17 characters

I don’t do much of the cleaning myself anymore. I tend to just collect money and make phone calls. That night, I had my people cleaning The Mark and those offices on 4th and Slide. No one could do the community college.

The work was refreshing. You just sweep, take out the trash, replace the liners, listen to an audiobook, maybe spot mop. Move around, turn your brain off. The admins get what they pay for. I’m not about to scrub down the crown molding or dust off the ceiling fans.

I missed doing the library most of all, especially late at night. There was only the one chick at the counter, a few kids with earphones near the vending machines and out in the stacks. That’s where looting was the best, out in the stacks where these little desks stood. The cameras have blind spots there.

I admit to being a klepto. The mistake most people make is to assume that minor crimes and wrongdoings necessarily go along with more serious ones. And I stole junk, day planners, notebooks. It’s not about money. People don’t let me into their lives, so out of pathetic desperation, I steal discarded pieces of those lives, feel like I’m on the inside for a few moments, and leave. It’s nothing personal.

Back home, I went through my haul. It was the usual doodles, appointments, reminders. There was this little black notebook though. I forget where I swiped it. Looting has to be seamless, almost unconscious to avoid being caught. Inside this notebook were three columns of data. On the first page, they were labeled as AIM, RN, DOB. The data filled almost the entire book. The first one, on the left, looked like usernames or maybe passwords: maxxvagimite70000, themacpatriotXxX!, WrathPriceofGames, xXdemonScorpionXx. In the middle column were normal names: Jesse Sellars, Matt Easton, Sean Lassalle. In the last column were birthdates. Everyone was born in the mid 80s, early 90s.

It was a marvel, all this compromising information. I’ve fantasized of discovering suicide notes, love letters. This notebook made me feel downright unimaginative by comparison. I kept wondering what mission the compiler was on. Did they know all these people personally? Why were some of the names scratched out? What’s with the asterisks and highlights?

Then I saw KKKaNaziTheZodiac, Alec Mazur, 03/15/88. One of my AOL screen names from high school, my legal name (not an alias), and my birthday. The row was highlighted, but many were. After some panicked flipping, I formed a hypothesis. Further examination resonated with it. The compiler was looking for duplicate screen names, for multiple names used by the same person. They were highlighting these duplicates, then marking them off, eliminating them.

I’ll back up now at this point. A long time ago, someone did something stupid, maybe evil. There was this girl. Everyone was so nice to her but in a cloying, feel-so-bad-for-you kind of way. Everyone gossiped about her. Would she try it again like she did in junior high? She had some kind of disease that gave her a weird smell and made her all skinny. I forget what it’s called. She’d go missing from school a few days and rumors would swell that she’d tried it again.

Eventually, she turned up dead. Everyone, logically, assumed it was suicide, but others speculated that it was murder. Her wrists were slashed open with a razor, which was found nearby in her bed. There were no foreign finger or shoe prints in or around the scene, no sign of forced entry, no sign of struggle, no skin or blood under her fingernails indicating a struggle. The rest of her family had been out when it happened. They must have felt so guilty when they discovered the body. The girl has this long history of suicide attempts and they just leave her all alone like that? I’d feel guilty.

They swore it was murder from the beginning. Their reasons were thin. This girl loved to write cryptic messages on her shoes and notebooks. I think she wanted to trade in some pathetic for some mystique. “In my nightmares I am forced to live” was one that sticks out to me, but her belongings were cluttered with juvenile shit like that. One of the many messages scrawled on her bedframe was “XLXXIZODI2UJKFLEF was here.”

Why would a murderer go through so much effort to hide their tracks, fake a suicide, only to leave a stupid message like that? There’s no point in trying to “decode” this random jumbling of letters. An encrypted message that short could fit too many names. Any name could be made to fit it if you have a name in mind beforehand.

The cops questioned me, of course. I lived nearby. I was alone in my room that night. I was in my room alone every night. They looked at me and saw an angry, lonely teen, a kleptomaniac, a suspect they desperately needed. Thankfully nothing came of it, at first.

The girl’s parents put out an award for any information that would lead to an arrest, $20,000. It was a large reward for a criminal that probably didn’t exist. All signs pointed to suicide. Kids harassed me at school though. People around town glared at me. There were other reasons, but my parents ended up splitting. My mom and I moved a few towns over.

Fast-forward back to the notebook. It’s amazing how little it takes to get a search warrant. The cops found email alerts set up on my computer for the girl’s name. Of course I did. I hoped every day, year after year, they’d catch a break and start investigating the real culprit.

Those idiots ended up charging me. Big waste of taxpayer money. I learned through the grapevine the notebook I found belonged to a criminal justice major. Some chick that was way too old, almost my age, was giving college one more try. She thought she’d fabricate some lunatic theories to “solve” a cold case. She actually ended up with the 20 grand.

You see, “XLXXIZODI2UJKFLEF” is 17 characters long. I had many usernames back in the day, supposedly they were all 17 characters long, including KKKaNaziTheZodiac. The prosecution loved using words like “catfishing” and “coercion” when describing what I did with all these accounts. When the bullied bullies back… I was just lonely, pathetic. According to a psychotic misreading of some old blog posts of mine, I am obsessed with prime numbers, especially 17, astrology, the zodiac killer.

That was enough for a search warrant? Everything they found was blatantly circumstantial. I’m no saint, I’ve admitted it several times, but that doesn’t mean I’m a murderer. And there is no physical evidence linking me to the crime. Everyone forgets too this could have been a suicide. It almost certainly was.

How could I slit this girl’s wrists without any signs of a struggle?

They had this asinine theory “explaining” how I could have restrained her without leaving any marks. Thankfully, the jury didn’t buy it.

I was acquitted, of course. People still haunt me though.

I lost my business, had to move back in with my mom.

One night, she’d gone out with her sister. I passed out watching cartoons in my room. I woke up with something pressing into my neck, pushing my head back in agonizing pain. I could barely breathe. If I was in better shape, I probably could have gotten him off of me. He wasn’t that big.

I couldn’t see much. The TV was the only light in the room. I could see some baking parchment taped around his shoes. A small pad of some kind was taped to his shin, the one that was pressing down into my throat. It was something just soft enough to not leave bruises but not too soft so that I’d be able to breathe well underneath.

He slashed my wrists, placed the razor and left.