“On your knees! Hands against the wall, Joe. You’re coming out.”
Joe did as he was instructed. He knelt down with his hands against the bare concrete wall. Two guards walked in and cuffed his wrists and ankles. One of the guards, a big, muscular black officer named Officer Belton was the same one who usually took him to see Professor Locke. He delivered Joe’s mail, brought him his meals, and took him for his thrice weekly showers and hour-a-day trips to what could loosely be called an exercise yard. In supermax, the guards did everything. There were no trustees to clean floors, hand out mail and library books, or bring the inmates their meals. The COs did that and they resented it. They often complained that they felt like servants to the inmates. Piss one of them off though, and you might not get your mail or a library book for days, and you might even miss trips to the exercise yard or even a few meals. Joe had seen inmates die in their cells because a CO refused to take them to see a doctor, tired of hearing them bitch and moan. The guards were your only lifeline and they could pinch it off at any moment and leave you in your cell to rot.
Joe felt Belton’s disgust and disdain radiating like heat from his skin. He hated the idea of doing anything for a serial killer. He believed in the Old Testament law “an eye for an eye” and Joe knew the man thought he should have been put to death for his crimes, not locked up and treated like a celebrity. Joe agreed with him; he should have been executed. This was much, much worse.
The other officer who walked in with Belton was a woman Joe hadn’t seen before. She was older than Joe by at least ten years and had a sad look about her, like she expected the world to hurt her. She reminded Joe of the school librarian from the college he used to attend, the one who had become his first victim, in spirit if not in appearance. She was pear-shaped with large hips and a plump ass, but breasts that were just barely discernible through her uniform. Not Joe’s usual type, but something about her triggered his appetite. He couldn’t stop staring at her. She had big, brown eyes that looked sad and wounded. Her skin was so pale it was almost the color of milk, but there was not a blemish on it except for a scar on her chin and one on her forehead that Joe assumed she’d gotten from fights with inmates. She had thick brown hair pulled back into a French braid and she wore glasses. Joe looked her over from head to toe, slowly, wanting her to see that he was appraising her. When he saw her watching him, he licked his lips and winked. When she blushed and averted her eyes, he knew there was something there.
“You’ve got a visitor, Joe,” Officer Belton said bitterly. His tone was filled with regret, as if he lamented the fact that Joe had any human contact outside of the guards.
“My lawyer?”
“No. A woman. Two women, actually.”
Selene? Joe wondered. Had they lifted the ban and allowed her to visit him again? It seemed unlikely, but Joe could not stop himself from hoping. Maybe her lawyers had worked some magic to get the restrictions lifted.
“Are you new?” Joe asked the female officer.
“Huh? Umm, yeah. I just got transferred in.” She was blushing again.
“From where?”
“Pelican Bay. I just moved to Seattle.”
“Welcome. We can use a pretty face around here to brighten the mood.” Joe found himself easily slipping into predator mode, saying all the right things, luring his prey. He smiled and she smiled back. He was in. It was well-known that female guards were much more likely to fraternize with male inmates than male guards were with female inmates. Rumors of female corrections officers having affairs with inmates were common. Forty-seven percent of all sexual abuse cases in prison involved women employees and male inmates. Joe was well aware of the statistics. A lot of women are drawn to dangerous men. There’s a strong correlation between fear and sexual arousal. That correlation accounted for most of Joe’s fan mail. It also explained why many women were drawn to the job. Many of the women who worked in prison were lonely thrill-seekers and Joe knew that, if nothing else, he was pretty damn thrilling.
Officer Belton caught the exchange between Joe and the guard and cut it off quickly. “You shut the fuck up, Miles. Unless you want to wind up in a strip cell instead of seeing your visitors. You give Officer Addison the same respect you give me. You hear?”
“Yes, sir.” Joe nodded and turned his gaze away from Officer Addison, but not before giving her another smile. She smiled back sheepishly and giggled a little.
Officer Belton looked like he wanted to commit murder. He clearly did not approve of the flirtation. “Move!’
