The Killing Vision - By Will Overby Page 0,33

discover that it still worked. It was then that a plan had begun to fester in his mind.

He began with experiments on animals— stray dogs and cats mostly. He strangled them, then wrapped their bodies in old sheets before hiding them in the freezer. Even with the thermostat set a little above freezing, they remained remarkably preserved for several weeks. And when spring came and the river began to thaw, he took them there to dump them in the water. He took only one a day; he did not want to risk someone noticing a cluster of dead animals floating downstream all at once.

He knew then that it was time to go forward. He had thought about it for a couple of years. How he would do it. What it would feel like. He just didn’t know who it would be. Not until that day in April when Sarah Jo caught his attention.

He’d seen her one afternoon as she passed the water treatment plant down by the river. He’d been there scouting out new places to fish, and he’d stopped to take a leak in the bushes. He heard her before he saw her; she was singing, some song by Miranda Lambert. He hid behind a tree as she passed by on the dirt road, swinging an instrument case in her fist as she walked. Her blonde hair was tied back in a ponytail, which bounced with her steps, and her jeans fit tightly around her buttocks, molded to them. He watched her until she disappeared. She never even knew he was there.

The next day he waited in the same spot, and she came by again at just about the same time. Again he watched her, and again she didn’t see him.

For a week he hid in the bushes and watched her every afternoon, planning everything he would do. And the night before he did it, he lay sleepless and sweating on top of his bed, his heart hammering with excitement, fondling the leather gloves he planned to use on her.

In the end, it had not gone as smoothly as he had hoped. For one thing, it had been raining; for another, Sarah Jo was a fighter. He had squeezed and squeezed her throat, but she refused to succumb. His rain-slick gloves couldn’t get a good enough grip on her neck, and the more she struggled, the harder it became to hold her. He finally wrestled her to the ground and kept his knee on her back while he pulled out his pocket knife. She was screaming in terror, flailing her hands blindly at him. He held up her head by her hair and sliced her throat open. The screams stopped with a gurgle.

He truly had not wanted it to end like that. Cutting her made the whole ordeal almost pointless. He had ruined her. Now, however, it was too late.

At first he had worried about the blood. There was so much of it. But that night, after several hours of heavy rain, the river overflowed its banks there at the low spot by the treatment plant, and any traces of Sarah Jo’s blood on the ground had been washed away with the muddy water. His clothes were another matter; in the end he drove to the lake and burned them in a barbecue pit at a public picnic area.

Once he was home, he worked feverishly through the evening while the lightning flashed outside and the thunder shook the walls. He had so much to do, and he was terrified of being caught.

The first thing he did was to carefully remove Sarah Jo’s shoes, then her jeans and panties. The sight of her nakedness sent a ripple of excitement through him, and it took every ounce of his mental strength to keep himself from tearing into her. The second thing he did was to take the sawed-off end of an old shovel handle (which was roughly the same diameter as an erect penis) and insert it firmly in her vagina. It was a difficult procedure; she was small and her flesh was dry.

With that done, he placed her into the freezer, positioning her carefully and covering her with a sheet, then lowered the lid. He piled the junk back on top of the freezer and left it for the night, taking her things with him. He would burn them later. The instrument case with the clarinet inside would be more of a problem; for the moment he hid it in