The Destiny Machine

by J L Aarne

  Thomas was the one to finally stop it. He twisted his fingers inside him one last time, forcing Rainer to catch his breath, then he made him take his hand off him and kicked his pants off the end of the bed. He ran his palms down Rainer’s sides to his hips, cupped them in his hands, and pushed inside him. Rainer arched beneath him and drew his legs up, knees pressing tightly against Thomas’s waist, fingers biting into his shoulders. That first long, deep stroke was slow and Rainer moaned low in his throat.

  Thomas stayed like that for a moment, deep inside of him, savoring the hot, tight grip of Rainer’s body, the way he shivered beneath him and started to squirm when Thomas didn’t move. The overhead light was on and everything was stark and illuminated, from the powder-fine sand in Rainer’s hair by his left temple to the shadow of the shallow scar above the right side of Thomas’s mouth. Rainer stared up at him, ran his fingers through Thomas’s hair to the back of his neck and wrapped his legs around him. He flexed his hips and Thomas thrust, driving a surprised cry from Rainer. He thrust again and Rainer bucked under him, rocked into it to meet him and they began to move together.

  Rainer liked it rough, especially in the mood he was in, but a gentle caressing touch here and there could make him shake and catch him unprepared by his own body’s pleasure. Thomas licked and nipped at his throat, held Rainer’s shoulder in his mouth between his teeth like a wolf while he fucked him hard and fast, making the bed springs screech in protest. Thomas’s hands were soft on his body though. He stroked them along Rainer’s sides, along his ribs, smearing sweat over his skin as it broke out on their bodies.

  Rainer made soft sounds of pleasure against Thomas’s skin as he pressed kisses into the base of his throat, along the curve of his jaw. His hands clutched at him when Thomas thrust particularly hard or when he touched the right spot, slid over it and stroked. Thomas thrust there, grinding into him and pressed him down into the mattress. Rainer shuddered around him and whispered encouragement in his ear, his breath warm along the side of his neck, causing Thomas to shiver.

  When Rainer tried to roll them, reverse their positions and take control, Thomas was ready for it and stopped him. He liked to lay back and let Rainer ride him, but that wasn’t what he wanted right now. He wanted Rainer right where he was; on his back pinned beneath him.

  “Not this time,” Thomas said through his teeth.

  Rainer dragged his nails lightly down Thomas’s back to his ass and hauled him against him. Thomas threw his weight behind his thrusts, harder, drawing breath-hitching cries from Rainer that only made pleasure swell down deep in Thomas’s belly and had him responding possessively. He dragged his hands through Rainer’s brown hair, the sweaty strands clinging to his scarred fingertips, and kissed his bared throat when he tilted his head back. Rainer’s voice trembled against his lips and he nipped below his chin.

  The sharp contrast of that pinching bite with the pleasure coursing through his body made Rainer gasp. He wrapped his arms around Thomas and held onto him, his hands sliding up his back, his neck, into his dark, damp hair, mirroring him.

  Thomas’s orgasm came first and Rainer held him as he moaned, his teeth pressed into the curve of his shoulder.

  Thomas only paused for a moment before he picked up his pace again. His strokes were less steady, but he ground his hips against Rainer’s ass, shallowly thrusting to feel the slick slide of his cock in his own come inside him.

  The obscenity of it, Thomas’s breath panting in his ear and the constant stimulation was enough. Rainer cried out, his orgasm snapping through him like a whip. He bucked against him and bit his own lip so he wouldn’t bite Thomas. Thomas still had his hands in Rainer’s wet hair and he growled into his mouth, licked past his teeth and swallowed his cries and moans of pleasure in a possessive kiss.

  They lay there for a while after, lazily kissing. The hunger was gone and they were sated for the moment, the kisses leading to nothing else than more kissing. They eventually broke apart and Thomas rolled off of Rainer with a sigh.

  Two of Thomas’s three cats sat inside the doorway staring in at them on the bed. Rainer nudged Thomas with his elbow to get his attention. Thomas turned his head toward him and he pointed.

  “We have an audience,” Thomas remarked.

  “Or a gallery of critics,” Rainer said.

