Page 7 of No Mercy In Red

‘Hey handsome. What you up to?’

Stacey.

It was nearly midnight, which meant one thing – she was looking for a late-night hookup. Stacey was gorgeous, but she had the personality of a brick. She’d tried to get me to commit for months, but when she finally realised that wasn’t happening, she settled for being a convenient distraction, and right now, I needed a distraction. I pushed the files away into my drawers and stripped down to my boxers, stepping in front of the full-length mirror. Angling my phone just right, I snapped a picture – abs flexed, the outline of my cock teasing through the fabric I texted back a quick reply:

‘Come on over.’

I hit send, smirking as I climbed onto my bed. I deserved to let off some steam, and railing a hot blonde seemed like a good enough way to do it.

Chapter 6

Max

Two weeks after Craig’s murder.

The first time I realised the world wasn’t fair, I was twelve. It wasn’t some dramatic, earth-shattering moment. It was a quiet, suffocating realisation – like slowly drowning while everyone around you kept breathing just fine. Twelve years old, that’s when my mother left, she had packed up in the middle of the night and never looked back. My father had never spoken of her again after that night, but I remembered. I remembered the sound of her heels, the way they would click against the floor, the scent of that perfume, that even now made my stomach churn. I remember the way she would look at me, the way it was like she couldn’t help the way her lip would curl in disgust whenever she saw me. I was nothing but an inconvenience to her. But my dad? He was everything to me, and maybe that’s why she hated me so much, because we were inseparable. He had raised me alone after she left, and despite the pain of losing her, he never once made me feel unloved. He was so strong, quiet, but the fiercest man I’d ever known when it came to protecting what was his. I knew he had his secrets – things he never spoke about, the things I wasn’t supposed to understand. But I saw the bruises marring his knuckles some nights, the way he would come home late, quieter than usual with a vacant look behind his eyes.

I never asked, because deep down I already knew. Justice, to him, wasn’t always found in a courtroom and perhaps that’s where I hadlearned it, and maybe that’s why I never hesitated when the time came to take matters into my own hands. But it wasn’t always this way. Not untilhim.The First man who ever laid his hands on me, the first man who broke me, twisted me into something else. He thought he could destroy me, turn me into his perfect little simpering masterpiece, and at first, he succeeded. But in the end, all he had done was place me onto the path my father followed, and turning out to be like my father was nowhere near the worst thing I could turn into. I could have been like my mother instead, a worthless woman who cared about nothing more than herself. At least following in my father’s footsteps I was doing something with my life, helping other people, even if nobody but me and Tony knew about it.

I thrashed, drenched in sweat, panting, my voice hoarse from screaming. Quickly sitting up, I looked around at my surroundings. Dresser, closet, tv, bed - my bed, I was safe. I sank back into my pillows, scraping back the hair that had managed to escape from my bun, exhaling a long breath. Staring up at the ceiling, calming my breathing down, I tried to recall what the nightmare was about. I’d had a nightmare every night this week, they were getting more frequent, and I knew why. It was days away from the anniversary of my ex-boyfriend, Shane’s, death, the day everything went to shit. Shane was my first, and last boyfriend. We dated for a few months in college, but eventually went our separate ways, then by chance, we bumped into each other on the night of my 23rd birthday. I had gone out with a few girlfriends and ran into him at our local bar, Mitzies. We had spent the night catching up and ended it back at my apartment, fucking for hours before collapsing into exhaustion. I had missed him; he was the only guy I had ever really been interested in. After that night, he pretty much never left my apartment, he stopped by his old place after a week to pick up his things, and moved himself in. That should have been my first red flag. But of course, a hot guy with a big dick makes red flags turn a rosy shade of pink. Oh, how fucking blind I was to his bullshit. He wasn’t so bad at first - a little controlling,but I saw it as him just showing me that he cared. He would constantly check my phone, and would block any male that would come up, either on social media or in my contacts. He said he was just really worried because his last girlfriend cheated on him, and because I was a people-pleasing dumb ass back then, and wanted to be the perfect girlfriend, I just let him control who I was allowed in my life. But it didn’t stop there. Over the course of five years, the control turned into possessiveness and the possessiveness turned into anger. The anger turned into bruises, cuts and a lot of blood, even breaking my wrist one time, desperate to get to my phone because he was convinced that I was cheating on him. It took me too long to admit to myself that I was in danger and longer to work up the courage to tell my dad. But when I finally did, he didn’t hesitate, because was the one person I knew would never let me down, and he didn’t.

