Handyman

Early in his killing rampage the victims were homeless women, easy targets, who rarely tried too vigorously to fight back. As his death list grew, so did his confidence to go after victims who would give him a better fight. First a teacher and then, as the story opens, a doctor trapped after office hours in her own examination room.

The killer, Eugene Rickey, has only one weapon, a large pocketknife he inherited from his mother, a knife he customized to encrust the handle with opal stones and small crystals. He calls the weapon, Opal, because that was his mother’s name, and the knife was her favorite possession. The crystals are an homage to the faceted glass she collected and displayed all around her mobile home so they would catch the sunlight coming through the windows and throw rainbows all over the walls. He hated those crystals. Their projected rays of light that hit him in the eyes and gave him headaches. Together with the physical and verbal abuse his mother inflicted on him and the humiliation to which she subjected him in front of the male lovers she brought home endlessly, his young life drove him mad.

For reasons he cannot understand, the latest torture and murder of the doctor left him unsatisfied and yearning more. He finds himself sizing up two women as his next possible victims. One, Cynthia Diamond, is a television news anchor who always wears clothes encrusted with crystals that caught and flashed the lights in her television studio. The other is Kirin Janacek, an architect whose latest project is a double high-rise office building in downtown Tampa. Rickey is in the midst of a home-improvement project for Janacek and her husband and has access to their home almost at will.

As Rickey’s madness grows, fed by frustration, he understands that the police could be closing in. He has to take his next victims quickly. Someone is going to die. It is only a matter of time and a plan.