An Easeful Death (32 page)

‘Never mind, babe, it’s over now. Time to put an end to your misery,’ Tye whispered in her ear. ‘Only I think this time our impotent killer’s going to get lucky. This’ll baffle your profiler friend, eh?’ He rubbed his bulging groin and grinned. ‘But first, precautions have to be taken.’

Stevie watched in horror as he sauntered to the other end of the room, turned his back and started to rummage among the junk on the table. The noise from the generator made it hard to interpret the sound of his movements, but she could imagine the grinding of tablets, the clinking of a glass and the trickle of liquid. When he turned once more to face her, he was holding out a glass of orange juice.

No! She knew what was coming next. She felt like she had always known.

He held the glass up for her to see the liquid turning blue. ‘You’re going to enjoy this, babe,’ he said.

With her ankles and hands bound, all she could do was roll onto her stomach and wriggle like an inchworm, anything to stop him from forcing her to drink the drugged juice. He gripped her shoulders and flipped her onto her back and she found herself cradled in his arms like a baby, like a lover.

She closed her lips and clamped her jaw, but he pinched her nostrils until her limbs tingled and her chest felt as if it would burst. The glass clunked against her teeth, her lips parted for air, and in a reflex action she gulped the mixture down.

When he let go she shrank into herself and curled like a leaf onto the gritty concrete floor. She watched him return to the table through blurred eyes.

She clenched her jaw. She couldn’t let him win.

She forced herself to think. It was Rohypnol, the dye confirmed that. It could start taking effect as early as fifteen minutes after ingestion, but might take longer to work its way through her fettuccine dinner. Her mind raced as she recalled the symptoms: impaired memory, dizziness, confusion, lack of inhibition, sexual compliance—there had to be more.

Think Stevie, think. Christ, you might only have fifteen minutes!

Tye glanced over his shoulder and smiled before turning back to the boxes on the table.

Stevie scanned the room for anything she might use to cut her bindings. Her eyes came to rest on the nearest metal cradle. If she could get closer, maybe she could use one of the edges to saw through the duct tape. But that glimmer of hope soon shattered when she realised the jagged hunk of metal was further away than it looked. She’d never be able to reach it without Tye seeing her.

He extracted the dark wetsuit from the box and laid it on the table between some cans of gold spray paint. The dull metallic gleam of a gun next to the paint cans caught her attention. It looked like the Glock Barry had given her for the re-enactment. Tye must have taken it from her bag. If she could find a way of getting to the gun ...

A pleasant floating feeling began to overtake her senses, she felt herself gently rocked, like a lilo on a calm sea. Thoughts of the gun faded into the back of her mind.

A sudden dry retch brought her back. It broke through the soporific rhythm of the drug and gave her scattered senses one last chance to regroup. Then an idea filtered through the fog of her mind; an idea that might even save her life. Nausea. That was it. Another side effect of the drug was nausea.

Drawing in a deep breath, she willed the filthy odour of the generator deep into her stomach, then begged her body to expel it. She gagged again, turned her head to the side and opened her mouth. Nothing happened. Perhaps she shouldn’t have suppressed the urge before. Tye turned to look at her and she pulled her head back with a jerk, she couldn’t let him see what she was trying to do. The sudden movement of her head caused her ponytail to flick against her face. Up floated another idea.

She jerked her head again, this time catching the ponytail between her teeth. She forced the tickling hairs to the back of her throat and gagged.

Again only a dry retch.

Tye had his back to her. He’d taken off his clothes and was busy easing himself into the wetsuit when her body finally obeyed her command. With several heaves she puked out the fettuccine and, she hoped, most of the Rohypnol. But she couldn’t let him see the mess. She wriggled as far away from it as she dared, nudging a bit of filthy tarpaulin across to hide it from sight, and prayed the stink of the generator would mask the acid smell.

Now she had to convince him the drug was still coursing through her system. She attempted to conjure up the pleasant floating sensation she’d experienced before she’d vomited. Returning to the lilo she willed back the sleepy feeling. On the verge of sleep, her limbs felt blissfully heavy. A moan escaped her lips, followed by a deep sigh.

