Free The Pain Scale by Tyler Dilts

one of the chairs at the dining table, then went into the kitchen. I poured myself half a glass of Grey Goose and topped it with orange juice, thought about grabbing something to eat, decided against it, and went back into the dining room. I spread photos, notes, and reports across the table.
    I started with their faces.
    Sara.
    Bailey.
    Jacob.
    The question was the same one we’d been asking for two days. Why?
    We had the missing wall safe as a possible motive for Sara’s murder. But why, then, the children? It was hard to believe they’d been murdered to eliminate them as witnesses. But what else was there? The MO matched that theory. But the kids couldn’t have testified. They wouldn’t have been any threat at all. Didn’t the killers know that?
    Maybe not. Contrary to what is depicted in popular culture, murder is rarely committed by geniuses, evil or otherwise. Killers are often shrewd but not highly intelligent. Almost all of the time, the simplest explanation is the one that turns out to be the truth.
    What was the simplest explanation here?
    Thrill killers, just in it for the visceral pleasure provided by extreme violence? Then why not torture the kids?
    A heist targeting the floor safe? Why, then, the extremity of what was done to Sara?
    Could it have been some combination of the two, as Marty had suggested?
    I wound up staying up most of the night searching for other possible theories. There was nothing else viable that I could put together with the evidence at hand. I couldn’t make sense of the story. Not yet.

    My father died when I was five. Among the things he left behind was a garage full of tools. For years after he was gone, I would nail and hammer and saw and generally destroy just about anythingI could get my hands on. For some reason I’ve never fully understood, I particularly loved sawing wood. Tree limbs, two-by-fours, broken broomsticks. Any scrap I could find, I would clamp in the vise on the workbench and cut. There was one old wood saw that was my favorite. I had no idea of its true age, but when I was a boy, it seemed older than anything I’d ever held in my own hands. Except for the teeth, which were polished to a fine gleam by constant use, the blade was the deep dull gray of aged steel. The handle was worn around the gripping surface, the bare wood itself almost as smooth as the varnish still adorning the corners and sides; and I took particular joy in imagining that it had been my father’s hand that had done the rubbing and wearing, and that my own hand was continuing what he had begun. I realize, of course, that the memory of the scent of sawdust, the soreness of my shoulder, and the tremendous sense of accomplishment I would feel as another piece of two-by-four clacked to the cement floor are stand-ins for the real memories I never had the chance to form.
    But I still have that saw.
    Late that night, after I’d turned the case over in my head as many times and in as many different ways as I could, I finally drifted off into a fitful sleep. I dreamed, as I often do, of pain. In the dream, my arm and shoulder and neck feel as though they are being rent by dozens of dull and jagged claws. The pain is greater than any I have ever felt and greater than any I can imagine, and in the disturbing logic of the dream, I will do anything to make it stop.
    Anything.
    I stumble out of my bedroom and into the garage of my childhood memories. From above the workbench, I pull my father’s saw from its place on the Peg-Board, rip my shirt off, and begin sawing at my shoulder. The teeth bite into my flesh, and somehow I know that this is the only answer for the agony. As I cut, the pain doesn’t worsen, but it changes. Each stroke of the bladecauses another burning surge that makes me scream louder than the last, but I continue.
    With each stroke, the blade rips deeper into my flesh. Blood spurts forward and back with the motion of the saw. Ragged bits of muscle and sinew clog the teeth.
    Even