Karin Schaeffer Story 01 - The Domino Killer

needed those disability checks to pay my rent, since the sale of my house hadn’t netted any profit.
    “Right,” I said. “Sorry, I’m just a little tired. Not thinking straight today.”
    “I understand.”
    I’d heard that too many times by now: I understand . So he knew. Everyone knew. All the world had been informed of Karin Schaeffer’s tragedy, and then moved on to the next big bad story...except for me, of course, having been abandoned to it.
    “You know you have an enemy.” It was smart of him not to have phrased it as a question. Of course I knew I had an enemy.
    “Martin Price is behind bars,” I told him.
    The media had called him the Domino Killer. In the detectives unit we’d called him JPP for Just Plain Psycho. The judge called him the worst threat to innocent people she’d ever encountered and put him away forever, specifically for the murders of Jackson and Cece Schaeffer, my husband and three-year-old daughter. There had been others before that but it was my family’s murders that had put JPP away once and for all.
    “He escaped last night. Got a call from your old unit in Jersey—asked me to find you. Seems no one answered when they called.”
    “Well,” I said, “thanks for telling me. I guess.” I wanted to get inside. Wanted the cool of my own private space. Wanted that sweet ice tea. But Detective Staples wasn’t finished.
    “The thing is, he left a note for you.”
    “A note?” Please, no. Not another note from Martin Price.
    “Well, kind of a note.”
    I could already see it. I already knew.
    “They found three dominoes laid out on his mattress: three, five, and one.”
    My address: 351 Pacific Street. Brooklyn, New York. A far cry and a different life from the house in New Jersey I’d shared with Jackson and Cece. Ours was such a sweet house, green clapboards and a front porch where we used to sit and watch Cece play on the lawn. I could still see her running towards me across the dandelion-speckled grass, bare-legged in a plaid sundress, brown curls bouncing around her cherubic face, calling, “Mommy, chase me!”
    “He also left you another message,” Billy said in a lower, softer voice that told me he wished he didn’t have to deliver this one.
    I closed my eyes. Saw the last message he’d left me almost a year ago, written in lipstick on my bathroom mirror: You Are Next . Only it wasn’t lipstick. It was my daughter’s blood.
    “It said, ‘See you soon.’”
    “Whose blood this time?”
    “His own. Must have cut himself. Probably had to steal some bandages so every local pharmacy is getting its security footage looked at right now.”
    I nodded. It would be the logical first step. But knowing JPP, he’d have disinfected and bandaged his wound and moved on by now. He was scary good at this. JPP’s thing was to engineer the toppling of a whole group, to watch an entire family fall one by one by one.
    He had already murdered five members of an extended family, the Aldermans of Maplewood, New Jersey—my old beat. Three murders into it the dominoes JPP left behind started making sense. Their face numbers offered a clue. The problem was deciphering it before he came back for the kill. My department and the FBI had already been working the case for a year before I was put on it.
    I was a newly minted detective when I found him pretty much by accident. I never would have thought to look in one of those zillion gallon chemical tanks off the highway. Never realized any of them sat empty sometimes. We’d had a tip and were canvassing the area and I heard an echo that sounded like it was coming from inside the tank. Climbed the side ladder and there he was, way at the bottom, napping on his side with his fists clenched just like Cece used to do when she was a baby. How he could sleep in that fog of petroleum fumes, I never knew. But there he was, super-human, inhuman, or both.
    Because I had found him, his imagination focused on me, and my family became his next target—though I didn’t know it at the time. To anyone else it would have seemed random, but to JPP it made some kind of twisted perfect sense.
    Two months after his arrest, he escaped off the prison bus during a transfer to the courthouse to hear the charges read against him, five separate charges of murder in the first degree. He killed two guards with a homemade shiv on his way off the bus. Hid. Traveled, somehow. Found my family and the rest was history.
    Now whenever I pictured our lawn I