He was handicapped early on in life, when his parents missed the boat on teaching him how to ride a bike. It quickly served as a point of ostracism from the other kids in the neighborhood, leaving him to the more sedentary activity of video game playing. As the years passed and the other boys traded in their bikes for the jock-like sports of football and baseball, Rorke graduated from video games to video games and porn. He never imagined that, locked in the basement (of his mind, to boot) for most hours, he would ever manage to finagle “the real thing”: sex. With an actual human woman. It was only because his older brother (who knew how to ride a bike), Ben, came back into town after disappearing for a bit into his college years that a couple of girls were brought down to the basement where Ben fueled them with as much alcohol and weed as their bodies could allow.

It seemed to Rorke that this was how one of them, Lucinda, managed to have the clouded non-judgment to find him attractive, at least ephemerally. Once Ben had slipped up to his own room with the other, Jess, Lucinda saw an opportunity to grab him by the belt and say, “Ready to fuck?” Considering he never had in all of his seventeen years, the inward answer was a resounding no, while the outward one was emitted as a salivating nod. She was quick with her motions, tearing her tank top off and standing up to shimmy out of her partially unbuttoned white corduroy skirt. She stared at him expectantly. “You gonna eat me out or what?” In this way, Lucinda had, at the very least, conditioned him to an important lesson: always give a woman head. It was more than his own parents had done for him with regard to their neglect in teaching him how to ride.

In fact, Rorke was so determined to delay what he couldn’t imagine to be anything other than her disappointment in getting fucked by a virgin that he ate her out for roughly fifteen minutes, longer than any boy ever had. When it came to longevity where it really counted though, he couldn’t deliver, releasing his seed in a bombastic deluge that, to Lucinda, couldn’t have possibly lasted for longer than twenty seconds. She appeared to burst out of her inebriated stupor in that moment to toss him off of her and scream, “You fucking asshole! Why didn’t you pull out?” She ran to the bathroom to piss out what he had put in against her will, washing her crotch furiously in the sink, the door open all the while. This image would often come to Rorke when he “finished a woman off” in the present. Conjuring Lucinda’s callousness and rage during his first sexual experience was all it took to kill a woman with one stab, and always right in the back as he kissed them in their apartments (he would, naturally, become referred to as the Kiss of Death murderer in subsequent news articles).

It was always very important that he sequestered them in their own environment–it was the surest way to get their guard down long enough for the stab. He would never penetrate them sexually, of course–that would leave behind too much of his DNA. Plus, ever since that first time with Lucinda, a certain unavoidable precedent for premature ejaculation had been set, rendering the act an embarrassment rather than a joy. No, his only thrill in “intimacy” came with the kill.

Being a serial killer in New York (he had migrated there in his twenties, as so many Long Islanders tend to do) was, like most jobs there, rather tedious and mind-numbing. After a while, none of the women were even distinguishable from each other, all of them so Scarsdale basic yet miraculously self-assured that they were a cut above their bland sistren. Even his own fiancée of two years, Helen. Helen who was the perfect cover, to be sure. For police tended to overlook non-loner types–as though the biggest freaks of all weren’t the ones in relationships. Rorke learned long ago from his brother how to emulate normalcy and, for a man, being saddled to a frivolous woman was the tried and true method for appearing to be “on the level.”

No one was more frivolous–or gullible–than Helen. Who actually believed that Rorke was a virgin who wanted to save himself for her until they got married. It just went to show that women would believe anything when it came to preserving their vanity. What’s more, Helen was placable with the fifteen-minute eat out as well. He ate her so good one night, in fact, that she fell into a coma-like sleep afterward, one that gave Rorke, who had perhaps downed too many whiskies sans rocks, an emboldened notion: he would slip Helen with a sedative for added security, toss her into the office where they had a pullout couch and then go out on the prowl for someone to, for the first time, bring back to his own turf. For the excitement of killing a woman in her own territory had grown stale–banal, even. He wanted to raise the stakes to regain his enthusiasm for the hobby again.

Placing Helen on the couch, which they had recently ornamented with the placement of a fan next to it in these hotter months of the summer, Rorke then went about moving some of the telltale party favor signs into the office with her. Because it had been a baby shower for one of her friends, one such party favor had been a Mylar balloon in the shape of a pacifier. It made Rorke want to vomit, and he hoped he could find a way to off Helen before she ever demanded a child of her own from him. But for tonight, he would worry about ridding the world of some other insolent woman instead.

Her name turned out to be Brianna. How rosy, he thought, as he proceeded to lay on his usual charm thickly (along with a dash of Rohypnol, which he had become increasingly reliant upon as he grew too lazy to bother with wasting so much time cajoling them–which was the part they all seemed to enjoy the most, hence dragging it out). It was also what he had dosed Helen with, but unbeknownst to him, she had an incredibly high tolerance for it after spending much of her college years hanging out at fraternities. It was thus that she teetered in and out of consciousness to the sound of the Mylar balloon rustling around the room as the fan had its way with the ever-deflating pacifier. Something about the sound put her on as high alert as she could be in her drugged state, as though it was warning her of some imminent portent. But soon, the rustling caused by the fan only ended up lulling her back into a deep sleep.

From which she awoke in a fit and start hours later, after the drip-drip-drip of what was Brianna’s blood and innards–creating a gentle sort of patter that sounded almost exactly like the rustling of that pacifier balloon–dragged her at last out of her induced slumber. Pausing momentarily to get her bearings, she realized she was in the office, rising to turn on the light. Upon so doing, the sight of all manner of indecipherable organs caught in the fan sent her into a screaming terror as she ran through the apartment in search of Rorke. What she couldn’t have known, alas, was that he was waiting right behind the door to stab her–as one female demise in a single night wasn’t quenching him like it used to. And, as mentioned before, he knew he really ought to nip Helen in the bud before she asked him to sprout them a child. Not that he could remain hard long enough to do so anyway. But she would never need to know that, he thought, as he stabbed her in the back. Yet, for some reason, Helen was taking it much more gracefully than all the others as she careened back into the office hissing and gurgling.

Rorke rolled his eyes as he took the knife out of her back and started to stab at any part of her he could hit, but she was proving to be wily in her movements, making him really work for the stab as he ended up popping the pacifier balloon and bursting it into tiny pieces, the guts of which intermixed with Helen’s and Brianna’s as he finished the job. And though it felt satisfying in the instant, he was all at once saddled with the realization that he would have to start from scratch on finding someone as amenable to his lies as Helen. Sweet, angelic Helen, who he could, now that she was no longer in her body, finally have an orgasm with.