sat... and I had to speak.
"Why, Janet?
Janet's lips curled at the edges, but I wouldn't call it a smile. "Care to guess?"
"Not really. Sexual abuse as a child, mental illness, hormonal imbalances, long-term sustained psychotic breaks-you really don't fit the profile for any of these. I'm sure you're aware that you have sociopathic traits, though."
She inclined her head graciously. "I do. You're right. My hormones levels are those of the average healthy woman, I'm not mentally ill, I'm certainly not psychotic, and my childhood was unmarred by sexual abuse - indeed, I was never abused in any way." She paused, staring intently at me. "Why do you eat, Agent?"
"I don't follow?"
"Why. Do. You. Eat. Agent?"
"Uh, it's... uh... necessary to sustain life?"
Janet bared her teeth-was that an attempt at a grin? "How succint. It's necessary to sustain life. Why do you breathe, Agent?"
"Same reason."
"But you can stop eating for days, even weeks at a time. Why do you breathe, Agent?"
"You have to."
"Why don't you just wake up and decide to not breathe? It's rather tiresome when you think about it. In. Out. In. Out. Give those old lungs a rest once in a while, why don't you?"
"You can't make a conscious decision to stop breathing, Janet." Maybe she really was crazy.
"Mm. But you can control your breathing, can't you?"
"Again, I don't follow."
"Most of the time, we breathe subconsciously. Automatically, you might say. However, you can breathe consciously, or manually. In fact, you probably are right now, now that I've mentioned it. Once it's called to your attention, you generally switch from automatic to manual breathing. The brain is strange like that. You can even hold your breath for a while, Agent, but not to the point of death-not all by yourself, anyway. Eventually, the brain will kick back in and restart that breathing process for you once you've passed out-that is, if you've managed to hold your breath that long. Most people can't."
She leaned against a Dumpster, moving the gun's aim to my face. I swallowed. She is toying with me. Did she do this with her other victims before they died? But I haven't done anything wrong! She only kills people who hurt other people!
"Agent Wiggins, to me, killing is like breathing. I'm rather like a constant manual breather, except I make the decision when to kill, not when to inhale. I don't know why I have this compulsion. It doesn't give me a sexual release, like that utter bastard Troy Workman. It doesn't quiet any loose voices I might have rattling around in my head, like Andrew Dubois. I don't get a mean sense of schadenfreude through watching people die, like Irma Stanislawsky. I don't even have a compulsion to make others suffer as I have suffered, like Hiraldo Guererra, for that matter-he raped, though, not killed, but just because someone has a pulse doesn't mean he's living. I must kill. If I don't, I do lose my memory, and invariably awake in the middle of a blackout in some ridiculous place. The last time I tried to stop, I woke up and found that I was stowing away on a scientists' boat to Antarctica, covered in elk blood. I began killing with animals-I grew up in a hunter's family, so that was normal. However, when the need became stronger, I graduated to a senior banker in my area who was known for his proclivities involving young boys. The police never had enough to charge him, but everyone knew. I was eighteen. And from then on, I knew my purpose-to kill only those that the law could not reach. Criminals are the best at catching other criminals, you know; we have the tools needed, the brains necessary. I have not once killed an innocent human. I pride myself on that, actually. "
Whole psychology textbooks ran through my mind. This wasn't profiling right at all. So she displayed one area of the homicidal triad-one that she was telling me about, anyway, if she was telling the truth, of course. I didn't detect deception, though, and I've learned to trust my instincts... unless that was just my ego talking, wanting to believe that she'd tell the truth to me.
"But gradually, I realized that there were others like me, others that slashed a bloody path across the lives of others." She paused. "They disgust me. Most of them can't even manage to kill elegantly, and those that do never have an inkling of a purpose. So, since they say 'it takes one to know one'... I started knowing one. And then two. And then eight. And then... well. Child abusers, rapists, serial murderers, violent bank robbers, budding cult leaders that were beginning to quietly abuse and murder - I killed them all. I won't lie and say I didn't get any enjoyment out of it. I did. Fulfilling a compulsion is agonizing for some people - obsessive compulsives, for example. With me, it's like scratching a really deep itch - very satisfying. You ought to see the look on their faces before I send them off."
