Snuff

by Simonson, Melissa

  “Did something like that happen to you?”

  She shows me her teeth in another disturbingly phony smile. “You talk a lot. You did that with Abigail, too. Like you’re desperate to find connections.”

  “There isn’t much else to do. And you look like you could use a friend.”

  She laughs. “Looks like you could use one. I should probably fix that.”

  SEVENTY-THREE

  “That slimy, lying motherfucker.” Lisette shook her head and snapped up her walkie after John stepped out of the interview room. “Somebody needs to drag Jacob Ivashkov’s dumb ass here for questioning. You can probably find him playing with his dick in his office at the Garden of Eve strip club.”

  John pulled out his iPhone. “Keep him on ice when you get him in. I’ll have Stacy run background. Maybe we can’t find Bianca because she’s using a phone under his name.”

  “I should have arrested that fucktard the second we saw him in that club.”

  “He may not be involved. Men other than Jacob work there. But it does make a lot of sense. Maybe he planned to harness an unbalanced woman’s mental instability to make money off of torture porn and snuff films—selling subscriptions to a site like hers worldwide would be lucrative. And it’s obvious he has no qualms about exploiting women.”

  She fought a yawn, covering her mouth with a clenched fist. “Exploiting women is a pastime of his. If he’s not snatching half his dancer’s money, he’s forcing them to be drug mules. But he won’t give us anything. The second he’s in the station, his lawyers will circle the wagons. He may not be high on the totem pole with the Ivashkovs, but he’s got the full force of their bank accounts behind him. Nothing’s ever stuck before.” She hid her face in her hands as she yawned again.

  “Go home. You’re exhausted. I’ve got things handled.”

  She shook her head and leaned against the wall, eyes shut, looking for all the world like a blonde Avenging Fury after waking from a coma. “They’ll bring Jacob in soon. I’ve got experience with the dipshit. You don’t. He’ll respond better to me.”

  “You’ve got experience with him, but he likes talking to you. His eyes lit up when he saw you in the club.”

  Her eyes snapped open when she rolled them. “He treats all women like that.”

  “Not all of them. There were naked women standing on a stage in stilettos, but all he looked at was you. He likes you. Not just because he objectifies women in general. There’s something there. It’s hard to describe, but it’s obvious.”

  Her top lip curled back. “He’s around naked chicks all day. Eventually it probably gets old. I’ve arrested him three times. People don’t like cops who’ve arrested them three times.”

  Not all of them look like you, John wanted to say, but didn’t. He hadn’t known her more than four days, but he could tell Lisette wasn’t the type to take compliments without hurling back a snarled fuck off. “All the same, he’s got a thing for you.”

  “I can’t believe we’re wasting time talking about this.”

  “I know you can handle him, and probably better than me, but I’m not going to send him into an interrogation room to play with you, simply because he enjoys it so much. He won’t enjoy talking to me since I’m not eye candy.”

  “You’re not that bad.”

  “Go home.”

  “Is that an order?”

  “If that’s the only way you’ll do it, then yes.”

  She zipped up her flak jacket. “You’d better call me if anything comes of your interview.”

  “Would I hold out on you?”

  She gave him a flawless deadpan, and John suspected it had taken years to perfect. “I bet you’re one of those freaks who get off on being withholding.”

  SEVENTY-FOUR

  “You don’t need to do that,” I say. The very last thing I need here is another kidnapped girl. “Just talk to me. You don’t need anybody else.”

  Her eyebrows meet above her nose in the briefest flicker of annoyance. “It’s a lot more than presumptuous to tell me what I need, considering you have no idea what that is.”

  My back conforms to the oh-so-familiar mold of grout and granite behind me. “I’m sorry. I don’t want to sound like I’m telling you what to do. I just want to understand.”

  “Understand what?” She looks amused and pokes her chest. “Me?”

  I waffle with my answer before I give up, deciding to stick to the truth. “Yes.”

  She waves an airy hand. “There’s nothing to understand.”

