Free The Devil's Cinema by Steve Lillebuen Page B

was set, and now it was time to bait the hook … My kill room was perfectly prepped. Plastic sheeting taped together and around my table; a large green cloth screwed into the drywall ceiling to shield view of it from my guest’s line of sight, and to shield me too, of course. I now stood but a few feet way from the front door, which I had locked of course. The plan was to wait in the shadow of my curtain until he approached the door and shock him with the stun baton followed by asleeper hold that would sap away his consciousness so that I could tape him up and set him on my table
.
    Clark’s eyes flared as he kept reading. He knew what was coming next: Johnny was going to show up at that garage and be killed by Mark Twitchell.
    But that wasn’t what happened.
    Apparently, Johnny wasn’t the first victim.
    The document described another attack on October 3, the Friday
before
Johnny disappeared. During the earlier attempt, the attacker’s stun baton had failed and the victim had fought back, reached for the man’s gun, and somehow managed to escape.
    Clark realized they had to find the surviving victim. And the Twitchell file had suddenly become something much bigger: a serial killer investigation. Thank God the detectives had the foresight to order twenty-four-hour surveillance, he thought. Now that the surveillance team had confirmed a positive sighting of Twitchell at his parents’ house shortly after Clark’s visit, he was at least being watched while they gathered more evidence.
    A T THE OTHER END of the office, Johnson drew his own conclusions as he read the diary. About halfway through the text, he noted how the author began paying homage to a young woman:
    Oh my sweet Laci. Just in case you are wondering, Laci is not my wife or my daughter. Laci is my ex-girlfriend. On paper she’s the complete opposite of everything that should be my perfect match. She has two small dogs that she treats like children and those people usually drive me up the wall … But I love her uncontrollably and always will
.
    The diary described his encounters with “Laci” at the movies while his wife, “Tess,” was at home and caring for their baby, “Zoe.” He later received a speeding ticket on the way to the woman’s home for a late-night rendezvous. The diary then evolved into an erotic narrative with an entire page devoted to the extramarital affair.
    Johnson thought it was pretty clear what was going on: Twitchell simply changed the names, but everything else was true. It meant Traci had beendownplaying her contact with Twitchell. Perhaps she was embarrassed about having an affair with a married man. Little did she know, however, that the object of her affection was secretly writing about being a wannabe serial killer with a lust for blood and violence.
    C LARK TOOK THE DIARY home with him that night, as did every other detective on the file. For the first time in his thirty-year career, he was overwhelmed with evidence in a homicide file. Reading the diary was an odyssey, a startling descent into the criminal persona, with the depths of human depravity presented to the reader in the form of entertainment. A detective usually never knew this level of detail about their suspects. Eyewitnesses were unreliable, even an admission from an accused was often embellished or twisted in some way. But what Clark and the team believed they had found this time was a virtual blow-by-blow account, an honest and full confession, relishing in every sordid detail. They had total insight into what the killer was likely thinking. Twitchell had written an extremely comprehensive account of how Johnny was killed. The descriptions were disgusting, some too graphic to repeat, words strung together about unspeakable and grotesque acts. Twitchell wrote at length about the difficulty in trying to hide Johnny’s body. He had scoured the river valley for the perfect spot, but there