The Killer Cookbook

A celebrity chef bites off more than she can chew when adding a secret ingredient to a dangerous man's meal

The botched execution of Norton Caraway – the most prolific serial killer you’ve never heard of – should have made national headlines for weeks. But Caraway was so much more than your average, garden-variety killer, and the factors that made his case so special, also made it embarrassing for powerful people with means to make unsightly stories go away.

That meant in the hours that followed, I had very little information to go on; just the details I’d seen first-hand in the witness gallery, and the gnawing feeling it was all my fault.

I paced until I thought I’d wear a hole in my apartment floor, replaying the events in the hopes that some logical explanation would let me off the hook:

Guards led Caraway into the chamber, scalp shaved bald. They restrained him in the electric chair; the method he had fought in court to have over lethal injection. When the executioner threw the lever, Caraway convulsed. I kept waiting for the shaking to stop. Instead it worsened. I don’t think I’ll ever forget the screaming, and the smell of burning skin.

Prison staff shut the curtains to the witness gallery and rushed us out. I left knowing he was still alive, silently praying with each passing moment that I would get the call confirming his death. When my cell phone finally did ring, it was warden Paul Perkins, calling from his personal number.

I answered. “Hello?”

“We need to talk about Caraway’s last meal.”

My blood felt cold. What did he know? How could he know? “I don’t—”

“In person.”

I’ve never driven so fast; it’s a miracle I didn’t get pulled over. I reached the penitentiary before dawn. Place looked like an old high school, wrapped up in barbed wire. An uneasy silence filled the long sterile corridors. The guards I passed looked twitchy, and unnerved. The whole prison seemed to be on its feet, waiting for something.

The warden greeted me in his modest office, all bookshelves and filing cabinets, with a small window overlooking the plains.

“It’s been a long night.” He gestured toward two steaming mugs of coffee on his desk. “Sit. Drink.”

I obeyed.

“I didn’t think you stayed for executions,” Paul said.

“Usually don’t.”

The warden lowered himself into his chair with a huff. “Why was last night different?”

I studied his pudgy face, normally bright, kind, and clean-shaven. This morning, his eyes were bloodshot.

“A victim approached me,” I said. Give him a grain of truth. Something he may know anyway. “It made this case feel more personal.”

“Who?”

“Rebecca,” I said. “She tracked me down and knocked on my door.” The poor woman had looked so thin, like she’d forgotten to eat. Miss-matched, wrinkled clothes.

Paul just looked at me, expectant. I continued: “I felt awful for her. So I invited her in. Made her dinner, then let her talk about her daughter.” Among other things. Oh, if only she had just gone home—

“I know you were doing a nice thing, but I’d be careful around her.” Paul took a sip of coffee and smacked his lips. “When Rebecca's daughter went missing, did you know that she was the prime suspect?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“A lot of people up in that tiny town still believe Rebecca is the strangler. Seems none of them are eager to open those old wounds.” Paul set the coffee down. “In the early days, back when it was only a disappearance, a K-9 officer paid her a visit. He wanted one of Daniella’s favorite stuffed animals. Something to let the dogs catch her scent. Know what they found?”

I shook my head.

“Weird stuff, Cathy. Runes, weird little dolls, and animal bones. She told the cop she’d been doing a ritual to bring her baby back,” Paul said. “She couldn’t tell them where she was when Daniella went missing. So they booked her.

“Caraway was well trained, disciplined. Waited as long as he could, I expect. But that urge…” he trailed off. “He couldn’t help himself, I expect.”

Had I given too much away in mentioning Rebecca?

“Point is, Rebecca might not have done anything to her daughter. But she’s not safe, or sane,” Paul said. “I’m getting side tracked though. The execution: you stayed out of sympathy then?”

“Sure, you could call it that.”

“Okay.” Paul nodded. “Well, things got a bit hectic after you left. Executioner cut off the power at the 20 minute mark. Way, way longer than it’s supposed to take.”

Paul took a deep breath. “By that point, Caraway looked like a half-spent candle. Bastard wasn’t just alive. He was coherent. Begging for death.”

“How is that possible?” I asked. I knew exactly how. The question was, did the warden?

“Problem with the chair, maybe.” The warden shrugged. “I made the call to override his wishes. He got the lethal injection, and stopped breathing at 3:45.”

Caraway was dead. I relaxed a little in my chair, but tried not to show a change in my posture.

“Why did you get into this job, Cathy?” Paul asked.

The shift in questioning caught me off guard. Where was he going with this?

“Honestly?” I asked.

