To: Det. R. Kraftman detkraftman#scpd.com
Date: June 21, 2018
Re: My recent phone calls
I am writing this out to send to you as I have been unable to reach you by phone or visiting the station, and the amount of info I need to give you is more than I can fit into a 30 second voicemail. My understanding is that you are the detective assigned to the murder investigations of Clint Perkins and Milo Foster. I read today that you have arrested a suspect in connection with both of these murders. I do not know anything about Milo Foster or his murder, but I can tell you I have clear evidence that Clint Perkins was killed by a man named Peter Barker. I am attaching a video to this email that might be self-explanatory, but I will provide a detailed account below of what I know and what I’m afraid is going to happen next.
Peter, or as we always called him, Petey, was a friend of mine and Clint’s since we were all 8 and in third grade together. Me and Clint were best friends pretty much since birth, and from the outside it probably looked like we weren’t friends with Petey at all, but that was just because we were always picking at him. The thing was, he was always so gullible. He wasn’t stupid, not exactly, but he just seemed to fall for everything we told him, and we could get him to do most anything.
For example, Clint once convinced him that Clint’s father, who was a drunk who had left town when we were infants, was actually a deep cover CIA operative in Moscow. Another time, we convinced him that my cousin had sent a new kind of chocolate pop rocks that were being sold in England. It was rabbit shit. After just a couple of minutes of convincing, Petey ate it down with a grimace.
I know that sounds bad. And looking back, especially now, I wish we had never treated him like that. But he made it so easy, and we were kids. And I will say, when he left town at twelve, we really did miss him. That’s what made it so hard when he came back our senior year of high school.
Petey had been a jolly, nervous kid with a high-pitched laugh and too much baby fat when he left. When we saw him sitting in homeroom the first day of 12th grade, we didn’t even recognize him at first. He had shot up to well over six feet, with thin, pale features and a perpetually somber expression. When we approached him between classes though, he brightened up and gave us quick hugs. He told us that he thought we’d forgotten about him, his voice deep and rumbly in a way that made it even harder to associate him with that little boy we had last hung out with.
But, he was still Petey, and between missing him and feeling some guilt over how we had treated him before, we tried to restart our friendship. I want to stress that we really did try. But it seemed like everything about him that had been weird or off-putting before had just been magnified in the intervening years.
He was very socially awkward. That was nothing new, but now it took the form of him alternating between being sadly creepy and aggressively rude. We took him to a couple of parties, and aside from scaring off every girl in a 100 yard radius, he almost got his ass kicked for talking shit three different times.
And it wasn’t like we could just drift off and leave him to self-destruct his social life either. He would glom onto me or Clint any time he was around, following us relentlessly and bringing down our own stock by association. We started trying to just ditch him and avoid him, but he always managed to hunt us down. That phrase…”hunt us down”…has a different meaning for me now. That crazy motherfucker.
Sorry, I’ll try to edit this before I send it if I have time. Just very upset right now. Anyway, when we realized that ditching him wasn’t the answer, we started trying to come up with some way to make him want to not be around us. No idea seemed good enough, and we knew we would likely have only one shot before he caught on. For a normal person, figuring out your “friends” are trying to drive you away would do the trick on its own, but as we were figuring out more and more, Petey wasn’t normal.
Then the murder happened. When Milo Foster got killed, it was big news in our town. Not that we don’t have murders, as you well know, but it was just the weirdness of it. The neck wounds, the blood being drained…hell, even the newspaper was calling the unknown murderer “the Vampire Killer”, although I guess that sounds more like someone who kills vampires really.
In any case, it gave me an idea.
We had avoided being mean to Petey or trying to trick him since he had come back to town, and it was hard to say if he was as gullible as he had been when he was younger. But one night when we were drinking and avoiding Petey’s texts, Clint and I were talking about the murder and it suddenly hit me. We should convince Petey that we killed the guy.
Even drunk, we knew that was potentially dangerous. We didn’t want to get in any actual trouble with the law, so we needed to either have proof we couldn’t have done it or make up such an outlandish story for Petey that no one else would believe it and we could play it off as either a joke or a lie if Petey tried to go to the cops.
