Snapshot

“Check the corpses,” he told Chaz. “See if they share anything obvious. Age, gender.” He barely noticed whether Chaz went to do it. Instead, he tucked away his gun and called up autopsy reports from the earlier murders.

He kept saying it. Horace the drug dealer’s voice echoed in his memory. This is a Snapshot; we’re all part of a Snapshot. Got to get rid of the Deviations, he said.

Don’t be a Deviation.

The first group had died by asphyxiation. The cops assumed they’d been suffocated in the bags, but that didn’t fit the pattern. They’d have been killed before being placed in the bags, right? The killer would have wanted to soak them first, to obscure how long they’d been in the ocean.

“Man,” Chaz said. “These people look bad, Davis. Even for dead folk. I think I might need to throw up.”

“Do it outside the room,” Davis said absently.

There, he thought, pulling up the records of one of the bodies they’d identified. A prostitute. He scanned her medical records. Asthma. It was a connection. One of the others listed the same ailment. The others didn’t list much, but they also didn’t have any notes from next of kin. So maybe the information just hadn’t been discovered.

The second group had died from poisoning. What was the theme? He scanned through the reports and happened across one note by an examiner. All victims were extremely farsighted and wore corrective lenses.

The third group—the bodies they’d found in the basement of the old apartment complex—clinched it for him. The officers there had left to find out why everyone was panicking back at the precinct office, but before abandoning their investigation they’d left a very important note.

These people all seem to have been naturally paralyzed.

“Ugh,” Chaz said, walking back into the room, holding a bucket. “Davis? Damn it, man. Stop standing there in the middle of them. What’s wrong with you?”

Davis looked around at the bodies. “You checked them all?”

“Mostly.”

Davis tucked away his phone, then rolled over a body. Her face was covered in swollen bee stings—a horrible sight. He could see why Chaz had been disturbed.

“He’s killing people he decides are Deviations,” Davis said. “He thinks he’s in a Snapshot.”

“He is in a Snapshot.”

“Yeah, but only his dupe is right,” Davis said. “And it only does what the real him has already done. The killer thinks everything is a Snapshot, and he’s trying to expunge the Deviations—which he sees as people who have some flaw in their biology. The first group had terrible asthma. The second group, bad vision.”

Davis rolled over another corpse. “These people were allergic to bee stings. Look at these wounds—those aren’t regular stings. He rounded up a bunch of people with terrible allergies, then locked them in here with bees. He’s cleansing the city of Deviations.”

“That doesn’t make any sense.”

Davis ignored him, inspecting the next victim, a woman who had died on her back with her eyes swollen shut. “Serial killers like this . . . lots of them are looking for power. Control. They feel they don’t have control in their lives, so they control others. Imagine being paranoid. You get the idea you’re in a Snapshot, that you’re not real. How might you act?”

He looked up as Chaz shrugged. “Everyone’s different,” Chaz said. “You’ve seen it. Some wander off, some cry, some—”

“Some kill,” Davis said.

“Yeah.” Didn’t happen often. Most people didn’t have it in them to kill, even if they discovered something terrible like this. But once in a while, someone they showed a reality badge to immediately reached for a weapon, perhaps thinking—irrationally—if they killed the person with the badge, it would disprove what they’d just seen.

That was probably too simple for this killer. Davis looked back at the dead woman. This killer was already crazy; you had to be, to do something like this. But mix it with a belief that your world was a sham . . .

It was surreal. In here, the killer’s dupe would be right. He was in a Snapshot. That didn’t change the fact that out in the real world, there was someone killing entire groups of people. Real people. Not dupes.

The woman in front of him stirred.

Davis cried out, leaping backward, scrambling for his gun—though of course he wouldn’t need it.

“What?” Chaz demanded.

“That one is still alive,” Davis said, pointing, hand shaking.

The woman rolled her head over and whispered something. “Water?”

Davis knelt down. “Get some water,” he said to Chaz. “Go!”

“Water,” she whispered again.

“I’m getting some,” Davis said. “We’re cops. It’s okay. Don’t worry.”

“He’ll . . . come back. . . .” She couldn’t open her eyes. They were swollen shut. She could barely move her lips.

“When?” Davis asked.

“Every night,” she said. “Every night at seven thirty. He checks on us then. We were going to jump him . . . but . . .” She cursed softly. “It hurts. . . .”

Chaz returned with a cup from the desk outside, filled with water. He knelt down, but didn’t move.

“Give it to her!” Davis said.

Chaz tried dribbling it onto her lips. She didn’t move anything but her head, which she could barely rock. It seemed like some got into her mouth.

“Seven thirty,” Davis said. “He’ll be back at seven thirty?”

The woman whispered something, but even leaning down close, Davis couldn’t make it out. Grimly, he checked the others. They were definitely dead.

The woman had started weeping. A tearless trembling.

Chaz stood up, then looked to Davis, who stared at the woman, horrified.

“I’ll take care of this,” Chaz said, getting out a pair of earplugs. “It’s okay.”

Davis nodded numbly, then forced himself to walk out.

A gunshot sounded behind him; then Chaz came to the doorway, his face ashen. Together they closed the door, put the rope back as they’d found it, and propped the chair in place. Chaz put the water cup back as Davis slumped down on a bench beside some lockers, licking his lips. His mouth had gone dry.