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It’s the first crime Chuck has worked with Mako in a while, he thinks as the plane begins it's final descent over the Alaskan airport. (Ugh. Alaska. Gross.) The last was at least two years ago now, some small time killer crossing back and forth over the Michigan-Ohio state line, only at all noticeable as a serial because his MO was weird as hell. They’d caught him quick. That was good, of course, but meant he only got to work with Mako that time about a week, and then they both got sent off to different cases. It was a shame. He likes working with Mako, he’s looking forward to it this time, even if it does have some weird traces of memories of their first case simply due to them being together.
He’s met at baggage by a tall blond dude, even taller than him, who says, slightly apologetic, that they found another body while he was in the air, Agent Mori requested that he - here he pauses and hurriedly introduces himself, “Oh, sorry, I’m Detective Becket, Releigh Becket” - bring Chuck right to the crime scene, but he’d understand if he wanted to stop off at the hotel real quick- Chuck waves him off.
“Just bring me to the crime scene, Detective...Beck?”
“Becket.”
“Whatever.”
Then the bloke wants to warn him that the scene is a bit bloody. Chuck tries not to laugh at him. He doesn’t entirely succeed. Like there’s anything left to freak him out. A crime scene is a crime scene is a crime scene. There’s a corpse and there’s blood and there’s cops and there’s FBI agents. Practically home at this point. Chuck disinterestedly weaves his way through the crime scene, avoiding the blood splashed all about, following the cop - what was his name? Becket. Some-weird-first-name Becket - and trying not to stare at his ass. It’s a nice ass. He stares a little.
Detective Becket stops before a slim, dark-haired woman talking to some CSIs. “Agent Mori, this is-”
“Hey, Mako,” Chuck interrupts.
She looks up with a small smile. “Chuck. It’s been a while,” she says softly.
Becket looks between the two of them with a startled expression. Chuck wants to snort when he sees the admiring way he looks at Mako, even through his surprise. Like he’s got any chance with her. She’s way out of his league - even if his league is big, gorgeous blond. “You two know each other?”
Mako nods. Chuck says, “Yeah, we worked a case together a few years back, met then. So, what’s the details of this?” She fills him in, and they focus on that, and questions of how they met are temporarily shelved.
But later, when they are driving back to the station, Becket awkwardly sitting in the middle back seat and leaning forward so that he can keep up with the conversation, and they’ve discussed the current case as much as they can, and Chuck just wants Becket to go be attractive somewhere else so that he can chat with Mako - then, Becket says, “So, how’d you two meet?”
“Like I said, we worked a case together a while back,” Chuck says flatly.
He thought his tone made it clear that he wasn’t inviting a continuation of this topic, but Becket says, “The two of you must have been pretty young then-” Gee, thanks for noticing and pointing that out, excellent detective work, Chuck thinks, and would probably say if it wasn’t for the look Mako gives him, “-What sorta case?”
Chuck doesn’t want to talk about it. He doesn’t want to talk about them ever again. Even with Mako, they don’t talk about it. Glancing over at her, in the driver’s seat, because she always insists on being the one to drive, he can see the tiny frown disturbing the perfect serenity of her face, the way her shoulders stiffen. He says, even less inviting, “Serial killers.”
“Killers?” Becket echoes, emphasizing the plural, and then you can practically see him get it, his blue eyes going big. “Oh- Not- Dr. K? And the other one, his boyfriend or whatever? Wow, I read about that, knew Ma- Agent Mori worked that, didn’t know you did too.”
That was back before he joined the FBI, when he was still just a police detective, like Becket - except not like Becket at all, of course, because he was actually good at what he did, and not just a golden retriever with a badge like Becket seems to be - so he supposes his name might not be in the official records. Which is bullshit. He was the first one to even notice the second of the two serial killers, the first person in nearly a decade to put all the kills together. Mako was an agent then, but junior, working on the Dr. K case, sent to liaise with the police once his case got suddenly caught up with a federal one.
“I did,” he says, flat. “Don’t much feel like talking about it, all right, so fuck off.”
“Of course, sorry,” Becket says, expression like he can’t decide whether to be offended by Chuck’s tone or apologetic for digging in where it isn’t his damn business.
Dr. K and his boyfriend. That’s what all the headlines said back then, with that damn picture, one of Geiszler’s creepy selfies. It’s the one where they look paralyzingly normal, posed in front of one of those roadside attractions, The World’s Biggest Ball of Rubber Bands or something like that, Geiszler’s arm flung around Gottlieb’s narrow shoulders, the former grinning into the camera, the latter rolling his eyes and partially turned away, for all the world just an overeager man taking a picture with his annoyed boyfriend. So that’s probably where the headlines come from. Chuck hates that. The headlines and the pictures, the ones that make Geiszler seem “quirky” and reduce Gottlieb to being his “boyfriend,” when he was a thousand times more terrifying than that. They both were.
But Geiszler was more famous, of course, he was trying to be, not trying to hide the way Gottlieb did. Gottlieb never had a cutesy little nickname the way that Geiszler did - and Chuck will never not hate the way that media insists on nicknaming serial killers, it’s bad enough when they do it themselves like Geiszler did - so Chuck supposes that is why he is usually just labeled as “Dr. K’s boyfriend,” even though he was just as bad, maybe worse. He killed for far longer than Geiszler did, but Geiszler gets most of the fame, with the way he went parading around Boston in his year of activity, with his grisly, horrific murder scenes and his perky notes, all signed with the name “Dr. K,” and no one with any clue what the K stood for.