"But... Janet..." My throat was dry; my hands were shaking - and yet, another stupid profiler question popped out of my mouth. "Why the tarot cards?"
She smirked. "For you, of course. A Death card means a murderer similar to myself - and, again, just because someone is breathing or has a pulse doesn't mean they're dead. That's why Hiraldo Rivera got the Death card; you can't tell me he didn't kill a boy-that-could-have-been. A poisoner in France that you probably don't know about yet got the Death card - he was terribly inept, all his victims ended up in comas, but I'd say they're far enough gone to be dead, wouldn't you?"
I had to admit that I would.
"A Fool card," she continued, "means that they recklessly caused the deaths of others. Your team will shortly find a Hierophant card somewhere in Alabama and a High Priestess card near the Canadian border in New York; those represent male and female cult leaders whose cults seriously harmed or killed other people. You'll find that gentleman in Michigan was an underground leader of a so-called 'Satanist' group - Satanist only in name, mind you. He was on the quick track to becoming another Kool-Aid pastor. I won't get into that mess just now - you ought to do some of your own work. Regardless, I digress. It's a code, Agent Wiggins. You'll figure it out."
Why tarot? I wondered, my brain whirring away from ways to escape, towards the reasons she'd choose a mythical card deck over something like index cards, a dictionary, a phone book with pertinent things underlined. "Janet..." Dear God, you are interviewing this woman. With a gun held to your head. You need a raise, Wiggins. "Janet, why the - the tarot, though? Why do you... why not write on index cards? Something like that?"
"Ugh." She waved her free hand. "Agent Wiggins, you have no imagination."
I saw her left hand twitch up to my neck.
After that, everything went white.
They found me in a hospital waiting room, and to this day, thirty months later, I have no idea how I got there. Did Janet herself take me? Did a good Samaritan deposit me there? Did I wander there of my own free will after being injected with... well, whatever Janet injected me with? (Tests were inconclusive.)
I was taken off the case, under grounds that I was too "emotionally involved" after my encounter with her... but I read the papers, I sneak a look at the memos, I occasionally manage to intercept an email between a few members of the federal team that now follows the "Hand of Fate." I still follow her. Or, more accurately, she follows me.
Sometimes I'll be eating in a restaurant, and a flash of a woman - something in the way she walks, the way the back of her head tilts slightly to her left, the curve of the very edge of her face where the smile just starts - makes me sit bolt up in my chair.... but she's always gone before I can move. Sometimes I'll get a message through one of the murderers I interview - saying they've received some strange communication, showing it to me. Last time it was the image of a Ryder-Waite Tarot deck. I feel a breeze sometimes, around five in the morning, and despite all the security systems I've installed in my home, I will wake to find my bedroom window opened with a copy of that morning's newspaper propped on my windowsill with a styrofoam cup of steaming gumbo sitting on top. We analyze the cup, the gumbo, the paper, every time. No fingerprints. No way to track the cups, since they're styrofoam and sold in every grocery store worth its salt. No way to trace the gumbo - we tried asking restaurants, but the recipe seems to be homemade, and there's no way we can track the grocery receipts of everyone who buys the ingredients in a five hundred mile radius. Besides, who's to say she doesn't get the ingredients in France, or Sweden, or Portugal? Or Florida?
After every break-in incident, we'll have official Bureau surveillance around my house... but something always comes up, the Bureau budget always runs low, the agents watching me always get called away... and then, after that - sometimes a few weeks after, sometimes a few months - she comes.
I have aged a generation in these past few years. I can't think straight, I can't wrap my brain around it. One question haunts me, along with the sickening sweet smell of blood that lingered in her hair and that strange, alert, vaguely amused, predatory look in her eyes:
Why?
Why?