Snuff (21 page)

I almost slipped this evening.

It was stupid, especially when I’ve counseled you on proper restraint. But what kind of man can’t admit his shortcomings?

Every now and then a new crop of girls enter the houses. 
Most know their stations and do as instructed, but every once in a great while we get a girl like the one I was forced to deal with tonight. 

Her name is Alena.  Apparently she’s been
negligent with her birth control regiment, and I do not like when my girls fall pregnant. It takes them out of circulation while we arrange abortions, but it’s understandable and unavoidable; things happen.

She refused
to take care of it.  I reminded her of the contracts she signed; she wouldn’t budge.  I like to think I’m a patient man, but she toed the boundaries, and I’m ashamed to admit I saw red.

She isn’t dead, before you think less of me,
though she is minus the child she fought admirably for, and she’s no longer one of my girls.

Is a fetus worth giving up free room and board?  They’re given more comforts than women of their class are normally afforded.  Most of them are married off once they’re too old to work; either by patrons or our matchmaking service. 

Perhaps I’ve been expecting too much of the fairer sex these days. 

Monday at 12:21
p.m.

IP Address: 75.84.67.69

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SIXTY-SIX

“What?” Lisette exploded into her cell phone, as John trailed her through the parking lot to where she’d double-parked.  “When the fuck did this happen?” 

John didn’t need to ask what the problem was as he cl
imbed into the passenger’s seat, but a knot pitted into his stomach.

But how
did she get past the goon squad?

“Why the fuck weren’t you coveri
ng the fire escape?”  She was still cursing by the time she slammed herself behind the wheel, started the car, and peeled out of the driveway. “Find out the friend’s name.  Well, fucking find out.  She’s not Madonna, she’s got to have a last name.”

She threw her cell phone at the radio after she hung up.

John caught it before it bounced to the floor mat, and stuffed it in the cup holder.  “How long has she been missing?” 

Her knuckles shone white on the wheel.  “Shit for brains over there says about thirty minutes. 
The friend was driving a white Altima.  Jack was at the grocery store.  Came back, and Brooke was gone.  She’s going to kill her.  After all Brooke’s been through, she’s going to be murdered in the fucking basement she just made it out of.”

“There’s still time,” he told her as the wheels of the patrol vehicle screamed down the street.  “I don’t think she’ll kill Brooke.  She wants
her to kill herself.  Bianca hasn’t actually committed any murders. I doubt she’d be inclined to start now.”

Lisette
didn’t seem comforted as she flicked the blinker and merged onto the freeway.

“Let CSU know they need to c
omb Brooke’s apartment for bugs,” he said.  “She wouldn’t have gone anywhere without good reason or proper motivation. If Bianca mimicked the friend’s appearance, she’s been keeping tabs, and it wasn’t simple surveillance.  That would have been too obvious, and something she wouldn’t risk, with patrol units sitting in the parking lot.  She waited until Jack was gone, striking when odds were in her favor.”

Lisette blew around a c
aravan of shiny, waxed hot-rods, and raised a concerto of furious car horns.  “What, you think she knocked on the door and told Brooke, ‘hey, I’ve got your boyfriend hostage?’  Why didn’t Brooke scream for help?”

“I’m sure she would have
, unless she’d been given good reason not to.” 

“What if she kidnaps another girl?”

He glanced at her profile.  It had gone stony since he’d last looked—the Sergeant Jennings version of Hardened Cop Face.  “We’ve got a BOLO out.  We know who we’re looking for.  The warrants will come through, and we’ll get Brooke back.”

SIXTY-SEVEN

The scent of medicinal cherry is the first thing I register when my eyes wrench open to a bleary mess of
white.

Her back is turned, a graceful hand sweeping up and down, painting thick black strokes onto the white walls.

I don’t say anything, too transfixed, my cheek pressed into the cold floor as I watch.  There’s a fluidity to her movements.  Precise and methodical, but the poetry in the strokes seem like improvisations. Like someone’s whispering the moves in her ear a moment before she brings them to life.  She must see something in the walls, something I can’t.  They’re showing her a picture, and she’s going to carve that chunky black pencil over them until she sets it free. 

Eventually she takes a few slow steps back, the heels of her b
oots clicking. Her loose and lacy cream blouse flares around her waist, auburn hair burning scarlet beneath the halo of florescent lights.  Ghostly remains of long-healed scars glitter, crisscrossing the flesh on both slender arms.