Kaiju, they figured that out once they figured out Geiszler was K. But that took a while, nearly a year of Dr. K terrorizing the Boston area and once or twice nipping out to the next states over, apparently with the sole intention of making his case federal. Every month or so a new body would be found, some merely dissected, particularly in the beginning, others with things done to them, organs transplanted to where they didn’t belong, body parts attached in the wrong place, all the blood removed, the skull cracked open to delicately take apart the brain; or the memorable time where he entirely took the body of a young man apart and laid all the bits of him out in organized, labeled rows in an abandoned storage unit. His victimology was all over the place, people of all ages, genders, and races. It didn’t seem to be about that to him, to be about the victim or the kill. His first victim was a middle aged man, shot several times, messily, the second was a woman whose throat he slit, the third an agender teen that he poisoned. He seemed to decide that was the best methodology and settled into it, thereafter, so far as they could tell, sneaking up behind people, easy victims alone at night, and drugging and poisoning them. There wasn’t much sense that he took pleasure from that. But what he did after, the dissections - and, just once, a vivisection - and the experiments and the sick staging of the scene - because the scenes were always carefully staged, like the rows of organs in that one murder - that was obviously his motivation.
Considering how bloody it all was, how elaborate, you think there’d be evidence, but for months and months they couldn’t find any ties to anyone. Geiszler was good. He wore gloves, he avoided cameras, he used materials you could buy from any hardware store, he had no particular pattern in where he picked up or dumped his victims. The only thing the police and FBI had was the murders themselves. They were looking for an actual medical doctor for a while, considering the scientific precision with which he went about his grisly work; or maybe someone who had trained but flunked out, or a nurse, or emergency responder, something. It didn’t lead them anywhere. From what Mako has told Chuck, they must have interviewed just about everyone in the city with any sort of medical training.
Then, in the end, on his thirteenth kill, Geiszler finally slipped. His killing rate had been increasing; he was probably starting to spiral out of control, as so many serial killers do, and maybe that made him less careful, or maybe it was a simple, inevitable accident, but he left a single solitary fingerprint. It was, miraculously, in the database. Newton Geiszler, arrested at eighteen for drunk and disorderly, no charges pressed.
He was indeed a doctor, but PhD, not MD, and Chuck imagines it must have been quite the sick shock for everyone in the investigation to learn that the mad Dr. K was a tenured professor of biology at MIT. But who could have suspected him? He didn’t even work with human biology, he studied lizards and shit like that. He was an awkward, twitchy sort of thing, according to his coworkers, but not anyone you’d suspect of being a killer, of being the Dr. K that had been the main topic of the news for nearly a year.
He was sharp, Geiszler was, literally a genius; it’s amazing the number of serials that will insist that they are geniuses even though most aren’t, but Geiszler was the real deal. Graduated high school at fifteen, second youngest ever admitted to MIT, a simply ridiculous amount of doctorates. No denying he was clever, which was probably why he was so damn slippery. He must have known, somehow, that he left a clue behind, because even though the investigation moved fast after that, when the FBI showed up at his apartment to arrest him, he wasn’t there, and neither was his car, or a decent amount of his clothes. What was there, was a note. Congratulating them on catching him. Particularly calling out Agent Mako, whose intelligence and youth he apparently admired. He’d been following his investigation, the narcissistic fuck. Chuck hasn’t read that note, but he’s read enough of Geiszler’s creepily friendly messages to guess at the gist of it. He genuinely admired Mako, not in a “I want to honor you by killing you” serial killer way, but just...he liked intelligence, and he’d seen that Mako had that, and had become fond of her as a result.
Geiszler wasn’t in his apartment, but there was a gold mine of information about him. He had left behind all these journals, full of notes on his “experiments” and also musings on life and himself, at varying levels of coherency. His laptop was also there, the history unerased, and no one could ever figure whether he forgot or whether he left it for them to find; but Chuck suspects it was left uncleared on purpose.
They found three things there of true significance; one was an important look into his psychology through his journals. They’d already profiled him pretty accurately, but the journals confirmed the profile and filled in the gaps. The way he viewed other human beings, for one thing; as the profilers had thought, he didn’t really see most people as being alive. “Cardboard cutouts,” that was a phrase he used a lot. People to him were like hollow outlines, extras in a movie, without thoughts or lives or feelings of their own. Explained a lot about how he could kill with such impunity. Killing a human, to him, was the same as crushing an ant would be to an ordinary person. And according to his journal, he was aware that that wasn’t how other people viewed humans. He knew that other people were able to feel empathy and sympathy, even for strangers, that they were able to care if those people were hurt; but Geiszler simply couldn’t manage to do that. It troubled him, that he was unable to care for or even understand most people. And this, it turned out, was a major factor in what drove him to kill; because on the one hand he didn’t care about other’s lives and felt no guilt over killing them, but on the other hand, because he wanted to understand others, and he seemed to feel the best way to do this was to take them apart and look at what was inside them. Literally. Thus his dissections and experiments. The other part of it, as no one was surprised to discover, was his overwhelming desire for attention. He killed to understand; he staged the bodies into horrifying mutations of themselves and left notes so as to garner attention. That he wanted attention from people that he didn’t view as people was a contradiction that didn’t seem to bother him.
