"Oh! What a tangled web we weave, When first we practice to deceive."  Sir Walter Scott

             It was the summer of love; it was the summer of hate. It was the summer I learned about death. Not the demise of neighborhood dogs whose “tombstones” I planted in my symbolic sandbox cemetery. This was real death, jabbing my life with the first sharp prick of my calling.

             I hadn’t thought about those days in years, but when I received an envelope this morning from a maximum security prison, it reminded me. I get these quite often, since I’m an expert on serial killers – which I refer to in my own wily shorthand as SeKs. People wonder how I can open these notes, since they could be anything from lascivious verse to death threats, but they don’t bother me. I’m often asked how I know these “monsters” so well, and I just shrug and say I read a lot. They accept that. People see what they want to see. That works for me.

             I picked up the envelope and thought again about my first lesson so many years earlier in how dangerous some people can be. Images passed through my mind of dead girls, crime scenes, cops in despair, and Clarissa. It was all just a mélange now, a primer in everything I needed to know to do what I now do. And it began with the first find.

             On a sweltering August afternoon during the late sixties in a town known then as the Midwest’s hippie haven, Lee, my older brother, was frying tortillas. He made them greasy the way I liked and the hot aroma of crushed corn was driving me crazy.

             “Salt ‘em good,” I said. I never got enough. As he flipped one onto a paper towel, I grabbed the salt shaker, turned it upside down, and watched the white crystals disappear onto the tortilla’s oily surface. My mouth watered.

             That’s when Jeff and Kenny rushed in.

             “You won’t believe this!” Kenny shouted. “We just left the police station!”

             “Whadja do?” Lee kept frying, not even looking up. He didn’t see how flushed they were, but I could tell something was really up. Their shirts were damp and dark, and they smelled of dusty perspiration. I didn’t know them well, but Lee sometimes bailed hay with them on a farm down the road. I liked Jeff’s large brown eyes but Kenny always looked at me as if I should be out skipping rope with the girls.

             “We were out working our old field down off Gideon’s Road,” said Kenny. “We were gassing up the tractor and heard this car door slam over behind where the old farm house used to be. We couldn’t imagine who could be out there –  you know, no one ever goes there, except –”

             He glanced at me, slightly pinker. I knew what he was going to say. I might’ve been only twelve but I knew what people did in cars on those dark farm roads besides looking for ghosts. I chewed my warm tortilla, licking salt from my lips, and looked him straight in the eye, the way my friend Clarissa had taught me. She was the bold one, but imitating her seemed to work: He turned away.

             “We thought maybe someone was bringing us lunch,” he continued, “so we went over to have a look.”

             Lee smirked and nodded. With his spatula, he pressed the flat corn patty deep into the melted grease. He was a quiet type, kept to himself, and didn’t usually say much, no matter how exciting something was. At least he didn’t say much to me. In fact, we never played “Cliff” or “Knife” anymore. The older he got, the more of a distant figure he became on the horizon of my existence.

             “Someone had just made a new path off the road,” said Kenny. “It kind of made us nervous. We couldn’t imagine who’d be out there on our property.”

             “We heard some rustling.” Jeff nodded fast, as if he needed to talk. “And then the car door slammed again and whoever it was drove away. We heard him take off on Gideon’s road, but couldn’t see the car. Then we ran to the other side of the building and spotted fresh tire tracks that cut off across the weeds, so we followed ‘em. Had to be him that did that. They were really fresh. They went for about twenty feet, and then we saw some crows on the ground over by this one spot, so we checked it out. That’s when we saw this...this black thing lying there with bugs crawling on it, and it smelled like sh – ” He shot me a look.

             “We couldn’t get too close,” Kenny added, “because it stunk and there were flies buzzing all over it. Nearly made me vomit, it was so bad.”

             Jeff interrupted him. “The skin was sort of a dark brownish-red, and you could see that animals had been eating it. It was all bloated and the bite marks went down several inches. I didn’t know skin got thick like that. We couldn’t even see a head, really. Just this mushy thing at the end of the torso, but you could see it was some kind of animal and there was nothing left on the ends of the legs. We were sure it was a deer. We thought maybe we should bury it so the animals wouldn’t drag it all over the field.”

             I stopped chewing. The tortilla seemed suddenly tasteless.

             “But when we got closer,” Kenny continued in a quiet voice, “I saw an ear. I mean, a human ear! It was chewed pretty bad, but I thought maybe it was human, you know? The way it looked on the head.”

             “Human!” I said. “Really?”

             “And I saw…” Jeff stopped then and sat down on a kitchen chair, as if a hideous memory had just washed over him. He started breathing deeply. He looked like he was going to be sick right there. I moved the salt shaker to make room for his arm and decided against another bite. I sensed I wouldn’t want to be eating.

             He took a deep breath and told us: The body had been chewed up pretty badly and he could see the torso moving in an odd way, like there was something inside. Then from a hole in the stomach area an opossum emerged, grimy from the rotting entrails on which it had just been feeding. Jeff had gotten sick right then and there.

             I pushed my tortilla away. I felt contaminated, as if Jeff had touched the thing and brought something from it into our house.

             “That’s when we ran away,” said Kenny, “and drove over to tell the cops. We still didn’t really know what it was, but I thought we should report it.”

             Lee looked up from his cooking. Now he was interested. I could see that Kenny was still nervous as he went on. “I don’t think they even believed us. They acted like we were pulling a prank or something. But finally two guys drove back with us to check it out. Then they called for some help. You should’ve seen all the cop cars that came.”

             “So did you see the guy that drove away?” Lee asked.

