I wrote this several years ago for the OC FanFic Contest but am just now getting around to posting it here.

I also wrote a sequel, which I will post after this one.

PROLOGUE:

Male hands caressed her creamy-white throat as her soft moans filled the air, increasing the electricity in the already electrically-charged room. His delicate feather-light strokes along her clavicle intensified her desire. "You are so beautiful," his murmured endearment, and hot breath, sent chills down her spine. She tried to turn around, to face her new lover (they'd only met that night…he'd been so sweet to her all night) but he kept a firm hold on her from behind. She really didn't care: he felt oh so good.

This sort of thing just didn't happen to her. After all, she was calm, rational and analytical, constantly thinking and rethinking relationships and situations. Casual relationships just weren't her "thing", so this one-night-stand-thingy was huge.

The hazy mixture of wonderment and lust currently consuming her was too absolutely, insanely, astronomically mind-blowing to think about once, forget twice. She really should've stopped all rational thought years ago. Look at what she'd been missing!

Unfortunately she picked the wrong day to stop thinking.

So lost in this newfound freedom she failed to notice the tightening of his hands around her neck.

At first.

Then haze evaporated as quickly as it had formed, along with her ability to breathe. She gasped and tried to scream. But the man kept squeezing.

Tighter.

Tighter.

Tighter still, until, with the quiet, quick precision of a man who'd done this so many times before, she was dead, slumped across her living room sofa. It had ended as quickly as it began.

Confirming her demise, he quickly and purposefully left the house, returning with the small Army camouflage duffle bag he'd hidden in her front bushes just a few hours before. He knew he wouldn't have been seen then. After all, the rest of the neighborhood was away, earning mediocre salaries at meaningless, deadbeat jobs.

Returning to the scene of the crime, he pulled out a plastic bag. Lifting her slack body, he chuckled wickedly as he stuffed a chicken bone down her throat. After retrieving a dinner plate from the obsessively clean kitchen, he arranged the rest of the food on the plate and finished his set-up, wanting the average observer to believe she had died from choking on dinner. He knew what he was doing and was very thorough; after all, he'd watched her, followed her, studied her patterns to learn her daily routines; he knew what she ate and even the most private details of her life.

Because he knew she was a devout vegan, he used chicken as the supposed murder weapon. After 26 – now 27 – murders without even so much as an inkling of him possibly being the murderer, he'd become excessively smug. He'd "casually slipped up" with each successive murder, revealing more and more "clues" about himself, his habits…and his insanity. These arrogant actions were rationalized, in his mind, as "helping" the police; after all, he felt pity for them – they were trying to catch HIM, the Definitive Serial Killer. Aww…those nice detectives down at the precinct really were trying so hard to catch him. But he was smarter.

And he was good, very good.

He would do it again and again...and he believed they'd never catch him.