The second important thing they found was his fascination with monsters. All monsters in general, and he viewed himself as being a monster, and wanted to be viewed as being a monster. He contemplated a lot what would happen when he was caught. He knew this was inevitable, and didn’t seem disturbed by that, but he had no intention of going to jail. No, his need for fame jumped in again, and, according to his earlier entries, he was determined to be killed in a “blaze of glory, a hail of bullets, all that action movie bullshit” as he called it, and he had very carefully considered what his last words would be, and had decided on, “Tell them I was a monster.” The words were written all over his journals. He’d probably turn himself into a monster if he could. He even had them tattooed on his body, all over him, and not just any monsters, but the ones he was most interested in - Japanese movie monsters, the giant ones, Godzilla and the like. That was what the K stood for: kaiju, the Japanese word for those monsters. It was probably how he viewed himself, as an enormous force of destruction, taking hundred of lives, although really his kill count was only in the teens.
“Only.” It’s so sick when you start counting tens of deaths as “only.”
The third thing they found about Geiszler was the worse, and this was where Chuck got involved. Geiszler left his laptop, history unerased, and the site he most often visited was a forum. For people obsessed with serial killers. People that admire serial killers, people that hypothesize what they would do if they were serial killers, people that claim to actually be killers. The FBI was aware such sites existed, of course, and most were monitored; but most of the people on these sites were fake, harmless freaks that dream about murder but would never even touch a knife, let alone actually do it. Geiszler knew this; he complained about it on the site, and in his journals, but he also never actually admitted to being a killer there, and kept all of his details carefully vague and a little off, so that he slipped through the cracks of observation.
He’d been frequenting the site since several months before he started killing. He called himself “Gojira” there, and liked to joke that he was “king of the monsters” but for the most part he didn’t interact that much with anyone and was not especially popular. When they flipped through his journals to find where he’d talked about the site - the journals were extremely extensive, the agents on the case hadn’t had time to read even halfway through by the time they found the site - there were several passages where he wrote about the “fakes” on the website with extreme contempt.
But then, shortly before he started killing, he found the user calling themself “Wells.” (Wells. As in, H.G. Wells, H.G. as in Hermann Gottlieb. They figured that out eventually, after they’d already found Gottlieb’s identity.)Wells had even less of a presence on the site than Geiszler did, but there was this one post, from about two years ago. Some user telling the story of a time they supposedly killed someone. It was clearly fake, and Wells pointed this out, disdainfully informing them that at that angle they couldn’t possibly blah blah, all creepily specific stuff, but nothing that should have screamed he was the real deal. There were plenty of fakes on there who had very specific knowledge of how to go about killing someone, even though they had never done it and never would. But there was something in that post, god alone knows what, that Geiszler saw and that informed him that Wells was the same as him. A monster.
Geiszler was elated in his journals.
He got in contact with him over the site. Wells was more cautious than Geiszler, ignoring the first message or two, and responding shortly to some others. Then Geiszler posted a cryptic hint to “watch the news tomorrow.” Wells responded, evening of the next day, “That was incredibly stupid.” And after that, they talked regularly. Not just regularly, but often, sometimes more than once a day. Mako checked the date of that influential message. “Tomorrow” was Dr. K’s first kill, which was sensational enough to make the news.
The two communicated via the forum at first, then by emails from addresses that were created specifically for that. The emails were unexpectedly encrypted. Geiszler had only basic knowledge of computers, so far as they knew, so that had to be from Wells. It took them a couple of hours to crack the encryption, and a while more to puzzle through the info, because Wells was still being a little cagey and not directly revealing his identity or location, but there were details of his killings. Stabbings, that he spoke of with clinical coldness. Wells was different from Geiszler, that was clear through the emails. Where Geiszler was all manic passion and energy, bragging about his murders relentlessly, Wells was distance and coldness and calculation, in every area except for the actual killings, which occurred when, he confessed to Geiszler, he “lost his temper, momentarily.” Geiszler found him fascinating. The agents reading the letters were increasingly horrified, seeing the way these two were getting involved. They begin to worry that this perhaps was where Geiszler had fled to, to this fellow killer that he was plainly intimate with.
Because the letters were so very intimate. They used nicknames - K and H at first, and later Newt and Herms. They told each other details about their lives. They started organizing meetings in person, fairly regular ones. Geiszler often ended his messages with “Can’t wait to see you again,” or “I miss you.” Once in a while, Wells/Herms would end his with, “Same.” Geiszler also wrote about Wells/Herms in his journals a lot, first as Wells, then as H, then, after their first meeting, as Herms. He wrote about almost nothing else. The only thing that held his attention as well was his own murders, but he was just about as fascinated with Herms’s murders as with his own. “It’s the only time he shows his true self, I think,” he wrote. He wrote a lot about Herms’s temper, and his self control, and how the only time he broke his self control was when he lost his temper. And how much Geiszler wanted to make him lose his temper. And how he was pretty sure that he was going to do that someday and that Herms was going to kill him eventually. And how he was pretty darn excited about that, and thought it would be way “cooler” than being killed by the police. But he was determined to be at least a little careful - didn’t want to make Herms snap too soon. All this, written lovingly, adoringly, like an ordinary person would write about their crush.