  After a few minutes, Rainer got up from the bed and went into the bathroom to shower. Thomas put his bloody, sandy clothes in the washer before he joined him. When he stepped into the shower, Rainer held up a bottle of pink body wash and raised his eyebrows inquiringly. It hadn’t been there the last time Rainer stayed over and it wasn’t really Thomas’s sort of thing. It was pink and the bottle said that it was sweet pea scented.

  “It’s Jasmine’s,” Thomas said.

  Jasmine was Thomas’s current girlfriend. Rainer had only met her a couple of times and he didn’t feel anything about her one way or another. She was pretty and Thomas liked her, so she was probably smart, which was all well and good. Her body wash in Thomas’s shower though was something else.

  Rainer didn’t like it. He examined the feeling and decided that it was jealousy.

  Without a word, he put the bottle down and picked up the shampoo. Thomas stepped under the water spray and didn’t say anything else about it. He didn’t need Rainer to say it to know that he didn’t like it or that he likely didn’t understand why it annoyed him. His expression didn’t change and his body language was the same as it had been, relaxed and comfortable, but no one knew Rainer like he knew him. His confusion and irritation had weight to them.

  They washed their hair and cleaned the sweat and sex off. The foam was swirling down the drain when Rainer backed Thomas up against the wall of the shower and kissed him. Whether he wanted to lay claim and reassert his ownership or just reassure himself, Thomas couldn’t tell and even Rainer didn’t know, but Thomas didn’t refuse him. They had sex again with the water sluicing down the tattooed slope of Rainer’s back and raining down on their heads. It was starting to run cold before they finished, but Rainer felt better afterward; exhausted, but good.

  Usually Rainer had trouble sleeping and sometimes went a few days with nothing more than a catnap to keep him going, but after pulling on a pair of Thomas’s sweats, he fell into bed and went to sleep almost immediately. Thomas turned off the stereo and the lights then he and crawled into bed with him. Rainer turned toward the heat of his body without waking and Thomas was soon asleep, too.

  Chapter 3

  Early Monday morning, Ezekiel was wide-awake at the kitchen table with files stacked up under and around his laptop and glossy photographs of dead girls spread out in front of him. On the laptop, Breakfast at Tiffany’s played on mute. The TV in the living room was in his line of sight and an old Fred Astaire movie played on mute there, too. “On My Way to the Cage” by Rollins Band was on the stereo loud enough to make the air vibrate and thump around him.

  Ezekiel led a new team of profilers at the Los Angeles branch of the FBI and the case he was currently working on was an old one in more ways than one. Two years earlier in the L.A. area there had been a series of copycat killings that mimicked the Whitechapel murders of the late 1880s. The murderer had killed, mutilated and dismembered eight girls in all over a period of three months only to slip away like a shadow, leaving behind nothing of himself. There was no DNA, there were no fingerprints, shoe prints, fibers, no witnesses, nothing. Law enforcement had never had any serious suspects and the killer had concluded the series of murders with his version of Alice McKenzie—a girl named Alicia McKenzie—and moved on.

  There were some very distinct differences between the age-old mystery case and the copycat that Ezekiel found interesting though: None of the girls had been older than 30. Only one of them, Meredith Theresa Kelley—Mary Kelly—had any connection to the sex industry at all. She had been a waitress, aspiring actress and, according to the reluctant statements of some of her friends, occasionally turned a trick or two when she was hard up for mo
ney. Each of the girls had been missing her top two canine teeth, except for Meredith Kelley, who had bad teeth beneath cheap veneers, so the killer had taken the bottom ones as well. Jack the Ripper’s familiarity with human anatomy and his surgical abilities were debatable and highly doubtful, but the copycat had some knowledge and skill with both. He had used a scalpel rather than a knife and recreated the wounds and mutilations with perfect, studied precision. That which had been done roughly and with rage and passion in the long-dead Whitechapel women had been done with cold, pre-planned exactness by the copycat.

