The Preston Predator

Amy had grown to love the feel of the sidewalk under her flats on her morning walk to work. Two years ago, everything about the tiny town of Preston had irked her. She had resented her parents for uprooting her and dragging her to the middle of nowhere, but somehow Preston had stolen her heart, and by the time she had graduated high school she no longer felt the need to flee back to society.

She took a deep breath of the fresh mountain air and paused just outside the bookstore. The morning sun had fully crested the eastern peaks, casting long shadows down Main street. She looked up at the shop sign over the door, Loved Books. She smiled, and reached out to pull the door open. Just as the little bell inside chimed, Amy's heart jumped. A large pane of glass next to the door had been shattered and was covered in plastic.

Her mind was racing as she entered the peaceful shop. The calming aroma of dusty books with yellowed pages struggled to slow her thoughts. She found her boss, and the store owner, Mr. Clark, sitting behind the counter smiling and nodding at a young couple. Amy didn't recognize them, so they had to be tourists.

"Yes, yes," Mr. Clark was saying. "You'll have to check with the curiosities store next door for more information about that."

"Thank you," the young man said, putting his hand on the small of the woman's back. He peered at Mr. Clark's name tag. "Ben, thank you Ben." He nodded at Amy's boss and turned with the young lady to leave.

"Thanks for coming in," Mr. Clark called out, forcing a smile.

As the couple left Amy caught the young man's gaze lingering on her a little too long, his eyes darting up and down along her body. Amy rushed past him to the desk and scowled in his direction as the bell over the door signaled their departure.

"More tourists asking about that darned Prescott Predator, can you believe it?" Mr. Clark sighed. "Anyway, good morning," he added cheerily. He grunted and slid off the barstool he usually sat on behind the counter. "How was your walk this morning?"

Amy frowned at him and glanced at the plastic covering the broken window. "What happened? Is everything OK?"

"Oh, that," Mr. Clark said, rolling his eyes. "There was a break-in last night. The security camera caught someone smashing the window, climbing in, and leaving just a few minutes later. By the time the police arrived the burglar was long gone." He sighed and stared at the broken window. "I've got someone coming later this afternoon to replace it, but if you don't mind watching the store for me I need to run home and shower. I've been here since four in the morning."

"Oh wow," Amy whispered. "Yeah, sure. Go on. I'll take inventory and..."

"Don't bother," he said. "I already did. If they stole anything, it wasn't off the shelves."

"Huh." Amy turned around and stared into the long, narrow shop with its staggered rows of mismatched shelves. "Could it have been something we didn't inventory yet? Something from the back?"

"That's what I suspect," he said. "Maybe you can go through the boxes and see if the counts match."

"Sounds good Mr. Clark," she said. "Go take a nice shower. Don't worry about the store."

He smiled at her. "I told you, you can call me Ben."

He was at least three times her age. She crinkled her nose and shook her head. "See you later Mr. Clark," she chuckled.

She heard the bell chime as her boss left, but she was already ducking behind the curtain that separated the customer floor from the back room, slipping past the "Employees Only" sign. It was still strange to her, finally being allowed in an "Employees Only" area. Something inside her tingled with excitement every time she went into the back room.

Amy flicked on the light and took in the extra thick dusty atmosphere. There were half a dozen boxes of donations, each with a little sheet of paper taped to the side where she had scribbled an initial count and listed off the contents, mostly just the titles of the books and the names of the people who had donated them, if they were known.

She sighed. There were probably over a hundred books between the six or so boxes, and none of the boxes looked disturbed. In and out in a few minutes? The thief would have had to dump the boxes out or know exactly which one contained the desired book.

The door jingled and Amy rushed back out into the front of the store. She immediately recognized Mike James, the owner of their neighbor store, Preston Curiosities.

"Good morning Amy," he called out. "I heard about the robbery and wanted to see if everything was alright."

Amy shrugged and pursed her lips. He was an older man like Mr. Clark, but where Mr. Clark was kind and warm, Mike James was slimy with eyes that made her want to hide.

"Scary to see a neighboring shop broken into. It makes me wonder if I need to put bars on my shop's windows, you know?"

Amy tilted her head a little and nodded disinterestedly, wondering how to get him to leave sooner than he was planning.

For a moment, Mike didn't say anything. He stuck his hands in his pockets and wandered around the front of the store, peeking around the corners of bookshelves and gazing into the back of the room like a rat pretending not to be looking for food. "Doesn't look like they stole much," he muttered.

Amy shrugged. "Mr. Clark took inventory. Said everything is still here."

