by J L Aarne
Rainer frowned. “Excuse me?”
He pretended surprise, but Rainer knew exactly what he meant and, by his question, that Ezekiel suspected him. Rainer had fed Kathy Conway’s left kidney to the coyotes after he murdered her and left her to be found wearing her own intestines like a necklace.
Rainer held Ezekiel’s gaze and a certain knowledge passed between them: Ezekiel knew and Rainer knew that he knew. His pulse didn’t spike, his pupils didn’t dilate, his mouth did not go dry with fear at the idea. Rather, he had to suppress the urge to grin as he experienced an exhilarating thrill of anticipation and thought, This is going to be fun.
Ezekiel took his hand back. “Thanks for this,” he said about the book. “I’ll get it back to you.”
“No rush,” Rainer said. “Good luck.”
He sat back down at his desk and watched Ezekiel leave. Only when he was gone did Rainer allow himself a brief, pleased smile. He hadn’t killed anyone in a way that received any attention in several months because his interest had been waning. Perhaps what he needed was an opponent to play with. Ezekiel Herod seemed like a formidable adversary; a wrathful god to be tempted by the devil.
Chapter 5
In the evenings, Rainer went for a run. He was a fairly heavy smoker and had to rest more than the average runner in the park. Thomas liked to tease him about it and called it his “evening wheeze,” to which Rainer would respond by pointing out the daunting number of academics in his field who gradually started to resemble cushy tweed chairs as they aged. He had no intention of becoming one of them.
Friday when he finished, he returned home to find his front door unlocked and his friend, Elijah standing in the living room between Rainer’s coffee table and TV, scowling at the wall. Scattered around the living room on the couch and table lay fabric swatches and cards of paint shades. Elijah had picked the lock on the front door. It wasn’t the first time.
Elijah held up his phone, aiming it at the wall, and said, “You see what I mean, Kitten? It’s atrocious. Look at the plaster!”
Rainer’s grey and black tabby cat, Pogo sat crouched atop the upright piano, hair on end in indignation at this strange intrusion.
“Yes, I do see. My, that is awful,” said Elijah’s wife, Erzsé on the phone.
Rainer went into the kitchen to get a bottle of water from the fridge. He returned a moment later and leaned in the arched doorway while he opened it and listened.
“Are you certain he can’t be convinced to just move somewhere more respectable?” Erzsé asked. “Honestly, I don’t know if even we can do anything with such squalor.”
Rainer raised his eyebrows and looked around his apartment. There were books and papers stacked up on the tables, out of place on the bookshelves and spilling over onto the floor and the piano bench, but his place wasn’t dirty, let alone something to be categorized as hopeless squalor. There was a jacket he had worn on Thursday over the back of a chair in the kitchen, which was small but completely serviceable for a man who lived alone and did not cook. The heavy round wood kitchen table had a few cigarette burns on it, but the linoleum floor was clean and un-scuffed. The walls were painted an ugly off-white, but there was no water damage or mildew, no holes or dents.
“Elijah,” Rainer said.
Elijah turned his head to look at him and smiled. He looked expensive and out of place beside Rainer’s old coffee table with its overflowing ashtray and stack of ungraded student papers. Elijah’s long black coat alone probably cost more than Rainer made in a month.
“Hello,” Elijah said, positively delighted to see him.
“Hey,” Rainer said. “What are you doing?”
“Oh, I’ve decided—and Kitten agrees it’s the best thing for everyone—that you are in dire need of a home makeover,” Elijah said. “We have graciously decided to undertake it, though it looks to be a god-awful challenge.”
Elijah was a strange man, but Rainer had known that from the beginning of their friendship. He was the only person Rainer felt free to openly discuss his murderous compulsions with because he was a killer, too. They had met two years before when Rainer killed Meredith Kelley, unwittingly stealing Elijah’s intended victim from him. Elijah had initially been so infuriated by it that he had threatened to kill Rainer for daring to snatch her away from him, only to change his mind when he realized the exact nature of what Rainer was doing. Once he had, he had been impressed and they had become fast friends.
