More Twisted

sneakers and a Boston University sweatshirt—his good-luck writing clothes, which he hadn’t donned in well over a year.
    Still in pain from the gunshot, he walked slowly down the hall to his office and went inside, turning on the light. Sitting at his desk, he clicked on his computer and stared at the screen for a long moment.
    Then suddenly he began to write. His keyboarding was clumsy at first, his fingers jabbing two keys at once or missing the intended one altogether. Still, as the hours passed, his skill as a typist returned and soon the wordswere pouring from his mind onto the screen flawlessly and fast.
    By the time the sky began to glow with pink-gray light and a morning bird’s cell-phone trill sounded from the crisp holly bush outside his window, he’d finished the story completely—thirty-nine double-spaced pages.
    He moved the cursor to the top of the document, thought about an appropriate title and typed: Copycat .
    Then Andy Carter sat back in his comfortable chair and carefully read his work from start to finish.
    The story opened with a reporter finding a suspense novel that contained several circled passages, which were strikingly similar to two real-life murders that had occurred earlier. The reporter takes the book to a detective, who concludes that the man who circled the paragraphs is the perpetrator, a copycat inspired by the novel to kill.
    Reviving the case, the detective enlists the aid of the novel’s author, who reluctantly agrees to help and brings the police some fan letters, one of which leads to the suspected killer.
    But when the police track the suspect to his summer home they find that he’s been murdered too. He wasn’t the killer at all but had presumably circled the passages only because he, like the reporter, was struck by the similarity between the novel and the real-life crimes.
    Then the detective gets a big shock: On the fan’s body he finds clues that prove that a local police sergeant is the real killer. The author, who happens to be with this very officer at that moment, is nearly killed but manages to wrestle the gun away and shoot the cop in self-defense.
    Case closed.
    Or so it seems . . .
    But Andy Carter hadn’t ended the story there. He added yet another twist. Readers learn at the very end that the sergeant was innocent. He’d been set up as a fall guy by the real Strangler.
    Who happened to be the author himself.
    Racked by writer’s block after his first novel was published, unable to follow it up with another, the author had descended into madness. Desperate and demented, he came to believe that he might jump-start his writing by actually reenacting scenes from his novel so he stalked and strangled two women, exactly as his fictional villain had done.
    The murders hadn’t revived his ability to write, however, and he slumped further into depression. And then, even more troubling, he heard from the fan who’d grown suspicious about the similarities between certain passages in the novel and the real crimes. The author had no choice: He met with the fan at his lakeside cottage and beat him to death, hiding the body in the garage and covering up the disappearance by pretending to be the fan and telling his boss and landlord that he was leaving town unexpectedly.
    The author believed he was safe. But his contentment didn’t last. Enter the reporter who’d found the underlined passages, and the investigation started anew; the police called, asking him for fan letters. The author knew the only way to be safe was to give the police a scapegoat. So he agreed to meet with the police—but in fact he’d arrived in town a day before his planned meeting withthe detective. He broke into the police sergeant’s house, planted some incriminating clothing he’d taken from the dead women’s houses and stole one of the cop’s mallets and a business card. He then went out to the dead fan’s lake house, where he’d hidden the body, and used the tool to crush the skull of the decomposed body and hid the mallet, along with some of the dead man’s hairs, in an oil drum. The card he slipped into the wallet. The next day he showed up at the police station with the fan letter that led to the cottage—and ultimately to the sergeant.
    The author, who’d asked the unsuspecting sergeant to drive to dinner, grabbed his gun, made him stop the car and get out. Then he shot him, rested the pistol near the dead cop’s hands and fired it into the woods to get gunshot