Getting Away with Murder Chapter 1 - No Hard Feelings

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“It was, without a doubt, it was some of the most fun I’ve had in my entire life,” the well dressed man in his suit said as he stood casually on the stairs. He had loosened his tie and untucked his shirt, and his jacket hung upon as he seemed to lounge, but he looked as if he had been the picture of a perfect image just seconds before. Now he looked like a student ten seconds after graduating, without a care in the world. “And I like to think I’ve had a pretty exciting life!”

The reporter blinked, her lipsticked mouth hanging open in a slight gape. Her grip tightened around the long handle of her microphone, shaking slightly, but she didn’t pull it back. “The… court case?” she said uncertainly.

Grant’s grin only grew wider. “Oh, that was fun too. The look of people’s faces… but no, I meant the events of that night. She begged me to let her live,” he continued. He spoke casually but with energy, like a father recounting an old story. The reporter looked a little pale, but she didn’t think to interrupt so he didn’t stop. “She told me she’d do anything, you know. Offered to suck me off every morning, clean my ass with her tongue, even cook breakfast and dinner! Be my loving girlfriend for the rest of her life. I thought it was just absolutely adorable, so I told her I’d let her go if she could get me off three times in one hour. And you know what? She did! When motivated that girl’s body could squeeze, let me tell you!”

The reporter licked her lips. She glanced towards the camera uncertainly. “And then…? What did you do?”

Grant rolled his eyes. “Well, they found her in my garbage can with a slit throat. What do you think I did?”

They stood on the wide marble steps of an old courthouse, the engraved pillars and a chattering crowd behind them. Several other reporters clamored for answers, jabbing their mics out towards Grant like spears in a medieval army line, but he kept his piercing green eyes focused on just the one he had singled out. She couldn’t hold his gaze for long. She kept looking away, only facing him for brief moments. “S-so what you’re saying is—”

“Yes. I confess. I killed them. All eleven they accused me of. I stole them from their comfortable homes, tied them up in my attic, and fucked them raw every single day.” He grinned and winked, half towards her, half towards the camera. In another context, it might have been charming. “Would you like to hear how they died?”

The reporter gulped. She fussed with the hem of her pencil skirt. “Do you have any comment on the witnesses that went missing before their trial appearances, or the evidence presented in court that was later found to be contaminated?”

Grant shrugged. “It’s not my fault if the police can’t manage a simple investigation. You’d think with three dead women found in my garbage bin pumped full of my cum they’d be able to stick a charge to me, but I guess not. Sometimes the man really just fucks up, huh?” There was that grin again. He waggled his eyebrows. “Or they wanted to let me off because they agreed that it was all those rag-munchers were good for. Take your pick.”

A new voice interjected — a protester jumped into the frame, pumping her fist furiously. “You belong in prison, you monster!” she screeched, practically frothing at the mouth as he met her anger with the same relaxed smile from the man. “We demand a retrial! A retrial! We have all your sick confessions on video now!”

“Awww. Uh oh, someone never watched Schoolhouse Rock,” Grant said with a bemused shake of his head. “I’m already acquitted! Haven’t you ever heard of double jeopardy? I can say whatever I want now and it doesn’t matter. But don’t worry love, you’re adorable.” He grabbed the microphone from the stunned reporter, ignoring her startled yelp, and held it up to his face. His voice crackled and popped over the tinny TV set’s speakers. “Shout out to the LAPD! I had a question for you. Did you ever clean my cum off the blonde’s severed head, or would that count as tampering with evidence? Not that you could ever get proper evidence delivered to a courtroom, apparently… is that how you did it? I admit I slept through most of the boring parts!”

On the other end of the TV watching this interview, Detective Isabella Santiago gripped her coffee mug so hard her that she heard it crack. Every other detail of the break room at the precinct was forgotten as she sat staring at up at the tiny little TV drilled against the corner of the wall near the ceiling as it played the live interview. Words scrolled across the banner at the bottom in a bold, punchy font: SAPPHIC KILLER ACQUITTED, CONFESSES TO CRIMES.

Where had it all gone wrong? Isabella’s jaw worked side to side as the cocky sociopath on the television continued to brag and taunt the media, the police, the public, the overall justice system, and her personally. The police officer had thought it was done by now, that she could put this nightmare behind her - It had been months since she and her partner had broken into his home and brought him to justice at gunpoint. So what if they had roughed him up a bit in the process? He had literally been on top of a woman when they found him! And now, now he was going free anyway because of, of all things… bad paperwork?

