The Monster Hunter Ch. 01-10

Ch. 1

Angel Johnson didn't think she'd get the orgasm she desperately needed from this guy.

Todd Mercer the Third talked a good game at the hotel bar. He wore an expensive suit, was well-groomed, smelled nice, and kept eye contact with her as he carried out an intelligent conversation. Angel learned was thirty-four and divorced, a lawyer, and a little older than her twenty-eight. She'd kept up hope that he would extend that attention to her when he asked her up to his room.

Todd was from Chicago, in town for a seminar on tax code changes. Angel was "in government service." It was easier that way.

Todd had a few drinks, while Angel stuck to bottled water that she opened herself. He didn't need to get her drunk as she readily agreed to join Todd in his room. They'd been all over each other in the elevator. Angel was panting with need by the time the door opened to his floor. They were pulling their clothes off before the hotel room door even closed. Angel tossed her clothes onto a chair, covering her purse, and turned to find him already lying in bed, stroking his cock like it was God's gift to women. It wasn't; it was as long and thick as a hot dog, not even a bratwurst. He'd better know how to work it. "Suck it," he ordered her.

Angel wanted her bootie trifecta; oral attention, athletic sex, and a clean goodbye. As she walked towards the bed, her brown hair down to the middle of her back and her lingerie accenting her athletic form, she thought she could salvage something. It was too late to find another partner tonight. She crawled onto the bed, taking it from him and giving him a lick from base to tip. He moaned in pleasure, and Angel grew more frustrated as she went. His hands were in her hair or by his side. He didn't caress her, play with her hard nipples, or pull her over into a sixty-nine. At least he didn't have the equipment to choke her.

She had to work for a minute to get him to full hardness. Then, with no warning, his cock pulsed and started shooting cum into her mouth. She kept her lips around it, swallowing it before coming off of it. "Sorry," he said. "You were so fucking hot that it snuck up on me."

"The night is still young," Angel said as she moved up his body. When she tried to kiss him, he turned his head aside. "What?"

"Can you brush before you try and kiss me?"

Angel rolled her eyes; it was good enough to fill HER mouth without warning, but he couldn't taste it on her lips? "Yeah, it must be gross or something," she thought. Angel climbed off the bed and walked to the bathroom. She found a Scope bottle by the sink, and she took a swig and swished it around before spitting it in the sink.

When she opened the door, he was asleep. "I sure can pick them," she mumbled to herself. "Never date a Todd." She stood there in her garter and bra, debating whether to wake him or leave when her cellphone rang. She pulled her phone out of her purse and answered it. "Special Agent Johnson," she said.

"Angel, it's Mark. He's done it again, two victims this time. Boss wants us out there now," he said.

Fuck. "Can you pick me up?" She gave him the name of the hotel, and he was thirty minutes out.

"Tell the locals not to process the scene until we arrive," Angel said. If it is the Monster Hunter, our FBI Task Force will take over from the Annapolis Homicide detectives.

"I won't. We rescued one girl, Angel. She's five, and she was drugged and sexually abused. The ambulance is taking her to the hospital now." This task force had been eye-opening for Mark; he usually worked kidnappings, few of which took turns like this case.

"Did those guys suffer?" Angel hoped so. The fuckers who hurt children were the lowest of the low, and she'd seen it all in her time in the Human Trafficking and Sex Crimes divisions.

"Let's just say I hope you haven't eaten lately," her partner replied. "They sounded relieved when I told them to hold the perimeter and wait."

That was a yes. Angel couldn't help but wonder what he'd come up with this time. "I'll be out front in twenty minutes," she told him. "Bring my laptop."

Angel finished dressing as Todd watched her. She pulled her hair into a ponytail, then put on her shoulder holster with her duty weapon over the white blouse and hung her FBI shield on a chain around her neck. The skirt and heels would have to go, but that's why she kept a change of clothes in the trunk of her car.

"You're a cop," he said.

Angel rolled her eyes. What gave it away? The Glock Nineteen, or the shiny gold badge? "FBI," she said. "I have to go."

"Can I have your number?"