The more the two communicated, the more Wells talked, and finally, in some of the latter messages, mentioned some personal information, usually in an offhanded way that made them suspect it was things he had already mentioned in the two men’s physical meetings. He had a limp. He’d been in foster care. It wasn’t a lot, but it was something. With that, and with the nickname “Herms,” and with the details of his murders, they were well on their way to finding him.
So they looked for a man matching the information they’d found on Wells, they tried to figure out where they had been meeting probed through Geiszler’s records, and they searched crime databases to see if there was a serial killer matching Wells’s crimes.
Geiszler’s credit records revealed that he had racked up charges in a town a few hours north over the course of several weekends. And Mako was the one to note that there had been several murders in a city that was as far from that town as Boston was. In fact, the police there had been suspecting the murders were the work of a serial killer, even if they had not yet made that information public. They’d worked up a list, at that point, of kids who’d been in the foster system that might fit the information they knew about Wells, and, wouldn’t you know, a single person from that list was living in that precise town. So that was the point they contacted the police investigation into that killer. Chuck was even the one to take the call.
It was odd, for Chuck. He hadn’t been investigating the killings for long, a little more than half a year. He was a fairly junior cop to be working the case, but that because he was the first person in the department to put it all together. No one had known, for the longest time, that there was a serial in their area, despite how long he’d been killing for, which was roughly a decade. They might have never figured it out if Chuck hadn’t gotten deja vu while assisting on a murder case, a body that had washed up in the river, all evidence removed by the amount of time in the water, other than the irremovable stab wounds. A lot of them. The kneecaps were broken too, but a bit of autopsy revealed that was post-mortem. A distraction, perhaps, to make the murder at least temporarily look like something it wasn’t.
The case seemed like a dead end. The man had disappeared a week ago, had no known enemies, no one with motive to kill him, no sign of where the primary crime scene was, no evidence left. But Chuck couldn’t stop thinking about how familiar this murder was. Remembering a case he hadn’t worked on, but had seen, about a year earlier. A mugging gone wrong, or so they’d assumed, despite the sheer quantity of stab wounds suggesting it would have had to have gone extremely wrong. They’d never caught the killer.
But the victim. In the “mugging”, it was a fifty year old white male, gray haired, tall, strongly built despite his age. And in this, the body in the river. Forty seven, white male, gray hair, tall, broad shouldered. They could practically be related. And both stabbed, repeatedly.
So on a hunch, despite being told there was no way, you’re just a junior detective, Hansen, lay off, he had searched, and had found two more victims, older white males, gray haired. All violently stabbed. One was left in an alley, murder unsolved, the other found miles away in the woods, unsolved. He also found a case where the body had been thoroughly burnt so that there was no way to tell cause of death, but by appearance he fit. It was hard to deny then, when he brought the evidence forward, and the more they looked, the more they found victims, scattered throughout the state but most heavily focused in this general area. The thing that was really the clincher, other than the victimology and the MO, was the time frame between the murders. It was far too orderly to be coincidental, always a neat division of time, half a year or a third of a year or, once, a quarter of a year.
The department had kept it quiet. Their killer had been killing for years (the oldest case Chuck had found was a professor half a state away. The murder was much sloppier and more brutal than the others. Chuck was sure it had to be the first. He was even more certain once they found out the killer’s identity, and determined that he had been a student of the professor. It was the only victim he had actually known), and slipping under the radar. Best to let him think he was still hidden, so that they could ambush him. So there was no nifty name for him like there was for Geiszler, no media cover, no local panic.
Chuck had been going crazy, trying to find this killer when he left not a speck of evidence behind and was clearly not killing people that he personally knew. He didn’t understand how he could be so fucking careful. The murders were brutal, multiple deep stab wounds all over the torso, resulting in severe blood loss and internal damage. It screamed of rage, total loss of control. A desire to completely destroy the person before him. Utterly personal and violent. How could someone who killed like that be so in control of every other aspect? He killed rarely, one to three times a year, a murder weapon had only ever been found in the first killing, and it was wiped clean. Most of the murders, other than that first, the body was dumped somewhere other than the primary crime scene, and often staged to look like something else, like the fake mugging. Most of the time they didn’t even know where the primary crime scene was. There were never witnesses. Not a single damn lead. Chuck was the one to figure out they had a serial on their hands, so he was given a high position in the running of the case, and now he felt like he was fucking it up, coming up with nothing.
Then all of the sudden, there’s a call from the FBI, hey, you know that killer of yours, well, we figured out his identity, and oh hey, we think he’s working with the infamous Dr. K.
He didn’t know he felt about it, having his killer’s identity just dropped neatly in his lap. It was good to know who it was of course, but it felt weirdly like cheating, to just be told, yup, this is him, Hermann Gottlieb.
It seemed so obvious, once he had the information on Hermann Gottlieb. Of course this person is a murderer, is your murderer, how could it possibly even not be him, just look at this guy’s life. Geiszler, when they investigated him, had a scarily normal childhood; the worst thing that ever happened to him being his parent’s relatively amicable divorce. He grew up in the suburbs, loved by his family, and then somehow he turned into a serial killer. But it wasn’t like that for Gottlieb. He had the sorta childhood that you always read about serial killers having.
