“They knew they weren’t supposed to be playing in here, so he didn’t mention it when I first asked him. Today, he got to feeling guilty and confessed. I made him clean it up this afternoon.”
Brenda felt a weight lift from her heart. One thing I don’t have to worry about anymore.
“Thanks for letting me know.”
Penny left the room, and Brenda stepped to the door and locked it behind her, slipping the chain across as well. As soon as she was sure the door was secure, she started the water running in the tub, sprinkling in a healthy dose of bath salts.
She opened the bottle of Sangria and poured a glass, downing half of it without even taking a breath. She still had a few doses to go on her pain medication, but she frankly didn’t give a damn. Maybe she’d finally get a good night’s sleep.
Topping off the glass, she took it to the tub. Setting it down on the rim, she stripped out of the dress and her underthings and scrubbed off her makeup at the sink.
Then she lowered herself into the warm water and let her head fall back against the edge of the tub. Who is the skellyman, and how in the hell did he find out where I’m staying? Why on earth is he stalking me? This is absolutely crazy!
The water soothed away her aches, the bath salts sending up comforting waves of scent. But her mind still whirled…spinning and discarding scenarios that could explain the hell her life had descended into.
Chapter 48
The skellyman was careful not to leave his room again until well after Wanda would have left for the day. He couldn’t risk her commenting about his wall to anyone else. And she was less likely to remember it without his face to reinforce her memory.
As soon as Drew’s shift began, however, the skellyman slipped out of the room, locking the door behind him. He hurried down to the lobby and leaned over the counter where the night manager sat peering at a girlie magazine with near-sighted fascination.
“Can I help you?” asked Drew, the exasperation evident in his voice.
“Maybe I can help you…I was going out, and I thought I might stop over at the newsstand—you know the one I mean.” He winked lewdly. “Can I bring you something?”
The kid’s eyes lit up. He glanced down at the magazine on the counter. It was obviously several months old, tattered and torn.
“Uh…well…”
“I’ll make it a surprise. Say, I forgot to give your mom the rent earlier. While I was out, I thought I would stop by and deliver it. What’s your address again?”
Suspicion flickered through Drew’s muddy eyes.
“I thought she said everyone was paid up for the week.” He reached toward the phone. “I’ll call and ask her—”
The skellyman caught his arm. Maybe Drugged-Out Drew wasn’t as clueless as he looked.
“No, really—you don’t have to do that. Okay, look man—I’ll be honest with you. I came into a little cash, and I wanted to pay a few weeks in advance. But I didn’t want to do it around here, because then she’d have to carry all that dough home with her.”
He reached into his pocket and pulled out a fifty-dollar bill. “Here’s a little something for your trouble…just give me the address, and it’s all yours.”
Drew peered hungrily at the bill. It would buy at least one good party for an enterprising individual.
With a sigh, the skellyman pulled a second fifty out of his pocket and placed it on the counter with the first. He’d have to make sure this was worth his while on the other end…
“I’m not sure she’s gonna be home this early. She plays bridge on Monday nights,” muttered Drew, not taking his eyes off the cash.
“Well, you let me worry about that,” soothed the skellyman, running his fingers along the bills. “I can just leave an envelope under the door for her…if I know where to go.”
Drew snatched the money from the counter.
“245 Falcon Street. There’s a doggie door in the back. You can stick the envelope through there.”
“You’ve got a dog? Nice. I love dogs.”
“Nah.” Drew took the bait like a prize bass. “We used to, but it’s been dead for years. She’s just too cheap to replace the door. Keeps talking about getting another dog someday, but she won’t, not with the new pet laws.”
He laughed—a great guffaw of sound. “Can you imagine Wanda picking up dog shit?” There was something cruel in his eyes.
The skellyman felt a twinge of comradeship for the young man. Maybe he shouldn’t kill Drew too… He sensed a kindred spirit behind the drug-riddled façade.