  Ezekiel had caught himself admiring the killer while studying the evidence and silently scolded himself for it. It wasn’t the first time it had happened with a case, but it wouldn’t help him profile the guy and it wouldn’t do to let his colleagues see it. He hunted the monsters; he wasn’t supposed to admire them. What they did was supposed to horrify and outrage him. It was supposed to sicken and disgust him and drive him to capture or end them. He still had that—the drive to hunt them to the ends of the earth—but the rest wasn’t something he had felt strongly in a long, long time.

  Maybe it was because he didn’t get out in the field much anymore. The victims weren’t people, they were information. He hunted the killers on paper with photographs, reams of data, psychology and conjecture. He could slip into the mind of a killer, but then he passed what he knew on to other people and went to the next case.

  He had already given a preliminary profile to the LAPD the day before and even he knew how inadequate and unhelpful it was: The Copycat Ripper was a white male between the ages of thirty and forty with above average intelligence. He was educated and had a background in surgical anatomy. He was confident, as evidenced by his fearless placing and posing of his victims in public places. For the same reason, he was not the type of person the average citizen would feel threatened by or imagine as a killer. He did not spring to mind when people heard that someone had been murdered. He was likely decent looking and employed in a respectable, even high paying job. It was possible, even likely, that he was a psychopath. He was probably heterosexual, though it wasn’t really possible to determine that conclusively from a copycat.

  Ezekiel had the glossy coroner’s photographs and crime scene photos of the copycat victims sorted beside photocopies, where photos were available, of the original Jack the Ripper victims. The similarities were hard to miss. The killer hadn’t sent anyone a letter from Hell, but he had intended for the bodies to be found and for someone to make the connection.

  Ezekiel put down the glossy photograph of one painfully pale and horribly butchered young woman and picked up another.

  The music on the stereo had changed to Nick Cave. He wasn’t listening to it any more than he was watching the movies, but it all helped him to think by running in the background.

  He put the girl’s picture aside. Something about this case had caught his interest and held it and he couldn’t put his finger on why yet. Murderers emulating Jack the Ripper, whether well or badly, were not unique or new. It happened all the time.

  Ezekiel remembered the original case in Whitechapel. He hadn’t been in England, but he had read about it in the paper. He and his twin brother, Jacob, had been living near Chicago at the time. Ezekiel had been working for the Pinkerton Agency, under various aliases, for almost forty years when the sensational news of Jack the Ripper made it into the papers on their side of the Atlantic. It was the first case of murder for nothing more than the pleasure of committing murder to catch the world’s attention and hold it. It was the first in his lifetime and it had fascinated him exactly because of its strange nature. The police had looked at the murders, realized what they had, and immediately assumed that the murderer was an inhuman, slavering, insane demon with a diseased mind that would stand out in a crowd. Ezekiel knew that wasn’t true at all. He had seen even then the wretched atrocities that mere mortal men were capable of, but law enforcement at the time was a hundred years away from the concept of psychologically profiling killers.

  It was the copycat’s last victim, Alicia McKenzie, who was the reason the case had been brought to Ezekiel’s attention again after two years. He picked up her photograph and examined it. She had been a beautiful girl. Dark brown hair, pale blue eyes surrounded by a fringe of eyelashes as long and dark as a china doll’s, full lips like most girls had to spend thousands of dollars to attain surgically and a beauty mark like a drop of dark chocolate above the left outer corner of her top lip. Like Alice McKenzie, she had been stabbed twice in the throat then held down as she lay bleeding to death while the killer mutilated her. With Alicia, as with Alice, the wounds and kill method were slightly different from the others, the mutilation less gruesome and more cursory, but unlike Alice, Alicia’s parents were wealthy, connected people with serious political clout.

  The FBI hadn’t been invited in on the case when it was new, but Alicia McKenzie’s parents were pushing the local police. The media spotlight they had put on the case in recent months threatened to be a huge embarrassment to the LAPD. It wasn’t much of a surprise then when the Copycat Ripper case ended up on Ezekiel’s desk. No one really thought the killer would be caught, but maybe if the FBI looked into it, the McKenzies would be pacified, shut up and go away.