The pencil slips from between her fingers
. Its edges bounce off the floor a few times before rolling away.  An eyeliner pencil.  I imagine you have to use whatever utensil is handy when the mood strikes.

The full-
on impact hits when she’s far enough away so I can see over her shoulder.

It’s crudely drawn, almost child-like, but the effect is
unnerving.

The spines of the skeletal bodies are twisted, vertebrae gnarling around jagged rocks they’re climbing.  Limbs are splayed in odd angles
, as if the bones are malleable.  It looks like they’re moving, as if she’s breathed life into them, but it’s got to be a trick of the light. 

They’re tearing chunks of flesh off one another.  Each set of eyes is simultaneously hollow and brutal
, like they’re living on the edge of ecstasy and emptiness. 

Her head rolls over one shoulder until I see the tip of her nose.  “You’re awake.”

Words I hadn’t planned on speaking claw their way from my throat. “Why are they eating each other?  Are they cannibals?”

She laughs
.  “No.  They’re not cannibals.”  She spins on one heel and falls onto an overturned bucket in a swanky heap of long limbs and lace and sheets of copper-threaded hair.  She’s a dancer.  I can see it in her careless but elegant movements.  “They’re symbolic of how people use, abuse, and step on others to feed their primitive needs.” Her hair tumbles in a red waterfall over one shoulder as she cocks her head.  “There they are.  Reflecting my demons like some fucked-up funhouse mirror.”

I’m not sure what I was expecting, but I sort of wish they were just cannibals.

“Do you remember this place?”

I blink at the familiar dark stains on the granite floor.  Of course I do.  Even if
the lights had never been turned on, I’d remember the cold fear it’s marinated in.

S
he gazes fondly at the black smears she’s crayoned, the heels of her boots clacking against the floor as her knees jiggle.  “This is where your devil danced with my demon.  It should feel like home.”

I press my palms into the
floor and push myself up.  “I don’t have a devil.”  All I have is a headache and a growing sense of discombobulating panic.

Her eyes harden
when she peels them off the carnival of blood painting the walls.  “Well, you’re a murderer.  Or have you forgotten?”  She gestures to the place Abby died.  It’s an oasis of speckled brain matter in the desert of my confusion.

“You made me do
that.”

“But you didn’t do it
right
.  You didn’t do your
job
.  So you’re going to stay here until you do.”

Is there even a right way to kill someone?  “I crushed her skull with a hammer.  She’s dead.  I did it because you made me.  You got what you wanted.”

“If I’d gotten what I wanted, you wouldn’t be here right now.”

“Tell your friend to let Jack go.  I’m here.”

Wrinkles slash into her forehead.  “I never had Jack. You’re too gullible.   Made my job easier though, and for that, I thank you.  I only need help lugging dead weight around.  Surveillance and computers can be self-taught, especially when you’ve been a hermit for nearly ten years.”

How did I not notice her word choice, their breathy cadence and flow, are exactly the same as the ‘man’ who kidnapped me?  It’s the same voice I heard shouting above my head in the dark.  The same eerie lilt that can sw
itch tack and cut like a file.

“Don’t worry.
”  She shoots me a reassuring smile.  “You’ll have a chance to make everything right.”

“How?”

She bounces to her feet, hair swinging behind her as she climbs the stairs.  “I’m going to let you have a do-over.”

SIXTY-EIGHT

John ducked beneath the CRIME SCENE tape and into Brooke’s apartment after leaving Lisette to collect Stanley Heckles from lockup. 

Crimson and orange light from the soon-to-set sun shone through the open blinds and stained the white carpet as he walked further inside. 

Jack Callahan looked ready to kill, pacing the living room with his hands jammed deep in the pockets of his jeans. “How the fuck did
she even get up here?” he asked, spotting John filling the threshold of the front door.  “She copied Brooke’s friend’s looks?  I bet all it would take to fool you people are one of those pairs of glasses with the nose and mustache attached.”

John took stock of the collection of CSU technicians—two crawling on the floor bagging hairs, three dusting for prints, and one posted on a barstool in front of a kitchen island. “I understand your frustration, and I know you’re worried and scared, but these little tirades aren’t helping anybody
.” 

Jack threw up his hands.  “Did you honestly expect different?”

No, he hadn’t.  He’d just hoped Jack would be tied up giving his statement to the police officers milling around the parking lot.  “Have you found anything so far?” he asked the room at large.  