He tried to kill him for me.

He waited for Shane outside his usual bar, standing by his car with a look that I had only seen in the darkest of his moments. But Shane saw him coming. The two got into a fight, brutal and unrelenting, but Shane managed to get away. He punched my dad and knocked him to the ground, but instead of carrying on the fight, he ran, jumping onto his motorbike and sped off into the night. I only by chance saw what happened as I’d been on my way to meet Shane myself, still not having the courage to leave him, despite admitting to myself and my dad that he was an abuser. I ran over to my dad, the look of shock on his face at seeing me there to meet Shane not having chance to fully settle before something else took over. Cold, hard rage. I had begged him to leave it, said he wasn’t worth it, promising that I would leave him and never look back, but I knew I was wasting my time, because Shane had hurt his little girl. I saw then truly who my father was, before even finding out what he did in that basement, that he was a cold and ruthless man behind his mask of warmth. Something in my heart swelled at that, my dad, the antihero, willing to hurt the man who had put bruises all over my body.He pushed to his feet, with a swift kiss to my forehead before pushing me to the side and jumping into his own car. My dad had followed Shane with unrelenting determination, desperate to catch and kill the man who had broken his daughter in too many ways to count.

What happened that night haunted me every single day. In the heat of the chase, Shane ran a red light at an intersection, just as an eighteen-wheeler came barreling through. The impact threw him from his bike and killed him instantly. My dad had lost control of his car, trying to swerve out of the way. Bystanders had said his car span out and crashed into the divider at full speed, head on. He survived the initial crash, and was placed in a coma for a week, but there was no brain activity. I had to be the one to make the decision to turn off his life support, I had to be the one to make the decision to end my father’s life, all because of that fucking piece of shit. All because I was too pathetic to leave after the first time he had hurt me. If I had left, my father would still be here. The sound of the machine shutting off replayed in my ears for a long time after that night, and it still now haunted me in my sleep. The news articles said it was a freak accident caused by a drunken idiot on a motorbike, and I was so glad that Shane was getting the blame. But I knew the truth, I knew that my had father died trying to make the world right for me, that he died trying to take justice into his own hands, just like he always had. And maybe, just maybe, that was the moment I realised I would do the same.

Because if the world wouldn’t give us justice, then I would carve it out myself.

Chapter 7

Connor

The deeper I dug, the more obsessed I became. The files, the men – it wasn’t random, it couldn’t be, and I had to know why.

For two weeks, I had barely slept. My days were spent pretending to be a functioning human being at work, whilst my nights bled into obsession. My apartment became a crime scene of its own – papers scattered across my desk, sticky notes plastered along my walls with victims detailed on each one, all joined to a large question mark with a tangled mess of red string which tried to connect dots that kept fucking refusing to align. Joe often came over giving me any new information they had found, but it was barely anything at all. It wasn’t making sense, none of it was, because nothing about this screamedserial killer.Serial killers were meant to be messy, impulsive, driven by something unhinged in their heads. But this felt more controlled and precise. I stared at the files for hours, my eyes burning as I flipped through the case reports, searching for something I’d missed. Each victim was different – different backgrounds, different ages, different social circles. The only think they had in common was that they were all men. Some of them were rich and respected men. Some were men with influence and promise of bright futures. I understood that serial killers often stuck to their own little demographic, like Dahmer targeting the LGBTQ community, but other than being men and most of them having money, that’s where their connections ended. They rangedfrom sport players in their twenties, to businessmen in their forties. Everything I found on these men just showed them to be typical guys, I was missing something. I had to be. I wanted to believe Joe, that this was just some psychopath with a lust for blood, but my gut told me otherwise, and my gut hadn’t been wrong before, and that’s why I needed those confession tapes. Joe had been adamant about me staying away from them, which only made me want them more. I had asked again and again over the course of those two weeks because there had to be something on those videos that the department didn’t want anyone seeing. Something important enough that despite their desperation, they couldn’t bring themselves to release them. I couldn’t hold off any longer, two weeks with nothing more to show than a mess in my apartment and a lingering migraine, I’d had enough.