             I sat forward. I wanted to know this, too. For all the fun of getting sickened by their descriptions, I was more interested in the one who who’d done it and returned for another look. I had a reason for that. A literary one, if you will.

             “All we saw were tracks,” Jeff told him. “I don’t know if he was just checking on the body, or what. I heard the cops talking about it. They said they couldn’t tell if the thing was a guy or a girl, but it looked like it’d been dragged back and forth across the ground a few times. It was just lying there in a pile of trash. But it had been dead awhile, I guess. There were maggots in it and things in the ears and it didn’t have any feet, like animals had eaten ‘em. Some parts fell off when they tried to put the body in the bag to take it away. I think everyone wanted to get sick when that happened. I guess they don’t know who it is. That was just about the worst thing I’ve ever seen.”

             “I think they found something else, too,” said Jeff. “A shoe or purse or something, over by the driveway, but we couldn’t see what it was. They wanted us to stay back.”

             “So they took it away?” I asked.

             Jeff nodded. “I don’t know if there’s still some part lying around somewhere, but I think they got most of it into the body bag. They told us to leave in case the guy came back. They thought it might be dangerous and they don’t want us back there for awhile. It’s roped off now. They’re not letting anyone on the property. I guess they’re staking it out.”

             “Don’t you want to go back out?” I asked. “Just to see?”

             Lee flashed me a disgusted look. He didn’t like my ghoulish side. He often complained about what I did because he wanted me to be normal. Once I wore this vinyl yellow-and-blue checkerboard skirt to school with a lacy blouse and some half-assed go-go boots (we couldn’t afford the real thing so I got K-Mart imitations), and he went ballistic. I guess my being conspicuous made him, as my brother, conspicuous as well, but I didn’t much care. I was a free spirit.

             “I don’t think I ever want to go back out there.” Kenny rubbed his hand over his belly. “Makes me sick just to think about it.”

             Their story made the next day’s newspaper. Clarissa and I read about it together as we listened to Gladys Knight on CKLW. It was a time when Timothy Leary urged us to try LSD, astronauts died violently, blacks rioted across the country, and hippies preached about free love. My associates were the school outsiders who cherished Black Sabbath and sensed the disturbing undertones of the Beatles’ new directions with Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. We affirmed the excesses of Morrison and Joplin. Inspired by The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, we smoked a bit of dope and explored the occult. Clarissa, especially, reached for intensity, and sometimes she scared me.

             So that day, we were in my room, sprawled on my iron-framed twin bed, surrounded by magazines like Tiger Beat that had articles about the miniskirt craze and the Rolling Stones. We wondered together how in the world we could manage to look like Twiggy. Clarissa had a real figure and always looked great in her clothes, Bohemian as they were, but she was definitely not the Twiggy type. She also had dark hair that she wore thick and wavy, with straight bangs that nearly hid her dark eyes.

             I didn’t always call her Clarissa. She hated her name, so she had picked another that she said suited her better. In fact, she had tried out several names, each lasting about a month, and then had settled on Zelda, because she loved Fitzgerald. But when I think about that name now, it gives me the creeps, so I’ll call her Clarissa.

             Anyway, she read the newspaper article while I listened because she had a richer, deeper voice. She sounded more like nineteen than fourteen and since she finished three books a week, she was practiced.

             “A body found yesterday on a farm,” she read, “was tentatively identified as that of a nineteen-year-old coed who disappeared suddenly without a trace on July 9th.”

             “God,” I exclaimed. “That means she was lying out there for a month, out in the open, without any clothes.” I shivered at the image. “In the rain and cold. Exposed.” I believed that everything had feelings, even my stuffed animals. I’d once vacated my bed so they’d have more room to sleep comfortably. It seemed to me that a corpse would still feel the cold and wet weather. She might even have been aware of that ‘possum creeping up to her, snuffling around as she waited to find out what it would do, and then feeling it burrow into her. What would that be like, I wondered, to have one of those grotesque creatures chewing on my stuff?

             I voiced this out loud, but Clarissa ignored me. “Authorities are attempting to establish that the body is definitely that of Emily Ceasar, who was last seen by her roommate. The body, decomposed beyond recognition, was found – oh, look, they have Jeff and Kenny’s names! Look!”

             I sat up and looked at the paper, shocked to see not only their names and ages, 15, but also their addresses printed for all to see.

             “Suppose the killer sees that,” I mused. “I mean, if he gets scared that they saw his car or something, he might go after them. Why’d they print their addresses?”

             Smokey Robinson came on the radio, with the sixth of ten Motown songs in a row. Clarissa went on to read about the medical examiner and the tests being performed to establish identity, and whether or not there was a bullet wound. But I was no longer listening. I was thinking about the girl again. Lying down on my back, I stared up at the constellations I had painted on my ceiling – Capricorn for me, Virgo for Clarissa, the Big Dipper because I liked it, and Sagittarius because I wanted to fall in love with a Sagittarian. No one could really see these “points of light” unless they looked hard because they were white on off-white ceiling paint, but the “right people” knew they were there.

             “So someone just snatched her away and killed her,” I whispered, hardly daring to breathe. “I wonder if she was hitching. I wonder if the killer was handsome or exotic. It’s so weird. One day she was walking around and the next, someone got her and that was it. Her life was over.”

             “He cut off her hands and feet.”

             “What?” I sat up to scan the paper. “It doesn’t say anywhere that he cut off her hands and feet. It just says they were missing. They could’ve been eaten off by animals.”

             “Or cut off.” When Clarissa took to a fantasy, she could be pretty stubborn, and hers tended toward the morbid.

             “He just left her out there,” I pointed out.

