His molars were turning black. A finger hooked in his right cheek, standing in front of his foggy bathroom mirror, Zac inspected his caries. Wiping some of the cloudiness so he could see a clearer reflection, he took his finger out of his mouth and smiled to check his front teeth. The bathroom was still steamy from the hot shower. He stared at the smile in the mirror, zoning out. The smile turned sinister. A sense of familiarity with the smile yet so far from his memory as if clouded by the steam. The tap leaked a drop or two, grabbing his attention. He continued with his daily affairs.
Walking past the fridge aroused his stomach. He opened an almost empty fridge where sat a rotten apple—he needed his vitamins—a carton half-full of milk and a whole rotisserie chicken. People in his neighbourhood were kind, especially since the previous week. Their concern manifested in home cooked meals made its way to Zac’s door on a daily basis, the result of which was the cooked fowl.
He put the whole chicken in the microwave and set it for two minutes. The chicken wouldn’t even be warm. He picked up a knife, the microwave beeped, Zac brought out the chicken. He cut himself a piece with such precision as if he struck a bone or a muscle in the wrong way, the cooked meat would feel pain. Pain… he could not even stand the word.
The bell rang and broke his almost meditative state of slicing. He looked up at the door which was right next to the kitchen and then at the wall covered with photos of a crime scene, maps, pictures of people and names, all of which were connected by a web of strings. He decided to ignore whoever it was; probably someone whom he’d rather hide his investigation from. Getting back to his work, he looked down at his gloved hands. He had no idea when he put them on (he sometimes did things simply out of habit).
Not giving him time to reason, his visitor started banging the door violently. He took off his gloves and opened the door to find the familiar face of Ollie smiling at him. Ollie was the girl from next door who had been interested in Zac since the day he moved in last month. She would often come around and talk to Zac. She was attracted to him in a way that all she cared about was being near him… hearing him talk or simply looking at him gave her a sense of comfort.
Given a choice, Zac would rather not have her look at his room’s wall, for he knew that she would worry about him. Come to think of it, she was probably the only person left who cared about him. But, she had already comfortably let herself into his cosy apartment and was staring right at all the evidence he had spent the past few sleepless nights working on.
“Oh lord, you’re still doing this? I told you to give it up. Zac, I’m worried about you,” Ollie had started with the conversation he had been dreading. “…This guy’s the most wanted criminal in the city. The police haven’t been able to get even close to catching him. I know it’s not easy for you to just lose your family like that, but I seriously suggest that you try and get a move on. Since the day it happened, this is all I’ve seen you do. You should get on with life, it’s what they would’ve wanted too.”
She had stopped talking and there was a pause. He knew she was expecting him to say something, hopefully an affirmation of him listening to her understandable advice. But it wasn’t easy to tell her that she was trying to win a lost battle. That he would spend the rest of his life working on the case if he had to, and wouldn’t rest until he had found the bastard who had shot his parents and sister. That he owed this to them.
So he just stood there in silence. She looked at him with concern, hugged him and made herself comfortable on one of the two chairs that stood next to the table, where his now stone-cold chicken lay. “I see you finally found your way to my mom’s chicken. She sent you that last night. You really should look after yourself, you know. Let me make you something. Let’s see… what do we have in the fridge?”
“Oh, I wouldn’t open that if I were you.”
“You have to be kidding me. I’m gonna run home and grab you some groceries. Promise not to starve to death by the time I come back?”
Zac went straight back to his case. He had a feeling that he was getting closer to catching the culprit and had no plans of giving up as he had finally got a lead that could potentially turn the whole thing around.
The Zodiac killer, that’s what he was called. The killer shot his family at point blank range and signed off a letter confessing to the brutal murders with the infamous sign, a circle with a cross in the middle. ‘ODI’, that is what Zac made of the sign. An ‘O’ with the letter ‘I’ forming the cross, dividing the circle into the letter ‘D’. As insensible as it sounds, he was sure that he had cracked the killer’s identity. “The Zodiac killer wants attention and hid his name in plain sight for someone to see it… to acknowledge his ‘charitable’ acts that no one else would dare to do; alleviate people from their suffering. It was RIGHT THERE! zODIac.” Confident that he was clever enough to put himself in the slayer’s shoes, this was the justification he gave for his deduction.
As Ollie had said, Zac’s parents weren’t the only victims of this psychopath’s brutal violence. In fact, numerous killings had been reported all around the city, all of which had the same untraceable nature and were believed by the police to be the doing of a single man (or woman, you never know). If there was one thing that was certain, this person certainly knew how to get away with murder. No evidence or signs of any slips made while committing the sin. All of the people who had fallen victim to this murderer’s crimes had been attacked in different ways—some suffocated, others poisoned, stabbed or, in the case of his family, shot. But, there had been no broken objects or any signs of the weapon, the only prints in the house were those of him and his family, and… the letters.
The police had lost the spirit, with which they had initially approached solving the crime, on reaching another dead end for they had no leads. Zac, on the other hand, was determined to get his family justice.
Ollie returned as she had promised. After forcing the half fried eggs, freshly pressed orange juice and the bacon-lettuce-tomato sandwiches, that she had prepared for him, down his throat, Zac had a good conversation with his uncommonly kind and caring neighbour.
“Any new developments?” Ollie enquired. “Maybe I could help. I know a little about guns.” Ollie had seen her fair share of investigative documentaries which fed her love for murder mysteries and was probably the reason behind her fancy for Zac.
“They found bullets, they said?”. Inspecting pictures of the evidence stuck on the wall, she went on, “Going by the size of the bullets, seems like they were shot from a .357 Magnum revolver.”
“Wrong”, Zac thought to himself, “the police confirmed it was a Glock 38 pistol.”
“The killer must have hidden the weapon far away from the murder site; that’s what they usually do.”
“Wrong again,” it was as if Ollie was trying to mislead him. He could not take it anymore. He had a sudden epiphany; so obvious.
“It was you, wasn’t it? Olivia Denver Iden—ODI! It was in front of me all this time!”
“How could you even think that?! I just wanted to protect you.”
“By shooting my family dead?”
“Oh, how do I explain this? You could not be more wrong about me!”
“Oh yeah? Explain this? It’s simple enough! The murder weapon is in your backyard! A Glock 38 pistol buried in your backyard, with my family’s blood on it!”
“This is ridiculous! Stop jumping to conclusions. I think you should take a break from this madness—clear your head for a while,” she tried to console him.
“Get away from me!” Zac pushed her away.
“It’s all coming back to me now. You dug the hole and buried it right after it happened… right after I shot them. I shot them!” he fell on the floor in a crumpled heap with his head in his hands. Ollie took out an injection from her jacket’s pocket and jabbed the memory altering Propranolol in his shoulder.
She had known it wasn’t long before he would figure it out and she was prepared. He would kill himself if he ever found out what his dark craving had elicited. It was his past that she didn’t want him to remember, for Zac didn’t either.
by Guntaj and Unat Pannu