Hacking into the police departments database wasn’t easy, but it wasn’t impossible either. Their security system was just your standard system to manoeuvre, something any half decent hacker with a braincell could get into. Within ten minutes, I was in. My hands were shaking as I sat staring at the open database before me, it was reckless of me to be doing this, to betray my best friend, to hack into federal files, but I’d stopped caring about crossing lines the second this case started getting under my skin. My obsession had begun to take over me and when I set my mind to something, I had to do it, I had to complete the task, and I had set my mind on solving this fucking case. I scrolled through endless files, quite surprised at how well organised it all was. Each crime labelled by category, petty theft, break ins, you name it, it had its own special file. But nothing that said ‘confession tapes’. Clearly, they wanted those buried a little deeper. I spent a good half an hour scrolling through endless folders, feeling myself getting more irritated with each dead end. They had to be on here, but where? I stood from my computer exasperated at my lack of findings, pacing up and down the room with irritation scraping at my insides. If I wanted to keep forbidden tapes on a database, where would I store them.

Of fucking course. In plain sight. I rushed to sit back down at my computer, quickly scanning the files before clicking on the one I chose to ignore, thinking it wouldn’t be important:‘signed off’.I took a deep inhale before double clicking the file, instantly being met with a password protection alert popping up, asking me for a code. Bingo. I hooked up the software already downloaded on my computer that could discover any password or code within minutes and sat back, watching as it did its work. One of my other friends from college, who was an absolute genius when it came to his hacking abilities, created this software in our final year. Its not surprise he now works for the FBI, although I’m convinced he actually works for the pentagon and he just isn’t telling me. I was hoping he forgot he gave me access to his programme, or he’s another person I could be getting in deep shit here.

Access permitted.

I let out a shaky exhale, the file labelled ‘confessions’ sat in front of me, all by itself in one single encrypted folder. Taking my time, ensuring my tampering didn’t trigger anything in their system, my pulse spiked as I clicked on the oldest dated clip, Warren Davis. The video opened to a dimly lit basement, a single bulb casting harsh light over the scene. The man I assumed was Warren sat in a chair, his wrists bound, his face swollen and bloody as his chest heaved. His sweat was dripping down his temples as he looked past the camera, eyes glassy with fear.

“I—I did it,” he gasped, voice hoarse. “I raped her, I hurt her. I—I deserve this. I’m sorry.”

A chill crawled up my spine, my stomach churning hearing the words that spilled from his mouth. I clicked the next one, then the next, each tape was the same, each man confessing to something vile – rape, assault, abuse, whilst being tied down to that same chair in that same basement. These were crimes that should have put these men behind bars, but from the look of these videos, they clearly never did. So, I was right, they weren’t random murders pulled off by a crazed, blood thirsty serial killer,they were executions. But how had I not found something about those men before, something in the news, fuck, even rumours, but there was absolutely nothing. There were no public allegations, no police records, no arrests, absolutely no public knowledge of this whatsoever, and it didn’t make any fucking sense. I went back into the police stations main database, and ran a deeper search, looking through sealed records and classified case files, and there it was. The entire reason why nobody had ever heard about these crimes, the entire reason these men had been fucking untouchable. Some corrupt bastard working for the police had buried all evidence. Every single one of these vile men had been accused before, and the reports had been filed, some even having their victims evidence collected, and then? Disappeared, into the deepest parts of the system, with their easily available records wiped clean except for the occasional petty crime like a fight or altercation. That way, anybody who knew that these men had been involved with the police, saw their files, and would just assume that it was due to small, unimportant crimes listed beneath their names. But the darkest parts of their files would never been seen in the light of day, stored somewhere nobody would find them. Each of their victims silenced before they could even get close to the justice they so rightly deserved.

