"I'm a psychologist, not a mind reader. But maybe if I could speak to that girl he brought up here from San Francisco.
She might know quite a bit about what's going on in Joseph's head. It seems that he's taken quite a liking to her."
"Why do you say that?"
"Because she's stil alive."
Chapter Forty-three
Joe sat on the blood-soaked bed, hugging his knees to his chest and rocking back and forth. The room was completely dark. Headlights from passing cars spun shadows around the wal s like a puppet show. Joe's thoughts were also dark and spinning madly along the inner wal s of his skul. He knew he wasn't cured. Kil ing Damon had done nothing to assuage his hunger. The pants, groans, and passionate shrieks and cries from next door were awakening the big predator's murderous libido. He could smel the thick musk of semen, sweat, blood, and stool from the semen, sweat, blood, and stool from the aggressive anal penetration taking place beyond his bedroom wal. In Joe's pants, the monster rose and stiffened. It was hungry again.
The hooker's ecstatic outbursts continued in rhythm with the pounding of her skul against the headboard. The animalistic grunts of her brutal trick were making Joe jealous. Another predator intruding on his turf. Joe squished his toes in the blood stil leaking from the saturated mattress. Alicia's blood. The outline of her body was clearly visible as a rustcolored stain. A tear ran down
Joe's cheek as he rose from the bed, gnashing his terrible teeth, and headed for the door.
The whore hadn't bothered to close the blinds to her apartment and Joe could see her being crushed into the mattress by a long, lean, muscular body saturated in sweat, muscles taut and straining with each violent thrust. The man's eyebrows were knitted together in concentration. His lips curled into a ferocious snarl. His eyes stared straight ahead at the bedroom wal. The look on his face resembled fury rather than pleasure. He didn't look like a normal trick. There was something too possessive about the way he handled the whore and something too passive about the way she received him; not struggling despite the violence being done to her by his savage lovemaking.
One of his long, muscular arms had snaked beneath the transvestite's chin and was squeezing tight, choking off her screams of pleasure as he punched his engorged penis deep into her bowels.
The whore's tongue lol ed out of her mouth, struggling for air, gasping like a newborn wrapped in an umbilical cord.
Joe could see that the man's thick organ was coated with blood from the whore's chafed and torn rectum. The monster strained in his pants, swel ing with blood, eager for a taste of the transvestite. It was ravenous now. Joe kicked in the door.
The whore screamed and tried to disengage from her trick's cock. The large black man calmly withdrew his blood-and shit-stained penis from the transvestite's anus and leaned across the bed, groping for his pants. The whore snatched a pil ow from the bed to hide her penis in a bizarre show of modesty. Stil trying to maintain the il usion of femininity even in the face of a hostile intruder.
The black guy wasn't groping for his pants in order to put them on. Joe saw that the man was trying to free something from one of the pockets.
Something big and silver. Joe sprang onto the bed and almost landed on top of the little transvestite, who let out a squeal and scrambled out of the way.
Shirtless, his muscles rippled, taut with violent energy.
He reached down and grabbed the black guy by the wrist, removing the hand from his pants pocket and easily snapping it. The handgun discharged into the floor just before it slipped from the man's fingers. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the whore try to run for the door and he leapt up and dragged her down by her hair and back onto the bed. The black guy took the opportunity and snatched up the gun with his uninjured left hand and brought it up to aim at Joe. The big cannibal charged and tackled him. A bul et ripped his earlobe in half and shattered his eardrum as he drove his shoulder deep into the trick's solar plexus, knocking the wind out of him. The guy fel to the floor with Joe on top of him, and this time Joe reached down and bit into the man's forearm, tearing out a large portion of muscle and disabling his hand completely. The gun was now useless to him.
Through the entire ordeal the man had not cried out once. His eyes were hard and cold and stared at Joe with a murderous hate as he continued to struggle beneath the weight of the big cannibal. They were predator's eyes.