  “I don’t believe that.”

  “So you’re calling me a liar? Or you think since you shared, I will? You watch too much TV.” Her gaze wanders. “What’s your stepfather’s name?”

  “Toby.”

  “Sounds like a fucking dog’s name.” One lean leg crosses over the other, the toe of her boot jiggling. “You should have killed him. You have no idea how much better you’d feel.” Her sparkling blue eyes are proof she’s speaking from experience.

  I pull my knees into my chest. “I couldn’t do that. Apart from not wanting to go to jail, I wouldn’t have known how.”

  “You figured it out just fine last time you were here.” Her face splits into another magenta lip-glossed smile. I realize now that she smiles most when she’s unhappy. And however unhappy I am, it probably pales in comparison to her. She’s animated, using her whole body when she speaks, but I can tell she’s cold and hard beneath all that pale flesh. “I lived with someone like your stepfather once upon a time.”

  She doesn’t look old enough for once upon a times, but I get what she means. Toby happened in another lifetime, one I’m not sure I’d been completely present in.

  “He abused you?”

  She laughs, long and loud and with bitter abandon. “Not like you were, not sexually. In that house, it wasn’t a life. It was a tour of duty. And that was only in the beginning. When she was being nice.” She forms air quotes. “My monster was born in a room like this. Just like yours. Or maybe yours was born back when Toby the Stepfather held you down night after night and made you bleed.”

  I don’t bother answering. He made me bleed so many times I lost count, but eventually I learned a few tricks to wash the blood from my sheets. Soak in cold water as quick as you can to keep the stain from setting. Massage shampoo into it. An hour later, Yahtzee. No more stain.

  If only it worked for the stains he left inside.

  The way she looks at me makes it crystal-clear she knows exactly what I’m thinking. “Sometimes I wonder if she made me this way. Because I can’t remember…it’s like watching a movie, and the actress looks and sounds like me, but she’s not. Or maybe it was inevitable. Either way I have to make peace with it. Get dressed every morning in the usual.” She pantomimes patting wrinkles out of her shirt. “Skirt, blouse, and pretense. I lie to most everyone I know. The mask gets heavy sometimes.”

  “Then why wear it?”

  “Because Halloween only comes once a year. I can’t be a monster every day.” She examines the shiny edges of her thumbnail. “Tell me about it.”

  There are many things I’d like to tell her, though I’m not certain which she wants to hear. “Tell you what?”

  “About your stepfather.”

  “He’s not something I talk about.”

  “Are we really going to argue?” She shakes her head. It looks like the cannibals behind her are shaking their heads too, but I must be going stir-crazy or experiencing the after-effects of whatever she injected me with. “Doesn’t look like you’ve got much of a choice.”

  “What do you want to know?”

  She hesitates. I imagine the whirs and clicks inside her brain before she finds the answer. “The first time.”

  So with that compelling purr of a response, I tell her.

  ***

  Toby had a low-lying hairline and a lower IQ. It wouldn’t have bothered me much, but he seemed to think he lived in a world full of morons, and that he alone was the sole possess
or of intelligence. Anything you did, he knew a better way to do it. Anything that happened, something bigger and bolder had happened to him.

  Nothing particularly big and bold had happened to me until Toby.

  His courtship of my mother was a whirlwind three months. My father had died, leaving her with a pile of bills and bitter about a great many things.

  We watched TV that night. Him on the armchair. Me on the sofa. I don’t know how it came to be that the armchair was Toby’s, since it had been in my house long before he exploded into it, but one day it was get out of the armchair; it’s mine. I never argued. Going along with him seemed easier.

  Every few seconds his eyes would flick over to me. It looked as though he had something pressing to share, but he didn’t, not until a commercial came on, when he very matter-of-factly stated that my mother, God bless her, slept too goddamned much.

  She did sleep too much, but that was the way of my world, and I didn’t mind. When she was awake, she was complaining.

