1

B&C killers. That's what most guys in Homicide called them.
As for Detective Jake Keen, he thought that VB&TC would be a
better name. B&C stood for bored and creative. VB&TC stood
for very bored and too creative.
The year 2000 had brought more than advanced technology, too
many parties and the global village; it had also created,
among other things that hardly seemed normal to 47-year-old
Keen, a new kind of murderer. Murderers that didn't kill for
the good old-fashioned motives- jealousy, money, hatred,
fun, mental problems, etc.- but out of sheer boredom and for
no other end than to simply be creative and innovative.
These killers tried to get a little of the spotlight in a
way that Keen found quite negative, but many people admired
them, and so many people could not be wrong, right? They
killed in special ways, places, times. They always tried to
be interesting, because a simple murder just wasn't good
enough for the papers these days. And so, the new "fashion"
in murders was things that haven't been done yet, things
that didn't happen even in movies... in other words, things
that stood out.
Keen could see why this had began. In a world where TV and
movie producers put creativity and originality before
quality, where man is self-aware to the point where he's
even aware of things that aren't there, and where everything
was becoming so sophisticated that it became instantly
obsolete, it was hard to find anything really meaningful.
The only thing that interested people outside of their small
lives was death, and the more horrible and shocking, the
better.
And in this sad reality Keen had to work, catching killers
with no motives, who almost always had no criminal record
before and never showed repent after. But the fact that
seemed strangest to Keen was that, although none of them had
ever come to him and confessed, they also rarely run away or
denied the accusations.  
The really sad thing, Keen always thought, is that I'm
probably only one of hundreds of thousands who've had the
same thoughts, and yet keeps doing the same things. And even
now, as I'm thinking this, I know that I won't change my
ways. It's really quite absurd. The modern man is a good
thinker and an even better talker, but as for actually doing
things, he could do a lot better.
After this long phylosophical debates with himself (which
always seemed to end up tied and in a dead end), Keen always
came out with a headache. And never with an answer.



2


Keen's character had always been a source of gossip in the
police. He was known as a serious, thoughtful and not too
friendly man. In fact, as far as anyone in the department
knew, he had no friends. People didn't pity him, though. He
was one of the most admired and respected detectives in the
city, and a figure young cadets looked up to. Everyone
guessed that if he didn't have any friends it was out of
choice and not because of his personality. Besides, he had
been invited many times by co-workers to go out for a drink
or to a Christmas party, and he'd always turned them down
politely. No one in the precint could say that he'd ever had
a conversation of more than three sentences with him which
wasn't work-related, and even when talking about work he was
a man of few words.
The older men thought of him as one of the last of a type of
person that was slowly becoming extinct- the
straightforward, direct, right to the point kind. The
younger ones simply regarded him as a mystery.
There were many legends on how he'd come to the city and why
he'd become a Homicide detective. He had transferred from
Chicago, everyone knew that. But no one knew anything about
his life there. He wasn't a talkative person, and to
investigate his past would have been very rude. So they just
satisfied their curiosity with stories: "They say he was a
happily married man, until a serial killer murdered his wife
and two children, and since then he's been after them" one
would whisper. "I've heard that he was an orphan who was
raised by a serial killer, and when the Chicago police
caught him they took the kid into their custody, and so he
grew up to be a cop who's an expert in serial killers" the
other would answer. Keen knew about the stories, and he was
pretty amused by them. He was quite a regular guy, actually,
but why spoil their image of him? It only helped him, from
his point of view.
And so, Keen's character remained a mystery.



3


With the B&C killers came some necessary "side effects"-
detectives that tried to think like them and were always
trying to be one step ahead of them (although mostly it was
a step in the wrong direction) and lawyers who had mastered
the it's-not-my-client's-fault-it's-society defense; and
some less necessary and much worse ones, in Keen's eyes- the
fans. The public just loved those guys, as long as their
killing zone was far from the public's home. And since every
place in which you kill will be close to a little piece of
the public and far from the majority, most B&C killers had
lots of fans and admirers. They were different, and in the
eyes of the people, especially the young ones, different was
good.
Keen was sure that the battle against the B&C killers
should be fought especially in schools and other educational
facilities. After all, the admirers of today could become
the admired of tomorrow. He remembered how he had cut his
hair and tried to sing like Elvis when he was young. As
crude as the comparison was, it was a true one.
But for now I must fight the fights of today, he thought,
and looked down at the stack of papers detailing the works
of a killer who had been nicknamed
Shakespeare the Ripper. This guy was really a piece of work-
he killed people and then arranged their bodies so they'd
depict scenes out of Shakespeare's plays, costumes and all.
He'd already done scenes from Macbeth, Hamlet, The Twelth
Night, The Merchant of Venice and some other plays whose
names Keen had forgotten. One he hadn't done yet was Romeo &
Juliet, and Keen was betting on that being his next murder-
his masterpiece, maybe.
Keen had men watching every location which fit his guess- a
balcony in a solitary place where Shakespeare could work
quietly. At the same time he was checking in all the
libraries, theaters and Shakespeare readers' clubs for big
Shakespeare fans... ones with psychotic tendencies.
All he could do right now was sit tight and wait. As with
most of these cases, he had went a step ahead of the killer.
Now he just had to hope that the step was in the right
direction.


