The Butterfly Killer

Chapter 5

5

Agent Burns tapped the tip of his pen to his notebook.

“It’s interesting that you were the first at the scene in both cases.”

Marcus leaned against his cruiser, his arms folded over his chest as he watched the forensics team do their job from the street. Chief had made it clear he wasn’t even allowed to guard the yellow tape line.

He turned to look at Burns. “Am I being interrogated?”

Burns popped a smile. “Nah. Just observing.”

Marcus hadn’t noticed how boyishly handsome Burns was until then. He was probably a ladies’ man.

Marcus shrugged. “Interesting or cursed?”

“Maybe intentional?”

His stomach twisted at the implication.

Burns continued on, not noticing how much Marcus didn’t like what he was suggesting. Even if it was just a theory or a joke.

“Taking into consideration your idea this is a copycat, making you the first one to find the bodies would almost be an homage to the original Butterfly Killer. The copycat is making you part of the ritual.”

A chill went down Marcus’s spine. What Burns was saying made sense and he didn’t want it to. Now he wished there wasn’t a copycat and the original killer was just changing his routine.

Agent Mercer came out from the house, ending the uncomfortable conversation they were having. Marcus had never felt so compelled to leave a scene that was connected to the Butterfly Killer in his whole life.

Except for maybe the first one.

Mercer nodded to Marcus. “How are you holding up?”

“I’m fine. Nothing I haven’t seen before.” He left out the part where he puked in the next door neighbor’s bushes. At least he’d been able to hold it long enough to not damage any evidence.

“Burns.” Mercer tilted his head, signaling that he wanted to speak to Burns alone.

Burns walked away from Marcus’s cruiser with Mercer. Burns would glance at Marcus a couple of times which made Marcus feel like he was maybe going to be questioned. He was fine with it, but he didn’t want to be close to the case in this way.

His life and family had been upturned by the Butterfly Killer. He didn’t need to be dragged further into it. And he definitely didn’t want this copycat killer roping him into their “plans” either.

Marcus turned his gaze away from the agents and looked at the quiet and deceiving house. If it wasn’t for the yellow tape or the police cars it would be unthinkable that such a gruesome murder had taken place there.

The young girl’s face flashed in his mind. He winced, closing his eyes which only made the haunting image worse. He covered his face, pressing the pads of his fingers into his temples as if it was going to give him any kind of relief.

“Are you sure you’re okay?”

“Jesus!” Marcus opened his eyes to find Mercer staring back at him.

The man was wearing a pensive look. “I’m serious. If this is too much for you, you should go home.”

Marcus shook his head. “I’m fine. Just haven’t been getting a lot of sleep.”

He yawned, starting out fake but then morphing into a real one. He wasn’t lying when he said he wasn’t getting the best sleep. That wasn’t anything new. With how much death he’d seen, it was a surprised he could sleep at all.

Mercer didn’t believe him. Marcus could tell that much by the look on his face. But the man didn’t have any authority over him. He could tell him to fuck off if he was messing with the investigation, but something told Marcus that Mercer wasn’t that cold-hearted. He understood this meant more to Marcus than anyone.

“I was going to ask if you’d want to look at the body?—”

Marcus’s eyes widened. “Yes! Absolutely.”

Mercer narrowed his eyes. “—but if you’re not feeling good?—”

“I’m fine. Seriously. I know this might sound strange, but I know this killer like the back of my hand. I’ve studied him for years?—”

“And that’s why I’m letting you. But make no mistake, if you get too latched to this and I think you’re letting your bias sway you, I will make sure you never get an inch close to this case again. Got it?”

Marcus nodded. He felt like a cat and Mercer had stepped on his tail. But he was fine. He wouldn’t fuck this up. He couldn’t.

Mercer watched him little longer. He was probably searching for an ounce of doubt on Marcus’s face. He wasn’t going to find it because this was the most sure Marcus had ever felt in his life. Even more sure than he’d been when he promised himself he’d find his mom’s killer.

“Come on.”

Mercer turned and started toward the house. Forensics was still out and about. The guy with the camera was taking pictures. It seemed so routine that no one was phased by any of it. However, if Marcus turned away from the house everyone was focused on, he’d see neighbors on their porches, kids staring out their windows, and random passerbyers filming.

They all were entranced by this new spectacle. Because that was all this would be to them. It didn’t mean anything to them. But to the woman who’d found her babysitter dead on her kitchen floor—to the kid who might have witnessed the young girl’s murder—and the girl’s family—this would mean everything. It would mean for the rest of their lives they would wake with night terrors of the girl’s murder playing out with no way in stopping it.

The agents and Marcus ducked under the tape. They were about to enter the house through the front door when Blevins stepped out from the shadows—again like a villain from a cartoon.