"No." Angel walked out without looking back. She was still horny and frustrated, but she told herself that at least she didn't compound her mistakes. Men were a means to an end, and it was better not to get emotionally invested in someone who would hurt you. She'd never gone past three dates, and that third date was a mistake. Other agents would ask her out, but she always turned them down; she didn't want to mix business and pleasure. It was better if they thought she was gay than for them to know the truth.

Angel took the elevator to the garage and made my way to her car. She pulled a pair of dress slacks and rubber-soled low black heels out of the bag in the trunk. Kicking off the four-inch heels, Angel pulled the pants up under her skirt before taking that off. Then she slipped her feet into the work shoes and packed her club clothes away for the night. She grabbed the FBI-logo windbreaker out of the back seat and took the elevator back to the lobby.

Special Agent Mark Prentice pulled in five minutes later in a silver Chevy 300S sedan. Angel settled her five-foot-nine frame into the passenger seat and buckled in. "Where are we going?"

"Falls Church," he said. Mark pulled out onto the freeway, turning on the flashers to move faster through the late-night traffic. The navigation system took us to the suburbs in Virginia and a single-story house at the end of a quiet street now filled with police cars. Mark parked the car, flipping down the visor to display the "FBI" logo through the windshield.

They showed their identifications to the uniform at the crime scene tape and ducked underneath. "Who's in charge?"

"Lieutenant Perkins, over there by those bushes," one of the men said. Looking over, they could see a woman in a pantsuit throwing up at the corner of a neighbor's house.

When seasoned cops were throwing up, you knew it wasn't going to be good. "Toss me one of those water bottles," Mark said to the EMT waiting by an ambulance. He caught the bottle and brought it over just as the woman was wiping her mouth.

"Thanks," she said before swished her mouth out with the water. "Detective Lieutenant Mandy Perkins, Falls Church Police." Angel's sharp eyes caught sight of the Marine Corps tattoo on the arm of the veteran officer as they shook hands.

"We're with the FBI task force on the Monster Hunter," Mark said, using the name the media had given the serial killer. "Do you think this is him?"

"No fucking doubt in my mind," she said. "The girl we took out of here had been held and abused, probably for years. We've made an identification on one of the victims. His name is Daniel Jackson, age fifty-two, a convicted Level III sex offender from Pennsylvania who disappeared off the radar there a decade ago. The home belonged to his late mother. Daniel never registered in Virginia, and the neighbors say the usual things about him."

"Let me guess," Angel said. "Nice man, quiet, kept to himself, can't believe he'd do something like this?"

She nodded. "Sounds like you've been down this road before." She was more right than she knew; for five years, she'd been dealing with the scum of the earth. Nobody ever came up to her after and said they'd reported the guy and nobody listened to them. "As for the victims, they were hung up, gagged, and tortured. I've never heard of anything like this outside the Mexican cartels. This Monster Hunter of yours knows how to inflict pain and suffering on those bastards."

"We need to see the scene," Mark said. "The FBI crime scene people are on their way. We'll work with your people to get the statements and continue the canvassing of the neighborhood."

"You can fucking have this one," Mandy said. "Come on." She led us past the uniform at the front of the house. We donned Tyvek suits, booties, and gloves, then went to the basement. Angel noted the heavy-duty basement door sealed against the frame, keeping light and sound from passing. The door could be locked from both sides, ensuring the perpetrator wasn't interrupted while doing his thing. "I'll wait here for you," she told them.

The stairway turned to the right and into a dimly-lit bondage dungeon. Mark and Angel stopped in shock; they'd seen this equipment before, but not on this scale. Daniel built all the equipment in the room to restrain and abuse children.

In the center of the room, hanging from the steel I-beam along the center, two dead white males hung in the air from chains padlocked to their wrists. Blood pooled underneath them, making its way to a floor drain nearby.

"Jesus," Mark said. "It's him. The Monster Hunter flayed them this time."

Ch. 2

Most serial killers kill in the same way every time. The Monster Hunter was not typical; the only common denominator for his methods was the pain he inflicted on them. The psychologist didn't know what to make of him, except to say he was well-read and prepared when he arrived. The smart ones were the hardest to catch.

Previous victims of the Monster Hunter died during different forms of medieval torture. Child abusers were his target, and the men had been burned alive, boiled in water, impaled, quartered, and slowly crushed under a heavy stone. Any of those were preferable to how these men died.

