by Jacob Stone
Henry dug through his desk and handed Nancy a folder that held his most recently completed comic book, and she brought it over to his bed so she could stretch out on it and look at what he’d drawn.
“The artwork is so good,” Nancy said as she studied the first page. “Clearly from a sick, depraved mind, but so, so good.”
“Ha! Who’s the one who got me reading H. P. Lovecraft?”
“I’m not saying I don’t like it, just that you’re clearly warped.” Then more seriously, “You’re going to be famous someday.”
Henry blushed at that. “You think?”
“I think.”
For the next fifteen minutes Henry worked feverishly on his comic book while Nancy read the one he had given her. Offhandedly, he commented that Aisley Martin was waiting for him when he left the principal’s office.
That got Nancy’s attention. “No kidding? The goth girl?”
“Yep.”
“The one that you’ve been nuts about since forever?”
Henry blushed at that. “I wouldn’t say I’ve been nuts about her,” he argued.
“So what did goth girl want?”
“Not much. Only that she’d like to have coffee with me sometime.”
“Congratulations,” Nancy said, although she didn’t sound congratulatory. “What do you know. My boy’s in love.”
That caused Henry to blush even deeper.
Chapter Nineteen
Los Angeles, the present
Henry didn’t bring a change of clothing with him, so he stripped down to his birthday suit before using the chisel and hammer on Gail Hawes, and since he had positioned Hawes on her belly and she wasn’t going to be able to see his nakedness, he didn’t have to worry about feeling immodest. When he was done, he found a full-length mirror in her bedroom and checked himself over. Not a single drop of blood or piece of gore had splattered on him, leaving him impressed over how careful he’d been, especially given that it was such messy work.
He returned to the living room where Hawes’s remains lay, and saw that two of her cats had surfaced. He recognized them from her Facebook photos as they stared at him with their accusatory pushed-in faces. Hermione and Ginny, with Professor Snape still in hiding. He noticed her laptop then on the dining room table (the room he was in was a combination living room and dining room) and an alarm went off in his head as he saw that it had been powered on.
He opened the laptop up and his heart turned into a cold, queasy mush on reading a Facebook post she had added about how she was going to be late for lunch because she had met up with a friend’s secret lover.
Oh jeeze, he thought, realizing that she must’ve typed it up while he was using the bathroom.
For a long moment he stood stunned as he thought about the consequences of what she had done, then he broke out of his stupor and deleted the post. Even though it was now gone, Hawes’s Facebook friends could’ve already seen it, including Susan. And even if they hadn’t, and even if he had deleted the post, it still might exist somewhere on Facebook’s servers. He didn’t know how that stuff worked, but he knew that once something showed up on the Internet, it never fully disappeared. He had to assume that the police would eventually see it. Even though Hawes’s post fortunately didn’t include his name or (thank God!) a picture of him, it would provide the police a link back to him, as fuzzy as it might be.
What’s done is done, Henry whispered to himself. Because of that annoying-as-heck Gail Hawes, he was going to have to do something now that he’d pretty much decided he didn’t want to do. For a long moment he was seized with the idea of posting a photo of Hawes in her current state as a fitting final status update for her, but then shook himself out of that thought. It would be incredibly stupid to do something like that. As it was, it might be days before the police discovered her body, but if he were to do something that childish and petulant, they’d be here in minutes. He had to calm down and act smart. As long as he did, that post wasn’t going to help the police, assuming that they ever found out about it.
Henry took a deep breath, and held it until he calmed down. Then he took the hammer and chisel to the bathroom and scrubbed them clean. After he had them wrapped up in cloth rags and stored away in his briefcase, and the duct tape cut from Hawes’s wrists and the sock removed from her mouth, he put his suit back on and used one of the cloth rags to wipe fingerprints off anything he might’ve touched. He noticed that Professor Snape had finally made an appearance, and that all three cats were sniffing around the lumps of Hawes’s brain that he had dug out. If he left them alone, they’d probably be eating it soon. He thought about grabbing them and locking them in Hawes’s bedroom, but then he decided so what. Why should he care what they ate?