“He’s not supposed to be here.”

Mercer didn’t even look at Blevins as he passed him by. “I said he could.”

Blevins went red in the face. “Who gave you the authority?—”

“I did,” Mercer said with finality. “I’m in charge of this case. I decide who works on it and I say he’s allowed in. Do you have a problem with that?”

A moment of silence passed. Blevins’s eyes darted to Marcus’s. He looked one second away from punching Marcus in the face. Instead of doing that, he marched away to his flashy car where his partner was waiting for him.

Burns shook his head in disbelief. “He’s got some balls.”

“More like he doesn’t have a shameful bone in his body,” Marcus muttered.

Mercer didn’t comment as he turned to go into the house. Marcus stopped thinking about Blevins entirely as he saw the house in a new light. He hadn’t been able to see anything past the kitchen. The living room was spotless which was strange with a toddler running around.

“Did Miss…”

“Miss Gomez. Age 35, single mom, unmarried. She hired Miss Catherine Yolts a week ago to babysit her son while she worked the weekend. Her mom usually babysits, but she was out of town. Gomez found her son unharmed in the living room. The kitchen was gated so there was no way he saw the body.”

Mercer gave a run down of the case as he lead Marcus and Burns to the kitchen where the body was.

Marcus tried to look at everything as they passed by. He wanted to collect as many details as possible. “And she didn’t have a cleaner?”

“I thought you might notice that.” They stepped into the kitchen. “No, she didn’t. She thought maybe Catherine had done it over the weekend.”

“Unlikely since Catherine’s mom mentioned Catherine hated when parents asked her to do things outside her job description,” Burns added.

Someone from the forensics team walked past them. The forensics seemed to have gotten everything they needed and were packing up.

Marcus felt a little more at ease. He didn’t like the possibility that he might disturb evidence. What he’d done back at the Calloway residence, getting close to the body when it was obvious she was long gone, had been a fluke. He couldn’t believe he’d done something so reckless.

“May I?” He motioned to her body.

“Go ahead.” Mercer didn’t seem worried about Marcus taking a lead. Though, the agents probably already looked at everything they needed.

Marcus ignored the gut-wrenching feeling rising in him. Slowly the world outside him and Yolts’s body disappeared. Time seemed to reverse. The sun rose back up in the sky and it was like when Marcus had found her body.

But the time went back further than that. As he kneeled at her side, the killer came back into the room in reverse. Marcus could see it so vividly it almost took his breath away.

He did the same as he did before. He took his time killing her, paying attention to each detail like his life depended on it. Because it did in some way. This was more than about the kill. It was almost as if the meaning and thrill he got relied more so on the aftermath.

Finding her body like this was more important to him than the initial kill.

Marcus turned away from the killer and the body. He looked into the living room.

“Why did you pick this house?” Why did you pick this girl? The Butterfly Killer had never gone after his victims while the children were home. He always struck when there were no kids in the house.

Marcus stilled when he reached the gate. Inside the living room, the TV was on and the boy was watching cartoons. He was none-the-wiser about what gruesome act was being done in the next room over.

Marcus went to touch the gate, but it disappeared before his fingers could graze it. The mirage he’d been witnessing blew away like mist. It was night time and the only people in the house were him, the agents, and the medical staff taking her body to the morgue.

“Did you notice something?”

Burns curiously poked his head into the living room, looking for what Marcus noticed. Marcus blinked away the last of the dream-like thoughts from his eyes. He rubbed them with the palms of his hands until he was seeing black spots.

“I don’t know. Sorry. This was a waste of your time.”

“You’ve give us new insight. That’s not a waste of time. It’s always good to have fresh eyes when the trail is going stale.”

Marcus hated the sound of that. A murderer was hitting the streets like he had something to prove—they had two new murders in a week and they didn’t have anything to show for the work they’d put in.

He was angry at both the agents and himself for not pulling something up. All he had was a theory of a copycat.

“Go home and get some rest. You’ll think more clearly once you do.”

He knew Burns was right. He didn’t want him to be though. It felt like he was pressed for time. And each time he looked at that girl’s body, the sentiment was more solidified.

The killer was out there and he was already planning his next murder.

If he hadn’t already done it yet.

As Marcus feared, there was another murder. He didn’t know about it until he was coming back to the precinct and he saw a swarm of people with cameras.

The media. Shit.

He parked and jumped out of his cruiser.

“Excuse me.” He pushed through the people wielding cameras.

“Do you know anything about the Butterfly case? The recent murder of the single mother found dead in her home this morning?”

Multiple people shoved microphones in his face and some guy with a notepad was ready to write down any notes.

