Snuff (18 page)

FIFTY-THREE

The phone rings yet again, as soon as I lock the door behind Jackie and Quinn, two co-workers from Norm’s.  I never realized I was so popular, and I’m not sure I like it much. The visitors haven’t been trickling in; they’ve been in floods.

Jack answers the phone on autopilot and holds it out for me.  “Sergeant Jennings.”
  The look on his face makes it clear he finds the company and phone calls irritating.  I’m sure he’d rather me hole up in bed until the Rapture. 

I take it from him and slouch
on the couch beside a sleeping Stripes.  “Hi.”

“How are you feeling?  You’d better be getting some rest.”

“I’m okay.  We’ve had a lot of visitors.”

“If the company bothers you I can call patrol in your parking lot, tell them not to let friends up.  I don’t want you overexerting yourself or getting stressed.  It’s bad for you and the baby.”

I peek through the blinds overlooking the parking lot.  Aaron and Brett’s relief sit there, engine idling.  Two people are inside the unit, but I only see their hands from this angle. 

Refusing visitors won’t bode well.  Then people would blow up the answering machine with worried messages.  They need to
see
that I’m fine, and I can’t blame them.  I’d do the same if it had happened to a friend.  “It’ll stop eventually.  I guess it’s nice they care.”

She grunts.  “I’m going to be stuck going through some stuff tonight
, so I won’t be able to see you till tomorrow.  There’s some things we need to go over.”

“Things?  Like what?  More voice modifiers?”

“More questions.  I know, they’re fucking annoying, but we’ve found new information.  I’ll head over around lunchtime with a pizza.  I know pregnant women have weird-ass cravings, but I refuse to get anything with anchovies.”

Fine by me.  I don’t eat anything that once breathed water.  “I’ll see you then.”

We disconnect.  The second I press END another call streams through.

Jack and I trade grimaces.  It’s going to be a long night.

FIFTY-FOUR

I close my eyes for the first swing. 

Clearly this is a mistake.  I miss my mark and graze her hairline, but I feel her skull give way beneath the hammer’s head.  Blood spurts when her c
hin smashes into the granite. 

When she rolls onto her back, her mouth hangs slack.  The impact made her teeth slice through her tongue, and half of it dangles loose from stretching tendons. Her eyes turn white when they roll up in her head.

I feel my own ticket to hell being punched in.

“Strike one,” he says.  “You can do better than that.”

I hope he chokes on those words, and the cigarette I hear him smoking through the PA.  Nothing beats a cigarette after an orgasm.  I guess this is his.

Abby’s still motionless.  I hope she’s dead.

“She’s not dead yet.”

“Will you shut the fuck up?” I turn around, the hammer swinging from my hand, and glare at the ceiling. 

“Will you do it right the first time?”

Tears prick my eyes.  I can’t tell if they’re from anger or sadness, but I think it’s a mixture. Abby’s skeletal chest rises and falls with shallow breaths when I turn back to her.

The only thing that may make this easier is that her eyes have closed. Her hand brushes my kneecap when I melt to the floor, poising the hammer to strike.  It quivers in my grip before I bring it down on her forehead.

The second blow gets more blood flowing, and the third
exposes bone and something gray and fleshy.

My stomach constricts like twisted bubble wrap when she exhales a red mist and
shudders. 

The craters I’ve carved into her forehead ooze red rivers down her ear.  I bury my face in my hands and cry so hard it’s painful, my heart stuffed in my throat and a ringing in my ears. 

I hope she knows how sorry I am.  When I peel my hands off my face, they’re smeared with blood and snot and flecks of squishy gray matter.

***

Jack’s arm is slung around my waist when I wake up.  He must have carried me to bed with him.  He’ll never stop taking care of me, no matter how crazy I get.

The alarm clock on the IKEA nightstand ticks over to three-oh-five.

Stripes’s undulating, furry belly rises and falls against my thigh.  I scoop him up and press him into my face.  He yelps in surprise but eventually settles into my pillow and decides it’s high time for a bath.

My spine stiffens when a hand curls around my shoulder.  “You okay?”  Jack’s voice is thick.  I used to think it was sexy when his voice is tired and husky.  I might still think it is, but my brain seems to have cut ties with most emotions. 

I reach up to hold the hand wrapped on my shoulder.  “I’m fine.”