He was disgustingly wealthy and intensely snobbish. His offhand comments about Rainer’s clothes and living quarters would have offended nearly anyone else. Rainer was not poor, but he lived on an untenured college professor’s salary and had almost no interest in such things anyway. If he had, his parents were wealthy and, had he been the type to take advantage of it, he would have wanted for nothing.
“Honestly, I spend a great deal of time here,” Elijah said. “If I’m going to continue to visit, I can’t be expected to do it in surroundings like these. I don’t know how you stand it, Rainer.”
Rainer shrugged and took a long drink of water. “I like it.”
“Oh, bosh, you do not,” said Erzsé. She was listening to the conversation from Elijah’s phone. Rainer could see her on the little screen in his hand looking back at him. “What nonsense. No one likes such things. They endure them because they have no alternative. Lucky you, we just won’t have it.”
“Where in the world did you find this hideous end table?” Elijah asked, indicating the table on the right side of the couch. “And this lamp? And… well, everything. It’s horrid.”
“Walmart, I think,” Rainer said.
“Oooh, we love Walmart,” Erzsé exclaimed.
“Yes, we do,” Elijah agreed. “We went on a fieldtrip there just last week.”
Rainer snorted laughter. The way he said it made a trip to Walmart sound like a day outing to the zoo.
Elijah picked up a short stack of the paint cards from the table and showed one to Rainer. It was a pale green. “What do you think of this?”
“Nothing,” Rainer said honestly.
Elijah held it up about a foot from his face and looked at it. “I rather like it. Perhaps not in the living room though.”
Pogo hissed at Elijah for getting too close to him and Elijah scowled at the cat. Rainer had found the cat in the parking lot at the university hiding in the tire well of a car one afternoon when he was leaving work. He had instantly attached himself to Rainer—which demonstrated an unfortunate lack of common sense for a feline—and Rainer decided to take him home despite the fact that the cat had been well-fed and well-groomed; obviously not a stray. Pogo never had liked Elijah though and Elijah felt the same.
Elijah went back to comparing paint colors and frowning at the wall while Rainer finished his water. He picked up the cat and petted him while he listened to Elijah and Erzsé making plans to dispose of his “vile” carpet. He glanced at the clock on the wall, saw that it was getting late, and put the cat down.
“Elijah, I’m going out,” he said. “I need to shower then I’m going to dinner. You can do whatever you want, just don’t destroy my stuff and lock up when you leave.”
“Excellent!” Elijah said. “You hear that, Kitten? We have carte blanche. This is wonderful. You must come over straightaway to assist.”
“All right,” Rainer said.
He started to go down the hallway, but Elijah called him back. “I did have another thing I wanted to bring to your attention,” he said.
He handed Rainer a newspaper. Rainer unrolled it and found a headline he remembered from four months earlier on the front page: THE LAMPLIGHTER KILLS AGAIN: BUILDING BURNS TO THE GROUND.
Without meaning to, Rainer caught himself smiling, smug with pleasure.
The article was about the last victim that had been killed by the murderer the media had cleverly dubbed “The Lamplighter.” In that particular instance, the oil used to burn the body had spread to the house and the tortured and mutilated body of the v
ictim, Nathan Overton, was discovered by the firemen who responded. Police and public officials vowed to organize a task force with the singular mission of running the killer to ground. Whether one had ever materialized or not was anyone’s guess. Nothing more had ever been said about it because the killer was never apprehended and the killings, which had been inconsistently timed throughout the span of a year, had stopped.
Elijah reached over the paper and tapped the morbidly gleeful headline with one finger. “I miss this man,” he said. “What ever happened to him?”
Rainer locked eyes with his homicidal friend over the paper. “He got bored,” he said.
“That’s a shame,” Elijah said with a sigh. He took the paper back, rolled it up again and tossed it down on the coffee table with his cards and swatches. “Do let me know if I can help in any way. Talent like that should not be wasted.”
“Yeah, I’ll do that,” Rainer said as he walked away, thinking of Ezekiel.