             “And went back to check,” Clarissa reminded me. “Jeff and Kenny must’ve been within feet of him! Suppose he saw them! He might’ve grabbed them and killed them, too! In fact, he must have seen them. That’s why he drove away. And now he knows what they look like.”

             “I wonder who he is.”

             “I wonder why he’d cut off her hands and feet.”

             I shrugged. “He’s crazy.”

             She continued. “The body was found on its side, face down, and was so decomposed that authorities had a difficult time determining whether it was a man or a woman.” She scanned down and read the last paragraph. “Miss Ceasar was described as weighing one hundred ten pounds, five foot two inches tall, with brown hair and wearing glasses. Hey, how much do you weigh? You’re about this height.”

             I didn’t want to say how much I weighed, so I mumbled that I didn’t know. But Clarissa was right. If I stretched myself, I was just over five foot two and, depending on whether I was dieting, often weighed about one hundred ten.

             Clarissa laughed. “If I wanted to find this guy, I could use you as bait.”

             “I’m getting contact lenses,” I pointed out.

             Then Clarissa’s eyes lighted up with a plan. “You wanna go to the murder site?”

             “Go? You mean now?”

             “No, tonight. When it’s dark. Maybe he’ll come back.”

             I felt suddenly cold. I couldn’t imagine creeping around in the weeds in the dark. Maybe her hands and feet were still out there somewhere. Surely, it smelled really bad, and probably some animals would return to see if she was still lying there. I didn’t want Clarissa to think I was scared, but I didn’t want to go. Then I thought of a way out.

             “Yeah, he’ll come back,” I commented with an air of wisdom. “That’s what the police are thinking, aren’t they? And they’ll catch us if we show up there.”

             Her face fell in disappointment. I knew her real intent. It wasn’t so much that she wanted to see the old farm, but she’d probably had some devious idea about setting me up. I sure was not going to any murder site with her, especially not if there were man-eating ‘possums around or scattered body parts. I didn’t know Clarissa well enough at that moment to realize she wouldn’t give in so easily. But at that moment she just shrugged in response as if she didn’t care, so I turned my attention back to the newspaper.

             It hadn’t been that far from our house. The field where Jeff and Kenny had found the remains of that girl was only a few miles away. I imagined the killer driving from there up through our town, maybe taking a left turn and driving over to our street. The girl’s parents lived in a town at the end of our road, so he might just drive past our tri-level house at some point, maybe glance in my upstairs bedroom window while I was undressing. I don’t know why that sent a frisson through me.

             It was like the time some friends and I camped out in the backyard one night in my parents’ tent when I was ten. Someone told us that a violent mental patient had escaped from the state hospital five miles down the road. We were sure he was armed with an ax and that he’d check in the back yards to see if there was anyone around to kill. We felt pretty vulnerable, but I remember something else, too. I wanted him to unzip the tent door and wade in among us girls, seeking one on whom to expend his rage. I wanted to see what madness looked like. The idea had excited me.

             I never told anyone else until I met Clarissa and she understood. I’d sensed that she would. Within moments of meeting her, I realized that we both embraced that verve that swells at the edge of danger.

             We’d encountered each other in the school library the year before. I knew she was two grades ahead of me but when I saw her reading Dracula, I felt bold.

             “You like vampires?” I asked.

             Her brown eyes shone as she looked up and I cringed over my washed-out pallor and thin reddish blond hair. I wished it was summer so I’d have a tan at least. But she didn’t seem put off. A prism hanging from a leather thing around her neck refracted red and blue shades of light onto her black sweater. I smelled a trace of exotic Indian incense in her dark hair.

             “I love vampires.” Her voice was throaty. “But the women in these novels are so insipid I don’t know why anyone cares about them.”

             I wasn’t sure what she meant exactly because I didn’t know that word, ‘insipid,’ but her expression of distaste conveyed my own feelings for other characters in the novel. The only one that had gripped me was the fiend, the dark aristocrat, the bloody count who slept in the earth – the vampire. I wished he’d come for me some night.

             “I know what you mean,” I said, even though I didn’t. I should have realized right then that this would be our position henceforth, me trying in vain to match her sophistication. “I can’t find any good books that have people who love vampires in them.”

             “I know. I’ve read everything, and there’s not much out there. It’s deplorable.”

             I then made a bold move, which was unusual for me. I told her my big secret. “I’ve written one.”

             “You’ve written a book?”

             “It’s not published or anything, but I keep it under my mattress at home. In sections. No one knows about it.”

             “How old are you?”

             I blushed. “Does that matter?”

             “No, not really. Is it any good?” She shifted in her chair and the glimpse I got of her body made me realize that she was almost a woman.

             I shrugged. “I guess you’d have to read it.”

             “You’d let me?”

             “Yeah, I guess.” I had spoken too soon and there was no turning back. “I mean, maybe you could help me with it. It’s not finished or anything. I don’t even have a title for it yet. But I’ve written a lot of pages…”

             Suddenly I didn’t want to confess that I’d written over a thousand pages. That sounded a little demented. “…oh, about seventy-five or so. I have some good characters, and there are also some ghosts in it. I’ll show you if you want to see it.”

             We agreed to meet again the next day after school. I could tell someone like Clarissa how exciting it was to think about a killer because she felt the same way. In some ways, she intimidated me, but I still wanted to be around her because I sensed that my life would change as a result. I had no idea at the time how true that was.

             There was a lot of talk about the murder for about a week or so. People were angry. They felt the girl had it coming. “What had she been doing out with a man like that, anyway?” “That’s what happens to single girls who make themselves accessible.”