He nods, bare chest pressed into my back.  He doesn’t need to say anything—I can tell what he’s thinking.  I’m worrying him.  Again.  I flick Stripes’s tail out of my face and earn myself a dirty look.  “I’m not used to sleeping long.  I was never really able to.”

Stripes runs his sandpaper tongue over my finger.  I don’t know why it makes me want to cry.  Whenever I’m upset, he’s the first thing I search for, but I always fall to pieces once I’ve gotten him in my arms. Jack says it’s something about their fur and warmth that makes them good for emotional therapy.  The kids with terminal cancers love when the Humane Society brings animals into the hospital. 

Jack’s lips brush my neck.  “I get it.  But you have me and your guard tiger.  We’ll take care of you while you sleep.”

I reach over to snatch the cordless handset up. 

Jack clicks on the bedside lamp and sits up
, too.  “What are you doing?”

I press *69
when the dial tone blares.  “I remembered something.  I have to talk to Lisette.”

“Can’t it wait?”

“No,” I snap, pushing off the blankets.  “What if I forget?” 

“I doubt that’d happen.”

I don’t.  It seems like I’ve forgotten everything except the way Abby’s broken body looked beneath those lights.

Lisette answers, interrupting the second ring.  “What the hell are you doing up, Brooke?” 

I’d ask her the same, but she sounds strangely alert for just after three in the morning.  “I had a dream.  It reminded me of something.”

“Go ahead.”

I pause, wondering how to articulate it. “He left me in there for a little while, after Abby died.  I always thought he was alone, but after…the hammer, I heard something weird.”

“I thought you couldn’t hear anything from up there?”

“I couldn’t.  Not normally.  I think he accidentally bumped the microphone or something.  It turned on for a few seconds before he must have realized, and turned it off.”

“What was weird about it?”

“It sounded like…I don’t know, like sex.”

“Like moaning or some gross shit?  Headboard banging around?  Slapping?”

I can feel my cheeks flush. “No, it was two different voices.  It’s the way they were talking.  I could tell they weren’t deciding what to eat for dinner.  It sounded like sex.  To me.  I guess. Not porn-star fake screams, but, you know.  Like how people talk during…it.”  I trail off stupidly as Jack wraps his hand around the back of my neck.

“All right,” she says after a long pause.  “I’ve made a note.  Let me know if you remember anything else.  But
tomorrow.  Go to sleep, for God’s sake.”

My love of art is all that remains of my sensitive side, so it would be egregious not to take pains to look after it.

There was an avant-garde performance in one of
my houses.  The overseer of the establishment tells me this happens often; perhaps I can show you some time.

The woman involved was something of
a masochist, which took away from the enjoyment in a minor way.  It’s better with an unwilling participant.  Regardless, it was interesting. I’d never realized how prevalent cannibalism truly is.  Certainly not as taboo as it’s made out. 

I refused the punch, after learning the ingredients.  The others seemed to enjoy it, if their red-stained teeth and enormous pupils were any indication.  I imagine it had been laced with some sort of hallucinogen, since after a few sips the majority stripped naked. 

You’d never know the clients are of high class and stature.  I suppose when you peel away money and status, we’re all the same primitive beings.

The woman didn’t die; there’s a physician onsite.  He dressed her wounds as best he could, though I rather believe she’ll think twice the next time someone proposes tying her to a pole and letting the clients run rampant.  I wondered if she would need skin grafts to repair the areas they’d sliced away. At least a few blood transfusions, since she’d slipped into unconsciousness near the midway point.

They say
find a job you love, and you’ll never work a day in your life.

I suppose this means I’m lucky.

Monday at 4:01 a.m.

IP Address: 75.84.67.69

Sent via contact form by an anonymous viewer on your website

FIFTY-FIVE

I’m not sure how long I slump there next to Abby’s body.  One endless, cold moment tiptoes into another, and I do nothing but watch and wait, long after I’d stopped crying, which hadn’t lasted long to start with.

Thinking isn’t a phenomenon occurring in my burnt brain.  Maybe it experienced an electric overload that made all unnecessary actions fizzle.  Either way, it doesn’t matter, and I’m not sure anything will again.

“You know this is
your
fault, right?” his voice asks above me. “She’s dead, and you’re not. Where can you go from here?”

I imagine I’ll go the way of all that passed through here before me.  Dead.

“There’s only one thing left to do,” he says, and I hear my future in those words.  “Only one way to stop that series of pictures.” 