Out of the corner of her eye she saw Tye pull the diver’s hood over his head. Then he manipulated his erect penis through a hole in his wetsuit so it lay flat against his belly. Under any other circumstances the image would have been ridiculous.

Block the fear.

Lack of inhibitions, sexual compliance.
She giggled. The giggle became a laugh. He smiled and moved towards her with a pair of scissors in his hand. She concentrated on making her breathing slow and even.

He cut through the bindings on her ankles and eased her legs apart. Not yet, she cautioned, not yet. She must wait.

He leaned forward, trying to press his lips to hers, but she turned her head to the side. He mustn’t taste the vomit. She attempted to distract him with a sensuous moan.

‘C’mon, babe,’ Tye said. ‘You’re going to love this. Don’t be shy.’

Another sleepy giggle.

He positioned himself at her feet and slipped off her trainers and socks. ‘I’m going to make you look real pretty.’ He picked up a can of spray paint and shook it. The ball inside the can rattled, then her toes spasmed as a chill wave washed over the top of her foot. Her nose and mouth stung with the fumes of fresh paint.

‘Just wanted you to get an idea of the final effect, seeing as you won’t be around to see it.’ He lifted her foot to show her. She smiled inanely while her heart felt ready to explode with fear. When he let her foot go it fell to the ground with a thud as if it really was weighted with gold.

‘But where to put the end product?’ he mused. ‘Monty’s car perhaps? Now there’s an idea. I’ll just give you back to him, all pretty and posed—a pretty picture for him to dwell on while he rots in jail.’

Through slit eyes she saw him pick up the scissors and move to the outer seam of her jeans.

Now!

Her double-barrelled kick caught him under the chin, knocking him onto his back. He hit the concrete hard. ‘You bitch! You fucking bitch!’

She sprang towards the table, turned her back to it and seized the gun between her bound hands. Tye was on his feet and about to lunge when the pull of the slide and the sound of the chambered bullet stopped him in his tracks.

With her back to him and twisting her neck around as far as she could go, she knew the only chance she had of getting away was to kill or disable him now. But the swaying of her body told her that despite her efforts, she’d still absorbed some of the drug. The bullet could fly anywhere.

She couldn’t think rationally.

In the middle of debating the pros and cons of recklessly letting the shot fly, she became aware of feet clanging down metal stairs. Then Monty was bellowing her name and pounding on the door.

‘In here!’ she called, the feeling of giddy relief now compounding her dizziness. ‘Open the door and let him in,’ she commanded Tye.

He was frozen on the spot several metres away from her. He looked from Stevie to the door, shook his head and smiled, in control again.

The hammering on the door stopped.

Cramping pains shot up her neck as her body reacted to its twisted position. To unbolt and unlock the door she’d have to drop the gun and she doubted her reactions would be quick enough to coordinate both movements. Keeping the gun on Tye as best she could, she edged herself closer to the door.

‘I’m in here, Mont, but I can’t open the door!’

With a heavy thump and a curse the door bowed but the lock held.

Tye dived towards her, and in the same moment a hollow banging sound from the floor made the spotlight above her shudder, the door vibrate.

Stevie fired. The bullet cracked into the far wall and ricocheted around the room like a slammed squash ball. She closed her eyes, waiting to be hit by the bullet, the impact of Tye’s body or both.

But when she opened her eyes again, he was gone.

Many sociopaths will study psychology books and become skilful imitators. One example is Australia’s notorious multiple murderer, Tye Davis, the exclusive subject of this study.

De Vakey,
To Catch a Killer

Monty cut through her bindings with the discarded scissors and passed a hand across her face as if needing reassurance she was still alive. Oblivious to the blood dripping from the back of her head he attempted to draw her to him.

She held him back with straightened arms; it was all she could think of to keep them both in the here and now.

He came to his senses and sprang to his feet. ‘Where the hell’s he gone?’

‘A trapdoor, here.’ Stevie pointed to the open wooden lid in the floor in front of them.

‘For Christ’s sake.’ He began to descend the rusty metal ladder, turning when she tried to follow to scowl at her, ‘You’re not coming. Go wait out the front for back-up. They’ll be here any minute.’

