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The Secrets of Singapore Valley

p. 7 of 10

          “I’m gonna be straight with you, Meredith, but there are details my lawyer doesn’t want me getting into.  I’m not sure why—I don’t know what we’re denying.  I am the Singapore Valley Slayer.

          “But I’ve been told not to discuss specific victims.  Which is fine.  I really just want to make two points here.  One is, my killing impulse was very reliable for a very long time.  And the other is, my career had two main phases to it.  But I didn’t change so much as my circumstances changed.

          “You see—all this time, there were always other things happening in my life too.  Most of the time, I wasn’t being the Singapore Valley Slayer—most of the time, I was being Bob Grisby.  So I was dating Paula, and then we were getting married and starting a family.  And I started working at Home Depot,  and I climbed the ranks till they made me store manager.

          “Once that happened, things started to get more comfortable for us, and we were able to move into the house at 1642—and that place had plenty of space in the backyard, so I was able to have my construction projects with my shed,  and the family just knew to leave me alone, with that being my personal space.  So finally I was able to complete my dream and have a real dungeon.  And that was when the second phase of my career began—when I could bring girls back to my secret space and keep them there,  and play how I wanted,  when I wanted,  as long as I wanted.

          “And absolutely no one knew about the entrance to the dungeon in the shed, I would have bet my life on it.  No one knew.  So how I was doing things had changed, but two other things hadn’t.  One was, how often I wanted it. At that point, I still did. 

          “And the other was, no one suspected me and no one knew a thing.

          “But years went by, and I stopped needing to kill as much.  I felt the hunt going out of me—just going out of my bones. Sometimes I would stop for months on end,  and I honestly would not know whether I was done for good.

          “And so now, how often I wanted it was changing, too—but what hadn’t changed was that no one knew.  And that was hard,  always having to be the same guy

          “But it was like that because I was successful.  And eventually, I took it for granted that I was very good.  I had been in Singapore Valley all the years the Slayer was active, and people knew me—and no one ever pointed at me and said, ‘I think it’s that guy.’  The real me was such a ghost that I didn’t even worry about getting caught.  No one saw my dark charisma except the girls I chose.

          “So with Christina and getting pulled over with her in my trunk—look, I don’t have a good explanation.  It was my first time in a while and I thought I couldn’t fail and I got too comfortable.  I let myself buzz that red.  I shouldn’t have.

          “But I did, I made that one mistake, and suddenly I was being pulled over,  and for the first time ever I was on the verge of getting caught. 

          “And then, out of nowhere, Pierce appeared.  And he made the cop disappear.  And he summoned me to his castle.

          “And the way he treated me that first time I was there,  we were buddies.  And I took that attitude—that apparent attitude—at face value, and what I experienced being there at his house—no,  nonot what I experienced, what I thought I experienced, was friendship.  I thought I experienced friendship.

          “And look—on the one hand, Pierce obviously was extremely successful.  His house had technology I had never seen anywhere. His bed floated.  He had a secret business on a site that only guys with multiple passwords and authenticators could get on.  So yes, I was impressed, and maybe that’s partly why I didn’t ask enough questions the first time I was there.

          “But in a weird way, I accepted it, because suddenly I had a companion.  I mean, here he was calling himself a predator,  even though he wasn’t a killer. And it suddenly felt like I had a colleague,  a peer.  And even more than that, someone I wouldn’t have to pretend with.  And after a lifetime of never having that,  it was a huge thing, frankly. 

          “So I accepted it.  And at first I was excited about having met Pierce, and I was excited about going back to his house the next couple times.

          “But pretty soon,  it started changing.  I didn’t like the looks he made when I was speaking—like everything I said was a bit amusing.  And he always brushed off my questions about how he got to know about me and why he was right there the day I got pulled over with Christina.  So I started realizing he just had an eye on me and knew about me somehow.  And had known for a while.

          “And I really hated this, when I started seeing he was just—monitoring me.

 

          “I went to Pierce’s house five times,  and we always wound up on the floor with the white walls and the computers and the floating bed. The last time I was there, he was hardly talking.

          “He spent a while standing at a couple of the computers on the wall, just typing.  I was over by one of the white couches.

          “After a while, he came over where I was. He waved his hand across the table,  and it opened in the middle, and he pulled out a couple beers.

          “He popped them open and handed me one.

          “He sat on the couch.  He tapped on the edge of the table,  and the wall in front of us lit up like a screen.  So I went and sat next to him.  He navigated the screen with his phone. I saw his passwords.

          “He wanted me to see him in action,  so he called up a video from a couple nights before. 

          “It was him with a girl in the room we were in.  It was pretty rough.  He was slapping her around and strangling her and so on,  and to be honest,  it was fairly well done. The way he stretched certain parts of it out was creative.  But then I realized why he was playing it.

          “He was trying to show me up—showing off how much punishment he could serve with just his big hands,  how he could dole out pure torture with his big hands alone.  I knew what he was saying.  He was telling me that his hands were his fangs—and me, I needed all my knives and my sharp saws. And he was sitting there,  all proud of himself,   swigging his beer,  with one arm draped out across the back of the couch and his ankle on his knee,  and twisting his foot and jutting his jaw and smirking.

          “But there was something else he still didn’t get at all.  And that is, the worst of it happens in their heads, before you begin. They can get away from you while it’s happening—I’ve seen that,  how some of them can escape to a place in their minds while you’re still there with them.  But they can’t escape while they’re waiting for you to come back.  When they’re waiting,  they’re trapped.  So the worst torture is when you keep them waiting. That’s the psychological part.

          “I wanted Pierce to understand he still had more to learn.

          “I turned to him and I told him that you can’t really punish a girl while you’re right there with her. The only way to really punish a girl is to leave her waiting. That’s the real torture, when she has to wait for the next session. Sometimes for a long time. That’s worse than anything you can actually do. That’s the psychological torture.

          “So I told him all this, and suggested that next time he try something more refined—and focus more on the psychological elements of torture.

          “He gave me this little smile.  He had his leg slung over the other, European-style.  He sipped his beer.

          “And he said,  ‘Bob,  I understand you have your preferences, but except in the most outstanding cases,  I focus upon the serial-killer genus, not upon the individual instance, which may be of very little note.’

          “And I said, ‘Pierce, if you don’t respect me, then why do you keep inviting me over?’

          “He said,  ‘I didn’t say that, Bob—’

          “I said, ‘I think you did! What is this, Pierce?,’ and I stood up and looked down at him. ‘How did you find out about me and why have you been following me?  Are you studying me as part of your predator project?

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