  Sleeping too much makes you lethargic, Toby said, with old-world wisdom. And when you’re lethargic, you can’t take care of things that need to be taken care of.

  That sounded fair enough, so I’d nodded.

  Your hair is more red than blonde, he said, and my tender fifteen-year-old brain got whiplash from the aggressive gear-switching of his thoughts.

  Why yes, it was, I noticed every morning when I brushed my teeth.

  I wasn’t sure how to answer when he asked if the carpet matched the drapes. I couldn’t be positive what it meant, but I had an idea, and it wasn’t pretty.

  How he came to be sitting beside me is a mystery. You’d think I’d remember everything about it in crystalline detail, the first time, but I don’t. Stale Bud Light clung to his pores; I remember the smell when his breath was heavy at my throat. I remember thinking it was forgivable, since he was drunk. I know now that he wasn’t. He wouldn’t have had such steady fingers if he was.

  He didn’t have an issue finding and unknotting the drawstring on my pajama pants. Nor did he have issue with poking those fingers inside me.

  I’ve heard people talk about out-of-body experiences. I didn’t feel out of my body, but it’s like I was strangely half-removed. Like it wasn’t real. How could it be? He was my stepfather. I’d heard about such things happening, but never to me.

  I remember my amazement at how hard his fingers were, and the relief that came when he finally slipped them out. That relief turned to revulsion when he put those fingers in his mouth and washed it down with a slug of beer.

  At his mimed request, I handed him the clicker and made a quick exit. I held my breath around him, bracing myself for a repeat performance, but when nothing happened the following two days, I’d relaxed. I’d been right; he must have been drunk.

  But he wasn’t drunk that evening he followed me into the shower, or the night after that, when I woke up to find him in my bed.

  It turned into Our Little Secret, though there was nothing little about it.

  For a long time, I wondered if he’d ruined me. I didn’t have much interest in men, and thought I never would, until one day Jack turned up at Norm’s, fresh from a twenty-four hour rotation in the hospital. Even with dark circles and pale blue scrubs that matched his eyes, stained with something that looked horribly like blood, he was the best-looking thing in that dining room. Like he’d been cut out of an ER drama and spliced into my boring little life.

  I used to catch him looking at me for no reason in particular, and I’d wonder if I gave off repulsive pheromones; maybe he could smell something wrong. But he never asked, I never told, and eventually the Toby Years faded into the monotony of my past. I thought they would always stay there; some dusty, cobwebbed box sealed shut with packing tape, never to be reopened.

  But psychopaths probably take pleasure in opening old wounds. Her meditative expression and faraway eyes confirm it.

  SEVENTY-FIVE

  “Okay, so, where do I start with this piece of work?” Stacy asked, slapping at her keyboard. “There’s so much to shuffle through.”

  John leaned back in Lisette’s office chair, gazing out the window at the landscape of craggy skyscrapers. The setting sun shattered off the mirrored glass of the buildings, blinding him. He turned away. “How about his birthdate?”

  “Well, sure, if you want to go the obvious route. He was born on Valentine’s day, 1983. Kind of a douche, by all accounts. He has a sealed juvenile record I can’t access unless I hack the database. Expelled from his private prep school senior year for fighting, no college transcripts. IRS information says he’s worked as management at Garden of Eve for three years, and no work history prior. Well, nothing the IRS has on file. Three cars registered in his name—a Cadillac Escalade, a Range Rover, and a Hummer. Phallic, huh? Big cars to compensate?”

  “I’d rather not speculate on the size of his penis.”

  He allowed her a long snicker. “I can never get over when you say penis. Anyway, three counts of sexual assault that were dismissed in pre-trial, and a date-rape charge that would have stuck, but the complainant got some amnesia and mysteriously forgot everything. DA thinks he paid her off. I’m betting she’s right, since the Ivashkovs seem to have a bank account bigger than Brangelina.”

  “Who’s Brangelina?”