             Clarissa and I followed it in the newspaper. Just as she’d suspected, the killer had cut off the victim’s feet, one forearm and hand, and several fingers from the other hand, as if in some grisly attempt to conceal her identity (that’s what the paper said). Where those parts were was anyone’s guess. We figured the killer had at least kept the fingers. We imagined him with a box full of body parts in his house somewhere.

             From the evidence, they could tell that he had first dumped the body on a pile of empty bottles and rusting cans near some box elder trees. The corpse had then been moved five feet away, where it lay for awhile, and then moved another three feet. One of the reporters surmised that animals had dragged it, trying to get meat off the bones. That idea made even Clarissa shudder, and it was almost too disgusting to think that the killer himself had moved her around, despite his obvious visit to the site the day of its discovery. After an extensive search, the girl’s clothing was found on the property, beneath some corrugated paneling. Her blue striped dress had been ripped down the front.

             Subsequently, we learned that the killer had stabbed her thirty times in the chest and abdomen, and had beaten her savagely. It appeared that he’d smashed her legs, breaking them in several places. The oddest thing about the case was that a young man had gone to the funeral home where the remains had been taken and asked if he could take pictures of the corpse. He’d claimed, falsely, to be a family friend. Later, they could only recall that he had been angry that they’d been unable to fix her up well enough for a photo, but no one remembered what he looked like, except that he was white, seemed around the age of twenty, and drove a Chevy. And he hadn’t had a camera.

             This particular bit of information was quite a tease for Clarissa. She pondered it over and over, wondering why this guy wanted a photograph of such a decomposed corpse. If it was the murderer, he could have taken pictures the whole time she lay out in that field, and maybe he did. Did he want one in the coffin to complete his collection? Or had he been playing with everyone, risking getting caught?

             “He must be a necrophile,” she concluded.

             “What’s that?”

             “Someone who has sex with dead bodies.”

             “Oh, gross.” I didn’t even want to hear it. “No one does that. You can’t.”

             “Yes, you can. Where there’s a hole, there’s a way.”

             I threw a pillow at her, partly to hide my embarrassment. I hated that she knew so much more than me about “those things,” but sometimes her imagination just went too far.

             “I’ve read about it,” she insisted.

             “In those books your mom makes you read?” I usually avoided that subject, but this time a conversation was called for.

             “Yes. There was one about a woman who kept her dead husband in her bed for a long, long time, and no one knew about it until she died and they went in and found him. She slept with his corpse! She was kissing it and everything.”

             “We read that for English class, and that’s just a story. It’s not true. No one really does that. Besides, kissing isn’t the same as ... doing it.”

             “Well, if it was reversed, and it was a dead woman, the guy could do that. He could, if he really wanted to.”

             “You’re so disgusting, Clar.”

             “And you’re incognizant.”

             I didn’t ask for a definition. She’d used that word to keep me from realizing just how she had insulted me. That she read more than I did – particularly adult books that her mother made her read at three o’clock in the morning because her mother was too scared or too drunk to be by herself – sometimes bothered me. But when it became clear that our relationship worked best when Clarissa felt a shade superior to me, I let it go. No one knew much back then about personality disorders. People were just strange or eccentric. She usually explained what she meant, anyway.

             When no killer was found and all the leads proved worthless, we eventually just forgot about the body. There was too much other stuff happening, not the least of which were riots, sit-ins, and demands that the government pull troops out of ‘Nam. We guessed that it had been some random killing, gruesome as it was, but that it was still just an isolated event. There weren’t many murders in our county. But then, things change. They always do. By the time it was done, there would be seven murders.

             Oblivious of what was about to explode, Clarissa and I worked long and hard on our vampire story. I say our vampire story because by this time Clarissa had taken it over. She’d even named it. The Last Syllable of Time, she called it, because the imagery was romantic and suggested a tragic immortality. We had set it in the old mansion in the center of town that had the tall wooden fence around its expansive yard, because everyone said the place was haunted. So we figured the vampires had started the rumors about ghosts to keep everyone away from their resting place.

             Anyway, we’d created a whole nest of vampires who allowed a few select mortals to hang out with them, so to speak. That was Clarissa’s contribution. She wanted those mortals to be us – the elect, who got as close as possible to such power and risk. For some reason, the vampires liked us and let us know about them.

             My favorite character was the ancient fiend, Rafael: lean, silent, and wise. His tragic flaw was that he fell in love so easily whenever he got bored. And having lived since the Renaissance, it was easy to get bored a LOT. Poor old Rafael had lovable, amusing Cane as a companion, but he wanted Jasmine, a beautiful mortal. It was a dilemma, and Cane was keen to it.

             “Guard” was Clarissa’s favorite. She’d invented him to give my story more “zing.” He had a dangerous edge, even for a vampire, because he was completely unpredictable and ravenous. Not just for blood, but for life itself. And he did things sometimes that made me cringe. It wasn’t beneath him to betray someone or set in motion a tragedy for his own entertainment. I’d never have created him on my own, I was sure. But he did kind of make things interesting. Besides, I had a way to get rid of him. We’d decided that vampires know when they’re done, and they do themselves in. So I could always write him out if I wanted to.

             As we worked, I learned things about Clarissa, and usually I liked that, because it felt like a real friendship, but sometimes it disturbed me. For example, once she wanted Guard to attack a young male victim and castrate him.

             “Why?” I asked. “What’s the point of that?”

             “Because he can get a lot of blood that way.”

             “Oh, geez, you’re making me sick. How do you know?”

             She shrugged, not looking at me. “I just think so. When I was little, I used to geld my plastic horses – I pretended to, anyway – and I’d paint blood running down their hind legs. It was really exciting.” Her eyes met mine. “I’d line them all up with their rumps to me and look at the red blood streaming down.”