Abuse, for one thing, physical and emotional, from his father. Chuck took one look at the mugshot of the father - Lars Gottlieb - included and had the same deja vu as on his body in the river. White male, forty five at the time of the photo, tall, powerfully built, gray hair. So the victimology was explained that easily. Lars Gottlieb had sent all of the family - wife, four kids. Hermann Gottlieb was third - to the hospital at least once, the police had been called on domestic disturbances multiple times, but somehow nothing was ever proved. How does that happen? It must have been blindingly obvious, but no one ever did anything. The wife - who from the hospital records took the brunt of the beating - never wanted to press charges, so the situation was left to escalate to the point that one day, Lars Gottlieb beat his wife to death.
There was no denying he was the one to do it. He tried to run, which was a dead giveaway. Plus, there was a host of evidence, not least of which was the eyewitness. Hermann Gottlieb himself. Thirteen years old at the time, coincidentally home sick from school that day when his father came home for lunch and lost his temper at his wife. The boy saw the whole thing. He tried to interfere, tried to save his mother, and for his efforts, his father pushed him down the stairs so hard that he broke his leg and did permanent damage to it. His mother died anyway. Was probably already bleeding to death internally by the time he interfered, according to the file. There’s a picture of the kid there, the bruises on display for the perusal of the court. A scrawny boy, face white with shock except for where the skin is mottled with bruises, numbly expressionless other than his eyes, which are huge and dark and shattered. He testified in court, and Lars Gottlieb was sentenced to life in prison, no hope of parole.
Three of the four Gottlieb kids were sent into foster care after that; the oldest was just barely eighteen and thus struck out on his own, declining to take custody of any of his siblings. The file’s brusque details of the time make it clear that foster care was not kind to Hermann Gottlieb. He was moved from home to home often. He was bullied in school and in the homes. There is record of an incident about a year after the murder of his mother; a boy in his foster home, with a known allergy to peanuts, somehow ate a dish prepared with peanut oil, and was sent to the hospital. Nearly died. They suspected it was done intentionally by either Hermann or the third boy in the home, but nothing was ever proved. Interestingly enough, two years later, the boy with the allergy was caught molesting a younger boy. Probably not a coincidence.
(The FBI hunted down this boy after everything was finally and totally over with Geiszler and Gottlieb; turned out he never actually did anything to Gottlieb, but had come damn close, had been on the verge of it before he was interrupted, and the peanut oil incident had happened the very next day, so that he never tried anything again with Gottlieb. So, yes, that was probably Gottlieb’s first experiment with killing, even if it wasn’t a successful death.)
With a childhood like that, it was hardly surprising that this man had at some point snapped and started killing. Killing his father over and over, or so it seemed. Not that Chuck thinks that a rough life dooms a person to evil, or that it excuses his actions in anyway. Plenty of people go through shit without losing it. But Chuck’s theory has been that for some people, maybe lots of people, they are born with something just a little off in them, a tiny bit of wrongness. For some, it’s not tiny, it’s huge and ugly, and then you get people like Geiszler, who are broken all through without a single damn reason for it. For others, it’s just a tiny seed of potential evil that is never triggered, and they go through all their life normal, or maybe even being a damn good person. And then there are the ones like Gottlieb, where something happens to them, something awful, and it cracks that little bit of bad inside them wide open until they are consumed with dark.
It may not be the scientific explanation, and he knows there is more to it than that, but in his heart that is what Chuck believes, to this day. (And sometimes, late at night, unable to sleep, he worries that that little bit of wrong is in him, just waiting to be cracked open. That he could be a monster too.)
There was no doubting it then, that Gottlieb was their killer...but it didn’t make it much easier. They went to his address, and found it dead empty. A small spartan home, only the bare essentials of life, and a chalkboard filled with innocent calculations - he was a mathematician - and, also, a note, on the bare kitchen counter. The handwriting didn’t match what was on the chalkboard. Chuck was the first to read it, carefully picking it up with hands encased in latex gloves. The damn thing is practically burned into his memory.
Good job getting this far, Detective Hansen! Hermann was right, you’re a sharp one. But too late. I made it here first. Herms is mine now. ;) Have fun hunting us down. We’re nearing the grand finale now, I can hardly wait! Keep an eye out for Herms and our badass combo work. Oh, and, say hi to Mako for me, won’t you, Chuck? Thanks dude.
-Doctor K (and also Hermann but he thinks this letter is stupid so he doesn’t want me to sign his name.)
He can still remember the shock of coldness that went through him when he read his name. He still has no idea how they knew him. Gottlieb knew about him, enough to think that he was “a sharp one.” He hadn’t even thought that the serial killer had known there was an investigation into him, let alone known who the detectives involved in it were, let alone known his fucking nickname. It was goddamn terrifying, but also a good thing, maybe, that letter. Reminded him that they were smart, both of them. He didn’t forget it once, after that.
He also remembers, at the time, thinking, And who the fuck is Mako? Then he got back to the precinct to discover that in the time it took them to check out Gottlieb’s place, the feds had shown up and swarmed the station, and he went deer in the headlights still when he heard someone call out "Hey, Mako!"
