Stacy and her friend and fellow dancer Annie (stage name: Cristal) had both quit school after getting their high school diplomas, but they knew economics better than most college students. Raising a kid on your own tends to teach the subject hard and fast. They both lived in the same crappy apartment complex and became friends around the laundry room and what was left of the lawn by the parking lot. They watched each other’s kids, commiserated about deadbeat ex-boyfriends and realized, at about the same time, that they were always going to be in debt or on food stamps working minimum-wage jobs while paying for day care. There was no shortage of guys who wanted to be the next deadbeat ex-boyfriend, at least for a night, so Stacy and Annie knew they were still hot enough—for Peoria anyway. They bought some cheap lingerie, hired a reliable babysitter, and began earning three to five hundred at night dancing in platform heels while their kids slept.
The problem was, there were a lot of other women who got the same idea when the economy went straight into the crapper. She and Annie watched as their number of shifts dropped to one or two a week.
But Stacy did a little Internet research and a little math. She counted up all the clubs in a 500-mile radius and figured that as long as gas stayed under five bucks a gallon, she and Annie could find a place to work every night.
True, it often meant a 600-mile round-trip before dawn, but that was easily solved by a little crystal meth.
The strip clubs out on the fringes were happy to see them. Smaller towns had a problem that the bigger cities didn’t: everyone knew everyone else. No matter how bad the economy got, there were always more men who’d pay to see naked women than local women willing to be seen naked. Stacy and Annie didn’t have to worry about running into the Sunday school teacher while in line at the supermarket after giving him a three-for-two lap dance in the Champagne Room.
In economic terms, they’d found a niche market. The local strippers didn’t even mind too much, because they took the shifts nobody else wanted, like Tuesday nights.
Of course, this meant they had to work harder to get dollars out of the cheaper customers, but they were motivated and they were pretty good at their jobs. Plus, hot enough for Peoria was usually way hotter than guys got to see in Fort Madison or Waterloo.
Stacy waved to the DJ in the booth and pointed at the women’s room door, signaling she was off the floor for a few minutes. He barely nodded back. The club was slow, even for a weeknight. Annie had struck pay dirt, however—an old guy who appeared ready to spend his entire Social Security check in pursuit of a heart attack while underneath her.
There were no lockers inside the restroom. There wasn’t even a door on the stall. This was just a place for the girls to change from their real clothes to their stripper-wear. Management had thoughtfully provided hooks on the wall for their bags, but Stacy carried everything valuable in her tiny stripper-purse. She’d been ripped off once before, and that was once too often.
She opened the little bag and found an even tinier envelope. She dumped a little of the crystal powder onto her hand and snorted it. Just a little bump. Annie worried she was doing too much, but she didn’t have much room to preach. They both needed something extra to get through the week.
Just twelve more years of this, Stacy thought, and then Evan’s college will be paid for. It almost made her laugh. There was no way she’d be able to make decent money at this even five years from now. She was saving some, but not enough. She knew she’d have to find a real solution soon. But it was too much work just staying awake these days.
Then the electricity shot from behind her nose to the front of her brain and pushed out all the weariness and fear. She walked back into the club like she owned it.
A new guy had come in. He was wearing a suit. The fat girl on the stage tried to get his attention, grabbing at her crotch, but Stacy locked onto him before he even ordered a beer.
A suit was always a good sign. Suit usually meant money. Suit also usually meant out-of-town, which meant lonely and horny and often willing to do something stupid.
She sat down and kissed him on the cheek. “I’m Amber,” she told him. “What took you so long?” It was her best line, and he was charmed immediately. Up close, he was younger than he appeared at first. He had doughy lumps under his dress shirt and dark rings under his eyes.
She learned why right away. His name was Lawrence—not Larry, never Larry—and he was eager to talk. He was in politics, racking up frequent-flyer miles and hotel and rental-car points across the country. He was spending a lot of time over the border in Iowa now because of the election. He really believed the president had a chance to take the state this time—he could see it in people’s faces, he really could. He’d just come from arranging a big campaign event. He couldn’t go into detail, he said, but he’d talked to the Secret Service, and he knew this was going to be huge for the president, just huge.
Stacy couldn’t care less—she didn’t follow the news, didn’t vote—but she felt the buzz coming off him. He felt important, needed, alive. Maybe it was the drug, but she felt some of his energy too. He was pumped up and ready to celebrate. And he was harmless. She could feel it. So she decided to cut to the chase.
“Lawrence,” she said. “Why are you here?”
“Well,” he said. “That’s obvious, right?”
She leaned in. “Say it. I want to hear.”
His voice shook a little. “I wanted to see—”
“Just to see?” Her voice was mocking now. She lazily traced the outline of her nipple through the black, deep-cut camisole she wore. “You sure that’s all?”
“I, uh, I thought that was all I could get.”
Her hand slid down the curve of her own body, across her bare thigh and up his leg. Her thumb barely brushed his erection, straining at the seams of his pants. Still, he shuddered like he’d been Tased.
“But that’s not all you want,” she said, drawing her hand back.
He nodded.