Joe shuffled forward with Officer Addison on one side and Officer Belton on the other. They reached a locked metal door at the end of the tier. Officer Belton pressed the intercom button and was buzzed through without saying a word. There were cameras everywhere and the officer in the control booth could already see who was at the door. Joe was led down a hallway into an elevator.
As he stood in the elevator beside the two officers, Joe allowed his eyes to roam again. The mousy new corrections officer was not bad looking. She wasn’t gorgeous by any stretch of the imagination, but she did have the sort of round, plump rear he liked. Her breasts, however, were a disappointment. She was barely a B-cup. Joe kept staring at them as if he could will them to grow. Beneath her diminutive breasts was the swell of a belly likely enlarged from childbirth. Even her pelvis bulged outward like a second stomach. She had well-rounded hips and thick thighs, but paradoxically, her arms and shoulders were thin. The one thing that almost tipped her over into beautiful were those big, sad, watery eyes, puppy-dog eyes. They were the eyes of a victim, the eyes of prey. A cologne of misery filled the air around her. It was obvious she’d been hurt before, probably many times.
Joe inhaled deeply of the pheromones wafting from Officer Addison. He could smell the sweat beneath her arms mixed with antiperspirant and rose-scented perfume, the moistness between her thighs, and something deeper, more primal, elemental, the scent of her soul. Her spirit was an echo of power, the faded remnants of some chaotic force like the smoldering embers after a forest fire with the potential to reignite into an inferno. The monster surged, roaring and raging to be fed. Joe wondered if the new officer was really as attractive as she seemed to him now or if it was just the long months of confinement without seeing a single female. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, but that’s nothing compared to what it did to the sex drive … or the prey drive.
Officer Addison’s lips were thin and pink. She wore no makeup and needed none. She had chubby cheeks and when she smiled, dimples erupted on both sides of her face. Staring at her, Joe couldn’t help but smile, and this time, there was nothing manipulative behind the expression. The guard was “cute.” That was the best way to describe her. She was practically adorable. Her obvious bashfulness only made her more endearing. Joe knew he had to win her over. If Selene’s lawyers failed, she could be his ticket to freedom. He only hoped he wouldn’t have to kill her when it was over. His conscience was still struggling with Alicia’s death. He didn’t want any more regrets.
The elevator doors opened and Joe was led down two more long halls and through three more doors before finally being led into a room to be strip searched. He was walked through a metal detector and then Belton patted him down and waved a wand over him before handing him off to a slender, pockmarked older officer Joe didn’t know. They usually had a CO from another cellblock do the strip search. COs and inmates often got too familiar and the warden didn’t want a CO letting something slip or getting paid off to ignore a piece of contraband. If the guards and the inmates didn’t know each other, that type of collusion was a lot less likely.
Both Officer Belton and Officer Addison remained in the room as Joe was ordered to strip.
“Normally, there’s only two of us in here for this. But since this is your first day, I didn’t want to throw you to the wolves so soon. And this motherfucker right here is the goddamn wolfman! Don’t let him fool you. He’d rip your goddamn throat out if he could. He’s in here for eating a
woman alive along with three other folks. Did you know that? They said there was nothing left of her but bones when he was done with her,” Belton said, watching the new officer for a reaction.
Joe turned to see her reaction too. She shivered and rubbed her arms like she was trying to rub away goose bumps.
“I’ve got it from here,” the pockmarked old CO said as he donned plastic gloves. “All right, Mr. Miles, you know the drill. Everything off.”
Belton unshackled him so Joe could remove his shoes, shirt, pants, and underwear. Joe folded them neatly and placed them on a metal cot. He made eye contact with Officer Addison while the old pockmarked CO checked under his tongue, in his hair, under his arms, beneath his ball sack. He saw her appraise his striated chest muscles, chiseled triceps and biceps, pronounced six-pack that was nearly an eight-pack, the thick trapezius and deltoid muscles in his shoulders, his huge quadriceps and calf muscles, and the impressive length and girth of his sexual organ, which was thickening and hardening as he stared at her. She inhaled sharply and managed, with obvious effort, to pull her eyes away from his groin.