How?

It was infuriating. They’d caught him literally red-handed — red-dicked, even — in a house full of evidence, full of photos of past and planned victims. He’d had a woman’s body buried in his garden, and a shitty home movie of someone — him — torturing a naked college girl with a cattle prod while she begged for mercy. What did it matter that they didn’t have a warrant at the time? If she and her partner hadn’t struck when they did, he may have realized he’d been compromised and bugged out! He might have — would have! — killed the girl he was with! For months they had been hunting the Sapphic Killer… a serial rapist and killer preying on the city’s lesbian women. The news had been positively glowing when they had gotten him off the street. That should have been the end of this nightmare.

Then the witnesses had started drying up. They’d had a dozen witnesses who had caught glimpses of suspicious behavior ready to testify, but they’d all suspiciously backed out of testifying right before the trial. Many of them had left town. Those few who hadn’t actually backed out right before the trial had changed their statements to be less incriminating… far less certain. He had won his motions for civil rights violations in the police violence against him, getting some other pieces of evidence thrown out… and some of what was left was flimsy. He wasn’t on any of the tapes, and none of them showed recognizable victim they knew about. DNA evidence from previous recovery victims had turned out to be too contaminated to be matched to him. The bones in his yard hadn’t been able to be identified. Soon it had become obvious that their last shot at a conviction had been Samantha… the poor woman that Isabella herself had saved from Grant when she’d caught him in the midst of raping her. She, at least, had been determined to testify… or so Isabella had thought. She had been worried that some… thug friend… of Grant, or some assassin, would find her, so she had taken her into protective custody, put her up in a hotel.

She had thought she would be safe… but she hadn’t thought about how isolated Samantha would feel, alone with her thoughts in a cheap hotel. The woman had bought a gun to protect herself with. The day after the trial had begun, while the news were slut shaming her, the abused young woman had eaten her own gun and fired up.

When Samantha took her own life, it all fell apart. The defend had never been able to cross examine her, so none of her testimony was admissible in court… that rapist bastard’s right to confront his accusers more important than obvious justice. It was a nightmare scenario from the ground up, and it made her sick just thinking about it. Witnesses had been sworn in, a jury empaneled… the District Attorney had been furious, but they’d had no choice. A few days later, Grant’s motion to dismiss was granted.

She was pulled from her thoughts by a door slamming open. “Detective Santiago!” an angry voice called. “Get the hell in here!” Sighing, Isabella forced herself up from her desk and walked into Captain Mendoza’s office as he sat down in his desk. “Close the door,” he said, glaring at the TV in his office that was, of course, playing the same press conference as Grant confessed, in detail, to the brutal rape and murder of eleven young, attractive lesbian women, live on national television. Isabella wanted to throw up as he bragged about how it felt to shove his 8 inch dick down an unwilling lesbian's throat, how sexy the look in her eyes were while he fucked her face and she choked on his cock. The soft, heavy feel as he fondled her jiggling tits, and the way she shuddered in disgust at a man’s touch. He admitted to loving the mixed smell of her fear and disgust as he pried their legs apart and entered them for the first time. Smiling at the pretty reporter he seemed to focus on, he did his best to explain the sensation of hearing a woman beg, plead, promise him anything and everything for mercy, and how vast the satisfaction was when she finally realized that there was nothing she could do, nothing in the world that was sweeter to you than ripping into her tender lesbian ass… nothing that could keep her alive.

In a just world, Grant would go to prison for confessing to such terrible crimes. In an even more just world, he would already be in hell. Unfortunately, they were stuck with this one.

“He’s making a goddamn fool of us,” he grumbled, glaring up at the screen. “We’re the laughingstock of the whole country!”

“That’s what you care about?” Isabella shot him a sideways look. “Not the fact that the devil himself is going free?”

“You should talk,” the Captain said darkly. “Your name is on the top of my shit-list right now. You just had to give him those black eyes, didn’t you? Had to threaten to kill him?” He sighed. “Do you know what I’ve been doing since the dismissal? My phone won’t. Stop. Ringing!” Mendoza glared at the phone, and Isabella saw that he had ripped the cord out of the thing. “In the past hour and a half, I’ve gotten calls from… the Commissioner, the DA, The Mayor, The Governor, the Secretary of the Interior, the ADL and the the ACLU, and 2 different Gay/Lesbian activist groups, and every single one of them used different words to say the same damn thing… I, I, had better catch this fucker, and it had better be air-fucking-tight this time, or it’s my ass…”

He groaned. “The only good news is… this is only temporary. We both know that asshole won’t be able to stop himself, doubly so now he feels he’s gotten away with it. We are going to watch him, and the moment he slips, we’ll be on him like stink on shit and nail his balls to my office door!”

