The coroner ruled it suicide. Victor ruled it murder.
Victor didn’t speak. He never did. Words were for the living. He moved forward in a single fluid motion, the cord slipping over Leonard’s head before the lawyer could raise his hands. Victor crossed the ends, pulled tight, and stepped close—chest to back, mouth by ear.
The silk cord was the color of dried rust. Victor Han loved that about it. Not the garish red of fresh blood, but the deep, arterial brown-red of a thing that had lived, pulsed, and been silenced. He called it his “little necktie,” and he kept it coiled in a velvet-lined box beside his bed, next to a photograph of his mother. Red Garrote Strangler
He placed a single item on Leonard’s chest: a small, hand-painted tile he had made in his workshop. It bore the image of a marigold. Marigolds were the flowers of the dead in Mexican tradition. A tribute to Maribel Soto.
His victims were not random. He was not a beast of impulse. Each name was drawn from a small, leather-bound ledger he kept in the false bottom of his wardrobe. The ledger contained one hundred and twelve names. Each name belonged to a man who had, in Victor’s meticulous judgment, avoided justice for the sin of cruelty against a woman. The coroner ruled it suicide
Leonard made a sound like a teakettle losing steam. His legs buckled. Victor went down with him, knees on the man’s shoulders, never loosening the cord. He watched the lawyer’s face in the reflection of a dark mirror by the door—purple, then blue, then the gray of old meat.
Victor was their reckoning.
The newspapers had given him the name six months ago. Red Garrote Strangler. Victor found it vulgar but accurate. The red was for the cord, yes, but also for the rage. The garrote was for the intimacy. And the strangler… well, that was simply the truth of his craft.