“Not so far, but,” the technician nearest the kitchen motioned John over, “I think it may have been through here.”  He tapped
an open laptop. 

“Through the webcam?  Was t
he light on?”

“No, but it would only be on when someone was actively watching.”

John slid onto the stool beside the tech.  “It’s relatively simple to hack a webcam, right?  One doesn’t need to be an evil computer genius to do it?”

“Not at all.  You’d just need to get your target to download an email attachment, or click a link that triggers an automatic download.  Activate the camera, then sit back and watch.  They have tutorials on
how to do it posted on YouTube.  It’s harder for hackers to go undetected these days, since people know more about webcam safety, but if the hacker only spies for a couple minutes at a time, chances are nobody would notice.”

A striped
gray cat that looked soft as cashmere jumped onto the third stool and peered around John’s shoulder.  He gave its head a preoccupied stroke as the screensaver flicked on—an image of Jack and Brooke, when she was in full makeup and strawberry-blonde.  “Is there a way you can prove who’s done this?”

“Well,” the tech said, snapping the laptop shut.  “We’ll take it to the lab.  See what we can make of it.  I’m pretty positive this is the means he used to spy.  No bugs or mikes
, and we searched this place top to bottom.”

John
glanced at the microwave clock.  About time to get started on round two with Stanley Heckles.  “If the other victims had laptops, run your tests on those, too.  Let me know what you find.”

SIXTY-NINE

“Does the name Bianca Cartwright mean anything to you?” 

Stanley Heckles’s bewildered eyes whizzed between Lisette and John, while his public defender scrolled through her smartphone, wearing a bored expression. “And why should he tell you anything?”

“Because h
air in the back of his van matched two of the dead girls.  If he’s not in on the murders, then he’s the one who dumps them. If he helps us, his cooperation won’t be forgotten.”  Lisette crossed her arms over her flak jacket. “No sense in lying, Stan. We already know you lived across the street from her when you were nineteen.  Was she your friend?”

“Sort of.”

She slapped her palm on the table.  “How can you be ‘sort of’ friends?  You are or you aren’t.”

His Adam’s apple bobbed as he nodded.  “Yes.  We were friends.”

John opened a file and spread the contents on the table.  “So that means you know about her Aunt Melinda.  Something you had in common, living with horrible women.  Did you know what was going on in Bianca’s house?”

“Not everything.  Bianca didn’t
tell me much.  Just that their aunt was keeping Reagan in the cellar.”

“Did you ever meet Reagan?”  He slid her photograph over, and Heckles accepted it with the tips of his trembling fingers. 

He bit his lower lip back, gazing into the flat, glossy depths of Reagan’s blue eyes.  “Bianca said her aunt didn’t approve of Reagan having a boyfriend.  It meant she wasn’t clean.  Nobody would want to marry a woman who wasn’t clean.”

Lisette rolled her wrist in circles.  “Is that what you believe, Stan?”

“No.”  He studied at the photo of Bianca John slid across the table, and ran his index finger over the contours of her face.  “I tried to help her.  Both of them.  They didn’t have anyone else.”  His brown eyes were wet when he looked up at John.  “They were just little girls.  I only wanted them to be safe.  Melinda was so mean to them.”

“How did you try to help?”

“I tried to get them out of that house.  We were going to do it after their aunt went to sleep.  They were supposed to meet me around the corner.  I was going to drive them to the train station.  But they never showed.”

“Is that when you called CPS?”

He nodded.  The movement made a tear spill over a pudgy cheek.   “I didn’t see them again until the ambulance came.  Reagan was dead.  I thought Bianca was too, until my mother told me differently.”

“You should have called the police if you knew what was happening
next door,” Lisette barked, revulsion twisting her plump lips.  “You’re just as bad as Melinda.  You could have helped them.  Could have told somebody before Reagan died.”

“There was nothing I could have done.”  Heckles pushed the photographs of the Cartwrights
away.  “My mother wouldn’t have let me use the phone to call anyone.”

“Why the hell not?”

John put a hand on Lisette’s elbow. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw her give his fingers a dirty look. “So you had to wait until she was asleep to make that anonymous call to Child Protective Services?”

“Mother found out anyway.”  He showed John the tips of his withered fingers.  “She made me stick my fingers in lye to teach me not to make unapproved phone calls.”

“How did your mother die?”

“Heart attack. 
It happened when she was in the back garden cleaning the birdbath.  I found her when I got home from work that night.”

Seems like there’ve been an awful lot of heart attacks going on recently.