I remember Clint busting out laughing when I suggested we convince him that we were vampires and that Milo Foster was our latest victim, and it started me cracking up too. But as we continued to talk and drink, the idea hung around, and over the next few days we kept talking about it, less and less as a joke and more as the beginning stages of a plan.
This is what we did. Stage One was smaller stuff in front of Petey. Clint made a point of having a bad reaction to pizza with garlic on it, saying he had developed a bad allergy. I made veiled statements to Clint in front of Petey about how my mother was still pissed that I wouldn’t try going to church any more since I had gotten so sick walking in last year. And both of us made a point of letting him see these silver pendants we started wearing, making a big show of trying to hide them after he had a chance to spot them. This was all stupid, obvious shit that wouldn’t work on most people, but if the obvious stuff wasn’t going to work on him, the whole plan was fucked anyway.
But it did. It took a couple of weeks, but Petey started acting different. He was still glomming hard, but now he was more quiet and he seemed to be watching us a lot more closely. We had a big homecoming party coming up in just over a week, so we decided it was time to escalate things into Stage Two and see if we couldn’t get rid of him for good.
After a lot of debate, we decided that Stage Two would be all me. We arranged for Petey to come over to hang out at my house, that I needed to talk to him. I then told my mother to just send Petey up to my room when he got there, but to please not disturb us after that. Petey was going through some stuff, I told her, and we were going to talk it out.
When Petey walked into my bedroom, the shades were drawn and the only light in the room came from my bathroom. I sat up in bed, trying to act surprised and sleepy, yelling for Petey to come in and shut the door in a hushed, nearly frantic tone. I leapt out of bed and slid home the deadbolt I had just installed on the door that morning and which would have to go as soon as he left, as my parents were really serious about their “no locked doors” policy.
I made a big show of looking upset and telling him that I had overslept and I didn’t want him to find out about it this way. I said I’d had a plan as to how I was going to tell him today and not make him scared, and fuck, now it was ruined. I said this as I was trying to gather up a bottle on my computer desk that was half-filled with pig’s blood. I was doing a terrible job acting—way over the top. But while I was busy internally cringing, he was eating that shit up.
He put his hand on my shoulder and told me to calm down. Told me he was my friend and that we could talk about whatever had me so upset. The poor, creepy fucker. I actually felt bad for him. But it had to be done, so I sat down and started.
I told him that close to a year earlier, Clint and I had gone up to his Uncle Mark’s cabin for the day. We were just planning on fishing and hanging out, but then a little after dark, Mark had shown up. He was acting weird, but it was his cabin, so we tried to play it cool. Cooked some fish, played some video games, and we were getting ready to leave when he locked the door. I didn’t go into the gory details (which I didn’t have because it was all made up), but Mark wound up attacking us and we woke up with bite marks on our neck. We had thought about going to the police, half convinced he had drugged and sexually assaulted us, but embarrassment and the family relation led us to keeping it quiet.
Over the next few days, we started noticing changes in ourselves, and then on the third day, the sunlight began hurting us. That night, an envelope was slid under our doors with our names on it. Inside each was a silver pendant that contained what appeared to contain patch of dried blood—we assumed Mark’s, but we didn’t know. There was also a slip of paper that just said “Wear it and it will protect you against the light and the hunger.”
And the necklace had worked. By the end of the week, we had developed a hunger that food couldn’t satisfy, and while the urge to attack people was strong, wearing the necklace usually controlled it enough that we could get by on pig’s blood. At this point I had gestured to the bottle, feeling compelled to use the prop after the hassle involved in getting it in the first place. And while direct sunlight made us uncomfortable, as long as we had the necklace we wouldn’t burn.
Now during all of this, Petey is just staring, taking it all in like it’s the most important thing he’s ever heard. Hell, to him maybe it was. But at this point he did ask why he hadn’t seen us wearing the necklaces in the gym locker room. The truth was because this was all pulled from our asses within the last couple of weeks and he had been in gym class with us for months, but thankfully we had thought up a response to that already.