He quickly showered and changed into something nice for dinner. Centzon Totochtin was not strictly black-tie, but it was prestigious and swanky, which meant a T-shirt and jeans was a bit too casual. Rainer shaved and wore a black silk shirt and slacks. Erzsé was sitting perched on the arm of his sofa when he returned to the living room and she smiled at him then gave him a critical once-over.
“Have a date tonight, do we, darling?” she asked. “You look… nice.”
She was a tall woman, curvy and slender and beautiful with mink brown hair done in an intricate braid down her back and eyes so dark they looked like onyx. She looked and smelled like a million bucks.
“It’s dinner with Thomas,” Rainer said.
“Oh,” she said. She exchanged a speaking look with her husband. “Rainer, sweetheart, what exactly is the nature of your relationship with your big brother? If you don’t mind us asking, I mean. I don’t want to be rude, of course.”
“Intimate,” Rainer said simply and without shame. “Extremely intimate.”
“Ah. We thought as much,” Elijah said.
Rainer and Thomas didn’t go out of their way to hide the nature of their relationship, but most people still did not know about it. People would rationalize it away rather than admit to the simple answer that was right in front of them when it came to such things. Elijah and Erzsé were not like most people though and his answer seemed to please them rather than disgust them because they had guessed correctly.
Rainer left them to their extreme redecorating and drove into the city to Centzon Totochtin. Traffic was a little busier than usual Friday nights, even in early September when most of the tourists were long gone. It took him almost an hour to get there, but Rainer didn’t mind the traffic that much and Thomas wouldn’t worry about him being late. Theirs was a standing date.
The restaurant was full when Rainer got there and he had to wait for a car to back out of a space so he could take it. As he walked around the building toward the doors, Thomas’s girlfriend, Jasmine came out of the restaurant. She was frowning, but she gave him a smile when she recognized him.
“Hey, Rainer,” she said. “I haven’t seen you in ages.”
She clearly defined “ages” differently than Rainer did. He had seen her briefly the month before when she stopped by Thomas’s house during breakfast to talk to him about some inane something he had already forgotten. Rainer made a pleasantly surprised smile appear on his face and paused on his way inside because she apparently had more to say.
“Hello,” he said. “How are you?”
“Oh, I’m great. I just came by trying to catch Thomas for a minute, but he’s swamped.” Jasmine tossed her dark hair back from her pretty face and sighed. “It’s not like I expected him to stop what he was doing and go out. I mean, I know better. Weekends are the worst.”
Thomas had blown her off because there was a more than 50/50 chance Rainer would be dropping in to have dinner with him. It pleased Rainer to know it, but he forced his expression to be sympathetic as he said, “It’ll die down in a couple of hours and maybe he’ll call you.”
“Oh, probably not,” Jasmine said with wry amusement. She made a dismissive gesture with one hand. “It’s all right. My parents have just been asking about Christmas. I know, right? It’s three months away, but they have huge Christmas parties, so Mom plans them like she’s readying herself for war.”
Rainer didn’t like where this was going at all. Like finding the woman’s scented body wash in Thomas’s shower, it kindled feelings of anger in him that he would have to control and evaluate later.
“Why do you need to talk to Thomas about it?” he asked, though he already thought he knew.
“Well, obviously, I want him to go with me,” Jasmine said. She rolled her deep blue eyes and sighed. “But you know how he is. If he goes, it’ll be like giving a cat a bath to get him to agree to it, and then I’ll probably have to make it up to him in sexual favors because, oh my god, he had to socialize.”
She laughed and Rainer made his smile widen to acknowledge the joke.
He felt his short nails biting into the palm of his clenched fist in his pocket. It took everything he had to maintain his pleasant, outward façade. “Well, it’s still September,” he said. “You’ve got a while to talk him into it.”
A chic young couple skirted around them and Jasmine seemed to realize they were blocking the way inside. She took a shuffling step to the left and reached out to touch Rainer’s arm, silently signaling him to do the same.
Jasmine wasn’t dumb or all that unobservant, but she had a blind spot where Rainer was concerned and did not sense the danger. It wasn’t her fault; most people had that same blind spot.
