Copyright© by author (TALAMYCUS) 2005

"Maybe I should get my Chief in on this, ma'am. I'm not even sure I know the protocol for something like this."

That was a lie, of course. He just didn't feel like he should have his relaxing Sunday evening turned upside-down so heinously and not have the opportunity to share the experience with his boss.

Detective George Renner would look back on this day as being one of the most astounding and frustrating in his life. At forty-one, he was a heavyset, farm tractor of a man and had been a detective in the small town of Warren Hill, VA for four years, since he passed the exam after his second try on his thirty-seventh birthday. Never in the time since had he officiated over a murder confession.

He had arrested six people for murder, the indictments coming at more or less even intervals during his tenure, and four of those had been out-of-towners - fugitives from justice, not to put too fine a point on it. The only murderers with whom he'd had personal contact spent every moment vehemently denying they had done anything wrong.

"In fact, ma'am, you don't really even need a witness for this."

The woman had come in at the superbly odd time of seven PM on this Sunday night in October. It was an hour when nothing else of importance was happening, so far as he knew, and he had drawn the unlucky job of holding down the fort at the town's tiny police station for the whole month of Sundays. Things were usually extremely quiet, as if the town was comatose, and given the amount of beer consumed in front of televised football games, there was a perfectly reasonable and likely reason for the town to sleep so deeply that it didn't even snore.

Now the town was having a nightmare; a timid-looking one that didn't break much of a sweat on the town's collective brow.

The woman who was interrupting the soporific flow of Sunday evening had come in almost silently, wearing expensive-looking black pumps and a blue-gray pantsuit that probably didn't come from Wal-Mart.

She wasn't a local, or at least hadn't grown up in or around Warren Hill, because her accent was very non-southern. He couldn't place it, exactly, except that it sounded a little New Englandish.

One thing was certain, though. She was clearly upset, albeit in a very resigned, subdued way.

"I know but..." stammered the woman. She reached into her large handbag and pulled from it an older looking tape machine. "Look, I have a tape recorder."

"Couldn't you have just made the tape another time?" he asked. "It's not necessary that I be present."

She shook her head.

"But it is necessary," she said. "If someone isn't with me, I might not be honest. I've got to tell someone."

If the lady hadn't been about to confess to murder, he would have given her a very impatient suggestion.

How about you tell your shrink, lady. This ain't no setting for a support group.

But this was different, in a big fat change-the-course-of-your-career way.

"I'd better call the chief anyway. I'll have to have his signature on all the paperwork, too."

She nodded almost absently.

Chief indeed. The thirty-year-old chief of police in Warren Hill was a former Secret Service agent and the pride and joy of the town; it's favorite son. But despite his impressive dossier, he still had a very boyish face; looked, in fact, young enough to be Detective Renner's son. He wasn't sure how this lady would react to that and he didn't want to stir things up any more than he had to.

He picked up the receiver of his desk phone and speed dialed Chief Aaron Sheffield's home number, immediately got the answering machine and guessed that the young chief wasn't even screening his calls right then. Even though he led a fairly private life, it was a popular rumor that anytime he wasn't immediately available, it was because he was in the company of the Warren Hill's mayor's eldest daughter, Whitney, doing things that didn't make the front page of the paper. This day and age, it just wasn't all that likely, in Renner's opinion, that the young suitor was simply sitting in the mayor's parlor, sipping tea and remarking on the weather.

Detective Renner left a short message to call the station, labeling it with the word "urgent" in such a voice as to imply how urgent it was. Also, because dotting his i's and crossing his t's had been a major contributing factor to the fact that he had passed his detective exam, not on the third or fourth time, but the second, he his the second button on the absurdly overqualified desk phone, made to handle thirty lines at once.

With that, he turned his attention back to the woman who had now begun to weep silently. He wasn't terribly surprised at the tears. A great many of the women who had been in this office, and not a few men, who had been in the office since he joined the five man police force nine years previous had good reason to cry. Most of them were in the process of ratting on or begging the release of abusive husbands or pleading for their misguided teenage sons to be let out of the drunk tank and that the whole thing be forgotten as a silly, negligible episode in the young hoodlums' misspent youth.

I need to make a statement, the woman had said. I have to make a confession, a murder confession.

The woman, who was now just showing the first signs of impatience, was crying. Guilt? Or maybe just an undirected emotional release he thought. George Renner was not a great thinker, but he always like to give it a shot to try and change that. No, George was methodical, which despite his lack of experience in the immediate situation, actually made him ideal for the job.

"Okay," he said, taking a fresh notebook from a bottom desk drawer. "Before we start the, um, interview, I need to get your name and place of residence."

