Pristine

Chapter 4 - ThE ClEaNiNg CrEw

The Zodiac Killer has seven confirmed victims, but claimed thirty-seven through his glyphs sent to the police. They were written in code. The case is still active and he has never been caught. Christine was just a child when that happened, but remembered hearing about it later when the likes of Ted Bundy and BTK arose. This letter looked a lot like something they could scribe and that worried her immensely.

Christine studied the note in the dining room which acted as her intermediary office during her leave of absence from the school. She hated having nothing to do. It was either clean, cook, write in her journal or think. Thinking being the worst of them all.

The note was extremely detailed. Each letter was cut with in perfect cubes, an array of different type faces, and colors. The pictures were bizarre, selected to leave an uneasy feeling, and effective in doing so.

A butcher hands a package of meat to a customer. The white package of meat has blood drawn on it with red marker. The red marks also trace the lips of the butcher and customer into twisted smiles along with big red X's for eyes.

A father pushes his daughter on a swing in a black and white photo. The little girl is abnormally skeletal. Her legs are no wider than broomsticks. She wears a gaping smile. Her father's eyes are blotted out with black marker. The father's stare her her uncomfortable. At any moment it felt like he would move. And in the woods behind them, hanging in the trees are pasted cut outs of shrunken heads lining them like ornaments.

A construction worker stood at the center of a crater, one hand on his hip proudly, the other on top of the shovel handle. The hole didn't make sense. It was large enough to take this single man's shovel a hundred life times to dig. And yet, there he stood proudly.

What does it all mean?

Christine's face clenched as she glanced at the pictures more closely afraid of what details could be revealed. She stood up from her seat and pulled a notebook from the kitchen junk drawer and began to jot down the letters.

She grouped the capitals and the lowercase letters in separate rows:

T E C E N N I G C E

h l a i g r w

Christine was always a puzzler. She grew up with very little toys and often grabbed the crosswords from the newspapers tossed around her childhood home. They were her treasures in all the trash. She stared intensely at the letters, building combinations, checking the colors, looking for clues, before she heard a sound.

BZZZZZZZZZZZZZ!

Pedro flew around her head ruining her concentration. She swatted furiously, swinging her body, allowing her to noticed a figure standing in the hallway. Christine screamed.

Christine retreated backwards from the entry into the kitchen and over to the knife block. She pulled at the largest handle of the lot and pointed it towards the shadow.

"Diana?! Is that you?"

"What?!" Diana answered.

Christine felt, for a moment, a false sense of security that she wasn't alone in the house. Her duty as a mother thrust her forward into the hallway. No one was there. Just the garbage back holding the items she found in her husband's bathroom. And a wide open front door.

Then she heard a mumbled laugh. A taunting, deep and smoky laugh she hadn't heard since she was a child. A laugh belonging to a voice that only spoke to her in her failures. When she broke her ankle on the way to the Olympics that's all she heard. And it was back.

The psychic ring of the laugh gave her chills and opened a cold chasm in her brain. A migraine came on as she retreated back into the dining room to find a chair. She squeezed her hands on both sides of her skull and shut her eyes until the pain and laugh subsided. When she opened her eyes, the letters were in view, and so was Pedro, dancing in little ticking steps. Christine readied the knife until she noticed something. The dance repeated the same movements, a pattern. From one letter to the next she watched him dance:

T

   h

E

   C

l

   E

a

   N

i

   N

G

  

C

   r

E

   w

Her head thud as it hit the table.