“People are more resilient than you think.” He grappled for the car keys in his pocket and punched the UNLOCK button as he approached the black SUV he’d borrowed. “Which video did you watch?”
“The most recent—a girl being burned over and over. He uses night-vision. It’s green and black, but the quality is high-tech. At first it was two girls sitting in a room. It was time-stamped, so I fast-forwarded until something happened. He’s got three vantage points and toggles between them. Two from the corners on the ceiling and a camera on him—I’m guessing it’s on his face. Glasses cam or something. His face never shows on camera. I threw up all my coffee. Now I have to get more.” She sniffled and cleared her throat.
He let her finish collecting her composure and settled himself behind the wheel. “Are you okay?”
“Do I sound okay? Can I shut this site down, please?”
“We can’t do that. We need the guy running it to think nobody’s onto him. If I let you shut it down he’ll just get another one up in a few days, and he’ll be angrier than normal. Probably take it out on whoever comes next.”
“I don’t see evidence of viewers paying to subscribe and watch the videos, either. Looks like it’s strictly personal, especially because of the encryption. Can you give this guy a kick in the nuts for me when you find him?”
“If somebody doesn’t beat me to the punch. The fact Brooke’s still alive hasn’t slowed him down? I thought the suicides might have served a purpose, given him a time frame or something. It’s hard to believe they’re not important.”
“I haven’t spent a lot of time looking around. I called you right away.”
“Can you tell if he streams video live?”
“Not unless he’s streaming live at the moment I check. He probably uploads the videos after the fact—makes it easier to encrypt.”
He drummed the thumb of his free hand on the wheel. “Send me those files.”
“You don’t want to watch that stuff.”
“I have to watch that stuff. I’m not excited about it.” John fumbled with his seatbelt and started the car. “I’m sorry you had to see it.”
“Hazard of the job, I guess, huh? You’ll have the file in a few.”
It’s said that the first high will remain the best. Every time that follows will fall just short in terms of pleasure.
I crave control too dearly to use or abuse alcohol or drugs, but this has made me a different sort of addict.
You asked once about the jewelry. They remind me of you. They sustain me when you aren’t around. I put them in new boxes—her eyes light up when she sees one on her pillowcase.
It’s incredible. She would weep if she knew. But you love me because you know. You’re the only one I don’t have to hide from.
We’re outsiders, on the periphery. Going through life pretending to be like everyone else, but knowing we’re not. The most we could hope for is to hide in plain sight and hope nobody works out the kinks.
It won’t be long, now.
Saturday at 3:47 p.m.
IP Address: 75.84.67.69
Sent via contact form by an anonymous viewer on your website
FORTY-SEVEN
The laugh track mocks me. One voice in it sounds phonetic: HA HA HA. I want to kill that guy, not Abby.
“Please, Brooke.” It sounds like she’s calling from across an ocean. Muted and ethereal. Some weird reverse Siren who wants to be annihilated, not the other way around.
Her hand trails my leg from ankle to thigh and back again. I press my knees harder against my ears and shake her hand off.
“I need you to do it. You need you to do it. It’s what’s best.”
I can’t imagine what would be best, and I can’t think of anyone who’d know.
Her fingers tangle in my hair. Vaguely I realize, as it falls about my neck, it’s not my natural color. I can’t bring myself to wonder why he dyed it. Does it matter anymore?
“Please.”
I lift my head. Her face is distorted, a mass of wobbly white skin and blurry blonde hair. “I’m not a killer.” I’m a fucking waitress slash actress, for the love of God.
“Only you can decide if putting a tired, sick woman out of her misery is murder.” She heaves a shuddering breath that makes me shudder, too.
She’s going to harp and nag and wheedle until I relent, I know this much. I also know it won’t be long until He chimes in as well.
Does Abby care what this will to do me, my conscience? It’ll relieve her pain, but all of it will transfer to me the second she’s gone. Once it can’t feed off her any longer it’ll occupy the closest living body. Me.
