Victims
by Michael D. Winkle

"Someone always ups the ante," said Liz.

"Meaning?" I asked.

"I mean these killings."

I buttered my dinner roll.

"I'm not sure I follow."

She nodded at the television over the bar.

"Someone's always pushing the envelope, looking for something new, something worse, to do."

After the networks featured a particularly dramatic sequence of serial murders, a copycat generated similar tension in the Midwest. But life went on…people still went to work, went to movies, ate at restaurants.

"It's not just losing it and going on a rampage," Liz continued. "It's not even the run-of-the-mill serial case. These people consider the subject deeply. They follow the demographics of homicidal outbursts and go one better."

Liz often came up with odd criminological theories. She first contacted me because of an article I wrote, "Multiple Murders and Anomalous Events," a rambling attempt to force correlation between famous murder cases and paranormal activity. She claimed to be descended from Mary Jane Kelly, the nineteenth-century streetwalker butchered by Jack the Ripper, and she bore a striking resemblance to famous murder victim Elizabeth Short, the "Black Dahlia." She may have a right to be odd.

"Okay, what's so different about our killer compared to, say, the cliched postal worker?"

"The disgruntled postal worker actually is someone who has snapped under pressure. Well, 'snapped' is the wrong word. It's more like a build-up of tectonic forces before an earthquake. He reaches his place of work looking comparatively normal, but he has weapons hidden on his person or stored in a closet waiting for him. As bad as disgruntled employees are, the more studied killers are worse."

The waitress refilled my tumbler. It amused Mary that I drank nothing harder than tea. She smirked as the brown liquid filled my glass with a clatter of ice cubes. At least I made her smile once in a while.

"You say studied," I noted as I stirred my tea. "What do you mean by that?"

The smile faded.

"There's a progression. A postal worker shoots several coworkers--adults. That began in the early eighties. Patrick Henry Sherrill over in Edmond became the archetype in 1986. In 1988, Laurie Wasserman Dann entered an elementary school in Winnetka, Illinois, and started shooting at kids with a .22 Beretta and a .357 Magnum. Then people started coming out of the woodwork, visiting playgrounds and shooting kids rather than adults. The worst case was the massacre at Dunblane, Scotland, in '96. No one would call these killers normal, and it's hard to accept they were sane, but they made a conscious and deliberate decision to target school children."

Liz flicked an eye toward the front of the Greenbriar Restaurant. A couple entered; a waitress seated them. A family paid and filed out.

"Then we entered what we might call the Columbine era, though Columbine High was not the first mass shooting of students by other students. The Jonesboro, Arkansas, shootings, over a year before that, were amazingly similar. The Columbine terror, however, was meticulously planned."

I nodded. I'd read a bit about Columbine.

"They wanted to kill five hundred people, blow up buildings, hijack a plane and crash it in New York," I said.

Liz watched an old woman hobble in with a younger couple. "Yes," she agreed absentmindedly. "They left a diary with a comprehensive outline of their intentions."

"And now?"

Liz played salad hockey with the last cherry tomato on her plate. She stabbed it finally with her fork. I winced. A cherry tomato looks like it's spilling blood and guts when you puncture its flesh--er, skin.

"Now someone's figured out how to target everybody. Bus drivers, kids, mothers with babies. Remember the old movie, The Invisible Man? 'We'll begin with a reign of terror. A few murders here and there. Murders of great men. Murders of little men. Just to show we make no distinction.' I thought the next quantum jump would require tons of money, influence, and weapons of mass destruction, but no. It needs only a reasonably deep consideration of the proposed campaign."

"You give deeper consideration to murder cases than anyone I know," I said. "Are you a profiler?"

Liz gave a single burp-like chuckle.

"My amateur profiling is more of a hobby, yet it's more than a hobby. You know who my great et cetera grandmother was. There's more to it than that. It's like ol' Jack cursed Mary Jane and all her progeny. Everyone in my family has come close to being murdered at one time or another. A few have been. My cousin in Chicago was. So was my aunt Loralyn. I read up on serial killers, spree killers, and mass murders in self-defense."

I lifted my eyebrows. I still had mercenary visions of improving my article. Never reveal your skeleton in the closet to a writer.

"I know they've tried to find 'types' of people who might be potential killers--men with an extra Y chromosome, for instance," I said. "That always struck me as being a new version of phrenology, like looking for the criminal brow and the close-set eyes. I've even heard that some people give off the 'aura' of being a victim--attracting the killer mentality."

I sipped my tea.

"You don't strike me as the victim type, though," I added.

"No," she agreed. "I really think of the family problem as more of a curse, something beyond coincidence. We seem to attract psychos. Remember the three women strangled in Ardmore a couple of years ago? The killings stopped as suddenly as they began. I lived in Ardmore then. . . Remember the Railway Murders outside Fort Smith?"

"Yes. Those stopped suddenly too, as I recall."

Liz smiled, thin-lipped and thin-eyed, like a panther.

"Well. . . I was living in Fort Smith at the time."

The waitress set down a little plastic tray cradling our check. Liz craned her neck to see past her as the door to the Greenbriar opened. She pulled up her big brown purse and dug through it.

"Hey, I'll get it --" I began as the waitress stepped away.

A loud crack echoed through the restaurant. Liz raised her hand, the purse engulfing it like a rectangular boxing glove. With another loud noise, more of a kwoomph, a jet of white smoke blossomed out of a corner of the purse. A second kwoomph came from the purse, followed by a second spume of cordite-smelling vapors.

I turned around and slid from my chair. A man holding a semi-automatic of some sort toppled back onto the checkout counter, a glass case full of Wrigley's Gum and after-dinner mints. The case shattered and the man lay inert among the kiddie treats.

People gasped and yelled and ran. I exhaled like a whoopee cushion and wiped sweat off my forehead.

Liz set her purse down.

"Like I said--I seem to attract psychos. We'll have to wait for the cops. Don't worry--they know me."

"Yeah." I tried lifting my tumbler, but the ice rattled like beans in a maraca. "And like I said, you don't strike me as a victim."

People muttered and jabbered around us. Soon sirens blared from uptown. Liz took out a nail file and cut a notch in the lip of her purse. She smiled again.

"Well. There are victims and there are victims."

Michael D. Winkle was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma and still lives in the same area. He graduated from Oklahoma State University with a B.A. in English, and he is presently working his way toward a Masters of Library Science. He is the author of numerous short stories and articles, including "Wolfhead" in Andre Norton's Tales of the Witch World 3 and "Typo" in Chaosium's Disciples of Cthulhu. He has also written several novels that slowly creep toward publication.