Isabella nodded. “Good idea, sir. Zahira and I were actually—”

“Zahira and you were sitting your asses down and behaving yourselves,” he said sharply. “It was your poor police work that got this guy off the hook in the first place.”

“Sir, we’re the ones who—”

“Broke into his house with a warrant?” he snapped. “Lost track of half the evidence, and managed to contaminate the rest? Beat him senseless? You should be glad I ain’t firing the both of you!” Mendoza slammed his fist on his desk. “You and your partner are going to keep your heads down and not make a further mess. Go do some paperwork… if you can manage not to fuck that up.”

Isabella grimaced, but didn’t protest further. Ultimately he was right, as infuriating as it was. Even if she was the one who stopped Grant’s raping streak, she still blamed herself for his eventual freedom. “Yes sir,” she said. “I’ll get back to work, sir.” She kept her voice carefully even as she stood and made for the door. He didn’t make any move to stop her.

There were several other televisions in the station, and every single one was tuned to one perspective or another of the same interview. She clenched her jaw as she passed by one that had the volume turned up and several beat cops clustered around with drinks in hand. “You should’ve heard how she screamed when I hung her by her tits,” Grant was saying. He still wore that same stupid grin, though he was now leaned casually back against one of the courthouse pillars. “She had udders like a cow, you know? She was practically asking for it, looking like that!”

Some of the officers glanced towards her as she passed, whispering among themselves. She heard the word “bait” uttered, and her skin crawled. Ever since it had gotten out that she was a lesbian, there had been more than one “joke” about how she could contribute best to catching him by dangling herself in front of him. They had stopped after she caught him… but it appeared they were back with a vengeance. It was infuriating, but Isabella was tired, and just wasn’t interested in starting a fight right now.

Finally she arrived at the situation room they had set up for chasing this prick… where she and her partner, Detective Zahira Nader, had worked tireless to bring Grant in. Two desks were pushed together against a wall, and a pretty olive-skinned police officer was tapping a pen against the wood of her desk and biting her lip in thought. She had the TV on as well, of course… she could only see her head from the back her dark hair cascaded all the way down her back. She didn’t notice as Isabella walked in until the hispanic detective turned off the interview in disgust, leaving to her partner looking up at her. “Hey,” Isabella muttered.

“Hey,” Zahira echoed. She swallowed. “We have to catch him, Izzy. Again. We can’t let this go.”

“The Captain said we have to.” Isabella plopped down at her desk and hung her head in her hands with a low groan. “That we’ve fucked up enough already.”

“Bullshit,” Zahira hissed. “Are you hearing yourself?” She leaned in, her voice low but urgent. “There’s no way we contaminated that evidence, Izzy. All those witnesses… all those coincidences… Someone is putting their finger on the scale.” She punched the desk. “We have to find out what happened. We have to stop him. You saw what he did to those women! What if it was me he had chained up in that attic? Would you just let that go cause Mendoza told you to?”

“That’s dirty.” Isabella shot Zahira an exasperated look.

“Well?” Zahira leaned in further, eyes wide.

Isabella met the other woman’s gaze for several seconds, pursing and biting her lips. “Look, even if I agreed to this, it’s not like I could find him anyways. He might be bragging now, but we know he’s got other victims out there and other crimes he hasn’t been put on trial for yet. It’s not like he’s gonna just waltz in—”

Just as she finished saying that, her desk phone rang. She shook her head at Zahira as she picked it up and brought the receiver lazily to her ear. “Yeah?”

“Someone at the front for you,” the old male voice on the other side said… but she noticed tension in his voice “Bring your partner.”

Isabella frowned. “Be right there.” She put the phone down and stood with a sigh, stretching her arms out above her. “Come on, Zahira. We’ve got a visitor, apparently.”