Joe knew right away that this guy was no trick. He was more likely the whore's pimp.
Sweat dappled the pimp's ebon skin as he used his bloodied arm as a club, trying to beat Joe off. Joe could not help but admire the man's tenacity. He let the guy land a few more strikes so that he could die like a warrior before the powerful predator leaned down and tore the man's throat out with his sharpened canines. Instantly Joe felt that familiar rush of endorphins, that tingling at the base of his cock, and final y the explosion as an orgasm ripped through him. Nothing had changed. He had traveled al this way to kil Damon and end the curse, yet the monster remained inside him.
The whore was stil screaming. She had jumped up off the bed again and was heading for the door when Joe rol ed off of the convulsing corpse of her panderer and seized her by the foot. He noticed with curiosity that the transvestite had managed to slip on a pair of lacy underwear while he'd been struggling with her boyfriend and that, despite the fact that the undergarment was just a few wisps of fabric short of being a thong, the whore's penis was not visible at al. He dragged the screaming transvestite down to the floor with him and strangled her silent. Joe squeezed and twisted until the prostitute ceased al resistance. Then he twisted harder, wringing her neck like a dishrag. For a man, her neck was as thin as a bird's leg and snapped just as easily.
Joe continued to twist the prostitute's neck until her shattered cervical vertebrae pierced through her skin and her head was facing the opposite direction. Then he pul ed harder until the flesh began to tear, the veins, arteries, and tendons popped one by one, and her head started to separate from her shoulders. He had to use his teeth but final y Joe succeeded in decapitating the whore. In a frenzy, he continued to dismember the corpse, using only his bare hands and teeth. When his bloodlust final y abated, the whore was little more than a torso.
Joe stood holding the remains of the transvestite's corpse and staring at the blood spattered around the room.
Semen leaked down his leg from where one orgasm after another had erupted as he'd dissected the whore's carcass with his teeth.
"I'm stil a monster," Joe mumbled as he let the limbless, headless thing slip from his hands into the pool of blood at his feet. He left the apartment, nearly tripping as he tried to walk on legs that stil shook from multiple little deaths.
"How do I stop this?" he wondered aloud, wiping blood and scraps of flesh from his lips. But he knew. He'd known al along. Damon had been right. The only curse was the one in his genes. The one he'd been born with.
Chapter Forty-four
Alicia was extremely thirsty when she awoke. Her head was pounding and there was a dul ache in her chest. Her thoughts were cloudy and sluggish from the painkil ers coursing through her veins.
"Water," she croaked, and an old man leaned forward with a Styrofoam cup. He placed the cup to her lips and the icecold water splashed into her mouth like a blessing. Alicia gulped it down in a few quick swal ows.
"Thank you. Where am I? Who are you?"
"You are in a hospital. You were attacked. My name is Professor John
Locke. I'm a psychiatrist. I'm here to help you. Can you remember anything about what happened?"
Alicia looked around her. She was in a hospital room surrounded by cops.
"What are al these police here for?"
"They are looking for the man who attacked you. Can you tel us who he is?"
"Don't hurt him. He's sick. He didn't mean to-"
Alicia thought about the last few days she'd spent being terrorized by the big cannibalistic serial sexmurderer named
Joe. He'd chewed
off her nipples, kept her chained in his apartment, murdered another woman in front of her and ate her while Alicia watched helplessly. He'd dragged her al the way across the state in the back of a van, cooked a man alive and forced her to eat human flesh, and then he'd…
"Oh my God! My breasts! He ate my breasts!" Alicia lifted the covers and stared at the bandages wrapped around her chest. They were completely flat. Her breasts were gone.
"Who? Tel us who did this to you. Who don't you want us to hurt?"
Despite al of this Alicia stil could not bring herself to betray him. "I can't remember."
"Do you remember how you got here? To Washington? Were you kidnapped? Did he bring you here against your wil?"