So that was how he met Mako. She was about the same age as him, smart and tough as nails, and damn knowledgeable about Geiszler, even if her ideas were often ignored due to her youth and low rank. All that appealed to Chuck, even if he did think she was a bit stuck up and was maybe a little jealous of her being the same age as him but FBI. He hit on her at first, and then they bickered until he was disinterested in her, and then they talked so much he became interested in her in an entirely different way.They got stuck together a lot, the two of them, during that whole awful time when Geiszler and Gottlieb were on the run, due to them being roughly the same age and equivalently ignored, Chuck for his age and for being police instead of FBI. The FBI made a big noise about wanting to work with the police to catch Gottlieb, but mostly the police investigation was shoved out of the way. They left Mako behind to “liaise” and went off chasing the two killers as Mako and Chuck, for lack of anything better to do, went through the messages and journals and picked each other’s brains and tried to figure out what would happen next. (And there was that one night they got damn drunk and the whole awful story of what happened to Angela, the entire reason Chuck became a police officer and had climbed the ranks fast despite his age, came pouring out. Mako stared at him, then, a single tear trailing down her face, told him her own story. It was remarkably similar. They didn’t talk about it, the next day, but it was different between them after that.)
What happened next in the investigation unfolded slowly, and then very fast. First was a tense, horrible four days after they found Gottlieb’s empty apartment. The FBI concentrated their search on the local area and on Boston, in the hope that the two would be territorial and would stick to their home ground. No one quite knew for sure if they should be looking for the two killers to be together, or if Geiszler had simply realized that the police identifying him would put Gottlieb in danger and had come here to warn him. Chuck spent most of the time learning everything he could about Gottlieb, and interrogating Mako about Geiszler. But mostly the only thing anyone could do was wait for them to act. They gave up on media silence, and spread their pictures throughout the news in the hope that someone would see them, but they must have been hiding well, because although loads of tips were called in, there was nothing helpful. Just waiting.
On the fifth day, they stopped waiting. A body was found in the next state over. Arranged in Geiszler’s signature style, with one of his notes...but cause of death was determined to be multiple stab wounds. Geiszler’s note informed them that Hermann had done the killing part, and Geiszler everything after. They were together. Working together. More than anyone would have expected.
The profilers were stumped. They kept insisting it shouldn’t be possible, that Geiszler and Gottlieb were basically antithetical to each other, entirely different styles. Geiszler didn’t care about the kill, but cared about the body; Geiszler was reckless and enjoyed and wanted the attention; Geiszler wanted to be caught, not immediately but eventually, and wanted to die dramatically, would probably kill himself if he had to, rather than go to jail. Gottlieb, on the other hand, was only interested in the kill, and had no interest in the person after that; Gottlieb was painfully careful, self-controlled, and preferred to not be observed; Gottlieb would have calmly continued on as before, content to never be caught, although it was agreed that if it came to actually cornering him, he was as likely as Geiszler to attempt suicide. As different as these two men were, as brilliant and stubborn and dangerous, they should not be capable of working together. Serial killing partnerships did exist, but were usually predicated on a firm understanding of who was dominant and who was subordinate. The profilers thought that Geiszler was probably more dominant, but they also thought it was highly unlikely that Gottlieb would meekly accept orders from the more reckless man, especially considering Gottlieb’s less than positive experiences with authority in his life. The general reckoning, as Geiszler himself said in his journal, was that Gottlieb would accept Geiszler for a time, but that Geiszler would definitely push him too far, and Gottlieb would lose it and kill him.
This was what they predicted, but a week after the first body, there was another one. And two days after that was a third (no one was sure why these were so close together. That was rare for Gottlieb). One of them snapping may have been inevitable, but clearly, they couldn’t depend on the relationship violently self-destructing.
But they didn’t have much else to depend on either. They kept killing, but they were zigzagging around in a pattern that no one could figure out. A year, a whole goddamn year, after everything finished, Mako called Chuck crying and said, “They were visiting fucking roadside attractions and museums!” and indeed when Chuck traced it, he found that everywhere they killed, there was something along those lines nearby, including, just once, a planetarium. Like it was a fucking vacation, or some sort of psychotic road trip. It must have been that, because that explained all of Geiszler’s photos from that time period which were almost entirely selfies with or without Gottlieb, pictures of pretty scenery and roadside attractions, and candids of Gottlieb, lots of which were blurry, apparently due to Gottlieb realizing what he was doing and trying to duck out of the image. It was all so fucking domestic and ordinary that Chuck had wanted to cry too.
As well as their seemingly random path, they were not sticking nearly as much to either of their previous MOs, including Gottlieb’s distinctive victimology. Most of the victims were male, but age and appearance varied more. So far as they could tell, it was easy victims, like Geiszler preferred. The experiments done to the body were quicker, the staging less elaborate, although Gottlieb’s MO meant they were a lot bloodier than most of Geiszler’s earlier dump sites. It was getting impossible to predict anything about them. They didn’t mix the way that anyone had expected, cooperating far more than seemed possible for people whose entire lives were marked with unsuccessful relationships, or, in Gottlieb’s case, a lack of any relationships at all. The only thing anyone could say for sure was that they would kill again, and that the deaths were coming closer and closer, and that the notes were increasingly taunting.
There was nearly a month of this sick cat and mouse game, Geiszler leaving his goddamn notes, mocking them, the whole time. The media circus was outrageous. Chuck wondered if it was worth it, at times. No one had seen them, and Geiszler was surely getting off on this attention, which was bound to make it worse.
