The Night Serpent

by Anna Leonard

  There was something about him, despite his practiced charm, despite his intensity, that almost made Lily forget her original discomfort. Almost. He cared about what he was doing. That made him likable. The fact that he was likable made her even more cautious. Charming men were men with agendas and ambition. Men with agendas and ambition were not to be trusted. It wasn’t any one bad experience that had drummed that into her, although it was proved, more often than not. No, that knowledge, that wariness, was born in her, it sometimes seemed.

  This wasn’t a date, she reminded herself, wondering at his pleased smile at her choices. It was, as he said, a business meeting. Over food. So what if he had an agenda?

  Everyone wanted something. Everyone had a secret. Even her.

  “So why is the FBI investigating this?” she asked again, taking a bread stick for herself.

  This time, unlike earlier that day, he answered her.

  “The FBI normally gets called in for certain things. Kidnappings, bank robberies, crimes that cross state lines or involve national issues…. This…isn’t really one of them.” He cracked a crooked smile. “Except it falls in that gray area of ‘might be of interest.’ Courtesy of the twenty-first century and modern paranoia, just about every investigated crime gets entered into a national database. Mostly they just sit there, unless there’s something in them that triggers an alert somewhere else. In my case, I look for tags that indicate animal-abuse cases.”

  He waved the remains of his bread stick at her, as though lecturing. It should have been annoying, but wasn’t, mainly because his intensity was so real, and focused on a thing, not her. Whatever it was that he did, it meant a great deal to him. She admired that.

  “Animal abuse is—it’s one of the things we’re taught to look for in the background of suspects. I’m working on a particular theory that, if I can prove it, could lead us to a way to identify and stop potential killers. So, if a police department reports a notable case of animal abuse it pings on my radar. If there are certain elements to the case, I follow up.”

  “Certain elements?” The waiter came with her glass of wine and his soda. Lily nodded her thanks, but kept her attention on Patrick.

  “A level of ferocity, or indications of repetition. Something that suggests escalation.”

  “That whoever it is, is getting ready to move on to something bigger,” she guessed. “Like humans.”

  “Exactly. Abuse, especially of cats, is considered one of the ‘terrible triad,’ of indicators that’s often found in the background of a serial killer. That, and arson, are historically two of the major warning signs of serial killers before they turn to human targets. It’s almost as though they’re trying to vent themselves on weaker beings, or—by some theories—are working up their nerve to go to the next level. Nobody really knows for certain. It’s an inexact science.”

  Lily was horrified, but fascinated. Everyone knew about serial killers, of course—even if you never watched the nightly news, you had to have heard of Silence of the Lambs. But she had never realized that there was a pattern, or a science, to it. Or that cats were so very much a target.

  “And you try to find them before then. But how do you know that they’re going to go to people next?”

  “I don’t. Most of the time they don’t, either. But if I can stop them before that line is crossed, that’s all that matters. Law enforcement isn’t all about punishment. It’s about being a deterrent, too.”

  She nodded. It made sense. “So this one incident brought you out here?”

  He hesitated, taking a sip of his soda before responding. “No. Not the one. This goes no further than this table, Lily.” He paused until she nodded her agreement. “Three years ago in the next town, there was a couple of scattered cases—cats being cut open and left, like some kind of sacrifice. By itself, that’s nothing, unfortunately. Wannabe Satanists, or just one kid with a cruel streak, or even a budding coroner who wanted to start small. They wouldn’t even have been entered in the system, except there was a small media fuss.

  “And that was nothing, until now. The reason they called me is that here have been two incidents prior to this in the past two months. All involving cats. All young males. None of them quite so…formalized as today’s offering. Whoever this guy is, assuming it’s the same guy from three years ago—he’s working out a pattern that satisfied him. If it was him three years ago…he’s on an evolving scale, an escalating one. And that’s a major danger sign.”

