Karin Schaeffer Story 01 - The Domino Killer

couldn’t help seeing six dominoes sitting in plain view on the grass—the first three digits of Jackson’s and Cece’s social security numbers—though in reality the dominoes weren’t found until the grass was cut and my husband and child were already dead. JPP had “warned” us, his way of giving us a loophole of escape; in his mind, he had done the right thing before proceeding with the inevitable. He was chillingly efficient in that way, like a corporate functionary, following his own predetermined procedures as he went about his task. My former partner Mac tried hard to convince me it wasn’t my fault we hadn’t found the dominoes in time. They had sunk into the long grass. Jackson and I had run errands all that last weekend, and the lawn had gone uncut. We had missed our loophole, our chance. And then JPP showed up early one morning, after I’d left for work and Jackson and Cece were alone in the house. Mac had tried so hard to convince me that there was no way I could have known the dominoes were there or that JPP had targeted my family as his next set of victims. “You would have had to be as crazy as he is to think that way,” Mac had said. But none of his comfort reached me. Jackson was dead. Cece was dead. And it was my fault.
    I had come to Brooklyn because it was unlike anywhere I had ever lived. I thought of it as hiding in plain sight; hiding from myself, really, since JPP was locked up and couldn’t get to me. Everyone had agreed it was a good idea, safer to lose myself in a crowd than suffer alone in the country somewhere. How did he find me? I had moved here only four months ago and had spent hours online and on the phone erasing any trace of my new location. But the thing about JPP was that if he wanted you, he found a way.
    “Come on,” Detective Billy Staples said. “I’ve got orders to bring you in.”
    I heard it two ways at once: protecting me was the obvious thing to do, and yet I didn’t want to go. I’d been there, done that. The police could do their best to save my skin, but the part that really needed saving—my heart and soul—were very much my own problem. I had been working on them full time for months now, doing nothing but finding any small way to “recognize pleasure” again, as Joyce would say. She hadn’t bothered saying “feel” pleasure or “be happy” because I wasn’t nearly that advanced yet. I was trying to hold myself together and I had discovered that I had to do it on my own. If I stepped into a police department right now, or any place filled with the smells and sights and sounds of my old life—the life that had brought this on—I didn’t think I could handle it. I needed to stay quiet and stay home, at least for now.
    “Don’t I have a choice?”
    “I’m not sure what other choice you really have right now, you know?”
    “I’m going to stay.”
    “No, Karin, you’ve got to come with me. It isn’t safe for you here.”
    But safety for me, these days, was in the eye of the beholder. “Detective Staples, I don’t believe you have the right to compel me.”
    He jammed his hands in his pockets and stared at me. He was wearing jeans, too, but his were clean. “Okay,” he said. “Have it your way. But we’ll be out here, just in case. And I want you to call me the minute you change your mind.” He handed me his card, white embossed with shiny blue lettering showing his whereabouts at the NYPD.
    “Thanks.” I slipped the card into my pocket. “I just want some time to think, and then I’ll get in touch.”
    He paused, then asked, “Do we need to worry about you?”
    “Need. Want.” I smiled, but he didn’t. He was right not to think it was amusing. I knew what he was referring to: nine months ago I tried to take my own life. “No. You don’t need to worry about me. I’ve dealt with that.”
    A cloud passed overhead and the sun blasted into his face, revealing a map of lines across his high cheek bones and a few gray hairs at his temples. I had put him at about thirty but saw now that he was older by a decade. He nodded and turned toward his car, then looked back.
    “By the way, I almost didn’t recognize you. You don’t look much like your photo.”
    No, I didn’t. In the head shot they took for my employee i.d. I had shoulder-length reddish hair and a big smile. The photographer had been joking around that day, or maybe he always did so staff photos wouldn’t look like mug shots.
    “That was taken five years