He’s bang on time. “Come on now, Brooke. She’s not bleeding and begging just for attention.”
I stand, eyes raking the walls, the bullet holes and blood. Girls have been here before me and Abby. We’re no virgin kills.
“She’s so convincing for someone playing a role she didn’t choose, isn’t she?”
She is. It’s all there. The important props for the character she’s been assigned. Blood, tears, decaying flesh, stumps of bone protruding from flayed, blackened skin. If fire is purifying, Abby’s pure as fresh-fallen snow. The least severe burns expose sinewy, stringy muscle tissue stretching across raw skin.
The hammer glitters in that ocean of old blood, promising freedom.
Get me the fuck out of here.
“That’s it,” he says approvingly. He’s my director now. I forgot this is his show. “Give me anger. Men like when women are angry at something other than them. It’s sexy.”
I feel like the furthest thing from sexy on the planet.
“You want to kill me, don’t you? Not her. That look says it all.” A flashbulb renders me blind for a second. “Couldn’t resist a photo op. You’re going to be the new face of failure. Prettier and younger, but sadly, no better off.”
“Don’t listen,” Abby croaks. “He’s only trying to make you mad.”
He’s not trying, he’s succeeding.
Abby scrabbles toward me with nail-less hands, legs dragging like broken doll limbs.
“You’re making our hearts pump faster, here. Will she? Won’t she? Will there be tears? Screams? Or will she play Stoic Hero and hold her emotions in check?”
“It’s okay,” Abby says, her ruined shirt falling off her shoulder. White bone glitters through a puckered burn to her chest. “I’m ready. Get it over with, so you can go home.”
And that is the only way I’ll get there. If I don’t, I’ll wind up slowly rotting next to Abby’s gaunt corpse until I’m lucky enough to die, too. Not from torture, but starvation. A slow death. I believe wholeheartedly that he won’t touch me. It was never me he wanted. I’m only here in an interactive audience capacity. A tool to employ at curtain call.
“Stop stalling. You can’t charm your way out, Brooke. You’ve sat here talking a real big game, but you don’t seem capable of backing those words up. Is that all you are? Talk? Flapping gums? You don’t have much else, now when we’re down to the wire, under the gun, ten minutes to closing.”
Abby lifts her hand to bat away a stray lock of matted hair. It bounces right back in her eyes, but I catch a glimpse of tears streaking clean rivers through dust and dirt caked on her face.
One more second and my head will explode, painting the walls with my brains right next to the bullet holes and gore of other Abbys murdered by different Brookes.
The hammer’s two steps away. I snatch it from its bed of blood and whirl around. “I’m not doing this for you,” I shout at the camera’s red light. “I’m doing this for her.”
“You and your nobility,” he says. “It’s saccharine. Though it’s nice to see you surrender with so much poise.”
Abby’s eyes flutter when I come closer. The closest thing I’ve ever seen to the look she wears is when a female porn star falls against blankets with a heaving chest as an orgasm that may or may not be staged wracks her body. It’s relief, almost. All that build-up has to c
ome to fruition eventually or she’ll combust.
The hammer slips in my sweaty grip, and she smiles weakly, flaking lips pulling back from bleeding gums.
If anyone needs a mercy killing, it’s her.
“Thank you,” she says, choking on blood dribbling onto her shriveled tongue. “You’re doing the right thing.”
She needs to stop talking. I might change my mind.
“We’re on pins and needles, Brooke.”
And Abby finally looks sated, because I’ve drawn the hammer back.
But then, it isn’t Abby.
It’s me, wearing the pajama’s I haven’t had since I was fifteen, soggy with blood between the legs.
“Please don’t,” the me that can’t be me begs. “I can’t tonight. I have a math test in the morning. I need to—”
***
Stripes’s whirling whiskers wake me when they prickle my cheek. I pull myself upright on the couch as the gavel from a rerun of Law & Order blasts through the living room. The blankets slip from my body, slithering to the floor, and Stripes almost does too, but manages to hang onto my shirt by the tips of his claws.