I told him that we didn’t want to get made fun of or draw attention to ourselves, so we would hide it in our underwear or a pocket during gym. As long as we were touching it or it was in our physical proximity, it would work. That lead into my next thing, which was the part we had worked the hardest on to get ready.
I told him that mirrors worked fine for us, but video cameras would only see us if we were wearing the necklace. I knew this was a lot for him to take in and try to believe, and so I had set up a safe way for him to see proof. I led him into my bathroom, where I had a computer monitor sitting on the counter. I showed him that it was connected by a long hdmi cable to the laptop on my bed, and the laptop had a camera.
Because I wanted him to be safe, I explained, he would lock himself in the bathroom and watch the monitor. Once I knew he was secure, I would take off the necklace while he watched, and he would see what happened. Trying to sound worried, I told him that I thought I would have enough self-control to get the pendant back on without any problem, but he was not to come out until I said it was okay and he could see me again on the monitor.
I expected to get some kind of argument or complaint. For him to start laughing or get mad at me for trying to trick him like the old days. Instead, he just looked at me silently for several seconds. When he spoke, his deep voice was grave.
“You sure you want to keep doing this?”
I was momentarily confused. “Well, yeah, man. I want you to see proof so you know I’m not joking around. And I have more I need to tell you.”
Again he was silent for a few moments, and his expression looked a little sad as he nodded. “Okay. Show me then.”
I took him back into the bathroom and shut the door. Once I heard him lock it, I went back in front of the laptop and started the video.
The key to the video was keeping it short and consistent. There was no sound, mainly to avoid him yelling something and it not showing up on the video. And I had recorded the entire thing just the day before at the same time of day, making sure that the lighting and position of things in the room were kept close to identical. In the video, I strip off my clothes except for the pendant—I really hated that part, but Clint said it would help sell it and make it a lot easier to do the special effects that were needed. Since I was the one doing the special effects, I saw his point.
Basically, I just used software to wipe myself from part of the video, so that what you see is that after I make a big show of taking off the necklace and throwing it on the bed, I disappear for about fifteen seconds until I suddenly reappear as I’m bending down and touching the necklace again. Then I put my clothes back on and turn off the camera before yelling that it’s okay for him to come out.
Petey came out immediately, and I expected a big reaction, be it fear or anger or excitement…but he looked pretty much as he had before seeing the video. It was odd, but I decided to just push through to the end.
I asked him if he believed me and he nodded that he did. I told him that the reason I was telling him all this, trusting him with our secret, is because we cared about him too much to put him at risk any longer. That we knew that the pendants worked most of the time, but we knew that occasionally they were overpowered by our evil, vampiric hunger.
Six months ago, I had woken up covered in the blood of a poor homeless woman. When I had talked to Clint about it, I found out he had attacked someone the month prior. We were disgusted by it, but we just pledged to help each other stay strong and not hurt anyone else. But then…as Petey had probably heard…Milo Foster happened. I told him that I would spare him the details (which I honestly didn’t know beyond that one article), but that we had been the ones that killed him.
Again, no real change in his expression. I wasn’t sure if he was buying it or not, but I was in the home stretch. I told him that we were coming to accept that we were dangerous to be around. We still didn’t know what we were going to do, but we couldn’t keep putting him at risk. Clint and I were in agreement that after he left my house today, we weren’t going to have further contact with him other than saying hello at school. I told him that Clint was too broken up about it to be here in person, but he could call and confirm everything with him.
He didn’t look upset by any of this really, but when he spoke, his voice trembled. “I…I understand. I appreciate you thinking about me, and I’ll respect your wishes. I really do hope the two of you find a way to control it or reverse it. I’ll miss you a lot.” Suddenly I saw a trace of tears in his eyes, and I was afraid he was going to lose it. But instead, he just backed away from me slowly, unlocked the door, and left.