"I can't remember. I can't remember. I can't remember!" She pounded her fists against the sides of her head and tears leaked from the corners of her eyes.
Soon she was openly sobbing. A black cop who looked like a detective stepped forward in front of the professor.
"Okay. Okay. We'l leave you alone. But if your memory returns, here's my card.
Give me a cal."
Alicia turned away and continued to weep into the pil ow. "My breasts are gone. They're gone. He ate my breasts!" She began to scream.
The detective dropped his card on the nightstand and backed away just as the nurses rushed into the room.
"Sorry, but I'm going to have to ask you to leave. You're upsetting the patient and she's stil in guarded condition."
"We were just about to leave." The detectives and the two professors stepped out into the hal with the captain.
"That was quite a show," Professor Locke offered.
"You think she was faking that? Did you see the look on her face when she realized that she'd lost her breasts?"
"That part may have been real but I don't believe for a second that she doesn't remember who attacked her. She's protecting Joseph."
"Protecting him? But he's the scumbag who ate her titties off," Captain Marshal added, with his eyebrows raised quizzical y. He looked both exhausted and overwhelmed, as if he would fal over at any second.
"Ever hear of Stockholm syndrome?" A sea of blank stares looked back at him.
"It's when a prisoner begins to identify, even to sympathize and, in extreme cases, to fal in love with his or her captor. Who knows how long Joseph had her or what he told her. His is a pretty sympathetic tale if you look at it from his perspective. Here's a kid who was attacked by a serial kil er and horribly tortured and raped for hours. He survives only to grow up and discover that this serial kil er passed some disease on to him that's turning him into a kil er too and the only way he can cure himself is by murdering the man who gave him the disease."
"So you think she bought al this bul shit?"
"It may not be bul shit. As I said before, there is a possibility that such a disease could exist. That's what brought us out here. We just need to convince her that it's bul shit. That's the only way we're going to get her to cooperate."
Captain Marshal 's cel phone rang and he excused himself to answer it. When he hung up, his face was set in a hard line that told everyone in the room that the night was not yet over.
"You think this wil convince her? We just got a cal from a motel manager a few blocks away. There are two bodies down there torn to shreds."
Marshal walked briskly out of the hospital fol owed by Montgomery and the two professors.
"I guess you two eggheads had it right. He's on a rampage now. It's only been a few hours since he kil ed Trent and the Janitor."
"He didn't feed on them, Captain. He must have been hungry when he got home. Not to mention his disappointment when he found that his cure wasn't working," Professor Locke offered.
"Wel from what my officers are tel ing me, he should be pretty damn wel fed now."
They piled into two separate squad cars and raced the two miles to the motel where Joe had been just hours before.
They slipped past the barricades and police tape and into the room where the dismembered bodies lay strewn around the room like wet red confetti.
"Jesus!" the two professors cried out in unison.
"Oh my God! He did this? How could anyone do something like this?"
"You tel us, Doc. Does this hold with your little theory? You stil think you can cure him with a few little pil s?" The captain was feeling surly. He didn't like the idea of a serial kil er in his town and he liked it even less that these two had known he was coming and hadn't said anything. If they had thought to drop a warning there might be four people alive right now and one lunatic behind bars.
But instead they had tried to play heroes. It was al he could do to keep from knocking one of them down. He knew exactly which one it would be too.
"I'm even more sure of it now than ever," Professor Locke said, elevating his chin to look down his nose at the policeman.
"This escalating pattern of violence is consistent with the pattern of addiction. He's developing a tolerance for it so he needs more. More victims, and more violence. If we don't get him into treatment the victims wil just keep piling up.
"That is unless we shoot him down. Or lock his ass up.
"That would be one solution. At least to this problem. But what about al the other kil ers out there? This is bigger than one man and a handful of victims. We could possibly put an end to this type of sexual/rage kil ing forever."
"Get off your soapbox, Doc. I ain't buyin' it. Now wait in the car while we search this place. You're contaminating my crime scene."