Stevie’s body contradicted her expression of stubborn defiance, forcing her to turn her back on him and heave again. It was like the opening of a floodgate she could no longer control. When it was over finished she whirled back to the open trapdoor in time to hear the fading ring of Monty’s footsteps on the metal rungs, a soft thump, then silence.

She sat on the edge of the hole for a moment, glancing around the ghastly room with her legs dangling. She found her eyes drawn to the misted silhouettes on the floor and a shiver rippled up her spine.

‘Bugger this for a joke,’ she said aloud. Feeling for the top rung with her foot, she eased her way into the hole.

The fishy odour that rose to meet her as she reached river level made her stomach lurch. Holding her nausea back by willpower alone, she stepped off the last rung and crawled through a short tunnel until she came to a wooden flap not much bigger than a doggie door. Once through this she found herself on a small sandy ledge about three metres above the sloshing river. The scrabble of frantic movements from the bank above made her look up into the wet night.

The rain that had started as a misty drizzle earlier in the evening had turned into a downpour. While the cold on her face served to drive away some of her drug-induced fuzziness, the rain made for poor visibility. She narrowed her eyes and tried to see through the wind and lashing rain, but all she could make out was the looming mass of the riverbank above her. With hands outstretched, she blindly groped against its muddy face for fistfuls of grass. The damp of the earth through the knees of her jeans and the sting of rain on her face caused a sudden wave of euphoria. A surge of heart-thumping adrenaline washed away more of the fuzziness in her head and the churning of her gut. She was alive. Unbelievably alive.

At the top of the bank she caught a glimpse of Tye running across the weedy plot between the riverbank and the power station. Dressed in his black wetsuit all she could make out was the pale backward and forward motion of his pumping hands and feet. The blurred outline following some distance behind had to be Monty.

All at once, several beams of light pricked the darkness. The sound of sliding tyres on mud broke through the noise of the rain and she saw Tye veer to the right almost into the path of a braking police car. A second sharp turn and he was face to face with another. Outflanked, there was only one way left for him to go and that was ahead.

Monty was closing the gap. She wanted to follow him, but staggered first to the uniformed officers scrambling from their cars.

‘Block the exits,’ she gasped. ‘You need to surround the perimeter. You can’t let him get out of here. Inspector McGuire’s in pursuit, I’m following...’

She attempted to rejoin the chase, but found herself held back by a pair of strong arms.

‘You’re in no fit state, Stevie. Stay with me.’ It was Wayne and he pulled her close. She felt the rain on her neck, heard distant voices and the crackle of car tyres as the uniforms dispersed. She didn’t have the strength to fight any more. As she buried her head in Wayne’s shoulder, she knew he was the only thing keeping her upright.

Tye’s only chance of escape was up, and by the time Stevie lifted her head he was already on the flat roof of the power station with Monty clambering up the maintenance ladder after him. One of the cops aimed a powerful spotlight and she held her breath as she saw Monty ease his way from the ladder onto the roof, his silhouette swaying in the wind. Soon he was pounding across the roof after Tye, who was heading towards a higher level of steeply pitched tin.

Tye sprang onto the other roof with ease and began to shuffle his way along it, one foot on either side of the pitch, negotiating himself around the mushrooming ventilation ducts as he came to them. Stevie guessed he was counting on there being another ladder on the end of this roof to take him back down. As there weren’t enough cops to surround the whole fence line, they might lose him yet.

She saw Monty hesitate as he climbed to the higher level. She could tell by the violent sway of his body that the wind up there was almost cyclonic. She stopped breathing, willing him to maintain his balance as he lurched from one upright vent to the next.

Waves of nausea and dizziness rippled through her body and once more she had to lean into Wayne. She heard him gasp, felt his body tense. She wanted to look but couldn’t lift her head. A shudder passed through him and into her.

But the shuddering wasn’t coming from either them, it was coming from the ground. It gathered momentum until the sound of tearing rafters and screaming metal fractured the air around. At that moment an invisible force seemed to suck the middle section of the roof down, taking both men with it.