He looked out of the peephole on the front door until he was sure the coast was clear. Something made him turn around, and he saw that Professor Snape was staring at him in this most curious way.
“Bon appétit,” he told the cat before slipping out of the apartment.
* * *
“I’ve got to tell you, sugar lips, I’ve been going nuts all day thinking about your long beautiful legs and what it would feel like having them wrapped around me.”
Henry held his breath as he waited for Susan’s response, because she might’ve seen Gail Hawes’s Facebook post, and if she did, she’d be asking questions about it. He had already figured out what he would say, but fortunately she didn’t bring it up.
“So you’ve recuperated then,” she said, her voice sultry.
“You better believe it. Right now I feel like I could go for hours. It’s going to be torture waiting for you.”
“Are you in the area?”
“Not too far away. I could be at your place at the drop of a hat.”
“You might not have to wait then. Hold on a minute.” It took less than a minute for Susan to get back on her cellphone and tell Henry that it was dead at the boutique and her boss gave her the okay to take off for an hour. “That should give us enough time for some serious afternoon loving,” she said in that same sultry voice from earlier. “I’ll meet you at my apartment in ten minutes?”
“You better believe it!” He hesitated, then added, “As long as you still haven’t told anyone about us. My lawyer called today warning me that he was within a day of settling the divorce, but that I had to be careful.”
“I haven’t told anybody anything, I promise, Howard.”
“Except for your friend yesterday.”
“Well, I didn’t tell Gail anything. She figured it out, the snoop! But she’s not going to tell anyone anything.”
That was truer than Susan could’ve realized. “I want you so bad right now,” Henry said. “Seeing you naked is all I can think about. But I got to be careful with the divorce almost done. You didn’t tell your boss why you’re taking off for an hour?”
“I told her I needed to do some shopping, that’s all.”
“Then let’s do it! I think I might explode if we don’t.”
“Oh, you’ll be exploding all right.” She giggled at her joke. “Several times in fact.”
This was what Henry was counting on, and he was calling Susan from a lot closer than she could’ve guessed—almost right across the street from her boutique. At that hour it would be too risky to meet her at her rented town house, but he had already located where she had parked her car in the garage near where she worked, and at least five minutes ago there was nobody anywhere near it.
After he got off the call with Susan, he moved swiftly back to where her car was parked, and was relieved to see that there still wasn’t anybody around. It didn’t take Susan very long at all to hurry to her car, and she appeared breathless as she took her keys from her pocketbook. Henry waited until she clicked her door unlocked before emerging from where he was hiding and slamming her head against the door frame. The impact was violent enough to have killed her, but in case it didn’t, he used his powerful hands to snap her neck. One look at her face left no doubt that she
was dead.
He used her key to click open her trunk, and then he put her body inside of it. He had to bend her almost in half to get her to fit, but with a little elbow grease he was able to close the trunk lid shut. He felt some remorse killing her this way since he had already satisfied his latest Skull Cracker killing, and he had grown to like her over the last three weeks, more than he had even realized until just a few minutes ago. But he’d had no choice. He was convinced the police would uncover the deleted Facebook post, and then they’d find Susan. Even if she didn’t know Henry’s real name, they’d find him once she gave them a description. He grimaced hard enough that his cheek muscles began to ache. This was all Gail Hawes’s fault, no one else’s.
Even in death, Hawes was annoying as heck!
Chapter Twenty
Tracy Lacey, the owner of Lacey Properties was a short, round woman of sixty whose hair was dyed an orangey-red. She couldn’t stop staring at Stonehedge in his disguise.
“You look so familiar,” she said. “Where do I know you from?”
“Not sure, ma’am,” Stonehedge said with a grin as he played up his role of detective. He was now wearing the cheap suit and tie that Morris’s office manager had picked up for him.