That was on a Sunday, and I found out later that he had called Clint briefly, who told him it was all true. Clint told me he had been afraid he was going to mess it all up, but he managed to keep from laughing and hung up quickly. The following day Petey wasn’t at school. We found out later in the week that he had transferred across town, and before the school year was out he had moved away again. We felt bad, but we were also relieved, and if I’m honest, a little proud that we had pulled it off.
That was over three years ago, and I haven’t thought much about Petey since. I’ve just finished up my Junior year of college, and while Clint stayed back in town to work at his mother’s store, we still kept in touch. He still was one of my best friends.
When I found out on Monday about Clint’s murder, I was devastated. Not just because he was killed, but that he was killed in such a savage and bizarre fashion. I had no idea who would want to do something like that, and when his mother texted me that you had caught his killer, it made even less sense. A random junkie just happened to kill Clint in his own home? No sign of a break-in or anything stolen, and the killer had come prepared with not only some object to stab him repeatedly in the chest, but a can of gasoline as well?
I didn’t express my doubts to Clint’s mother, but when she then texted that the man was also being charged with Milo Foster’s murder as well, I felt a chill. First, because it made so little sense. Meaning no disrespect to your investigation, but it’s fucking stupid. Second, because it made me think about Petey.
I tried to find Petey on the internet. Social media, address lookups, you name it. No sign of him at all. I tried to tell myself that I was being paranoid, that my guilty conscience and my grief were making me crazy. Then two hours ago I got an envelope slid under my door. Only this time, it wasn’t a pendant from a made-up vampire. It was a USB drive containing a single video file.
Petey had clearly set up the camera before Clint came into the room--the angle was high up and showed everything clearly. I recognized it as Clint’s bedroom, and while I had known Clint was killed at home, I didn’t know exactly where until I watched it. I felt dread crawling up my spine as I watched Clint come in and flop down on the bed. After only a few minutes of shifting around on the bed, he looked like he was asleep.
I wanted to scream a warning as I saw Petey slowly come out of the closet and inch closer to Clint. Suddenly, with alarming quickness and grace, he leapt on top of him. Clint woke immediately and began yelling, but Petey remained silent. While he tried to struggle and get Petey off of him, it was no use. Petey was much bigger and stronger, and it didn’t take long for him pin Clint’s arms underneath his knees. That’s when he pulled out the wooden stake.
I couldn’t see Clint’s face well at that distance, but I could hear him screaming. “Oh fuck! Oh no! Shit! Petey! No! I’m not a vampire! It was a fucking joke, man! Please don’t do thi-“ He was cut off as Petey began to slam the stake into his chest once, twice, five times. At first there was wet gurgling, but by the third blow Clint was silent.
When he got up off the bed, Petey turned to the camera, his face still solemn as he spoke. “Better safe than sorry.” Then he goes back to the closet, pulls out a gas can, and starts soaking Clint’s body with gasoline.
That’s where the video ends.
My hands are shaking as I write this. I’m about to attach the video and send it on to you. Not trying to be a dick, but I haven’t heard something from you by in the morning, I’m going to the newspaper. You’ll have all the evidence you need to lock that sick fuck up when you find him. I don’t know if he really thinks we’re vampires or if this is all some sick revenge for him. Either way, he’s extremely dangerous.
After I send this, I’m leaving town for a few days. Please try to find him soon. Maybe it’s my imagination, but the last few days I’ve been feeling like I’m being watched, and he clearly knows where I live. If you have
He stopped writing the email there because I interrupted him, and it doesn’t feel right trying to guess at how he would finish it, so I’ll leave it at that. I felt like I needed to post this somewhere to honor what was his final wish, his final word, etc. I changed the names and a couple of details, of course, so it can’t ever be traced back to me. I’m trying to do the right thing here, but that doesn’t mean I want to go to jail for it.
As for the truth of what he was saying, whether they made all this up or whether that was just a palatable version for law enforcement, well, who’s to say? As to whether I think they were really monsters or not? It’s a complex answer, and the best response I can give is that there are many kinds of monsters and not all vampires feed on blood. Some feed on hope and self-respect and dignity. So either way, yeah, I think they were vampires. And I loved them, but they needed to be put down. I hope they have found some rest now.
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Credits
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