"Bind, Torture, Kill," I said. "BTK was how Dennis Rader signed his name in all the letters he wrote to the media."
"That's sick, man," said Max. "How many people did he kill?" He obviously wasn't too disturbed by it.
"Maybe ten," I said. "The police aren't sure yet."
"Only ten?" said Max. "That's nothing. You could kill more than that robbing a bank. That guy in your project last year was way better at it than that."
"It doesn't matter how many they kill," I told him. "And it's not awesome—it's wrong."
"Then why do you talk about them all the time?" asked Max.
"Because wrong is interesting." I was only partially engaged in the conversation; mostly I was thinking about how cool it would be to see a body that was all taken apart after an autopsy.
"You're weird, man," said Max, taking another bite of his sandwich. "That's all there is to say. Someday you're going to kill a whole bunclvof people—probably more than ten, because you're such an overachiever—and then they're going to have me on TV and ask if I saw this corning, and I'm going to say, 'Hell yes, that guy was seriously screwed up.'"
"Then I guess I have to kill you first," I said.
"Nice try," said Max, laughing and pulling out his inhaler.
"I'm, like, you're only friend in the world—you wouldn't kill me." He took a puff from his inhaler and tucked it back into his pocket. "Besides, my dad was in the army, and you're a skinny emo. I'd like to see you try."
"Jeffrey Dahmer," I said, only half listening to Max.
"What?"
"The project I did last year was on Jeffrey Dahmer," I said. "He was a cannibal who kept severed heads in his freezer."
"I remember now," said Max, his eyes darkening. "Your posters gave me nightmares. That was boss."
"Nightmares are nothing," I said. "Those posters gave me a therapist."
I'd been fascinated—I tried not to use the word "obsessed"— with serial killers for a long time, but it wasn't until my Jeffrey Dahmer report in the last week of middle school that Mom and my teachers got worried enough to put me into therapy. My therapist's name was Dr. Ben Neblin, and over the summer I'd had an appointment with him every Wednesday morning. We talked about a lot of things—like my father being gone, and what a dead body looked like, and how pretty fire was—but mostly we talked about serial killers. He told me that he didn't like the subject, and that it made him uncomfortable, but that didn't stop me. My mom paid for the sessions, and I didn't really have anyone else to talk to, so Neblin got to hear it all.
After school started for the fall, our appointments were moved to Thursday afternoons, so when my last class ended I loaded up my backpack with its way-too-many books and pedaled the six blocks over to Neblin's office. Halfway there,
I turned at the corner by the old theater and took a detour— the Wash-n-Dry was only two blocks down, and I wanted to ride by the place where Jeb got killed.
The police tape was down now, finally, and the Laundromat was open, but empty. The back wall only had one window, a small, barred, yellow one that I assumed belonged to the restroom. The back lot was almost completely isolated, which the newspaper said was making the police investigation pretty hard—no one had seen or heard the attack, even though they guessed it had happened around ten o'clock at night, when most of the bars were still open. Jeb had probably been coming home from one when he died.
I half expected to find some big chalk outlines on the asphalt—one for the body, with another for the infamous pile of innards nearby. Instead, the whole area had been scoured with a high-pressure hose, and all the blood and gravel were washed away.
I dropped my bike by the wall and walked around slowly to see what, if anything, I could see. The asphalt was shaded and cool. Part of the wall had been scrubbed as well, almost to the roof, and it wasn't hard to figure out where the body had been. I knelt down and peered closely at the ground, spotting here and there a purple smudge in the texture of the asphalt where dried blood had clung and resisted the water.
After a minute, I found a darker stain on the ground nearby—a hand-sized splotch of something blacker and thicker than blood. I picked at it with my fingernail and bits of it came up like greasy ash, as if someone had cleaned out a charcoal barbecue. I wiped my finger off on my pants and stood up.