The Painted Killer

By Zach Neal

A sex-crazed psychedelic slasher targets women and girls. He's got a knife. It's 1969 in middle America and nothing is the same anymore. Detective Al Gaetano and his team must find the killer before he strikes again. Their only clues are a few flakes of paint from his body and a modus operandi. A dark and funny novella.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Zach Neal
• Release date: Feb 22, 2013
• ISBN: 9780991899906

Zach Neal

Zach Neal has been writing ever since he can remember. A forestry management professional, he prefers the outdoors to the office. He lives in the Halton Hills overlooking the Greater Toronto Area. He studied at the University of Toronto. Zach’s a single father of two healthy and energetic children. Zach’s boys, Aaron and Jason, mean everything to him.

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The Painted Killer

Zachary Neal

This Smashwords edition copyright 2014 Zachary Neal and Long Cool One Books

Design: J. Thornton

ISBN 978-0-9918999-0-6

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

The following is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to any person living or deceased, or to any places or events, is purely coincidental. Names, places, settings, characters and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination. The author’s moral right to the proceeds of the work has been asserted.

Table of Contents

Scene One

Scene Two

Scene Three

About Zach Neal

The Painted Killer

Zachary Neal

Scene One

What do you think, Ed?

He straightened up from examining the window ledge with a sigh.

I think you might be right.

The signs were there. There were flecks of paint in a number of different hues, a word I had only really come to understand during the course of this investigation.

But it sure looked like the same M.O.

A young and attractive young woman, alone in the home, sleeping, and a ladder carried from behind the shed, providing access to the second floor window. The screen, silently cut, with a box-cutter was our guess. Her parents came home from a baby shower after two a.m. The next morning, her dad caught a glimpse of the ladder as he was leaving for work.

The window was propped up with stick, which would prevent it from suddenly dropping and making a lot of noise. As long as he didn’t catch it with a hip, he’d be all right. He’d be pinned under it, or the girl would be startled awake and start screaming. The rest was easy, I suppose, once he was in the room.

Sooner or later the killer would graduate to roaming further afield, for anyone could see there wasn’t much future for a true predator in a small town like Jefferson City. Sooner or later someone would see something, report something. Sooner or later the guy would get pulled over in a traffic stop.

There was something that spoke of the thrill-seeker in the series of killings that had rocked the town since early spring.

The constable held his notes ready.

Ellen Tierney, age twenty-one. She was a college student in town here. Had a part-time job at Kresge’s lunch counter. He lifted a shoulder in the direction of the rear window, for she had a corner room with two windows side by side over the driveway. Ladder’s out back.

What was she studying?

He flipped through pages as birds sang in the yard and children down the street whooped and hollered.

Ah…business administration.

Boyd was a good cop and he was first on scene. His partner was with the parents and little brother.

Kresge’s was a local department store on Fourth Street, in the historic downtown area. The cheeseburgers weren’t bad, but I didn’t recall ever seeing her there.

Ellen, staring up through death-dimmed brown eyes, was a honey blonde, with a body weight of about a hundred fifteen pounds by the look of her. She was about five-seven or five-eight. She was apparently sleeping in panties. She wore nothing else, but the night was warmer than usual, and the upper floor seemed awful hot to me. They say blood smells. I don’t know about that, but sweat and fear do. The air was drenched in the terror of her last moments.

Her throat was cut from ear to ear. We figured he held the knife at their throat to keep them quiet while he raped them, and then cut their throat as soon as he was done. Then he made his exit.

The ladder was the sort of touch that had probably led to the second one. He might have just seen one lying there. After that, the Painted Killer looked out for them, and it was probably a factor in the choice of victim. On the third killing, he entered an unlocked garage through a side door. The ladder was hanging on the wall on pegs. Whether he already knew it was there, possibly having seen the homeowner using it, we didn’t know. He might have deliberately gone looking. He never carried them far, a couple of doors down through backyards at most. We were pretty sure he was doing surveillance and reconnaissance before making the attempt, although it was by no means a positive thing. Counter-surveillance of selected neighbourhoods revealed nothing because he never struck while we were watching. It’s very likely that he made our posts and laid low for a time.

He tailed the young women from somewhere, maybe just by walking around in parks, and he scoped them out in advance. There were quite a few nice parks in town, and after a long winter, they were bursting with people walking