             I didn’t know what to say. I mean, it was no worse than my own confession about wanting the backyard maniac to expend his rage on me, but it seemed more aggressive somehow … more savage. It scared me a little.

             “If you hate men so much,” I said, “why do you hang out with Cullen?” That was her current boyfriend, at least for that week.

             “I don’t hate men.”

             “Really? You slice the imaginary balls off plastic stallions and you tell me you don’t hate men? Seems a little obvious, doesn’t it?”

             “Look, Mrs. Freud, I don’t hate them. I want to be one.”

             “Why? What’s wrong with being a girl? Vampires like girls better.”

             “Sometimes you amaze me, Kit. Everything’s wrong with being a girl! You’re just so ... so helpless! You have to do what people tell you. You can’t wear your skirts short or wear much make-up, or be aggressive, or say anything serious. No one cares. We’re just a boy’s fancy watchband, a cheerleader, a secretary. Is that what you want? You want to just serve men, be what they decide, wear what they decide, think what they tell you to think?”

             I couldn’t think of a thing to say back. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know anything more about Clarissa’s secrets. The last time we’d talked in an intimate way, I’d heard all about how her mother hit her in bizarre rages, and how their house was always grubby and full of dirty dishes and rotting food. It was just them … no father, no siblings. Apparently her mother had some sort of mental disorder, and she lied a lot, but I didn’t ask for details. Clearly, it made Clarissa unhappy and sometimes afraid.

             Generally we both took out our frustrations and teenage urges on the vampire. We were trying to work out a scene between Rafael and Guard over Jasmine when we heard about the next murder.

             Clarissa read about it from the newspaper as she lay across my bed. As usual, we were at my house, to avoid her mother. It was pouring rain outside and had been for almost a week. The dam at the west end of town was threatening to burst, which was the biggest news around, and we were both a little depressed. We couldn’t go out and our story was at an impasse. Then we heard about the murder on the radio and Clarissa ran out to get a paper.

             “The partially decomposed, nude body of a university coed,” she read, “stabbed five times and with the throat slashed, was found yesterday afternoon behind a clump of trees off a deserted dirt road.” Clarissa looked up at me. “She was identified by her jewelry.” Returning to the newspaper, she reported, “This girl was out hitch-hiking. God! I was hitch-hiking the other day from the fairgrounds. It could have been me!”

             “Who found her?” I asked.

             Clarissa scanned the four-column article while I glanced at the smiling photo of a pretty, dark-haired girl named Judy – Judy-who-was-no-more.

             “Some construction worker digging in the storm drains. The body was lying on its back and ‘the head was unrecognizable because of advanced decomposition.’ The top half was decomposed but the bottom half wasn’t. That’s strange.”

             I made a strangled noise. It was weird the way I wanted to hear all this, up to a point, and then didn’t. It was like ravenously eating this terrific dinner and then suddenly just wanting to puke.

             “Her dress was pulled up to her shoulder,” Clarissa continued, “and her underwear was around her ankles. Her body was partly covered by grass.”

             “Was she raped?” I asked.

             “It doesn’t say, but why else would her clothing be like that? Of course she was. This guy is a devil. He’s out of control.”

             We glanced at each other before she returned her gaze to the newspaper. “She was stabbed in several places and her body was only four miles from where the other one was found last year. They’d lived about three blocks from each other. Wow!  Do you think it was the same guy?” She looked up from her reading.

             “Sounds like it,” I affirmed.

             Clarissa rolled over and looked at me, a fire shining in her eyes. “God, that’s so exciting. A killer right here in our own backyard, stalking around unseen! And he particularly likes dark-haired girls.”

             “We don’t know that.”

             She raised an eyebrow. “Maybe redheads, too?”

             “Blond,” I said. “Strawberry blond.” That was putting an elegant spin on it.

             I was miffed that, of all things, the color of my hair might eliminate me from the killer’s attention. I wanted to think I could attract someone with this guy’s boldness. I didn’t want him to kill me, of course, but I hoped I’d stand out. I imagined that the victims of such a deranged mind had to be special in some way. They had to shine a little.

             “You’re just suffering from freshman syndrome,” Clarissa said, guessing at what as behind my annoyance with her.

             “Yeah, right,” I said, feeling pretty much nondescript. “Anyway, he likes them thin. This girl was five-foot-four and weighed only ninety-eight pounds.”

             “Okay, slim, you got me there.” With her build, there was no chance she weighed ninety-eight pounds. She scanned the article for more details. “She did get into a car with three guys, so maybe it’s just a coincidence.”

             “Or those three guys killed the other one, too.”

             “Or maybe they did a copy-cat. These guys know about the murder last year, pick up a girl, rape and kill her to get their goodies, and then stab her to throw the blame on someone else.” Clarissa shrugged, unimpressed with her own theory. “Wouldn’t it be something if we saw the killer somewhere?” she went on. “I mean, let’s say we saw this guy with this girl and then the next day found out she’d been killed in the same way as these others! Then we’d know we’d been that close. Now that would be exciting. We could write papers on ‘how I spent my summer’ that would blow our teachers’ minds. ‘I spent my summer lurking around bars to see a killer.’” She giggled at the idea.

             “These murders were a year apart,” I pointed out. “Even if it’s the same guy, he won’t strike again that fast. And we don’t know that he hangs around bars.”

             She ignored me. “I think we need to get out more. Go places where a guy like that would show up. We’d get better material for our story. Can you imagine brushing up against a psycho?”

             “Like Guard?” I raised an eyebrow, with the implication that I was already rubbing up against a psycho – his creator.

