Snuff

by Simonson, Melissa

  She gave a few overzealous nods and downed the contents of a mug. “I found something in that box of old cases. It was worth staying to look into. I think I’m starting to put this together.”

  He crouched beside her and squinted at the yellowed pages. “What have you got?”

  “Either the name of the perp or one ginormous motherfucker of a coincidence.” She held up a photograph. “Bianca Cartwright. Does her face look familiar?”

  Shy and crooked close-mouthed smile, round face, high forehead, blue eyes of slightly different sizes.

  She had the same asymmetry of the murdered girls.

  Lisette slapped the photo into his chest and crawled to another pile. “Bianca and her sister Reagan grew up in Laguna.” She snatched up two more photographs, the first of a white-haired man, and the second of considerably younger woman with broad, intimidatingly attractive features. “Dad was some bigwig at the Colgate-Palmolive Corporation, Mom was an ex-model turned homemaker. Guess what happened when Mom and Dad got into a car accident on Pacific Coast highway and died?”

  He accepted the photographs she stuffed into his hand. “What?”

  Lisette bounced to her feet, wound a path to the far corner of her office, and plucked another document up with lithe and nimble fingers. The ceiling fan flapped it out of her hand, but she barreled on. “They went to live with great-aunt Melinda. Grandparents were too old to look after two fifteen and seventeen-year-old girls, so the courts granted Aunt Melinda full custody.”

  “Was Aunt Melinda not a nice lady?”

  She snapped up another photograph and threw it across the room like a Frisbee. The fan boomeranged it back, but John got a glimpse before it fluttered to the floor—a hawk-faced woman with steel-gray curls marching across a shiny pink scalp.

  “Aunt Melinda was a cold-hearted bitch with a God complex, and a distinct aversion to children. Particularly young girls. She pulled Bianca and Reagan out of highschool because she didn’t approve of coed institutions. She wanted them to be homeschooled. You know what she taught them? It wasn’t fractions and English lit.”

  Her enthusiasm was contagious. John hoped she didn’t lose it the longer she was on the job, the way most cops did. “What?”

  She blew a sweaty lock of hair out of her face, hands on her hips. “She taught them that God doesn’t like dirty little whores.”

  “How does one go about teaching that?”

  “Aunt Melinda found out Reagan had a boyfriend. Reagan was the seventeen-year-old. She went batshit, locked Reagan in the cellar, and tried to beat the slut out of her.” Lisette pawed through another stack of documents. She selected a handful and shoved them into John’s arms. “Hospital records. Someone made an anonymous CPS call saying the girls hadn’t been seen in weeks. Guess what they found when they entered the house?”

  He didn’t bother asking as he looked through hospital photos. Most were close-ups of a frail body with waxy skin riddled with contusions.

  Green-tinged burns. Gnarled, skinny fingers. Black foot-shaped bruises stretching across an elegant path of jutting vertebrae.

  “They found a dead Reagan and a half-dead Bianca. Aunt Melinda caught Bianca trying to sneak her sister out of the cellar one night. Locked them both down there and said Bianca needed to be punished as well, like consorting with the likes of an alleged whore would make her one, too. Said she didn’t want Reagan’s slutty behavior rubbing off, and there was only one way to do it.”

  “And how was that?”

  Lisette threw the fistful of papers up in the air as if she were playing fifty-two pickup. “Bianca had to do the beatings herself. Interviews said she refused. Of course that didn’t make Aunt Melinda happy, so she stopped feeding them. Kept them in the dark. They got desperate. Reagan got sicker. Infection, gangrene, fever. Aunt Melinda yelled at them through the vent and said only one of them would get out of there, and it wouldn’t be Reagan. She told Bianca to kill that whore unless she wanted to die down there. It went on about three weeks.”

  He looked up from the photographs. “Did she kill her?”

  Of course not. Didn’t have the strength of courage, did she? Why else would she murder surrogates for herself on three week rotations?

