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Mark Thomas Kent was his name. Hayeston’s only documented serial killer. Such recognition would be enough to forever etch his name in the town’s history. The fact that he was a high school student when he started killing made him that much more infamous.

He was a childhood friend of Damien and Ted’s. They played together. Swam together. Joked together. But, in middle school, Mark began his evolution into a psychopathic murderer. In high school, he fulfilled his vision and cost two young women their lives – a cheerleader and a cashier at a local grocery store.

Rumors quickly spread throughout the town that there were other victims, as of yet undiscovered. Serial killers normally got better with time. More skilled. Like anything else, practice made perfect, so the common belief was there may have been a third or fourth corpse hidden in shallow graves out in the orange groves somewhere. Or within the city limits where the locals lived and worked.

As soon as Damien was accepted into the Hayeston police academy he befriended Sally May, the woman in charge of the records room. After a few bribes of food from a local rib joint and nearly thirty of Damien’s powerful flirtatious smiles, Sally relented and allowed him to read Mark’s files.

For weeks after he had completed his training for the day, he’d sit on the polished tile floor in between long rows of file cabinets and sealed boxes and digest every piece of information the investigating officers had collected. Some- where in there Damien hoped to find the trigger, the catalyst for why his elementary school friend had become a killer.

Damien knew the pains of family disfunction. His father, now passed, was a bastard. Brutal and violent. Damien’s mother had been beaten into submission and had lost her dreams of a happy life, escaping into romance novels and a few too many glasses of wine. Only Damien’s brother, Jacob, seemed to come out of their childhood a better man, turning a painful history into a life of service. He never understood why Jacob was drawn to the priest- hood, a vocation to a God Damien wasn’t even sure existed, but Jacob seemed at peace and Damien didn’t dare take that away from him.

Mark’s childhood wasn’t picture perfect, but it was better than Damien’s. Or, at least, it appeared that way. So, if Damien’s early life hadn’t molded him into a sociopath, then how could Mark’s?

The police psychologist, Dr. Moira Jones, took extensive notes and recorded a stack of digital audio tapes of her interviews with Mark and her thoughts afterwards. In them she tracked Mark’s first violent thought. He was three years old. Their cat, Mittens, had scratched him, and he wanted to choke the life from it.

Three years old – already contemplating murder.

Mark was born a sociopath. He had never felt anything for anyone. He couldn’t, even if he wanted to. The part of his brain that housed connections to others, the empathy of their pain, the sympathy of their situation, never ignited a synapse in Mark.

Everything he felt was tied to what he wanted and what he wanted most was power. To acquire power, he needed to control. In order to control, he needed violence. In order to be violent, he needed to practice.

And practice, he did.

Like most other serial killers, Mark started with animals, like Mittens, and worked his way up.

Even before he hit puberty, Mark was one of the largest kids in his class, both taller and fatter, and satisfied his growing urge for power by bullying and beating those weaker than himself.

Later he drugged and raped girls as early as eighth grade. Eventually, he was able to hold the most power anyone could, that of life and death. For the cheerleader, cashier, and any others buried nearby, he always chose death.

As Damien looked at the half-buried body laying under the warped stairs at the front of the shotgun house, strands of her blonde hair exposed above the soil, he was reminded of Daisy Hicks, Mark’s last victim. She worked at a local grocery store and, on her break, went out to the loading dock to have a smoke. She never returned to her cash register and was found weeks later under the porch stairs of a boarded up house on Meekers Avenue, seven miles away.

That must have been why Damien had been called to the crime scene. He wasn’t the only one to see the similarities.

Mark was safely locked up on death row at the Florida State Prison in Raiford.

Which meant someone else was killing young blonde girls and was using Mark as inspiration.