As if on cue, still-frames flip through my mind.  One after the other, so fast they’re blurring, but not fast enough that I can’t see
them clearly. Two empty pupils of two different sizes, brain matter leaking from an open crack in the skull, half a tongue hanging from cracked, parted lips.  The hammer still in my hand.  I don’t have an image of my own face, but my creative subconscious conjures one to superimpose.  A Brunette Brooke with black eyes, a face like some idol of a wicked god, carved of bone-white wood.

“
Jack won’t love you after all this.  That baby would be better off dead than with a mother like you.  So what now?”

“What now?” I echo dully, legs splayed, thighs rolling outward.  They’re almost the same color as the floor.  “You’ll tell me, I’m sure.”

“Wouldn’t it be tragic if something happened to Jack?  A convenient car accident, or a mugging gone wrong.  That can be arranged.”

Thinly-veiled t
hreats can’t punctuate this fog
,
so I stare at my thighs until my eyes cross.

“Perhaps I should let you take a moment to reflect on tonight’s events before we pack up,” he says. 

And I do.

Though I don’t stay strictly on the path of Abby, straying into overgrown thicket
s of the past; things I hate reflecting on.

Thick, stubby sausage fingers peeling
the sheets back, Old Spice, hot breath that reeks of Blue Moon and chewing tobacco. 

“Oh, no,” I tell him, tightening
my hold on the blankets like they’ll somehow protect me. 

“Oh, yes,” he says and claps a hand over my mouth.  His eyes are blue but look like black puddles through the weak glare of my alarm clock. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”

And it always
did
startle me, though in all honesty I can’t say why. 

***

I don’t wake up covered in a film of cold sweat, which may be something to be proud of, though my analysis might be skewed.

The alarm clock
’s red numbers shine on Jack’s sleeping face. Five twenty-two. Stripes groans softly and pokes my nose with the pink pads of his paw. 

“Meow,” I agree, and throw the blankets over
us.  

FIFTY-SIX

John pushed into the homicide department, travel mug of coffee in hand, and headed for Sergeant Jennings’s office.

“Enter with caution,” Holmes said, looking up from his desk calendar with an arched gray and bushy eyebrow.  “She bit a messenger’s head off ten minutes ago.”

“She’s not a morning person
?”

Holmes
laughed.  “She is.  When she’s actually slept the night before.”

A weaker man might have been frightened at the prospect of being reamed by a sleepless Sergeant Jennings, but John rapped on her door anyway.

“What?” came her muffled snap.  “Leave the fucking mail with Holmes.”

He pushed the door open and froze in the threshold.  Lisette glanced up through mussed bangs, on all fours.  Photographs, police reports and case files obliterated the carpet.

“I wasn’t expecting you until later.”

He picked his way to an open chair and
dropped his briefcase.  “Have you been here all night?”

She gave a few overzealous nods and downed the contents of a mug.  “I found something in that box of old cases.  It was worth staying to look into.  I think I’m starting to put this together.”

He crouched beside her and squinted at the yellowed pages.  “What have you got?”

“Either the name of the perp or one ginormous motherfucker of a coincidence.”  She held up a photograph.  “Bianca Cartwright.  Does her face look familiar?”

Shy and crooked close-mouthed smile, round face, high forehead, blue eyes of slightly different sizes.

She had the same asymmetry of the murdered girls.

Lisette slapped the photo into his chest and crawled to another pile.  “Bianca and her sister Reagan grew up in Laguna.”  She snatched up two more photographs, the first of a white-haired man, and the second of considerably younger woman with broad, intimidatingly attractive features. “Dad was some bigwig at the Colgate-Palmolive Corporation, Mom was an ex-model turned homemaker.  Guess what happened when Mom and Dad got into a car accident on Pacific Coast highway and died?” 

He accepted the photographs she stuffed into his hand.  “What?”

Lisette bounced to her feet, wound a path to the far corner of her office, and plucked another document up with lithe and nimble fingers.  The ceiling fan flapped it out of her hand, but she barreled on. “They went to live with great-aunt Melinda.  Grandparents were too old to look after two fifteen and seventeen-year-old girls, so the courts granted Aunt Melinda full custody.”

“Was Aunt Melinda not a nice lady?”

She snapped up another photograph and threw it across the room like a Frisbee.  The fan boomeranged it back, but John got a glimpse before it fluttered to the floor—a hawk-faced woman with steel-gray curls marching across a shiny pink scalp.