He was proven wrong about that. In the end they just get a lucky break, due to that very media exposure. Someone saw them, or thought they saw them, recognizing them from their photos. It was unexpectedly back near Gottlieb’s original hunting grounds. (Why? Why did they do that?) That was when everything started happening fast. The two men were cornered at the gas station where they’d been sighted. Chuck and Mako were close enough that they got to go along, and since he was senior on the case and Mako was the only FBI agent around, they were even the ones to go into the gas station, just in time to see the back of a man ducking out the back. Resisting arrest, as predicted. Chuck shouted, “At the back-” into his radio, as he and Mako ran through the gas station, ignoring the terrified looking clerk in the corner. Geiszler and Gottlieb were making a break to their car, the shorter man tugging on the limping one. Chuck couldn’t stop thinking about how this was the first time he had actually seen either of them. Chuck and Mako both shouted at them, pulled out their weapons. He’s not sure which of them shot first, or whose bullet it was that made Gottlieb stagger and nearly fall. He didn’t even realize then that Gottlieb faltered due to being shot. He’d never actually shot anyone before. He thought it would be more dramatic than that. And anyway, it doesn’t really matter, in the end. One of them hit Gottlieb. Geiszler hauled him back up, and somehow they made it to their car.
They followed them to a motel. Just a shitty little motel. They managed to put some distance between them and the police, but not entirely slip them, so that when Chuck and Mako made it to the motel, their car was parked badly and they were out of sight.
He can’t remember the name of the motel chain now, which seems incredible to him, when his memory of everything that happened then is still so vivid. He dreams about it. He knows Mako does too. They don’t talk about it.
He can’t remember the name of the motel, but he remembers the greasy and frightened looking motel manager, how her voice shook when she told them that yes, they did have a room occupied by two men. Room twenty five. He remembers the door to their room, which was painted garishly blue, and the room number in peeling gold on the door. It didn’t occur to either of them that they ought to be waiting for back up. They managed to be the first here of any police. That didn’t seem like a concern, then. Chuck was the one to knock on the door, and then try the handle when there was no response, Mako just behind him. It wasn’t locked, so he went in, gripping his gun tightly in cold hands.
There’s so much about the scene he saw then that disturbs him still. Like, the bed. Just one bed, a double. And, christ, what the fuck, why were they staying in a room with only one bed? Were they sleeping together? The media headlines after, kept referring to them as lovers, but there was never any actual evidence of that. Geiszler had had sexual relationships before, with people of all and no gender, but they’d dug all through Gottlieb’s past without finding a single sexual or romantic relationship. He hadn’t even had any friends, let alone lovers. But still. There was only one bed.
They were both on that bed, Geiszler kneeling on the far side, Gottlieb lying on his back, very still. His eyes were closed. He looked almost peaceful, that’s another thing that still appalls Chuck. He looked like he could have been sleeping. And so human, he looked so human and ordinary, a slender man sleeping on a hotel bed. Chuck thought of the picture of a battered and broken teenager, not of all the men dead because of him.
Then of course was the realization that his shirt was supposed to be white, not red, and he noticed that the huge red stain spreading across his front darkened almost to black, around a small tear in the fabric over his stomach, and that the pale, limp hand lying on his stomach was also drenched in red, and that Geiszler had red all down the front of him too. Then it was painfully obvious that Gottlieb was dead. The way he staggered in the shootout. That was the moment that Chuck put that together with the bullets flying in the air, and realized that either he or Mako had hit him. Seemed obvious then. He couldn’t have been dead very long.
Newt was kneeling next to him, on the far side of his body, staring at Gottlieb’s face, his hands out of sight behind the body. He didn’t look up when Chuck slowly, cautiously, gun trained on him, entered the room, Mako slipping in behind him. Chuck found that his vocal cords were frozen by the tableau before him. Mako said softly, “Dr. Geiszler.”
He looked up then, a slow movement that seemed at odds with the few minutes of security footage they had of him, in which he had moved near constantly with hyper jerkiness, nothing like the stillness he had then. There were tears on his face, and his eyes were red and swollen with grief. That is another of the things that Chuck finds so very disturbing. It made him human the same way that Gottlieb’s peaceful face did. It was, for an instant, hard to remember that this short man crying for his dead - friend? lover? comrade? - was a killer.
Chuck forcibly reminded himself that he was a killer, and gripped his gun tighter. He opened his mouth to speak, order his hands up, tell him to get off the bed - but Geiszler spoke first. His voice was also disturbing. A few years after all of this, Chuck had a case chasing down a different serial killer - although Chuck had a hard time thinking of his measly five kills as serial, when compared to the body count that these two racked up - and when he interviewed the man, he had a deep, sonorous, self-righteous voice. Chuck had thought, now this is what a serial killer should sound like! And yet, the man’s voice quickly slipped out of his memory, but Geiszler’s shrill voice, hoarse from crying, haunts him still.
He said first, “Oh, hey Mako. And you must be Chuck.”
“It’s over, Dr. Geiszler,” Mako said, voice only shaking slightly.
Geiszler snorted, gestured at Gottlieb with one hand covered in blood, probably Gottlieb’s. “Well, duh. Course it’s over. Grand finale. Just...didn’t expect it to be like this.”
Chuck swallowed hard. He suddenly can’t remember any of the rote things to say. “Yeah, it’s over, so let’s end it.”