“Do you go to open houses here in Venice?”
“I’ve been to a few.”
“That must be it,” she said, satisfied with that explanation. She then turned to give Morris a dubious look. “You’re not police. I don’t know if I should be talking to you about this.”
He handed her the letter Gilman had arranged for him, which stated that he and the rest of the MBI investigators had been deputized by the Los Angeles Police, and that the mayor was entrusting MBI to investigate Corey Freeman’s murder. Lacey read the letter carefully enough so that she could’ve been memorizing it.
“As the letter states, I’ve been authorized to look into this matter, but even without that authorization, I would’ve thought you’d want to see Corey Freeman’s murderer caught.”
“Of course I do,” she groused half under her breath. “It just seems so peculiar, that’s all, to be talking about things like this to people who aren’t the police.” She blinked several times as she looked at Morris. “Especially asking me to point fingers at someone.”
“Are you telling me one of your other realtors had a problem with Freeman?”
Lacey looked as if she were suffering from a bout of gas before finally nodding. “Corey was a dear man. He’d been here seven years, and was genuinely well liked. I personally was very fond of him and cried like a baby when I heard the terrible news.”
Her eyes became misty as she recounted this, and she seemed to struggle for a long moment before she was able to compose herself. “No matter how nice people are, there can be friction at times,” she said. “A realtor’s office can be extraordinarily competitive, especially when you have multimillion-dollar properties, like you do here in Venice. And sometimes there can be misunderstandings.”
“One of the other brokers accused Freeman of poaching a listing?” Stonehedge asked.
Lacey looked a bit sick. “It happens sometimes, and quite by accident. A seller came in off the street and Corey signed him up and got the listing. One of our other brokers later claimed that he had given this seller his business card at a party, and so the listing should’ve been his. This was a four-point-two-million-dollar home, and by being the listing broker Corey earned a hundred and five thousand-dollar commission.”
Stonehedge whistled softly. “I might be in the wrong profession,” he said.
Morris shot him a look and then turned back to Lacey. “What’s this other broker’s name?”
“Glen Blakeman,” she said as if it pained her greatly to divulge the name. “Glen’s such a dear. I can’t believe he’d hurt Corey over this.”
“Blakeman have a temper?” Morris asked.
Lacey looked sick to her stomach as she nodded. “At times,” she admitted. “Although he’s really all bark and no bite.”
“Did he make threats against Freeman?”
She looked even sicker. “He was just letting off steam. I’m sure he didn’t mean any of it.”
“Do you have Blakeman’s schedule from yesterday?”
She shook her head. “The realtors here maintain their own schedules. Glen must’ve been out showing properties. He wasn’t in the office yesterday.”
“Anything else you can tell me about Blakeman?”
Lacey appeared absolutely crestfallen. “Glen’s the listing broker.”
“What?”
“The house where Corey was found, that was one of Glen’s properties. He’s the listing broker for the house.”
* * *
Lacey wrote down Blakeman’s cell phone number and home address, and handed these to Morris. There were two other brokers in the office, and Morris spoke to both of them and got the same story about the bad blood between Freeman and Blakeman.
“Who wouldn’t be upset about losing that kind of money?” one of the brokers asked. “I have to admit, when I heard about Corey being found murdered and saw that the address was one of Glen’s, the thought crossed my mind, but I guess I tried to talk myself out of it. So you think Glen killed Corey?”
“Too early to tell,” Morris said.
When Morris tried calling Blakeman’s cell phone, he got a message. He tried a second time, and again the phone rang through to voicemail, asking him to leave a message.
“Blakeman doesn’t seem to be picking up,” Morris said.
Stonehedge moved closer to Morris and in a soft enough voice so nobody in the office could hear him, asked, “Is it possible this isn’t SCK? A hundred and five grand is a good reason to kill someone. Hell, I’d consider it for less.”