Jack looks up from East of Eden. He snaps the book shut as he walks over, and sinks on the cushion beside mine. “Are you okay?”
I nod, clutching the cat to my chest. His purrs are surprised until I knead his furry neck with two fingers. “How long have I been asleep?”
Jack checks the clock on the microwave. “About fifteen minutes.”
A whole fifteen minutes. Better than my record at the hospital. Maybe later I can work up to half an hour.
Jack brushes hair off my face and presses a trail of kisses down my throat while Stripes turns in nomadic circles on my lap.
He kisses my earlobe and rests his head on my shoulder. “Do you want to get in bed?”
Our open bedroom door taunts me. So does the light blue comforter and ruffled bedskirt. The lamp from IKEA that always breaks sits beside the nightstand from IKEA that’s always losing screws. It’s comfortable and warm, but I think the only place I’ll find genuine comfort is at the bottom of a vodka bottle, since it always seemed to work for my father.
Not An Option now that I’m with child.
What a loaded question, do you want to get in bed. I do, but he might come with me. Am I comfortable with that? Logic says yes, considering he’s the man who managed to impregnate me. But Logic has no place in my head. Nothing’s made sense for weeks.
“Let me put you in bed if you’re tired.”
I shake my head and burrow back beneath the blankets. “No. I’m fine right here.”
Our first night together, we traded childhood stories, but I’ve never told you about my first. I’d been full of youthful arrogance, though I didn’t realize at the time. It’s a fond memory—being young and reckless and brimming with all the potential in the world.
Her name was Radomila. What’s amusing is, translated to English, it means happy favor.
She looked something like you. Or perhaps a twisted, ugly caricature of you. Same coloring, but where your skin is smooth, hers was lumpy with old acne scars. Quite unsightly.
She gave me such sweet release.
Occasionally I come across a woman who reminds me of her, and I can’t help myself. Not long before we met I had such an experience.
I visit Radomila whenever work brings me back. The bones, wrapped in old sheets, are likely dust by now, but her memory lives on.
Two more days seem a lifetime from now.
Sunday at 3:20 a.m.
IP Address: 75.84.67.69
Sent via contact form by an anonymous viewer on your website
FORTY-EIGHT
A warbling moan of bone-chilling agony abruptly cut off when Lisette stabbed the pause button on the computer inside her office. “Well this isn’t what I’d planned to do when I got up this morning,” she griped, swilling the remaining inch of her long-cold latte. “I thought I’d be taking another run at Stan.”
Inspired by her coffee cup, John took a sip from his own. “Mr. Heckles won’t have much to add unless he’s confronted with irrefutable evidence.”
“Sex Crimes doesn’t have much on the unidentified prostitute. Room was paid for in cash by the victim. Someone cleaned up afterward, before the maids did too, so the forensic evidence wasn’t there. Got a vague description of the man from some cracked-out junkie in the next room. Tall white guy with dark hair and expensive shoes. So that narrows it down to half the men in LA.” She backed the video up to the beginning. “Listen to the way he speaks. It’s weirdly formal. I hate polite psychopaths.”
The way he spoke was something John’s brain had been toying with since the moment he’d heard it. Something was off, something unusual—and also something he couldn’t identify immediately.
She folded her arms over the zipper of her hooded sweatshirt, a grimace twisting her face as she looked at the still-frame on her flat-screen monitor. “Why is he only hurting one? I mean, he went out of his way to kidnap two. Why bother?” She pointed at Brooke, who looked thoroughly terrified though unharmed. “I can only assume he’s doing it for a specific reason, but I’m coming up dry. Seems like wasted effort. If he wants to torture someone psychologically, he could have just mailed Abby’s husband a DVD of this shit. He has her driver’s license. Couldn’t be that hard to do.”
But he needs to see the terror on their faces, doesn’t he?
