Mr. Midnight

by Allan Leverone

  “So drag his ass into that chair and tape him in. He’s probably not going to regain consciousness and that’s a damned shame, but just on the off chance he does suddenly pop his eyes open, I want to be sure he has a prime view of the display of performance art to come.

  “However. Just to show you I’m not unreasonable, I’ll help you. Hold this,” he said, flipping the knife into the air and catching it by the blade in the fingers of his bare hand. It was an impressive trick, one he had mastered years ago. He offered it, handle-first, to the young woman.

  Her eyes grew wide and she froze, confused, then reached hesitantly for it. At the last moment, Milo yanked it away like Lucy pulling the football away from Charlie Brown. He had always thought that comic-strip gag was stupid, that there was no way in real life Charlie Brown would actually fall for it, but apparently the guy drawing the cartoon had known a little bit about human nature.

  The dumb bitch moaned and Milo laughed companionably. This was too much fun. “I guess I’ll just hold on to this for now,” he said. “You don’t mind, do you?”

  She looked away and didn’t answer.

  “Now, let’s get on with it. I’m afraid our time will be cut short thanks to this guy.” Milo nodded toward the body of the dead cop. “Once he fails to check in at headquarters on his hourly donut run, they may send someone to look for him.”

  He grabbed the unconscious hero wannabe by the shoulder with both hands, holding the knife handle nimbly in the fingers of his right. Then he flipped the man over so that his back was leaning against the chair seat. A great swell of blood bubbled out of his chest and the young woman gasped and quickly reached for him as well. Together they lifted him—she wasn’t kidding, he really was quite solid—head lolling, into the chair.

  The girlfriend held him steady while Milo reached for the duct tape, expertly rolling it around his ankles and wrists, taping them to the chair. He added a couple of long swaths, securing the man’s waist to the chair-back and the tops of his legs to the seat for support. His head still rested on his right shoulder, but Milo supposed there was nothing he could do about that. This would have to suffice. The odds against the hero wannabe ever regaining consciousness were astronomically long anyway, especially after his eventful trip across the floor. Besides, the clock really was ticking.

  He clapped his hands together and smiled at his two other companions. The conscious ones. “What do you say we get started?”

  CHAPTER 42

  Holland Montvale had been a homicide investigator for longer than he cared to remember, and over the course of his career had seen the bodies of hundreds of murder victims, all suffering various desecrations and all in varying stages of decomposition. One thing they all had in common—maybe the only thing—was the ugliness of the crime’s aftermath.

  Gruesome injuries, tissue breakdown, a stricken look etched on the victim’s face, the stench of bowels and bladder being voided, all served to make the act of leaving the world via violence even messier than entering it had been. Learning to compartmentalize the reaction to that messiness was essential for any homicide dick and Holland Montvale had long since become accustomed to doing so.

  But Holland had to admit this scene was worse than most. The young woman had suffered, and terribly, from the wounds inflicted upon her small frame, and it was clear, even this early in the investigation, that death had come slowly. His gaze lingered over the ravaged body and he said a fervent prayer that when his time came, it would be over quickly.

  The CSI techs were busy doing their CSI tech stuff. Holland tried his best to stay out of the way until their work was done. He stood off to one side of the room, waiting patiently, watching the flurry of familiar activity with a professional detachment as he tried to put himself inside the killer’s head while the crime was taking place. It was awful to contemplate.

  A full complement of BPD officers had descended on the tenement building and fanned out in all directions, canvassing the area, searching out potential witnesses and, as unlikely as it seemed, hoping to get lucky and retrieve the murder weapon. Holland knew he would have to wait for the coroner’s report to be sure, but he felt confident the wounds had been caused by a common kitchen knife. What else would someone use to strip skin from bone?

  Assuming it was a knife, maybe it had been thrown or dropped by the killer in his haste to escape the scene.

  It seemed unlikely, but based on the condition of the victim’s body and the damage that had been done to her, Holland felt there was at least some chance the patrol officers might uncover something useful. He was no psychologist, but as a longtime homicide dick he felt he could reasonably make a few assumptions based on both the condition of the victim and of the apartment itself.

  The nature of the wounds on the body suggested that the suspect possessed, in addition to a terrifying level of psychosis, a meticulous personality and high intelligence, as evidenced by his preplanning skills. It couldn’t have been easy to set up the torture device and to lure the young victim here without being discovered.

  But the sloppiness of the execution—blood splattered everywhere, the corpse still strapped into the chair, the crime scene not even the subject of the most perfunctory cleanup—gave Holland pause.

  He had worked similar scenes before. If his theory was correct, the man—it was almost always a man when the crime was this vicious—was dissembling. He was being overtaken by his psychosis. He was becoming even more dangerous and unpredictable than he clearly already had been. The thought gave Holland a sinking feeling in his gut.

  He wandered around the tiny shell of abandoned apartment, concentrating mostly on the room where the young girl had been butchered. The living room. He thought about the irony of such a vicious murder occurring in the “living room” and a chuckle that sounded suspiciously like a choked-off sob escaped before he was able to stop it. He looked around to see if anyone had noticed and was relieved to see no one had.

