Karin Schaeffer Story 01 - The Domino Killer

When I left for work that morning the house smelled like toast. The last sounds I heard were the ding of the toaster and Jackson slamming shut a cupboard, humming. My husband nearly always hummed when he puttered around the kitchen. Cece darted past me at the front door and headed up the stairs in her footed pajamas and the broken plastic tiara she wore every chance she got. She didn’t notice me when I paused to blow her a kiss, but it was okay; I’d catch her when I got home.
    Now, more than eight hours later, something felt off about our green clapboard house. It seemed unusually still, wrapped in a heavy quiet. Cece’s tricycle sat on the overgrown lawn exactly where it had been earlier. The bag of trash Jackson had set out, bound for the bin at the end of the driveway, still sat on the porch by the front door, buzzing with flies. His guitar was still leaning against one of the chairs we’d relaxed in last night after Cece went to bed. Jackson was working on the first new song since he’d started law school, something pretty that reminded me of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young’s “Our House.” I’d closed my eyes and listened as he serenaded me about the good, simple life we’d built together.
    I walked into the house and the aroma of toast was gone, replaced by a smell that was sharply metallic. A draught from the kitchen greeted me in the front hall, which meant the back door had been left open, which meant that Jackson was on the back porch playing with Cece until I got home from work when one of us, usually he, would make dinner. I was immeasurably relieved to be home after the crappy day I’d had reassembling a case the Maplewood PD had believed was closed. Martin Price – JPP for Just Plain Psycho to the detectives like me who had hunted him for a year, known as the Domino Killer to the media – --had knifed his way off a police bus. He’d been en route to the courthouse to be formally charged with five counts of murder in the first degree. Now we had to find that lunatic again. Put him away again. Next time, he’d travel in shackles and stay in solitary, whatever it took to keep him in.
    I kicked off my shoes, tossed my purse and keys on the table and headed into the kitchen, eager to find my family and rejoin the other, better part of my life. The smell became sharper, and strangely familiar, as I approached the kitchen. A quick breeze made me shiver. The back door slammed shut, but instead of the busy clamor of Jackson and Cece having come inside the loud clap was absorbed by an eerie hush.
    “Jackson?”
    It was so quiet. Where was Cece? She couldn’t have been with him without singing or chattering or asking her constant questions.
    “How is the air strong enough to shut the door?”
    “What is wind?”
    “Do the ants in the grass know my feet belong to me?”
    “Were you and Mommy born the same day as me?”
    “When will Mommy be home?”
    I pushed the swinging door, issuing our standard warning to avoid collisions: “Coming through!” The stench inside the kitchen seemed to explode. My bare feet landed in a gluey wet puddle of something on the linoleum, and finally I recognized the smell.
    Streams of half-dried blood flowed across the slanted floor of our old house, pooling in a crimson seam at the base of the wall. My gaze followed the blood between my feet and the wall, back and forth, twice, before I gathered the courage to look up.
    Two pieces of toast lay stiff on a plate. Butter had collapsed around a knife halfway into the stick. A dead fly floated in one of the glasses of orange juice I remembered Jackson pouring hours ago. He was still in his pajamas.
    He had twisted away from the counter and fallen on his side. The handle of one of our long cooking knives protruded from his back, the source of the river of blood that reached across the room and in which I stood. Nauseated. Dizzy. Frozen to my core. Screaming. Screaming. But without making any sound because, I kept thinking, because I don’t want to frighten Cece .
    There was no sign of her having entered the kitchen, but she must have heard something; must have heard the sound of her father falling. She was a sweet, caring child and would have come running. Had she pushed open the swinging door and seen....
    I turned and ran a trail of bloody footprints through the dining room, through the front hall, up the pale gray carpet that bumped up the stairs where I’d last seen her, hurrying after some urgent purpose in