Free The Holy Terror by Wayne Allen Sallee

Century Bold Roman on the first page of the Chicagoland section the next morning:
    Grisly killing near Hancock has police stymied
    The Sun-Times , still as sensationalistic as the New York Post even though Rupert Murdoch had sold the paper eighteen months before to start the Fox television network, devoted the entire front page to the murder:
    VAGRANT DISMEMBERED
    NEAR GOLD COAST
    Much the same way a reporter coined the phrase “flying saucer” after interviewing Kenneth Arnold regarding the disks he saw over Mount Rainier in June of 1947, Sun-Times reporter Nora Chvatal rephrased a comment by Det. Lt. Jake Daves of Harrison District Violent Crimes as “Does Chicago have a Pain Killer stalking its streets?” The article was continued inside the tabloid-size paper, a note at the bottom of page one read See DISMEMBER, pg. 7.
    PHASES , an alternative weekly newspaper catering for the most part to the clubs scene on the north side, somehow came into possession of an on the scene photograph, and the editor ran it above the fold on the November 18th issue, borrowing from the Sun-Times in the process.
    In blinding white Baskerville type over a stark scene of blacks and greys, the story was told:
    PAINKILLER:
    Chicago’s got a live one again.
    The Tribune did not pick up on the catchphrase until the next known disappearance, five days later. Someone at the news desk evidently knew that the papers in Gotham sold better when David Berkowitz was referred to as Son of Sam as opposed to the dull-sounding .44 Killer.

    * * *

    Painkiller didn’t sound like there was a psycho out there in the streets. As with moon-faced Berkowitz, or even Jack the Ripper a century ago, the public was mystified and curious at a name like that. Painkiller. A few people were even known to let the word roll off their tongue, see how it sounded aloud.

Chapter Nine

    The words and the pictures and the cold city reality were digested by many that day after the first known murder.
    Victor Tremulis took time out from writing in his journal about what it would feel like if he first masturbated, then slit his wrist, and then drained his blood into the recently emptied shaft, and read what the indifferent print writers and editors had to say about the killer. Or, as Tremulis thought of him, the new kid on the butcher’s block.
    He sat in front of the Wendy’s on Quincy Court, letting the Sports and Business pages scatter like scared pests in the November wind as he concentrated on the story, fascinated.
    He was as curious about murder as he was mutilation.
     
    * * *

    Mike Surfer and Wilma Jerrickson sat near the back of the Marclinn lobby because Mike was involved in one of the three-times-a-day cleaning of his neck shunt.
    The Impact brand portable aspirator box lay on the man’s lap, and at this point, Surfer was doing no more than fiddling with the contents, doing a mock inventory. At times like these, Wilma Jerrickson, known as Grandmother or Gramma to most of the Marclinn’s residents and visitors, thought that Mike Surfer acted like a stubborn child who did not want to clean his room.
    When he had tired of fiddling with the plastic-wrapped aspirator tubing, Mike brought up the subject of the man in the wheelchair killed up by the Cass Hotel. The story in the Sun-Times had said the man’s name was Robert Dolezal. Surfer usually read The Defender , Chicago’s black daily, but the somewhat propagandist, even to blacks, tabloid ignored the Wabash Avenue killing in favor of a front page tirade against President-elect Bush. But if the victim had been black...
    Mike Surfer avoided thinking that Reggie Givens hadn’t been back to the Marclinn in a few days. He told himself upon waking that morning, before seeing the newspaper, that he would wheel on up to the Hard Times tavern later.
    “Somepin about that man getting hisseif kilt in that chair.” Wilma knew that Surfer started most of his conversations with a simple statement.
    “It is hard to believe