The Bruiser.
That’s what happens when the media catches wind of something like this, they need something catchy, a phrase that they can use to reduce the entire investigation into a second, something Pavlovian they can use against their audience. They say it, send that jolt of fear into the hearts of everyone they’ve been conditioning, and watch the eyes turn to them, and the money pour in. The Bruiser, fuck, what a fuckup that whole fucking thing was, right down to the interview, that really capped the whole thing off with a fucking cherry. Still, I’m getting ahead of myself. I told myself I would start at the beginning, leave this as a…final report, of a sort. I have a feeling I’ll need something like this, once this is all said and done. Once I finally find him, and I’m close. Closer than he thinks.
Me. Right now, as for most of my life, I’m Detective Adam Hoft, the lead investigator of the…bug-fucking crazy serial rapes of men in the city, of which there have pressently been four known cases. I regarded myself as jaded, I thought I had seen everything, but this shit–this shit defies reason. All of it. I can’t explain some of the things I have seen in the course of this case, and I don’t think I ever will be able to explain it until I finally catch this crazy fuck…but I gotta be honest, I’m fucking terrified of him, and you should be too. That Pavlovian shit? Good. Be terrified of him, lock your doors, observe the curfew, because the few details you know? You don’t know shit. But let’s start at the beginning, like I said, with the first victim, Bernard Goldwell.
On the morning of September 24th, the precinct 911 received an anonymous call from a cellphone, which ended up being a burner, about a rape victim. The speaker gave the address twice, and then hung up without answering any of the questions asked by dispatch. I myself wasn’t called in until around noon, once the cops who responded to the call realized they weren’t dealing with something…conventional.
When the officers arrived at the small house the caller had identified, they found the door unlocked, and entered. The building was empty, but down in the basement, the officers found a man, later identified as Bernard, sleeping on the concrete floor wearing nothing other than a thick metal collar, which was attached to a heavy metal chain, attached to a stake which had been driven into the brick wall of the basement. He was dehydrated and disoriented, and for several minutes he demanded the officers get “Master”, that he needed him, screaming for him, attacking anyone who tried to get close in order to free him, telling them that if he got free, Master would be furious.
Like I said, hardly a conventional case, and I’ve seen some strange shit before. I was called in, and conducted my first interview with him down in the basement, still in the collar and chained to the wall–and still completely naked. It was…hell of a first impression, and I could see why some of the officers initially thought this must be some elaborate prank, because Bernard did not seem to be the kind of person you would expect to get raped.
Now don’t misunderstand me, I know that men can be, and regularly are, sexually assaulted, but there are some kinds of guys that you don’t think would go down easily–and Bernard appeared to be one of those sorts of guys. He was big–several inches over six feet tall, and burly. Hell, more than burly, he was built like a brick shithouse, as my dad would say. Thickly muscled, with a thick layer of fat, lots of hair–a real man’s man, if you get the picture. Not the sort of character you might associate with being chained down in a basement, calling out for a master.
Still, by the time I arrived, he had gained some coherence, though he still refused to let any of us unlock the collar. It had to stay on, he told us. Master had told him it had to stay on, and so on it would stay. We chatted a bit, I got him comfortable with me, and then I started probing…but his answers were…well, a bit unbelievable. He didn’t know how long he had been down in the basement, but he guessed it had been several days. In fact, when we nailed down the timeline later, we determined he had been held captive for almost ten days, all told. I asked him if he knew where he was, and he said that he did–that this was his house. He lived here alone, but when I asked him who had done this to him, and how he’d gotten in (since no one had found any evidence of forced entry) he clammed up.
At first, I thought he was just ashamed. After all, ten days locked down in a basement can do strange thing to someone’s mind, but it wasn’t that. I asked him a few other questions, and he gave clear answers, showing he obviously remembered what had happened well enough, but when it came time to ask him who had done this to him, and what he had done, he would go vague and try and tell me he didn’t remember anything, which I could tell was bullshit. Then, one of the other officers who was looking for evidence upstairs, found the photos.
They were photos of Bernard Goldwell, but the man in the photos was most certainly not the man down in the basement. We went looking for other things, and found his wallet in the pocket of some pants upstairs in the master bedroom, and sure enough, the man on the license was the same man in the photos, which is to say, we all assumed that the man down in the basement was not, in fact, Bernard. No–the picture was of some young fellow, easily a foot shorter and a hundred pounds lighter than the man down in the basement, with no beard, and no hair to be seen.
Bracken's Corner 