“Aunt Melinda was a cold-hearted bitch with a God complex
, and a distinct aversion to children.  Particularly young girls.  She pulled Bianca and Reagan out of highschool because she didn’t approve of coed institutions. She wanted them to be homeschooled.  You know what she taught them?  It wasn’t fractions and English lit.”

Her enthusiasm was contagious.
John hoped she didn’t lose it the longer she was on the job, the way most cops did.  “What?”

She blew a sweaty lock of hair out of her face, hands on her hips.  “She taught them that God doesn’t like dirty little whores.”

“How does one go about teaching that?”

“Aunt Melinda found out Reagan had a boyfriend.  Reagan was the seventeen-year-old.  She went batshit, locked Reagan in the cellar, and tried to beat the slut out of her.”  Lisette pawed through another stack of documents. She selected a handful and shoved them into John’s arms.  “Hospital records.  Someone made an anonymous CPS call saying the girls hadn’t been seen in weeks.  Guess what they found when they entered the house?”

He didn’t bother asking as he looked through hospital photos. Most were close-ups of a frail body with waxy skin riddled with contusions.

Green-tinged burns.  Gnarled, skinny fingers. B
lack foot-shaped bruises stretching across an elegant path of jutting vertebrae.

“They found a dead Reagan and a half-dead Bianca.  Aunt Melinda caught Bianca trying to sneak her sister out of the cellar one night.  Locked them both down there and said Bianca needed to be punished
as well, like consorting with the likes of an alleged whore would make her one, too.  Said she didn’t want Reagan’s slutty behavior rubbing off, and there was only one way to do it.”

“And how was that?”

Lisette threw the fistful of papers up in the air as if she were playing fifty-two pickup.  “Bianca had to do the beatings herself.  Interviews said she refused.  Of course that didn’t make Aunt Melinda happy, so she stopped feeding them.  Kept them in the dark.  They got desperate.  Reagan got sicker.  Infection, gangrene, fever.  Aunt Melinda yelled at them through the vent and said only one of them would get out of there, and it wouldn’t be Reagan.  She told Bianca to kill that whore unless she wanted to die down there.  It went on about three weeks.”

He looked up from the photographs. “Did she kill
her?”

Of course not.  Didn’t have the strength of courage, did she?  Why else would she
murder surrogates for herself on three week rotations?

She shook her head.  “No.  She didn’t do anything.  Essentially just watched her die.  When CPS found them
, Reagan had been dead about three days.  Bianca wasn’t far behind.  She’d been digging into her wrists with her fingernails, lost a pint of blood, not to mention she has Type 1 diabetes, and hadn’t been given her insulin injections.  They pumped her full of fluids and intravenous nutrition in the hospital, taped her wrists up, and kept her two weeks for observation. Melinda was tossed in the psych ward.  She died in there about four months ago.  Guess who visited before she croaked?”

He felt his brows pull up in surprise.  “Really?”

Aunt Melinda’s messages must have really sunk in. A terrified fifteen-year-old girl was just naïve enough to believe an angry old woman preaching faux sermons through a forked tongue.  She followed twisted commandments handed down by the only God she’d ever worshipped.

“Fucking really, but she only visited the one time.”  Lisette reached to tighten the elastic around her ponytail and sank onto her knees.  “Why visit that crusty old cunt?  If I were her
, I’d only visit her grave if I had to take a piss.”

Maybe s
he made an appearance as a Reaper, not as a concerned niece.

“How did Melinda die?”

“Heart attack.  She had a history of heart disease in her family.”

Or she had a little injection of diabetic insulin and went into heart failure.

He picked up the photograph of Reagan Cartwright.  She had the same blue eyes and blonde hair of Bianca, but the chiseled, wide bone structure of their mother.  “Bianca hates herself.  That’s her face she’s killing over and over, not Reagan’s.”

She rolled hack to sit on her heels, clasping her hands over her knees.  “Guess who lived next door to Aunt Melinda?  It’s the best part.”

“Stanley Heckles.”  John stood and offered his hand help her up.  She yanked herself to her Timberlands and dusted off the thighs of her jeans with far too much vigor for someone who hadn’t slept in over a day. “I can send patrol to Bianca’s address if you want to talk to him first. Hairs in the back of his van match Paula and Rebecca.  If he’s not in on the murders, then he’s the wheelman.”

“He can wait.  He isn’t going anywhere.”