Girl Psycho

His offspring (Dlamini)

There was some sick fucking shit on the internet. Of course Dlamini knew that, but she had never actually gone deliberately looking for it before. She knew she had probably just caused some loud 'ping' or earned herself a red flag on some worldwide FBI spy software that hopefully tracked sick-fucks Googling the stuff she was currently Googling.

She had found some videos of live killings. She had one open at present, but she wasn't sure she wanted to watch two teens bludgeon and old man to death in the park. She wasn't sure she wanted to watch the video of the guy slashing his lover up with an ice-pick either. And she definitely didn't want to watch the girl vacuum pack the kitten.

Like she said. Sicko-fucks.

But she hadn't found what she was really searching for. The internet just didn't seem to boast the kind of stuff she was looking for today. Maybe she just didn't know where to search.

She looked at the screen shot of the girl from the video again. Her partner Jake was sitting across from her, she waved it in front of his face.

"How old do you think this girl is? 13? 14?"

Her partner looked up from his desk, he was still looking queasy and he had brought a new framed photo of his two daughters to work and placed it on his desk next to his computer. She didn't have kids..now. She didn't want kids, so she had no idea what he must be feeling right now. She didn't understand the protective urge parents have. That unconditional love, she could only imagine.

He only looked up briefly. "Ja. 13 maybe?"

"And his sons says he saw those pictures when he was about eight, so his dad must have been...." she started trying to count on her fingers. "And his son is forty-five...Ok, I sucked at maths. Help me figure something out..." She took out a piece of paper and started scribbling.

"Forty-five minus eight." She opened her desk drawer for a calculator.

"1979." Jake said without thinking.

Dlamini looked up at him, "You've already worked this out?"

"I think we can add a few years each way. Son's recollection might not be too good. Thing might have happened a few years prior, or after. So we are looking for a missing girl, approximately 13-15 years old, blonde hair, who went missing somewhere between 1976-1983." He looked up at her.

"That narrows it down," she said sarcastically.

"And where was Mr. Lambrecht living at that time? Jo'burg?"

She was hoping it would be somewhere more obscure, smaller town, so they could narrow the search a bit.

But Jake nodded.

"Great. You know how many missing kids there will probably be?"

He nodded. "And the big catch is that the files aren't on the system- hard copies only. We are going to have to go down to the big basement."

She sighed. The big basement was the graveyard of police files past. Boxes and boxes of old files. It would be a big job sifting through them. And it was located in Pretoria too, where all the files went to die and gather dust.

"What did we have back then, MS DOS?" Jake asked with a small smile. It was the first time she had seen him smile in two days.

Dlamini smiled back. "Remember those big dial-up modems that made that strange clicking noise while they took ten minutes to connect to the internet?"

"No, this was before the internet and cell phones partner. We were still using typewriters back then and fax machines and those phone's with long spring cables that used to get tangled around the furniture in your home."

"Ha. I remember those. The phones didn't have buttons either. You had to use your finger in one of those stupid dialing things. Calling 911 took ten minutes. What a bitch."

We smiled at each other briefly. "Start in the morning?" She asked.

He nodded.

"I'm going home." She got up and started packing her things.

"Hot date?"

"Ja. With my couch." Dlamini walked out the station giving her partner a brief wave as she went.

**

She arrived home and threw herself on the couch- she hadn't showered or changed which she usually did first, but tonight she didn't care. She grabbed the remote and flipped straight to the crime channel. You would think she wouldn't want to watch crime in her free time, but she did.

"Serial killer Night." She read out loud as the big gold words emblazed themselves across the screen- like this was a show about fashion or the Kardashian. They really did know how to make murder look glamorous. She clicked the info button and the details of the show popped up. She read them to herself.

The show was about Andries Venter. She remembered him. He was one of South Africa's most infamous killers, other than Gert van Rooyen. "The Cupid Killer" they had dubbed him because of his propensity to give his victims a final death blow to the heart. He didn't use a bow and arrow though. She hated how the media gave them nicknames, it humanized them in some way, and people like Venter, were not human. Not at all.

She threw her shoes across the room and watched. The show was hosted by one of those pretty, blonde, well-dressed female criminal psychologist types who spent time contemplating the nature of the crime and what it all meant. Searching for meaning in something so meaningless. She spent time talking about the killer's troubled childhood, his motives and the mental illness diagnosis that had contributed to him perpetuating the murders he had.

Bullshit. All of it. You are either born evil, or you are not. That was her opinion anyway, and all that crap about your daddy abusing you or getting raped by your brother, was just an excuse to cushion the severity of the crime. She was raped. She had a crap childhood. You didn't see her running up and down the highway with a gun like Aileen Wuornos.

She watched the show. It took on the usual format. They showed happy, smiling photos of all the innocent girls he had sexually assaulted and murdered. Bloody crime scene pics, images of his childhood house in black and white to highlight the dark troubles within. Venter's father had been convicted of getting too friendly with various neighborhood girls when he was about eight and had been sent to jail. In her experience evil ran in the blood, it ran in the family, she had seen it far too many times before. Her mind quickly drifted off to Eddy Jnr... but she stopped that thought. It was work related. She'd think about that tomorrow.

She watched Venter talking into camera with those deadpan, inky black eyes. His eyes were startling. There was nothing in them but pure evil. They seemed devoid of everything. She shuddered at the thought of those women staring into those eyes when they died. Those eyes would have been the last thing his victims would have ever seen...

His eyes seemed familiar in some way thought?

She pushed that thought out of her mind. Thank God a person like that hadn't bred. At least he had spared the word that, because who knows what the hell his offspring would be like.

The sound of her phone ringing disturbed her thoughts. "Shit." It was her sponsor. "Double Shit" she was meant to be at an AA meeting tonight. "Triple shit" she was the one who was supposed to be sharing her story of experience, strength and hope.

She turned her phone off as the guilt gnawed inside her again and suddenly, for the first time in months, her thoughts drifted to a nice, cool Beer.