             “Yeah, like him. He’s not just a vampire but a lunatic.”

             We both laughed. When I think about that now, in retrospect, it’s not so funny.

             This murder, too, went unsolved and the buzz eventually died down. We scanned the newspapers for weeks for material and occasionally spotted an article about a woman who’d hanged herself or a man who’d beaten up his wife, but these stories offered no fodder. We couldn’t very well make another murder happen, nor did we have the faintest idea how a killer would act in public, so we eventually went on with our story without the media’s assistance. Apparently the local reporters failed to share our obsession.

             But then it happened again. Nixon had been elected president, vowing to end the Vietnam War, and we were still mourning the double demise of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. So much for the Summer of Love.

             This time there were two bodies, found within days of each other. If it was the same killer, the guy was getting insatiable. The first one was found on a rainy morning in March.

             “Did you read about it?” Clarissa asked as we fell into step after school. I hadn’t seen her in nearly two weeks because she had a new boyfriend with whom she was obsessively in love. I knew she’d dump him in a week.

             “Just glanced,” I said. “I have a chem test – all that crap about mercury and whatever.”

             “Ok, in a nutshell, then, she was found in a cemetery, she was a law student, and a stocking was tied around her neck, but it wasn’t hers because she was wearing pantyhose. Bullet through the head.”

             “That much I know. Anything really interesting?”

             “She was five foot four, hundred-twelve pounds – my size.” Clarissa smiled and raised an eyebrow. “They got close this time. Found her within a few hours of her murder. The woman who discovered the body might have even seen the murderer because she spotted a white car pulling out of the cemetery around midnight.”

             “Nude?”

             “Not this time, although her dress was pulled up.”

             We walked in silence for a few minutes while I fingered my vague sense of guilt for some hole or other that would allow my curiosity some justification for making its way through. If it had been my body that was found out in a cemetery, I wouldn’t want people talking about me like this. But then, they would anyway, whether I liked it or not.

             “You coming over?” I asked Clarissa.

             “Not today. Mom wants me to run errands.” She didn’t have to spell it out. Her mother was on a bender and couldn’t do simple things like buy groceries.

             I had little time to do more over the next couple of days than glance at the newspaper, so I was surprised when Clarissa came knocking at my door all out of breath.

             “It happened again!” she said, holding up the paper. I spotted the headline: “Slaying Called Most Sadistic.”

             We went directly into my bedroom and closed the door.

             “God, so soon!” I exclaimed. “What’s the story?”

             “She was found less than half a mile from where the body was discovered last July – the one by the storm drains. She was nude, about twenty years old.” She picked up the paper to read it to me. “The victim had apparently been strapped down sometime before her death. Her body bore deep marks which apparently were made by a leather belt. A garter belt was knotted around her throat. They think she’d been dragged to the spot. There were no knife or gunshot wounds. The chief of police said it’s the worst murder he’s seen in his thirty years of service. ‘There’s no question,’ he says, ‘that this is some kind of animal who has to be caged.’”

             She looked up and I met her eye. “Guard,” we both breathed out.

             “We’re going to have to say something to Rafael,” I told her, although we had abandoned that story a few months earlier when schoolwork and home pressures had forced us to other things. But now we had reason to pick up the threads again. Two murders this close together meant good press coverage that would give us grist.

             “An animal that has to be caged,” Clarissa repeated. “God, I’d like to run into that guy somewhere. I’d like to just see the look in his eyes. I wonder if they turn red.”

             “No, you wouldn’t.” Even as I said it, I knew that things had shifted for me. Somehow the images that once had gripped me were beginning to feel strange.

             “Yes, I would.” Clarissa was almost offended that I’d challenged her. “I can’t think of anything more exciting, can you?”

             “Actually, I could. Does it say anything more? What was so sadistic about this one?”

             She scanned the paper, then shook her head. “They’re not saying, but they seem to think there’s a link between the other three killings. And they don’t expect Ike to live.”

             “Ike?”

             Clarissa laughed and point to the article beneath. Former President Eisenhower was having heart trouble. Further down I saw that Middle East talks were moving slowly. There were seventeen indictments from the “New Left” riots at the Chicago Democratic convention last August. In the event that the first lunar landing succeeded in July, the United States was planning ten more trips to the moon. What an odd assortment. We were living in a momentous age, but this “animal” was walking around killing as if there was nothing else going on in the world.

             “Maybe we should visit the murder sites ourselves,” Clarissa said. “I can get my mom’s car. We could go have a look. We’d know if there’ve been vampires about.”

             “I’m sure they’ll be roped off.”

             “These last two, yes, but what about the others? Everyone’s forgotten them by now. We could go to the cornfield at least.”

             A chill shot through me at the idea. It was like sneaking off to the cemetery. I’d done that every night one summer for two weeks, always terrified that I’d brought something unseen back home with me.

             “This girl was five-feet-four again, same as me, and about one hundred and fifteen pounds. God, he goes for my type, I’m telling you. And she was around my age.”

             “My age, too,” I pointed out.

             “But brown hair. He likes dark hair.”

             I grabbed the paper and read it over. “This girl’s hair was light brown.”

             “But brown, nevertheless. Not re – I mean, strawberry blond.”

             We soon learned the girl’s identity and age. She was sixteen. She hung out on the local campuses, and had been hitching where Clarissa and I often shopped for clothes. We’d been there just the day before this girl had disappeared.

             “So shall we go tonight?” she pressed.

             “It’s raining. We won’t find anything, anyway. The police combed the area.”

             “As soon as it stops raining, then.”