Mike James frowned. "Interesting," he hummed. His head was down in thought for a moment. He peered up at Amy suspiciously, then looked to the side. "Well, if you find out what they were after, you can let me know." He smiled the way a door-to-door salesman does when he's sure he's about to close the deal.

"Sure," Amy said. "Have a nice day."

He looked around once more and raised his eyebrows. "Ben left you here all alone after a robbery?" He sounded incredulous.

"He'll be back any minute," she lied, instantly regretting it. She should have claimed the police were nearby or something.

He stood a moment longer, sizing her up. It made her skin crawl. After a long, agonizing pause, he tipped an invisible hat at her and grinned. "Maybe it was the Preston Predator that broke in." He winked and turned to the door, leaving the jingling bell sound echoing in her mind as she retreated back to the Employees Only curtain.

That man had built his entire livelihood around the fictional Prescott Predator. Sure, for the last thirty years the area had seen an unusual number of disappearances, but Preston was in the middle of a huge forest and it was a growing town. People disappeared in forests all over the world, not just in Preston. More people meant more disappearances, but Mike James wanted people to believe it was a monster or creature dragging its victims away into the woods because that was a story that brought in tourists, and only tourists were stupid enough to go to his ridiculous shop.

It took a full hour before Amy found anything missing from the boxes in the back. "Ah ha!" she cried when she finally discovered the missing book. It was part of a box donated last week by Chester Jones, an old retired detective whose wife, Mary used to come and browse the bookstore for hours on end. Amy breathlessly remembered the obituary after Mary's body had been found mangled in the forest almost a month ago. She knew Chester was heartbroken. She felt tears coming and wiped them with her palms.

The box was missing a copy of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit. The store already had several copies of this popular book. She shivered. Why had the burglar specifically taken Chester's donated copy of The Hobbit? She looked into the box again and found an envelope at the bottom. She pulled it out and opened it. Inside there was a note. She read it to herself.

"Please forgive me for breaking your window. When you learn what I needed the book for I hope you will not press charges. I am trying to save lives. I hope you will understand. Signed, Betty."

Amy had to think for a moment. She knew a Betty, but from where? School? "Oh!" she cried out loud. Betty was a stocky middle aged woman who worked at Preston Curiosities next door with Mike. She had been in a few days earlier asking about book ciphers and spent hours combing through the shelves looking for something specific. She had seemed flustered then, more flustered than any bookstore patron should ever be, which is why the incident had been burned into Amy's mind. "Book ciphers..." Amy whispered. Then she remembered that Betty had bought a copy of The Hobbit.

The bell chimed out in the front of the store. It sounded more distant and muted than usual, like the memory of a bell ringing in a tiny church. Questions assaulted her mind with the breathtaking energy of soldiers fighting for their lives. Something was wrong, and somehow the bookstore and gotten wrapped up in it. She reached a hand out to grab the curtain but froze before pulling it aside. The quiet on the other side bothered her. Hairs on the back of her neck stood on end. Her skin was shrinking around her, pulling tight until she couldn't move or breathe.

The curtain flashed open and Amy screamed. Mike James was surprisingly spry for an older man. He tackled her to the ground, throwing both of them into the short wall of boxes and books which crashed to the ground around them. He held a firm, rough hand against her mouth and clutched her neck with the other, pressing a knee into her gut. She reached out with both hands, clawing at his face while she writhed and squirmed. He had to weigh at least twice what she did. Her throat was completely closed and her lungs were burning. She kicked and punched. Finally she snagged part of his face with her fingernails but she couldn't see what. Had he turned out the lights or... She was going limp.

"Police!" An authoritative female voice was screaming loudly. "Put your hands up!"

To Amy the voice sounded far away. There was a crack followed by a series of loud, furious clicks. Mike's whole body went rigid and shook before collapsing on Amy, his head slamming into the hard ground beside hers. She was lightheaded and dazed. Everything was hazy and dreamlike. His weight was smothering her. Finally he was pulled off her. All of the tense muscles in her body went limp and she let her face fall to one side while her eyes slipped closed.

"Ma'am? Ma'am?" It was a man's voice, but it was muffled. Someone was grabbing her by the shoulders and shaking her. "Call an ambulance," the man said.

***

Amy woke up in a stretcher. Mr. Clark was looking down at her. "Amy!" he cried. "You're awake! Thank goodness!"

She was outside, at the back of an ambulance. Confusion overwhelmed her. She couldn't move her head. It felt like her shoulders, neck, and head were being hugged by a gentle but firm boa constrictor. She tried to look around with just her eyeballs.

"We need you to keep still," a gentle voice said.