No. Drew would be able to testify I asked for the address—and gave him money for it. I can’t afford to take such a risk. Oh, well, at least I can make it quick.
That much he could do.
Unlike what he planned for Wanda. Wanda would be a masterpiece.
“I’d better get on over there,” the skellyman told Drew. “I’ve got an appointment myself tonight. I’ll just slip the envelope through the dog door like you suggested.”
“Okay, bro. Take it easy.”
Drew was once more absorbed in his girlie magazine before the skellyman was out the door. And the conversation had made the manager forget to ask for the key.
Yes, everything is going well, the skellyman thought as he loped through the streets.
Falcon was in an older part of town—rundown, but not nearly as bad as the hotel. Here the shabby houses were once grand estates—two story monstrosities with gingerbread detailing and widow’s walks on the roofs. Paint peeling, windows boarded up, the grand ladies of architecture were definitely showing their age. But they sat in the center of huge over-grown lots, with plenty of cover for skulking about.
The address Drew had given him proved to belong to a house in better condition than most of its neighbors. The paint was grimy, but not peeling. The gingerbread was intact. There were even stained-glass side lights to each side of the front door.
Not bad, the skellyman thought.
He wouldn’t have expected this from the condition of the hotel. Maybe Wanda had inherited a family home. This wasn’t bought with $50 weekly rents…not unless she had more properties than he knew about.
Glancing down the empty street in both directions, he started through the yard toward the rear of the house. The houses to either side were dark. He should be undetected.
He found the dog door, just as Drew had described it. Either he had lost more weight than even he realized, or it’d been one huge dog. It was easy to slip through the opening into the house.
He pulled a penlight out of his pocket and shone it around the interior. He was in a large, neat kitchen. The appliances were gleaming stainless steel. Figures she spared no expense in what is probably her favorite room of the house.
He eased open the refrigerator and studied the interior, thankful again that his fingers no longer bore print pads. It made life so much simpler.
His mouth started to water just looking at the well-stocked fridge. Carefully, he reached in and snagged a chicken leg off a plate without touching anything else. No point in being overly careless either.
He practically inhaled the meat—it was the first he’d tasted in weeks. The bone went down the disposal with a purr. Good quality appliances too…
The resultant silence seemed to bear out Drew’s assertion that Wanda spent her Monday evenings at bridge. Otherwise, she would’ve been on him like white on rice for messing with her kitchen.
Confident now that he was alone in the house, he fixed himself a heaping plate from the contents of the refrigerator, gorging himself on food like a starving man handed his last meal. Clean up consisted of rinsing the plate, toweling it off, and hiding it deep in the stack of clean ones in the cabinet. Then he used the towel to wipe down any other surface he might have touched.
He was taking no chances on forensic evidence tripping him up. Frowning, he searched the cabinets with the towel wrapped around his fingers. He grunted with satisfaction as he found a pair of lemon-yellow dishwashing gloves
under the sink. Tossing the towel in the trashcan, he pulled on the gloves. That would make the rest of this less brain-taxing. Now there is no way I can leave any prints.
Comfortably full for the first time since he could remember, he began to explore the house. He found Drew’s room on the ground floor, instantly determined as such by the reek of pot and the piles of clothing scattered on every available surface.
A wad of small bills was thrown on a dresser, and the skellyman pocketed it. It didn’t cover what he’d given Drew, but it wasn’t anything to be sneezed at—and it would help foster the idea this was a random break-in and robbery.
Heading up the stairs, he found Wanda’s room at the top. It was a frilly fantasy any pre-adolescent girl would have given her eyeteeth for. A large canopy bed dominated the space.
He pushed down on the top of the pink comforter, and his hand sank six inches into the overly soft mattress. He wondered how Wanda managed to get out of bed in the morning.
The furniture was French Provincial in style—white and gold with lots of curlicues and arches. A baroque style telephone sat on the nightstand beside the bed, and he cut the cord.
