the personal notes of a serial killer

And now he, Lester, was deep in Dr. Decuir’s papers—the personal notes of a serial killer. For the princely sum of three dollars an hour on top of his regular TAship, he was employed by Professor Q. Madison Morris, Ph.D. to go through them page by page, in search of anything interesting that might make it into the Professor’s upcoming book, Race, Class, Gender, and the Political Economy of Murder in a Nineteenth Century City.

Dear God, he thought . . . as he turned another page. Three dollars an hour wasn’t near enough. Not for this.

For a murderer, Decuir was a dreadfully boring man. His papers consisted mostly of notes, letters, business records, and a set of diaries, all of them uniquely tedious (“had toasted cheese for lunch. Tea was cold”).

He turned another page. Not that it mattered, he supposed. Morris would write whatever he damn well pleased. Whatever Decuir was or wasn’t, it wouldn’t matter to the good Professor. He’d find some way or another to wedge the throat-slicing doctor into the book. Assuming he ever got around to writing it, that is. Morris had received tenure after his second book—a magnificently researched monograph on a series of deaths in a small Colorado town shortly after World War I. It had been long believed that the many dead had been the result Spanish Influenza. Morris, however, argued a serial poisoner had been at work. Someone—and he suspected the local postmistress—had been spreading death, a little at a time, and for no other reason than it gave her pleasure.

Morris had finished that book 20 years before. He said he was now working on this new one, the one that Lester was supposed to be researching. But, so far, not a page of it had seen light. And, since he had tenure, what did Morris care?

Lester put aside the notebook he’d been reading (prescriptions written between April and June, 1920) and picked up another. It was a dusty, hardback thing, and when he opened it bits of browning paper fell to the table. There was a curious smell to it. Like earth. For some reason he found himself thinking of decay. He opened the book…

Oh!

There, on the crumbling paper, were sketches of a human body, sliced open from throat to groin.