The woman straightened up a little and cleared her throat.

"My name is Nancy Thurston. I actually reside in Georgetown, Maryland, but I've been staying at a hotel in Charlottesville for a week or so."

George wrote this down, a little numbly, completely unsure what he was getting himself into. For some reason unknown to him, he asked to see the tape recorder. She seemed puzzled, but handed it over willingly enough.

"I just put fresh batteries in," she said, but I have extras in case." She combed her shoulder-length blond hair from her face with one hand and sat forward on the edge of the chair.

George examined the tape recorder just long enough to make sure it had easily recognizable and reachable control buttons. There was a very new-looking blank TDK ninety minute cassette inside. He didn't want to say anything to Ms. Thurston, but he was mostly checking to make sure the thing was real; that she hadn't come in to do an elaborate leg-pulling. She seemed honest enough, and the tape machine was decent, if a bit old.

"Okay, then," he said. "I guess we should begin. Would you like something to drink before we start? Coffee? Water? Maybe a soda?"

She shook her head.

"Just a box of tissue," she said faintly. "This is going to be hard."

Detective Renner, noticing the conspicuous absence of a tissue box on his own desk - he was and always been a hanky man - stood and went to a utility cabinet, returning with a box of Puffs for his strange interviewee. He got the feeling, right then and there that he might as well get a bag of popcorn, because he anticipated quite a story, and as he had no movie to watch...

Forgoing the popcorn for a refill of his coffee cup, Detective Renner came back to his desk to proceed with the interview.

After making sure he had a good pen and two spares, checking to see that his coffee cup was sitting on a coaster and that he was sitting in his chair in such a manner as to cause the fewest squeaks, he pressed the double "record/play" button.

"This is Warren Hill, VA police department Detective George P. Renner speaking. It is the 17th of October, the year of our Lord, 2004."

"With me is Nancy Thurston of Georgetown, MD, by way of Charlottesville, VA. Ms. Thurston, would you please state your full name and date of birth?"

"Nancy Jean Thurston. I was born, October 17th, 1954."

Detective Renner started at this but made no comment aloud. Good looking woman for fifty. Only old-looking feature is her eyes. Not even the skin around her eyes but her eyes. They looked like yellow tinged white marble, or maybe antique parchment.

And for God's sake, why would a person - any person - choose their birthday to do something like this?

"Your marital status?"

"Single."

"Never married?"

"Right. Not divorced, not widowed: single."

More than a hint of irritation accompanied the statement and Detective Renner felt an apologetic need to explain his clarification.

"Sorry if that seemed to be an unnecessary question, but many people aren't aware of the distinction."

"That's fine." She sounded calmly melancholy again, if a bit detached.

"You are aware this interview is being recorded, correct?" He gave her a wan smile at this question too, letting her know he was just following the old advice, not necessarily legal advice : C.Y.A.

"Yes."

"Have you been coerced by anyone to make the following statement?"

Miss Thurston closed her eyes, as if searching for the answer in her head. "Only by my conscience."

He hated to say anything, but hang it all, she was the one who wanted it formal.

"Please answer yes or no."

"No."

"Miss Thurston, please make your statement."

The woman drew herself up, setting her handbag on the floor, as if to deny herself the comfort of it's weight in her lap.

"I have committed murder."

Detective Renner had known the reason she was there, but it still struck him as somehow unlikely. Yet the words, even though they had the tone of a well- rehearsed speech, appeared to cause her physical pain, as if they were being dragged from her throat.

"Please explain the circumstances."

"Pardon?"

"Well, for starters, whom did you kill?"

She uttered a quiet bark of a laugh that was at least half-sob.

"There are so many. I never thought about listing them. I suppose it's time to tally them up"

Renner sat forward, his chair emitting an outraged squeak.

"You say many? You've killed many people?"

"That's right."

"How many?"

"I guess we're about to find out an exact number. Dozens at least."

Detective Renner took a deep breath and prepared to write down what promised to be a terrible list. He wondered, crazily, if he had enough paper.

"The first time was June of 1977 in Daytona Beach, Florida. The Marston children; Jill was fourteen, Andy twelve and Becky 10. One night, while their parents were out, having a romantic dinner, I locked them in their parents' beach house and set it on fire. Mercifully, they all died from smoke inhalation and didn't suffer any pain."

Renner's mouth went suddenly, violently, bone-dry as he wrote down the names of the victims and the location of their demise.

What had he gotten himself into? This was, he guessed, part of the job. He wasn't a security guard whose only job was to prevent unauthorized ingress and egress, along with the occasional litter pickup. He was a by-God detective. That package suggested, if not quite promised a few violent crimes and murders during its chaotic lifespan.

