by Doug Hewitt

Evening news shows called him the “Motown Madman” because all of the deaths were in Detroit. Tabloid newspapers called him “The Decapitator.”

The decapitated heads were never found beside the victims. They were sent by mail to law enforcement agencies.

Although calling the killer by different names, news shows and tabloids agreed that the mailings were acts of taunting.

I’d quit the force a few days before the first beheading. I was tired after twenty years of police work, the bad guys outnumbering the good guys, the mind-numbing paperwork, the pay never keeping up with the cost of living.

I started an investigative service, the kind that catches spouses cheating. The work was uninspiring, but the pay made up for it.

Detroit’s known as the Motor City, a city that measures your stature by how much horsepower you have under your hood. I had plenty of horsepower, but I wasn’t into revving my engine in that showy teenage way. Still, when Peter Black’s daughter started coming on to me at Lou Scallarie’s retirement banquet, my rpm’s went through the roof.

I’d done a job for Black a few months earlier. His second marriage was on the rocks. He was an ex-cop, and I’d cut him a special rate. When I showed him the pictures -- his naked wife and her lover at the local no-tell motel -- he actually seemed relieved. The pictures saved him a bundle of money in the divorce. Julie Black was nineteen at the time. She had full lips that were always pouting, short blonde hair tucked behind her ears, and a body curved in all the right places. She had brushed past me and asked me if my case load was hard. I didn’t answer because I knew she was trouble.

I remembered that unanswered question as she pulled me behind a row of coats in the banquet’s self-serve coatroom and told me she admired my manhood. For a moment, I couldn’t think of anything to say. Of course, I couldn’t help but admire the way her breasts filled out her red sweater.

“You’re still too young, Julie,” I finally said, looking up into her eyes.

“I’m twenty now,” she said, batting her eyelids. “And you can’t be much older than thirty.”

“Forty’s closer to the truth.”

She reached into her purse and pulled out a short metal pipe. She took out a vial, tapped white powder into it, and lit it with her Bic.

“That’s illegal,” I told her.

She blew smoke at my face. “You had to go to police school to learn that?”

“Just don’t get caught selling it.”

“You don’t even know what it is.”

“Crack.”

“Try PCP, buddy boy.”

“Christ.” I should’ve left. I’d known she was trouble, and here she was proving my point. Still, something intrigued me about the daughter of an ex-cop smoking PCP at a policeman’s retirement banquet.

“I’m sorry for you,” I said.

“About what?”

“About whatever makes you do this. I imagine you had a shitty childhood.”

“Oh, you mean like my dad neglecting me?”

“Something like that.”

She blew more smoke in my face. She was starting to grin, but her eyes looked angry. “You don’t know squat. I had a fucking wonderful childhood. My brother was a few years older, and he turned me on to drugs. That made everything okay.”

“It’s an escape,” I said. “Mental masturbation.”

Her grin softened into a seductive smile. She reached down between my legs and held my manhood.

I hate to tell a woman where to keep her hands, so I made no move to dissuade her. “So you had a close relationship with your brother?”

“Fuck no. He’s whacked out. A regular fucking lunatic. But, he can get mellow on the right drugs. Then he’s okay.”

“You really shouldn’t be identifying your dealer to me.”

Her grip tightened uncomfortably. “You fuck with me and I’ll scream rape so loud your ears will burn.”

“I don’t want to fuck with you.”

She stroked the front of my pants. “But you don’t want to fuck me, either.”

“I’d like to fuck you very much. But ...”

Julie’s father picked that moment to find his coat. He pushed the coats aside and stared at us.

Julie quickly put the pipe in her purse.

“Oh,” Black said. “I didn’t mean to interrupt. Julie? Is that you? What’s going on here?”

I cleared my throat. “I was just asking few questions, Mr. Black, regarding your first wife’s death.”

“My daughter knows nothing about Emily’s death.”

He’d been investigated, of course, but he came out clean. He wasn’t even in the country when she was killed. Besides, at the time, he was still on the force, and nobody believed he was capable of murder.

“I read the newspapers, Dad. I know how Mom died. She was butchered.”