  “So you think…” She shuddered involuntarily. “You think we have a baby serial killer right here in Newfield?”

  She’d had nightmares about that; not often, maybe three or four times, but unlike most of her dreams they tended to stay with her even after she woke: of women dying, one after another, in terribly bloody ways. She hated those dreams, all the more so for never being able to figure out what caused them or how to prevent them.

  “No.” He shook his head, almost as though he regretted that lack of serial killerage. “The indicators I’ve seen so far suggest that he hasn’t crossed that line. I’m not sure that’s the direction he’s going in, either. His pattern is…Different. Odd. Intriguing.”

  Lily cocked her head and studied him. “You find strange things intriguing, Agent Patrick.”

  He accepted the jab with self-aware good humor. “Nature of the job, Ms. Malkin.”

  The conversation was interrupted by the delivery of their meals, and the resulting pause to sort things out.

  “No,” he said again once they started eating. “I don’t think he’s a serial killer. The specifics line up—cats, violence, repetition. That’s what pinged on my radar. But seeing it—the feel of it is all wrong.”

  “Intriguing?”

  “To a person with my background, yes. Serial killers have a variety of reasons for acting the way they do, by their standards. The files—” and he made a gesture with his fork to the file at his side “—the first two cases, and now this one, they don’t show the kind of…passion normal to a serial killer’s buildup. This was…”

  “Restrained.”

  He looked at her with surprised respect. “Yeah.”

  Lily didn’t know why she had said that, but when she thought about it, it was true. The violence had been contained, the cats carefully tended, the scene almost designed, like a stage set….

  Going back there made her insides queasy again, so she changed the subject. “So what’s the third thing? You said there was a—terrible triad? You said two, so what’s the third?”

  “Bed-wetting.”

  Lily stared at him. “Bed-wetting.”

  “It shows up often enough in established serial killers that it’s considered an indicator, yes.”

  She wasn’t going to laugh. It wasn’t funny. “But not a crime.”

  “No, not a crime. We don’t investigate anyone on the basis of soiled linens.”

  “I’m not laughing,” she told him.

  “Nobody ever does,” he assured her, his dark eyes creased around the edges with humor. “Joking is frowned on in the FBI.”

  Lily ate a few bites of her veal, letting the moment pass intentionally, and then looked up at her companion. “All right. You said you wanted to ask me something about the case. About the cats?”

  He took a bite of his own ziti, chewed and swallowed before responding. Good table manners, she noted.

  Another point in his favor, were she keeping any sort of list. Which she wasn’t.

  “Yeah. About the cattery that you said he had. You work in a shelter—it looks like you have a full house there?”

  “Always. Females, unless they’re fixed, breed regularly even when they have kittens already. Even if you could stop every stray from breeding tomorrow, there would be more cats in shelters than we could ever find homes for.”

  Lily felt guilt once again for not adopting one or two of her own. She had the room, and Lord knew she had gotten over her fear…but something held her back from bringing them into her own home.
She still needed that distance, the place to retreat to, in case things went wrong.

  “So why was he breeding them, if there are so many out there to adopt?”

  “For color.” No hesitation in her mind now, not after what Patrick had told her. “He—we’re assuming a he?”

  “For now.”

  “All right. He used spotted tabbies with white paws, all seven of them. The cats before, they were spotted as well?”

  Patrick nodded. “According to the files the cops gave me, yes. Not all of them had the white paws, though. That was new.”

  “The spotted markings are common enough, but not so much so that you could find seven of them, all about the same age—not kittens, but less than two years old, I’d guess. And to find three…three batches of seven? The combination of color and age, there’s no way he could assume he was going to find them all at the same time. So it makes sense he’d try to breed them himself.”

  “That was my thought, too. This guy, whoever he is, wasn’t flying off the cuff. He has an agenda. There was planning here, at least a year’s worth to be breeding his own litters. More, since the first incident was two months ago, and the cats were about the same age.”

