Succulent Prey

Everyone turned to look at him as Joe walked into the room. The cops had been there. He could tell. They had been asking questions about the librarian and his name had come up. That meant they would be back.

Joe slipped down into his seat and stared defiantly at the professor, waiting for him to begin his lecture. They had nothing on him, not yet anyway, so he still had every right to be there. The professor stared back at him with an expression that was full of questions and suspicion. His hand shook as he raised it to scrawl on the blackboard.

The eyes of his fellow students crawled over Joe’s flesh. He imagined he could feel each of their curious stares like a legion of worms trying to wriggle their way into his mind to harvest his thoughts. It made him itch. He scratched the back of his neck as if to rake their stares from his skin. The professor kept looking back over his shoulder at him as he wrote on the chalkboard. Joe knew he had burned that bridge. It was obvious that everyone, including Professor Locke, suspected him of having done something to the librarian. Professor Locke had spent most of his career profiling and apprehending serial killers. If anyone could spot the monster in their midst it would be him. There was no way the professor would help him now.

‘There have been many theories that have tried to link the compulsion to kill to brain abnormalities. There was once a theory that murderers possessed an extra Y chromosome. This was, of course, disproven. There have been theories that have sought to link early head trauma to violent criminal behavior. Neurologists have even presented CAT scans that actually showed increased brain activity in the limbic region of violent sexual offenders and decreased activity in other areas of the brain. They have found that most signature sex murderers were themselves victims of physical or sexual abuse or at the very least mentally abused, but then there were others, like Ted Bundy, who had very normal and happy upbringings. And then there are, of course, people who have been abused, who have had brain traumas, and who have active limbic systems that don’t grow up to murder strangers. So what makes them do it?’ The professor turned to look directly at Joe.

‘Are they just evil?’ the professor asked. Joe raised his hand and he felt the students on either side of him flinch. Professor Locke stared at Joe’s rising arm then looked around the room as if seeking the class’s approval before calling on him.

‘Yes, Joseph?’

‘Is it possible that it is an evolutionary mutation?’

‘A what?’

‘An evolutionary mutation, part of natural selection. Man is the only creature on the earth without a natural predator, except other men. Perhaps as our population explodes Mother Nature has felt the need to select certain individuals to act as population control. Perhaps giving them drives and instincts that other humans don’t have, which genetically predisposes them to mass murder─to cull the herd, so to speak. In the wild the weak and the helpless would have died off, killed by other animals, other predators, but civilization and our technological advancements have made for the possibility of even the weakest human beings surviving and flourishing. As a result, a world that was adequate to support small tribes is now populated by nations of millions, smothering the earth and draining it of all its resources; killing it like a cancer. Just three hundred years ago there weren’t even a billion people on the planet and now there are six billion. There are more people alive right now than have ever lived. Perhaps nature is just seeking a remedy for the plague. Isn’t it possible that murderers are the natural antivirus?’

Joe didn’t care about the stares and the whispers. After today he would have to get out of town. This would probably be his last opportunity to pick the professor’s brain before the cops came knocking on his door.

‘Well, Joe, if what you suggest is true and signature killers are just men who are higher up the food chain than us, not a glitch but an advancement in the natural selection process, then there would be no hope to cure these individuals. There would be no need for the psychiatrist, only the policeman and the executioner.’

‘Perhaps that’s why no one has ever cured one,’ Joe replied.

‘I think I liked your virus idea better. At least that one contained a little hope.’

‘Yeah, I liked it better too.’

The class ended and Joe left the lecture hall and walked quickly to his sociology class. He scoured the campus for signs of police. They had no evidence that the woman was even dead, just that she was missing. Someone probably called when she hadn’t shown up for work and they couldn’t get an answer at her apartment. He’d parked her car down in the projects at Hunter’s Point and caught the bus back home. By the time they found it the car would probably be completely stripped and they would assume she’d been the victim of a carjacking. Except that half the fucking campus was probably telling the cops that Joe hung out at the library every night and he was sure a few of them had seen them at the coffee shop. If they somehow found his apartment they’d find the body. But by then he’d be in Seattle killing Damon Trent.