  He considered the murder weapon. Or, more accurately, the absence of a murder weapon. What did it mean that the knife was gone? In most cases, it would simply mean the killer had maintained the presence of mind to take it with him when he left and had disposed of it elsewhere.

  But in this case, Holland wasn’t so sure. The perpetrator had not made any attempt to hide the mutilated body of his victim or in any way clean up his mess. Would it be consistent with the apparently mindless, frenzied nature of this attack to assume the man had regained enough logic and preplanning skill after committing this horrifying crime to take the murder weapon with him and get rid of it somewhere?

  Holland didn’t think so. He thought maybe it meant something else. Maybe it meant the killer wasn’t quite done yet. Maybe he planned on using the knife again.

  Holland had moved to the entryway between the living room and the kitchen in an attempt to stay out the way of the evidence techs, whose work he hoped would be finished soon. He shook his head slowly, thinking about Mr. Midnight running around the city, and when he did, his eyes fell on a piece of trash, no great surprise since the entire apartment was filled with trash. But this particular piece of trash appeared to have been placed, not scattered haphazardly like everything else, on a small uncluttered portion of the scarred kitchen counter. Something about it bothered Holland. He bent down and examined it without touching it. It looked like the back of a cardboard insert to a snack cake package. Written on it in messy, spidery script, was “7 Granite Circle.”

  Holland felt his pulse quicken. It was a long shot, but maybe this “7 Granite Circle” was where the killer had gone. Maybe he had tortured this information out of his victim and was even now either at this address or on his way there. That the person who had planned and executed a crime of this magnitude would leave a handwritten note leading investigators to his current whereabouts seemed unlikely in the extreme, but if Holland’s theory about the killer dissembling was correct, it was at least a possibility.

  He reached into his pocket and pulled out his ce
ll phone. Holland Montvale had no idea how many towns and cities in the surrounding area had an address of 7 Granite Circle within their boundaries, but that information could be accessed easily enough. And it needed to be accessed right now.

  Before it was too late.

  CHAPTER 43

  When the disgusting murdering psycho had offered his knife to her, flipping it into the air and then holding it out like a proud teen offering flowers to his date on prom night, Cait had known immediately he was screwing with her; she wasn’t stupid and he wasn’t nearly as clever as he thought he was. But she still could have grabbed for it. She had just been so concerned with Kevin and the awful blood bubbling out of his chest that she was just a little too slow on the uptake.

  If she had only whipped her hand up and grabbed it out of his slimy paw! She pictured herself plucking it cleanly from his palm and stabbing him in the heart, puncturing his chest like he had punctured Kevin’s, blood pouring out of the wound as he stared disbelievingly at the tiny woman he had so badly misjudged, at the knife handle sticking out of his own body, quivering to the pulsing beat of his dying heart.

  Cait considered herself a pacifist and not so long ago would never have imagined herself capable of the sort of black fantasy she was currently experiencing. But the world she had known her entire life, a world where people treated each other with dignity and respect and where things proceeded along a rational and understandable arc, that world was gone, at least for now. It was gone and it had been replaced by a world of madness and hate and unimaginable brutality and violence, a world where an armed police officer is no match for a madman with a knife.

  Cait was so wrapped up in the vision—not a Flicker, just a regular, garden-variety daydream—she didn’t realize the murdering bastard was talking to her until he leaned down into her face and shouted, “Hey!”

  She recoiled in surprise. “What?” she whispered.

  “I said, it’s time to get this production rolling. Are you ready for Act One?”

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “It means you’re to get your pretty little ass over to that couch and lie down on it.”

  Oh, God.

  This was worse than she thought. The idea of that horrible, nasty man raping her, sticking any part of his disgusting body inside her, was too much to bear.

  As if he could read her mind, the man snickered. “It’s not what you’re thinking,” he said. “Although, if you don’t get moving, I might fuck you just to make a point.”

  Cait knew she should shut her mouth and do what the man said, but she couldn’t help herself. “What point would that be?” she said, half wondering when the breakdown she was expecting any moment would strike and she would be reduced to a blubbering, sniveling idiot. So far it hadn’t happened, but how far off could it be? She felt her sanity warping, being stretched to its limits.

  “The point,” he answered, baring his teeth, his hate for her radiating off him like a force field, “is that you think getting raped is the worst thing I could do to you, but you have no fucking idea how wrong you are. But if you don’t do as you’re instructed, and I mean right fucking now, I will rape you just for the fun of it and then we’ll take things from there.”

  Cait began moving in a confused daze toward the couch. She wondered why he wanted her to lie down if he didn’t plan on raping her. She wondered what she had ever done to this man to warrant the kind of hatred he clearly felt for her.

  She couldn’t recall having ever met him—and she was certain she would remember a man this evil if their paths ever had crossed—but everything he was saying seemed to indicate this was personal, that everything he was doing was about her, and her alone.