He was hers now. It was too easy. “Tell you what,” she said. “It’s about time for my smoke break. You have a car?”
He nodded even harder. “Out back.”
“Well,” she said, standing up. “Maybe I’ll see you out there.”
Stacy went to the bathroom again, got her coat and waved her pack of cigs at the DJ, who again barely acknowledged her.
Lawrence Edwin, advance campaign coordinator for Americans United to Re-Elect President Samuel Curtis 2012, could barely wait two minutes before too-casually going out the door after her.
Lawrence made a show of checking his pockets and picking up his jacket before he left. Only one person cared enough to watch his act.
The Boogeyman heard everything. His hearing was so acute now, he could pick up the click and slurp as a stripper chewed gum on the stage. He could hear the fiber of the cheap industrial carpeting being crushed under the waitress’s heel as she went out of her way to avoid him, sitting in the corner. He could hear the beating of Lawrence Edwin’s heart as the blood rushed away from his brain.
He waited three minutes before he got up and followed them to the parking lot.
ZACH COULDN’T IMAGINE a parking lot of a strip club that didn’t look like a crime scene. This one just happened to have two dead bodies in it.
They were hacked up in the backseat of a rental car. Despite the chunks taken out of their bodies, it was left very clear what they were doing before the blade had come down on them: her head rested in his lap, separated from the rest of her body.
The local police had called the state troopers, who’d found Edwin’s wallet and business cards and called the Secret Service. Cade and Zach had backtracked along the highway to take a look for themselves.
“Is it him?” Zach asked.
“It. Not him.”
“Right. Well?”
Cade nodded. “This isn’t right,” he said.
“Preaching to the choir, Cade.”
“No. It shouldn’t be doing this. It’s never traveled this far
before. It usually stays in one area. Usually limits itself to one hunting ground at a time. This is different.”
Zach wasn’t quite sure what Cade meant. “Things change, I guess.”
“No,” he said again. “Not things like it.”
“You’ve changed,” Zach pointed out. “You adapt. You improvise.”
“Because it’s in my nature to do so. It’s not in the Boogeyman’s.”
“Apparently it is now. Oh, just so I know, does it have to attack someone having sex? Is that a rule I missed?”
“Griff had a theory about that,” Cade said. “He believed it hated sex because it hates life. Sex is the ultimate expression of life; it’s what your species is designed for, and it’s what most of your lives revolve around.”
“You’re one to talk. I’ve heard the echoes when Tania comes to visit you.”
Cade didn’t reply. Zach knew this was a touchy subject. Tania had not responded to any of the messages Zach had left on the encrypted phone he’d given her in the past couple of months. For all he knew, it was in a landfill somewhere. Cade, when asked, would only grunt that he was not her keeper. Zach assumed from the surliness that Cade wasn’t getting any.
This was troubling, because Zach felt a lot better when he knew where something as dangerous as Tania was. He hated the idea of her springing out at them from the dark if she finally decided to turn on them.
Whatever, Zach decided. They’d leap off that bridge when they got to it. There were more pressing matters right now.
A car pulled into the lot. Before the local police could intercept the driver, she hopped from the front seat and began taking pictures with her phone.
Megan Roark.
“Son of a bitch,” Zach said. “That’s all we need.”
He ducked under the crime-scene tape with Cade as she came running after him.
“What are you doing here, Mr. Barrows? Is it true that another campaign staffer has been killed?”
She must have been recording. It was the only time she’d call him “Mr. Barrows” and not “Junior” or “Sparky.”
Cade kept his back to her.
“All right, ma’am, you’re going to have to step back,” a policeman said to Roark.
“Don’t you touch me, don’t you touch me!”
“I’m not touching you.” The cop sounded almost hurt.
“You can’t cover up the truth, Mr. Barrows!”
Then Roark pressed a button on her phone and put it back in her bag. She stopped pushing against the cop and became almost calm.
“Okay, I’ve got enough of that, I think. You got anything to tell me, Sparky?”
“Nothing you’d want to print,” Zach said. “You’re freaking insane, you know that?”
She gave him a radiant smile. “Got to get those pageviews up. You want to tell me why one of your people was getting a hummer from a lap dancer in this shithole when he was killed?”
“No comment.”
The cop had had enough. “Ma’am, you’re going to have to leave this area now.”
“I’m not old enough to be called ‘ma’am,’” Roark said.
He popped the button on his handcuff case.
“I’m going, I’m going,” she said. “I’ve got what I came for. See you back at the hotel, Junior.”
Zach watched her get back into her car and drive away. “I wonder who’s leaking to her.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Cade said.
“It doesn’t?”
“We stop the Boogeyman. No more story. Cure the disease, Zach. Not the symptom.”
Cade turned away and headed back for their own car.
Zach looked over at the body bags now being hoisted into an ambulance.
Yeah, he thought. And what if we can’t do either?