But dozens of murders? Dozens? He gripped his pen tightly and took a reassuring sip of warm coffee.

"Next I killed Van Charles - he was an animal, so I didn't feel very guilty about it, but I don't want to leave anyone out - by running him off a Daytona Beach pier in his Mustang. He was very drunk, but I'm the one that did it. Made the brakes fail, you see. They didn't find him for days."

Then came Andrew Marston," she said as he was writing down the name of her fourth murder. "He was the kids' father. He thought he'd been on the trail of the killer, but he was wrong. I made him put a shotgun in his mouth pull the trigger."

"How did you-?"

"Please don't interrupt!" Miss Thurston said forcefully. "I have to concentrate just to remember all their names!"

"Okay," he said, mopping imaginary spittle from his face. "Please go on." Oh geez, he thought. Dozens more!

"... and the contents of his chest cavity blew out, painting the living room wall with multicolored chunks."

Renner was far past nausea now. He had actually seen car wrecks with injuries as gruesome as the ones Miss Thurston described. Through the telling, however, her voice had taken on a very lazy, almost bored quality. She might have been dictating a highly complicated recipe, but one she was so familiar with that it just wasn't fun anymore.

And that horrified him.

At this point, however, rather than being one or two steps away from hysteria, she looked as though she could fold her arms, lean back a little and go to sleep. Her eyes, though, he thought. Those eyes look like they never close.

Several minutes into the narrative - Renner was seriously beginning to think he would have done better to call in sick this evening - Miss Thurston took a slim, silver cigarette case and matching lighter from her handbag, without even pausing in her speech. Then, although government buildings in Virginia were officially smoke-free, she took a slim, unfiltered cigarette from the case and lit it, drawing deeply and picking tiny flecks of tobacco from her tongue with petite grace and discretion. Maybe that's why her eyes look like that, thought Renner. The lady definitely smoked like someone who didn't just smoke cigarettes, but used them.

He took the heavy Duke Blue Devils glass ashtray from the corner of his desk, making sure there were no sunflower seed shells - his own harmless trade-off from Winstons since his third year on the force - and quietly placed it on the desk near enough for her to see it. The lady tapped her ash into it without even looking.

Then she continued talking.

"I set a bomb to go off in Standifer's Cabinet Shop in South Union, Kentucky. It was supposed to kill an employee of his, Luke Mitchell, but instead it caught Russell Standifer and he was torn to shreds by flying bits of lumber and the shrapnel from the tools in his shop. This was in..." she paused a moment for recollection... "in 1991."

She sat silent for a few seconds, taking deep drags on the designer cigarette that had never been meant to be smoked in such a violent manner. Its fine paper burned in a haphazard, clumsy pattern of char and nearly fell apart before she had finished it. Instead of stubbing it out, she merely dumped the remaining fragments in the ashtray.

During those few moments, Detective Renner had looked down at his notebook. He had written down the name of each of the deceased and assigned it a number, not necessarily in order of death, but by the order in which she had mentioned them.

Twenty-eight.

Twenty-eight times this woman claimed to have killed another human being. Sometimes she killed one at a time. Other times she took as many as five in one blow. It was unthinkable that one person could have committed all those crimes and never got caught. Then again, there was really no pattern to follow. These killings, seemingly done at random, and nothing about them that bespoke a certain profile of serial killer. The only things they seemed to have in common was their fairly gruesome quality and, of course, the fact that the culprit had never been caught.

This woman, though...

She was attractive in a way that for a moment escaped him. Not glamorous, exactly, but she had a kind of dignified grace, as though she were used to being seen in public or having her picture taken often. He wondered why he had not asked her occupation and if she was some locally famous socialite in her hometown. Certainly she was pleasant to look at, except for those eyes. He almost could have forgotten why she had come - that she might be collecting for some charity or, that she was a lawyer collecting arrest record info were two possibilities that had come to mind - except for her eyes. They had a haunted look, as though she had seen, or at that moment was seeing something unspeakable; something that had been going on for a long time.

Renner almost didn't notice that she had begun speaking again, although if she had mentioned a name, he was sure he would have heard it...

"... a break for a few years, thinking I was finished. I rested, my conscience abating somewhat. But there was this compulsion, you see." She lit another cigarette. "A compulsion to keep doing it, so I set aside everything in my life - my family, a man I was engaged to, my health - all so I could take up killing again."

Detective Renner heard these words and sat back quickly, drawing an obscenely loud squeak from the overworked hinge on his desk chair.