Geiszler nodded slowly. “Yeah. Um. Tell them…” and Chuck, with a sneer, braced himself for the rest of it. I was a monster. Or maybe now it would be, We were monsters. But Geiszler trailed off, looked back at Gottlieb’s face, serene as it was not in any of the photos that existed of him, in which he varied from irritated - in most of the “selfies” that Geiszler took - to fake smile, to utterly expressionless. Then you couldn’t help but notice how empty his eyes were. Like they had shattered that day when he was thirteen, and everything inside him had fallen out the cracks, leaving behind only darkness.
He put the bloody hand on Gottlieb’s cheek, and started over. “Tell them I loved him.”
Chuck went cold all over.
“And he loved me too. He told me so, last thing he said. You know, I don’t think he ever loved anything in his whole fucked up life after what his dad did. But he loved me…”
“Dr. Geizler,” Mako said, voice somehow tiny in the room. Chuck wondered if she was as scared as he was, an unreasoning terror that gripped his bones and went on and on. Geiszler still didn’t look at them.
The next part was so fast, but every second of it so clear. Geiszler lifted the hand that was still out of sight. Chuck shouted, “He’s got a gun!” and even as everything seemed to blur with speed he had time to wonder how the fuck they didn’t know that they’d had a gun, and time to aim but not to shoot, and time to move himself in front of Mako, all on instinct. She shouted at him about it later. And in perhaps the most honest moment of Chuck’s life, he told her that it wasn’t because he thought she needed protection or was weak, but just because he’d come to care about her by that point and didn’t want her to get hurt. She went silent, then said, “I care about you too. Idiot.”
That happened later, of course, but somehow it is included in his memory of what happened with Geiszler, as if that moment of honesty between the two of them, one that has never been repeated, was slipped in between the moment when Geiszler revealed his gun, and what he did next, which was to press the gun to the side of his head and squeeze the trigger.
A near perfect silence followed, filled only with the thump of Geiszler’s body tilting over and falling next to Gottlieb’s, and the ringing of his ears from being that close to a gunshot.
Then it was all over, mostly. There was processing the scene, of course. Bagging up all the evidence. Dealing with the media. Some absolute moron leaked a bunch of the pictures of the two men that Geiszler had on his phone, and the media went insane over that. There was an intimacy in the photos that were undeniable, so even though Chuck and Mako were the only ones to hear those awful last words, and only ever told it to the officers that took their statements, who were smart enough to keep that confidential, still everyone seemed to reach the conclusion that the relationship between the two men was possibly romantic/sexual, in a really fucked up way. Dealing with that was horrible. He still gets call from people wanting to interview him about the two. He always refuses. The articles and books get written anyway. He hates that. That’s exactly what Geiszler would have wanted. He probably would have even loved the names they get. “Dr. K and his boyfriend.” Gottlieb would have murdered people over that headline. Geiszler would have been overjoyed. Chuck hates it for both of those reasons.
But the worst part of closing down the investigation was something that Chuck brought on himself. Some sick impulse drove him to volunteer to be the one to tell Lars Gottlieb that his son was dead. He visited him in prison.
Just like looking at his photo, looking at Lars in person was a horrible deja vu. It had been more than twenty years, of course, so he was older now, older than any of Gottlieb’s victims had been, but he still fit the profile. Was still in good shape for his age, had all of his silver hair. He had stared at Chuck with contempt the whole visit, as if Chuck was the prisoner, the abuser, the killer, the father of the psychopath. When he informed the man that his son had killed nearly twenty people in a decade, and was now dead himself, he had-
Lars said, with a curl of his lip, “Should have pushed the stupid boy down the stairs harder. Or maybe just killed his mother earlier, eh?”
Chuck never wanted to hit anyone in his life so bad.
“You ask me, those deaths on your conscience,” Chuck’d said, a little astonished at how calm he sounded. “Hermann Gottlieb may have been the killer, but you- You made him that. Runs in the family, I guess.” Then he left, before Lars Gottlieb could say more.
He called his dad when he got home, the first time in six months. They talk pretty regularly since then. It’s still not great between them, but at least he knows his dad would never wish he’d killed him.
Things settled slowly, even when it seemed impossible to return to a real life after what he saw in that motel. Chuck returned to investigating normal crimes. He got interview requests less often. The stories about “Dr. K and his boyfriend” faded away. He sent Mako a Christmas cards, and she sent him New Years cards. They talked every few months, never about crime, definitely never about Geiszler and Gottlieb. He applied to the FBI - somehow the police didn’t seem like enough anymore - and she helped him out with that, and visited him when he made it in. Which of course he did, after all he did on Gottlieb’s case.
Neither of them have any siblings. They both have small families. Herc and Stacker have met by now, and get along excellently, so now they often end up spending holidays together. They both knew that that is what it was, for them, and sometimes Chuck has dreams where he introduces Mako to people as “my sister,” but they don’t really talk about that either. They’ve worked two cases together, and both went great, closed up faster than anyone expected. The first time, after they ended the case, they went to a bar together, got drunk, and Chuck said, “I still dream about that motel sometimes.” Mako said, “Me too.” That’s that.
Other than, of course, people who insist on asking about it, people like the stupid sexy golden retriever police officer in the back seat who says now-
“But that was a fucked up case, huh. They were real monsters.”
“They weren’t,” Chuck says angrily, twisting to glare at the man. “They were human. Just human.”
Mako says - they both turn to look at her, listen to her quiet words - “That’s what he never understood. That that is what makes them so scary. They were like that, and they were human.”