There was another player in this game though, clearly a connection the police hadn’t yet made, because every missing persons original cases traced back to the same law firm. The law firm in our town that claimed to specialise in representing victims of sexual assault. Every single asshole and piece of shit that existed in this town had at some point had their names passed through that office. Unfortunately, someone had been working against these women, someone very high up the ladder was getting paid off by the right people, getting cases dismissed before they saw the light of day. It wasn’t just the justice system that failed them – it was a well-oiled machine, designed to protect the guilty, constructed by rich, powerful men. Only now, it seemed someone had decided to start dismantling that very machine, one missing person at a time. So, thiswasn’t just a mindless killer, if that’s what they were, after all, bodies were never found, only reported as missing with gruesome tapes attached. But I guess it didn’t take a genius to figure out what happened once those tapes stopped rolling. This was somebody who was going out of their way to deliver justice to the scum of the world that the system failed to. I leaned back in my chair, running my hands through my hair as I stared at the screen, my heart pounding in my chest.

Fuck.

My hands trembled slightly as I closed the files down, rubbing at my face. This changed everything, because these men weren’t victims, they weremonsters, and someone had made it their very own personal mission to take them out one by one. I should have been horrified at that realisation, disgusted even. Instead, a sick sort of admiration curled in my gut, because whoever was behind this wasn’t just killing for the sake of it, they had a moral code and a mission. And that alone made them even more dangerous. Who was I to try and stop someone who was doing something for the greater good, illegal or otherwise. This person wasn’t evil, they were just… morally grey so to speak. A modern-day Robin Hood, but instead of stealing money from the rich to give to the poor, they were murdering abusers to give their victims a sense of peace. This was the part where I knew I should walk away from this, turn a blind eye and pretend I knew nothing, maybe even tell Joe that I felt wrong for getting involved with this. But I wasn’t going to, I couldn’t. I needed to find out who was doing this, who was the mastermind behind taking away the scum from the streets.

I went into the kitchen to make myself another coffee, setting my mind on the next step that I needed to take. I needed to see just how deeply the law firm was connected in all of this. I sat back down, taking a large drink before beginning to dig around.Justice4You, what an ironic name considering the current events happening right under their noses. Their database was just as easy, if not easier, to access than the police’s.Christ, after I figured out who was doing this, maybe I’d teach these places how to set up decent protection on their systems, who knows what kinds of crazy assholes could be lurking about. I looked through the files of cases first, typing in each missing mans name to ensure I was right, making sure that every single one of them had come through this office, and they had. Only this time, their files weren’t clean, only marked asdismissed. Each one of their files detailed the depraved acts they had carried out, some files being pages long, with multiple victims. I felt sick, my palms starting to slick with sweat as I read the inhumane things these men had done. I had to pause and calm myself down when I got to the pages that had their victims’ testimonies. Some of these men had so much evidence piled against them and yet they somehow still managed to walk free, unscathed by the system whilst their victims had to deal with lasting trauma. I couldn’t begin to imagine how those women felt hearing that their cases had been dismissed, how despite reliving their horrific stories in hope for justice, they were shut down and told there was nothing that could be done. I was furious, outraged, and absolutely devastated for these women. The system was fucked. I closed down the files, taking a deep breath. I couldn’t read anymore, I couldn’t look at one more sentence that described the depravity of these men, so I moved on to the employee files. It was a small firm with only thirty or so people working there, a handful of lawyers, HR, assistants. Nobody that really stood out and screamed ‘serial killer’. But I suppose if serial killers looked a certain way it would make life a whole lot easier.

But those employee files were exactly how I foundher.

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