  She racked her brain, trying desperately to think, but her brain wouldn’t cooperate. It felt like mush. The panic that threatened to overwhelm her made concentrating difficult. She knew this was her long-lost brother, the twin she had not even been aware existed until yesterday; that much she had already deduced, even without the benefit of a Flicker.

  Could it be he was aware of their relationship? If so, could his barely controlled rage be somehow related to that knowledge? And more importantly, could she figure out a way to use that knowledge to her advantage? Dammit, think!

  She reached the couch and turned to sit on the dingy material but Milo stopped her with a hand on her shoulder. “No,” he said. “We can’t very well put on this performance with you still in your street clothes, can we?”

  The panic threatened to mushroom again. What the hell did he mean by that? The situation was bad enough without this madman speaking in riddles. “I don’t know what you mean,” she said, a lump forming in her throat, tears on the verge of returning.

  Cait longed to be wrapped in Kevin’s arms, his muscular body pressed to hers. It was an almost visceral need. She glanced at him, still unconscious, duct-taped to the chair, and forced herself to focus. He was dying and he needed her, and falling to pieces from terror and confusion would do nothing to help him. “So I need to change my clothes?” she asked, amazed at the steadiness of in her voice. She had no idea where that was coming from.

  “Well, not change, exactly,” he said with a smile. It made him look like a shark about to strike.

  “May I undress in the bathroom?”

  The crazy bastard actually laughed at that one. “Oh, sure,” he said. “No problem. You go right ahead into the bathroom, where there are probably no more than a couple of dozen potential weapons you could use against me! Scissors, tweezers, nail files, maybe a toothbrush to jab into my eye. How fucking stupid do you think I am?”

  Cait dropped her head. Her eyes swept the floor, taking in the damage from the smashed chair. She sighed. She knew where this was going. She raised her head resolutely and began unbuttoning her blouse. She hesitated only a moment before shrugging it off her shoulders and down her arms. She shook it onto the floor where it fell, inside out, atop a jagged splinter of broken chair. Then she unsnapped her jeans.

  Another moment’s hesitation and then she pushed them over her hips and down her legs, stepping out of them, and then they joined her blouse on the floor and Cait Connelly was standing in front of her assailant—her brother!—in just her matching black panties and bra and socks.

  She reached behind her back to unhook her bra and to her surprise, Milo shook his head. “That’s enough,” he said, his voice husky, “at least for now.”

  Cait let her hands drop to her sides and the two of them faced each other and Cait waited for the next awful instruction from this awful man and suddenly she felt it again—that little push she had first noticed when she was kneeling over Kevin’s body trying to stanch the bleeding while the lunatic with the knife was preoccupied with carving up the police officer.

  The little push was familiar. It was the sensation of an image being forced into her brain without any effort on her part to accomplish it. Cait had tried to describe the sensation to Kevin once and had likened it to an inflation needle being inserted into a basketball—the air that was already inside the ball stayed there, but once the needle forced its way inside, more air could be pushed into the ball.

  There was one very significant difference, though. She had never been able to stop a Flicker. Once that little push started, the Flicker was coming and there was not a damned thing she could do about it. But when she had experienced what she believed to be the onset of a Flicker a few minutes ago—twice—while occupied with trying to stop Kevin’s bleeding, she had managed to successfully block it out.

  At the time she had not given it too much thought; things were happening fast and she was in a panic and there were other, more critical issues to consider. Now, though, as she felt the relentless push in her brain, she wondered if she could do it again. It was absolutely imperative that she keep her wits about her. The last thing she wanted was to disappear insider her mind under the influence of a Flicker and allow this maniac even more control over her than he already enjoyed.

  Kevin
needed her, he was dying because he had tried to protect her, and she represented his only chance at survival. She willed herself to ward off the Flicker, concentrating with everything she had, rejecting the push. The lunatic with the knife—her brother—was talking to her, he was saying something, she could hear him and knew she should answer him, but her concentration was focused entirely on rejecting the Flicker and so for the second time in just a few minutes she risked everything by ignoring him.

  And it worked.

  After a few seconds the push eased off, started pulling away, made a last-ditch final effort to invade her mind and then was gone. Cait felt a trickle of sweat roll down her cheek and brushed it away with her hand. She was exhausted but thankful she had been able to repel the ill-timed Flicker. She glanced at Kevin—he was still unconscious and seemed to have gotten even paler—and noticed her mother staring at her with a look of intense concentration, she seemed almost to be pleading with her expressive eyes.

  Then she shrugged her shoulders and returned her attention to the crazy man named Milo. She waited to see what was coming next.

  CHAPTER 44

  Everett Police Captain Lynn Talmadge punched the flashing yellow button on the ancient console phone taking up an almost comically large portion of her desk. An audible clunk told her she was now connected with the outside caller, Lieutenant Bruce Miller of the Boston Police Department. Miller had insisted to the dispatcher that he be connected immediately with the watch commander at the Everett station, that he had critical information to pass along regarding potentially a life-and-death situation. “This is Talmadge. How can I help you, Lieutenant?”