Welcome to the Daily Show, my name is Jon Stewart, got a tremendous show for you tonight. Apparently I am going to eat a tub of rice pudding bigger than my torso. [LAUGHTER] No, seriously, we’re going to have Denis Leary on later and he’ll ramble on about his cooking show on the Food Network. [LAUGHTER] But first, let’s look at the presidential race in our award-adjacent coverage, Indecision 2012. It’s getting rough out there on the campaign trail. What’s that you say? Because of the hard-hitting questions about our plummeting economy, overseas wars and massive federal debt? No! Because working for the Curtis Campaign has turned into a really horrific good-news, bad-news joke. The good news is, you will get laid. The bad news is, someone will probably kill you. [LAUGHTER] Now I know there are those in the audience who will say, ‘Jon, I likes them odds… ‘
—The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, Monday, October 15, 2012
OCTOBER 15, 2012, LAFAYETTE, ILLINOIS
Crystal Waddell was working late in the campaign office again when Dustin came to her desk. He looked determined. The beautiful, blond lummox of an intern had made excuses to stay late at the campaign office with her all week. Every night, she would let him walk her to her car. He was worried about her after the recent killings. She told him she didn’t have any plans to get caught in the parking lot of a strip club, and he blushed. Such a gentleman. His mother trained him well. And every night, he would look at her wedding ring when he was about to lean in for the kiss before his nerve failed him. She thought it was sweet. Annoying, but sweet.
Tonight was different. They were alone in the office, about to turn out the lights and lock up. Only this time, he approached her at her desk. She could see it in the way he moved—almost marching up to her, dead set on making it happen this time, right here, right now. Crystal was torn.
She never, never did anything at the office. Campaigns were gossipy enough. She preferred cheap motel rooms where her rental car was one of a dozen others in the lot.
The fact was, Crystal had decided she was going to sleep with Dustin the moment she saw him. He was going to be her plaything and reward, her tension-breaker from the stress of the campaign. She’d come to look at the boys like Dustin as an expected—and well-deserved—perk of her job. Crystal was a brilliant campaign fundraiser. She could pump dollars out of donors long considered dry wells. More than that, she was expert at the minutiae of campaign finance laws, and her disclosure forms were works of art. She knew exactly when to file and exactly how much info to give. She knew exactly where the line of legality was and how far over it she could go when juggling checks from other candidates, PACs and independent pressure groups. Crystal held and dumped money in a half-dozen accounts and could always be relied on to find cash for a last-minute TV buy if necessary. It was exhilarating and enervating work. She was required to be dazzling for at least eighteen hours a day. So she had no guilt about a little illicit sex if that’s what it took to recharge her batteries.
It wasn’t that she didn’t love her husband and her wee darling son at home. She’d been genuinely grateful to leave the campaign trail when she got married at twenty-eight. Before that, she’d lived on Diet Coke and ephedrine tablets, flying from one state to the next, raising money for the National Committee and a string of candidates, stopping at her apartment in D.C. only long enough to get her suits dry-cleaned. It had been that way since she graduated from college and sprang into her first job as an assistant to a congressman. She’d been amazed at how much time was spent begging for cash and found she had a gift for opening wallets and checkbooks. So she made that into her career.
But she’d looked around at the people in her profession—the other fundraisers, direct-mailers and year-round campaigners—and been discouraged. By the time they hit forty, they were burned down to wire-frame versions of their previous selves. Only their charm kept people from noticing how much they’d devolved.
When her boyfriend, a handsome policy analyst from a good WASP family, finally proposed, she’d said yes. She got pregnant almost immediately. For a couple of years, it was domestic bliss.
Then one day, Crystal got a call from an old colleague who was raising money for then-Senator Curtis. She was going to turn him down when it
hit her like a bolt from above: she was bored out of her skull. Her darling boy was in preschool. Her hubby spent all day at his think tank and most nights buried under reports and books. She wanted back in the game.
Once on the trail again, she discovered something else. Crystal was, for the first time in her life, insanely horny. She’d never thought of herself as someone who needed a lot of sex. It just wasn’t that big a deal to her. One of the reasons she’d married her dull but reliable hubby was that he wasn’t exactly an animal in the sack, either. Most nights, they were both more content to get an extra hour of sleep.
But whether it was passing thirty or just being out of the house again, she found herself constantly, ravenously and indiscriminately aroused. She’d watch gym-toned men walk in airports on business trips and feel almost like pouncing on them like a lioness would a gazelle, tearing open their suits to see what was inside. She did her best to resist temptation, becoming a compulsive masturbator after a lifelong hands-off policy toward her own body. She’d go into the tiny, cramped airplane restrooms and jill herself off repeatedly in a single flight, then spend all night watching hotel-room porn. She even bought a vibrator on one of her trips and had it out of the packaging before she started the engine of her car.
But Crystal was basically a practical woman, and she found doing anything halfway ridiculous and frustrating. She saw no reason to deny herself what she wanted. After all, she still ate ice cream straight out of the container. She just worked it off at the gym.
So, four or five days in a row, she was the perfect wife and mom. Then, four or five days away from home, she would get what she needed.
Crystal could have had any number of affairs with any number of donors or other political operatives; the host of one of the talk shows passed her his hotel key card when they met at an event. But she had standards. She didn’t want a doughy guy who’d spurt himself dry in fifteen minutes and then talk politics for the rest of the night. She didn’t want an affair. She wanted to fuck.
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