“Touch your toes, son.”
Joe bent over and the officer checked his rectum with a flashlight before probing it with his fingers.
“He don’t look so tough now, do he? Huh? He still look sexy with a fist in his ass?” Belton asked Officer Addison, glaring at her in disgust.
“Okay, he’s good.”
“Get dressed, Miles. Your visitors await,” Belton said gleefully.
There was something different in the way Belton spoke to him now. There was a smirk on his face. Earlier he seemed incensed at the idea of anyone coming to visit him, especially two women. Now he seemed to be delighted by the idea.
“Who are they?”
Belton waved toward the visiting room. “See for yourself.”
Joe hurried back into his prison clothes and the two officers walked with him into the visiting room. Seated on the opposite side of a thick glass partition was a voluptuous Spanish woman with long, black, curly hair, pudgy cheeks with deep dimples, full bow-shaped lips, and large, timid eyes with heavy eyelashes. She was young, barely twenty, and painfully pretty. Even through the conservative, high-necked blouse she was wearing, it was obvious that her breasts were larger than average.
Joe paused in the doorway of the visitor’s room and staggered backward a few steps. “No. It can’t be.”
“What’s wrong, Joseph? You see a ghost?”
Behind the Spanish girl was a woman in her forties with the same long curly hair, the same dimpled cheeks and bow-shaped lips, the same voluptuous bosom, the same fiery, explosive aura. It was evidently the girl’s mother and she looked familiar. Joe remembered seeing her at the trial. She was Alicia’s mother. He shuffled forward as if in a daze, pulled out the metal folding chair, and sat down. With trembling hands, he picked up the phone and the woman on the other end did the same.
“A-Alicia?”
The woman shook her head slowly. Her eyes filled with tears and her bottom lip trembled. “No, you piece of shit. I’m her sister. Lana.”
Joe turned to look at the older woman. She snatched the phone from Lana’s hand and hissed between clenched teeth. “Alicia was my daughter. You murdered her! I just want to know why. Why! At the trial, you said you loved her. How could you say you love her and do … do what you did to my baby?”
The tears cascaded from her eyes. Her face creased and pinched in a grimace of pain, mouth snarled, brow furrowed.
Joe looked away from her, and at Lana.
Lana scowled in contempt and took the phone back from her mother.
“Did you read my letters?” he asked.
“No! I don’t want to read some bullshit you spent nights perfecting, picking just the rights words to make yourself sound better! I want you to tell me right here and right now. How the fuck could you do that to my sister?”
Joe dropped his head and his lip trembled. A tear spilled from his eye and he quickly wiped it away. He took a deep breath, raised his head to look Lana in her eyes, and spoke. “I-I did love her. I was sick. It wasn’t my fault. I couldn’t help myself. I loved her so much. You have to believe me. I still think about her.”
“We don’t want to hear about you fantasizing about Alicia. You murdered and ate her. We just wanted to ask you why. We want to be able to find closure, to forgive you so we can move on. But we can’t do that until we know why you did it.”
Joe struggled with the words. He could see Alicia so clearly in Lana’s face. Her voice even sounded similar. Her expression, full of pain and anger and fear, marred by his betrayal, was almost identical to the expression Alicia had worn when he began to cannibalize her breasts. Even with all the guilt and remorse Joe felt now, he couldn’t stop himself from staring at Lana’s breasts. He began to salivate and the monster awakened, hungry and mean.
“She was just so beautiful, so sweet, so … so tragic,” Joe said.
Lana dropped her head and cast a look toward her mother at the word “tragic.” The older woman nodded with her eyes down. They both knew what he meant by tragic. He was referring to Alicia’s late father and why he’d killed himself.
“I fell in love with her the moment I saw her. She was going to help me fight this thing inside of me. She was going to help find a cure, but the longer I stayed with her, the harder these … urges were to resist. She was the most flawless, the most perfect woman I’d ever seen. I never wanted to hurt her.”