             “We’ll see.” I had a biology test to think about. I had in mind to go to college and wanted to do well. She said nothing more.

             A few days later, I was eating lunch at school when Clarissa sat down across from me and leaned close.

             “I’ve heard something,” she whispered. “Come on.”

             “I’m hungry.”

             “You won’t be after I tell you this!” She got up and hurried away. With a groan, I packed my baloney sandwich into its Baggie and followed. Clarissa had ducked into the gym and was sitting on a pile of dark blue gymnastic pads, waiting for me. I dropped down next to her and tried to ignore the heavy odor of male sweat. “This better be good.”

             “It is. I know something about the murders and I didn’t read it in the newspaper. I heard a guy talking about it. He said his dad knew one of the cops on the investigation.”

             “Okay. So give.”

             “It’s definitely a vampire.”

             “What?”

             “It is. For one thing, there’s never any blood around these bodies except what’s on them – nothing on the ground, even though they’ve clearly lost a lot of blood.”

             “I thought the theory was that they were killed somewhere else and then were placed where they were found.”

             “That’s a theory. Someone’s interpretation who can’t think of anything better. But listen. This last girl, she had a tree branch stuck up her ... you know...”

             I looked at Clarissa in horror and closed my legs reflexively. “A tree branch?”

             “Yeah. Like the guy couldn’t do it, so he got mad.”

             “What does that have to do with vampires?”

             “They might get that frustrated sometimes, knowing they could do it when they were human but can’t anymore. Guard would get that crazy. But there’s something else. The girl before that was having her period. She had a sanitary napkin on. So that extra blood probably drew Guard right to her.”

             “Is that true?”

             “Yeah, that’s what this guy said.”

             “What about the others? Wasn’t one of them raped?”

             “Well, the first one was too decomposed to tell anything, and yeah, I think the second one was raped. But I don’t know for sure.”

             The whole thing left me unsettled, but quite quickly a fifth murdered girl was linked to the others. And she’d been only thirteen. I wanted to know what Clarissa thought but I hadn’t heard from her, so I scanned the paper while I waited for the call that would surely come any minute. I read the description of the trial for Sirhan Sirhan, who had shot Robert Kennedy, and then turned the page. Right there was a photograph of the crime scene. Some reporter had gotten to it fast. Next to a group of cops was a blanket-covered body. For some reason, this was starker than seeing a smiling school picture of the once-alive girl. There she was. Cold and dead. I flinched.

             She had failed to return home from school and the next day, she’d been found dumped along the roadside, mutilated and strangled. She was so close to the road that one foot nearly touched the blacktop. The article said that she was clothed in only a short-sleeved shirt, which was unbuttoned and pulled up. A dozen slashes marked her stomach and a white cloth was jammed in her mouth. One of her shoes was found on the other side of the road, a mile south, as if tossed from a car, but the other one was missing. She had been killed only twelve hours earlier. On page 25 was a photo of the black, t-strap shoe that the girl had worn. Deanna was her name.

             Then I saw that the police had figured out where she’d been killed, because they found some of her clothing there. Near a column of photos of the five murdered women was a picture of an old farm on Gideon’s Road, where the first murder had occurred. Now this would be of interest to Clarissa. I wasn’t sure I even wanted her to see it. But I was secretly relieved that it would nix our idea of going to that crime scene.

             But Clarissa had seen the report, of course, and she’d decided it was time to act. My final exams be damned. We had to exploit this opportunity. How many times would we ever again be living in a place where there was such a plethora of murders? I didn’t know the word, ‘plethora,’ but it wasn’t hard to figure out.

             Reluctantly, I agreed to let her pick me up after dark one spring evening. In the car, she told me she’d learned about a suspect in these killings and she knew where he liked to party. That was news to me. I didn’t know there were any suspects, aside from victims’ boyfriends who’d been cleared. But Clarissa often had ways to get information. That she hadn’t told me before bothered me, but I didn’t challenge her. I just wanted to get this over with.

             There was no banter between us that night about vampires. I could sense we were on a serious mission, and there was something in Clarissa’s demeanor that told me she was determined to locate this “suspect” and get close to him.

             I could go into all the things we did that night to find him, but it all blurs together. Despite our youth, I remember, we ended up in bars (but not for long), or outside them, looking for some phantom figure. I was so tired by midnight that I wanted to call it quits, but Clarissa was the driver and she insisted we keep looking. I had reason to wish forever after that I’d just said no.

             At one place in a seedy area, she pulled up and parked. We waited there for a few minutes in silence. Then a man stepped out of a bar with a red neon outline of what appeared to be a nude woman. Clarissa sat up straight.

             “I think that might be him,” she whispered. As far-fetched as it is now to believe she could have found “the suspect” herself, I bought it. The idea that we were that close scared me. We watched him stop to light a cigarette, cupping his hand against a breeze until the tiny red burn took hold.

             “I wonder if he’s looking for someone,” I whispered.

             “Go on!” Clarissa urged. I thought she was talking to him, but when I looked at her, she was looking back at me.

             “Go on?”

             “Yeah. Go up to him. See what he says. Tell him you need a ride.”

             “What?”

             “Go on! He’ll get away. This is our chance.”

             I couldn’t believe what she was saying. “You go, then.”

             She gave me an exasperated look. “His victims are getting younger. That’s what he wants. You’re perfect. You’re not finking out, are you?”

             I swallowed. I felt suddenly foolish over my jealousy of the victims, that they’d drawn the attention of a killer. This wasn’t a game.

             “Hurry!”

             “Clar – ”

             “Kit, this is it! What we’ve been waiting for.”