4


Three days later, his step had been proven to be the right
one. One of the cops watching the locations had spotted a
car which stopped near it, and the driver had taken two big
bags up to the balcony. The cop had waited until he had
enough proof that this really was their friend Shakespeare,
and then called for reinforcenments. But these were
meaningless in the end. As brave as Shakespeare (whose real
name turned out to be William Davis, one of the 200 or so
names in Keen's list of probable suspects) was when he
poisoned his victims- he had to leave them intact for his
scenes, after all- he had immediately surrendered when he
saw the gun pointed at him.
Mr. Davis was a 40-year-old man and 30-year-old fan of
Shakespeare's work. He claimed that his motive for the
killing of more than a dozen people was art. Keen believed
him. He'd heard of much stranger motives. He just hoped that
they had a lot of Shakespeare's work in the Death Row's
library.
"Fuck", he whispered to himself after interrogating Davis
for a little more than 5 hours. He was never satisfied
anymore after catching a killer, not to mention happy. He
just had a small feeling of accomplishment. Very small.



5


Work was coming in quantities these days. It was Holiday
season, and a lot of lonely people were celebrating by
finally taking themselves in their hands and killing.
Ho-ho-ho.
As the days passed Keen was getting more and more
depressed. Hope was something he had lost long ago. Now all
he had was habit. He didn't believe that he was helping the
world or saving people anymore. He wasn't trying to catch
killers because he wanted the world to be a safer place. It
was just all he knew how to do. Besides, what other option
did he have?
Like most people he had been raised to believe that human
beings were good, and like most people he had a lot of
doubts on whether that was true or not. For some reason he
was leaning towards not.
What can we do, he wondered more than once. What the hell
can we do? He wasn't worried about questions of why we are
here anymore- he'd given up on those as a dead end long ago.
Now it was mostly how. The world wasn't as familiar a
place to him as it had once been. In the past he accepted
all of the bad things which he saw on the news or in his
first years in the police as anomalies, exceptions to the
rule. These days he wondered if it wasn't the other way
around.
He did consider himself to be a good person. Not perfect,
maybe not even very good, but relatively good. But there was
only a thin line between good and bad, wasn't there? He had
caught more than one murderer who had been a very good
person before he started killing. He looked at those
people's records, and at what their families, friends and
co-workers told about them, then looked at their faces, and
just couldn't find what had gone wrong. How could someone
stop being Jack the Friendly Neighbor and start being Jack
the Ripper so suddenly? That was the biggest question that
bothered Keen. If he had an answer to that question, maybe
he could find a solution for it, too.
The case he was working on right now was that of a killer
nicknamed Santa Claws. This killer, according to
eyewitnesses, climbed down chimneys wearing a Santa costume,
and then came out of the house after delivering his very
deadly gifts. He gave everyone the same gift- a knife stuck
in the chest. He was described as a fat man with a white
beard wearing a red and white outfit. Well, isn't that a
surprise, Keen thought to himself.
Since it was so close to Christmas, the killer was quite
inconspicuous in his very conspicuous diguise. Keen's idea
on how to catch the killer was a simple but smart one: he
advised every houseowner in the city who had a chimney to
either close it down in some way or put some kind of alarm
or trap there. He did this through the media- newspapers,
TV, everything. Again all he could do now was simply to be
patient.
Two days before Christmas the case was closed. Someone had
put a very effective trap in his chimney- a loose brick. As
soon as ol' Santa had tried to grab onto it, he fell down
the chimney and broke his neck. Although the man's method
wasn't one Keen approved of, Santa would kill no more. And
that was good, right?