  “But why?” Why would someone do something like this? Why use cats? Why cats of that specific type? “And God, how could he breed cats, raise them and then kill them?”

  Patrick poked his fork at the mound of ziti on his plate, and then looked up at her, his dark eyes now shadowed by more than exhaustion. “I don’t know. But I’m going to find out.”

  Then he leaned back and smiled at her, clearly changing mental tracks. “But enough. You’ve confirmed what I suspected, and may yet be useful to the investigation, so this meal is hereby considered a justified expense. Therefore I’m not going to do anything right now except enjoy the lovely company, the excellent food and the fact that I’m not cooped up in a hotel room watching reruns of Fox shows I didn’t like when I first saw them. And I insist that you do the same, just to keep me company.”

  Lily flushed, but smiled at him, and went back to her veal piccata, hyperaware of the fact that he was watching her every move, observing her the same way he had observed the crime scene. Charming, but ambitious, she reminded herself. Be careful.

  “So. You volunteer with cats and work in a bank. And, occasionally, help out the local cops and wandering feds. What else does Ms. Lily Malkin do?”

  Lily didn’t play games, was what she didn’t do. “I bake. I work out to burn off the calories I put on from baking. I sleep as much as humanly possible. I like modern art and Delta blues, an occasional glass of wine and really scary movies with buttered popcorn. I have no siblings, my father lives in Seattle where I grew up and my last relationship ended amicably. Anything else?”

  He blinked, visibly thinking over her words. “No, I think that about covers everything, and then some. Your turn.”

  She didn’t have to think about that at all. “What does the T stand for?”

  “The letter T,” he said easily, and she smiled reluctantly in return. Oh, charming. Very, very charming. But she still wasn’t going to play.

  Lily turned off the beeping alarm even before she turned on the light as she came in through the garage. Once the condo was plunged back into silence, she slipped her shoes off at the door, dropped her bag on the dining-room table and shuffled to the narrow spiral staircase that led to the bedroom. She had lived in a studio apartment when she first came to town, but on her morning run one day she had passed the row of town houses under construction and, on a whim, stopped in at the builder’s office. Three months and most of her savings later, she had closed on her town house, and two months after that she had moved in.

  It was the first place she had ever owned, the first real home she’d had since leaving her father’s home for college sixteen years before. Her dad had choked up when she called to tell him the news. Her dad was a little weird: “not married? No problem, honey, you’ll find someone some day. But this endless string of living in apartments? That can’t be healthy!”

  The condo wasn’t large—a kitchen, living room and dining room downstairs, and a bedroom and bathroom upstairs—but it was all hers. Her refuge.

  She stripped as she went into the bathroom, tossing her clothing into the hamper and turning on the shower. The two glasses of wine at dinner, plus a hot shower, might be enough to let her get to sleep—and stay asleep until the alarm went off. If she was lucky, and fate was kind, she might not even dream.

  Or if she did, maybe they would be the hot and sexy kind. Lord knows, she had enough material to work with tonight.

  “Don’t get so caught up in secret-agent-man fantasies that you forget to finish paying those bills,” she told herself, pulling her hair into a scrunchie and knotting it. She was on shift at the bank from ten to four, and if she didn’t get everything into the mail in the morning, it would bother her all day.

  The mirror was starting to fog, and she rubbed a spot clear to check her skin.

  “Holy shit!” she shrieked, spinning around.

  There was nothing there, of course. She had known there wasn’t going to be anything there. It wasn’t possible that there was anything there—the alarm had been on, no windows had been open. There was no way a cat could have gotten in.

  There was no way she could have seen, reflected in that tiny corner of the mirror, a cat sitting on the shower ledge behind her, watching her with wide, rounded green eyes.

  Mrrrrrai?

  And there was no way she could hear the plaintive query of a cat, echoing off the tile of the shower, over the sound of the water and the rasp of her own breath.