Morris shrugged. “We’ll find out.” He next called Detective Walsh and told her about Blakeman. “Can you arrange for the LAPD to pick him up?” he asked.
“Will do.”
Within seconds of getting off the phone with Walsh, Morris’s cell phone rang. Gilman. Morris answered, and told Gilman that he was just about to call him.
“I’ve got a person of interest for Freeman’s murder,” Morris said, keeping his voice low. “This might not be SCK.”
“Then your person of interest is wrong. We’ve got a second killing. This one in West Hollywood.”
Gilman gave him Gail Hawes’s address.
Chapter Twenty-one
Long Island, 1982
“I’m going to Super Comics after school. What do you say?”
Henry gave Nancy Bower an apologetic smile. “Can’t,” he said. “I’ve got plans.”
“Don’t tell me you’re having coffee with goth girl again? You don’t even like coffee.”
“Who says?”
“You’ve told me that!”
“I like mocha lattes. That’s where they put chocolate in the coffee.”
Nancy rolled her eyes. “I know what mocha lattes are. So that’s what you’re doing after school, huh? Coffee club with goth girl?”
Henry’s cheeks flushed pink. He said, “Afterwards we’re going to her house. I’m going to show her my Shrieker comic books.”
Henry and Nancy were sitting together in study hall. He dug out his latest completed comic book from his backpack and handed it to Nancy. As she flipped through the pages, she became demonstrably exasperated.
“You’re kidding,” she finally said. “You’re making goth girl a shrieker hunter? Everyone else gets torn apart by them, but goth girl can kill them with a bow and arrow? You realize how stupid that is?”
Henry snatched the comic book away from her. “I liked the way I did it,” he said. He pulled his social studies textbook from his backpack, and for the rest of study hall acted as if Nancy wasn’t there.
* * *
For weeks Henry had been dreaming of this moment, and now that it was happening and he was actually alone with Aisley in her bedroom he could scarcely believe it. He pinched himself, and nope, he was
n’t dreaming. He really was sitting on a beanbag chair and watching Aisley as she lay on her bed and read his full series of Shrieker comic books. He gave a quick look around to admire once more how cool her room was with the pewter skull, the pentagrams, the witch figurines, and the bats and other creatures painted on her walls, and then he was back to watching Aisley.
After that Henry couldn’t take his eyes off of her. Aisley wasn’t a skinny stick like a lot of the popular girls at school. Instead she had this breathtaking hourglass figure. Maybe a little plump, but to him she was perfect, especially her smooth, round, baby-doll face. She’d been reading his Shrieker books for an hour and was now on his last one, so of course he was anxious for her verdict, but simply watching her made him nearly breathless. His heart soared when a tiny smile crept over her lips. At that moment he experienced pure, unadulterated joy for the first time in his young life.
“You made me a shrieker hunter,” she said. “So cool.”
The next minutes were torture as Henry waited for Aisley to finish. When she did, she got off her bed, kneeled next to him, and kissed him on the cheek.
“These Shrieker books are so cool,” she said. “I love them.”
The thought of her lips having been pressed against his cheek and her close proximity made Henry dizzy. A hotness flushed his face as he fumbled awkwardly for her, trying to draw her in for a more passionate kiss.
“Whoa,” Aisley said as she pushed him away and quickly got to her feet. “What do you think you’re doing?”
Tongue-tied, Henry blinked at her several times before stammering out an apology. “I thought you liked me,” he said in his confusion.
“As friends. Not romantically. I thought you were cool.”
A redness glazed Henry’s vision and a loud buzzing filled his head as he stumbled to his feet and gathered up his comic books and his backpack. He mumbled something to Aisley, but what it was he had no idea. He was only barely aware of leaving her room and clumping down the staircase to the front door, and it wasn’t until he was nine blocks from her home that the buzzing in his head subsided. It was only then that he realized that he’d been walking to Nancy’s house, and was in fact only three houses away.