“They’re only upset about the damn octopuses,” declared Claire from behind her laptop screen.
“That’s not right. Octopi? Octopodes?” puzzled Sean, half-listening.
“Three murders in a week, no known suspects, and people don’t give one shit.”
“Well, not entirely true; from what I’ve seen people are pretty excited about it.”
“It’s sick. These men had families.”
“Well so did the octo…paes.”
“You know they haven’t found their heads yet? The sick fuck is probably keeping them as trophies.”
“I wonder what he used to attach ‘em to their necks. Seems like it would be too slippery for duct tape or staples or something. You’d have to sew it, but that takes time and a steady hand…”
“Sean, have some respect! These are peoples’ lives!”
“I’m not sure those guys count as people.”
Claire shot Sean a look. He put down his phone, sat up straighter, and adjusted his glasses.
“Okay, sorry for being flippant. I do feel bad for their families. But these guys made their money by lying, cheating, and stealing from good people. The world is a better place today than it was a week ago – from a utilitarian perspective, the killer is a hero.”
Claire scoffs. “You can’t be serious. Standing by while a vigilante murders people erodes everyone’s human rights and makes a mockery of our justice system. How is that utilitarian? It might appeal to our baser natures but if this continues…”
“Then we get a revolution! It’s only vigilante justice if it stops here. Look at the awareness it’s brought, the unity between the parties. I’ve seen ‘It’s not left and right but up and down’ on Facebook at least three times. People are waking up,” Sean turned his phone screen back on to look for examples.
“Meanwhile, their positions have already been filled and their firms report no loss of profits. Life goes on as it was before for everybody but these individuals and the people who loved them.”
“We have to start somewhere, honey. Somebody on Reddit said that’s what the octopus means. Tentacles grow back. We have to cut off the head,” he flicked open Reddit and went to his saved posts to find what he was referring to; it was a very well-written and detailed post.
“Who is this ‘we’? You’re going to assassinate Jeff Bezos from your La-Z-Boy?”
Sean had gotten distracted by a video he’d saved and forgotten about of an ox hooking a woman’s braids with his horn and yanking her to the ground. Or was it a bison? Were they the same thing? He didn’t know. “Suppose you could just jam some kind of skewer through the octopus and the neck and call it a day…” he considered distantly.
***
While the first three dots were easy enough to connect – a lobbyist for big pharma, a corporate lawyer defending white collar criminals, the CFO of a mega-corporation – opinions were split on where the next few victims fit in.
Victim four, Heather Rodriguez, managed a fitness club in Ohio. She was 46 with a son in community college and a daughter in public high school. She had a dozen direct reports: personal trainers, front desk clerks, a maintenance person. All reported she was a fair and generous boss, although one part-timer complained that she didn’t approve his request for a day off for his birthday and then wrote him up when he called out sick. “What did she want me to do, give our members the flu?” Heather’s salary was $72,000 per year.
Within hours of her death, Redditors were scouring her social media posts for clues. One photo showed her all dressed up next to the owner of the health club and several other people in suits as the mayor of her town cut a ribbon with novelty scissors. One anonymous poster claimed that owner was a slumlord but provided no further information when questioned; another reviewed the mayor’s budgets and noted a 15% increase in spending for “public safety equipment”. Some speculated this coincided with a few new cruisers spotted in the police fleet; an obvious kickback for their support in the election.
While a few sleuths continued looking into her loose associations and their misdeeds, another contingent accumulated all the photos of Heather posing next to children. Of course, some older pictures were with her own offspring, but at least seventeen different posts were of her smiling next to, or sometimes holding, unidentified kids, from infants to preteens. A few had comments that may have been written by those kids’ parents – friends or relatives of Heather, maybe – but others gave no indication as to who they were. “What grown woman hangs out with all these children? It’s not normal,” wrote u/SteamFunkLife on December 13th.
Victim five took some time to identify, as he was found naked and, like the rest, cephalopod-cephalic. His fingerprints weren’t in the system, and nobody came forward for two weeks to claim his body. During that time, internet criminologists had him pegged, in turns, as a Saudi prince, a cartel kingpin, a fugitive crypto scammer, and the Backstage Strangler (a little-known serial murderer that plagued the off-Broadway circuit circa 1989).
His grandmother, instead, identified him as Shajith Sharma, a mild-mannered young man with a cyber security degree who was working quality control in a macrobrewery. The implications were obvious to those who discuss such things. Either he was stealing recipes from the craft breweries in the area to sell to his superiors (he was pictured on Instagram drinking several different hazy pints); or he was part of the child trafficking ring that operated in underground bars and nightclubs around the country. The smoking gun: Shajith had been a driver on regional deliveries for three years prior to making the lateral move to the factory due to “back pain”. There remains no evidence that those refrigerated trucks were only filled with beer.
By victim six, some of the shine was off the apple for “The Kraken”, as the Sansbury Informer had been the first to call him. Two months had passed since the first murder and page views had been steadily dropping with each successive grisly headline. Nonetheless, certain niche internet forums continued their good works. This one was a bit less of a mystery, which may have also contributed to public apathy: a school principal named Thomas Katsaros, who, in the course of a 42-year career in education, had had three formal complaints of sexual harassment from his coworkers. Thomas reportedly would confess to friends that he had an “old school idea of humor”. Somebody later graffitied “SEX PEST” on his headstone.
Number seven, or “The Aberration” as she was called in a popular podcast years later, briefly regained national attention to the case because she was quite beautiful in her crime scene photos: her almond-shaped green eyes, Cupid’s-bow lips, and petite, upturned nose all adorning a head still remarkably affixed to her body. A grocery bag with a half-thawed, imported Portuguese octopus lay just feet away from her strangled corpse.
The conversation quickly circulated around water coolers and across bar tops. Did the killer run out of time? Did he forget his sewing kit? No, he’s too calculating for that. Was it a copycat – or was The Kraken sending another message? Perhaps he was giving up on the project in protest of the lack of public protest! Leaving the octopus murders unfinished at number seven had a sense of poetic justice that resonated with millennial ennui. Will any of us truly accomplish our goals? Does it even matter if we do or do not?
Unfortunately for the romantics, the Kraken did complete his series, on a dock in New Jersey on a frigid night in February. Number eight was a homeless man who would likely have died from the cold in any case. Investigation into his past revealed mental illness that was diagnosed and treated for several productive years, until the man could no longer afford the therapy nor the medicine. He ended up pan-handling in Hoboken, up until the Kraken wrapped his tentacles around the man’s throat and relieved him of his misery.
A public who had already moved on to the winter Olympics had no appetite to rally behind a killer of the downtrodden. “This isn’t punk rock, it’s just sad,” tweeted @SardonicNarcotic. It got 738 likes and 345 retweets. Only in the forgotten corners of the internet, on outdated forums that have been semi-active since the late 80s, will you find anybody talking about the cryptic runes inscribed in the dock near the body. Or the suddenly-erratic weather patterns, which are easy enough to explain away as climate change. But how did those fishermen dredge up all seven heads some 30 miles off of Nantucket? Was it the shock of those rotting faces that drove them to their silent lunacy, or something else they experienced out there? The collective intelligence and creativity of the world wide web thus far has provided no answers.