Chapter 1
Cole
Nothing says Christmas quite like the glow of twinkle lights reflecting in a pool of crimson blood.
This is by far my favorite time of year, especially living in Detroit. By March I’ll be over all the fucking snow but right now, in the heart of December, I love it. Christmas isn’t complete without snow and murder, in my opinion. All I need now is my little souvenir and my Christmas will be complete.
You see, the news articles and law enforcement have been speculating that I’m a cold hearted killer who chooses his victims at random and takes a piece from each one as a morbid memento to remember the gruesome crime. They’ve spun some wild ideas, that’s for sure. But no one is even getting close to the truth.
Sure, a few of them have gotten bits and pieces of it right, but no one has really gotten to the heart of why I do what I do. It’s sad, really. I’m disappointed. The more I read the Reddit forums theorizing about my yearly ritual, the more convinced I am that the people who try to solve true crimes are more messed up than me. I mean, one person even suggested I take my souvenirs toeatthem. That’s just disgusting and far from the truth.
Frank Warrick was my most anticipated kill of the year. Of the three targets I chose this year, he was the most unsavory.
Wasbeing the key word because Frank Warrick no longer lives. His body remains—though he looks a little worse for wear—but his corrupt soul has left this plane of existence.
Frank is what I like to call a fox. A fox may look all cute and cuddly, but that’s just to make you forget they’re actually vicious predators. A fox won’t hesitate to maul any willing victim that walks into their trap.
In Frank’s case, that willing victim was sixteen year old Cara Crane. Most people think of predators as middle aged balding men who prey on children. But predators come in all shapes, sizes, and ages. Including twenty-eight year old men with an eye for sixteen year old virgins. Every sixteen year old girl loves to be told she’s so mature for her age, but they don’t understand that it’s not a compliment from older men, it’s just a pick up line. Never trust an adult who wants to date someone underage.
If the media thinks my souvenirs are bad, they should see what I found in Frank’s closet. Cara definitely wasn’t the first virgin he brutalized, and she wasn’t going to be the last. Frank didn’t just want to take an innocent girl’s innocence, he wanted to make them hurt, he wanted to see them bleed.
Well, look who’s bleeding now, you piece of shit.
For as much planning as I put into each kill, I’m rather lazy when it comes to the clean up. If the police are going to come snooping around anyway, I might as well let them do the heavy lifting for me.
I learned a lot during my year working for the morgue about the things they look for to identify killers. Cops are really loose-lipped, running their mouths in the presence of anyone they overlook, like the apprentice mopping the floors. You’d think they’d be a little more observant considering it’s their job.
To be honest, I don’t like the process of extracting the hearts, but itmust be done. So I take my scalpel and start slicing away. The first couple times I did this, I was sloppy, the cuts looked more like someone hacked into the guy’s chest. It wasn’t a pretty sight. But now that I’m on my fifth year of this Christmas tradition, my skills with a blade are much more precise than they used to be.
I also learned that to make the heart look all pretty like it does in movies, you have to cut the vessels just right to separate it from the lungs. That part is easy, thankfully.
Gazing upon this monster of a man with an open wound in his chest, I’m filled with the warmth this time of year always brings. The holidays are the time of year to give back, to spread love, to help those in need. And what better way to do that than to take the hearts of heartless people.
I always like my last kill to be the week before Christmas so I have a full week to enjoy my new decorations before I have to take them down for the year.
Afterall, you can’t keep hearts encased in resin lying around all year. That’s just reckless.
But a month of heart-felt decor? That’s ok.
I take one more second to make sure the closet door is open so the police will make sure to look inside and find the evidence of Frank’s predatory behavior before heading for the door.
But it rattles. The doorknob fucking rattles.
Damnit. I made sure to lock the door but in this small apartment complex, that door is my only way out. This is not something I accounted for and I should have.
Think fast, Cole. How do I get out of here?It seems like the person on the other side of the door doesn’t have a key because I hear a female voice that sounds like she eats gravel for breakfast call out, “Frank? You in there? Let me in, fucker.”
I look left. I look right. I look behind me and spot a window leadingto the fire escape. There’s too much snow outside to go home tonight. I was planning to just crash here since Frank lives alone. The lady on the other side of the door must live in this building too.
Fire escape it is, I guess. I’ll figure out where I’ll stay tonight once I’m out of danger. The first step is getting out of this apartment.
I parked my car three blocks over so no one would report seeing an unfamiliar vehicle in the area once the police start asking questions. After five years of evading arrest, the cops are taking it like a personal attack that they haven’t caught me. It’s not like I’m doing this to spite them. If anything, they should be thanking me for taking three dangerous people out of this world every December.
With my car parked that far away and the piles of snow outside, there’s no way I can get to it without succumbing to hypothermia or frostbite before I reach it. As usual, the weather reports had been wildly inaccurate, because as I look out the window, it’s not just a foot of snow I see, it’s the ice planet of Hoth out there. And not a tauntaun in sight.
So I do the only thing I can, I step out into the frozen wasteland of Detroit and pray I find somewhere warm to wait until the coast is clear. Maybe I’ll get lucky and find an apartment where the residents have left for the week to visit family.
I’m on the fifth floor so I descend the ladder-like stairs–which is really hard to do with the amount of snow and ice everywhere. The cloth shields I have on my boots to cover my tracks keep slipping on the rungs of the ladder.
