MY NEIGHBOR IS A SERIAL KILLER

Chapter 1

Mike was a nice, normal person.
Or at least, I thought he was.
It wasn’t like the whole picture had been laid out in front of me. Any single piece could have been overlooked: a late-night arrival, a strange sound, a dark shape dragged through the yard. Taken alone, each one could be explained away. But when you put them together, when you laid them out on the table like a jigsaw puzzle, the image became clear.
Unequivocal. There was no dispute.
Mike was a serial killer.
I stood in the gloom of my dining room and peered through the dusty blinds. I know what you’re thinking. Some kind of Peeping Tom, right? I’m not. Although there is a thin line between curiosity and paranoia.
Over the half-height chain-link fence covered with weeds and vines, Mike’s headlights cut through the early morning fog. He wasn’t always there, but when he was, he kept odd hours. Always up to something, and that something wasn’t good.
The wagon’s engine idled as the tires rolled slowly over the rain-slicked road and eased to a stop in front of his driveway. Obviously, he didn’t want to wake the neighborhood.
Well, I had some news for Mike.
I tapped my watch. 2:14 a.m. I pulled the pen from my mouth and jotted the time on the notepad in my hand. Next to it, I wrote: returned home. Then I set the notepad and pen on the dining table and returned to my investigation.
Mike backed into his driveway. The garage door rose with an old, tired creak. When it reached its highest point, he eased the wagon inside and killed the lights. A moment later, the engine stopped, and the garage door began its slow descent.
Then the quiet returned.
Anyone else would have gone back to bed. But I’m not so easily placated. In fact, if I had found a pack of microwave popcorn in the pantry, I would have thrown it in the microwave. Because I knew what was coming next.
A thud. Barely audible, given the garage walls, the space between our houses, the fence, and the window I was peering through. But it was there. I counted in my head, following where I thought he would be moving through his house. Then came the squeal of his back door as he pushed through it, dragging something heavy behind him.
It was hard to see, like it always was, but it looked like a bag.
From my perspective, it was about the size of a body.
Then he stopped. Like a dog catching some far-off whistle. And I swear to God, he looked right at me.
For one second, I froze before ducking below the window.
I held my breath. My ears rang as I listened. I was waiting for the classic sound. It took a moment, but there it was. Metal against dirt. I slowly and silently released my breath, then peeked through the corner of the blinds, barely moving them, just in case he had one eye on my house and sensed a shift in the furnishings.
They know about stuff like that, serial killers. They know things. They sense things. They don’t think like you or me. Something is a little screwed up upstairs. A few nuts not quite tightened.
Under the glow of the moon, Mike drove the end of his shovel into the soil, scooped some out, and made a neat pile beside the hole. When there was enough space, he jammed the shovel into his small mountain of dirt, dragged the bag over, and dumped it in. Then he grabbed the shovel again and stood over the body.
This was the part I hated. The part I could never bear to watch.
But this time was going to be different. This time, I intended to stay until the end. The very end.
Mike lifted the shovel.
Just as he drove it down, I fell backward onto the carpet.
I pressed both hands over my heart and felt the rhythmic thump beneath my palms. Faster than usual. Louder than usual. Between the sound of the shovel slicing through bag, bone, and muscle, between the wet squeal of releasing blood, my thoughts drifted to the heart medication in the cabinet above my bathroom sink.
And in that moment, I couldn’t remember whether I had taken it that day or not.
The ceiling swirled above me. For a moment, I thought I had either fallen asleep or woken up. It wasn’t any noise that stirred me. It was the absence of one.
I pulled myself to the window and, on my knees, peered out.
Nothing.
No Mike. No body. Everything buried. Evidence covered beneath a layer of soil, no doubt where the body could decompose and feed a new row of azaleas.
With no obvious lights on in the house, I reached for the notepad and pen. By the moonlight filtering through the blinds, I made another note: buried a body.
Previous pages held a myriad of disconnected notes, complete with dates and times.
Arrived home.
Strange noises.
Digging in the garden.
A muffled scream.
That last one was in quotation marks. I mean, it sounded like one. I suppose he occasionally took work home with him. I looked at the boxes on the table. Me too, Mike. Me too.
Given the quietness, I checked my watch again, decided to end the evening’s voyeurism, then stepped sideways into the kitchen, opened the third drawer, placed the notepad and pen inside, and closed it.
As I shuffled down the hallway, I wondered if I would be able to sleep at all. Usually, after witnessing the burial of a victim, I had the most gruesome nightmares. I would wake with the sweet relief that it had all been a dream and still feel irrecoverably tired. Or I would toss and turn, one eye on the window, the other on the bedroom door, putting together a plan for what I would do if Mike decided I was next.
But there was no reason for him to want to kill me. There was no way he could know about my covert activities. I was careful.
Then I looked up and froze.
At the end of the corridor, beyond the glass back door, at the rear of my property, Mike stood in the shadows.
Shovel in hand.
I froze. Literally. I could not move. My eyes fixed on him. He knew. He knew everything. He knew I was watching. He knew I was taking notes of his comings and goings and indiscretions. He knew I was waiting for the right time to tell the police. All of it.
And now he was here to silence me.
His eyes locked on mine. My heart stumbled into an ugly rhythm and my vision began to blur.
Then Mike was gone. The garden empty.
I fell back against the wall, one hand clutched to my chest. I waited there for a moment, waiting to see if Mike, or a vision of him, would return. It didn’t. I quickly did the rounds, ensuring the windows and doors were locked. But would any of that stop someone like Mike?
Time would tell. By then it would be too late.
I finally shuffled into the bathroom. I didn’t bother turning on the light. I opened the cabinet and retrieved my yellow pill bottle. Then I closed the cabinet door.
Mike stood behind me in the shadows.
I gasped and spun, dropping the bottle. It clipped the edge of the sink, smashed onto the floor, and knocked the lid loose. Pills scattered everywhere.
But when I gazed into the gloom, there was no Mike.
Once more, there was nothing in the shadows.
I crept into the hallway, peered around corners, checked every dark pocket of the house, then made a beeline for the kitchen. I grabbed the largest knife I owned from the wooden block and moved through the rooms with my phone in one hand and the knife extended in the other.
911 glowed on the screen.
My finger hovered over the call button.
But the house was empty. The doors and windows were locked, just as they had been when I checked them hours earlier. I kept the knife with me as I cleaned the pills off the bathroom floor, rammed two into my mouth, and swallowed them. Then I put the rest back in the bottle and returned it to the cabinet.
In my bedroom, I eased under the covers and held the knife against my chest.
The rain started up again. A low rumble worked through the sky, followed by a flash that lit the room a few seconds later.
Then a thought came to me.
I steadied the knife, spun on the bed, and turned on my phone’s flashlight. I wriggled to the edge and took deep breaths. I told myself I was only going to jab the knife at whatever might be under there. That was all. One quick jab. Then I would know.
I counted to three, leaned over, shone the light into the black space beneath the bed, and jammed the knife forward with a yell.
The blade struck nothing.
I stopped.
There was nothing there.
I eased back onto the bed, turned off the flashlight, and lay on my back with the knife clenched to my chest.
I didn’t know what would get me first. My damn heart condition or thinking I was seeing Mike when he wasn’t there.
Or maybe just Mike.