Just like the woman to have a landline. What a throwback she is.
There was a tall standing dresser and a low slung mirrored one. He rifled through their contents, finding lots of frilly underclothing to match the room.
He grimaced in distaste. The thought of Wanda wearing the garments disgusted him. But he was less disgusted by the cash box he found hidden deep in one of the drawers.
It was locked, but he wasn’t trying to hide the fact there’d been a robbery, so it was a matter of minutes to force it open. Inside the box were neatly bundled stacks of cash. She must make her bank trips on Tuesdays after the rent payments.
If she gets this much money every week, no wonder she has a house like this, he thought as he swiftly counted through the bills. There was almost five thousand in cash.
He felt like he’d won the lottery. This was more money than he’d had in…he wasn’t sure how long. It would pay for his fixes for at least a month if he was careful.
And I’m still going to have the pleasure of murder too? How much better can one night get?
He heard a key turning in a door downstairs and grinned. Fun time.
Stashing the money in his pockets, he left the empty cash box sitting in the center of the rumpled bed. Then he took up a waiting position behind the open door. It won’t be long now.
Chapter 49
Wanda strutted into the room. She started to toss her purse on the bed, and then caught sight of the empty cash box on the bed. “What the hell?”
As she stepped forward past the doorway, the skellyman pushed the door closed behind her. “Hi, honey, I’m home,” he purred.
She spun. “What the hell are you doing in my house?” She darted toward the phone beside the bed.
“Too late, Wanda. I’ve already taken care of that.”
She began to fumble in her purse, eyes wide with terror. Her mouth worked, as if she were trying to scream—but no sound came forth.
He lunged to grab the strap and yank it away from her. He opened the door just wide enough to toss it into the hallway outside the room. “This is a no-call zone, dearie.”
Wanda cowered beside the bed, clutching at the bedpost as if it were a lifeline. “What do you want?” she whispered.
He slipped his knife out of his pocket and made a show of opening it. “It’s a bit warm in here…don’t you find it a bit hot?”
He stepped closer, running the knife down her chest. “Why don’t you get out of these things and make yourself more comfortable?”
Her eyes were starting from her head as she complied, whimpering deep in her throat.
When she was naked, he forestalled potential screams with a sock stuffed into her mouth and a scarf tied behind her head.
“Now…let’s see. Ah! That’ll do.” He placed the chair from her vanity into the master bathtub.
“Get in the tub and sit down,” he ordered, gesturing with the knife.
Tears rolled down her fat cheeks as she tentatively stepped into the tub. She shook her head wildly, pleading with her eyes. It set her rolls of fat jiggling in most unfortunate ways. She looked like Miss Piggy on a bad day.
“Tut, tut, dearie…this won’t take long.” He bound her to the vanity chair with the thick silken cord from her draperies.
“My turn!” he crowed.
He reveled in her wide-eyed horror, as he performed a bizarre burlesque strip-tease of his own, humming “Let Me Entertain You” as he tossed off his clothes, and then folded them neatly on the bed, far away from the danger of gore splashes.
His cock reacted to the anticipation of what was to come, leading the way back into the bathroom like one of those signposts with the pointing finger.
He heard her gasp and whimper behind the gag—no doubt expecting him to use the hard cock to violate her dainty, virginal self—well, not too virginal. After all, she had a kid.
Maybe she’s smarter than I give her credit for. Maybe she’ll even put two and two together and realize I’m the one who raped and murdered Candy…
He supposed she couldn’t be too stupid. After all, she was a pretty shrewd businesswoman.
Probably thinks it’s her turn for the same. Well, she’s half right.
He started skinning her alive, peeling the outer layer from her one strip at a time with a straight-razor he had found in Drew’s room. She made frantic whimpering noises, trying to scream behind the gag. Her eyes stared at him in disbelief and horror, shimmering with tears of pain that soon spilled down her fat cheeks.