  Lily took a deep breath; slow in through her mouth, out through her nose. “I’m tired. I’ve had a stressful day. I probably should not have had rich food and red wine on top of that. I’m hallucinating.”

  Mrrrrraaw.

  “And I don’t need you laughing at me, either,” she told the phantom cat, getting into the shower and, against her original intentions, pulling the scrunchie out and putting her head entirely under the falling water, letting the steam and sound drive everything else away.

  “Just let me sleep tonight,” she said: a prayer to whoever might be listening. “No dreams. No staring at the ceiling. Just…sleep.”

  Somehow, she didn’t think that was going to happen.

  Chapter 4

  He didn’t like it here. The basement wasn’t a good place. It was too damp, and too cold, and the off-white concrete floor absorbed the smells no matter how much bleach was dumped on it. But he had run out of other options; after his last failure, the authorities were watching empty spaces too closely, and he dared not openly rent anywhere, not with all the beasts he would have to bring with him.

  This would have to do.

  He finished scrubbing the table, and paused to wipe sweat off his face. He smelled as bad as the bleach and piss combined. There was no way She would come to him smelling like this. He needed to be clean, oiled and scented, and appropriately dressed, or even the very best sacrifice would be in vain.

  The creatures around him were listless, most with their bellies distended with pregnancy. God, they were disgusting. Too long to wait, and nowhere to find new ones. Only four males were right, and he needed seven, but he couldn’t wait any longer.

  The appeal had failed again. He was close, so close, and yet the key would not turn; She would not come. Three years he had waited, since waking: three years counting cycles and watching the signs. Only once each turning was it right, and the doorway was only open so long; if he didn’t find the right combination, it would close and lock and he would be forever on the wrong side, all he hoped to gain gone for yet another year.

  Seven times three was a lucky turn; this would be the time. Three times to be lucky.

  Seven was the number, was a holy number, all his instincts told him so, the same way he knew he would know Her when she came. There were no books, no guides to show him the way: instinct was all he h
ad to go on. Instinct had told him who he was, what he must do. Instinct was all he could trust.

  He glanced up into the sky. The moon. The moon was key. The dark moon was coming, and all the steps had to be taken before then—when She waxed full again, it would be too late to try again until the cycle passed again. But the faster he worked, the less perfect the beasts. He needed to find some way around that, something to make the offerings acceptable. And soon, soon! When the final offering was made, it had to be perfect!

  A cat mrrrowed, low and angry, and another answered, setting an entire cage of the things off.

  “Shut up!”

  It wasn’t fair! He didn’t understand the urgency that drove him, or the knowledge that filled him, but they were the only things that had any reality, any substance. Everything was wrong suddenly, since that moment three years ago when his old existence had disappeared and left him in this hell. There was nothing inside him now except for that urgency. His brain could focus only on the things he needed, the steps he must take. All sensation, all joy, was gone: he woke in the morning and the sky was the wrong shade of gray, the air the wrong smell, the speech of those around him the wrong sound.

  Only when he drifted back into the dream was everything made right again. Only then did he feel whole. The dream of what was through the doorway, his rightful, long-denied prize. Her, and the knowledge She would bring.

  Everything he did, the steps he went through, they were all toward that.

  “Water, water, everywhere, all for the beasties to drink,” he chanted. He poured water from the jug into plastic dishes, placing each one in a cage, careful to move so as not to actually come into contact with any of the creatures. The gleam in the beasts’ eyes taunted him, made him dizzy. They judged, they always judged, the damn things, as though they were somehow better than he was.

  Damn things. How he hated them. Hated them! They were cruel, and faithless, and they betrayed….

  “Calm, calm,” he crooned, his voice a deep, soothing baritone that made the cats’ ears flicker to attention as he passed, his left hand reaching up to touch the palm-size amulet hanging under his sweatshirt. “Follow your courses and be thorough. They’re only animals. They don’t know a thing.”