“I hate when you say that,” he said. “Implies you’ve been dishonest about everything else.”

“I picked a terrible time to be a chef. Restaurants going under right and left. What was it, 25 percent in the whole country that year?”

“Something like that,” Paul agreed.

“Any halfway decent owner wanted a chef with serious culinary experience. Sleazy ones wanted to get me on server staff, so they could see my ass in one of those tiny uniform skirts,” I said. “You were my only option.”

“Cooking last meals for death row inmates has its perks,” Paul said. “No bad reviews to worry about.”

“No repeat customers either.”

“The ideal learning environment.” He curled his lips into a smile. “And look where it got you.”

We both cast glances to his signed copy of, “The Killer Cookbook,” sitting on the edge of his desk. It looked like he’d put it to good use, too, judging by the sauce stains and kitchen spills that flecked the book jacket. Paul had been the one who encouraged me to write it. He even thought up the tag line appearing on the inside cover: “Gourmet meals to die for, straight from death row.”

“You did tell me people would have an appetite for it, if you’ll pardon the pun,” I quipped.

“Pardon?” He asked. “I think you’ve got a twofer.” We both chuckled in spite of the unease hanging over the room.

He pushed the book farther away from himself. “So why did you stay when it all took off? The bestseller list, cooking shows. Anyone would’ve hired you. Hell—you could have your own restaurant.”

“Authenticity.” I tasted each syllable of the word. I hated how often my publicist used it. Hated the way it felt in my own mouth even more.

“No other reason?” the warden asked.

I answered honestly: “No.”

He leaned in. “You didn’t ever like to mess with them?”

“Who?”

“The prisoners. You ever mess with their food?”

He knew. He knew, and he saw it in my eyes. “What’s going on?”

“Engineer took a look at the chair.” Paul bit his lip, and shook his head. “Nothing wrong with it. So after Caraway’s heart stopped, I ordered an autopsy. Maybe he had some freak medical condition. I don’t know what I was expecting.”

The warden went on, his voice starting to shake with anger. “You know what I find DNA. A Victim’s DNA. Daniella’s blood, mixed in with the food in Caraway’s stomach and intestines.”

My face felt prickly. Stress-sweat tricked down my forehead, stinging my eyes. “Her what?”

“I’m asking you this as a courtesy, because I consider you a friend: did you tamper with Caraway’s last meal?”

I opened my mouth.

“And before you answer—” he cut me off, “—keep in mind what’s going to happen here. Sure, the state wants to keep this one low profile. But they’ll still need to at least investigate what went wrong. Might do their own autopsy. Maybe take a look at your other meals.

“I need to know how long this has been going on? Was this always some karmic justice for you? Like spitting in a rude customer’s food on a—a just, sick level?”

“Paul, you don’t understand—”

“I’m sorry, Cathy I’ve gotta fire you. You can walk away clean. If you don’t make a fuss, I don’t think they will either.”

Food tampering?

Then it clicked: Paul only thought I’d been tampering with their food. He harbored no suspicions that anything supernatural even happened.

He didn’t know what I’d done; the ritual that evil woman had convinced me to play a part in. I thought back to Rebecca, and the vial she had given me along with a tattered recipe card.

“Execution is too good for him,” she’d said. “Feed Caraway this, and he will never know peace.”

Where had she gotten her daughter’s blood for the concoction? Why did the lethal injection work when the electric chair failed?

A blaring siren from some distant watchtower answered my second question. “Prisoner escape,” the warden muttered under his breath. He reached for his phone. Before it was halfway from its cradle to his ear, a corrections officer barged into the room, panting.

“What’s happened? Are you alright?” Paul gestured to the front of his uniform, soaked in blood.

“It’s not mine.”

“Then whose? Who’s down?”

“The coroner.”

The warden had gotten halfway to his feet when he froze. His brow wrinkled. “Wait, then who’s missing?”

“Caraway.”

My breath caught in my throat.

“Caraway’s body is gone. Autopsy report too. Someone must’ve broken in and dragged it off. They can’t have gotten far.”

“How many hurt?”

“Half dozen,” the officer panted. “Pretty badly too. I don’t know about Hopkins and Clark. Medics are with them, but…” the officer trailed off.

“How about you, you’re not wounded?” Paul asked.

“No, sir.”

“Good. You’ll need to keep Cathy safe in my office until those freaks are caught. You’d have to be some special kind of screwed up to try stealing a famous killer’s body.”

“Yeah,” I agreed.

