>This story was written for an anonymous commissioner.
>It is fully written, at 29,000 words, and will be posted in parts.
>Each part will have more specific content tags in the subject line.

“Without a doubt, it was some of the most fun I’ve had in my entire life, and I like to think I lead 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 or think to interrupt, and John’s grin only grew wider.

“The last one begged me to live,” he continued. He spoke casually but with energy, like a father recounting an old story. “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! 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!”

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

“Then I slit her throat and fucked the hole.”

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 John 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 killed them. I stole them from their homes, tied them up in my attic, and fucked them raw every 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?”

John 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. Sometimes the prosecution really just fucks up, huh?” There was that grin again. He waggled his eyebrows.

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. “We demand a retrial! A retrial! We have all your sick confessions on video now!”

“Uh oh, someone never watched Schoolhouse Rock,” John 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.” 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 Femina City Police Department! 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!”

Back at the police station, Detective Isabella Rodriguez gripped her coffee mug so hard her knuckles went white. She was sitting in the break room, looking up at the little TV drilled against the corner of the wall near the ceiling as it played back an interview that was broadcasted live just that morning. Words scrolled across the banner at the bottom in a bold, punchy font: ACQUITTED MURDER-RAPIST 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. It had been months since she and her partner had broken into his home and brought him to justice at gunpoint, but now he was going free anyway because of, of all things, bad paperwork. How? They’d caught him literally red-handed—red-dicked, even—in a room full of photos of past and planned victims. He’d had a woman’s refrigerated carcass kept on ice in his bathtub and a shitty home movie of himself 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!

And then the witnesses had all dried up too. They’d had a dozen witnesses who had caught glimpses of suspicious behavior ready to testify, but they’d almost all mysteriously pulled out right before the trial, and those who’d stayed had changed their statements to be less incriminating. Their last shot at a conviction was the poor woman that Isabella herself had saved from John when she’d caught him in the midst of raping her, but she had taken her own life before his defense was able to cross examine her, making her previous testimony inadmissible.

It was a nightmare scenario from the ground up, and it made her sick just thinking about it.

She was pulled from her thoughts by a heavy sigh from beside her, and she turned to see Captain Mendoza sitting down.

“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?”

“It’s only temporary,” the Captain said darkly. “We both know that asshole won’t be able to stop himself, doubly so now he feels he’s gotten away with it. We can watch him, and the moment he slips, we’ll be on him like stink on shit.”

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

“Rachel 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 without a warrant?” he snapped. “Lost track of half the evidence? You should be glad I ain’t firing the both of you.”

Isabella grimaced, but didn’t protest further. Ultimately he was right, as infuriating as it was. Even if she was the one who stopped John’s raping streak, she was also to blame for his eventual freedom.

“I should get back to work.” 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,” John 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. Her skin crawled, but she wasn’t interested in starting a fight.

Finally she arrived at her desk. Her partner, Detective Rachel Oswald, had a desk pushed up against her own. The pretty blonde was tapping a pen against the wood of her desk and biting her lip in thought.

“We have to catch him, Izzy,” Rachel said. “Again. We can’t let this go.”

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

“Are you hearing yourself?” Rachel leaned in, her voice low but urgent. “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 low.” Isabella shot Rachel an exasperated look.

“Well?” Rachel 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 into the department asking to see me.”

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

“Someone at the front for you,” the old female voice on the other side said. “Bring Rachel.”

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

Isabella didn’t wait for any response before she started off, but she heard Rachel 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 Rachel 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 Rodriguez.”

The voice stopped her in her tracks and sent a chill down her spine. She froze, eyes wide, and saw him sitting there, leaning back against the wall with a magazine draped lazily over his lap.

John grinned as he stood and held a hand out to shake. “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—” Rachel drew up short next to her, 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 civil with this rapist. “Didn’t you have enough fun with the reporters already, or are you here to brag some more?”

John held his palms up, stepping back with a small bow. “My apologies, Detective. I didn’t mean to upset you.”

“If you didn’t want to upset me then you’d have gone 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.

He snorted. “Aren’t you going to listen to what I have to say?”

“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 her desk.

“You know I’ve killed more women, don’t you?”

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

“No. Not yet.” He hummed playfully. The sound made her jaw clench. “But I’m willing to give one. Every woman I’ve ever taken, what I did to them, where I disposed of them, all in complete detail. Signed and sealed.”

That piqued her interest. She glanced back, exchanging a look with Rachel, but didn’t turn to face him fully. She spoke carefully, measuring her words. “Wait here, then. I’ll get an officer to take your statement.”

“No, Detective,” he said. “I’ll only deliver my confession to you.”

An involuntary shiver raced down Isabella’s spine. Something about the way he said that 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, having him recorded in an interrogation room could go a long way to justice. She looked towards Rachel, who answered with a firm nod.

“Okay, but not me alone,” Isabella said, pulling out her handcuffs. “Rachel will sit in as well.”

John’s smile widened, and he looked at Rachel with a wry smirk. “That’s fine with me.”