Lana’s voice was softer now, less combative. “But you did. You did hurt her. You killed her. You fucking ate her alive, you sick fuck!”
“She asked me to,” Joe replied.
“What?” Lana and her mother asked in unison. Joe hadn’t testified on his own behalf at the trial. He’d sat sullenly beside his lawyer as expert after expert, including Professor Locke, testified to his mental state. This was the first time he’d spoken about Alicia to anyone other than the professor.
“She asked me to eat her. She said she wanted to be part of me. ”
Lana’s mother gasped and let out a moan like she’d lost her child all over again. She looked heavenward and clasped her hands in a position of prayer against her forehead. Tears wept from her eyes. Lana’s eyes blazed brilliant with rage.
“No! I don’t believe that. You’re fucking lying!”
“She loved me too, Lana. She understood me.”
“Bullshit! You murdered her! She trusted you and you betrayed her. You’re a sick, perverted bastard and you deserve to be locked up forever!”
Joseph nodded. “You’re right. I’m a sick bastard and I do deserve to be locked up, but you’re wrong about Alicia. We loved each other and now we are one. I still feel her inside of me, in my blood. I’ll always love her. She’s part of me forever.” Tears welled in Joe’s eyes and spilled down his cheeks.
For a moment, as she watched the big cannibal weep in obvious pain, Lana’s expression softened. For just a moment Joe could tell she believed him, that she wanted to believe him. Because the way he described Alicia’s death was almost beautiful, poetic, not like the horrific photographs they’d shown at his trial. And Joe knew Lana needed to believe Alicia had died happy, loved, rather than screaming in pain, afraid, and alone, helpless in the grip of a sadistic serial killer. Thinking about her sister dying that way had obviously been tearing her and her mother up inside. Joe’s story offered her another interpretation, one that might allow them both to sleep at night.
Then, as abruptly as it had come the expression was gone and Lana’s dark, beautiful eyes hardened once more.
“No one could ever love you, Joseph Miles. You’re a fucking monster! No one could ever love you!”
Joe nodded in agreement. The tears flowed without relent now. “I am a monster. You’re right. And you should never forgive me. I took her away from you. I took her from the world. It was selfish of me … of both of us. I’m sorry. I couldn’t help it. I tried. I’m sorry.”
Joe hung
up the phone and stood. Lana and her mother stared at him, hugging each other for support. Hatred burned in Lana’s eyes. Joe had never seen such raw, naked aggression in a woman’s eyes before. Lana looked so much like Alicia it was breaking Joe’s heart to look at her. She could have been Alicia’s twin. It hurt him to see that expression on a face so beautiful, a face he had once loved, that he still loved. He turned and knocked on the door.
The new CO, Officer Addison, opened the door and Joe held out his hands for the shackles. The officer’s hands trembled as she secured the cuffs around his wrists. Joe was weeping openly now. His body jerked and hitched, wracked by the force of his sorrow. He couldn’t get Lana’s face, those eyes filled with rage and sorrow, out of his mind. Her words followed him out of the room.
“No one could ever love you, Joseph Miles. You’re a fucking MONSTER! No one could ever love you!”
She was right. This thing he had become had robbed him of any chance he had of giving and receiving love. Anyone or anything he got close to he destroyed. Joe continued to weep unselfconsciously. Beyond Officer Addison, standing in the hallway, Officer Belton smiled.
Ten
Officer Cindy Addison didn’t know what to think of the giant serial killer weeping and moaning the name Alicia over and over again as he lumbered along beside her, shackled at the wrists and ankles. There was something so painfully tragic about him. He’d looked so dangerous and intimidating when they’d come to remove him from his cell, so arrogant, powerful, even sexy. But now he looked perfectly pathetic. He’d been almost hysterical with grief ever since she’d escorted him from the visitor’s room, and she could tell by Belton’s demeanor that he had known this would happen.
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