Twisted Justice

By Michele Acker

Excerpt

Monica watched dispassionately as the man sat up in bed screaming, noting her own reactions and writing them down on her chart. “Heart rate increased by ten beats per minute,” she murmured as she wrote. “Hmm. Use to be thirty. I wonder if he's become immune?” Looking up, she watched him go through the rest of the cycle. She couldn’t hear him through the sound proof glass, but she could see the terror on his face, the way his body curled in agony, the self inflicted scratches along his arms.

Good, I hope he suffers. I want him to suffer. The same way Jenny did.

When the cycle finished right on time, as it always did, she noted the time down on the second chart, the one she showed to people. She had begun a radical and still experimental treatment to rehabilitate rapists and murderers, and there were many people, government officials included, who were very interested in how this case turned out. After years of study and hard work and convincing all the right people that her treatment wouldn’t physically harm the patient, she’d just this year been allowed to request a volunteer from the prison.

The man she’d chosen, David Blain, had been tried and convicted the previous year for the rape and murder of Elizabeth Pearson, a thirty-year-old stockbroker from Los Angeles. But he was more than that, much more. Though never caught or tried, he was also the man who raped and murdered her sister, Jennifer, twelve years before.

No one knew of course, especially not her superiors. If they had, they’d never have let her near the man. In fact, if they’d known she had a private agenda, they’d never have given her funding in the first place. And a private agenda was exactly what she had.

It had taken her most of the twelve years since her sister’s death to find the killer. He was smart. Smart enough to elude the police for all those years. He’d moved to another state, changed his name, his appearance, his career, everything. And since the police never found any fingerprints, they couldn’t track him. But he could never change. He was a slave to his proclivities, his appetites, and that made him predictable. She knew he would rape again, so she watched and waited. When it happened, she gave the police anonymous tips so they could arrest him.

And while she looked, she went to school, studied, learned all she could about how the criminal mind and memory worked, finally coming up with a way to extract the memories of anyone, even a corpse, and transferring those memories to someone else. It worked better than she could have imagined. It came time to share her ideas with those in power. But she had to be extremely careful or they would see right through her.

What she suggested was rehabilitation. What she wanted was revenge.