  She shook her head. “No. She didn’t do anything. Essentially just watched her die. When CPS found them, Reagan had been dead about three days. Bianca wasn’t far behind. She’d been digging into her wrists with her fingernails, lost a pint of blood, not to mention she has Type 1 diabetes, and hadn’t been given her insulin injections. They pumped her full of fluids and intravenous nutrition in the hospital, taped her wrists up, and kept her two weeks for observation. Melinda was tossed in the psych ward. She died in there about four months ago. Guess who visited before she croaked?”

  He felt his brows pull up in surprise. “Really?”

  Aunt Melinda’s messages must have really sunk in. A terrified fifteen-year-old girl was just naïve enough to believe an angry old woman preaching faux sermons through a forked tongue. She followed twisted commandments handed down by the only God she’d ever worshipped.

  “Fucking really, but she only visited the one time.” Lisette reached to tighten the elastic around her ponytail and sank onto her knees. “Why visit that crusty old cunt? If I were her, I’d only visit her grave if I had to take a piss.”

  Maybe she made an appearance as a Reaper, not as a concerned niece.

  “How did Melinda die?”

  “Heart attack. She had a history of heart disease in her family.”

  Or she had a little injection of diabetic insulin and went into heart failure.

  He picked up the photograph of Reagan Cartwright. She had the same blue eyes and blonde hair of Bianca, but the chiseled, wide bone structure of their mother. “Bianca hates herself. That’s her face she’s killing over and over, not Reagan’s.”

  She rolled hack to sit on her heels, clasping her hands over her knees. “Guess who lived next door to Aunt Melinda? It’s the best part.”

  “Stanley Heckles.” John stood and offered his hand help her up. She yanked herself to her Timberlands and dusted off the thighs of her jeans with far too much vigor for someone who hadn’t slept in over a day. “I can send patrol to Bianca’s address if you want to talk to him first. Hairs in the back of his van match Paula and Rebecca. If he’s not in on the murders, then he’s the wheelman.”

  “He can wait. He isn’t going anywhere.”

  FIFTY-SEVEN

  “I was under the impression there was only one guy doing this,” Jack says, stabbing at a scrambled egg with his back turned. “And suddenly there’s two?” He dumps the eggs from the frying pan and slaps the spatula into the sink.

  Pulp bobs at the surface of my glass of orange juice. I can’t drink it. It looks like bits of flaky flesh.

  Singed, wiry tendons stretching over raw, greenish skin. I won’t be able to handle the smell any longer. It’s like old, rotting meat, tossed in the garbage can three days before trash pickup. Pungent with the scent of decay.

  “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  I hadn’t remembered or pieced together what I’d heard until last night, when Jack’s voice was thick with sleep. He sounds like that when he tells me he loves me every time we’re in bed—sort of muffled, because he always says it with his lips on my throat. Those voices had sounded the same. Hoarse, moaned whispers. “I didn’t remember I’d heard someone else until last night.”

  Our decrepit Mr. Coffee wheezes, and Jack turns to slosh some French roast into a mug. “Are you sure?”

  I massage my eyes until I see red. “I’m not sure of anything, really.” Maybe I’d imagined it. There’d been lots of other things on my mind, what with having just killed someone.

  “It sounded like sex?” He curses when he burns his hand on the stove, juggling his mug and the frying pan’s handle. “Real sex, not taped sex? Like how we sound? Like those noises—”

  My stomach somersaults. “God, Jack.” I push the glass away. “Can yo
u shut up?”

  He shakes his head. “You can act on camera and in front of a pack of producers, but if someone mentions anything to do with sex, you blush.”

  I’m afraid this will have to be short, but take heart. I’ll be home soon.

  I understand your quandary, but who better to remedy it than you?

  These things have a way of working themselves out once you separate emotion from fact.

  I’ll be waiting to hear how you handle it. Breathless.

  Monday at 9:17 a.m.

  IP Address: 75.84.67.69

  Sent via contact form by an anonymous viewer on your website

  FIFTY-EIGHT

  Lisette’s driving was alarming.

  Because of LLI, driving was initially a frightening prospect. Other sixteen-year-olds complained about being chauffeured by their parents, but John had been happy to let Molly bus him from destination to destination until he hit seventeen, and she finally put her foot down.