  The stereo abruptly went silent and Ezekiel’s head snapped up. Jacob stood in the living room beside the entertainment center, fresh from the shower, looking sleepy and irritated. He went to the flat screen TV and turned it off, too. Then he yawned and walked through the kitchen to the coffee pot. He emptied what was left in the old pot into Ezekiel’s thermos and gave it back to him before starting a fresh one that wouldn’t be quite as stout.

  Jacob and Ezekiel were twins, but they were not identical. They had the same black hair, but Jacob’s was long past his shoulders and Ezekiel kept his short. Jacob was slim, pale and androgynously pretty while Ezekiel was tan, thicker built, heavier and more muscled. Jacob’s eyes were bright blue and he had a mouth that wouldn’t have looked out of place on a woman, coated in lipstick. Ezekiel’s eyes were dark chicory brown and his mouth was wide but did not have the full, almost pouting bow of his brother’s. No one ever mistook one of them for the other.

  Jacob was wearing an old pair of jeans and a black T-shirt. He pulled his long hair back from his face with an elastic band as he crossed the kitchen to where Ezekiel sat. When he reached him, he leaned in and pressed a quick kiss to his mouth. He tasted faintly of mint toothpaste. In contrast, Ezekiel tasted like too strong black coffee and Jacob’s cigarettes, which he was in the habit of stealing.

  “You didn’t sleep last night,” Jacob said. He filled his cup with coffee, stirred in one packet of sweetener and two teaspoons of creamer and sipped it. “What are you working on?”

  Ezekiel nodded to the files and glossies on the table. “Jack the Ripper’s biggest fan,” he said. “Have a look.”

  Jacob raised an eyebrow and walked around the table, his coffee cupped in his hands. He stood there studying the crime scene photographs and the black and white photocopies and drank his coffee without comment for a while.

  Ezekiel had moved them across the country from Virginia seven years earlier after Jacob had a psychotic break following a case of human trafficking he worked that ended with a high death count.

  The traffickers had slaughtered over fifty children between the ages of six and thirteen rather than let themselves be caught with them alive. Before that, Jacob had been an active agent with the FBI like Ezekiel. He had worked for a time with the Behavioral Analysis Unit, too, but even then he had mostly dealt with abductions and missing persons rather than killers. Missing people were sometimes found alive and brought home, so Jacob had spent more time in the field than Ezekiel had in quite a while. He looked at things differently than Ezekiel and occasionally made connections that Ezekiel would not.

  Jacob was getting better. Because he was getting better and because of his experience, even with his sanity hanging by tenterhooks, he occasionally s
till consulted with law enforcement and the FBI. Jacob was still crazy, but the thing was, he had always been crazy, they just hadn’t always known that he was crazy.

  Jacob picked up a photograph, looked at it and put it back down with a soft huff of laughter. “These were two years ago?” he asked.

  “Yeah. March, April and May,” Ezekiel said. “Some people of interest, but little evidence and no suspects. Then the killings stopped.”

  “I doubt it,” Jacob said.

  “He seems to have enjoyed it,” Ezekiel agreed. “Eight people in three months is a lot. With most killers, I’d say he was devolving, going on a spree, but I don’t think he was. They were always clean, exact replications, he never lost control. But after the McKenzie girl, there weren’t any more and he didn’t start over.”

  “Then he moved on to something else. Because this? This isn’t the work of a quitter,” Jacob said. “Look at this. He’s got them posed, he took vics with similar names… No, this guy’s playing here. It’s a game.”

  “Catch me if you can,” Ezekiel said thoughtfully. It was something that had appeared twice in some of the more credible taunting letters Jack the Ripper had mailed to the police.

  That was what had caught his interest. That thing he couldn’t put his finger on, Jacob had pointed him right at it. It was a game.

  Ezekiel closed his laptop and started gathering together the files and photographs. “I have to get ready for work. What time is it? Christ, it’s already six?”

  Jacob took the files from him and set them aside on top of Ezekiel’s computer. “Sit. I’m going to make pancakes and you’re going to eat them before you go running off.”

  “I’ll just grab something on the—”

  Jacob put a hand on his arm and gently pushed him toward a chair. “Sit, Zeke. The case is two years old. It’s not going to get any colder if you eat breakfast first.”