Amy looked. There was a nurse smiling at her. She looked back to Mr. Clark. "Did you bring the police?" Amy asked. The words felt scrapy and coarse in her stinging throat.

He shook his head. "I came when someone called and said the police were raiding the store," he laughed. "I thought you called them."

A small, quiet voice piped up off to the side. "It was me," it said.

Amy strained her eyes to get a look. It was Betty. Her short gray hair framed kind, curious eyes that smiled effortlessly. She held a stack of papers and books against her plump chest.

"I'm Betty Jones," she said. "Chester was my father."

Chester! The stolen book! Amy wanted to ask a hundred questions, possibly more. Her mind felt too cloudy to pick just one though. She looked up at Mr. Clark, who was looking more perplexed than she'd ever seen him.

"I remember Chester," Mr. Clark said. "His wife Mary loved browsing the bookstore."

Betty nodded. "My mother. She loved books." Amy saw Betty's arms tense, crinkling some of the papers in her stack.

"Chester just made a donation last week I think," Mr. Clark said. "So..."

Betty looked ready to cry. She nodded again. "He's gone," she choked. She clenched her jaw and looked over at one of the nearby police cruisers. "Murdered."

"Oh," Mr. Clark gasped. "I'm sorry."

Betty took a deep breath in through her nostrils, still flexing her jaw muscles under her soft cheeks. "Thanks," she said at last, tears dancing on her eyes. "He knew it was coming though," she said. She hefted the bunch of papers and books in her arms. "He left a whole lot of notes all about the man he knew would kill him." She smiled. "Only problem was that he wrote them all in code and I only just figured out how to read them last night."

Mr. Clark looked confused.

Amy smiled and whispered, "The Hobbit."

Betty nodded. "The copy you sold me helped, but it wasn't right. Parts of the message decoded correctly, but other parts were nonsense, a garbled mess." She carefully slipped a sheet of paper free of the stack and held it out to Mr. Clark.

He took it. "It's just numbers, lots and lots of numbers and dashes."

"Right," Betty said. "It's a book cipher. The numbers are in groups representing page numbers, line numbers, and how far into the line to count to get the correct letter. He encoded the message using an original 1937 first edition copy of The Hobbit. Famously, there were lots of revisions made in later copies, so more recent versions wouldn't work. I needed the original."

"And he donated it to us last week," Mr. Clark said, shaking his head.

"I'm sorry I stole it," she said. "It was late and I didn't have time to wait. I had a feeling I needed to move quickly." She pulled the book out of the stack and held it out. "You can have it back. It's probably worth a small fortune," she added. "You should check and see what you can get for it. These are pretty rare I think."

"So what did the notes say?" Mr. Clark asked, taking the book and handing back the page of numbers.

"Even in retirement my father was working hard to close a slew of cold cases that he believed were connected to Mike James. He knew he had collected enough evidence to put him away on several charges of kidnapping, but not murder. I guess Mike eventually caught on to my father's sleuthing and threatened to kill my mother if my father continued pursuing the case. So dad had to back off and record what he could in these notes, knowing that if Mike ever suspected anything he'd come after mom."

"Why did your dad let you work for Mike if he knew the man was a serial killer?"

Betty smiled. "He didn't know I was working for him. In fact, at first Mike didn't know I was Chester's daughter. But..." She blinked and a tear streamed down her cheek. "When he found out, that was when he went after mom. He thought dad had planted me as a spy to gather evidence." She shifted the papers to work an arm free and wipe her face with her sleeve. "He could have killed me," she gasped, her whole frame shaking. "But instead he went after mom."

Mr. Clark moved around Amy's stretcher and put an arm around Betty. "It's not your fault," he said. "Mike was a bad man."

Betty nodded and sniffled, rubbing her face against her arm. Amy could see some of her makeup smearing off. "Well," she said, "the police have all my father's notes now. These are just copies I made for myself." She nodded down at the stack. "Hopefully with my father's help they can make sure he stays behind bars for the rest of his miserable life."

"There's still one thing I don't understand," Mr. Clark said. "If your father didn't have enough evidence to convict Mike before, how could his notes help now?"

Betty smiled darkly. "My father did have enough evidence to convict Mike, he just didn't realize it." She flipped through the papers and gingerly pulled one out. "At one point dad saw that Mike was running a fan website for the Preston Predator in which he had details about some of the disappearances and murders that only the killer would know. Before dad could report the site to the police Mike took the site down. Dad never said anything to the police because he thought the evidence was gone forever. Dad didn't know about the internet archive project, the Wayback Machine." She smiled. "We retrieved the archived site data and the police have subpoenaed all of the information required to connect Mike James to the site and prove he was the author."