  His first time behind the wheel had been an overwhelming and nerve-wracking nightmare. Countless dangers and obstacles littered the road. What if that woman drinking a latte in the left-hand land accidentally dropped it and swerved into his? And that man in the pickup looked enough like a rolling catastrophe, but on top of that, he had a ladder in the bed. Suppose a sudden gust of wind blew by and knocked it right out into the road? They’d die a fiery death on the highway and cause a multi-car pileup that would subsequently kill others. No wonder hundreds of thousands of people died in car wrecks each year.

  “For God’s sake, that’s not going to happen,” Molly had said from the passenger’s seat, and probably with an eye roll, but John had been too frightened to lift his eyes from the road to check.

  Eventually he’d realized those variables and hindrances weren’t likely to occur, and he’d relaxed a little, made his peace with the road. It wasn’t long before he’d stopped being scared out of his wits. But that was strictly when he controlled the wheel. Sitting in the passenger’s seat at the mercy of Lisette’s whims and weaving brought that terror back with the force of hurricane.

  He closed his eyes so he didn’t have to see his impending death.

  “Are you there yet?” Lisette snapped into her walkie.

  “Nearly,” was Holmes’s static reply.

  John kept his lids shut. He didn’t want to imagine what might happen if he found she’d taken her hands from ten and two.

  “Hit up Laguna PD and let them know we’re coming.”

  If they even made it there alive. “Make sure someone’s sitting on Aunt Melinda’s house.”

  He was forced to wrench his eyes open when she made a sharp right off the freeway. “I did. But she’s not going to be holed up there. If she’s got any sort of smarts, she’ll know we have old Stan in custody. I doubt she’d risk going there if she thinks there’s even a slight chance we know about it.”

  She slammed her palm into the horn and cut off a Beemer.

  The thrill of horror climbing his spine was hard to shake, but he tried anyway, grabbing the bar by the window. “Why don’t you use the siren?”

  “I feel like an asshole when I use it.” She flicked the blinker and swerved ahead of an SUV, leaning over the wheel with muttered curses.

  “And cutting people off and flipping them the bird isn’t being an asshole?”

  “Backseat drivers are even bigger assholes, you know.” She stabbed a button on the dashboard when beeping droned. “What?”

  A gruff voice filled the cabin. “Nobody home at 12 Vista. No car in the drive, no answer when we knocked. You want us to hear a lady calling for help and force entry?”

  John gave a quick ‘no’ at the same time she said “fuck no, are you stupid? Warrant’s on the way. Sit tight.”

  And in the meantime, John thought, tightening his grip on the bar, he’d sit tight, too.

  FIFTY-NINE

  “It doesn’t look like anybody lives here,” Lisette said, once they’d gotten inside 12 Vista’s French doors. The rest of the tactical assault team surged ahead, splitting into separate rivers of black SWAT clothes and Kevlar. “It looks like a model home. A really filthy one.”

  John made a noise of agreement and swept a finger through spidery layers of dust on a spiral banister twisting around the staircase. “She doesn’t live here.

  She popped the clasps on her bulletproof vest. It parted to reveal a black wife beater with LAPD burned on the front with cracking neon-yellow lettering. “Bianca’s parents willed this to her. It’s rent-free and beachfront property. Doesn’t get much better than this. Aunt Melinda lived in a dump.”

  He cracked his knuckles, staring up the domed ceiling hovering over the foyer. A chandelier with dusty bulbs hung beneath a backdrop of ivory and gold crown molding. He tried the closest light switch. “Utilities aren’t paid up.” The walls were bare and yellowed, with lighter square patches every few feet. “She’s taken down art or pictures. This place must feel like a lifetime ago. It’s impersonal. No family photographs. No life. Nothing to suggest she considers this home.”

  John could almost feel the place decomposing.

  This house makes her sad. She isn’t likely to hole up somewhere that screams heartache and death.