6


Keen came back from the courtroom feeling astonished. There
were more than a thousand fans there who had asked for the
killer's autograph, sang songs about her and applauded her
all the way up the court steps. Shouldn't they be applauding
me? Admiring me? Keen thought for the hundredth time. She
kills them, I try to protect them, and they just keep
cheering her.
Keen, who had again been the one responsible for the
catching of the killer, had been BOOH-ed. He just didn't
understand people anymore. The least they could do was show
him some appreciation, some thanks, the tiniest bit of
respect. But they hated him because he had caught someone
whose victims were chosen absolutely in random and could
well have killed any of those fans of hers instead of her
reported 23 victims.
The girl, a 25-year-old waitress who rode the bus every day
from work, simply sat in a window seat, and waited to see if
someone would sit beside her. If someone did, she'd get off
the bus on the same station as that person, follow him until
they were alone somewhere, and killed him. She killed
everyone equally- women and men, young and old, black and
white. Their only crime was sitting next to her.
She, like all other killers, had been given a nickname. Hers
was The Bustard. It was cute, Keen had to admit.
Keen had caught her in a very unsophisticated way. Since all
victims had been travelling on the 7PM number 15 bus, he
just put two men in it and one in each of the bus-stops, and
they caught her on the first day out there, while following
an old woman.
Her sentencing had taken place today. She'd been sentenced
to death, a fact that had angered her fans, but not too
much. There were many more killers out there, and though
they did admire her, she wasn't worth their tears.



7


The problem, Keen was thinking, is that human beings just
can't keep up with their own decisions. He had become a very
logical man, in his own way, and since his logic told him
that death wasn't necessarily a bad thing, he no longer
regarded murder as such an atrocious act. But people had
decided on some standards, by which death was bad and murder
was one of if not the worst crime possible, and they should
stick with that decision, dammit. You can't say that murder
is a horrible act and then go to the movies and enjoy seeing
young actresses slashed. It's hypocritical.
And besides, people just don't care for anything these days,
his line of thought continued. Things were so good for most
of them that they had nothing to fight for, nothing
substantial to achieve, nothing so sacred to them that it
was worth much more than themselves. Ideology was at its
lowest point in a long time. Most people today were
egocentric, cynical and uncaring fucks in his opinion, and
sometimes he thought that they deserved what they got.
His present mood was caused by his most recent case. An
11-year-old boy had confessed to six unsolved murders, and
he'd brought proof and everything. That made him into the
youngest serial-killer in history. His motive was as
astonishing as his age. He did it because he wanted to be
the youngest serial-killer ever.
His name was Dennis Goldberg. He was given the obvious
nickname of Dennis the Menace.
Christ, Keen thought, once kids had wanted to be the
smartest or the strongest in history or something. Now they
want to be the youngest serial killer. What the hell's wrong
in this world?!?



8


He couldn't really say that things had been better once.
There was WW2 to prove that, along with many other examples.
Keen wondered if then people had also just pretended to be
shocked by what happened, while at the same time doing those
same things or at least not stopping them. He guessed that
the answer was yes. Human beings were just fucked up, and
that's all.
Keen's feelings about murder were becoming less and less
negative with time. It wasn't just that he'd seen so much of
it that it didn't touch him in quite the same way anymore,
although that was part of it. It wasn't just his harsh
feelings and thoughts against people either, although that
was also part of it. Neither was it just something inside
him, something that had always been there and had grown with
time, but he guessed that that was part of it, too. It was
those three things and a lot more. It was desperation, hate,
tiredness, disgust. It was his life experience, which was so
different from what he was educated to believe. It was a lot
of logical thoughts which made a conclusion which should be
unlogical.
He didn't have a lot of work these past few days. The B&C
killers seemed to be in some kind of break. Keen quickly
became very bored. He was used to the speed and exhilaration
of his usual cases. He was used to sitting at his desk,
reading all the facts about a murderer and at the same time
trying to build both a clear picture of him and a way to
catch him. His mind was going to other places now. Dark
thoughts were on his mind all the time.
Finally, Keen reached a decision.






9


Keen's last case would be the only one in his long career
which would not be solved by him. After six months and more
than 50 murders, his partners in homicide started whispering
that the mysterious killer had at last defeated and
outsmarted the detective which, until then, had been
nicknamed The Invincible.
Keen was almost definitely the most experienced detective
in the world. He was legendary for his creativity and
intelligence, and no matter how smart the killers were, Keen
always seemed to be one step ahead of them. Well, they said,
everyone meets his match eventually.
The killer, whose work was recognizable by the notes he
always left in the crime-scene, adressed most of these to
Keen. But Keen didn't look worried by this. He didn't even
look worried by the fact that he hadn't been able to catch
him yet.
He has always been a cold son of a bitch, they said, but
that much? Many Homicide detectives decided that something
strange was going on with Keen. They couldn't have been more
correct, but none of them came even close to guessing what
that thing was.
The mysterious killer was not nicknamed, although he was
admired like no other killer in history, since he had no
special MO and no unique characteristics to name him for.
Someone had suggested The Mysterious Killer, but it hadn't
caught on, for obvious reasons. Some reporter had suggested
The Invincible, not knowing about Keen's nickname in
Homicide.
After reading that reporter's article, Keen had laughed at
the irony. The killer had already been called that for some
time. From before he had become a killer, in fact.