The captain and Detective Montgomery cleared everyone else out of the room except for the CSI crew. They immediately went to work photographing, bagging, and tagging everything they found that looked even remotely like it might lead them to the kil er. There was more than enough physical evidence to tel them who the kil er was and even to practical y guarantee a conviction-his DNA and fingerprints were al over the place. But there was nothing here to suggest where he might have gone.
"What about the telephone?"
"This one?" the captain asked, lifting the receiver from a cradle that was tacky with blood.
"No. The one in the apartment he was renting. Let's get the phone records and find out who he was cal ing."
"That's no problem. There's a police liaison at the phone company who does traces for us."
They were both more than a little relieved to leave the murder scene.
"Where's that manager?" the captain asked one of the officers standing nearby.
He pointed to a short, paunchy, balding Mexican with guilty, fidgety eyes. The man stepped forward, looking from side to side as if frantical y trying to plan his escape. He had the look of an ex-con with the crude tattoos to match.
"Which one did Miles stay in?"
"Right next door… uh, sir."
"Wel, then open it up! We need to check it for evidence."
They paused in the doorway of the apartment, taking note of the handcuffs attached to the bed and the wide bloodstain that saturated the mattress and sheets. This is where Alicia had been held, where Joe had performed his radical mastectomy on her. The big burly police captain froze and turned to look at the young black detective with stunned, exhausted eyes.
"What the fuck are we up against here?"
"A man. Just a man."
The captain picked up the phone and dialed the operator. Minutes later they had their information. He set the phone back in the cradle and let out a sigh of relief.
"Wel, it looks like Joseph Miles is your problem again. The last number he dialed was back in the Bay Area.
Hayward, California. A Mr. Lionel Ray
Miles. He's going home to Daddy."
Lionel Ray Miles stood on his porch, cradling the Mossburg pistol-grip shotgun in his arms and peering out into the darkness. He knew he'd heard something out there. Maybe one of the neighbor kids was playing a trick on him, but he was sure he'd heard the sound of glass breaking. And it had sounded like it was coming from his garage. He crept around to the front of t
he garage and saw that two of the windows had been smashed and there was a huge dent in the aluminum, as if something big and heavy had crashed into it. He heard shuffling noises coming from inside.
Lionel Ray jacked a round into the chamber and crept around to the side service door. He didn't make a sound.
He was not about to give whoever had dared break into his property any warning. Lionel didn't want to scare them away. He wanted blood. He imagined himself creeping up on some teenaged crackhead or speed freak and opening up on them with the shotgun. One less junkie, sneak thief, shoplifter, burglar, purse snatcher for the overburdened court system to worry about.
The service door on the side of the garage had been smashed in too. It looked like someone had used a sledgehammer on it. That door had cost
Lionel Ray two hundred dol ars at the home-and-garden store. Not to mention the time it had taken him to instal it and paint it. That alone was enough to justify him blowing away the intruder.
There was a shadow in roughly the outline of a human body standing right beside Lionel Ray's prized '69 Lincoln
Continental. The Lincoln was Lionel
Ray's dream car. Not a Cadil ac or a
Mercedes, but a Lincoln with its sleek lines and suicide doors had always symbolized success to him. He'd purchased it on eBay with money from his 401K. Had it driven al the way from Texas. And that speed-freak intruder was using it as a shield.
The Lincoln had al its original chrome bought straight from the factory and shined to a high gloss. Brand-new black leather upholstery. White-wal ed tires. Lionel Ray had spent countless hours restoring the car to mint condition. It was his pride and joy and there was no way he was going to risk a shot in the dark that just might spray the old girl with buckshot and ruin the new eighthundred-dol ar paintjob he'd just put on it. If need be he'd just walk over there and throttle the bastard with his bare hands. Lionel Ray Miles was tal with thick muscles from years of hard labor rather than months in the gym. He had no fear of the intruder attacking him before he could squeeze off a shot.
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