"I'm going to be sick," Mark said. He'd seen some shocking crime scenes, but this was well past those.

"Go upstairs," Angel told him. She started her phone recording video and her comments for her walk-through of the scene. The two men had something stuffed in their mouths, and their eyes were open in silent agony. Blood was everywhere, so she watched where her booted feet stepped. She would come back to the dead men later.

Instead, Angel went down the hallway towards the far end of the basement. There were two rooms on the left side, both of the heavy metal doors open. The cells had cement floors, a mattress with a thin blanket, and a bucket. The ceiling-mounted closed-circuit cameras in each corner facing the door provided full coverage of the cell. Fingernail scratches and vertical smears of blood on the door were evidence of the child's extended imprisonment.

It must have taken him months to build this out. The original egress windows were filled with concrete, leaving the stairway as the only entrance. He'd covered the walls and ceiling with multiple layers of overlapping sound insulation. He could be down here for days, and no one would hear the screams.

It was a design-built torture chamber and the playground of a professional child abuser. "I'd bet a paycheck there's a burial ground somewhere in the basement," she said as she reached the back wall. Once a victim came down those stairs, she would never go back up. Daniel could hold his victims for months, even years, until they finally died.

He planned for every eventuality, except being found by a man sicker than he was.

His labors enabled the Monster Hunter to torture the pair for hours without his neighbors knowing a thing.

Across the hall from the cells, Angel found a bathroom/shower room and an office area. The camera feed was still on the monitor. The monitor showed the two cells, the upstairs and the front and back of the house. There was no computer and no recording system, which was a surprise. Many of these pedophiles liked to tape their victims so they could replay them between victims. "This fucker didn't have any 'between victims' time," she muttered to herself.

(If you are squeamish, you might want to skip five paragraphs.)

Heading back to the main room, Angel used her flashlight to inspect the bodies. A discarded scalpel lay in the pool of blood below them, obviously the murder weapon. It was a disposable model, available in any medical supply store or hospital.

The Hunter sliced through the skin around their wrists, following that with a vertical slice down to their armpits. The killer then peeled back the skin from their arms like you might remove a long dish glove, exposing the underlying muscles and tissue. Two empty bottles of rubbing alcohol and some smelling salts floated in the puddle of blood. The disinfectant would amp up the pain, and the salts would revive them when they passed out from it.

The Monster Hunter got his money's worth. The pain must have been beyond imagining.

The bloody skin tubes hung down along their sides, but that was just the warmup. The next cuts went from shoulder to shoulder just below the neck and along their sides to their hips. The skin of their chest and abdomen were peeled away and hung down to their knees. Another incision in their stomachs allowed their intestines to spill out below them.

"Victims likely died of shock and blood loss," she said into her phone. Using her flashlight, Angel took a closer look at their mouths and wasn't so sure. She used a pen to lift the flap of skin over Daniel's hip out of the way, enough to verify where the object in their mouths originated. "Or perhaps they choked to death when he stuffed their cocks and balls down their throats. Damn, he's raising his game," she said quietly.

She backed away from the bodies, careful not to step in blood. Once clear, she swapped out her booties to be safe and headed up the stairs.

Angel met the Crime Scene guys in the kitchen. The team leader recognized her. "Is it as bad as they said?"

"Worst I've seen, and I've seen a lot," Angel said. "There's also no sign of forced entry, and the footprints in the blood are probably from the local cops. Make sure you get pictures of the shoes of every person who went down there, including me," she told them. The soiled Tyvek suit went into a garbage bag by the door, and then she was done. She walked out the door, meeting Mark and Mandy outside. "We need cadaver dogs and ground-penetrating radar out here as soon as possible," she told her partner.

"What's going on," Mandy asked.

"There are two general types of child molesters," Angel replied. "I call them Opportunists and Collectors. The opportunists see someone, take them, use them, then kill or release them. It might be a day or a decade between victims, as the need builds until they see a chance to do it again. This guy was a Collector. They kidnap their victims and hold them, using them whenever the urge strikes. He's built a soundproof bunker down there, and he lives in a suburban neighborhood, and he probably did this to more than one girl. Once Daniel is done with a girl, he has to get rid of the body. It might be in the back yard, but it's more likely it never left the basement. He might have a grave under the concrete down there."