The sight made him raise an eyebrow, and drag the razor down those cheeks, where the salt of the tears made the flaying even more painful. Her desperate blinking as she tried to stop crying made him chuckle.
Soon however, the rolling eyes began to annoy him, so he plucked them out with the tip of his knife and set them on the edge of the tub before resuming his razor work.
The fascinating bit about the whole thing was that she could have easily overpowered him—she was at least twice his weight and strong for her age and sex—but the moment she felt the prick of the knife, she was putty in his hands.
And he molded that putty from Wanda, the hotel owner, into a quivering red blob of blood-soaked jelly, slicing off bits here and there to sculpt its shape.
The blob stopped quivering far too soon for his liking.
He lost interest in the mutilation once she passed out. It was no fun after she stopped mewling behind her gag. He toyed with the idea of bringing her around so he could keep playing, but he was getting bored anyway, so he just slit her throat and ended it.
With a sigh of discontent that his playtime had been cut short, he turned his back on the thing in the chair, and rinsed off in the shower stall across the room from the tub. Pretentious bitch…separate bathtub and shower in the same room!
Shaking his head like a wet dog, he pulled on his clothing, rinsed his knife, and put it away. The razor, he merely folded and stuck in his pocket. He wanted her blood on that for later. Once he’d cleaned up, he returned to his search of the house.
Aside from the cash he’d already found in Wanda’s bedroom and on Drew’s dresser, he found a bit of silver in the kitchen and a small cache of bearer bonds stuck inside a hollow book in the living room. They weren’t worth much, but their portability was convenient.
He contemplated the electronics, but they were too bulky to carry through the streets without a car. He did snag an MP3 player from Drew’s room, however, sticking the ear-buds in his ears and scanning through the contents.
Quite a collection of violent lyrics on Drew’s playlists. Such a troubled young man…
As he made another pass through the kitchen, he glanced out the big garden window toward the backyard. There was a rosy tinge of dawn in the air. Funny…it hadn’t seemed like any time at all had passed, but he must have played with Wanda for hours.
He wondered if Drew would wait for Wanda to relieve him, or simply leave the hotel unattended when his shift was over.
He debated what to do…then decided to wait for Drew. He gambled that the clerk was unlikely to spend a minute longer at his desk than he was paid to do. Drew didn’t strike him as the type to work overtime—even if his mother were his boss.
The kid should be along soon, and when he arrived, he would murder his mother…how tragic. There might be a bit of a bother about time of death, but on the other hand, it wasn’t going to be the first thing that came to mind when they found her either.
The skellyman helped himself to another chicken leg—torture was hard work—and settled down in Drew’s room to wait. He availed himself of the huge collection of girlie mags strewn about the room, but nothing he saw gave him the thrill that inflicting pain caused, and he was soon bored with them.
He threw aside the magazine he had been flipping through and lay back on the rumpled bed, fingers laced behind his head as he tried to remember the first time he had realized his affinity to inflict pain.
It’d been decades ago…when he was a mere boy of eight or nine. There’d been a stray kitten hanging around the neighborhood.
His mother was dreadfully allergic to pets, and he’d never had one of his own. This scrawny bundle of fur had fascinated him. He spent weeks cultivating a friendship with it—feeding it bits of table scraps spirited out of his mother’s kitchen. It began to trust him, rubbing against his legs and purring whenever it saw him. The birdcage ribs had begun to disappear beneath a sleek, well-fed coat. He’d called it “Pete” —for no good reason he could think of.
One day he was sharing bits of a fried chicken leg with Pete when the kitten accidentally nipped his finger. He knew it was an accident, even then, but a blinding fury welled up inside him. He kicked the animal halfway across the yard where it hit a tree with an audible crack. As he looked down at the pain-wracked creature mewling and trying to crawl, he realized his thing had stiffened—it was his first remembered hard-on. Even now, it sent remembered shivers to his groin.
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