Mr. 8

Chapter 5: The Second Victim

Denton waited in the drab, windowless room. The thought that Bill was about to arrest him for the murders began to seep into his mind. He stared at his reflection in the one-way glass and told himself not to be paranoid. Whatever Bill's reason for asking him to come down to the department with him, it couldn't be that. The fact that he had been made to wait in an interrogation room was only because Bill didn't have an office of his own.

He looked over at the gray metal door and tried to remember the name of that lawyer he met at last year's Art in the Park fundraiser. On the ride over to the station house, Bill had asked, "Okay Dent, what's this about her personality changing?"

"The girl... the woman was neat, almost obsessively so." 

"Was she?"

"You saw her room. The way she kept it goes beyond clean. I wouldn't be surprised if she's borderline OCD."

Bill made a left onto Byron and with one eye on the road gave Denton a nod, encouraging him to go on.

"Then she started making the eights. Think for a minute: you are an extremely orderly, organized person and you want to draw a figure eight somewhere in your room. Where do you do it? How do you do it? She could have done it any number of ways that fit with her mental profile, but she didn't. She reorganized things on her dresser; she doodled in her book; she put stickers all over her laptop. And the stickers actually show a progression: she started off with labels from bananas. She probably added a new one each time she ate one, but how many could she eat in a day? It started slowly, a sticker every now and then. It may have been an odd thing for her to be doing, but she was consistent about it. Then all of a sudden, she grabbed anything at hand to finish the design quickly."

"I hardly think a bunch of stickers makes someone a slob." There was an unfamiliar frown on Bill's face, the right corner of his mouth tugging down involuntarily.

"No, not a slob, but these acts were erratic. They even seemed to be absent-minded. She let the tight control she kept on her environment slip."

"Still, I don't see how—"

"She was changing, and it was very specific to those eights. Under normal circumstances, they should have appalled her sense of order. But this change was even more obvious with the other victim."

"What? Now you're going to tell me that Meyers was a neat freak?"

Meyers. So that had been the delivery man's name.

"No, not neat. He had been a recluse. You told me that the neighbors said he kept to himself, but it went beyond that. He was asocial. He had almost no life outside of that apartment. He didn't care about his appearance or what people thought of him. The place was well lived in. He had spent a lot of time wearing out the furniture, the carpets. But he didn't entertain. He didn't even have a computer, so he didn't email or chat with anyone online."

"So?" Impatience permeated every millisecond that the one syllable was drawn over.

"So, there were new clothes in his closet. The trash can in the bedroom was full of department store bags. He had been going out to bars all over town; there was a pile of receipts on his nightstand. There was also a plastic bracelet from The Green Fiend." Denton almost gasped after that last word. The oxygen in his lungs was completely exhausted.

The Green Fiend was a popular club with students. Denton had never been there, but he'd passed it often enough. It was on 9th Avenue not far from the Square, up on the second floor over a bunch of shops. Its sign depicted a cartoonish green demon with bright red eyes. The lime green bracelets they gave out at the door were a common sight around campus, especially in September when freshmen would keep them on the next day like a badge of honor, proof that they had actually gotten in.