             I shook my head. I wasn’t going out there. I watched him take a drag on the cigarette and start to move away. Then I heard a quick schwick next to me. I glanced down and saw the flash of metal. It didn’t register until Clarissa held it up a little.

             “You’re going,” she said. “Get out of the car. I’m not taking you home. Get out. Now you’ll need a ride. Go ask him. He’ll give you one.”

             I couldn’t speak. The set of her jaw and the cold sheen of her eyes told me she meant it. She wanted me to get out and go up to a strange man at midnight outside a girly bar and ask for a ride home. She wanted me to put myself on the line, and my choices were to do it, be left out there at night, or try to get the knife away from her and drive myself home.

             I had no idea what to do. I couldn‘t move, not even when I felt the sharp blade against my ribs, poking through my sweatshirt and saw beads of perspiration on her upper lip. There was no way I was going to offer myself up as the next girl to be found dead along the road, missing a shoe. The picture of that blanket-covered body came clearly to mind.

             But I didn’t have to make the choice. A car drove up and the smoking man got into it. He’d apparently been waiting there for someone, probably his girlfriend. He wasn’t a suspect at all, just someone that Clarissa had picked out in desperation when our trolling had yielded nothing.

             Suddenly, she laughed. It had all been a joke, she said. Just macabre humor. And I did know what ‘macabre’ meant. But that’s not what it was to me. I was shaken. I’d seen something in the past ten minutes that had altered me. I’d grown up. I now understood that people may not be who they seem, no matter how well you think you know them. The girl next to me was a monster. She’d been using me. We’d never been friends at all.

             I didn’t say anything, didn’t look at her. I let her drive me home because I couldn’t move. When we got to my house, I got out, shut the door and went in. I never looked back. And Clarissa never called me again. Not even when there were two more murders. In fact, I didn’t even read about them, nor about Manson’s gang, which had invaded the homes of Sharon Tate and the LaBiancas in California, killing seven people in a gory bloodfest. I didn’t call Clarissa about that. I just kept to myself. And when the police finally arrested a man for the murders in our town, I was relieved.

             He was a young guy, still in college. Carl Brett Owens. I didn’t follow what came next. I couldn’t bear it. Along with my vampire manuscript, I kept all of that under my mattress, so to speak. But during his trial, I went out to my backyard and under the pretense of burning trash, which I did every Saturday as my chore, I sat down with the thousand-plus pages about Rafael, Cane, and Guard. I held each one over the fire until it became ash, pausing sometimes to glance at a line or two. I recalled the day we’d decided that vampires know when they’re finished. These, my creations, were now done.

             I never wanted anyone to see this work, or to know of its existence. I never again wanted to believe that I’d been so attuned to these monsters. I also burned a letter that had come from Clarissa – an indication of how desperate she was feeling. She’d mentioned the trial and said that they had the wrong guy and predicted that he’d be acquitted. The real killer was still out there. I knew she was hoping to rekindle things with me, but there was no going back.

             Owens was convicted and sentenced for life. It was an ending for me, and a beginning. I can’t say the same for Clarissa.

             So now, many years later, I’d become an expert on serial killers, those college boys, family men, businessmen, and law students who harbor lethal urges. I went to college and grad school after all, and specialized in the “doubled lives” of the vampire who looks like us. I unfolded the letter I’d just received and saw what I expected. There were never really any surprises here. Another letter from another killer: Karl Justin Barrett. He’d been one of mine, until I’d betrayed him. I snorted.

             The reason I know the way these SeKs operate, duping people around them, is because I study them in the wild. Yes, in the wild. Few researchers are bold enough to do that, but my theory about how their brains work can only be confirmed if I allow them to come to me without the fear that I’ll turn them in. They appreciate the chance to talk. Not because they feel remorse but because they want to gloat; they want someone to know what they’ve done. So I study their doubled lives without anyone being the wiser. In fact, my colleagues believe that the people who go in and out of my office are volunteering for a study on the neurological substrates of food cravings. No one really knows me, and I’m grateful to Clarissa for teaching me how to thwart a clear view of who I really am. She also showed me what happens when one's cards are played too openly. The hidden face will show itself, and once it’s out there, there’s no more buffer.

             So it didn’t surprise me after the case was over with Owens’ conviction to hear that Clarissa had gone out one night to a busy highway and stepped in front of a truck. Its side mirror took her head right off. My mother told me, expecting me to cry, but I didn’t. There was no reason to. Vampires know when they’re done. But there was one more thing for me to do.

             A few days after Clarissa’s funeral, I went to speak to her mother, the woman I knew only from Clarissa’s dark tales. She came to the door, dressed nicely in tan slacks and a white blouse. Her hair was clean, her nails manicured, and there was no telltale odor of cigarettes, not on her or inside the tidy house. My hunch was confirmed: Clarissa had lied to me all along, about her life, her home, her problems. She’d been a tortured soul. Her weary, saddened mother told me that day that Clarissa had spent some time recently in a psychiatric hospital. I just nodded. I was glad she was gone.

             But she wasn’t gone entirely. We’d merged our creative skills to engender our vampires, so part of her was with me, and eventually I realized that thanks to her I’d gained a survival skill. I could actually spot them – those creatures who led doubled lives. It was kind of like the people who claim they can see ghosts. I had a second sight, but it was for the monsters inside people who passed as normal. As I developed more knowledge about psychopathic killers, I learned to lure them to me and use them for my work. And once I was done, I turned them in. Because for all their clever predatory skill, they didn’t have what I had: they never recognized my own doubled soul.

             Thanks, Clarissa, wherever you are.

"Oh! What a tangled web we weave, When first we practice to deceive."  Sir Walter Scott