John had several ideas why there were two, none of which he could be sure about. Perhaps the man was bent on recreating a scenario, or some twisted fantasy. “Whatever his reasons, they make perfect sense to him.”
Maybe there’s a set of rules he has to abide by.
Lisette rubbed her makeup-less face. “What I mean is, why not just take one girl, torture her or whatever, and broadcast that? He’s taking enough risks with the kidnapping. What gives?”
“It’s a game.”
More like a ritual, the voice piped up.
She blinked, red veins splicing through the whites of her eyes. “Not any I’d want to play.”
Nor him. He pressed his lips together, gazing at the black-and-green images of a spread-eagled Abigail with open glistening burns blotching her thighs. John leaned forward to rewind the tape. “Did you notice he never speaks when he’s in the room with them?”
“Maybe he’s shy. Lots of these jackoffs have low self-esteem. A stutter, a lisp. A big nose, a huge birthmark on his face. Maybe he was teased mercilessly when he was a kid and it fucked him up, like our pal Stan. Maybe they were best friends in elementary school and sat together at the reject table.”
Speaking to the victims, broadcasting his voice on the internet—though only on an encrypted personal blog—was already stupid. What if someone ID’d him by voice? If anything he was delaying the inevitable, but in the grand scheme of things, speaking so often was as bad as revealing his face. Either way it could land him in hot water.
He looked back at Lisette as sunlight trickled through the blinds and set her irises on fire. “It’s odd, is what it is. Sadists need to interact with their victims, which is what he’s doing, but he’s only chatty when he’s a voice above them. You’d think the same would apply tenfold when he’s right next to them. His face is covered—he wouldn’t be embarrassed about his theoretical big nose when he’s got a ski mask on.”
She shrugged. “Maybe Abby and Brooke didn’t inspire chattiness. Girls next door might not be his preference. He did a number on Brianna; only Abby endured worse. Maybe Brianna’s tape will give us more to work with.”
His brows dark eyebrows knit together. “Brooke said he was short. She’s right. He looks to be your height, 5’5 or so.”
“Fucker’s definitely got a Napoleon Complex. Just another thing he’d be self-conscious about.” She peered into her empty coffee cup. “I need a goddamned coffee cart to follow me around. Caffeine runs are inconvenient and the coffee here sucks balls.”
“I think he’s edited his voice.”
“I’ve heard that voice before.”
“You’ve heard the same perp?”
“No. The voice.”
She nodded as comprehension dawned. “He’s using voice modifying technology. Maybe he’s got a really shrill voice, for a man. Maybe he sounds like he’s going through puberty. Doesn’t want to crack on camera. Might be embarrassing when he’s got an audience. I’ll have someone look into voice modifiers. With any luck we can get a list of buyers, unless he purchased it online.”
But of course he made the purchase online. He wouldn’t make such an amateur mistake.
“You see how he keeps stopping to look up at the cameras?” Lisette rewound the tape and squinted. “Like he’s trying to impress someone. He looks back like he needs instruction.”
More like a friendly greeting. Hey! Look what I can do!
John tapped an index finger against his mouth. “The speech pattern is odd. He uses hedging devices. Men don’t do that.”
“What the hell’s a hedging device?”
“Phrases like, ‘you know’, and ‘I think.”
She tucked her legs beneath her on her swivel chair and cradled her chin in her hand. “I don’t use them, and I didn’t have a penis when I checked last.”
“Probably because you were raised by a man. Was your father a cop?”
Her eyes went slitty with amusing annoyance, and John swallowed a laugh. “Probation officer.”
Suddenly Sergeant Jennings’s bizarre personality made much more sense. “Women use hedging devices because they don’t want to imply their feelings apply to others. By saying “I think it’s because” instead of “it’s because”, they devalue their thoughts and opinions. It’s instinctive. Something most women can’t help. Men are more assertive. They use ‘you know’ when there’s a presumption of shared knowledge, not to glean some sort of indicator they’re right from the recipient.”
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