Until this point, even though Miss Nancy Thurston of Georgetown, Maryland had shown supposed remorse for the actions she was now detailing, she had always sounded resigned, calm... even bored. She knew these things were wrong, but the penance apparently had to wait until she had finished her enumeration of that long, horrible list.

But now, there was fervor in her voice, almost as if she couldn't wait to tell him. Hearing the word "compulsion," though he wondered if his initial instinct - telling her to go see a psychiatrist - might not have been the best move. It was certainly on the tip of his tongue now.

Miss Nancy Thurston, however, seemed to be a woman who got her way, and was used to getting her way most, if not all the time. The fact that the roster of her killing spree approached a score and a half indicated, with terrible probability, how she had gotten her way. When she continued speaking, there was nothing in her demeanor to suggest a dominant nature, but she sat forward over crossed legs and spoke in a low, confiding voice and her face was full of excitement.

"In 1995, on the Fourth of July, I locked ten people in a fireworks store in Kimball, Tennessee and shot a Roman candle into the front, through the glass. With all the bangs and whistling noises, I couldn't really hear their screams..." she paused to swallow hard - is her mouth watering? thought Renner - and tears almost gushed from her eyes... "yet, I know there were screams."

"Even over the smell of the gunpowder, the burning powdered metal that makes the different colored fire... even with all that merchandise erupting all around them, there was still the distinct smell of a giant barbeque going on..."

Detective Renner had experienced his share of chills since this statement had begun, but at that last description, he actually shuddered violently. If his coffee cup had been full of hot java, he would have burned himself badly. If he had been disarming a bomb... well, goodbye small town police station.

What had shaken him, what had truly shocked him was something he almost didn't notice. She had come very close to pronouncing the word "merchandise" with the ever popular inflection heard in so many gangster flicks.

"Moichandise."

Her tone had almost, but not quite, taken on that of a storyteller with a sick sense of humor, someone who might make a joke about the way a dismembered body looked like Venus de Milo with extra ketchup.

Up to this point, he had known, academically at least, that someone who had committed murders into the double-digit range must be profoundly disturbed. Now he thought he was beginning to see some of those deranged qualities emerge, just from her eloquent descriptions of the killings. He was suddenly very glad his gun was in his desk drawer instead of his locker.

"Leslie Archer chased down the man she thought responsible for the fireworks store fire, a man named Raymond Springer. She didn't get him, though. Even though she followed him up the side of a mountain with her Remington rifle. I tripped him near the cliff and he tumbled nearly a hundred feet down an embankment before plunging to his death off a sheer rock wall, two hundred feet to the ground. Leslie herself barely escaped the same fate."

Detective Renner recorded the name of Raymond Springer, but not Leslie Archer, since she had not died. That brought the grand total to thirty nine. Thirty nine times this woman had taken human lives, some of them in the most fantastic circumstances. How had such a woman done these things? Chased down armed men, wired explosive... been in just the right position to do things?

He had heard strange, unsubstantiated but widely believed rumors - shoot, there were countless movies on the subject - that the government - those in actual power, not the puppets and figureheads - frequently hired people of unsavory character to perform certain duties. These duties, at least in the stories Renner thought of, involved unspeakable atrocities performed all round the world, every day. Some of them even happened in the United States of America, these movies and popular novels would have us believe, all approved on the highest levels, the most rear echelon of the offices of the powers that be. Not necessarily in the name of justice, but certainly in the name of security.

Detective Renner could think of other, possibly more plausible reasons for this woman, well into middle age to have been able to perpetrate all those crimes - all those murders - and remain at large. And God help him, it didn't look like she had finished the list!

Indeed, she was lighting another cigarette that looked too perfect even to smoke and clearing her throat to continue.

"I killed Lonnie Hunt and his neighbor Ed Dotrice. Then I led the police of Madison, Georgia on a wild goose chase by making them think the two had killed each other." She folded her arms, leaning the construction crane-like boom of her right free to carry the cigarette too and from her mouth. "But it was me." She dragged on the cigarette and let the smoke come out with her whispered words like wispy punctuation. "It was me."

"I kept thinking, 'I've gotta stop. I'm turning into a monster.' But like I said, there was a compulsion... and irresistible pull to keep on. So I did." Then she unknowingly echoed Renner's early thought. "God help me."

She cried for a moment, blessedly, Renner thought, not trying to talk through her sobs. She crushed out a half-smoked cigarette and rubbed at her lips. Given her expensive taste in clothing, it was surprising that she was not wearing lipstick, but her lips were still very pink and lovely despite the tears that had made the upper half of her face look so sodden. Blindly, she reached for perhaps the thirtieth tissue she wound use that night and wiped her streaming eyes and swollen, runny nose.