COUCH MATINEES

Detective Steve Cooper thought his eyes were doing tricks on him. Sure he had seen the character Regan do it in “The Exorcist”, but to see a body live; the chest against the floor and the shoulder blades facing upward…with the head turned 180 degrees, the dead eyes staring up at him, pleading for justice, was almost too much for the 30 year veteran of the Homicide Squad to take.

He turned away from the sight to see through the window, the C.S.I. team climbing from their van. “Let them figure our how someone could snap a neck and turn it around so perfectly.”

“What was that Steve?” This was from Cooper’s partner for the last five weeks, Edward Young. Everyone called him ‘Eddie’, everyone except Cooper, who insisted upon calling him by his given name, Edward. Cooper wondered if his comment about the C.S.I. was not just in his head and he had said the words out loud. “Nothin’ Edward, whatCHAgot?”

Eddie Young was kneeling by the body, using his latex clad hands to check for some identification on the corpse. So, far he had found nothing in the back pockets on the pants or the side pockets of the jacket the victim wore. He needed to wait for the C.S.I. to clear the body and document its position before he would be able to check the front pants and shirt pocket. “No I.D. so far Coop, and would you PLEASE call me anything but Edward, I told you only my mom calls me that, and if she does, she is pissed.”

“OK ‘chump’ here comes the ‘trace twits’, so we better give them some room to do their job.” “Chump is not what I had in mind you clown…”

As Coop and Eddie walked out of the apartment they gave their first impressions of the crime scene to the C.S.I. techs and then began speaking with the neighbors. What they collected was a lot of information about nothing. The apartment was supposed to be empty; no one heard a sound the night before, even the neighbors whose bedroom wall backed to the living room where the body was found.

“How the hell could they not hear anything?” Eddie mumbled as they left the apartment next door. “Freakin’ walls are so thin you could hear a mouse fart through them, but some guy gets his head turned like a screw-cap and they don’ hear a sound…” “Well Edward, it is the nature of people to not want to be involved when something disturbing happens so close to them.” Coop replied.

Eddie Young looked at his partner and thought he saw a little grin disappearing from his lips. Just as he suspected, Coop was calling him Edward more so to bug him than because he wanted to use the formal name…’just busting my balls’, Young thought.

It had been four days and the body found in room 718 of the BOOTS MOTEL had still not been identified. A search of the FBI fingerprint files had turned up nothing. A full sweep of the local neighborhood shops and bars had not turned up one person who could recognize the face. The Medical Examiner had ruled the death a homicide with the cause being a broken spine. This did not surprise either of the detectives. The victim had certainly not taken his own life by twisting his head around. What did surprise them was that there was not a single mark on the body. No defensive wounds, no markings from restraints, nothing.

Eddie Young and Steve Cooper had just finished another day of knocking on doors and asking questions and were sliding onto bar stools at McCrackie’s Lounge, a hangout for their precinct. Sean McCrackie, son of the founder, moved down the bar towards them and grabbed two Foster Lagers, knowing the drinks of his best customers. Sitting the two beers in front of the detectives, he grabbed a bottle of Pinch from the top shelf and poured Coop his double shot and placed the glass on the bar.

“Tough day gents?” Sean asked. “If you call a body with its head twisted like a cork and four days of no clues tough, then yeah…it has been one tough bitch day.” Coop responded as he shot the Pinch down his throat, put the tumbler back on the bar and indicated to Sean to reload the glass. “I saw the story of a body being found around the corner in the paper but they said nothin’ ‘bout no twisted head.”

“Trying to keep that quiet Sean”, Eddie spoke up, “It is just too weird to be out there. This guys head was twisted 180 degrees…I learned how to snap a guy’s neck in the Marines, but damn…I never knew you could twist it so completely without ripping it off the shoulders.” “Well yeah, unless the person doing the twisting was super-human.” Sean mumbled as he walked down the bar to serve a new customer.

Eddie and Coop looked at each other almost simultaneously shook their heads. “Super-human, yeah we got us an evil Superman out there…sheesh.” Eddie said as he finished off his beer. As he placed his bottle back on the counter his pager began to beep. A second later, Coop’s pager also beeped. They both looked down and recognized the number as their shift commander’s.

Coop grabbed his cell phone and dialed. “Yeah Capt’n, he is right next to me. Only one apiece so far…yeah I had some Pinch, but only, um one…OK, OK, two…the same? They sure? OK, well give me the address.”

Twenty minutes and three mints apiece later, they pulled up in front of the CAFFREY MOTEL and LODGE and saw the squad cars and the CSI van already there. As they walked toward the room where all the activity was taking place they were met by their Captain, Andy Dixon.

Dixon was rumored to be in line for the Chief of Police position when the current chief decided it was time to put down his gun and pick up his fishing rod. “Well Capt’n, what do we have here?” Eddie asked.

“Like I told your partner, it should all look familiar to you two.” As the three men walked into the room, the flurry of activity was moving all around them. It looked totally unorganized but they all knew that, like the activity of a bee hive which looked totally frenzied, everything that was going on in the room was well choreographed.

Lying on the floor in the middle of the room was another body. Once again, the head was twisted perfectly 180 degrees, eyes opened, the dead stare straight at the ceiling. Like with the first body, there did not seem to be a mark anywhere on the back, legs or arms. This was easy to ascertain as unlike the first body found, this one was totally naked. “Damn, now he is stripping them naked?” Coop sighed. One of the CSI techs looked up “Think he was naked in bed when the attacker struck” he said tilting his head to the bed, which looked like a struggle had taken place on it.

“No semen on the sheets, so it was not sexual. We found some hairs and some DNA, it is already on the way to the lab, but the hairs appear to belong to our victim.” The two detectives did their through search of the victims clothing and the suitcase which appeared to not have been unpacked. Again, not one shred of identification could be found.

As they had done with the first case, they checked with the front desk and got a look at the register, to find once again an illegible signature and an out of town address, which when looked into, did not exist.

Back in the squad room later that same night, Eddie Young looked over at Cooper and caught him beginning to nod off. “Hey Coop, why don’t cha head home and catch some sleep and I will finish the paperwork”, the younger detective said. “And miss out on all this fun, no way.” Cooper replied. “What do you think of this Edward? Two guys, in their late 30’s, early 40’s, heads twisted like the cap of a quart bottle of beer, no markings on their bodies at all, no injuries other than their necks being snapped like twigs, both registered with phony addresses, no DNA other than theirs, nothing…like this killer is not even human.”

“Coop, you listening to what you are saying? Not human? C’mon, who are you Sean McCrackie? You believe in ghosts and goblins and superman?” “Well, what the hell…no one is that good that they can surprise two guys, both of whom are almost 200 pounds and 6 feet tall, and snap their necks, twisting it all the way around and not leave ANY evidence…not even a freakin’ broken fingernail.”

It was three weeks and four bodies later and Cooper and Young were no closer to ending the killing. After the third killing, someone had clued in the local newspaper and the details began to leak. The newspapers had latched on to the name “Twistello” and to the chagrin of Detective Steve Cooper, the name stuck.