He jabbed one of his sausage fingers in my direction. “Don’t think I’m done with you. This isn’t over.”

He had no idea how right he was.

The corrections officers didn’t catch them. Little did they know, there wasn’t a them to catch. A member of the riot team made raving claims: said he’d fired dozens of rounds into the charred, disemboweled corpse of Norton Caraway. He just kept coming, howling in pain the whole time.

The warden’s preferred explanation felt equally far-fetched to me: the unnamable agency that had honed Caraway into a ruthless instrument of death, wanted his body for some clandestine purpose. So they took it.

Staff buried an empty box in the prison cemetery and pretended the night had never happened.

Theories of witchcraft, or an undead man fighting his way out of the penitentiary never crossed anyone’s mind. If everyone was willing to forget, perhaps I could, too.

But I couldn’t. He had the warden’s autopsy report. The one that raised questions about his last meal, and the woman who cooked it.

I kept thinking of the way he studied me, how normal he’d looked. He was average height, and in decent shape. Neat, combed hair, atop a round face, with a small nose. Nothing about him was intimidating, or even remarkable.

Difficult to pick out of a lineup.

Paul quietly let me go from my job at the prison. Felt like I got off easy for what I did. My publicist cooked up a new way for me to maintain my authenticity: making meals for the families of Caraway’s victims.

Setting it all up involved a lot of phone calls with strangers; unknown numbers popping up on my caller ID. So when my cell rang one weekday evening, I answered without hesitation.

“Hello, Cathy speaking.”

“Cathy—I’ve just learned the most interesting recipe. You’ve got to include it in your next book.” The voice was wheezy and labored. “It’s to die for.” The caller let out a laugh somewhere between cackle and coughing fit.

“Who is this?” I demanded. But I knew.

“Rebecca told me everything I needed to know, in the end. Told me how to reverse what you bitches did to me,” Caraway said. “The bullets weren’t the worst of it: frying in that chair; being paralyzed while they cut me open to dig around in my guts—” he raved, “—I felt everything. I still feel everything! The pain is constant.”

I kept the phone close to my ear, turning on the spot to ensure my windows and doors were secured. I kept expecting the man’s marred remains to leap out at me.

“But you can take that pain away,” Caraway rasped. “I’d be honored, Cathy, if you’d have me over for dinner.”

My phone buzzed with a text message notification. A new image. Bony fingers wrapped in disfigured skin, pinched the edges of a recipe card.

“Dinner for two,” I read aloud.

“The witch could only push around pain and suffering from one person to the next: Daniella to me, and now me to you,” Caraway said. “Follow those instructions, and you’ll have a proper last meal for me.”

“And for me?” I asked.

Caraway laughed. “You’ll take on my suffering. Every pinprick of pain I’ve felt since I ate that cursed dinner you served me. It’s a heavy burden, I admit.”

“If I refuse?”

“I’d hoped your conscience might get the better of you. Or at least some sense of responsibility for what you unleashed.” He sighed, his labored breath crackling in the receiver. “Rebecca said we both needed to eat willingly. I can’t force you to cook, or eat. But I can certainly persuade you.”

“How?”

“Use your imagination. Watch. Give me a ring when you’ve seen enough.”

The call ended.

I called the police, lied about some vague phone threats from a stalker. An officer came to search the house. When he found nothing, he promised he would be in the area, and gave me his number.

I was so worried about my physical safety that I never quite wrapped my head around what the madman actually threatened me with.

He’s careful, but I can see his pattern in the disappearances and killings that go unsolved. I’ve unleashed a quiet terror on the world: a man who craves death, who cannot be killed, and whom no one is looking for.

And he wants to make me pay.

I know what I have to do to stop him. I know I’m the only one who can. But I’m scared of what it means to take on that pain myself. Every time I think I’m strong enough, I think back to those screams of agony from the witness gallery, and the smell of burning flesh.

Maybe justice can wait a little longer?

---

Thank You for Reading!

This short story is part of the Stasis collection. More short stories to bend your perception of time and space can be found below:

The Stasis Collection

To ensure you don’t miss future installments, subscribe to Cole’s Chapters! A free subscription will get you access to the collection’s four core stories, until it moves into the Premium Archives and another collection begins.

Upgrading to paid, means you will get a bonus story! You’ll also get several extra episodes of the Montauk Serial Novella. On top of that, you also support my work as a writer, which I think is pretty rad.

If you don’t have the money for a paid subscription, telling a friend about me is pretty cool too. Getting your words in front of eyeballs is honestly harder than doing the actual writing and editing…