Humanity had crawled its way, tooth and nail, to the top of the food chain and no longer had any natural predators, except for each other. The odd consequence of this was that human beings were the only animals that ignored fear, that most important of survival instincts, even when it presented itself. Many survivors of attacks later said that they had felt something or been inexplicably afraid before they were ambushed, but they had shrugged it off as nothing, as them being silly or irrational. That was what humans did with their fear in the twenty-first century.
What was silly and irrational was Jasmine thinking that laying a hand on Rainer was in any way acceptable. The touch was brief, but Rainer’s hackles rose and he wondered if his nails had broken the skin of his palm, he was clenching his fist so tightly against the rising urge to grab her. He didn’t, but the only thing that stopped him was Thomas and the knowledge of how angry he would be if Rainer hurt her.
That and the witnesses.
“Excuse us, dear,” said an older man as he and his wife went around Jasmine.
“Sorry. I guess we should go, we’re holding up traffic,” Jasmine said. She put her hand out like she was going to touch him again—one of those many harmless casual touches that people like her were so fond of—but stopped the action before there was contact. “Well, anyway, if you see Thomas, tell him I was by, okay? And good luck.”
“I will,” Rainer said. “And thanks. Goodnight, Jasmine.”
I want to eat your heart out, he thought with a flash of feral longing.
He took a deep breath and closed his eyes as she walked away, gathering his control around the urge and chaining it firmly down. He did not have many rules, at least not conscious ones, when it came to killing, but one of them—one of the biggest—was don’t shit where you eat. Do not kill those connected to his life. He had only rarely ever broken that rule and most times it had come back to bite him.
Well… nibble him.
After a minute, Rainer continued walking and went inside the restaurant. He said hello to the hostess and walked by her and those waiting to be seated to a table in the back. When he sat down, he took his hand out of his pocket and examined the palm. No blood, but his nails had pinched deep red crescents into his skin.
“Good evening, Mr. Bryssengur.”
Rainer looked up to find a young waiter sta
nding beside his table. He hadn’t noticed him arrive and that made him instantly irritable. That that little bitch had upset him badly enough to have him this distracted was intolerable.
“Can I get you anything to start?” the waiter asked, laying a menu on the table before him. He also set one on the table across from Rainer for Thomas. “Wine or—”
“No,” Rainer said shortly. He silently scolded himself and added, “Thank you. Just tell Thomas I’m here.”
The waiter nodded and left him alone. A few minutes later, he returned with a pitcher of water and filled the water glasses. “Chef Bryssengur—ah, your brother, I mean—said he’ll be right out. There’s, well…”
Rainer raised his eyebrows at him and picked up his water to sip.
“I think someone’s getting fired,” the waiter—whose name Rainer was fairly certain was Bobby—said in an undertone. “He sure was mad.”
Rainer smiled fondly. Thomas had a frightful temper. It was a cliché about chefs that he did full justice to. “What happened?” Rainer asked. Bobby was hovering around his table so it seemed the polite thing and he was curious. “Burned the veal?”
“Quinn—he’s the new busboy—got caught dealing coke in the bathroom by Chef Gold,” Bobby told him in an undertone.
Rainer grinned. Coke was popular with some restaurant workers, it was something even he knew (Bobby was probably high right now). There was no way Thomas wasn’t aware of it, but Quinn had been caught in the act by Thomas’s sous-chef, which demonstrated a level of stupidity and carelessness that could not be overlooked, even in a lowly busboy. Thomas would be in the act of mercilessly humiliating the poor man, who no doubt would be kissing the hem of his white coat anyway because Thomas would not call the police regardless of how pissed off he was.
“I better get to the rest of my station before he gets out here,” Bobby said. “I’ll let you have a few minutes with the menu, okay?”
“Sure,” Rainer said.
He opened the menu and skimmed it. One day he would order the oysters with the wasabi wine vinaigrette, but he wouldn’t order it while having dinner with Thomas because Thomas loathed oysters and would refuse to come near him. He knew the dinner menu pretty well and didn’t really need to read it, but he was killing time while he waited.