Isabella didn’t wait for any response before she started off, but she heard Zahira stand and follow her. What was she thinking? Isabella was just as upset as anyone else in the department, but surely the lesson to be learned from this whole fiasco was to not go around bending the rules, and now Zahira wanted to try again? Did she want to embarrass the department for a second time? No, as much as it sickened her, the only safe way to play it was to sit it out and let the Captain call the shots. She was probably too personally invested in the case to properly handle it anyways. Her mind wandered back to the image of a bruised and sobbing woman handcuffed to a pipe, her breasts and thighs stained with dried semen. She shivered, bringing one hand up to rub at her elbow as she opened the door to the lobby. She just wanted to put the whole thing behind her.

“Ah, Detective Santiago!”

The voice stopped her in her tracks and sent a chill down her spine. Isabella froze, eyes wide, and she whirled to see him standing there, leaning back against the wall with a magazine draped lazily over his lap. Grant grinned as he stood and held a hand out to shake. “I just wanted to show up and tell you that there were no hard feeling, Detective Santiago… Or should I call you Isabella? That’s your name, right?”

Isabella bristled. Her hands balled up into fists by her sides.

“So who’s the—” Zahira said as she walked up further and then drew up short next to her as she caught sight of that bastard, blinking in surprise. “…Huh?”

“What the fuck are you doing here, scumbag?” Isabella spat. Some civilians sitting around the room glanced warily in their direction, but she didn’t care who saw. She wasn’t going to be polite with this rapist. “Didn’t you have enough fun with the reporters already or are you here to brag some more?”

Grant held his palms up, stepping back with a small bow. “Oh don’t be like that. My apologies, Detective, I was only trying to be polite. I thought you would find it vindicating to know that you had been right about those eleven women. I didn’t mean to upset you.”

“If you didn’t want to upset me, then you’d go straight home and put a bullet in your skull,” she hissed. Times like this she regretted being a cop. If she was a civilian she would’ve beat the shit out of him right then and there. Truthfully, she was tempted to do it anyways, repercussions be damned.

“No rude,” he snorted, a wry twist of a smile on his face. “That wouldn’t be much fun because then we wouldn’t get to talk.”

Isabella glared at him. “We’re not talking.”

Something twinkled in his eyes. “So you aren’t going to listen to what I have to say? I did come all this way…”

“Not a chance.” Isabella turned sharply on her heel, glancing towards the officer working the desk. “I don’t want to talk to this fucker.” She reached out and grabbed the doorknob that would take her back to the bullpen and her desk.

“You don’t really there there were only eleven, do you?”

Isabella paused. She didn’t look back as she answered. “Is that a confession?”

“What? No… I haven’t confessed to anything.” He hummed playfully and the sound made her jaw clench. “Not yet.”

That piqued her interest. She glanced back, exchanging a look with Zahira, but didn’t turn to face him fully.

“Officers, I’d like to confess to a crime. I’m afraid I’ve killed a woman, and I just… have to clear my conscience. I’ll tell you everything… who they were, where it happened, what I did to them… and where they ended up afterward. Every incriminate bit in complete detail, signed, sealed and delivered.”

Isabella spoke carefully, measuring her words. “Wait here, then. I’ll get an officer to take your statement.”

Grant clicked his tongue. “No, Detective,” he said. “I’m afraid I have to insist. I was only here to make you feel better, after all… I insist on being given an opportunity to make it up to you… by giving you my confession directly.” He shrugged. “Of course, if you don’t want it… well, I’ve always wanted to travel abroad. I hear there are several lovely islands in the Caribbean that are very friendly to ExPats, with exquisite weather… and no extradition.”

An involuntary shiver raced down Isabella’s spine. He’d be gone, and never coming back… he’d get away with it. Still… something about the way he was manipulating her so clearly put her on edge. Finally she whirled to look him in the eye, brow furrowed with suspicion. “What are you up to?”

He shrugged, still wearing that lazy smile. “Do you want me behind bars or not? Or are you afraid to listen to one handcuffed man in the middle of a fully staffed police station?”

Isabella’s lip curled back into an ugly snarl. The idea of being alone in a room with this monster, cuffed or not, made her skin crawl, but she also had to admit that this could be a potentially huge opportunity. Even if he wasn’t being completely honest she doubted he could resist taunting her with information that could be useful… and having him recorded in an interrogation room could go a long way to justice. She looked towards Zahira, who answered with a firm nod.

“Okay,” Isabella said, pulling out her handcuffs. “But I won’t be alone. Zahira will sit in as well.”

Grant’s smile widened, and he looked at Zahira with a wry smirk that seemed almost like a leer. “That’s fine with me,” he said as he stared her partner up and down with a letcherous grin. “That’s totally fine with me, detectives…”

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