  “It’s more of a home than Aunt Melinda’s. And she’s only twenty-seven,” Lisette argued, but it didn’t sound as though she believed her own reasoning. “It wasn’t that long ago.”

  “The time that’s passed doesn’t matter. She was a completely different person when she lived here. When you’re as broken as she is, being reminded of happy things only makes you feel worse.” He headed up the staircase. “It’s like she scrubbed the house of everything that might remind her of her family.”

  Lisette trailed him, Timberlands heavy on the granite steps as shouts of ‘Clear!’ from the tactical team emanated from first-floor rooms. “Then why not sell the place? No sense in holding onto a house you never plan to live in or rent out. This joint would sell for several million. I put in a request for some basic background information on Bianca, but it might take a few days to get it. Who knows how many real estate holdings she’s got. If she’s not here or at Aunt Melinda’s, we got nothing for a Plan B.”

  He took the nearest right instead of continuing up the second flight of stairs. “We know her name. It’s more than we had twelve hours ago.”

  He stopped in the threshold of the closest bedroom and nudged the cracked door open with his foot. Lisette stopped short behind him, steel-toed boots stomping on the heels of his shoes.

  She steadied herself on the small of his back and peered around him. “Good God. What is this? Fucking Chucky’s workshop?”

  It was like stepping into a completely different realm, a place where pain contaminated the air, crept through the puffy pink bedspread, climbed rose walls and slithered behind the filthy faces of long-forgotten porcelain dolls stuffed into built-in shelves.

  They were all missing their eyes. Not from the passage of time, but because someone had gouged them from the sockets. A knife, John assumed, cataloging the frenzied white nicks carved into cherub-plump cheeks of each face.

  Their peach-painted lips smiled, but those vacuous black holes looked like they could swallow a soul.

  A shrine to her dead sister?

  More like a museum of memories past.

  “She ripped the eyes out like she did to Brianna. She must have reminded Bianca of herself.”

  “Looks like she’s a special kind of fucked up.” Lisette squatted beside a cobwebbed cardboard box and peered inside. She pulled a pair of latex gloves from her back pocket. Two puffs of sterile-smelling powder burst into the stale air as she snapped them on.

  John pried open one of the closet doors. A busted vanity leaned against the far wall. Shards of a broken mirror scattered over the granite floor, tipped in red.

  Physical pain to dull emotional pain, the voice said. Cutting yourself to feel better. What a stupid notion.

  He opened the second door
and pushed racks of plastic-sheathed clothing aside. The photographs he suspected Bianca had removed from the living room sat there, collecting dust and grime in gilded frames. The Cartwright family’s smiles were glazed with age—most of them. Bianca’s face had been clawed from each image.

  Every few seconds something thudded. John looked over his shoulder to find Lisette pawing through the box, tossing books with gnarled spines and notebooks on the floor.

  “We should take this with shit with us.” She pried open a jewelry box. A ballerina twirled slowly as weak music chimed, the dust smothering her pale pink tutu flaking off in misty spirals. She popped open the bottom drawer of the box. “Anything in the closet?”

  “Family portraits. Nothing that would help find her. Bianca’s a cutter. She hasn’t been here in a long time. The dust is undisturbed.”

  She turned the jewelry box around. Razors black with blood nestled into the pink satin lining. “No shit, she’s a cutter.”

  How many times has she tried to commit suicide? She doesn’t have the guts—the courage—to really commit?

  “Oh, shit.” She stood, the jewelry box rattling like a demon lived among the bloodied razors. “I forgot to tell you. Brooke called late last night. She says she had a dream that reminded her of something. Apparently she heard something after she killed Abby. Said it sounded like people having sex, but she only heard for a few seconds. I’m going to go out on a limb and say it’s not Heckles. He likes his women nice and dead.” She walked to door and stuck her head out. “I need a lab geek up here!”

  John brushed past her and headed for the staircase. “I’ll have my tech analyst get background. It’ll be quicker than waiting for your people.”

  SIXTY

  Jack smiles like I’m a precocious child when I give him my grocery store list until he actually reads it. “Bananas and wine? Jesus. Is this a joke?”