"Sick fuck."

"Yeah." Angel knew all too well what life in that basement was like, and the rage burned inside her. "Do we have an identification on the other guy yet?"

Mark rolled his eyes. "Yeah, and that's a whole other shitshow." He pulled out an evidence bag from his pocket; inside was a passport, wallet, and diplomatic credentials from the Turkish Embassy in Washington. "Colonel Ishmael Akpakar, age forty-five, Military Attache' at the Turkish Embassy. I called it in; the State Department will be here with a representative from their Embassy shortly." He looked over at the press vans and groaned. "And the shitstorm will continue."

Angel glanced at the press. It was five in the morning, and there were six news vans parked down the street. The "Have you given them anything?"

"Hell no. I don't like cameras, and it's well above my paygrade now," Mark said.

"We've made no official statements, but some of the details have leaked out," Mandy said. She showed the news feed on her phone. "MONSTER HUNTER TORTURES TWO AND SAVES ONE IN FALLS CHURCH," read the headline over a photograph of a small girl coming out in a gurney. "We'll be referring all inquiries to the FBI's Task Force."

The three heard a buzzing sound. Looking up, they saw a drone circling the house taking video. If there was any doubt as to who was responsible, our presence here cleared that up. Angel pointed to the quadcopter. "Can we do anything about that?"

"Judge says the FAA has jurisdiction over the airspace; it's no different than that news helicopter over there," Mandy replied.

Monster Hunter's latest murders would be today's biggest story, and it had two sides. Some people thought the Monster Hunter was a sick serial killer who needed to be caught and thrown in prison for life. The majority agreed he was a sick bastard but didn't mind him taking out the trash that the police couldn't.

"There's nothing more we can do here until the scene is processed," Angel said. "Any good places to eat around here? I could use some breakfast."

"I'm not hungry," Mark replied.

"I know a place with decent coffee," Mandy said as she led them off. Reporters shouted questions at them as they climbed back into their cars and drove out. Some yelled at Angel by name, asking when the FBI would bring him to justice.

Mark had a news talk station playing on the way, and the story dominated. Callers were of two minds on the topic, the majority saying the dead men deserved every bit of pain and suffering they got. "If MY daughter had been in there, I'd shake his hand and buy the guy a beer," one caller said. Another caller said the police should be arresting these sickos first, "so the sick bastards can get shanked in prison with the other rapists and abusers."

If you are a serial killer who wants the public behind you, make your victims rapists and child molesters.

I'd had no sex, no sleep, and the regular workday would start soon. It was going to be a circus, and I had ringside seats.

Ch. 3

"You know, a coffee IV would be more efficient," Mark said as he drove them back to the crime scene.

"Funny guy," Angel replied. She took another sip of the jumbo cup from the gas station they'd stopped at after she'd finished her coffee from the office. It was seven at night now, a full sixteen hours since the phone call and thirty hours since she last slept.

"I hate it when you're right." The coroner took the bodies by ten, and the crime scene guys cleared out by two. That was when the team of cadaver dogs came in. They didn't have any hits in the yard, but they stopped and sat down in a basement corner near some storage boxes. "The concrete was fresher in the area the dogs indicated, and they've got construction guys down there cutting the concrete to get underneath it. They can hear a void when they tap on it."

Angel closed her eyes and leaned back against the headrest, knowing what that meant. They'd likely have the grave excavated before they arrived. She had been with the medical examiner for the last few hours, so she wasn't up on everything. "Is there any good news? Anything pointing to our killer?"

"Nothing that we can use in court. We have good prints on the two dead men and the child, but the crime scene guy didn't sound hopeful. No shoeprints, but in one place, the blood spatter outlined his shoe. Size eleven, matching what we know already. Either he's wearing moccasins, or he has shoe covers like the ones we wear. The video system didn't have recording capability, Daniel doesn't have a home phone line, and his cellphone is with our technical guys. We got lucky on the canvas; one of the homeowners has a video system that records, and the front door camera shows his driveway and the street. We went back a day; we didn't see Daniel's car, but we did see the Colonel arriving at five-thirty-two last night. You can't make him out, but the make and model matches."