the murder architect

What they didn’t understand was that, despite what they might think about his antics, and despite the man bleeding out on the floor in front of him, he was not insane. A little crazy, yes. Dangerous? To certain people, in a roundabout way, maybe. But ‘insane’ conjured up foul images of murderers and convicts, the bloody and the brutish, the cruel and the conspiratorial. He was none of those things. He was an architect who crafted impossible scenes most couldn’t stomach.

After all, someone had to plan the murders.

He wouldn’t commit them, of course. Again, he was no killer. He, long ago, had learned that those who murdered the man often wound up rotting in the can. Or worse, they wounded up murdered themselves. Killing, and being killed, especially in the business of killing, often went hand-in-hand. And knowing of a murder, especially to a murderer, was the same as committing one. And so he did not know the name of the dying man whose blood was pooling repugnantly close to his loafers, nor even why it was determined he had to go. He wasn’t even sure who had hired him.

All he knew was this: the man had to die, and so it was his job to make sure nobody knew why.

Achieving this was a feat of utmost planning. He operated through a complex network of mouthpieces who fished information from clients, always taking just enough and never too much, and passed it along to him. Then he did his own research and, if he found the killing suitable to his skills, got to work. Weeks of meticulous observations followed in which he marked out every detail, relevant or not, and began painting a portrait of someone’s death. Not a crime, but a scene that told a story.

Because there was no such thing as a truly ‘perfect’ crime. Careful planning could always be usurped by a detective if a detective was allotted endless time and resources. Anything, if pursued relentlessly, had a path to being solved. But that was fairytale, and so that’s what he created—fairytales. He crafted scenes that’s true meaning, like an art-gallery masterpiece, was left up to personal imagination. With each brush-stroke, he painted threads, lose plotlines, that connected different possibilities and coincidences that urged the police down all the wrong pathways and wasted their time until the crime went cold, buried under another six-feet of murders.

But leading law-enforcement on these carefully constructed goose-chases was a cooperative effort. It was imperative that the assassins followed his specifications to a T. One mistake and the painting would be muddied. All the details would melt together, creating an ugly ruse, a stain, that could be blotted away to reveal the truth. The problem? Humans, he’d learned, were fickle. Trusting them to do anything right was like trusting a dog not to eat the scraps off the table. Even if they knew they’d suffer consequences, they’d indulge themselves and move on, hopeful it wouldn’t be noticed.

And that was why he was there, standing over the dying man. Waves of death were coursing through his spasming body, shoulders thumping the hardwood as drool bubbled between his lips, coagulating in the blood beneath him. His eyes flicked open-and-closed, on-and-off, as he looked up at the Architect, pleading for help. The gesture wasn’t returned. He wasn’t here to play savior; he was here to play cleanup, scouring the scene for any mistakes. A mark on their work was a mark on his work and what few minutes he had were already dwindling. Two minutes ago, a gunshot had rang out and thumping boots had trampled down the condo’s stairs. Now, sirens pulverized the midnight air, and soon police would trample over the killer’s footsteps, and they’d be all over this place like ants on a sugar cube, picking it apart piece-by-piece before taking it back to their den to savor.

The killers had followed his plan well. Better than most. Most of the time his weeks of research were in vain. Louts, driven by passion and maybe a bit of Guinness, got sloppy and tended to forgo the tiny details that kept them from ever getting caught in favor of the ones that helped them avoid capture for a few weeks. These men, though? They’d combed through the files he’d delivered carefully, it seemed.

He’d informed them of the man’s foolish lack of self-security, how he often left his door unlocked and sometimes even open, and so there was no sign of forced entry. He’d given them the schedules of every tenant in the building, and so they’d come at the exact time he’d recommended, when most were out-and-about or too busy in their own worlds to care about anything else. They’d even paid attention to his most crucial suggestion, to wait until the night of the 19th, when a thunderstorm would have everyone scrambling. These men, unlike most he worked with, were professionals.

And yet, laid there, sopping up blood and collecting brain matter, was a wallet.

A hunk of leather, cured flesh, packed full of everything anyone would ever want to know about the man who just put a .22 slug into another man’s neck.

 This is why he couldn’t trust humans—most mistakes they made were the ones that seemed too stupid to be made, and so they didn’t even realize they’d made them until it was too late.

He bent down, lifted the wallet carefully with a pair of handmade wooden tweezers, and dropped it into a Ziploc baggie. As he crimped it closed, he watched the blood naturally fill the gap where it laid, then he hurried to the other end of the room, eyes preening every nook and cranny for any further mistakes. He found none. They’d tossed apart the living room as he’d instructed, leaving behind all the tell-tale signs of a robbery and left a set of bloody footprints with a random set of shoes leading to the fire-escape. Good. He’d have to trust they’d planted the evidence that pointed to the victim’s disgruntled work colleague. The sirens were drawing near.

As he fled the scene of the crime, he couldn’t resist casting one last look into the room. His eyes finally met the man’s and he watched the light leave the poor soul’s eyes with a restrained smile. He wasn’t pleased by his passing, at least that’s what he’d tell himself a week or so from now, when he was no longer the Architect, but rather the person. When the guilt caught up to him, causing him to collapse in a panic, he’d say: ‘I didn’t want to see him die, I didn’t want to see him die.’ But in that moment? He did.

Because watching this man die and leaving unnoticed meant dropping another unsolvable mystery into the police department’s lap. They didn’t know it, but over the last few years, he’d been their greatest nightmare, turning their filing cabinets into refrigerators packed with cold cases. For him, the thrill wasn’t the hunt, it was the survival. One day, a detective who matched him might arrive, and a true challenge would begin. But that day?

That day he relished in another victory.

The Architect stuffed the baggie into his pocket and hurried out the way he’d come in, following a path of blind-spots in the cameras he’d charted for the killers and ducking into the laundry room on the first floor to avoid the soaking-wet, out-of-breath Mr. Milton who, even during a storm that could zap him down, wasn’t going to skip his late-night marathon-training. Milton dashed past him and up the stairs, unaware that in a few minutes he’d be yanked out of his evening bath and hounded with questions about a man he’d never met. Chaos would soon ensure, but the Architect saw none of it, slipping off into the shadows.

An hour and a half later, he sat in his home, in his living room, wearing a robe and flipping through an old novel. On the TV was a baseball game between two teams across the country, and in his lap was a Saint-Bernard that couldn’t find anything to ever be upset about. Next to him, in the fireplace, the killer’s wallet crumbled to ash without ever having been opened. Later that night, when the man realized what his mistake, he’d panic, and maybe even flee, and yet all the evidence would be here, miles away, in some suburban trash-can. A week from now, it’d be in a landfill. A week after that? Cosmic dust.

But none of that mattered now. He’d showered, scrubbing the stench of death off, and was now a real person again with a real job. Tomorrow, he’d go into the office and listen to his boss bitch about their sales numbers being down as he threatened to fire everyone, and he wouldn’t think about how easily he could arrange his death. In a month, he’d go to a junkyard thirty miles south and retrieve his payment and his next job and when that happened, he’d once again embrace the stench of death. But when you carried it around, you called to it, and times like this…

“Daaaaaaaddy! I’m home!”

…he couldn’t call to anyone but the family he loved so dearly.

THE END