  “What’s the matter with you? Never mind, don’t answer that. I’m emailing the records, but tying him to this blog might be tricky. I hate to say it, but it looks like the only way I’ll get any leverage is if a new video uploads live, but that’s unlikely, since it looks like she’s uploaded all the other ones after the fact. The email account gave me less than nothing. Either no one uses the contact form, or she permanently deletes messages immediately after they’re sent. I’ll keep tabs on it, though.”

  New video would be a double-edged sword, and not something John hoped would happen. If the blog was updated, it meant another girl was about to die.

  SEVENTY-SIX

  She slides off the bucket, crossing her skinny-jeaned legs as she settles onto the white granite floors. “Do you ever wonder if all we are is all we’re meant to be?”

  That sounds like metaphysical philosophy garbage, and I skipped those classes in community college, having opted for more practical courses like World History and Interior Design. “I’m not sure what you mean.”

  She leans back on her palms, blue eyes slitting as she stares right through me. “Well, you’re a waitress. Have you ever been anything more than a waitress?”

  “I’m not just a waitress. I’m an actress, too.”

  “They’re all waitresses. Most of them stay waitresses, by the way.”

  I poke the white floor. “If I believed all we are is all we’re meant to be, I would have given up a long time ago. We control our destiny. It’s not like our lives have been decided—fate’s in our hands.”

  Her eyelids, painted in shimmery champagne and copper shadows, flutter closed. “You really think that?”

  “I have to. If I didn’t, there’d be nothing to live for.”

  “Someone very dear to me asked that question once before. I didn’t even know he was there. Sort of sidled up behind me when I got off the stage and whispered in my ear. I’m a stripper.” She cracks one eye open, glossy lips parting into a smile. “I know. Pretty rich for me to call you a whore, when I take my clothes off for money. I’m well aware of the irony.”

  “Why do you do it if you don’t like it?”

  A pretty little dent of confusion etches between her arched eyebrows. “What else would I do? That’s all I’m good for.”

  “Who told you that? It’s not true.”

  “Nobody had to tell me. It’s just one of those things you realize. Some girls want to be pediatricians or marine biologists. Not me.”

  “You’re married. Whores don’t get married.”

  She throws me another sharp look, so I wave at her left hand. “Your ring. You are married, right?”

  “Engaged. Kind
of.” She admires the way light splinters off the diamond when she wiggles her fingers and smiles. It looks more like a grimace. “He likes you.”

  It’s my turn to be confused. “Who?”

  “My fiancé. He thinks you’re a firecracker. Watching you rant and rave and cry on those cameras really turned him on. He couldn’t take his hands off me when he finally made it back in time for curtain call. I suppose variety isn’t what he likes, huh? It’s little girls like you and Abby.”

  Little girls who also look a lot like her.

  SEVENTY-SEVEN

  “Will the charming Miss Jennings be joining us, Mr. Special Agent Maxwell?” Jacob asked when John stepped into the interview room.

  John pulled out the chair opposite him and sat. “It’s Sergeant. Not ‘Miss’.”

  Jacob cracked a smile. “Either you have too much respect for the chain of command, or you’ve got a thing for her. I don’t blame you, if it’s the latter.”

  “You know a lot about chains of command, don’t you?” John opened a manila file stuffed with pages he’d printed from an email Stacy had sent. “You’re pretty low on the Ivashkov chain of command. Were you only included because your uncle’s in charge?”

  Jacob’s eyes lost a little of their mocking luster. “It’s a family business. I’m part of the family. My uncle wouldn’t have had it any other way.”

  “Then why’s your sister going to Yale Law? He paid her tuition with a personal check. He’d have done the same for you if you showed any smarts, but you’re the just the manager of drug front. You’ve never shown any ambition. Your school records are mediocre at best. You’re lazy—no jobs outside the ones your uncle created specifically for you, and you’ve never done any hard work in your life.” He pointed to Jacob’s entwined fingers. “You’ve got the smoothest hands I’ve ever felt. When we shook, I remember thinking they were like a woman’s hands.”