Marcus shook his head. “I’m not?—”

The front doors to the building opened and a publicist working with the FBI agents came out. She raised her hand.

“If you have any questions about the on-going case, I’ll take them now.”

The swarm almost trampled over Marcus to get to her. He let out a sigh of relief, but stared at the group as they started throwing out questions.

His feet were cemented to the steps as he watched them, but he really wasn’t paying attention. There had been another murder. All last night he hadn’t been able to sleep because he’d had this feeling that there was going to be another killing.

The time was ticking. This copycat had an agenda. They weren’t just killing for a sick thrill. They had a plan that needed to be done and they were trying to get through it quickly.

Marcus dashed through the front doors. He went straight to the room where they kept all the case files. He flashed his badge at the man minding the front desk and he was let through.

As he’d been thinking in his bed last night, it occurred to him that maybe the copycat had deliberately chosen the two victims for a purpose. His idea was further backed up by the recent murder—a single mother. That fit the victims of the original Butterfly Killer.

He went to the stack of unsolved murders in the year of his mother’s killing. The Butterfly Killer had a specific two month period between killings. So if Marcus looked at the month two months prior…

He pulled out multiple cases. He slapped them down on the table in the center of the room. The light dangled above him, casting a yellowish glow on the old paper.

His hands shook as he flipped through the cases. The pictures of death made him nauseated, but he pushed through. He was onto something. He could feel it.

The words started to mush together as a half hour and then an hour passed by. He rubbed his eyes as he blinked the fatigue away. He moved to sitting at the desk rather than craning over it. His motivation waned as he didn’t find anything for some time.

It was depressing to see how many cases in just a month had gone unsolved. But it was a different time years ago. The technology had been different—and the times had changed. He wasn’t sure if it was for better or worse. Sometimes it felt like death and murder was the only constant things in this world.

He let out a sigh and dove back into the files, praying he would find something.

He was calling it quits when someone else walked into the file room.

“Hey, you working on something?” Burns asked as he walked over to Marcus.

Marcus was packing up the files. “I thought maybe there was a cold case no one thought was connected to the Butterfly Killer.”

Burns nodded. “Okay. What makes you think we’ve overlooked it?”

Marcus stacked the files neatly and back in the order he’d found them. “Well, I thought what if the copycat knows the killer better than we do? What if they know the Palmer case wasn’t the first victim?”

Burns rose his brows. “That’d mean the copycat would have to be close to the Butterfly Killer. Why wouldn’t you think it’s just the Butterfly Killer repeating his pattern?”

“Because how clean everything is. The original murderer didn’t care about leaving his DNA behind. The copycat is. I’m betting that if we did find DNA evidence it wouldn’t be a match to the original string of murders.”

“Right. So you haven’t been able to find any correlating murders.”

Marcus’s shoulders slumped. He shook his head in defeat. “Nothing. I even went a year ahead of the Palmer murder.”

He pushed the files away from him in disgust. Each step he took forward, he was ending up at another roadblock. They didn’t have time for this.

“You might be looking in the wrong time frame.”

Marcus leaned forward, his hands in his hair. “How? He has a pattern. He strikes every two months.”

“Except for the fact he went cold for two years,” Burns pointed out. “He might have gone through a rest period between his first couple kills. Something could have happened that prevented him from having the time to kill.”

“So you’re saying we might have to look back years? That would take forever.”

Burns let out a snort. “That’s why we have a team working together. I’ll run it by Mercer. He’s been fine with you helping out so far. I don’t see him having a problem spending resources. We haven’t got any new leads anyway.”

Marcus didn’t feel any more relieved by the idea. It sounded to him that he’d hit a brick wall again. He just didn’t understand why it became harder and harder to put the pieces together.

Burns must have seen how the new affected him. He laid a hand on Marcus’s shoulder.

“You’ve been down here for hours, haven’t you? You should come back up to the Hell room.”

Marcus perked up at the name. “Hell room?”

Burns gave a soft laugh. “It’s a joke between me and Mercer.”

Marcus should have been happy he was being invited into the room usually reserved for detectives. But his racing thoughts of doubt and worry prevented him from having any kind of celebration.

He shouldn’t be celebrating at all when there were people being murdered. But such was this life he was living.

“What do you say? I’ll even order us some food.”

Marcus thought it was funny he seemed to attract one of two people: ones who hated his guts and ones who wanted to pamper him. He guessed one caused the other. In which order he couldn’t say.

He gave a small smile. “Yeah. I’d like that.”

He rose from the seat, grabbing the files and putting them away in the cabinets he’d pulled them from.

Another night of lost sleep wouldn’t hurt and to be close to the case as Burns was offering, that was as close to a dream come true he was ever going to get.